Draft of article sent to academic and public administration journal for review this weekend. Concerns the New Orleans recovery process, civic engagement and questions regarding environmental sustainability and leadership.

1. Hard to go back and fix it: The ―footprint‖
issue and the limits of civic renewal
in post-Katrina New Orleans
by
Ray Mikell
Affiliation: University of New Orleans

2. Abstract
After flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and associated flood control system failures in
New Orleans, opinion makers soon began discussing the possibility of shrinking the city's
physical size. The issue was furiously debated among civic and government authorities in the
Crescent City as well. Two proposals to shrink the city's size failed, however, largely due
protests from homeowners, and issues related to race and class. Citizens were not widely
consulted before these first two proposals were made public, leading to a backlash that resulted
in increased civic participation. While the city is almost as famous for its Byzantine politics as
Mardi Gras, lessons here may be universal, especially regarding the need for local governments
to consult with citizens after disasters. The case also shows, however, the limits of civic
engagement in a diverse and troubled city, and a city without an engaged and active mayoral
administration.

3. The New Orleans flood walls knocked down by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge had
barely settled before the commentary and unsolicited advice for the city's future came, fast and
hard. It came from self-appointed experts and frequently-cited authorities alike–from journalists
and pundits (Garreau, 2005), as well as economists (Glaeser, 2005), geologists, architects,
planners, and countless Internet bloggers. Most notably, many suggested that New Orleans did
not need to be (or either would not be) rebuilt; if not at all, then certainly not in its entirety.
Dennis Hastert, then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, summed up the arguments in
a blunt manner just two days after the hurricane: ―It looks like a lot of that place could be
bulldozed‖ (Katel, 2006; Day and Rosenblum, 2005, p. 11). These individuals were advising
that New Orleans do, or be forced to do, what no other city in history had ever done after a
disaster–to shrink its physical size.
One thing these opinion-makers never did was New Orleans residents what they thought
about their city's future. However, a debate also soon ensued locally over whether to quot;shrink the
footprint,quot; as the idea to shrink the city’s physical size came to be known, in the lingo of the
post-Katrina planning process. Yet just two years later, it was clear that New Orleans was going
with the pre-storm status quo. Talk about economic incentives for quot;clustering;quot; that is,
encouraging denser settlement in recovering neighborhoods, continued to some degree (UNOP,
2007), but all the furious debate and policy talk changed nothing.
The reasons for the failure of footprint shrinkage advocates are not easily pinned down.
This is true in part because of an inability to fairly compare citizen attitudes before and
immediately after Katrina. The demographic layout of New Orleans was too uncertain for
-1-

4. 2
survey administrators to claim much confidence in their results. This article represents an
attempt to examine reasons for the failure of the post-Katrina planning efforts all the same, based
on the belief that examining the matter is important for myriad reasons. It is not only worthy of
further examination due to the international attention paid to New Orleans after Katrina. The
case should also be of more relevance given that damages from extreme weather events, water
shortages and other problems resulting from global climate change are widely predicted. Its
lessons may be especially important, regardless, to American cities with racially and
economically divided populations and limited tax bases.
Given the statistical issues noted above, the question of why New Orleans went with the
status quo are examined in half-descriptive and half-analytical format, with post-Katrina land-use
planning discussed alongside matters of seeming demographic, historical and geographic import
to the debate. The study concludes with an analytical consideration of the debate's aftermath, the
associated rise of neighborhood group activity in New Orleans and, in a section considering
lessons from the Crescent City case, the impact of social distrust and a lack of civic cohesion in
contributing to planning failures. The literature on post-disaster resilience is used as a guide for
this analysis. Multiple methods are used to examine citizen attitudes and political and civic
organization, including documentary evidence, observation (e.g., of planning and recovery
meetings), survey data and social network analysis. The research outlines the evolution of the
city's recovery process, and in turn has been influenced by that evolution. More specifically,
what first appeared likely to be a study of a strictly technical process evolved into a case study in
democratic participation and social capital, interacting with more technical aspects of public
administration.

5. 3
Inasmuch as the research examines that process and its aftermath in such detail and
through multiple methods, it stands virtually alone. What occurred in the months after the storm
has won little in the way of scholarly attention. This is unfortunate, for while the city is almost
as famous for its Byzantine politics as Mardi Gras, some lessons here may well be not only
relevant but timeless, especially regarding civic engagement and communication with a
dispersed population.
A lethal cocktail: The role of race, class and home-ownership
As almost anyone who watched much Katrina-related television coverage or read media
accounts of the storm's aftermath might have guessed, the raising of issues and class issues in
New Orleans' recovery planning was thoroughly predictable. Before Katrina, the city had been
overwhelmingly black, with a 67.5 percent majority, according to 2004 U.S. Census estimates.
Most of the serious flooding occurred in majority black neighborhoods besides, due in part to
legacy of racial segregation and discrimination that forced black people into less desirable
(typically, lower-lying) neighborhoods. Some of these areas were marked by severe poverty,
including the Lower Ninth Ward, whose extreme flooding–and the isolation of its poorest
residents after the storm—made it a sort-of poster neighborhood for urban poverty and lingering,
deep racial injustice in the United States.
The class issues involved in recovery planning were more complicated than an exclusive
focus on lower-income residents might suggest, however, and often defied stereotypical thinking
or cliche. For example, the most heavily populated area that sustained damage, Eastern New
Orleans, was a black middle class haven. Heavily flooded Gentilly was also predominantly
middle class, with a racially mixed population. Meanwhile, the predominantly white and

