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INTERFACE
Introduction: Making a Difference
in Response to Hurricane Katrina
JOHN FORESTER
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
When disasters strike cities, universities can make a real difference “on the ground”, as
well as in the classroom. Behind news stories of student volunteers gutting houses lie
many possibilities of putting the design professions to work—to assess actual structures,
to listen to residents, to re-imagine and guide city building and re-building. The essays in
this Interface explore the actual promises and risks involved in pro-active university
responses to major social calamities. The essays begin with Ken Reardon’s story of
organizing and collaborating, managing and coaching, encouraging and leading. Three
project participants then explore issues of real logistical challenges, the significance of race
relations framing planners’ work, and the development of students’ senses of
commitment, responsibility and leadership.
In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in fall 2005, New Orleans residents and
community organizers sought help from trusted planning faculty at Cornell University,
Correspondence Address: John Forester, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, 106 West Sibley Hall, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY, 14853 USA. Email: jff1@cornell.edu
Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 9, No. 4, 517–564, December 2008
1464-9357 Print/1470-000X On-line/08/040517-48 q2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649350802481363
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the Pratt Institute, and the University of Illinois, among others. Cornell professors and
students in the Department of City and Regional Planning responded to the challenge, and
soon found themselves collaborating with colleagues at Columbia University and the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on what they came to call the New Orleans
Planning Initiative (NOPI).
Fifteen months later, this work would appear in two hundred newspapers declaring,
“Ninth Ward Can Be Rebuilt, Planners Say”. Several months after that, city officials
pledged to target $140 million of $1.1 billion on the Ninth Ward, a set of neighborhoods
with a new future now promising residents the possibility of return, not just open space
hiding their displacement.
This Interface begins to tell the story of this ambitious initiative—because we can learn a
great deal from the NOPI experience. We learn about the ways universities can contribute
to people in need, practically and theoretically. We learn again that universities are hardly
structured to do this kind of work, and even with a prestigious and influential
“community partner” we see how complex is that basic planning question, “Just who is
the community?” We learn about theory and scholarship through practice, and vice versa.
We begin to explain how a student- and resident-driven plan became compelling
enough for the New Orleans City Council to adopt it officially as part of the city’s strategy
for rebuilding. Not least of all, we learn too from students whose reflections upon this
academic and applied work are insightful and moving, revealing and inspiring.
Could a collaboration between university planning departments and an activist
community partner thousands of miles away not just make a real contribution to aspiring
planning students’ educations but make a real difference in the political landscape and
recovery efforts of devastated neighborhoods? Impossible? Not at all. Here’s how it
happened, tumultuous as it was.
Planning, Hope, and Struggle in the
Wake of Katrina: Ken Reardon on the
New Orleans Planning Initiative
KEN REARDON in conversation with JOHN FORESTER
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
We had undertaken the Cornell– Columbia –Illinois partnership with ACORN and
ACORN Housing with the sense of continuing a tradition of participatory planning and
design that many of us have been involved in: we identify an organization that represents a
community that’s facing some challenge, and we work with them in figuring out the kind of
questions that need to be answered and the kind of planning and research activities that
need to be carried out.
1
We often acknowledge that whatever the presenting issues are,
they’re to be tested by going beyond the involvement of the leaders of that group to as
broad a representation of the stakeholders in the community as possible. In this situation
we were asked by ACORN to collaborate with them in developing a plan to guide recovery
for this area (the seventh and eighth districts of the city of New Orleans which comprises an
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area referred to as the Ninth Ward) which comprises a number of neighborhoods, most of
which are predominantly African American, which have a considerable low-income
population, although they also have working-class and middle-class residents—but within
these two districts are several of the most important African American communities in the
city of New Orleans. Many of these communities were deeply affected by Hurricane
Katrina because of the failure of three levee systems surrounding their neighborhoods.
At the lowest point in the Lower Ninth Ward the homes were covered by 22 feet (6.7 metres)
of water.
This was in neighborhoods that had, on average, 40% of their population living below the
poverty line, according to the 2000 census—and then they were hit with one of nation’s
worst storms. They were devastated.
So ACORN called up two institutions that they have had long histories working with,
Pratt and Cornell, who they knew had done participatory planning and design that had
resulted in projects moving from the drawing board to actual implementation. As it turned
out, Pratt took on the job of working with ACORN in New Orleans East and Gentilly
neighborhoods, and they’ve done great work. We at Cornell were asked to focus on the
Ninth Ward. It was an area that had roughly 57,000 people before the storm. In the weeks
and months following the storm, only 20% of that population had been able to move back.
We were invited to go to New York in October of 2005—just four weeks after the storm—
to meet with ACORN representatives to hear about what they had in mind. At that point,
they were asking for a pretty ill-defined set of planning, design and development
assistance. They said that they were going to try to refine their agenda at a conference in
Baton Rouge on November 7-9, to be held at the Louisiana State University (LSU) alumni
center, a conference at which they would have 100 residents coming back, and they
wanted to do a two-day conference where they heard from the best scientists and
professionals familiar with post-disaster recovery processes, and based upon that
discussion, their board would determine what kind of help they needed.
So we went to Baton Rouge, and for two days we heard epidemiologists discuss what
they knew about health effects of storms, and we heard from housing experts, folks who
worked in Kobe, Japan and North Ridge, California and Banda Aceh. At the end of the two
days the ACORN leaders came back and said, “Our overarching desire is to have a
group of universities work with us in crafting a comprehensive strategy for assisting
people in returning home.” That was the way that Beulah Labostrie, the president of
Louisiana ACORN, described it: as a homecoming plan.
So in the fall back at Cornell we studied background documents, and in the spring we
started developing some volunteer work to get ourselves more familiar with the
community. We went down and did some house gutting. We also organized several classes
in the Department of City and Regional Planning which began looking at issues such as
the storm water management system, and we had an environmental planning class look at
that. We had a second class look at what the physical fabric looked like before the storm
and afterwards and how might we begin to knit back the urban fabric: this was an urban
design studio. We had a third class that looked at how the historic and cultural resources
of this very, very culturally rich community could be used to facilitate and advance
economic redevelopment.
Then our historic preservation class led by Jeff Chusid did a study of the St. Roch’s
Market. The reason why that was important is that visually it marks a gateway from the
French quarter to these neighborhoods on St. Claude Avenue which is a main East/West
thoroughfare. Also, because it was a former publicly owned retail-vendor food market
selling fruits and vegetables to poor and working-class people, it was the poor people’s
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counterpart to the French market in the French quarter—and in the wake of the storm,
people did not have access to a store that could meet these consumer needs, getting fresh
fruits and vegetables, which was pretty important.
So we did these projects in Spring semester of 2006, all of which was a prelude to follow-
up work. In the summer of 2006 we sent nine interns down there from Cornell, with half of
their salary paid by Cornell, half by ACORN. Pratt sent some students down, and we
worked on a series of projects.
Very quickly news came back that the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation was going to be
partnering with the Greater New Orleans Community Support Foundation to fund the
development of a comprehensive plan, and they were going to be accepting requests for
qualifications, proposals to work with neighborhoods of the city. We got called late in July
from our student interns. They asked us if we could help them put together a proposal,
and we did.
The proposal we put together joined ACORN, as the grassroots mobilizing institution,
with ACORN Housing, one of the nation’s premier affordable housing production
organizations, and a series of what ended up being three universities, Cornell, Columbia,
and Illinois, which had great planning and design capacity—to develop a comprehensive
revitalization plan that would meet the requirements of the city, really a physical plan to
restore infrastructure and the built environment as a prelude to the return of the
population.
We submitted our proposal, as did 68 other consulting firms. We were the only non-
profit submission. We subsequently made a presentation to a panel of experts hired by the
greater New Orleans Community Foundation, Rockefeller, and the City Planning
Department of New Orleans. We were delighted to find out that not only were we chosen
to be one of the twenty-two organizations that were finalists, but that we were being
considered to be one of five organizations to serve as senior consultants for the
comprehensive planning process. So we were selected not just to be neighborhood
planning consultants at the local level, but we were actually selected because of our
“extraordinary capacity” as described by the staff running the comprehensive plan
process, and we would become district consultants to oversee the work of neighborhood
planning and organizing in the seventh and eighth districts, better known as the Upper
and Lower Ninth Ward.
In the Upper Ninth Ward, the local neighborhood planner was to be one of the world-
class architectural firms with a long community planning history, EDAW Associates. This
is a major international planning firm and we were going to supervise them, students and
faculty from these three institutions!
I thought that this was an extraordinary compliment to our non-profit consortia—and it
was very surprising. In addition to that firm, in the Lower Ninth was John Williams
Architects, and John Williams, a long-time New Orleans architect, was the designer of
River Walk, from the Morial Convention Center to the French Quarter, the boardwalk
promenade that was built on top of the levy. He’s a major urban designer, and he was then
working with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to implement the green housing project that
had been targeted for the Lower Ninth Ward, the outcome of an AIA international
competition. So we were to supervise him as well!
So, what was I thinking? One reaction was: we were collectively one bunch of really
smart, clever folks! My other reaction was to think about the city and the initial strategy of
the Urban Land Institute—based upon the Brookings report that the population of the city
was likely to shrink by 50% and not all neighborhoods could be saved, because there was
considerable discussion that among the neighborhoods they would least want to worry
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about would be the Lower Ninth Ward—the suggestion being that it was all below sea
level, and it was only poor people of color who were trouble makers anyway. This is not an
exaggeration: one white Congressman has said, “God did for us what we could never
do through public policy,” and that was to wash away a lot of poor people of color, the
latter part which he didn’t say, but it was the clear implication.
The head of the city’s Bring New Orleans Back committee said that, “This is going to
move us in the direction of having a healthier city: less black, more white, less poor, more
affluent.”
The mayor then heard from lots of people of color of all income classes who said, “I hope
you’re not going to follow these kinds of crazy ideas,” and the mayor then got up and was
quoted as saying, “This will always be a chocolate city.” He then got lots of grief about that
from the white community.
So my second theory about what this meant was that we were being chosen for what
was clearly such a politically contentious area to plan for—where there were clear
divisions based on class and race—because there were huge decisions about whether or
not we should even bother to rebuild the Ninth Ward. So maybe the city thought the best
thing that they could do, perhaps, was hire a bunch of students who might generate the
kind of empirically based findings that would then allow the politicians to go whichever
way local politicians dictated. You could, on one hand, be trapped by a lot of good
analysis but claim you hired some good people: You could say you wrapped the weak
plan in Ivy League clothes. With Cornell, Columbia and Illinois involved, how could
anyone suggest that we didn’t get good people? So the question was whether there was
really excitement about us, or whether there was excitement about having the perfect set
up for a fall, a patsy operation that would allow them to do whatever the hell they
wanted to do ultimately.
So we got notified that we were chosen to do this, and we decided to mobilize all the
resources that we could to do it as well as possible. To a large extent, part of our unique
selling point before the selection committee was, “We can do it all, baby: organize, plan,
design, develop and manage an increasingly complex redevelopment process.”
We really harped on the fact that we could reach beyond the community to the diaspora
that were living temporarily in receiving cities through ACORN’s 109 local offices. We laid
out a very ambitious bottom-up outreach process that would be going on throughout the
entire planning process, and I think that really resonated with the selection committee.
The presentation before the search committee came from the ACORN Housing/Uni-
versity Partnership, and the presentation was made by Richard Hayes, ACORN Housing’s
Director of Special Projects. He talked about the overall philosophy of the partnership and
introduced the members. He then turned it over to Steve Bradberry, who received the 2005
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award at the Kennedy Center. He is the director of the
Louisiana ACORN Organizing. He got up and talked about our commitment to outreach
and to reaching underrepresented communities.
Then Louisiana State University, at that point, was involved with its Architecture School
and Hurricane Center, to the extent that they could mobilize their extensive database of
physical conditions before and after the storm—really to make sure that the physical
designs made sense. I then spoke too and represented Cornell and the University of
Illinois, where I used to work. I talked about our skill in carrying out resident-driven,
participatory processes that not only have come up with good plans but that had raised
substantial amounts of outside capital and had implemented plans, and they seemed very
excited. Here I was drawing on my East St. Louis work and earlier work on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side—Essex Street Market project and Auction Sales project.
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With that, we thought we were off to the races, and we developed a very detailed work
plan for mobilizing ACORN leadership’s members and then using that core to go out into
the neighborhoods of the seventh and eighth districts to reach out to people from other
organizations, whether they had been involved in previous work or not, and so to go to
people who had never been touched by public planning processes, to make sure that over
time we had increasing numbers of people participating.
At that point we ran into a rather substantial roadblock in the form of ACORN itself—
who could not see any reason why we should reach out beyond ACORN and its members
to put this plan together. According to ACORN staff, ACORN had knocked on every one
of these doors repeatedly to challenge people to get involved in various community
building activities—and at this point anyone who was not in the organization had
basically handed in their franchise in terms of participation in local government. So we
began to encounter, on a pretty regular basis, situations where we would meet with the
ACORN staff to discuss how we were going to do the outreach, and they either cancelled
the meeting or came late or otherwise were unavailable for that discussion. That went on
throughout the fall just when the work had to occur.
I don’t think they really had any clear idea of what planning was. I also think there is a
certain tradition in community organizing that basically says that there are unequal
resources and unequal opportunities and structural injustices because there are policies
and institutions reinforcing privilege, and so what they’re about is blowing up those
structures, and they do it through confrontational direct action, Alinsky-style organizing.
Now, while they mobilize large numbers of people around common concerns, they had
judiciously avoided ever taking responsibility for implementing programs that came
about as result of people’s struggles. Their rationale is not an unreasonable one—which is
that if housing is in need, and you take on that work and you put pressure on the local
public and private institutions to redirect housing resources to an area, if you then take on
the job of building the housing, it will be so time consuming that you will have no time
to keep manning the barricades to make sure that the resources come and that the second
round of the investment really occurs.
So ACORN has always, basically, said, “We are about organizing people’s power and
not services—we are not a delivery operation.”
Planning is sort of the bridge, maybe, between organizing and service provision. It’s the
how-to: the road-mapping operation that is very critical to get from the idea to
implementation.
Even though ACORN had recruited us to do this, and we had spoken in front of the
selection committee about how we would collaborate—we sounded like the world’s
greatest symphony—when we actually sat down after getting the award and asked
“How are we going to do this?” ACORN made it very clear that they didn’t see any need
to go beyond their own staff and leaders in eliciting input on the plan.
We kept hoping that spring would come and that based upon dialogue, we would get
them to see the importance of engaging with us in the late summer and the beginning of
fall. We had been awarded the contract, and we now had to begin doing the work. Now
much of the work under this contract was looking at historic data, so we didn’t need to
immediately get in the field, but we were going to need to get there pretty quickly, because
there had to be meetings in late September and October to present preliminary data—and
in order to have meetings that were well attended, we had to be doing earlier outreach and
notification, etc.
We kept trying to talk to ACORN about this, and it become very clear that they were not
going to cooperate in helping us to do outreach into the community. They somehow
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thought that we could distill what we needed from existing data and the stories that their
staff, not even their leadership or membership, would tell us—and that we could create,
from that, a compelling plan. They didn’t really believe that data was that important or that
the buy-in by other institutions was very important. They basically felt that they had
sufficient political power to get major commitments for redevelopment in the Ninth Ward,
and they only needed us to catalog their ideas.
They didn’t claim they represented the neighborhoods. They claim, and they’re very
clear about this, that they represented their membership—and that their membership was
the only group of people that deserved to be represented because they were paying dues
to ACORN. This was, after all, going to be an ACORN plan.
Well, that represented a “bait and switch” in the sense that they had applied to the city
to do a plan for all the residents in the seventh and eighth districts, whether they were
ACORN members or not, whether they were progressives or fascists. If you were a citizen
of New Orleans and you lived or worked or did business or ran an agency in the seventh
or eighth district, as we understood it in our response to the RFP, you had a right to be
represented in the planning process. ACORN had implicitly said that they signed on to
that, but now when we had come to them to the work plan, clearly there was a whole list of
people, interests, groups and personalities who they had disagreed with in the past on
a variety of things and who, from their point of view, we were not to contact or be in
touch with.
We had to identify who, based on a public mapping of the community, represented
those constituencies throughout the neighborhood, and we sent out information to them
and asked them to meet with us so we could get their institutions’ points of view, and we
were going to follow that up, then, with a more expansive outreach to residents door to
door. And that is what we did.
ACORN, having gotten the contract, and proclaiming that as a victory, mostly then
focused their attention on a couple of lawsuits to get the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) to make their payments to residents, which was important—and they
won that in a series of court cases. They also won a court case against insurance
companies, and they threatened a court case to prevent the city from taking homes that
had not moved towards gutting within a certain period of time. The city had wanted to
declare a health hazard and use the power of eminent domain to go in and take the homes
and knock them down. ACORN fought them through the courts very extensively while
we were doing the basic planning activities on those things. They otherwise seemed
focused on those legal strategies.
