Extreme Weather and Society

Shirley Laska Editor

Louisiana’s
Response
to Extreme
Weather
A Coastal State’s Adaptation Challenges
and Successes

Extreme Weather and Society
Series Editors
William A. Sprigg
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ, USA
Sheila Lakshmi Steinberg
Department of Sociology
Brandman University
Irvine, CA, USA

Extreme Weather and Society examines people, place and extreme weather, from anemerging trans-disciplinary field of study. The series explores how abrupt andtrending changes in weather alter physical environments and force community
responses challenged by cultural practices/interpretations, politics, policy,
responsibilities of education and communication, community health and safety, andenvironmental sustainability for future generations. The series highlights extreme
weather alterations to different physical and social environments to better explore
how people react and respond to extreme weather. The hallmark of this series is theinnovative combined inclusion of social and physical science expertise.
Extreme Weather and Society contains single and multi-authored books as well asedited volumes. Series Editors are currently accepting proposals, forms for which
can be obtained from the publisher, Ron Doering (ron.doering@springer.com).
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15334

Shirley Laska
EditorLouisiana’s Response
to Extreme Weather
A Coastal State’s Adaptation Challenges
and Successes

Editor
Shirley Laska
University of New Orleans Emerita
and Lowlander Center
New Orleans, LA, USA

ISSN 2367-3397	    ISSN 2367-3400 (electronic)
Extreme Weather and SocietyISBN 978-3-030-27204-3    ISBN 978-3-030-27205-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0
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Foreword

Projections of future extreme weather; environmental history; social diversity,
inequality, and vulnerability; environmental justice; impacts of historic disasters;
actual and potential impacts of policies designed to mitigate disaster losses andadapt to changing coastal conditions; distinctive local and regional cultural traditions; cultures and livelihoods at risk; and recommendations for future risk reduction and adaptation policies and actions—all these topics and more are addressed inthis comprehensive volume, which promises to be an indispensable resource for all
those seeking to respond to hazard-related environmental stressors, both in Louisianaand beyond.
These pages contain both broad and in-depth analyses of the “wicked problem”
posed by hazards and climate change. As several authors note, in contrast with problems that have specific solutions, even difficult ones, wicked problems are highly
complex and novel, difficult to define and frame, and subject to multiple and often
divergent interpretations of the nature of the problem and how to address it. When
policies and programs are created to deal with wicked problems, those solutions
often lead to more problems. Adding to this challenge, climate change has beenlabeled a “super-wicked problem” (Levin et al. 2012) for four reasons. First, there
is pressure to act; time is running out to address the problem. Second, those who aretrying to reduce the risks posed by climate change, from individuals to corporations
to nation-states, are also contributing to it. This means that adequate responses toclimate change will require radical, fundamental changes in behavior and socialorganization. Third, climate change poses a major global collective action challenge, but there is no overarching authority that can compel or manage action.
Fourth, both current and proposed solutions focus on near-term timeframes, butaddressing the problem requires long-term thinking and strategies that must be sustained over time—which is almost unthinkable under contemporary governanceregimes and in light of conflicts over the significance (and even existence) of the
problem. The authors in this volume rightly characterize climate change adaptation
as a multigenerational challenge, but policies can shift whenever political powerchanges hand.

v

vi

Foreword

The chapters in this volume explore various facets of this super-wicked problem.
Among the things we learn in these pages is that the entire state of Louisiana is at
risk from land loss, sea level rise, and intensified storms and flooding. Trying toaddress those vulnerabilities through federal post-disaster mitigation funding, one
disaster at a time, or on a project-by-project basis, is not an effective approach, butcurrent policies, such as FEMA’s emphasis on post-disaster mitigation projects (asopposed to pre-disaster ones), shape state and community mitigation options. As thediscussions here argue, in the current policy environment, the emphasis should be
on forward-facing, system-focused post-disaster strategies that are based on the best
available science, but that are also just and sensitive to the needs, values, and preferences of the members of affected communities—what the editor refers to as exceptional recovery for essential resilience. At the same time, steps must be taken to
move toward policies that call for large-scale programs that are not tied to specific
events.
Attempts to address the conundrums of climate change and associated extremes
are fraught with difficulty. With respect to coastal land loss, an environmental riskthat Louisiana faces more than any other state in the nation, the book documents
how the concept of restoration may be embraced in the abstract, but on-the-groundprojects to address land loss are often contested. Ambitious restoration projects likethe state’s Coastal Master Plan represent a major step forward, but they overemphasize technocratic and engineering-based approaches while downplaying the importance of local preferences, and they can be out of step with efforts aimed atstrengthening community resilience. Programs that are broad in geographic scope
are appropriate for the scale of the problem of land loss, but local voices, particularly those of marginalized groups, may be muted by such efforts. Similarly, managed retreat from rapidly disappearing coastal areas makes complete sense
conceptually, but the chapter authors show how complex this process is in practice.
For example, what constitutes a fair and just relocation process for tribal peoples
with a prior history of forced relocation? How can the distinctive cultures of coastal
natural resource communities be maintained when environmental refugees are
required to abandon the places where those cultures flourished? What happens toplace-based livelihood strategies and family traditions when communities areuprooted? Relocation from endangered coastal regions means relocation to somewhere else—typically somewhere else in Louisiana. However, what if those newlocations are lacking in adequate services, personnel, and administrative capacity
and are economically depressed—as many rural communities in Louisiana are—and what if the residents of receiving communities are less than welcoming? What
if those receiving communities are also vulnerable to disasters like the so-called
unexpected flooding of 2016?
This volume addresses in rich detail the aftermath and recovery following
Hurricane Katrina. The importance of a political economy analysis of hazards anddisasters is a thread that runs through these discussions. Katrina’s devastation wascaused in no small measure by the activities of the oil and gas industry and the interest that promoted projects such as the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO).
Occurring in a historical context of spatial racism, that devastation disproportion-