6. 4
affluent, as well as low-lying, Lakeview area flooded as badly as any in the city, including the
Lower 9th Ward. Finally, much of the reporting in the international media event that was
Katrina overlooked the fact that a majority of residents of the Lower 9th Ward lived in owner-
occupied homes. Even given the severe damage these neighborhoods received, then, there was
no simple, clear means by which to decide which ones would be rebuilt or bulldozed, to borrow a
term from Hastert There were issues of due process involved, issues of environmental and
racial justice, and fiscal issues galore. Future public resources were on the line, in an already
fiscally stretched Orleans Parish. Moreover, these were the areas more likely to house native-
born New Orleans residents than any part of the city (Campanella, 2006). Environmental
sustainability and real or perceived public safety shared the stage with a host of other compelling
issues.
Footprint shrinkage advocates thus faced a steep uphill climb here, in a city with only two
hills (in Audubon Park and City Park). Before going into such matters further, however, an
introduction to the commissions or organizations involved in the planning process is necessary.
In the first few months after Katrina, New Orleans residents were drowned in flood
waters of another sort--swampy, brackish waters full of acronyms, abandoned studies and
endless board meeting minutes rather than the more familiar post-Katrina debris. John Beckman,
a planner with the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based urban design and planning firm Wallace,
Roberts and Todd and a man who was a central player in these affairs, described the process with
one word: quot;Anarchyquot; (Reichard, 2006). Nonetheless, many formal organizations were
associated with the process. They are introduced below:

7. 5
Urban Land Institute (ULI): A smaller-footprint plan was first developed by this
Washington, DC-based policy think tank, whose membership is largely taken from the real estate
development industry. A group of 50 architects, real estate developers, academics and elected
officials was then sent to New Orleans for hearings. The team interviewed some 300 residents
and held a quot;town hallquot; style meeting.
Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB): Created by an executive order of Mayor
Ray Nagin, it served beginning October 2005 in an advisory capacity. It consisted of leaders
from government, business and finance, religious institutions and the legal community.
New Orleans Neighborhood Redevelopment Plan (NOLANRP, popularly known as the
Lambert Plans): The BNOB plan appeared all but dead in the spring of 2006, so the City Council
drew up an alternative. This was to be a linked series of plans created by neighborhoods. The
initiative was financed with $2.9 million in federal Community Development Block Grant
(CBGB) monies.
Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP): This last of the major planning processes was
sparked by the BNOB's failure, as well as concerns about transparency in Lambert Plans hiring.
It was initially funded in part with $3.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation. Deliberative
meetings were held beginning in August 2006 at three levels: Within 13 planning districts and
citywide, as well as multi-city to involve more Katrina evacuees.
Against rebuilding: Green spaces, moratoriums and the BNOB
The divisiveness of initial talk of shrinking the city's footprint went over with citizens
about as well as discussion of moving the professional New Orleans Saints football team to San
Antonio, Texas. ULI authorities had touted their decision-making as rational, but they failed to

8. 6
take into account how the past informed attitudes about expert or elite policymaking. The city's
citizens helped give birth to the battle for American historic preservation during the 1960s in
reaction to plans to lay a quot;Riverfront Expresswayquot; past Jackson Square. The stretch of Interstate
overpass was ultimately built in the historically black Treme, north of the French Quarter,
leading to the ruin of its Claiborne Avenue commercial district and canopy of live oaks (Lewis,
111-12). At the same time, many lower-income residents no doubt recalled the planning
involved in the creation of River Garden Apartments, a mixed use development abutting the
more affluent and trendy Warehouse District in the city's Central Business District, which
replaced a 1,500-unit public housing development (Lewis, 134-135). Joseph Canizaro, a BNOB
commission member as well as a former ULI chairman, played a significant role in the River
Garden saga (Thevenot, 2006). For this, as well as his close ties to President George W. Bush,
Canizaro quickly came to be be a lightning rod for criticism of the BNOB (Horne, 2006).
The team suggested rebuilding in stages, with immediate rehabilitation suggested for
areas that remained largely dry or which were more lightly flooded, with moratoriums on
rebuilding elsewhere. The ULI team simultaneously recommended the creation of a quasi-public
recovery authority granted eminent domain powers. The agency would have the power to decide
whether to allow rebuilding or force buyouts based upon factors including the extent of flooding
in the past fifty years, the possibility of future flooding and historic value.
To the ULI team, closing or limiting redevelopment appeared only rational. All they
needed to hear, really, was that most flooded sections had been built on drained swampland, and
had long ago sunk below sea level from subsidence. Residents of these areas, by contrast, felt as
if planners wanted to punish them for failures of the federal hurricane and flood control system