There was another part of ACORN, ACORN Housing, whom we worked with more
successfully. So while we were having these meetings scheduled to talk about how we could
go forward on the work plan, ACORN would absent themselves, but we worked with their
housing division, whom we initially thought had some degree of independence. They were
very supportive of what we were doing. They agreed to the work plan and they had helped
us a lot to elaborate the work plan. They agreed to supervise our students on certain aspects
of it, and they helped us to design the instruments, etc. They were working hand in glove
with us, and we thought that meant that we also had ACORN’s tacit endorsement.
At one point, as we were moving forward, we had four sets of deliverables due for the
city. We had to do a report back for the city. The first deliverable required us to identify our
team, come up with a work plan, review census data and then do a review of all the past
plans relevant to this area. We were given 29 plans to review. What were the consistent
themes, and what were the holes in terms of goals and objectives? We produced that first
deliverable in September, and that was then shared at the community meeting.
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Only three of the sixteen consultants met the deadline. We were one of them.
We presented it in a meeting, and about 70 people came. They found that some of the
themes that we were talking about really didn’t resonate. We used that feedback to focus
on what we were framing as sets of questions for our interview schedules and
questionnaires.
After that meeting, we began to feel that there were some community groups that were
unhappy with ACORN, groups that didn’t have the view that ACORN could be an honest
facilitator, because in the past they hadn’t been satisfied with the work of their members.
It became clear that this was becoming a problem, that groups were beginning to say
ACORN and its partners, the universities, couldn’t be honest because they had a vested
self-interest, whether it represented underrepresented poor people or not. Now ACORN
Housing staff person Richard Hayes, Director of Special Projects, was the key person we
were working with. Richard was the project leader of our whole coordinated community-
university effort. With our help, he identified some aid organizations who seemed really
exercised with ACORN’s selection. He developed, based on several interviews, a brilliant
memorandum of understanding (MOU) that reinforced the notion that this plan was for
everyone and that ACORN would be one of many groups but would not be the owners of
this plan.
That didn’t really give up very much from ACORN, but yet it took some of the fears of
these groups into account. It was all set before a second meeting that would be held on our
second deliverable, which was on the initial analysis of local physical conditions and the
initial inventory of potential projects in the neighborhood—based upon secondary data
analysis and some community interviews that we had done.
We were about ready to finish our second deliverable and have our second meeting,
when Richard, seeing that there were some brushfires from groups that felt excluded,
brought these people together, developed this memorandum of understanding, right
before the second meeting. Everyone was there, all the groups, and they were ready to sign
the agreement. Fifteen minutes before the meeting was set to start, he got a phone call from
ACORN saying that after discussing who these groups were, ACORN felt that the other
groups who were complaining had no standing. ACORN was basically telling ACORN
Housing’s Director of Special Projects that he should leave the meeting right away and
that his parent organization ACORN would not sign their own agreement.
So they pulled the rug out from under his own memorandum of understanding. Now
these groups—not all of them, but I think a substantial number—had felt like they were
being invited to an honest effort to open up the process and address their past concerns.
They had had no complaints about the outreach and research methods that we were using.
But it was mostly that in the past ACORN had done X, Y and Z, and this totally incensed
these groups—and now they had made a concerted campaign to call the foundation that
was managing the funds for the process, the Greater New Orleans Community Support
Foundation. They basically argued—here they were pretty clever—that our selection was
a conflict of interest because we were both planners and developers. They hung that
argument on the fact that ACORN had bid on 150 tax-delinquent properties in the seventh
and eighth district, even if they had been asked by the city to do so, so that we could
assemble some parcels for future development that ACORN might or might not have
developed themselves. (Those parcels could have become the core of some nodes or
growth poles in the neighbourhoods.) These were some of the same groups that were
ready to sign the memorandum.
So after ACORN pulled back from the MOU process, they raised hell with the Greater
Support Foundation, and ACORN kept working on their lawsuits. This was three weeks
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before the national election, and ACORN was a national organization that represented
working class people. They were instrumental in the election passing, in seven states,
living wage campaign statutes, and they were believed to have turned three congressional
districts and to have been influential in four or five more in the November election.
The proof of the pudding in terms of their perceived power was that upon the
Democratic National Committee assuming power, ACORN was the first citizen
group invited to Washington to consult about what they wanted given the role that
they had played in returning a number of seats that gave the democrats the majority.
So when we were doing the work in New Orleans, ACORN’s national leadership and
national offices working from the same building on Elysian Fields were frying much
bigger fish.
It was painful when Richard Hayes had been decapitated, because we were all working
very hard towards this, and we felt that this negotiation was really quite important: he had
paved the way for us to really reach out to a lot of groups whose involvement would give
more legitimacy to the plan, whose ideas would enrich it and would give us a broader
political support, and if nothing else, as I know from past experience, it takes a smaller
number of deeply committed folks to stop something than it does to build something.
So we were livid, pissed, angry, ready to kill: we had planned to take 80 students to
New Orleans. This was the week of October 8 and we had planned for months a major
outreach effort to survey physical conditions—some 3,500 building lots, parcel by parcel,
by looking at 49 different aspects with all of this data being loaded into Palm Pilots and
GPS units to located longitude and latitude. We also planned to inspect fifteen public
buildings and examine 400 businesses that lined the neighborhood along four or five
major commercial strips in three clusters. We planned also to interview two dozen citizen
groups and maybe as many as 300 residents.
All that was planned to take place after having completed the secondary analysis of
existing data of post-Katrina conditions. Our survey of people’s priorities was going to be
pulled together by mobilizing about 80 students, mostly from Cornell with a smaller
number from Illinois and Columbia, to go down under the supervision of six or seven
faculty members for five days—at a cost of US$32,000 to get all this work done.
But then, ten days before that, ACORN pulls the plug in this meeting. These community
groups started calling their friends, and then one week before we are about to leave for
New Orleans, on the last day we could conceivably get low cost fares on Jet Blue, we get a
fax from the Concordia Consulting Group, which was managing the comprehensive
planning process: “Dear Gentleman, you have been realigned—meaning you are no
longer responsible for planning anything and we are appointing other people to take your
place.”
“Realigned” is really lovely: it doesn’t even sound that bad, as a way of describing or
saying, “getting your ass fired,” “getting canned,” because ACORN had gone out of their
way to dump on their former opponents, and they weren’t really paying attention.
Their antennae weren’t where they normally are because they were so focused on the
national election. After we’d heard from Richard about getting this memo saying all bets
were off, we felt as if we were facing the dark night of the soul.
Here we were trying to develop a comprehensive plan to help people in the poorest
census tracks in the city to return home—and they are waiting again, like they were
waiting on the rooftops to be rescued—and we really felt there was a moral and ethical
and professional responsibility to give voice to the aspirations of these people, who we
had only just begun to get to know on our trips down there, people who seemed to love
their neighborhood, who had strong multigenerational networks and relationships.
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This was not the picture of the Ninth Ward that was presented in the media, whose images
and conversations spoke of hoodlums and renegades. These were amazing folks who
welcomed us into their homes and churches.
With that on one side, on the other we were faced with the reality of being fired from our
contract—a contract that provided us with the ability to meet our expenses. We had spent,
up to that point, $110,000 or $115,000. The University had allocated $100,000. We were
already $15,000 over budget, and now we were looking at spending another $35,000 or
$50,000 to finish the work, and it looked like there might not be a possibility any longer to
be paid.
And then we had another set of considerations that related to the students. They were
really excited about doing this work. Because of these extraordinary circumstances, this was
maybe the most important planning project in their lifetime, to help the city—whose
planning capacity was weak before the storm and non-existent after—not only to restore
some conditions but also to improve conditions in a very historic African American
neighborhood.
So the students had enormous passion for this project, and we had one undergraduate
and two graduate classes. As we got into the project and the conflict with ACORN—and
the disappointment with their information and their non-responsiveness—there was a
growing frustration, and then we had to go back to the students and say we got fired! And
all this after they had walked to hell and back to deliver 500 to 700 pages of good stuff in
terms of two deliverable reports, in good form and on time, even after what they
considered to be the indifferent attitude of ACORN.
There was a considerable sense among these students that, maybe, despite how
important the project was, this was not going to be a project that would allow them to
serve the people as they hoped, that ACORN was just too dysfunctional a partner and that
doing anything for them so discredited us that we couldn’t go on. So we had a long
discussion about whether or not we would continue, and we wanted the students and the
faculty to make that decision—I didn’t want to impose it.
So we talked about the pros and the cons, and ultimately the students decided that in the
short run we should meet our obligations to our client even if our client was irascible and
irritating. That is, they said we should do our best to reach the people, develop the data
that would allow us to tell their story of what they needed to get back home and restore the
health and wellness and vibrancy of their neighborhood—and that meant continuing with
ACORN.
So we decided to continue with the project—and bite the bullet and spend another
$32,000 exactly on hotel rooms and food and airfare, because we were so late in making
this decision, given these developments, that the University couldn’t finance it. We were
only able to finance it because one of the faculty members and his wife fronted it on their
American Express bill, with the expectation that the University or ACORN would
reimburse us.
With that done, we all got on the plane in late October and spent five days in
New Orleans. There had been a lot of concern among some of the faculty on campus that
this was too dangerous a setting to put students in, because there had been a lot of news
coverage on growing crime in the Ninth Ward, so we took some precautions—but I was
very confident that we wouldn’t have a problem. We went down and divided the 80
students into 40 two-person teams.
Half of them did physical condition surveys, and they rocked! They did 3,500 parcel
surveys, with the Palm Pilot and GPS equipment, which we downloaded every night so
we could have summary Excel files that we needed. We cleaned it up each night and went
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through all the tables and charts and made sure that we were getting it right. They were
looking at structural integrity, foundations, the vertical elements, windows, whether the
roofline was right, whether there was a roof.
The other group had a semi-structured interview schedule focused on getting the
history of families: why they came to the neighborhood, what was special about it, why
they stayed, what the strengths and weaknesses were before the storm, what happened to
them physically during the storm. Did they evacuate? Did they stay? What was their
experience?
There’s a quote in our plan that occurs in two places, which I guess means we thought it
was really important, that we heard when we were driving around the Ninth in these big
vans. We had green t-shirts that said, “rebuildtheninthnow.org” and we got out in our
second hour,and an elderly woman who was sweeping the porch yelled out to me,
“Young man!”
I pulled my van up, and I got out, and she said, “Who are you?”
I explained who I was, and she asked if I was involved with these nice young people
who had been walking up and down doing these interviews, and I said, “Yes.”
And then she said, “Well, we have been inundated with people coming into our
neighborhood (this was fourteen months after the storm), people coming in with cameras
taking our pictures. In fact, we even had tour buses! We took care of those, some men in the
neighborhood had a solution (I think it had to do with putting nails in the street),” she
says, “but I can’t tell you how happy I am that you are actually getting out of your vans.
You are the first van people to actually get out of your vehicles and take the time to get our
story, and I think it is a story that hasn’t been told.”
As the days went on, we were embraced by this community. Almost everyone—when
we knocked on their door—took the time out from rebuilding their house, watching their
kids, cooking dinner, to be interviewed by our students. It was very emotional.
One African American kid in my class, a sophomore, knocked on an elderly couple’s
door, and they were trying to put up sheet rock in their house. They took time out, this
83-year-old husband and wife, and they put the sheetrock down and sat down in chairs in
their back yard surrounded by lemon and orange trees and spent an hour and a half telling
their story of the settlement of black people in this neighborhood. They told him what their
experience had been like, why they came, why they stayed, how they raised three children
and sent them off to college, what the conditions were like in the neighborhood, a
beautiful neighborhood, a working-class place, how much sharing, how much
neighboring activities there were, and then what happened during the storm.
They got to the Superdome, and they were there for many days. They went through all
the horrors that were reported. They were then evacuated; they ended up in four different
states before they returned home. And now without any assistance from their insurance
company, FEMA or the state Road Home Program, they had liquidated their 401K (tax
deferred retirement account) and they were rebuilding their house themselves, at age 83.
The student took notes with his colleague, deeply moved, thinking that these could be
his grandparents telling this story. He took notes and he listened and he tried to ask follow
up questions, and when it was all over, the man hugged him and thanked him and his
partner for taking the time out to allow them to tell their story—that they hadn’t really had
the chance to tell anybody—and they thought it was important that people know and not
forget what happened, and that they know enough to act on it.
He said, “I want to repay you,” and the student had no idea what he was talking about.
He went into the kitchen and took out two plastic bags, and took them back outside, and
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the 83-year-old man got on a ladder, and he picked off two shopping bags full of fruit:
oranges and lemons.
But that wasn’t enough. The man and his wife went to the refrigerator and he had eight
or nine cans of soda, eight or nine yogurts and he took out everything in his refrigerator
and gave it to our student. He came back to our van and ended the day at five o’clock in
tears, deeply moved, weepy—a tough, young, inner-city kid, a great young man.
I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “You won’t believe this. They had nothing—
they are trying to reclaim their house ...”—and they felt the need to thank us for just
coming by and listening.
We then came back to the church where we were all meeting, and that fruit became our
dessert. The student got up and told this story, and some of the other students resonated
with that and talked about how they had similar experiences. For the remainder of the trip,
we had a hard time getting students back to the vans by 5 p.m. because they wouldn’t
stop interviewing. We ended up with 230 interviews.
When they came back to campus, they killed themselves entering all the data in a week
and doing the analysis. We then had some internal problems where the faculty disagreed
about what we should produce. One faculty member felt that we should just be satisfied to
develop a detailed research document, an atlas of data, and that we should not feel obliged
to do a plan—because we needed more time and all the data wasn’t in, and we weren’t
going to be able to clean it up properly. This professor also didn’t feel that there was much
likelihood that ACORN would really do anything with this, so why kill ourselves?
The other argument was that we had something in these interviews that no one else had:
we had some really important information about the physical condition of the building
stock, that it was much better than many people thought and that a great many of the
houses could be rehabbed. So because of the peoples’ desire to return and the information
that the houses were in better shape than many believed, the argument was that this was
information that absolutely had to be brought to the public debate about the future of the
Ninth Ward—that we shouldn’t allow race and class to determine whether or not this
neighborhood would have a future.
Ultimately the latter argument won out, and all the students finished a preliminary and
then a secondary cut on a vision of the neighborhood. It was uneven but had some very
good material, and I think they persevered because they hoped, even if it was unlikely,
that someone would listen.
I didn’t know, as the lead faculty person at Cornell, whether ACORN would even host
an event for sharing the draft plan. The semester was running out, and we had five
students and a couple of faculty colleagues who wanted to help us refine the plan.
I went to New Orleans to give a talk, and while I was there, I called up ACORN and said,
“We’re going to take this material—we think it is so valuable—and we’re going to refine it
and present it as our plan. We don’t want to do it if you are not interested, but we think
there is material in here that is really critical that you will want to be a part of.”
ACORN’s leaders had just come back from one of several overseas trips that they had
taken at this time, and I went over and presented it at their national meeting to the
executive committee for the New Orleans/Louisiana Chapter of ACORN. I basically
summarized five or six points: eight out of ten houses are structurally sound, and they
could be rehabbed at a cost that is less than new construction. The overall sense [was] the
majority of the people that we interviewed are committed to coming back—and coming
back not to sell their homes but to rebuild their community. That there were, for every
person to come back, five family members and fifteen friends who were at the cusp of
deciding about whether or not to come back, and what was critical about that was not only
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the physical infrastructure but social supports: education, healthcare, housing, and
employment. And this was really important because the comprehensive plan being
developed by the city had a scope of services that restricted attention to just physical
issues—a remake of the old urban renewal strategies—physical determinism: if you build
it, they will come. Of course you need to have water and gas and sewage. But once you
have that, you then need to worry about, “Will I be safe in my living room at night, or will
thugs come into my home?” “Will my kids be able to go to a local community school where
I can be involved in their education?” “Will I be able to get a job?”
At one point, as I’m going through the data with the ACORN leadership, Wade Rathke,
the founder of ACORN, whose voice really matters, says, “This is spectacular— fantastic
stuff, this is important; this supports what we were hearing from our housing staff.”
I had a one page memo with bullets, and I just waved the 6-inch stack of our documents
and said, “It’s all in here.” Wade then turned around and said, “If we are going to have a
chance to influence the planning process, we are going to have to have this done before the
impostor planners who had been hired to replace us present their ‘plan’.”
Their deadline was January 13. Wade said that we’d need to have our plan a week before
that, and the meeting had to be on Saturday so we could have it above the centerfold in the
Metro section on Sunday. He pulled out his blackberry from his pocket and said, “It has to
be January 6. Can you do it?”
Well, we had something called exams coming up, after which students traditionally go
home, and we then would have Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, New Year’s Eve. How the
hell could we get the goddamn thing done by January 6? But I made the commitment on
behalf of our team that we would get it done.
