Review: Coming Home to New Orleans: Neighborhood Rebuilding after Katrina

August 29, 2005, the date Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, is part of our collective consciousness. It releases a barrage of memories: the rising floodwaters, the hundreds stranded on the I-10, and President Bush’s promise to “do what it takes . to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives” (CNN 2005, online source). Yet, as the Katrina headlines shrunk and the Great Recession became the new national crisis, a lingering question is, How has New Orleans survived? This is the central issue that Karl Seidman tackles in Coming Home to New Orleans, which tracks how six neighborhoods took charge of their recovery in the context of the bureaucratic quagmire that comprised the Bush Administration’s response. Seidman’s aims are twofold. First, he seeks to diversify the historical record on the aftermath of Katrina by illuminating the role of “grassroots recovery (or rebuilding),” which he defines as the “activities and initiatives undertaken by resident-based organizations focused on rebuilding a defined neighborhood” (15). Second, he wants to draw lessons from these communities’ practices to inform bottom–up, neighborhood-led disaster recovery planning. Seidman pursues these goals using a multiplecase-study, multimethod approach. He triangulates a diversity of sources, including more than seventy interviews (largely with neighborhood leaders), U.S. Census data, media articles, plans, reports, scholarly accounts, and neighborhood organization archives. He also draws from his experiences as a participant observer of the unfolding events, having played a supportive role in neighborhood recovery efforts since 2006. Coming Home to New Orleans mostly meets the goals it sets. It is a detailed portrayal of diverse strategies of survival among divergent communities. The case studies differ in their racial and ethnic, tenure, and income composition; political mobilization and institutional structure; and levels of damage. They range from the more racially and ethnically diverse, affluent, and organized Broadmoor, Faubourg St. John, and Mid-City to the tightly knit, poor, and Catholic Vietnamese community in Village L’Est to the predominately African American, institutionally fragmented and poor Tremé and Lower Mid-City. The strategies undertaken are equally diverse in their scopes. All of the communities sought to attract homeowners back to rebuild their properties, using methods such as neighborhood branding, basic goods and services provision, and volunteer mobilization. A handful explicitly strove for the more complex goal of a “complete neighborhood” by planning for commercial, educational, health, and recreational services and resources that would improve residents’ quality of life and socioeconomic mobility. On the whole, the accounts contribute to the burgeoning literature on neighborhood disaster recovery by showing how social capital that emerges initially through the provision of “therapeutic aid” can be later harnessed for community development (Picou and Marshall 2007). Coming Home to New Orleans also is a call for restructuring the way we approach disaster recovery planning to better meet neighborhoods’ needs. Currently, programs to support communities after a disaster are largely managed by national agencies or state governments. They focus on quick-fix aid to individuals and households or local governments for public facilities repair. Seidman makes two arguments for supporting the neighborhood-level in disaster recovery efforts. First, people’s decision to return and rebuild come from what they observe at the neighborhood level. Community-based organizations (CBOs) play an important role in tempering uncertainty and restoring key services and a sense of place, which cultivate a mass commitment to return. Second, CBOs’ local knowledge and legitimacy put them in an opportune position to coordinate participatory planning processes and implement federal, state, and local recovery programs. Seidman brims with ideas of how to integrate neighborhoods into recovery plans at various governmental scales. A particularly sensible one is to dedicate a branch of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide longterm funding and technical assistance to neighborhoods to bolster their capacity. One strength of the book is its frankness about the limitations of bottom–up planning. Underlying pre-Katrina conditions and geography shaped recovery. More affluent, primarily owner-occupied, and higher elevation communities had more resources and less damage and thus greater capacity to rebuild. This finding provides fodder for mixedincome housing advocates by suggesting that more economically diverse communities may be more resilient to disaster 540652 JPEXXX10.1177/0739456X14540652Journal of Planning Education and ResearchBook Reviews research-article2014