9. 7
were to blame for their fate, ones not acknowledged by a federal interagency study until June
2006 (Link, 2007). It soon became clear that New Orleans City Council members found the
ULI's proposal objectionable regardless (Mann, 2006).
The BNOB decided to move on. In so doing, the commission consulted with planner
Beckman, who had worked with the city previously. He suggested that closing large swaths of
the city was quot;planning for failurequot; (Mann, 2006). Even so, he went on to propose another
rebuilding moratorium. What made his plan proposal distinct was that it required citizen
participation during this four-month period, during which neighborhoods would be required to
prove their viability. Left unexplained was how evacuees who were scattered across North
America were supposed to be contacted. (The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) had earlier refused to divulge evacuee contact information to the ULI.) Finally,
Beckman recommended the creation of another recovery agency with eminent domain and
buyout powers.
It is essential to understand that the BNOB proposal's viability hinged upon the receipt of
billions of federal dollars. Unfortunately, legislation proposed by U.S. House of Representatives
by then-Rep. Richard Baker (R-Baton Rouge) that would have provided these billions never
made its way to the president. In January 2006, President Bush signaled that he would veto the
larger recovery bill on the grounds that its potential long-term expense–up to $80 million–was
far too high (Baum, 2006). The commission received yet another blow when Nagin, who was
soon to face a reelection battle, publicly distanced himself from its proposals (Baum, 2006;
Mann, 2006).

10. 8
A quot;Productive Form of Denialquot;: Home Owners Say No
In the months following the failure of the BNOB, Nagin and City Council members were
castigated at the national level, particularly by dismayed ULI leaders. Even so, the reaction of
local authorities had not been particularly unusual. According to Vale and Campanella (2005),
no urban area had ever willingly and dramatically shrunk its physical size after any disaster,
largely due to pressures from property owners. The very notion of urban resilience in the wake
of a disaster had been less typically driven by planners or any authorities than by these property
owners, in a sort of socioeconomically productive form of denial (345-347). What this meant for
New Orleans (even setting aside later programs that encouraged the return of homeowners over
renters) was that the first residents to return were more likely to be homeowners, a sizable
number of whom had returned to all sections of the city two years after the storm, including
those that saw heavy flooding. These are discussed in detail below.
Most of the areas sustaining the heaviest flooding had been settled largely after the turn
of the 20th Century, when drainage pumps allowed families to begin moving into areas that were
formerly cypress swamps. Past populations and leaders, footprint advocates thought, made a
mistake here that was now avoidable. Any consideration of levee failures was cast aside in favor
of what was termed a common-sense admonition against building below sea level. Advocates
frequently pointed to older maps of the city, particularly late 19th Century ones, as showing that
the city's dry and lightly flooded sections corresponded remarkably to the city's older footprint.
Accordingly, they saw the city's future in its past. At meetings of the UNOP, consultants
referred to areas closer to the Mississippi River as the city's sustainable sections. Ironically,
though, it had been the audacity of building the city's original sections on such an unlikely site

11. 9
that lent New Orleans much of its initial cachet (Lewis, 2003). It was an oasis of civilization in
the harshest of environments, not a model of sustainability. What was now being asked, then,
was in effect not whether the city could be made perfectly safe. Instead, the question was, Is
there no place to draw a line, no limit at which residents can agree to stop fighting nature?
In pondering the matter, one could do worse than to first consider Eastern New Orleans,
site of some of the deepest post-Katrina flooding. Sections of this former marsh that had been
unsettled until the late 1970s sustained heavy flooding in earlier storms, including Betsy in 1965
and Camille in 1969. It thus had no historical importance and had a history of flooding besides.
Meanwhile, the Michoud fault line, located south of the area's residential sections, was leading
the area to sink faster than any other part of metropolitan region. The area also sits perilously
close to Gulf of Mexico given wetlands loss at Lake Borgne. Its residents—mostly black middle
class, in an area that developers hoped would be a middle-class white haven (plans fell through
after the 1980s oil bust)-- were nevertheless more likely to blame post-Katrina flooding on the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), a shipping channel built in the 1950s to create a shorter
route to the city's port.
The area's residents felt as if their being targeted for past flooding was unfair, then,
largely due to past engineering decisions that they felt exacerbated any natural problems. A way
to further understand their concerns is to realize that quot;eastquot; in New Orleans equates to quot;east of
the Industrial Canalquot; or, more formally, the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC), a shipping
channel built by the Port of New Orleans in the first quarter of the 20th Century to link the
Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain. After World War II, the canal was connected to the
Corps of Engineers-built Gulf Intercoastal Waterway at a point north of the city's Ninth Ward.