I came back to Ithaca and put out an email to the students and faculty saying that we
had a chance for ACORN to really mobilize in support of our plan, but we have to get it
done, and four or five students agreed to help, along with a couple of faculty members.
By January 5 we had ready, in our hands, to get on a plane to New Orleans on January 6,
a 246 page document, a 170 page plan with 70 pages of appendices. We presented it then in
the Ninth Ward twice on Saturday the 6th.
We organized the team of students and some of our spouses and other faculty, and
through an amazing cooperative effort, we transformed the 300 pages of prescriptions
which our students had completed in the fall into a tightly written and well illustrated
document of 170 pages. It took from December 28 through January 5, nine in the morning
until one or two in the morning, and the last few nights, we didn’t sleep at all to get it all
done, all beautifully laid out. It had to be to the printer the day before we boarded the
plane to New Orleans.
This was a neighborhood where a whole lot of people in powerful positions would just
as soon have it slide into the Mississippi River, the whole Ninth Ward, and this was a last
opportunity for some of that community’s vision to be presented to suggest that it had a
future. So the pressure was intense—from the time we got selected in late July until the
time we delivered the report on January 6: more than any other time in my professional
life, I didn’t have a decent night’s sleep, worrying whether or not we could do it and in a
manner that would maximize the chances that a group like ACORN could redirect the
policy trajectory in the city.
Those last few weeks were hell! The students were finishing their exams and having an
up and down checkered experience in my class because of all the turns and twists and
uncertainty in the work plan. Why would they give up their holiday? They were
exhausted. To create a plan that they weren’t even sure that our client wanted?
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So I put out the email, and only a handful of them responded. A PhD student who had
taken some time away in the latter time of the semester to take his qualifying exams
promised us that he would come back in strong. His positive response brought along two
other students, which got us up to three. And then one of the faculty agreed to help us
proofread, and I recruited my wife who helped us to fine proofread as well.
Then a number of other people said that they could not come back, but they could send
us stuff and work from home—so another three or four other people played that role from
around the country. So we were getting documents from as far away as Japan from
Shig Tanaka, Indianapolis from Andy Rumbach, and from David Lessinger who’d been in
New Orleans. So we had this core of people, Richard Kiely and myself, and then our
colleagues at Columbia and Illinois, Rebekah Green and Lisa Bates—with the five people
here and the extended group of fourteen, we transformed this 300-page thing into a svelte
document that really reads pretty well—and looks great!
How is this different from other planning processes? I have always worked closely with
my community partner so that when we’d go in to present the plan to the broader
community—because we’d worked with them by doing outreach, outreach, outreach—
first of all they’d feel that they were part of creating the plan. We’ve tried to do so much
outreach that the residents know it and we increasingly understand what they—broadly,
whether they are members of the partner group or not—want.
Since ACORN wasn’t there when we did our surveys, we were really coming in and
doing a presentation before two groups that was very much more reminiscent of the old
planning consultant who would come into town, meet with the community leaders, find
out what their itches were, go back to their consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
collect and analyze data and then just show up 20 minutes before submitting their plan to
the mayor (and asking for their check) to present it to the community.
Many times in that kind of planning—we call it “over the fence”: collect the data,
analyze it and just drop the report off, throw it over the fence for the locals to review before
you run out of town—I have seen dozens of planners get their asses kicked from the local
community to hell and back because there is such a disconnect between the communities’
visions and hopes and wants—and what’s in the plan.
So here we are, “commie” planners from the Northeast, committed to community-based
planning: myself, Richard, our colleague from Columbia, Rebekah Green, and a number of
our students, Marcel Ionescu-Heroiu, Praj Kasbekar, Crystal Lackey and Andrew
Rumbach, going down to present in the morning at the breakfast meeting to a dozen or
fifteen of ACORN’s political allies.
Who knew who would be attending the meeting—because ACORN was inaccessible.
They just told us to show up at 8:30 a.m., and here we are, arriving with 70 copies of Das
Plan, 240 pages long, 40 of them in color and 30 in black and white. At the last minute they
say, “Well, how about if a lot of people come? Let’s make 250 copies of the executive
summary.”
We didn’t have enough time, so we made 150—so at least we had that. We show up and
eventually by 9 a.m.—because, you know, people in the Ninth Ward show up a little late
for things—60 people showed up. But it wasn’t just that 60 people showed up, instead of a
dozen—it was who they were: We had the ranking black politician, State Senator
DuPlessis: very powerful on the oversight committee of the Louisiana Recovery Authority,
which was controlling all the federal pass-through money and all the state money: very
powerful. There was President of the City Council, Oliver Thomas—very important,
maybe the next Mayor of New Orleans. We had two other City Council persons, the sister
of a well-known former mayor, Morial, and then another City Council member; we also
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had staff from the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the main redevelopment agency of the
whole state, the city’s redevelopment agency, folks from the New Orleans Recovery
Authority, NORA, and then we had representatives from the planning and design and
consulting firms that had replaced us, our successors, sitting in the back with notepads,
including John Williams, who was one of the leading forces in getting our asses fired,
sitting there—a man in black.
Then ACORN brought in their national board members from throughout the country—
folks from New York, Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco, from Los Angeles, Houston,
Dallas, and Atlanta. Their state board was there, and then their city board was there, and
some staff. So we had in all about 60 people.
We had a 40-minute presentation prepared: who we were, the goals of the planning
process, our methodology, findings, and recommendations, all in 40 minutes. It was a
power point presentation that we’d stayed up until 2 a.m. in the morning doing,
exhausted since we had been up for days doing the plan. But we had nothing prepared on
a presentation, but we knew we needed it. We were going to have everyone present a little
piece of it, but five minutes before we started, Wade Rathke came up and said, “Whatever
you do, don’t do 40 minutes. Take ten minutes on your key findings, and we will get to
everything else in the Question/Answer period.”
So we shifted gears and decided to kill the power point, and I got up and presented
what was unique about the plan and the process, what the key findings were, what the
most dramatic proposals were that were included in the plan. I then turned it over to
Rebekah Green to talk about some of the specific findings in more detail, based on the
mapping of physical conditions.
The officials there had seen sixteen presentations over the previous week—and they’d
been underwhelmed by all the other planning reports that they had witnessed—because
the preliminary reports of the other planning firms were due. On the Friday and Saturday
that we were there, all the districts were having their meetings, and all their paid
consultants were doing their presentations. Half of these had already taken place by the
time these guys had showed up in the Ninth Ward on that Saturday morning, and they
had been underwhelmed.
I started out by saying that there were four kinds of plans, and I did a little bit of
planning performance art. I said, “The first kind of plan is the grand design plan: An
architect shows up wearing black Armani sunglasses and presents a plan for doing things
in your neighborhood that has never been done anywhere else in the world, and that he
can’t even get his own neighbors in his neighborhood to do, but he wants to come down to
your devastated neighborhood (where they can write him a big check) to do it.” We said,
“That’s not our kind of plan.”
The second kind of plan is the “over the fence” plan where the consultants come in and
do a quick “fly over” of the neighborhood, do secondary analysis, and then, before they
stop off at the City Council to get their check, they drop off the 300 pound document,
usually throwing it on top of the City Council president’s desk. At that point the City
Council president played along with me and he took out a napkin and wrote out a check to
me and gave it to me as I threw the plan on his desk. So in this kind of plan, I said, “You do
all the work that suggests that there are problems (which the people already knew), and
you leave them with very little information on how to get from here to there.” I did a
rendition of the Michael Jackson reverse-moonwalk, which is very risky for a white guy to
perform. They roared with laughter. I said, “That’s not the kind of plan we’ve done
either!”
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The third kind of plan is the “shelf plan” where you collect every bit of goddamn data
you can, you present it in a big thick glossy binder, you have no intention of seeing it
through in terms of implementation, but it has a nice look on the planning director’s shelf.
I said, “That’s not the kind of plan we’ve done either.”
We talked about this being the “People’s Plan” which had come from the voices of the
residents and which built on the momentum of the residents already involved in
redevelopment activity. We said, “We view it not as the end of the process where we are
here to get the check from the Council, but as the beginning of the process to move
towards rapid implementation by working shoulder to shoulder with you. We just want
to make sure to check the 26 proposals in here: we want your feedback on which ones are
most critical, and we are prepared to keep working to help move towards
implementation if you think that what we have here is worthy of the time you gave
us to create it. If this doesn’t sound like your plan, if we haven’t gotten it right, there are
going to be parts that are not focused that we can tighten up. But we are here to see that,
first, we got the big picture right and, second, that out of these 26 proposals, the most
critical things are there, and we want to see which ones, from your experience, are the
most critical.”
With that background, we then talked about what was unique about this. First, it was
resident requested. Second, it was data driven. We had gone out and collected data that
nobody else had. Not one other planning consulting firm took the time to go out and look
at 3,500 properties. Third, we also took the time to go out and hear from the people, the
unorganized residents, 230 of them, including 70 businesses, and on and on. Fourth, we
were committed to helping with implementation. These were the unique things.
Now, what were the findings? What did we find out that other people haven’t told you?
First, that eight out of ten of the structures are in good shape structurally. Second, that even
in the most devastated parts of the neighborhood, most of these structures can be, in a cost
effective manner, re-habbed—they can be re-habbed at a cost that is within the Road Home
allocation, and that the AFL-CIO Housing Trust fund folks have verified that their
members in this labor market can do this work at the amounts we are quoting. Third, that
the residents had indicated an overwhelming desire to come back—to come back and live,
to rebuild their community, not to sell and get out of town.
But we learned that once you get though that and begin to get into more extended
interviews with residents, you find out some disturbing things. One is that few of them
have gotten their compensation from their insurance companies, FEMA, Road Home,
Community Development Block Grant Program (CDBG) funds, and people have a
deep fear or dread that they’ll share with you, if they think that you are really listening,
which is that their money is going to run out before they finish their rebuilding and that
they’re going to have to sell their multi-generational home, and that it is unnecessary.
The other thing they’ll tell you is that while they are killing themselves to rehab their
houses, they are making big decisions about how to rehab, what rooms to do, what
materials to use, with their only sources of information being, often, an eighteen-year-old
kid at Home Depot as their housing consultant—so that there’s a desperate need to get
high quality technical assistance on construction.
I said, after that, “Now, let’s turn it over to Rebekah, who is a senior post doc research
fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University,” and she went over the more detailed
mapping of where the homes were and what shape they were in, a color thematic map of
what areas were most devastated and would have to be rebuilt, and what the standards
and costs would have to be.
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At that point we came back, and I said, “Now what is the vision for where we are
going?” I presented the overall goal of the neighborhood plan, which was “to create an
environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant and socially equitable and just
neighborhood,” and to get there, I said, “We need programming in six areas. Pull out your
executive summary.”
So we went through them: “Environment—Five proposals. Economic Development—Six
proposals. Housing—Five proposals. Municipal Services—Four proposals. Education—Five
proposals. Arts and Culture ...” I said, “We think that progress can be made towards these
five areas, and the critical difference here is that this is not only a physical plan. That
is necessary, but not sufficient.” We went back to the urban renewal analogy and people were
nodding, nodding. “Now, with that done, we would like to open it up to your feedback.”
At that point the most powerful politician there gets up, Senator DuPlessis, and she
says, “I have never met this team before, but let me tell you, this is an awesome document.
I have the executive summary. Look, I have marks all over it: Yes, Yes, Yes, star, star, star.
You’ve got it. This is what I am hearing from my constituencies and what I am seeing for
myself. Now we have to develop some priorities for what happens in the first year and
how we are going to find the resources, because the city doesn’t have it. The city has to
enact a plan so that future proposals have to come in within these general guidelines—but
the state and federal government have the money, and I am sitting on it, and I need your
help to craft an omnibus bill to basically create a redevelopment fund to amplify what the
federal government is doing.”
At that point there was lots of applause, and then the head of the City Council gets
up and says, “I have been flown all over the world to post-disaster situations, and every
expert, public and private, has been in to see me. I have learned something about this.
I would say that the best principles of what I understand are needed, appear to be
represented and under girding this plan. This is a fine plan, and we will take this to the
City Council for adoption.”
Then Councilwoman Morial got up and said, “Absolutely—and there are two things
you need to strengthen.”
I said, “Fine, we have two students here who’re typing up every comment, and if
everyone who has stood up and said something can give me their address or business
card, we want to get back to you to make sure that our summary captures your concerns.”
So I introduced Praj and Crystal again, who were typing it all up. We were also
videotaping it, which I wasn’t quite aware of, because Marcel had his camera which was
powerful enough to videotape, so we had all of this on audio.
At that point we then moved into a second meeting for which all but the state senators
stayed. The other officials all sat on the stage, and now we’re surrounded, elected officials
at our backs and 100 residents of the neighborhood in front, two thirds ACORN members,
one third not. We then went through the entire plan all over again.
Instead of the ten-minute presentation, we did the thirty-minute version with the
students presenting the content. They did a great job and were warmly received. There
was lots of applause, lots of kidding. I made a point of talking about the diversity of our
group, where the students were from. They chuckled when I made reference to Marcel
(who’s from Romania) and his accent, and to Praj Kasbekar, who’s from India. They were
very sweet to the students and welcoming.
At the beginning, when we talked about our research methods, I asked, “How many of
you have been interviewed by our team?” About a third of the people in the room had
been interviewed. We were carrying on the conversations that we had started on their
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porches. They too were wildly positive about the plan. We spent two hours going over the
details of the plan with them.
We got thanked many times—it was embarrassing. We told them that it was an honor to
work with them, and that we were in awe of what they had managed to accomplish
against all odds—and that we considered it a distinct honor to be their planners, and that
we would stay as long as they wanted us to—and that the moment we were no longer
helpful, we would welcome being told that—quietly, if possible!
It was really something. There are three or four experiences that I have had in my career
as a planner that were completely transformative, and this is right up there. I felt like we
had served our client very well and that we had gotten it right.
The general meeting was great, and at the end an elderly black man came up to me, and
he said, “I just want to talk to you for a minute, young man.”
He said, “I am a working man. I am not an expert on these things. I am back in my
house, I am helping my neighbors, but it is hard for me to figure out what is going on—it is
very confusing— and it is hard for me to see a way forward, although I hope that there is a
way. This was laid out and broken down so clearly by your students—I can see that it is
possible to get from here to there.”
We had said that it was a ten- to twenty-year process, and anybody suggesting that what
had happened could be fixed in a minute, even with strong state and federal commitment,
was doing them a disservice, and he said, “We understand that, from what happened after
Betsy.”
At the end, a council member got up and exhorted people to take the next step, which
was to then begin mobilizing support to get the plan adopted. They were describing it as
their plan, “the people’s plan.” It was quite lovely.
We stayed around for a bit to meet with the ACORN street staff, the people who actually
put the fannies in the seats—a group of black women who facilitated the meeting. They
were great—powerful. They thanked us, and I guess this was their way: They would come
over and say, “Okay, honey,” and they would turn their heads, and that was the signal that
we were supposed to give them a kiss on their cheek, “a little sugar.” That was a new
custom for me—but it happened enough that I’m now an expert at it—it was really quite
lovely.
Then we were interviewed by the Times-Picayune. Their reporter said, “You know, we
have had to go to all these meetings.” So they now had been to sixteen districts each, four
meetings. So they had been to a lot of meetings, 64 of them. The reporter said, “This was
the only meeting where you could feel the enthusiasm.”
She said, “I really have the sense that there’s some excitement and energy—that this
builds upon what people think and what they want to see happen. Most of the other
meetings have been a disaster,” and she said that there would be an article the next day in
the paper.
The next day there were two articles. One reports on all the other meetings. It contains
one tale after another tale of planners getting it wrong, failing to include in the plan things
that people have said repeatedly, and getting their butts kicked. It’s the standard
top-down planning model. This was in the Times-Picayune the next day: “New Orleans
Plans Leave the Launch Pad.” It describes the worst day of the Apollo space shuttle
program: bad!
On the bottom it says, “ACORN Does Its Own Plan.” That article was incredibly
positive. They interviewed people in the city and other places who supported the plan.
A second interview we did was with an AP [Associate Press] wire-writer, a journalist
(stringer), and this guy, who had been through a lot, asked very good questions.
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Now because one of our students’, Andy Rumbach’s, father is on the governing board of
the AP—and Andy is the graduate student who mobilized our first students to go to do
volunteer work in New Orleans, and he knows the whole project, I sat Andy down with
the AP wire guy so that he could pull in students and faculty as the reporter asked specific
questions. We got a really well written AP wire story, which by now has been picked
up by over 150 newspapers and was on Fox news recently on TV and on several other
national networks.