Forewordvii

ately fell upon the poor, racialized, and minoritized residents of New Orleans. We
learn in these chapters how those residents were further marginalized during therecovery process. Deprived of public housing, ignored in many recovery plans,
priced out of a rising rental market in part because of the scarcity of living-wagejobs, and unable to cope with the loss of kin and friendship networks and neighborhood solidary, many never returned. And we learn how, guided by neoliberal logics
of recovery such as land speculation, privatization, and the reduction of public services, the “new” New Orleans is becoming whiter, less affordable, and more gentrified, but spatially remains strongly racialized. These and other research findings
provide a strong critique of putatively color-blind policies that are blind to theireffects on people of color.
Discussions in this volume also show how, in the context of major disasters andaccelerating land loss, Louisiana has become a laboratory for new efforts to alleviate those problems, such as the LA SAFE (Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for
Future Environments) program and the Gentilly Resilience District in New Orleans.
Both were funded primarily through the National Disaster Resilience Competition,a collaboration of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and theRockefeller Foundation. In these chapters, questions arise regarding whether suchprojects, developed with limited funding on a one-time basis, are replicable andscalable. The broader feasibility and efficacy of these and other experiments canonly be assessed over time.
As some chapter authors note, issues of federalism inevitably arise in any discussion of hazards and disasters. The contradictions of federalism are yet anotherexample of the wickedness of the problems discussed here. Within the US federal
system, decisions in areas that are important for hazard mitigation, such as land use,
are largely outside the purview of federal and state jurisdictions. Federal government requirements like the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 cannot ensure that the
mitigation plans that are required by the law are adequate—or that they are implemented. Federal post-disaster assistance programs require financial participation on
the part of states and local jurisdictions, with the latter showing considerable variation in their ability to meet matching requirements. Because specialized skills areneeded to even apply for some federal forms of assistance, that assistance favors
well-resourced, high-capacity large cities, as opposed to smaller communities andrural areas.
At several points in the book, the authors argue for the importance of state action
in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. The importance of states isinarguable, particularly in the current policy environment, in which federal leadership has rolled back measures such as the flood risk management standard and federal climate change action planning and has withdrawn from the Paris Climate
Agreement. States are considered closer to local communities than a distant federal
bureaucracy and more sensitive to the distinctive concerns of different populations
and interest groups within their jurisdiction. At the same time, in a neoliberal political economy, many states lack the capacity to ensure the provision of even basic
services, much less those associated with hazard mitigation and climate change
adaptation. Some states are not politically inclined to develop such capacity.

viii

Foreword

Moreover, as the Louisiana case illustrates only too well, state governments are
susceptible to capture by powerful economic interests, to the detriment of many of
their residents. The same is the case for local communities, whose decisions, absent
significant organized opposition, tend to conform to growth machine imperatives.
Researchers have a tendency to identify problems and leave their solutions toothers. This is not the approach taken by the authors in this volume. Virtually, every
chapter proposes strategies for ameliorating problems like those associated withpopulation relocation and including marginalized groups in adaptation decision-­making and ends with policy recommendations. Quite frequently, the recommendations focus on the importance of framing and tackling problems holistically,
blending a knowledge of the technical and scientific aspects of particular challenges
with an understanding of their human dimensions. Louisiana itself is a testament to
the inadequacy of technological fixes, from levees that provided a false sense ofprotection and then failed repeatedly to projects like MR-GO which caused erosion
and contributed to Katrina’s storm surge.
At many points throughout this volume, the authors refer to Louisiana as a canaryin the coal mine, a harbinger of things to come, and a microcosm in which to analyze national and global disaster and climate change challenges. As these authors
show, although undeniably unique in so many respects, Louisiana illustrates starkly
the kinds of issues with which many other communities, states, and nations are currently grappling and will continue to be forced to contend with as climate change
progresses and intense hydrometeorological events occur with greater frequency.
Both the issues and dilemmas identified and the recommended actions proposed
here are relevant for communities across the nation and around the world.
University of Colorado Emerita		
Boulder, Colorado