12. 10
Later, the Corps widened this junction to carry waters flowing in from MR-GO. This, critics
charge, was a critical error; the result, they allege, was creation of deadly quot;funnel effectquot; as storm
surge was pushed into the Industrial Canal during hurricanes. The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers did not acknowledge problems, but instead maintained that Katrina's storm surge
would have made its way into Eastern New Orleans even if the MR-GO had not existed.
Nonetheless, in July 2007, the Corps requested appropriations of $13.5 million from Congress to
close the Gulf outlet (Rioux, 2007).
Another area of the quot;eastquot; affected by this problem was the Lower Ninth Ward. It had
always been distinct from the rest of eastern New Orleans, though, and not only given mostly
earlier development. Instead, the Lower 9–as many locals call it–sits on land of generally higher
elevation than areas further east. Curiously, then, the area was often discussed during the post-
Katrina months as if it sat on the city's lowest-lying land, an idea propagated by authorities
including Nagin (Baum, 2). Part of the reason for this perception may have been that it faced
heavy flooding after Hurricane Betsy at a time when Eastern New Orleans was largely unsettled.
It also faced major flooding after a series of heavy rainfalls that began in the late 1970s, ones that
also affected the Broadmoor area discussed below, largely as a result of drainage issues (Colten,
2005). Unlike the more recently developed sections of Eastern New Orleans, it also featured
housing of some historic importance in Holy Cross, which borders the Mississippi River and is
of similar elevation to the French Quarter and other riverside neighborhoods.
West of the Industrial Canal, the most contentious debate focused on Broadmoor, a
National Register Historic District neighborhood that sits at what locals colloquially call quot;the
bottom of the bowl;quot;that is, at the lowest point in the older section of the city. The area was

13. 11
drained and developed largely in the 1920s and 1930s. According to Colten (2005), residents
had filed more repetitive claims under FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) than
any other section of the New Orleans areas, largely as a result of the heavy rainfalls mentioned
earlier. What makes the area susceptible to flooding during such storms is that it catches runoff
from areas of Uptown, forcing the city to pump the water out. Failing that, residents watch the
area act as a reservoir for runoff (Colten, 2005, 151). In defending their neighborhood after
Katrina, Broadmoor residents insisted that, as a consequence of NFIP-forced improvements to its
drainage system, problems with regular flooding had been largely worked out before the storm.
This position had some backing from a University of New Orleans study (Stack, 2006). At the
same time, its denizens pointed out that Broadmoor has a large number of raised basement
homes made of rot-resistant wood, a feature more favorable for flooding prevention.
The ULI's John McIlwain would, however, hear none of it:
There's a strong possibility that all of this (planning) will fail partly because of the
efforts of people in Broadmoor. Rather than pull together to say how do we
design a city that we can all live in that's better and safer for everyone, they're
simply saying, 'I want my neighborhood back, the hell with you ... (Goldberg,
2006, 3).
What McIlwain saw as NIMBYism, however, Broadmoor residents saw as defending a
way of life and a historic neighborhood. Consequently, the footprint debate seemed poised to be
eternally stuck in the immediate post-Katrina muck. Campanella (2006a) suggested that it had to
be admitted that the planning was hampered by seeming unresolvable differences in perspective.
People who lived in heavily flooded areas were more likely to see all sections as under threat.
Many doomsayers—mostly from outside the city—agreed, but instead of advocating increased
protection confidently advocated the entire city's abandonment or relocation. Residents of quot;dryquot;

14. 12
areas of the city, by contrast, were more likely to endorse a limited rebuilding. Variables such as
historic value, meanwhile, were not easily quantified, and not easily balanced against safety or
sustainability goals regardless. There was, in short, probably no way for those involving in the
immediate post-Katrina planning in New Orleans to create an unequivocally rational, limited
rebuilding plan. At the same time, it has to be noted that few involved with the BNOB land-use
debate had a scientific background. Most were not even urban planners, but instead architects
and real estate developers, including a Los Angeles developer whose memoir of the ULI process
featured a professional endorsement in blurb form from the creator of a popular television show,
America's Funniest Home Videos (Hart, 2007).
Given the failure of the ULI and BNOB land-use ideas in local political marketplace,
what ultimately seemed poised to matter more was whether FEMA would change its guidelines
for building in floodplains, given that state recovery officials had indicated that these would
affect how recovery dollars were dispersed. In April 2007, however, the agency released
floodplain building guidelines that were essentially unchanged from pre-Katrina years (Baum,
2006). Its justification was that flood control improvements were sufficient.
The footprint’s comeback: The ULI plan and “clustering”
The footprint issue was never prominent in the meetings for more neighborhood-focused
Lambert Plan process. By contrast, the creation of a final citywide plan was the raison d'être of
the UNOP. It was in this process that the footprint issue was reintroduced, mainly in an
intentionally understated, albeit clumsy, manner via survey questions asked at quot;town hallquot; style
gatherings. At the first citywide meeting, for instance, participants were queried as to whether
they considered keeping the city's pre-Katrina layout as quot;importantquot; or quot;very important,quot; or the