We’d already gotten some phone calls from Harper’s Bazaar magazine who were
interested in doing a feature; they were going to extend their feature to include the
consideration of the plan. Then, we had several students doing interesting things in their
off time between semesters, all over the country. One student wrote me an email that said
her mother and father were lying on the beach in Aruba and they’re reading the paper, and
in the USA News section, the lead article was “Ninth Ward Plan Completed”! So while
they were on the beach on vacation, they phoned their daughter back at home in
Massachusetts to say, “Hey, you made the front page of the Aruba Times!”
One of our other students, a great undergraduate, Ed Washburn, is working for a
congressman in Wooster, Massachusetts—doing constituent work during his vacation.
Ed has been telling the congressman all about our work, so when the congressman comes
back from DC this week, Ed has downloaded the 240-page report and has left a copy of it
on the congressman’s desk. Unbeknownst to Ed, the congressman is related to
Councilwoman Morial and State Senator DuPlessis, who he had just been with.
He then immediately called her up on the phone and said, “Hey, I got this great plan,
and I just wanted to make sure you know about it.” The two cousins gave the congressman
in Massachusetts a hard time that they didn’t need any Yankee from the North telling
them what to do, that this was a fine plan and they were already working on it, and
that when they needed money they’d be calling up their Massachusetts congressman for
some help!
So completing the plan has positioned ACORN and the residents of the Ninth Ward to
make an argument that their neighborhood has a future and there’s a way to get to that
future with available resources and that they had the partners to do it. The partners would
be our university collaborative, intermediaries like the Enterprise Foundation, LISC [Local
Initiatives Support Corporation], Seedco, Neighborhood Works, and other funders like the
AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations] who
was already there, physically present, saying that they wanted to partner, and some other
national and international financial institutions like Fannie Mae, to whom we’d gotten the
plan to try to keep the momentum going. The key thing is the new planning czar of
New Orleans, Ed Blakely, is a colleague of ours, former planning department chair of UC
[University of California] Berkeley and USC [University of Southern California] and
former Dean at the Milano School at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
He is the new recovery director. He has announced his intentions to try to model the
potential for redevelopment by selecting three catalytic projects, major projects in three
different areas. We wanted to position ourselves through the plan and through our
political support to have one of the catalytic mega-developments be in the Ninth Ward,
and we think that we have the development team to do it. I think it’s a pretty irresistible
team, and with the political support of ACORN, we are hopeful.
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The City Council, Planning Commission and A Major Press Conference
We had received, again, enormous positive feedback. We got thoroughly criticized for the
public school element of the plan, which was the weakest, and they, members of the
community, who had been working on this with their City Council members, then
presented us with fifteen pages of what it should include. That got put into the plan. And
then there were several other things that were weak that residents had good ideas about.
On the next Tuesday we went to City Council. City Council voted unanimously to direct
the City Planning Department staff to incorporate our plan, the People’s Plan for the Ninth
Ward, as an amendment to the new, soon to be approved, comprehensive plan. From there
we went to the City Planning Commission. We presented it again. At the City Planning
Commission we only had one serious challenge—when a member of the city’s
Engineering or Public Works Department got up and said, “I do not believe this physical
conditions data. I think that this is absolutely unlikely to be true. You guys got it wrong.
You did this with sophomores from Cornell—well intentioned, but probably
incompetent.”
Rebecca got up and said, “Are you a licensed civil engineer?”
The guy says, “Well, I once was.”
“Well, I am.”
She said, “Let’s go out right now and look at fifty of these properties, and if we’re off on
any of these measures by more than three per cent, I’ll buy you dinner.” That was it. He did
the reverse moonwalk and we never heard from him again.
Ultimately, that week the Associate Press—who had come to our meeting—wrote an
article which appeared in three hundred and seventy-five metropolitan newspapers
around the world which said, “Planners Say Ninth Ward Can Be Rebuilt.”
This was an amazing eight-hundred-word article that got enormous play.
Then, a week later, the Unified New Orleans Planning process (UNOP) plans come
forward. They get adopted by the City Council. Now, I checked and our plan was not
referred to, but several weeks after this process, Ed Blakely, the Director of Recovery
Services, called a press conference to announce the capital spending plan to support the
implementation of the comprehensive recovery plan. Everybody was expecting that the
Ninth Ward would get little or nothing. Ed Blakely is there, Mayor Nagin is there, Oliver
Thomas is there, the representative of Governor Blanco’s office is there, and the only
citizen group invited is ACORN, whose president and vice president are there. Ed Blakely
gets up and says that, “We’re going to spend $1.1 billion in these seventeen rebuild areas,
and two of them are going to be in the Ninth Ward, including one of them in the Lower
Ninth Ward, and we’re going to spend there, $145 million.”
So we went from residents being uncertain and then really believing that official policy
was moving toward a clearance policy where they were in the third category of an urban
triage situation—to a situation where they could imagine, once they could get through this
incredibly contorted pipeline of the Road Home Program, which was getting better—that
in fact their city and state might be investing in infrastructure to allow them to make a
reasonable reinvestment.
Then, of course, when things go bad, they can sometimes get worse. We then hit the
sub-prime loan crisis. Unfortunately one of the major banks that had originated many of
the mortgages in refinancing the Ninth Ward is Country-Wide Banking, which is deeply
involved in that sub-prime issue. I’m not suggesting that they did anything untoward, but
this has certainly slowed down the availability of the kind of credit that would be the
gap financing that people would need.
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So the Plan gets adopted. It’s now being substantially resourced in terms of the physical
infrastructure side, and now ACORN is working very, very hard with help from Illinois,
Columbia and Cornell. We held a meeting in New York and Washington and in
New Orleans where we got all of our Business School and Hotel School alumni and invited
them to an investment opportunity meeting. We had sixty people respond in each of those
locations and we’re now trying to help them raise the capital to do the Community Design
Planning and Law Center. It would help people who were coming back trying to make
their way through the system—and secondly help to finance what would be a four-
hundred unit, mixed income, mixed use redevelopment in the Lower Ninth Ward to really
signal to people that they can comfortably come back because there is going to be a real
core there of improved physical spaces—designed in a manner that they want at
affordable prices at a range of incomes, including rental and very deeply subsidized
public housing. The problem is that we’re now trying to get the market to accept that at a
time when they are reeling from the sub-prime crisis.
But as the Irish say, there have been “many a slip between the cup and the lip.” Many
past plans for the Ninth Ward have faltered based on turf politics, business opposition and
poor technical work. We have to make sure that that doesn’t happen, and I think we need
to keep remembering the words of Julius Nyerere—in the message to the folks in the Ninth
Ward and to ourselves—that we must run, while all others walk. To make sure that it gets
implemented, we are going to have to continue working harder than anybody else—and
I think that’s what has gotten us this far.
Persistence, Timing and Personal Resources
What keeps me doing this work is that there are times during the year when you as a
college professor—or college professor/part-time administrator as I am—where you are
absolutely sure that you’re involved in something that has very little redeeming value.
Our clients seemed ambivalent, the city officials seemed hostile, and even the students
seemed alarmed—but the reception in New Orleans when we presented the plan just
reminded me how important the work was, and how transformative it can be for yourself
and others when the work is done well.
I think we really put together a plan that is garnering enormous support, and it may
actually change the lives of people who need assistance. The metaphor that I keep thinking
of is that people waited on their roofs in the Ninth Ward as the water rose, and now
they’ve been waiting for fifteen months, for most of them in seven or eight different
unacceptable housing and employment situations. They are, many of them, still waiting to
come home—and our plan provides a way forward, and it may be a pathway to allow
them to return, and if that happens, that would be something that we could all be very
proud of, individually and collectively. It’s really good work. It means something. We are
able to teach students lessons we can’t teach anywhere else.
For me personally, I grew up in a neighborhood in the South Bronx and it fell apart when
I was a kid: it’s not the buildings, it’s the families, and it’s my class, and it’s the social
organizations that made up the life of my neighborhood, which were destroyed. I went
into planning because I thought it was a way to prevent that or restore other communities.
When you do this work well, that can happen.
It’s that hope that keeps me going. Paul Niebanck was a great older colleague of ours
who was honored at the end of his long career—it’s not quite over yet, because he still has
some very interesting work to do—and he said then, that fundamentally, we’re in the hope
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business. We have to lay out for people the possibilities that human beings can solve what
appear to be intractable problems and do so in a way that promotes justice.
I saw that when we presented the plan in New Orleans. I don’t know if we are going to
get to the other side of the River Jordan, if it will falter along the way, but we got
everybody in the boat, and we got it heading in the right direction, and everybody is
pulling at the oars. There’s a strong current, but there are a lot of people on the other side
of the river who look like they’re waiting for us. So we have folks in the ballpark; we have
them in the game. But it’s going to be a struggle, and we have to remember Frederick
Douglass’s words, that “power concedes nothing without a struggle”—and that’s what
we’re into.
I didn’t know if we were going to get the damn thing done. It was an enormous amount
of work. If anyone did an hour less than what they did, we wouldn’t have had a finished
plan to put in our van to take to the airport. I was never so proud of my students or the
department. I think there are damn few programs in the country that would have
undertaken something as risky as this, and the fact that we were able to pull it off in a
grand fashion makes me extraordinarily proud of our program here.
When I went down to present the plan—and for other really important events, I wear
my father’s ring. When I am hoping that we will line up all of the forces of good and of
hope and of optimism, I occasionally will wear this ring. For me, as I said, I grew up in the
South Bronx—it was destroyed during my youth, and in the course of that it undermined
the health and sense of security and comfort and hope and optimism and worldview of
my family and all of the families that grew up around us. They developed a darker view of
what the future was like because they had lost home and had lost community.
I think many of them, and myself, have spent the rest of our lives on a journey to try to
reconnect, to find that somewhere. I am absolutely certain that that’s why I am a planner.
I saw that this was a profession where I could be part of a process to resist that kind of
undermining, by market forces, or turn it around.
That became very apparent in the New Orleans story, that they were facing the same
thing: de-industrialization, suburbanization, racism, and then a horrible natural disaster.
Despite all of that, this African American community, the children, grandchildren, great
grandchildren and great-great grandchildren of freed slaves, had put this community
together and kept it together despite all these powerful corrosive forces. And now, after
all of that, they might be wiped away because we were unwilling to do for them what
we seemed so willing to do for rich people and for California communities facing fires,
or for privileged families along the South Carolina seacoast. Somehow we never even
asked whether or not the hilly Oakland neighborhood should have been rebuilt and
reinsured. That’s where they had the fires out in California. But we certainly, in a
heartbeat, were willing to write off a 200-year-old African American community in
New Orleans!
My grandparents were labor leaders, my father was involved in the settlement house
movement, my mother was involved in the community schools movement, all about
trying to keep the neighborhood of the South Bronx together when it was heading
towards the skids, and then we lost that fight and they moved elsewhere to try to be part
of rebuilding an inclusive and equity oriented community in the community that we
moved to.
That’s whose memory and model and behavior I have in the back of my mind. My father
called it “going to bat for people,” and he never failed to respond to a phone call.
So I remember the metaphor, “under the lion’s paw.” This community, if you think about
it, is facing the lion, but they’re under the paw, and I always try to reach back and think
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about those heroic stories of organizing and advocacy and resistance in my family.
The reason I think ACORN called, which is interesting, is that their national director of
organizing is my first cousin, Helene O’Brien, and she and I had lived in a building of the
South Bronx with 60 units, and thirteen of them were related to me. One of the families
were the O’Briens, two of their sons were organizers with Saul Alinsky in NYC, and one of
whom, Tom, worked with him on the Chelsea project. Helene is Tom’s daughter.
So we come from this clan of Irish hell raisers, and there was something very nice
about being involved in this project, as an extension of this family. She too, I think,
is in the process of trying to rebuild the community. I think that the part that rings true
to me is what I have read that talks most powerfully about the instinct and desire to
build community. I love that little essay from Wendell Berry, “On Homecoming,” when
he observes that we measure the success of our graduates at the land grant university—
where we teach big agriculture—by how far they’ve risen above their initial station in
life, almost always encouraging them to go elsewhere, toward new horizons. He said, it
seems to me, that this has gotten us almost nowhere and that what we really have to do
is help people realize that they stand on a lot of other peoples’ shoulders when they go
to university—and the universities, like Cornell, have to impart that knowledge to
support and strengthen and build that sense of community—and that gives meaning to
our work: that what we ought to be doing is preparing people for the art of
homecoming.
Now I can’t go back to the South Bronx, it’s no longer the community that I left. But that
experience there and in Morristown has given me some unique skills and opportunities
and competencies. There are occasions when that background fits very well with the needs
of the community. One of the things you have to realize in planning is when that happens,
when your skills are best matched for that place. I think that in this case in New Orleans,
that was true.
I think one of the other lessons here is just pure perseverance. There were a thousand
reasons along the way that reasonable men and women should have quit. But we wouldn’t
have had the kind of Easter resurrection on Saturday and Sunday after presenting the
People’s Plan and this whole process possibly wouldn’t be there.
We were working with the city’s agency which was demanding these deliverables
every two weeks—and that was killing us. Our client who had helped us present and get
this contract on the basis of this highly participatory project then appeared unwilling to
engage in it. We then got fired. We lose the ability to cover our expenses. The Dean’s office
begins to get concerned with the overages in the accounts. It doesn’t even appear as
though our community client is interested in a final presentation, the document—and that
we’re basically being used as a window dressing. The city—after we got fired—clearly
wanted us to go as far away as possible. We had our successor firms—architecture and
design firms that tried to pick up the project after we were fired—then soliciting our
graduate students and asking them to go to work for them, asking them actually to share
their data with them! We had faculty becoming more fractious over whether or not we
were totally insane to continue. I mean it: There was very little encouragement for us to do
this thing.
Yet there’s one interesting thing, now that it has been presented and there’s been such a
positive local, political and national press response: We can’t imagine having not done it.
But on any given day between now and then, from when we started to the final
presentation, if you had taken a poll, most reasonable men and women would have
decided that this was the last thing we should be doing. I think there’s a message in there.
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I do have a favorite quote from this whole period. It was from the time when we got
fired. David Lessinger, our graduate assistant said, “Now that we’re fired, we’re really
going to get going.”
Note
1. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is the largest direct action
organizing group in the United States. Founded in Arkansas in the early 1970s, ACORN currently represents
more than 300,000 poor and working class families.
Challenges of Disaster Response, or
What the Textbooks Don’t Teach Us
ANDREW RUMBACH
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the chief organizer of the nation’s largest low-
income community organization, the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now (ACORN), contacted several universities including the Department of City
and Regional Planning at Cornell University to request technical assistance for relief,
recovery, and rebuilding. These conversations led to the formation of the ACORN–
University Partnership (AUP), a cooperative planning, development, and community
organizing effort between ACORN, ACORN Housing, and several academic planning
programs. Since October of 2005, over 150 students, faculty, staff, organizers, and
development professionals from the AUP have provided the residents of the Ninth Ward
top quality planning, design, and development assistance. By August 2006 the AUP had
been a district planning consultant in the city’s Unified New Orleans Planning process.
In January of 2007, the AUP published “The People’s Plan,” a comprehensive recovery
strategy for the Ninth Ward, which was adopted by New Orleans City Council in January
and the New Orleans Planning Commission in February.
The following essay summarizes lessons I learned from our engagement with ACORN
and the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward. I have worked in the AUP and on New Orleans
recovery planning in a number of ways; as a graduate student, as an AUP staff member, as
a volunteer, and as a research intern in New Orleans during the summer of 2006. My status
as both a student and an early member of the AUP staff allowed me to observe the
partnership in a number of ways. I was present during most of the conversations about the
Initiative’s direction, and witnessed many of the “messier” aspects of managing a multi-
institution partnership with significant programmatic and budgetary pressures.
As a student, I was able to discuss the direction (and day-to-day intrigues) of the
partnership with fellow students, and I enjoyed a certain professional insignificance on the
ground in New Orleans; residents, organizers, and partnership staff seem to speak more
candidly and informally with students than they do with faculty or staff “higher up the
food chain.”
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The reflections in this piece are unapologetically critical, and paint a negative picture of
our relationship to ACORN and our work in New Orleans. This is not the whole story; our
successes have been discussed extensively elsewhere. We’ve tried to bring a planning
curriculum into a real-world tragedy and to form a unique partnership between a
community and academic institutions, in order to provide the best possible recovery
assistance to a devastated community. I think we’ve been successful, and provided a life-
changing educational experience to scores of students. Critical reflection is necessary for
shaping future action, however. I look forward to a long and productive engagement with
the residents of the Ninth Ward, and I have a great deal of optimism about the future of the
ACORN-University Partnership.