Kathleen TierneyReference
Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the trajectory of superwicked problems: Constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy
Sciences, 45(2), 123–152.

Preface

When a particular location is selected to be the topic of an edited volume, the editor
has to select contributors who have experience with that location and have done
research there on the topic of the book within the discipline(s) sought for it. Simple?
Well, no. One has to interactively identify appropriate subtopics—in this case forhuman/social response to extreme weather risk and adaptation to it—with what scientists of that discipline have studied within the locale, i.e., Louisiana. However, theassignment from the “Extreme Weather and Society” series editors Bill Sprigg, an
atmospheric scientist, and Sheila Steinberg, an environmental/social scientist, added
to the requirements: to include multiple disciplines, not just my discipline of sociology, because they believe in and are approaching the series to enhance “an emerging
trans-disciplinary field of study of extreme weather.”
They expected contributors from multiple disciplines to be included in one of
their series volumes and that those selected should offer a logical weave of findings
and policy/practice implications for extreme weather/climate change adaptation.
Given my career of transdisciplinary research collaboration as well as numerous
assignments to multidisciplinary advisory boards within Louisiana and in otherstates and serving on the National Academy of Sciences multidisciplinary teams forenvironmental/societal risk topics, I was already a “practitioner” of the approachand thus enthusiastically sprung to the challenge.
This book honors the series editors’ goals with 10 disciplines represented in the
22 contributors, including 1 by a biophysical scientist and 4 chapters having multiple authors from more than one discipline.1 I believe that the disciplines of thecontributors selected are all very relevant to the serious societal need to swiftly andappropriately address the adaptation to extreme weather including climate change.
In order to ensure that such a transdisciplinary edited volume would be approachable to more than specialists of an individual chapter’s author(s)’ discipline, 5 of the
11 chapter manuscripts were reviewed by relevant expert reviewers from different
disciplines than their authors, 4 chapters had coauthors from different disciplines,
1
Anthropology, architecture, geography, history, marine science, planning, public administration,sociology, urban studies and GIS.

ix

x

Prefaceand the other 2 were reviewed by the book’s editor who does not have their specialty
but is a specialist of the their topics. The reviewers were selected based on the interaction between the editor and first author of each chapter with those reviewers
selected having very solid credentials. All of the authors were very positive about
having their manuscripts be subjected for review because they were committed tothe series editors’ goal of transdisciplinary access and utility. Each contributor
responded fully to suggestions made by the reviewers.

 State Case: Louisiana Social Science Resources for ClimateA
Change Adaptation
No different from any other resource, how a state fares in providing human resourcesable to address extreme weather and climate change will contribute to its successdoing so. To reinforce this point, I call your attention to the recently created Social
Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) interactive map, funded by the National
Science Foundation and created by the Natural Hazards Center at the University ofColorado. Into the software is inputted the existence of social scientists engaged in
extreme events research, their credentials, and where they are located. This GIS
product recognizes the importance of the location of social scientists to achieve“communicating ongoing project or research outcomes to affected communities anddecision-makers.”2 While just launched, it will be interesting to follow how many
Louisiana social scientists register. A recent report on this question did not show
Louisiana as having a robust number of such researchers. The comments of a presenter at a recent meeting on the Sacramento Delta who had done a literature searchon social science research on deltas reported very limited findings: “Only researchon New Orleans and the Mardi Gras culture.”3
To pursue this part of the Louisiana case, social science resources, the chapter
authors were examined. Approximately half of the 21 authors of the chapters havebeen trained at Louisiana universities and half outside of the state. Fourteen holdacademic or nonprofit organization positions within the state, and seven are in academic institutions outside of the state. The latter are affiliated with universities
along the Gulf Coast and in the South, Northeast and California.
Three of these scientists outside of the state have left positions within Louisiana
to go to these institutions in other states. A possible explanation is that scientists
experienced with climate change research are in demand by other areas struggling
with similar challenges and thus have out-of-state opportunities. This appears to be
the case with the small group examined. Future science human resource research
will be important to reveal how scientists respond in their personal careers to
2
EAGER: Interdisciplinary and Social Science Extreme Events Research, Natural Hazards Center,
University of Colorado. https://hazards.colorado.edu/news/research-projects/eager-interdisciplinary-and-social-science-extreme-events-research. Accessed January 27, 2019.
3
Personal communication, January 30, 2019.