15. 13
reverse. A majority of the mostly white and middle class crowd answered that it was not very
important. Another sizable majority (of an audience made up of mostly middle class residents, at
least half from non-flooded areas) agreed that more recovery dollars needed to be spent on
projects in areas with the heaviest concentration of residents and open businesses in 2006–that is,
those that did not flood. Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a council member representing parts of
Gentilly, Eastern New Orleans and the Ninth Ward suggested that the questions brought to mind
the footprint debate from the BNOB process (Williamson, 8).
Later, more demographically representative gatherings led to a seeming consensus in
support of quot;clustering;quot; that is, for increasing density within areas with the highest flooding risk.
Such clustering would be aimed only at areas experiencing less than a 15 percent return. Beyond
that, the city could offer to buy out properties, or to offer a swap of participant properties with
housing redeveloped by a city recovery authority (UNOP, 2007a, 5). However, longtime
housing and land-swap advocates at the Bureau of Governmental Research (2006), a local policy
institute with ties to many of the city's civic and business elite, subjected the final UNOP plan to
withering criticism. Its analysts noted that the UNOP document included frank discussion of
flooding risks that certain areas faced, but irrationally encouraged resettlement anyhow.
Still, it seemed to many observers that the clustering idea was politically doable.
Consequently, just before the UNOP had won state approval, the city's then relatively new
quot;recovery czar,quot; planning professor Ed Blakely, produced a detailed, neighborhood-based
recovery plan based on the clustering concept. His plan was to spur neighborhood development
by encouraging commercial development in 16 zones, including sections of the Lower Ninth

16. 14
Ward and Eastern New Orleans, as well as sections of Broadmoor, Gentilly and Lakeview. In
mid-2008, though, the potential for funding the plan seemed doubtful.
Perhaps remarks made by City Council member Stacy Head in discussing the
establishment of a city recovery office applied here as well, then: quot;It's like a bad margarita. Once
it's in the glass, it's hard to go back and fix itquot; (Author, 2006). Others seem relieved, however,
that the pouring of a vastly more bitter concoction had been avoided.
The aftermath: Top-down planning versus neighborhood engagement
What went wrong here? Some authorities thought the main issue was that authorities
higher than local officials needed to be making land-use decisions involving sustainability.
Houck (2006), in particular, suggested that officials in New Orleans as well as neighboring
Jefferson Parish were too lenient with homeowners after the storm, allowing people to rebuild
even with damage assessments of greater than 50 percent that would have forced compliance
with updated FEMA guidelines. Such decisions, he suggested, needed to be more inter-
governmental and serious (2006, 63-65).
It was the failure of the Baker bill, however, and subsequent housing-related legislation
that acted as incentive for such unserious behavior. What the Bush administration gave its full
support to instead was a block grants program for reconstruction, one aimed more at repairs and
reconstruction than buyouts. Unfortunately, the policy developed to disperse monies from grants
in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco's ill-fated Road Home program, appeared to exacerbate
what Lewis (2003) called a nearly pathological distrust of government in New Orleans, one that
pre-dated Katrina (although this, as indicated later, may be significantly more complicated than
the author suggests). The $7.5 billion housing program was the subject of a fusillade of

17. 15
criticism, given fiscal shortfalls and the bureaucratic ineptitude of the Washington, DC-based
ICF International, which handled its implementation.
Other than the winking and nodding at damage assessments, those who returned to New
Orleans found little help from Nagin's office. His administration failed to engage with citizens,
or provide them much information and assistance in the months to come. Citizens, with the help
of charitable foundations, non-profits and universities, stepped in to fill the vacuum. In a city
with no history of much grass-roots engagement, neighborhood organizations were seen by many
observers as being more active than ever before (Horne and Nee, 2006; Nelson, Ehrenfeuct and
Laska, 2007). The prototype for this apparent new era was the Broadmoor Improvement
Association (BIA), whose membership jumped from two-hundred to six-hundred after the
release of the BNOB report. Soon, the organization completed projects as diverse and complex
as a repopulation survey, an assessment of elementary education needs, and a probe of the city's
pumping system. This won the attention of Harvard University, which sent consultants to help
with the neighborhood's redevelopment plans, and the William J. Clinton Foundation, which
promised $4.5 million in funds and in-kind services. In 2007, the neighborhood opened its own
charter school, and had secured an agreement to reopen the area's public library.
Other neighborhood groups, including those in Gentilly and Mid-City, carried out
initiatives in policy areas addressed during the larger planning process, including education,
cultural affairs and environmental sustainability. For instance, the Holy Cross Neighborhood
Association was attempting to create a model of sustainable rebuilding, with assistance from the
nonprofit Global Green USA. Residents were also working with scientists to restore the
headwaters of the area's Bayou Bienvenue, largely destroyed by saltwater infiltration from MR-