An Introduction to New Orleans
I could not fully grasp the scope of Hurricane Katrina until I stood in New Orleans for the
first time. It was January 2006; a group of fellow students and I had managed to scrape
together enough in donations to fund a service trip to the Gulf Coast. To save money, we
had rented a passenger van and driven 1,400 miles south, stopping to pick up students
along the way. The mood was jovial, nervous, excited; we were going to spend fourteen
days gutting storm damaged homes. As our van crossed through the gulf coast of
Mississippi and into Louisiana, the mood quickly turned. Loud conversation, joking, and
laughing gave way to a respectful silence. Everywhere around us we began to see signs of
disaster. Small things first: tree branches littering the streets, twisted signage, and the
occasional downed power line. Along the coast and into New Orleans, the signs of
devastation grew. Street signs and stoplights were nonexistent. We drove through entire
neighborhoods without power and passed abandoned shopping complexes, houses
stacked on top of one another, and thousands upon thousands of ruined cars. New Orleans
was a ghost town.
We spent our time working for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now (ACORN), the largest low-and-moderate income community organization in the
United States. Cornell’s Department of City and Regional Planning had begun a
partnership with ACORN in October 2005, and the service trip was our first face-to-face
exposure to our future partners in recovery planning. We began by gutting houses in the
Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Gentilly, and Lakeside.
Two months earlier the Urban Land Institute, at the request of the mayor’s blue ribbon
panel on rebuilding, had released the first comprehensive recovery plan for the city.
Around the country, physical planners and architects were questioning the rebuilding of
New Orleans’ hardest hit neighborhoods, calling instead for a higher, denser settlement
along the natural levee of the Mississippi River. Where the once-proud neighborhoods of
the Ninth Ward had stood, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) plan envisioned large swaths
of open space and parks, effectively “shrinking” the footprint of the city and erasing tens
of thousands of homes. The plan caused an uproar.
Over 300,000 New Orleanians were still displaced, living in shelters, with family and
with good Samaritans in Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and hundreds of other cities and
towns; in their absence, the city was planning away their neighborhoods. The homes
we gutted, families we met, stories of triumph and tragedy we heard—all were informed
by an unflappable drive to return home, to rebuild communities and to put their lives back
together.
New Orleans has a neighborhood mentality—one of the first things any New Orleanian
will tell you is where he/she “came up“. A plan drafted by outsiders that called for the
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erasure of historic black neighborhoods was not just shortsighted, galling, and callous—it
was a shot across ACORN’s bow. This was the atmosphere our fledgling
partnership faced—a devastated city, where political and racial tensions were high, and
where planning seemed largely to blame.
We spent the next two weeks ripping the insides out of flooded homes, the first step of
the rebuilding process. It took a team of fifteen volunteers two to three days to gut a
house—and over 80,000 homes in New Orleans were flooded during hurricanes Katrina
and Rita. The enormity of the need was overwhelming. We witnessed the racism and
classism of the recovery process; white upper-class neighborhoods were abuzz with the
activity of trash removal, service restoration, and the delivery of FEMA trailers. The Lower
Ninth Ward stood virtually abandoned, and was still (five months after the storm) closed
to residents and volunteers alike.
Though we were academically and professionally interested in long-range recovery
planning for the Ninth Ward, the physical act of gutting out homes was enormously
satisfying. While we knew how small a dent we were making in the overall problem, we
could see and quantify our success. Each house we finished represented one family that
much closer to returning. At the end of each day, we had accomplished something
tangible. Later, during the endless fits and starts of the planning process, and the endless
hand wringing over the trials and tribulations of our planning partnership, I would
remember this service trip with fondness. Stripped of race, class, gender, and politics,
gutting homes was and still is the most straightforward work I’ve ever done in
New Orleans.
Disasters are Messy
Disasters are messy, an abrupt realization for many of the students and faculty that joined
the New Orleans Planning Initiative. After returning home for the spring semester, many
of the students from the volunteer trip enrolled in CRP 679, the New Orleans
neighborhood planning workshop. Our community partners were both ACORN and a
sister organization, ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC). While ACORN is a community
organization in the sense of organizing around political, social, and environmental issues
that impact the lives of its members, AHC operated in very different ways. Across the
country AHC staff provide mortgage counseling and housing services to low and
moderate income families, and leverage public and private funds for the development of
affordable housing. The workshop’s nominal objective was to support ACORN and
ACORN Housing in the development of a recovery plan for the Ninth Ward.
In reality, ACORN’s staff were still operating out of temporary offices, with less than
25% of their pre-Katrina capacity. A staff of eight pre-Katrina organizers had been reduced
to three, and 7,000 member resident families to less than 200 still living in New Orleans.
Most of these families were scattered in the diaspora, and those that remained were
desperately trying to put their lives back together. As one senior ACORN leader
responded to our proposal to create a recovery plan, “Man, we don’t have time for
planning!”
This statement speaks volumes about the early relationship between ACORN and
Cornell. Surely the threat posed to the Ninth Ward by the ULI plan necessitated a planning
response: what plan would replace the top-down, socially sterile, quick and dirty ULI
proposal? ACORN and its members needed professional expertise and the public prestige
of having “big name” universities as partners. Yet ACORN was justifiably skeptical of
planning. “Planning” in New Orleans has historically been a code-word for destructive
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development projects, neighborhood segregation, social exclusion, and the projection of
“white” interests onto “black” neighborhoods. Infamous examples in the Ninth Ward
abound: the relocation of the rail yards from the French Quarter, the virtual segregation of
the neighborhood by the construction of the Industrial Canal, the gentrification of the Holy
Cross and Bywater districts, and the planned redevelopment of the waterfront into
high-end retail and expensive condominiums. This had been the legacy of “planning”—
the evidence ACORN organizers saw as having failed their membership.
I remember vividly our first planning meeting at ACORN headquarters. Twelve bright-
eyed students and faculty from Ithaca were seated in a cramped conference room, along
with two ACORN organizers and six extremely skeptical Ninth Ward residents. We had
every intention of leading them through a classic SWOT “visioning” exercise, to identify
strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats in their neighborhoods.
They looked at us like we were crazy. One after another they stood up and talked about
damaged and destroyed homes, the criminal negligence of insurance companies, FEMA’s
failure to provide temporary trailers, and why their friends and neighbors could not come
home. Any attempt to bring the conversation back to “visioning” was quickly (and
angrily) rebuked. This was the theme at many of the early post-Katrina meetings around
the city—well-intentioned planners, especially those from outside New Orleans, were
shouted down with people’s immediate, pressing concerns. One Lower Ninth Ward
mother all too poignantly shouted: “We’ve been planned to death!”
While ACORN searched for the role of planning in their work, the studentsstruggled to feel
relevant to the city’s daily recovery efforts. The mayor, City Council, state legislature, and
federal government were constantly butting heads over the control of federal and state
resources, allocation of funds, and the direction of recovery, and each time they did, the reality
for planners on the ground changed. Students and faculty organize time and effort in a
semester format, where work proceeds in a linear fashion for fourteen weeks and culminates
in a final project/exam. Several times during the fall 2006 semester, the class began to work in
earnest on a research project or planning document, only to have ACORN’s needs change.
For instance, following the storm, the mayor’s office hired unqualified and
inexperienced “housing inspectors” to tour the neighborhoods and apply a “red tag” to
houses that were in “imminent danger of collapse” or that posed a public nuisance.
The city was set to bulldoze these “red tagged” houses, even though their owners were
mostly displaced and unable to inspect the damage for themselves, and though the
inspections had been found at best amateur and at worst, baseless. One group of students
worked feverishly on an analysis of red flagged houses, to provide ACORN with
information on inconsistencies between and among inspectors and inspections. Several
weeks into their task, the New Orleans City Council announced a moratorium on
bulldozing flagged homes, effectively rendering the students’ work moot.
Frustration in the course was palpable; by the end of the semester, the students were
completing cookie-cutter workshop projects, on the subject of New Orleans but serving no
real purpose in the recovery planning efforts. For example, one group looked at
evacuation planning for the Ninth Ward. In the absence of new data, however, they could
only study the neighborhoods as they were in 2000, and so could only recommend what
“should” have happened during Katrina. Students left the workshop with mixed feelings.
They understood that post-disaster realities were at fault for the ever-changing needs of
our community partners. Recovery planning in the city had stalled, and little could be
done. On the other hand, an enormous amount of work seemed to go without use, and
their “partners” at ACORN were acting more than a bit skeptically about the real utility of
their own academic partnership.
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Perhaps the partnership’s saving grace was the information the students provided to
ACORN for their political fight against the ULI plan. We were able to build trust in small
ways and with small gestures; we provided maps showing that, contrary to the opinion
popular in the press, the Lower Ninth Ward was not an extremely low lying neighborhood
prone to flooding. We designed professional posters and boards for ACORN organizers,
helping them to gain a reputation for effective, professional public presentations. We did
an analysis of the ULI “green circles” plan and showed that the long-term maintenance
cost of parks and open space was far beyond the city’s fiscal capacity. Over time, these
pieces of analytic ammunition provided the beginning of a productive relationship. Like
gutting a home, this work built trust, one small step at a time, between students, faculty,
organizers, and Ninth Ward residents. The process was reciprocal; each time we came to
New Orleans for a meeting or an event, ACORN worked a little harder to turn out
residents, politicians, or community leaders, and they spoke a bit more confidently each
time about our role as advocates for poor and working class families.
Gaining “Legitimacy”—AUP and the Unified New Orleans Plan
Five Cornell students moved to New Orleans to intern with ACORN Housing for the
summer of 2007. We were packed into a tiny office in the back of ACORN headquarters.
Tripping over each other’s computer wires, we were literally and figuratively separated
from ACORN staff. Our marching orders came from AHC’s Washington DC-based
director of special projects, Richard Hayes, who had a PhD in planning and a great deal of
confidence in the planning partnership.
Every so often an ACORN organizer would breeze into our office and make a rushed
request for a map, a data set, or a plan review, and we were happy to oblige them. We
weren’t working strategically, however. The requests were piece-meal, and we were never
informed as to the broader policy goals or tactics of the ACORN leadership. There was no
collaboration linking the interns and the organizers to inform the direction of our work.
As we interns acquainted ourselves with the latest NOLA planning news, an
announcement of a new “Unified New Orleans Plan” came across our desk. That plan was
to be a privately funded, city-wide recovery planning effort endorsed by the City Council,
the mayor, and the governor’s office. The resulting “plan” would break the political
impasse and start the flow of money from the federal government. We interns joked that
we should apply—a motley crew of planning academics, students, and community
rabble-rousers—to counterbalance the inevitable flood of mainstream professional
planning and architecture firms.
Several weeks passed. Three days before the deadline for proposals Steve Bradberry, the
head organizer for New Orleans ACORN, asked us to prepare an application. Nine
months of rocky relations between ACORN and our planning department seemed to
vanish in light of the prospect of leading the recovery efforts in the Ninth Ward. We spent
the next three days furiously assembling a proposal. Sprawled across the living room and
kitchen of a sublet apartment at 2 a.m. the morning the proposal was due were the student
interns, the Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell,
Ken Reardon, Richard Hayes, AHC assistant director Marty Shalloo, and a number of
architecture and planning faculty from around the country. We had received a generous
response of offers of collaboration from other planning and design schools—from the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Pratt Institute, and the Earth Institute of
Columbia University—who formed the ACORN University Partnership. We sold our
partnership to the UNOP selection board based on our expertise in planning and
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development, community organizing and participatory action research, a sales pitch that
made each of the three organizational partners indispensable. Over 65 planning and
architecture firms applied, including some of the largest and best known in the world.
The ACORN-University Partnership was the only non-profit applicant, the only one with
a community organizing partner, and the only one with university participation.
Truth be told, I thought we were a long-shot candidate. Though we were long on
academic participation and experience in housing development and organizing, we were
extremely short in practical planning experience. No one in our group was a practicing
planner, and each of our faculty participants had teaching commitments. I expected that
the selection committee would prefer traditional planning firms with portfolios
of completed projects over our unique combination of organizing and planning talent.
I was surprised when we were chosen for an interview with the selection committee; I was
shocked when Ken Reardon reported that it had been one of the most successful
presentations of his career. In July 2006, the UNOP board recommended fifteen planning
firms to the public for consideration as neighborhood planners. Residents were invited to
attend a presentation of each firm’s credentials, then to vote for the planner they wanted
working for their neighborhood. ACORN organizers worked overtime to get the word out
about the vote. Soon after, UNOP announced contracts for ten neighborhood and five
district level planning firms. Because of our “extraordinary capacity for planning” the
ACORN-University Partnership was hired to oversee districts seven and eight,
encompassing the Lower and Upper Ninth Wards.
I was nervous about partnering with ACORN in an official planning process. Working
with ACORN had been a calculated risk for Cornell from the beginning; community
organizers rely on near complete autonomy of action, so that they will never have to
compromise their vision or the desires of their membership. Community-based planning,
in contrast, tends toward inclusion: identify the stakeholders, bring them together for
visioning common goals and objectives, rearticulate goals and objectives according to best
planning practice, and attempt to minimize disagreement between stakeholders. How
would we manage this tension?
Our partnership with ACORN, it turned out, severely limited our ability to work with
other community organizations. Before the UNOP process, this had not presented much of
a problem; managing a partnership with one community client was challenging enough,
and ACORN’s large membership base in the Ninth Ward made them an ideal partner.
Yet, the moment we were hired as district recovery planners, our mandate grew more
complex—now we were responsible not only to ACORN but to the larger Ninth Ward.
We were now committed to a fair process with the inclusion of all residents—low and high
income, black and white, ACORN members and not.
As the district planners for the Ninth Ward,the AUP was now a part of the establishment,
a cog in the wheel of city governance. We speculated that our hiring might have been a
deliberate strategy by City Hall to bring ACORN and their membership into the fold, to
force them to be accountable for the success or failures of the recovery process.
Whether or not that was the case, ACORN had no intention of playing nice with the city
government. On the eve of the UNOP board’s hiring decisions, scores of ACORN
members stormed City Hall demanding service restoration in the Lower Ninth Ward.
They trapped the mayor coming out of his office, surrounding him in the hallway chanting
their demands. They had, as Cornell professor Ken Reardon is fond of saying, “lit the
mayor’s pants on fire.” The protest drew citywide attention, especially in the print
media—and the ACORN organizers were overjoyed. Our interview team was more than a
little upset; on the eve of possible selection into one of the largest recovery planning efforts
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in US history, the organizers had (without our knowledge) seemingly jeopardized our
standing for a minor “action” on City Hall. ACORN’s action foreshadowed a much larger
lesson we were soon to learn; that ACORN would resort to what they did best to get things
done, regardless of prevailing conditions in the planning process.
Is the Past Always the Present?
In July 2006, our rag-tag partnership formally became one of five “district” level planners.
We were to plan for nine neighborhoods with nearly 40,000 residents including the Lower
Ninth Ward, the most politically explosive neighborhood in the recovery process, and
most in the media spotlight. We were also put in charge of two neighborhood-level
planning firms and a budget of more than $250,000.
A strategy meeting of ACORN, ACORN Housing, and University partners took place in
early August 2006 to hammer out the details of work-flow and to get commitments of
partner participation. We set up a fairly rigid division of labor, with Richard Hayes of
AHC leading the effort, the university students and faculty providing planning and
technical services, and the ACORN organizers working to reach out to residents in
New Orleans and in the “diaspora” of Katrina victims across the country. Because UNOP
was a highly centralized process, our district team’s work was to be fed directly into a city-
wide recovery plan. Our schedule was ambitious; major deliverables were due every two
to four weeks, and the entire process (including four public meetings) was to take place in
less than six months.
Our planning faculty firmly believed that the quality of work for the Ninth Ward had to
be heads and shoulders above other districts. Since the city was considering writing off
some of these poor and working-class neighborhoods, their recovery plans had to stand
out to justify eventual funding decisions. The pressure on the students was enormous;
they affectionately referred to the process as the “deliverables death march.”
An ACORN organizer confided to me that “people’s minds all across New Orleans were
being blown” by our being hired as the district planners. At the time I didn’t really
understand what he meant and I took the comment as a compliment. I soon learned that
“minds being blown” was another way of saying that individuals and groups across New
Orleans were up in arms, especially because several groups fundamentally distrusted our
motives. Though ACORN Housing was nominally in charge of our UNOP work,
community members did not distinguish between ACORN’s organizers and their housing
staff. Those who butted heads with ACORN in the past viewed them as a partisan group,
interested in the welfare of its members and not representative of the community at large.
In their minds, ACORN was an unlikely candidate to carry out an inclusive, participatory
recovery planning effort.
No surprise, then, that groups like the Bywater Neighborhood Association, primarily a
white, middle-upper class organization, opposed our hiring. ACORN fought tooth and
nail with such groups, and conflict was to be expected. What surprised me was the
grassroots opposition we faced from low-income African-American individuals and
groups, a demographic ACORN claimed to represent.
Some complaints stemmed from bad blood in the past. Over the years ACORN had
lined up opposed to just about everyone, and New Orleanians have a very long memory.