18. 16
GO (Wiltse, 2007). Citizen-led groups even pushed for the creation of new green space and
parkland, most notably a group known as the Friends of Lafitte Corridor, which pushed for the
conversion of a defunct railway corridor to a bicycle and exercise trail. It was to stretch through
a racially and economically diverse area, from Mid-City to the French Quarter. Advocates won
state funding for the first segment in November 2006 (Friends of Lafitte Corridor, 2007).
Despite criticism of curiously worded surveys as a means of gaining citizen input at
meetings, the UNOP process nonetheless provided a means for thousands of citizens, including
evacuees, to communicate their wishes to planning professionals. It also provided some impetus
for renewing talk of creating a neighborhood council structure for the city, an idea initially
introduced by the elite-backed Committee for a Better New Orleans in 2004. CBNO-backed
planning sessions for what was termed a quot;citizen participation systemquot; began in mid-2008 and
involved a demographically diverse group of participants.
What these groups did not receive was backing from Nagin's administration. Some
officials with mayor's office argued that public hearings were sufficient for public participation
and feedback. Blakely was a skeptic as well. While indicating support for a more structured
neighborhood council system, he nonetheless suggested that he feared the groups might demand
patronage or make new contributions to the city's storied history of public corruption
(Williamson, 32). While there was little to suggest that such fears were warranted, it was true
that the city set no standards for their operation or recognition. Anyone who wanted to set up a
group and claim to speak for a neighborhood could do so. Some groups had existed for decades
(e.g., the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization), but new large umbrella groups were formed
post-Katrina in Gentilly and Uptown.

19. 17
Whatever the case, Nelson et. al. (2007) hypothesized that this increased activity had
been caused in part by a distrust of governmental officialdom among New Orleans residents,
with African-Americans being particularly distrustful. All the same, the authors believed that
city and planning leaders should have anticipated citizen-driven recovery efforts, given evidence
from other recent disasters, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (2007, p 8). They
stressed that Nagin may have underestimated the amount of suspicion that would be generated by
the BNOB process and developer Canizaro specifically.
There was nothing in the way of empirical evidence, however, to suggest a strong
correlation between neighborhood group activity and distrust of government. African-American
residents of New Orleans clearly had reasons view government leaders with suspicion Katrina,
but blame was not easily placed. The same was true of distrust of the BNOB process and those
pushing for a smaller footprint. Nagin, after all, did not take the fall for the commission's
actions. Instead, as noted by McBride and Parker (2008), he won re-election in 2006 in part as a
result of black distrust of white elites, as opposed to distrust of government per se. Fears of
black political disempowerment in a whiter post-Katrina demographic landscape also entered
into the Nagin-supporting black majority's calculus.
Within months of his reelection, though, Nagin's approval ratings declined among black
or white residents alike (Howell, 2007; McBride and Parker, 2008). Meanwhile, a survey of
neighborhood group members showed disappointment with city and planning efforts to be
particularly high, echoing other surveys (Howell, 2007). Respondents were not feeling
enthusiastic about the performance of city officials in the recovery effort, with 47.5 percent
believing their effort having fallen far short of what it should have been, and another 35.6

20. 18
percent believing that they have not done well at all. Even so, about 70 percent also suggested
that either the City Council or their own council representatives had acted in a manner that
furthered the aims of their organizations' recovery aims or goals. 1 . The City Council won
similar approval in another survey the next year. There were, again, major problems with all
these surveys. Clearly, though, opportunities for gaining trust and consenus had been lost.
To make matter worse, when authorities involved in recovery planning in New Orleans
finally took to heart the need for civic engagement, with the UNOP process, the majority’s
wishes had limited impact. That final plan was unenforceable, consisting mainly of statements
of broad goals and ideas for economic and community development. The UNOP plans included
suggestions for business incubators, health clinics and the like that, one could argue, were
practical long-term goals and worthy of discussion. Still, the epic-length series of plans featured
many fantastical renderings of sustainable urban dreamscapes, with elegant yet modern
pedestrian esplanades bordering environmentally-friendly, clean and modern architecture, with
sidewalk cafes abounding. The city looked in these renderings like a cross between the pre-
Katrina Big Easy and a post-millennial vision of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. In reality, New
Orleans was doing well even three years later just to get major roads in flooded areas repaired.
The city went so far as to announce repairs of streets and sidewalks with signs with the names of
Nagin and all New Orleans City Council members and the slogan, ―Rethink, Renew, Revive.‖
The administration of basic city services was played up a major event. In the interim, many
heavily flooded neighborhoods were facing a lack of social services and public transportation.
Neighborhood engagement apparently had its limits, or at least it had limited connection to the
policy planning and implementation of local government administration. Neither, however, had

21. 19
the top-down planning worked. What was lacking, it is argued below, was anything to bring
disparate interests and administration together in the making of decisions. There was, to make
an understatement, a disconnect here.
Lessons from the Crescent City: Strengthening and Building Networks
The lessons for other cities and locales, then, cannot be as simple as encouraging citizens
to become more engaged, or to rely on civil society or social capital to do all the heavy lifting.
What may matter more is how citizens are engaged and whether elected officials and
administrators have ties and are responsive to citizens. More particularly, it may matter how the
avenues for their engagement are structured, or more specifically with whether citizens are
encouraged to associate with interests or stakeholder groups that work at cross purposes. Even in
cities without more racially diverse or divided populations and a lack of financial resources, such
as New Orleans, it was unlikely that as dramatic an undertaking as the shrinking of city’s
physical size--and an accompanying, forced buyout of tens of thousands of homeowners--was
going to be accomplished without trust and established ties between residents and their civic
leaders or the local elite strata generally, including private sector leaders.
It still may be that some recovery-related problems could have been avoided through a
more streamlined structuring of recovery decision making. Nelson, et. al. (2007), for instance,
suggested that cities need to learn from New Orleans’ bad example and have a plan in place in
order to deal with a disaster’s aftermath. Further, they recommended that cities would do well to
name one designated agency for post-disaster planning processes, given the involvement of
groups or stakeholders with competing priorities. This would eliminate duplication by rival
agencies or authorities, as faced in post-Katrina New Orleans (2007, p. 45). The evidence

22. 20
presented earlier and below regarding the respect according the city’s Planning Commission
makes a case for this argument.
What others thought New Orleans desperately needed was something harder to define,
however, and not easily created in any careful and deliberate way. Burns and Thomas (2006),
more specifically, suggested that the city’s failures before and after Katrina were in part a result
of its lack of or an urban regime; this being loosely defined as a coalition of government leaders,
important private sectors actors and other interests of the sort Stone (1989) saw as essential for
effective urban governance. Burns and Thomas did not see New Orleans as being a city where
citywide leaders had any shared policy goals or vision. There was hardly anything resembling a
corporate presence in the city. Diverse interests instead formed smaller or ad hoc coalitions
similar to Helco's (1978) issue networks, mainly for one-shot initiatives.
A social network analysis-oriented study of neighborhood group leadership, undertaken
from late 2007 to August 2008 2, appeared to provide some empirical backing for this idea. At
the very least, the study demonstrated that the ties between neighborhoods and between
government authorities and neighborhoods were something less than cohesive. In this research,
neighborhood organization leaders were asked to identify groups with whom they worked or
cooperated with (with quot;working or cooperating withquot; defined as sharing information and alerting
fellow organizations about meetings of interest, providing with technical assistance and help
with grant applications, and the like) at least once a month. Despite the fact that citizens had
been brought together during the UNOP process, and that Internet message boards were
commonly used by neighborhood groups after the storm, most neighborhood leaders did not
indicate working with a diverse array of groups. They were more likely to cite working or

23. 21
cooperating primarily with, first, neighborhoods that bordered their own and, secondly,
neighborhoods with similar demographics. Clusters of dense ties are thus shown in a graph
shown below as existing in more middle class to upper middle class flooded areas, such as
Gentilly and Lakeview, as well in and around Mid-City, with less dense clusters found in the
French Quarter and neighborhood riverfront areas, along with sections of Uptown. These
clusters are, however, isolated from one another. Most remarkably, Uptown clusters are shown
as being tied to Mid-City and thus Gentilly and Lakeview by only one tie. Some clusters are
even completely separated from the larger network, including more affluent sections of Eastern
New Orleans and Algiers, a non-flooded district of the city across the Mississippi River..
The network graph is shown in Figure 1.2, following a mapping of the clusters'
geographic location in Figure 1.2. The clusters are encircled in matching patterns on the map
and network graph, in order to better demonstrate their congruity.
Figure 1.1 Map via Greater New Orleans Community Data Center/Knowledge Works

24. 22
Figure 1.2 Produced with: UINet 6 for Windows, NetDraw
Meanwhile, a network graph taken from data on ties between neighborhood groups and
local government demonstrated that these organizations had their strongest ties with the New
Orleans City Council and its members, as well as the City Planning Commission. The
relationships are shown in the graph in Figure 1.3 below. The council and CPC are represented
as the two large dots toward the center of the graph, demonstrating that calculations showed
them to have high quot;betweennesss centrality,quot; a measure of how much capacity a particular actor
has to act as a broker among other actors (Hanneman and Riddle, 2005). Less central to the
network was Mayor Nagin, whose node is located from the left of Blakely’s, as well as those of
the council and the CPC. Council members surround the network in a nearly oval pattern, a fact
which mostly demonstrates that individual council members (four are elected by district, with