Even in this time of great hardship and tragedy, old political, social, and organizational
rivalries dominated the Ninth Ward landscape. This was no great surprise for our
partnership, and it came with the territory of partnering with an action-oriented
organization. Still, what was surprising was that a great deal of the opposition to ACORN
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was generated after the hurricane. Past rivalries had intensified and new rivalries had
emerged in the chaos of rebuilding. The influx of money and volunteers and the near
constant media attention had spurred the founding of dozens of new organizations and
revived long dormant ones. The stakes (and potential prizes) are high—hundreds of
millions of dollars could flow into the Ninth Ward over the next decade, and
neighborhood organizations could have an unrivaled period of access to resources.
ACORN’s traditional dominance in the neighborhood, in terms of members, money,
and political power, was being challenged in new ways. Their response had been to
virtually ignore these new groups and to actively oppose collaboration with them.
Such community in-fighting and organizational competition has hampered recovery
efforts in the Ninth Ward. The St. Roch market is a case in point. A fresh seafood market
through much of the twentieth century and more recently a “po-bo” [sandwich] restaurant,
the historic St. Roch market building was an obvious choice as a potential “anchor” project
for the revitalization of the St. Roch neighborhood. Time and again during public planning
meetings, Ninth Ward residents have discussed the need for a grocery store. The only
options in the neighborhoods are corner groceries and convenience stores, which lack fresh
fruits, vegetables, and affordable prices. Cornell Historic Preservation and Planning
students spent the 2006 spring semester doing meticulous documentation of the building,
including a structural analysis and a complete cost-estimate for repairs so that the building
could now become converted into a fresh vegetable and seafood market. In June of 2006, a
friend who works at a large non-profit financing group called and expressed interest in the
project, and I arranged a meeting with the ACORN leadership.
The financial group offered extremely favorable financing options for the development
of the market, and wanted to make it the “signature project” of their Katrina recovery
portfolio. There was a clear need for a market, financial support was available, and much of
the pre-development work had been completed—the major obstacle was political support.
The lease on the market was held by the City of New Orleans, and the City Council was
reluctant to cede control to a private organization. Around the same time, another
neighborhood organization publicly expressed an interest in revitalizing the market.
The local City Council representative suggested that the two groups share control over the
building and co-develop the project. ACORN organizers were too skeptical to consider it
seriously—they viewed the competing group as a front for gentrifying white interests,
who would turn the market into some sort of upscale “yuppie” enterprise. Twenty-two
months after Hurricane Katrina, the market still stood empty.
To be fair, ACORN was never convinced that the market was an appropriate project for
them to take on—given the financial risk involved and the extraordinary need for housing
development. Sunk costs would have exceeded US$1 million, and the project would have
required a commitment of staff and organizational energy that was in short supply.
Instead of walking away from the project and giving their blessing to another developer,
however, ACORN continued, successfully, to oppose any alternative development process
that they would not control.
The St. Roch project provides just one example of the inter-organizational conflict
that characterizes post-Katrina planning in New Orleans. One of the greatest obstacles to
recovery in the Ninth Ward, I’ve learned, has been the deep mistrust between and among
citizens, organizations, and their government. Much of this mistrust has grown from the long
history of contentious class and race politics in New Orleans, and any outsider who questions
the skepticism of politically savvy groups like ACORN runs the risk of sounding naı
¨ve.
ACORN has won hard-fought political victories for poor and working-class families in
post-Katrina New Orleans, from the early moratorium on bulldozing flood damaged
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homes to gaining the return of utility services to the Lower Ninth Ward. In the context of the
UNOP planning process that promotes collaboration and integrated neighborhood
development, however, ACORN’s fierce independence has hardly sped development along.
Inter- and Intra-Organizational Conflict
As the AUP worked on recovery planning in the fall of 2006, three individuals and groups
worked to publicly oppose our involvement as district planners. The first was John
Williams, the principal of a New Orleans architecture firm, hired as a neighborhood level
planner in the UNOP process and contractually accountable to the AUP team. He clearly
felt that his firm should have been put in charge of planning for the Lower Ninth Ward,
and he actively worked to wrest control of the process from us. The second was a Lower
Ninth Ward resident and leader of a recovery organization, doing work similar to ACORN
but on a smaller scale. She represented a small but vocal group of community members at
odds with ACORN. The third was a group of middle and upper income neighborhood
associations who worried that their interests would not be addressed by ACORN. These
included groups in the Holy Cross, Bywater, and Marigny neighborhoods, where ACORN
membership was low and previous battles between groups had taken place.
This opposition should have been manageable and certainly within the bounds of
neighborhood politics as usual: these groups were making their voices heard in the
neighborhood as well as complaining to the citywide UNOP team. Everyone expected
recovery planning in the Ninth Ward to be contentious. For the AUP, managing criticism
of ACORN seemed relatively straight forward—make as many friends as possible by
reaching out to residents, institutional leaders, organizations, and government officials—
to show that the process would be open and transparent considering the needs of all
residents—not just ACORN members or low and moderate income individuals.
As AUP students and staff began talking to these “movers and shakers”, however,
ACORN grew suspicious. With the crushing workload of the planning “deliverables death
march”, the ACORN organizer’s role had been minimal—they lacked the requisite
experience for doing demographic analysis, plan reviews, mapping, and slogging through
the inevitable technical minutiae. Despite Unified New Orleans Plan’s optimistic promises
of being a participatory process, the budget for diaspora outreach and organizing
(ACORN’s stated role) had not been approved by the Greater New Orleans Foundation
board.
1
Feeling their control over the planning process slipping, ACORN organizers expressed
frustration not just at the university students and faculty, but also at their own ACORN
Housing. Although the public viewed ACORN and ACORN Housing as a single group, in
reality the two are separate organizations with a long, intimate, and contentious history as
political siblings. AHC is made up primarily of professionals, an organization required by
law to remain apolitical (since they rely on federal money for low income housing
development). So, ACORN organizers view AHC at times as aloof and pretentious. As an
ACORN New Orleans staff member told me one night after a few beers, “ACORN
Housing comes in here and thinks they are the kings of the fu**ing world, and let me tell
you, they’re not.” The university students and faculty worked most directly on recovery
planning with ACORN Housing staff, since they shared an interest in affordable housing
development and “spoke the language” of planning. So the relationship between
ACORN’s organizing side and planning had always been strained. By August of 2006,
there was little communication between the two sides. Interactions between ACORN
Housing, university colleagues, and other community organizations heightened
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ACORN’s own suspicions. We came to fear that ACORN members might launch a protest
at their own planning meeting, against their university and housing partners.
This internal conflict undermined our ability to deal with the growing public and private
criticism generated by our own planning subcontractor, the Lower Ninth Ward community
organization. Our director of recovery planning, Richard Hayes, was in an impossible
position, trying to quell the anger of outside groups through collaboration and inclusion,
while facing internal criticism from ACORN leadership over just that collaboration.
A critical moment came in September—Hayes arranged for a “Come to Jesus” meeting
with a wide range of our critics so that they might sign a memorandum of understanding
to guide future work. Essentially, that agreement committed each group to put aside their
grievances for the remainder of the planning process, and it guaranteed that the AUP
planning team would give full consideration to each group’s views. But fifteen minutes
before the meeting began, ACORN leadership pulled the plug. They refused to sit down at
the same table with our critics. Doing so would elevate our critics’ status and give them too
much power in the recovery process. It was a telling moment of the power dynamics in the
AUP—despite the vast majority of the work being done by University and AHC staff, when
push came to shove, ACORN leadership made the hard political decisions on the ground.
Canceling the meeting at the last minute exposed our internal weakness to our critics
and to the UNOP leadership. It was obvious that AUP director Hayes had been overruled
by the ACORN leadership, and the fissures in our team’s decision making structures were
now clear to anyone watching.
We were removed from our position as district planners in the Unified New Orleans
Plan two weeks later. The official rationale was that ACORN Housing had a conflict of
interest as both a planner and developer; that its prospective development of 150
adjudicated properties in the Lower Ninth Ward disqualified it as a “neutral” planner.
We knew this was political cover—for not only had we disclosed our development
intentions in our original application to UNOP, we touted these as a key strength of our
partnership. In reality, ACORN misjudged the strength of the individuals and groups
lined up against us, and those groups were able to campaign effectively for our
termination as a designated UNOP district planning team.
Today some in our partnership say that our critics opposed the return of poor and
working class African Americans to the Ninth Ward; that they were those who argued that
Katrina was a “blessing” for New Orleans and that some families would be “much
happier” in places like Houston, Baton Rouge, and Little Rock. Our firing, this argument
goes, was the triumph of entrenched class interests in the face of a people-powered
movement. No doubt, such groups played a large part in our dismissal, and they have
continued to work against poor families wishing to return to their homes. Yet some in the
partnership place an equal amount of blame on ACORN. As recovery planners, we should
not have ignored opposition groups, should not have left them to stir the pot against us.
The old mantra of keeping one’s friends close, enemies closer bears repeating. ACORN
made a key strategic blunder and severely damaged their relationship with their
university partners in the process.
The week following our dismissal, we were at a crossroads. Should Cornell and the other
universities sever their relationship to ACORN, to clear the way for a new partnership, to
continue to work on the problems of the Ninth Ward? Several offers from other UNOP
planning firms, including the ones hired to replace us, came floating in as others hoped to
capitalize on the work we at the three universities had already done. Or should we
continue with our community partner, “warts and all,” and finish what we had started?
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After much hand wringing and discussion, we chose to stick with ACORN.
Notwithstanding our long and rocky relationship, Cornell professor Ken Reardon who,
along with Richard Hayes, was leading the AUP effort, saw ACORN as the best link to poor
and working families in the Ninth Ward. Many of the 35 students, of course—students who
had committed their semester to the UNOP process—were shocked by our dismissal and
openly questioned the prospects of continuing to work with ACORN. I agreed with their
position. In our view, students, faculty, and AHC staff had done the vast majority of the
“heavy lifting” during the planning process, and from a distance we could hardly see what, if
any, benefits we were deriving from our relationship with ACORN. Experience and
seasoned judgement won out. Professor Reardon recognized the importance of ACORN’s
political clout in the planning process, which would pay rich dividends in the weeks and
months to come.
It’s the Politics, Stupid
Following our dismissal, the AUP continued to work on a comprehensive recovery plan
for the Ninth Ward. The students and staff had done an enormous amount of work and
wanted to finish what they had started; to quote David Lessinger, our graduate student
liaison in New Orleans, “the more we get fired, the harder we will work!”
As the weeks passed, we started to see our dismissal as a mixed blessing. Though we
were once again outside the “official” process, we began to feel that the UNOP process
was too deliverables-driven, that the planning teams were straight-jacketed by the endless
requirements of the citywide planning team. As a result, the process was being driven too
narrowly by the physical aspects of planning—“pipes and drains,” so to speak. Most of the
needs and concerns we’d heard voiced by displaced residents had to do with the social as
well as the physical aspects of recovery: quality education, healthcare, police and fire
protection, and access to fresh foods and restaurants. A recovery plan that targeted these
social vulnerabilities, we saw, would complement the UNOP plan and advance the needs
of poor and working-class people.
As a result, now working without official sponsorship or funding, the students, faculty,
and staff continued to work furiously through the end of the fall 2006 semester and into
the holidays to produce The People’s Plan for Overcoming the Hurricane Katrina Blues.
2
This plan wasbased on the most completedata collection effort in the Ninth Ward following
Hurricane Katrina—it included geo-coded surveys of over 3,000 individual housing and
business parcels and open-ended interviews with more than 150 residents. We had not only a
unique story to tell, but we had surprising findings that would make national news.
Based on the housing data and analysis, Columbia’s Rebekah Green found that the
damage in the Lower Ninth Ward was much less than previously reported, that the vast
majority of structures could be rebuilt in a cost-effective and responsible way. These
findings directly contradicted the popular perceptions in the media and the intentions of
earlier plans to “shrink” the Lower Ninth out of existence. Our planning analysis could
make a real difference, if we could present it effectively.
Learning of these findings, ACORN wanted to publicize them before the barrage of
publicity that might follow the announcement of the UNOP preliminary plans on January
13
th
, 2007. So we worked round the clock over the holidays to produce the plan to present
on January 6
th
. As I drove up to the meeting space, carrying 50 copies of the plan,
I wondered whether we would have a large enough audience to get rid of them. We had
two meetings scheduled that day—the first was for policy makers, the second for the
general public. ACORN had organized the meeting, and we had no idea what to expect.
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The Ninth Ward had seen dozens of neighborhood, district, and citywide planning
meetings during the UNOP, and whether our partnership’s “unofficial” work would
garner attention outside the official process was an open question.
As I walked up the stairs, I was shocked—the room was packed. I counted more than
50 politicians, community activists, church leaders and media representatives. Three
New Orleans City Council members, two state legislators and a city alderman were there
even if the mayor’s office sent their regrets.
No amount of participatory planning, well thought-out project proposals, bullet-proof
data sets, or slick power-point slideshows would trump the importance of having local
political power. Planning techniques and tools can help local groups to act, but the groups
themselves, who represent constituencies, must organize for change. ACORN’s ability to
bring important public figures to meetings and presentations proved their expertise in the
power politics that defines the City of New Orleans.
The day following our January presentation of the People’s Plan, an article appeared on
the front page of the local Times-Picayune, and an AP story was picked up by over 180 news
outlets across the US and Canada. We were then invited to present the plan to the
New Orleans City Council and the City Planning Commission in early February.
On February 17, 2007 the Council officially adopted the People’s Plan and instructed the
Planning Commission to incorporate our recommendations into the citywide recovery
plan. The People’s Plan—born of uncertainty, conflict, hard work, a firing, and persistence
against long odds—will have a significant impact on the direction of recovery planning in
New Orleans, one of the largest urban recovery efforts in history.
This was a remarkable turn of events for the AUP, and it rejuvenated the relationship
between ACORN and its partners. What changed between October and January? The most
significant difference has been the development of credibility: planners have planned,
developers have developed, and organizers have organized. ACORN has seen that their
partners could produce a plan that reflects the needs of their community, and we have seen
that ACORN could support our work in the community, in City Hall, and in the broader
political process. Problems withcommunication and trust persist, but each partner has found
a working space in the partnership that allows them to contribute in a meaningful way.
Epilogue
In April 2007,the New Orleans Office of Recovery Management announced fourteencitywide
“targeted recovery zones” sites for significant public investment and potential economic
growth. The Lower Ninth Ward was named as one of the sites, and was allotted over $145
million in recovery funds. During the announcement the Office’s recovery czar Edward
Blakely pulled ACORN members on stage and praised the organization for fighting on behalf
of the displaced residents. Eighteen months later, the “returnto wetlands” plan proposed by
the Urban Land Institute had been defeated, and the ACORN University Partnership will
continue to support all Ninth Ward residents who are struggling to return home.
Notes
1. The Greater New Orleans Foundation managed the Rockefeller Foundation grant that funded the UNOP
process and that had no public accountability mechanism. The Foundation is composed of local political,
business, and legal elites, and operated as a quasi-public oversight body during the UNOP process.
2. Available online at www.rebuildingtheninth.org
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Politics, Inspiration and Vocation:
An Education in New Orleans
EFREM BYCER
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
I took my seat five rows from the front in our half circle of chairs at Holy Angels Church.
We were in the Bywater community in New Orleans. This had been one of the longest days
of my life. I’d slept only two hours, all of which had been on planes on the way from
Syracuse to New Orleans. That was hardly actual sleep, especially since we’d been
running through the terminals to ensure that we made our connection. For 66 students and
faculty traveling from Ithaca to New Orleans, this trip was a logistical nightmare.
Once we all arrived in New Orleans, we drove off in our minivans to our hotel, dropped
off our bags, and headed to the field wearing our bright green shirts. We wasted no time.
I began conducting interviews in the Lower Ninth Ward that afternoon. We regrouped at
Holy Angels Catholic Church for a traditional New Orleans jambalaya dinner and the
long-awaited meeting with the leaders of our partner in the recovery planning effort: the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Steve Bradberry,
who was in charge of the New Orleans operation, and Wade Rathke, ACORN’s executive
director and international leader, were representing the organization.
Bradberry and Rathke each gave short presentations about the work ACORN has done
in the past and what it hoped to accomplish working with its university partners.
Something about Rathke rubbed me the wrong way. Here he was, a tall, skinny, white
Arkansan wearing snakeskin cowboy boots. His arrogant speech and aloof body language
made it seem like he was talking down to us, which I found surprising since he was
supposed to be the leader of an organization that stands up for poor and working class
individuals, mostly minorities, all over the country and throughout the world.
My frustration grew when they opened the floor to questions. Rather than answering
questions outright, Rathke avoided giving direct answers. As my classmates asked
questions, I had an impulse to stick my hand in the air and get more clarity. I rarely
asked questions in these types of settings. I prefer more intimate environments where
candid communication can occur more easily, especially when a speaker is as respected
and experienced as Rathke.