25. 23
Figure 1.3 Produced with: UINet 6 for Windows, NetDraw
another two at large, one of which had just had been elected to office as the survey was
administered) are typically deemed more important by specific constituencies than city at large.
The larger picture painted by these graphs appears be that although neighborhood activity
may have increased after Katrina, the overall network of neighborhood groups–as well as
between these groups and government, as well as nonprofit groups and faith-based
organizations–remained fractured. Networks linking neighborhoods to city council members and
the city Planning Commission were strong. These ties made sense at an intuitive level, though,
given the involvement of the commission and council members in Helco-like issue networks
with neighborhood groups, ones primarily involving land-use decisions. The respect accorded
the City Council as a whole pointed to at least some potential for it to exercise greater control

26. 24
over competing interests. This potential was likely to be limited, however, given that only two
council members represented the entire city, with the other four representing districts. Lending
less hope for the formation of an efficacious governing urban regime was the apparent lack of
any actor or authority with enough network connections to broker between competing local
interests on controversial citywide issues. In the absence of such brokers, the introduction of
grand planning schemes only wastes time and civic resources. With them, the footprint plans
may have at least been moderated, or effective compromises introduced at an earlier time.
Discussions underway in 2008 to form a citywide citizen participation system had the
potential to form an organization that could overcome the problems of coordination or collective
action posed by the decentralized nature of neighborhood group organization in the city, and in
this way lead to a stronger civic culture. This is not to say it would be unwise for authorities to
engage with any one particular group or cluster of groups (or make use of associated post-
Katrina nonprofits such as Beacon of Hope, which opened recovery centers dedicated to helping
citizens rebuild as efficaciously as possible, first in Lakeview and then Gentilly and the Lower
Ninth Ward), or that such engagement would create beggar-thy-neighbor effects. It is only the
case now that some neighborhoods at least do not suffer as greatly from the status quo as others
do, especially predominantly lower-income and African-American neighborhoods.
There should practical reasons, meanwhile, for government agencies to work with these
neighborhood organizations. More specifically, it would likely be wise for governmental
authorities and civic leaders or elites to engage these groups in plans for dealing with evacuation
and the administration of critical services in the aftermath of a catastrophe. It is worth recalling
here that there was no clear citizenry with which the BNOB could engage in New Orleans

27. 25
immediately after Katrina, given that FEMA was unable to provide contact information. The
experience of the neighborhood organizations in helping residents find their own way back home
could thus be instructive. More than a few groups discovered that the Internet can be a useful
tool for organizing when residents are scattered hither and yon. Administrators could take a cue
from this, developing emergency response and recovery e-mail lists or message boards
connected to remote servers or those operated by third parties outside of New Orleans.
Whatever the case, the biggest lesson remains while the effects of citizen engagement
may be limited, the alternative may present even greater blocks to progress, and a slower than
necessary recovery from catastrophe. Certainly, there were fiscal and intergovernmental issues
in post-Katrina New Orleans that slowed the city’s recovery. Still, ideas such as clustering and
green space creation are almost certainly more likely to take hold if embraced by engaged
residents of an affected city than if presented as coming from Mount Olympus. This was true
even in a city as low-lying as the Crescent City. Likewise, detached pundits and analysts were
less likely to resolve thorny recovery issues than those individuals who chose to make a go of
things the rough and uncertain place that was post-Katrina New Orleans.
Endnotes
1. The survey was put together via lists of City-Works and two other non-profits (the established
New Orleans Preservation Resource Center, a historic preservation group, and the
Neighborhoods Planning Network, formed post-Katrina with the aim of assisting neighborhood
groups), a survey targeting neighborhood organization members was developed. Neighborhood
message boards were added to inquiry lists. The survey was administered beginning in late
November 2006 and ending in early January 2007, before the final UNOP meetings.
2. The data was put together through the lists cited above. Based on a working definition of
neighborhood groups that excluded business improvement or commercial district associations,

28. 26
mandatory homeowners groups, condominium associations, community development
corporations and other non-profits, it was estimated that anywhere from eighty to one hundred
active neighborhood organizations of varying size (many with overlapping boundaries) existed.
The survey was administered via an Internet survey page and mail surveys from December 2007
to June 2008. There were eighty respondents in total, representing some sixty-five organizations
from all sections of the city, with no single section dominating. Fifty group leaders filled out a
long-form questionnaire with nineteen questions, and another thirty completing a four-question
short form used for confirmation of reported neighborhood-to-neighborhood ties. The data was
processed via UCINET, a social network analysis program, and NetDraw, a graphical program.
The option to symmetrize data in UCINET was exercised given questions about conflicts of
answers with information about formal ties between groups gathered at neighborhood and
planning meetings. In many cases, group leaders also asked for one leader to speak for an entire
board. Consequently, one reciprocal tie was counted as a full tie. In most case, however, ties
were reciprocal and did not vary from expected and regularly found patterns regarding
geographic proximity and demographic similarity.
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