As I listened to him, I became increasingly uneasy. His arrogance and refusal to answer
questions angered me more, and my temper could easily be tripped as I was operating in a
state of sleep deprivation. I noticed he never called on the people who had their hands
up for a while.
At an opportune time I raised my hand, and much to my surprise, he called on me.
I meant to ask a very straightforward question regarding the political environment of
the neighborhoods and city in which we were working. I was also curious about ACORN’s
reputation for going at it alone. My frustration and lack of sleep may have changed my
tone to sound more accusatory. I asked, “Why are we not working with other groups in the
Ninth Ward, such as Common Ground and Catholic Charities, which are doing good work
and have the same goals we do?”
I thought this was an honest and straightforward inquiry, but Rathke became more
defensive than he had been on any other question. He did not answer my question, and
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I would not settle for that. I wanted answers. I thought I was entitled to them. After all,
from what we had heard, Rathke was the reason we had recently been fired from the
official UNOP process.
Just a few weeks earlier, I had been sitting in my New Orleans Neighborhood
Workshop in the Barclay Jones Design Lab on the third floor of Sibley Hall listening to Ken
Reardon and Richard Hayes explain what had happened. Other planning groups involved
in the Ninth Ward claimed ACORN had a conflict of interest because it also has a
residential development division, ACORN Housing. ACORN had struggled with many
other organizations in the past, I was told, and this was the way in which many of them
were seeking revenge. Before this situation blew up, Richard Hayes drafted a
memorandum of understanding (MOU) in which he agreed that ACORN Housing
would not develop the properties the plan covered in the near future. With this MOU he
was able to bring all the parties together and make peace.
When the parties were about to sign, the ACORN leadership pulled out. Shortly before
the meeting was supposed to start, Rathke called up Hayes and told him not to circulate
the MOU for signatures, even though he had written it. This infuriated the other
consultants and led to the firing of ACORN and its university partners from the UNOP
process. Although this was a blessing in disguise, removing us from the “deliverables
death march” which had consumed our semester to that point—while also giving us the
freedom to perform tasks as we saw fit, it was also one of the saddest days of the entire
semester. After finding out the news of being fired, everyone was upset. I had never been
fired from anything before, and to be fired from something as big as this—even though
there is nothing any individual, especially a student, could do—was devastating.
At the same time, I saw my classmates rise to the occasion, which made this day also one
of the most inspiring. Everyone said they would continue with the work and make the best
possible plan for the residents of the seventh and eighth planning districts, whether we
were part of UNOP or not.
While I felt there were certainly benefits to being outside of the formal recovery plan
process, I still felt that the best way for us to shape the type of plan we wanted was for us to
be part of the citywide initiative. We lost an official voice within the process and
perpetuated negative perspectives of ACORN when an opportunity existed to change
those relationships and collaborate in order to help the residents the most, which
I assumed to be everyone’s overall goal. I had blamed Rathke for this loss.
So here I was insisting upon straightforward answers from Rathke. Without knowing it,
I had called him out. He and I went back and forth for a few minutes. I asked about
ACORN’s relationship with other non-profits in the area, which he would not answer, as
well as why ACORN would ever to agree to be part of a planning team when Rathke was
more concerned about helping his dues-paying members rather than the community at
large. My understanding of planning meant you left no one behind. As a community
planner, you plan for everyone.
We went back and forth for about five minutes, or at least that is what it felt like. I had
never stood up to anyone like that before, much less one of the most highly regarded
leaders in the country with more than 30 years of organizing experience compared to my
fourteen months of college. I cannot now imagine what had possessed me to do that. I was
always the type of guy who played life by the rules. I never asked questions of those more
knowledgeable and experienced than myself because I figured they knew what they were
doing. My grandmother had always told me to shut my mouth and do what I’m told.
Having been raised in a Jewish household, I had been taught to value and respect my
elders, especially those with more education.
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All I knew was that by the end of this fiasco my eyes were burning as I held back tears,
and people around me were shifting in their seats with tension. I had lost so much hope for
the people of the Ninth Ward. Here was our supposed partner undermining us rather than
working with us. Now that we were outside the process, ACORN was free to fight the plan
if it did not meet its specifications—to the point that nothing might ever be done to help the
people get back to their homes and rebuild the community.
I sat in silence and clenched my fists as I sat waiting for the questions to end. I wanted to
cry, to let it all out, but I would not break down. I would not let him get the best of me. He had
told me that I should not be challenging him because I was, after all, just a student. Little did
he know, I was a teenager and only a sophomore in the Urban and Regional Studies program.
This was my first hands-on planning experience, and I only had basic background on cities
from my freshman year. It was a fluke that I was evenin the neighborhood workshop. I meant
to take planning classes about the theory of spatial design and quantitative methods, but one
was cancelled and the other was moved to a time that conflicted with the one required
planning class for sophomores. I saw the New Orleans Neighborhood Planning Workshop as
an option, and it had Ken Reardon as its instructor. It would fulfill my qualitative methods
requirement for the undergraduate degree. I had heard many positive remarks about Ken,
and he was one of the most highly regarded figures in the planning field. I would have an
opportunity to learn how he thought and to learn from the best.
I walked to class on the first day and took a seat at the center table. I recognized a few of
the faces that walked in, but I only knew them because we had played intramurals
together. None of the students were undergrads (three more undergrads would eventually
join the class). We went through introductions and everyone was a graduate student.
Many had worked in planning related capacities before coming back to school. Others had
worked as teachers or in other professional jobs. I had three years experience at a
supermarket and had spent a summer working for the South Burlington Police
Department. What the hell was I doing in this classroom? I must surely be out of my
league. I did not have the background to be involved with such a massive project that
would affect so many people. Thank goodness Ken and my adviser, John Forester,
convinced me that I would never have another opportunity like this one.
The year before, when I first heard about Katrina, it all seemed surreal to me. It was only
my third day of classes when I heard what seemed like rumors from my classmates about
a massive hurricane hitting New Orleans and the entire city being underwater. Professor
Bill Goldsmith made reference to it in his lecture that day, and from then on he tied in
New Orleans to every lecture he gave on economic and racial disparity. When I saw
pictures of the city, especially the Ninth Ward, I could not believe my eyes. I did not think
I was looking at an American city. Maybe those were pictures from Indonesia, Sri Lanka,
or some other developing nations in the Indian Ocean ravaged by the tsunami of 2004, that
had been mistakenly inserted. There was no way my country would allow such a disaster
to happen within its borders.
I went through my freshman year of college feeling detached from the events of Katrina.
I kept hearing about how bad things were in New Orleans, but I never heard about
solutions. Little did I know I would help formulate one.
The confrontation with Wade was a turning point in my participation in the
workshop. Until that moment, I had been a soft-spoken member of the class searching for
my place. I had spent weeks focusing on parks, recreation, and open space as those were
the only topics I felt remotely qualified to report on. I knew parks and recreation were
important to a community in reducing crime, providing safe places to play, and improving
the aesthetics of a neighborhood. I saw parks also as ways to improve disaster
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preparedness because we could turn the most damaged areas into parks that could also
serve as disaster mitigation zones.
I had wanted to become an environmental planner. When I came to Cornell, I believed
planning to be a top-down process in which I, as a trained planner, would come to know more
about the community and could therefore tell the citizens what was best. “Participation”
meant meeting with them to see if they agreed and giving them some time for their input, but
I would make the ultimate decisions of whether or not to include what they say.
Since I began working on New Orleans, I no longer felt this way. I did not want to be a
top-down planner whose job it was to outsmart the community. New Orleans residents
despised this type of planning. This type of planning led to distrust of the government and
a general loss of hope for the future of their neighborhood. These residents needed to be
involved with the process. They knew the community better than any government official
or planner and had a direction they wanted their neighborhood to go. I came to view a
planner’s job as helping a community create a vision for their community and then
helping the residents turn that vision into a reality.
Yet I had lost so much faith in the ability of New Orleans to recover because of what I saw
as Rathke’s inflexibility. I think now that is one reason I became so much more active in the
planning itself. Until then, I figured everything would work itself out. We had some form of
a schedule to work on and our leadership, with their years of experience, would be able to
pull it all together. After that night, I did not feel that way anymore. It was as if I had a new
purpose in life. Since he was not going to fight for the people of New Orleans, I was.
It was bizarre to feel that my sudden increased involvement actually meant something.
At the end of the day, I was going back to Ithaca, still just a sophomore. I am not going to be
able to reach out to people on the ground. I had no reputation with any politician or
activists in New Orleans. But none of these details seemed to matter. I felt empowered.
Somehow, I would make a difference.
We went back to the hotel that night, and I was exhausted. I went to the lobby to call my
girlfriend and tell her how my first day in New Orleans had gone. She sensed something
was wrong as I told her how the events of the evening had unfolded. I felt a tear go down
my cheek, but I kept myself in line as my fellow travelers were hanging out in the lobby,
and I would not appear weak.
I needed to be strong—for the people I hoped to serve. If I got upset and let it show to the
point that I would need time “in the van,” then that would mean one less interview
I would be able to do. That would mean one less resident whose story and vision would be
part of our plan. I would not be the reason for that happening. These people had been
through so much. Many lost their homes and everything in them. Many lost their family
and friends to the flood waters. They were back. They were rebuilding. They were strong
beyond belief. I owed it to them to be at least a fraction as strong.
I spent the next morning walking the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward with my interview
partner, Andrea. As I walked, I was in awe of the damage and destruction still seen in this
neighborhood more than fourteen months after Katrina (I would later be informed that this
neighborhood looked significantly better than it had just a few weeks before our trip). Houses
were boarded up with symbols indicating if dead bodies had been found in the structure.
Many of the properties were overcome with grasses almost as tall as the house itself.
Holy Cross, where we spent the afternoon, was not much different. At least there
seemed to be more actual reconstruction of homes going on. The one thing I did get from
residents was that people were coming back. If they were not back yet, then they wanted to
be. Everyone we met said that New Orleans was their home and there was no place like it.
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I met one of the most memorable people of the trip that day. “Peter” was his name.
Trained as an electrician, Peter had retired some years ago, and now he was rewiring
houses for only the cost of materials. Andrea and I approached him in the parking lot of
Harvest Baptist Church where he was talking to a team of volunteers from Gainesville,
Florida who had been up for three months doing construction work. He seemed happy to
see us at first, but his voice expressed a different tone. He was upset that yet another
group with their clipboards and colored shirts would come into his neighborhood. He was
sick and tired of countless groups coming in and asking him to tell his story and what he
wanted to happen with his neighborhood in the future. He asked, “Where is the action?”
He believed things got done through action, not surveys.
Despite his skepticism, he talked to us for quite a while. He conveyed a distrust of
government at all levels, unhappiness with the Road Home Program, his perceptions of
racism, and his disenchantment with the planning process. Maybe by the end he believed
us when we said that these surveys would develop a plan calling for serious action in the
most damaged neighborhoods, but I’ll never know. As the interview came to a close, he
invited us to view his latest project.
He took us into the church, which was also where he worshipped. He had recently
finished the lighting in the sanctuary. We walked in and he turned on the lights, and
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The room was a bright white, symbolic of a deep faith in a higher
power and the people of the community. We were surroundedby destruction and death, but
in this room I felt hope. Peter invited us to Sunday worship, and I said we would try to be
there. We left him in the church as we continued on our quest for interviews.
As I left Peter, I felt much better about the rebuilding effort. He was taking the
recovery effort into his own hands and making things happen. Though I felt ACORN
was going to leave people like Peter behind, the residents were acting in their own
right.
I met many people like Peter who were rebuilding their own homes and the homes of
their relatives so that they could one day return to New Orleans. Many of them were
funding these endeavors out of their own savings and doing all the work with their bare
hands. I had never seen such dedication to one’s own community before. I began to feel
hope again—and felt we owed it to these people to write the best plan possible.
For a while I felt guilty and pretentious to introduce myself as a Cornell University
student. I have always lived a comfortable life—too comfortable. My family has never had
an issue putting food on the table or lived in neighborhoods with high crime, pervasive
drugs, and poor schools. My family could even afford to send me to one of the most
expensive institutions of higher learning in the country. Here I am, a white Ivy Leaguer
from Vermont, and I had the chutzpah to expect the people of the Ninth Ward to tell me
their stories.
But then I thought of the other side. Being at Cornell gave me a power and credibility
the residents did not have. When they face being left out, we may be included for no
other reason than we bring money and name recognition. We have an obligation as
privileged, well-educated, and respected citizens to use this power for the people who
need it most.
As we moved into Bywater, St. Claude, and St. Roch to meet residents, the interviewees
echoed both Peter’s frustration with how things have gone so far and his self-
determination to remake lives for themselves. I remember talking to a resident on
Saturday in St. Claude as he was working on his neighbor’s Chevy Tahoe. He could not
have been much older than me. He explained that he had just started his own car detailing
business. In fact, he worked out of his van and would drive to his clients’ homes or offices
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to work on their cars. Business was slow, but his clientele was growing. He also said he
had taught himself how to go about getting his business registered and licensed to do
work in New Orleans. Rather than focus on his problems, he was going to move forward
and make something of himself.
The night before, we heard a presentation about Cafe
´Reconcile after our gumbo dinner
at Holy Angels Church. Cafe
´Reconcile was a non-profit that took delinquents off the
streets and taught them skills for the hospitality industry, particularly restaurants.
The students were taught culinary techniques that often led to jobs in the service sector,
which is a large part of the New Orleans economy. Cafe
´Reconcile was also hoping to
expand to include its own banquet hall where its students would do catering, to have
classrooms where students could learn math and reading skills alongside their parents,
and to found a small business incubator where entrepreneurs would learn the process of
starting a business and learn the skills necessary to make their business a success.
I was already feeling more hope. So much was going on in New Orleans to help the
people, even when it seemed that the government and planning process were leaving
many of them behind. We found multiple store fronts where church groups were giving
out free meals to residents who could not afford groceries. Friends were working together
to rebuild their neighbors’ homes and take care of their properties so the city did not take
them away. These people took care of one another. Without a doubt, the people were the
strongest resource in this community.
Our planning trip culminated on Sunday with morning worship. Andrea and I had
already decided to go back to Harvest Baptist Church in hopes of seeing Peter one more
time before returning to Ithaca. When we described our experience earlier in the week
to our peers, they wanted to visit the church with us. The twenty of us remaining in
New Orleans caravanned down St. Claude Avenue to Harvest Baptist for services.
When we walked in, we were greeted like celebrities. Immediately after opening the
double doors into the building, you felt like you were in heaven. Everyone was singing
and clapping. They were all so joyous, the destruction all around us. How was this
possible?
Their secret was to focus on every success. In the last week, one family had been able
to return to their home. The team of volunteers from Gainesville had just left, but they
were instrumental in rebuilding the church so that everyone had a place to pray on
Sundays. At one point, the preacher had everyone introduce themselves to three new
people and hug them. They celebrated life with such a passion. In that room, I would
never have thought the woman and her daughters in front of me were living in a small
FEMA trailer or that the man across the aisle had lost his business. It was a breath-taking
and inspiring experience.
My first Baptist Sunday morning service was my last memory of New Orleans. While
the bad taste Wade left in my mouth still lingered, I felt there was potential for this
community to rebuild and become something greater than it had ever been.
The weeks following our return to Cornell were filled with inputting the data we
gathered in the resident and physical conditions surveys. Using residents’ answers to the
questions, we compiled a list of potential projects for the two planning districts, including
a community design center, pocket parks, commercial corridors, and community policing.
The list grew to over 65 suggested projects. Through a series of meetings we reduced that
to twenty proposals, some of which were short-term (two to four years) and others that
were long-term (five or more years).
Students in two classes completed plan elements and case studies on these proposals.
Reports and summary statistics followed from the faculty and New Orleans Planning
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Initiative (NOPI) staff. At the end of the semester, students handed in their assignments
and went home for winter. Rathke called as the semester was coming to an end and asked
to see all the work that had been completed to date. But that work had never been
compiled and placed in one location. He asked for a preliminary version of the
presentation to be given to the community and political leaders on January 6.
With professors swamped with end of the semester grading and administrative work
and graduate students finishing up final papers and projects, who was going to put all the
work together? I had finished my exams earlier in the exam period and was looking for
some New Orleans work to do before heading home. After talking with Reardon about
what there would be for me to do, this project was the priority.
I spent the next three days compiling all the work prepared by students and faculty.
I finally got to see the deliverables we produced earlier in the semester when we were still
part of UNOP. I could not believe how much we had accomplished as students in one
semester. We had performed background research on the neighborhoods, analyzed all
previous plans for the districts, collected data in the field, and were now putting a plan
together for a community. I came across reports on schools, businesses, and structural
damage. At the end of the three days I assembled three copies of a 250-page document of
plan elements, demographic data, and reports summarizing all the work our workshop had
done over the semester to be handed to Reardon, Hayes, and, much to my pleasure, Rathke.
With this as a foundation, my colleagues could work over the holidays to produce a district
plan with high quality graphics for the public presentation on January 6.
An International Student’s Perceptions
of Hurricane Katrina
PRAJ KASBEKAR
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
I watched the news on August 28, 2005 and listened to “Hurricane Katrina” warnings
along the gulf coast. Having come from India where hurricanes are not given names
or made the subject of stories, I wrote to my mother at home in Mumbai about how in the
USA hurricanes are named. Even though I had always felt amused as I listened to the
different names and stories of hurricanes here, when I heard that a hurricane named
“Katrina” was raging in the Gulf of Mexico and posed a real danger for the areas in its
path, my amusement turned into nervousness. I told my mother of my fears, and she
responded, “Come on Praj, the USA is one of the most technologically savvy rich
countries, they will know what to do,” which sounded reassuring at that point. I had
confidence in the capabilities of a “developed” country like the USA who had seen many
hurricanes—and I thought, “Oh, they will know how to deal with it.” I went to sleep that
night with a prayer for the Gulf Coast. Little did I know that the area needed something
more than prayers!
When I woke up the next day, the stories of Hurricane Katrina started making the
rounds on television. Every news channel, national and international, jumped at the story.
The images were streaming live, showing gusts of wind blowing through the Gulf Coast.
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Then came the devastating news of levee breaches in New Orleans, including the
Industrial Canal; water was rising everywhere; most of the houses in the Lower Ninth
Ward were submerged in the flood waters; residents were climbing on the roofs of their
homes and desperately calling for help. These images go through my head even today.
Every hour brought a new story related to the disaster. The reports of deaths started
coming in.
I was shocked to see the long line of residents affected by the hurricane as they stood
outside the Superdome in New Orleans. It was heart wrenching to see small kids crying
for food or water and to see some even trying to find their parents. After looking at all the
devastation and flooding, I remember thinking, “Well, it will be OK. The government will
send lots of aid and manpower to help the city and its residents get back on their feet.
Surely, this is the USA ...one of the world’s richest countries!”
But the stories of devastation never stopped, and I saw no sign of relief for the evacuees.
This was so surprising for me—not at all something I expected from this country.
The disappointing response of the government to the hurricane survivors in New Orleans
made me wonder about the reasons this was happening. I couldn’t get it. How was this
possible?
After looking at the news for several weeks it occurred to me that most of the people
who seemed affected were poor African American residents of New Orleans. The people
wading through the water, the people on the roofs, the people waiting in line at the
Superdome for water and food ...almost all of them were poor African Americans. There
were other stories that caught the attention of the media—especially concerning the
looting of Wal-Mart and other electrical appliances stores. I saw the images of young
black men carrying huge plasma screen TVs out of stores. I wondered too, “What was
the government doing? Where was the relief to stop people from going to such
extremes?”
The international media—especially the Indian media—picked up on the stories of
looting and portrayed these as if the whole city was under the siege of looters,
predominantly African Americans. When I saw how the whole devastation was
portrayed in mainstream Indian media, I felt bewildered. These were exaggerated and
unjust portrayals of the resident’s sufferings. The salient theme of the articles in print as
well the stories on television soon became a comparison between the Indian and western
cultures, Mumbai floods that happened around the same time and the flooding that
resulted from Hurricane Katrina. Both disasters led to massive flooding and many
people suffered.
Mumbai had flooded because of heavy rains on 28
th
July 2005. Due to the flooding,
the public transportation system collapsed and thousands of commuters were stranded
in their offices or at railway stations. However, the response of the residents of the city
to the disaster was commendable. My family was stranded in their offices. My sister-
in-law who was pregnant was taken in by an old couple who lived in the area and
who took care of her until the water receded. There were many instances of total
strangers helping each other out. Not a single act of looting or violence was reported.
The Indian media started drawing the parallels between the two disasters and started
advocating the “supremacy” of Indian culture and society versus that in the USA. One
of the most popular news sources, the Times of India, drew the comparison and
suggested,
When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, its citizens went on the
rampage. Contrast this to how Mumbai responded when devastated by
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torrential rains. In the face of an inept administration, what kept Mumbaikars
afloat was the extraordinary show of common cause and concern. Pre-modern
systems of affiliation still provide the template for social inter-actions in India.
Be it the daily ritual of having a meal or celebrating festivals, chatting with
fellow commuters on the train or asserting caste identity, life here is a collective
affair. And as one walks into the twilight years, the path does not lead to an old-
age home. Life, like before, is spent with kith, kin and community.
Even my friends at home started to express the same feeling through their emails and
messages. One of my friends wrote, “I saw on the TV, young black kids going around the
city throwing stones and acting crazy. This is what happens when there is no one to teach
them how to act under stress.” I felt it was unfair for her to assume that the reason behind
the lootings was essentially lack of guidance and proper upbringing. I really couldn’t
assess if it was the media or bias against western culture or clear lack of concern for the
affected people that aroused these reactions. I understood why they reacted to the
New Orleans situation the way they did, but I thought they hardly had adequate
information to draw conclusions about the “failed society” of the USA. Still, I was really
not sure how to make them aware of the real situation.
I sometimes feel that I did not do enough to convince my friends of what really had
happened, just as I myself was not quite sure how to make sense of all the events that took
place post-Katrina. The disaster happened for numerous reasons; the historical failure on
the part of Army Corps of Engineers to provide secure levees; the mismanagement and
failure to provide relief by FEMA, the failure of city government to provide its citizens safe
passage to get out of the city, and the list goes on.
Yet if one looks at the race and the economic status of the residents affected, one
cannot help but wonder: Did the lack of concern shown by all levels of governments
not have anything to do with most of the evacuees being poor African Americans? It is
hard to answer that question in a straightforward fashion. But I could not help but
notice the difference between the disaster mitigation strategies applied to rich white
communities of Florida and California and those helping the poor black communities of
New Orleans.
As an international student and a person of color, I tend to be more sensitive about race
issues. I don’t know if my judgement is skewed by my background, but looking at the
relief response, I came to the conclusion that race did play a big role in the Hurricane
Katrina disaster. I have experienced several sides of this racial divide myself since I have
been in the USA. It is not coincidental that virtually every time I fly, the people who are
taken aside for security checks are brown skinned people like me and African Americans.
It is incredible to see the look of “suspicion” in the security officers’ eyes. It’s incredible to
me that my skin color can determine how dangerous I am. When my friends in India asked
me to explain the lack of disaster response, I could not yet list all these thoughts. I was still
learning about these racial dynamics, and my trip to New Orleans after the disaster would
teach me even more.
After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, many institutions wanted to get involved in the
rebuilding and revitalization process, some targeting the worst hit areas in New Orleans.
Our Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell was one of them. After the
hurricane, many of my fellow students came together and organized planning trips to go
and assist the house-gutting process in the city. I remember that I was both overwhelmed
and quite scared to get involved. When one of my colleagues asked why I was scared,
I realized what was holding me back. I was scared of going down to New Orleans because
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I was scared of meeting and working with the city’s African American residents. When
I tried to reason with my fears, I realized that my prejudices had grown from several
disturbing personal experiences.
I had come to the USA in 2003. This was the first time I had been away from my family
and friends. I think that I felt vulnerable emotionally for the first six months. In that time
I took many tourist trips. On one of them, I visited relatives in New Jersey. When I had
made my way to New Jersey from New York City by the train, three African American
women had tried to push past me to get seats and had said to me, “It’s because of you
people that we can’t travel by planes: that’s why we have to be in trains!!”
For a minute there I was so shocked to hear her reference to 9/11 and its
relationship with my skin color! I couldn’t believe my ears. A total stranger was accusing
me of being guilty because of my skin color. Furthermore the accuser herself was a
person of color. This insensitivity and ignorance baffled me. Yet it also solidified my
prejudices regarding African Americans. As I grew up in India, I had always seen those
videos of rap songs on TV with lots of violence and derogatory terms for women. When
the Indian media covered crime in the USA, often the criminals were shown to be
African Americans. So when that woman on the train reproached me with those nasty
words, my shock subsided and my racial prejudices became stronger. I had similar
experiences in New York City, and I found myself becoming more and more fearful of
African Americans. So when the chance arose to go to New Orleans and help, I couldn’t
really convince myself. I thought if African Americans who are not really stressed can be
that mean to me, then I did not want to face the people who were going through the hard
times of Katrina’s devastation. I actually felt threatened. I convinced myself that
I couldn’t deal with it.
As the Spring of 2006 went by and I saw all the work our students had done in and on
New Orleans, I started feeling more and more uneasy about my prejudices and, quite
frankly, my cowardice. When I came back to Cornell after my summer internship, I felt
that I needed to put aside my fears. I remember talking to Professor Ken Reardon in
New York City, and he told me of some new developments on the New Orleans front. Our
planning department and ACORN Housing had been chosen as the planners for the
seventh and eighth districts. This area included the worst hit areas in the city. Ken said that
we had lots of work to do, and he encouraged me to get involved. When the fall semester
started, I decided to just go to the workshop and listen to Ken and his ideas. As always,
Ken portrayed the amazing task that we had to accomplish and how important it was.
Somehow I decided I was going to stick with it. I can say that my decision to stay in that
New Orleans Planning Initiative Workshop was the most important and successful
decision I have taken in my life.
The workshop had its ups and downs however. I would like to concentrate here on the
New Orleans trip that brought 60 students from Cornell to do survey analysis for three
days in the Ninth Ward.
Quite frankly, when the trip was announced I was nervous as well as curious. To spend
three days roaming the streets in some of the worst hit areas and try to talk to people, to be
asking them questions, made me nervous as well as somewhat excited. I was preparing
myself mentally to keep aside my prejudices and act as a normal human being with
compassion for people who have lost everything. It wasn’t easy. Especially when one of
our professors brought two psychologists to class to help us “prepare” for the trip, I started
freaking out more. I thought maybe there was after all a need to panic while dealing with
people from different races and cultures.
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When the day came to fly out to New Orleans with fellow students, I was scared and
worried about myself. I think even my mother and some friends were little uneasy.
I remember her telling me, “Praj, don’t be adventurous. You don’t have to brave all the
time. If a situation arises where you feel threatened, withdraw from it as soon as possible!”
I think Amol, my husband, was worried too. With all of the people being worried about
my trip, I was getting more and more nervous myself.
When we reached the city, I was apprehensive about the sights I might see and the
people I might have to interact with. After reaching the hotel and being assigned the
survey areas that I would work in with my faculty partner, Pierre Clavel, we set out to
the Lower Ninth Ward to do resident interviews. I will never forget my first glimpse of the
disaster as we started driving down from St. Claude Avenue towards the Lower Ninth.
Collapsed and washed-away houses lay everywhere. Streets after streets were deserted
and were in total disarray. It was an unbelievable sight. How different to experience
something first hand than to read about it or to look at pictures on the television!
We parked our car along the road and started walking towards our assigned part of
the neighborhood. It was surreal to be in the area! It had been fourteen months already
after Katrina, but still I could feel the magnitude of the disaster. The debris of the
collapsed houses had not been cleaned up. Some crumbling houses still had furniture in
them. We walked for two blocks, and I remember telling Pierre that it was hopeless to be
there. I was convinced there would be no one to interview. I meant, “Come on, who in
their right mind would come back to this devastation?”—and as if to answer my
defeatist attitude a strong voice called out to us from one of the houses, “What are you
guys doing here?”
It startled me. As we walked towards the house, we saw a middle-aged African
American guy sitting on the steps of his trailer, next to a crumbling house, with a beer in
his hand at 2 p.m. in the afternoon. I proceeded to tell him who we were and asked if he
could answer our questions from the survey. He instantly agreed and offered us a chair.
He started telling us about where he was when Katrina happened and how his house
was in a much worse state than it was now. He told us how he had been shelling out his
own savings to rebuild his house, a house that his grandfather had built. When I asked
why he was not waiting for financial help from the government like some other residents
in the neighborhood, he said, “If you want to get your house up again, you don’t have to
wait for nobody! People should remember that and come back and work on their
homes.”
When I said, “It must not be easy for people,” he looked at me, straight in the eyes, and
said, “Nothing in life is easy!” and gave out a hearty laugh. I did not know how to react.
I just couldn’t believe his attitude. Initially I thought that he was kidding with me but his
steady gaze made me realize that he was serious!
After this first interview we moved on, and we started noticing trailers on the sides of
houses. We started talking to more and more residents. One guy told us how he had been
rescued from the top of his house. One woman told me how she was convinced that
nothing was going to happen until she heard the winds against her windows. One guy
told us how he had recently bought a big screen TV and how he was convinced by loo king
at the large images on the TV to get out of New Orleans. The same guy later added that the
first thing he did when he saw his half washed away home was to look for that TV and
how disappointed he was to have lost so much.
But all of these people kept telling me that they were working on getting their lives
together. All these people, all African Americans, were so friendly and full of hope.
This was really hard for me to understand. I had been expecting a totally different
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behavior based on my earlier experiences. It was bewildering. After talking to eight
residents in one day, I came back to our hotel totally speechless and, to be honest,
totally confused.
I had expected people to be angry and maybe even to lash out at us. I was definitely
prepared to hear swearing about the government, but mostly I expected some reaction to
my international status. I was fully prepared to hear, “Oh, you’re not from this country,
you wouldn’t understand,” or maybe someone talking to me loud and slow, thinking that
I could not understand English (I have always experienced this at airports. I am usually
tempted to tell them that I am Indian, not deaf!). My whole idea of how a poor black
person caught up in this disaster might react was shattered on that first day in the
Ninth Ward.
The next day I woke up early, eager to go back to the Lower Ninth and meet more
people. I was suspicious that all the people I had talked to on the first day had been so
friendly and positive. I thought maybe things would be different from now on. Once we
came to the other streets in the Lower Ninth, of course, the stories were different—but the
underlying hope for betterment was still there.
I remember meeting an old couple. Their trailer was standing on the vacant ground
where their beloved house used to stand. The woman started talking to us, and she
answered our questions with a certain apprehension. She kept wondering why we were
asking her so many questions about the insurance and all. But her husband seemed to
enjoy our conversation. He said that he was just happy to have some new people to
talk to. After some time the woman started opening up to me. She told me how they
had to leave their house in a hurry so she hadn’t been able to take lot of personal
belongings. After Katrina, when she had a chance to come back, she found her house
sitting on top of her neighbor’s house, she told us, and she gave out a big laugh. I didn’t
know how to react. I could understand the humor in the incident at the same time that
I could not ignore the tragedy of losing all of your personal belongings—your old
pictures, your old furniture to which you are so emotionally attached—all lost without
your being at fault.
After our conversation, the woman asked me where I was from, and she commented
that she loved Indian food. She also added that I reminded her of her granddaughter
who was away for school, and she spontaneously hugged me with tears in her eyes. That
one hug said so many things to me. I was so glad to be there at just that time. These small
moments are the ones that make you appreciate life for what it really is. In that whole
second I could feel her pain as well as her love. We bade them goodbye, and we started
walking towards our car. All I could think of was how my prejudices and preconceived
fears would have led me to miss all this. If I had decided to not go to New Orleans
because of someone else’s hurtful comments, I would have missed an experience of a
lifetime!
After four days of meeting the most wonderful and courageous people and getting
some important survey work done in the process, I came back to Ithaca, emotionally
drained. I did not know how to explain to Amol or even my mom in India how I was
feeling. I felt jubilation in the fact that I had these amazing experiences at the same time
that I felt ashamed of my own earlier feelings.
When I called my mom in India her first question was, “Are you OK? I was so worried
for all four days.” I did not know where to start. I told her about all the people I had met,
how they welcomed me into their homes, how they told me their stories. I told her how
they had looked out for me and my colleagues when we were in the field, how each of us
had these wonderful stories about the people we had met. How happy I was to be able to
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do this—and to have changed my senses of racial prejudice. Of course I also told her that
my bag did get opened at the airport once again.
I am sure that my mom was not expecting me to be so positive. She was surprised, as
were many of my friends who had gone on and on about the Mumbai floods. One of my
best friends from school asked about my experiences. When she heard about them, she
sarcastically asked, “Did you have too much to drink in New Orleans?” I didn’t know
what to answer, but I sure was convinced to tell her how wrong we are to judge things so
hastily.
Our planning experience in New Orleans has surely made me realize how much
I needed to look beyond racial barriers to allow myself to have some of the most amazing
experiences of my life.
Editor’s Note
These essays are excerpts from a book project nearing completion, The New Orleans
Planning Initiative, Kenneth Reardon and John Forester, Eds, that tells the participants’
stories of an extraordinary university-community collaboration mounted in the face of
urban devastation and extensive political, administrative, and logistical obstacles.
The editors hope that the book will demonstrate the many possibilities of pro-active and
responsive university-based “service-learning” efforts.
Reardon and Forester’s original conversation took place on January 11, 2007; it has been
supplemented briefly by remarks from Ken Reardon’s presentation at the 2007
Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference, both edited by John Forester.
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