Prefacexi

extreme weather challenges and whether these challenges harm or enhance a state-­level “pool” of extreme weather scientists focused upon a particular state’s adaptation challenges.
What is believed by this editor is that extreme weather adaptation should include
consideration by universities within a state and by state management boards ofhigher education of whether the state is committed to creating and nurturing adequate numbers of scientists specializing in these topics within the state’s universities. A recent effort introduced by the Louisiana State University Sea Grant Program
reflects well on Louisiana in this matter to overcome the shortfall noted above
because it is focused on enhancing state specialists among the young faculty. The
program is called La D-I-A:(It) supports scholars interested in applying their work to real world problems and sharing
these discoveries with diverse audiences. By encouraging multidisciplinary research efforts
and strong links with coastal communities, the Louisiana Discovery-Integration-Application
Program (La D-I-A) connects science, communication and coastal residents. In essence, theprogram provides a two-way conduit between university research results and community
needs.4

This is a very encouraging development in Louisiana’s need for very extensive
research on extreme weather and climate change and adaptation to it and the abilityof scientists to collaborate with the state’s communities supporting them to adapt
better to extreme weather and climate change.
It is with gratitude that I thank the chapter contributors for working with me on
their chapters and their refinements. The book would also not have been possible
without the assistance of two key individuals—both recent graduates of Louisiana
universities—who prepared the chapters for submission (Olivia Porter, MURP, JD)
and who created detailed maps or refined the many figures necessary to enhancesuch topics (Julie Torres, MS ES). I am honored to have had such a team.
More authors than would be expected had to complete their chapters while moving to new positions or being occupied by family responsibilities such as the arrivalof three babies and one grandbaby. They have asked me to dedicate our book tothese very young twenty-first-century recipients of the adaptation successes that
their parents, grandparent, and other authors of this book are contributing in supportof their futures.
To Willa, Elias, James, and Pia.
New Orleans, LA, USA  Shirley Laska

4https://www.laseagrant.org/outreach/ladia/

Contents

1	Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”����������������������������������    1Shirley Laska
Part I Louisiana’s Risks Anticipating the Future Challenges
to Other U.S. Coastal Communities
2	Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone ������   35Donald F. Boesch
Part II Climate Adaptation Challenges and Solutions
3	Connecting the Dots: The Origins, Evolutions, and Implicationsof the Map that Changed Post-Katrina Recovery Planningin New Orleans ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65Zachary Lamb
4	Antagonisms of Adaptation: Climate Change Adaptation
Measures in New Orleans and New York City��������������������������������������   93Kevin Fox Gotham and Megan Faust
5	Adapting to a Smaller Coast: Restoration, Protection,and Social Justice in Coastal Louisiana ������������������������������������������������ 113
Scott A. Hemmerling, Monica Barra, and Rebecca H. Bond
Part III Relocation and Resettlement: An Extreme Adjustment
6	Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learningfrom Histories of Horror and Hope�������������������������������������������������������� 147
Nathan Jessee
7	Sojourners in a New Land: Hope and Adaptive Traditions ���������������� 185
Kristina J. Peterson

xiii

xiv

Contents

Part IV Types/Locations of Communities and Their Responses
to Extreme Weather: Urban
8	Post-disaster Development Dilemmas: Advancing Landscapesof Social Justice in a Neoliberal Post-disaster Landscape�������������������� 217
Anna Livia Brand and Vern Baxter
9	Reimagining Housing: Affordability Crisis and Its Rolein Disaster Resilience and Recovery������������������������������������������������������ 241
Andreanecia M. Morris and Lucas Diaz
Part V Types/Locations of Communities and Their Responses
to Extreme Weather: Suburban/Mid State
10	The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood:
With Special Focus on the Different Rescue and Recovery
Responses It Engendered������������������������������������������������������������������������ 263
Michelle Annette Meyer, Brant Mitchell, Shannon Van Zandt,
and Stuart Nolan
Part VI Types/Locations of Communities and Their Responses
to Extreme Weather: Rural
11	Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas�������������������������� 285
Alessandra Jerolleman
Part VII Types/Locations of Communities and Their Responses
to Extreme Weather: Coupled Coastal-Inland
12	Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community
Well-Being Across Louisiana’s Dynamic Coastal–Inland
Continuum������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 313
Traci Birch and Jeff Carney ppendix 1: Twenty-First-Century Flooding in Louisiana:
A
Sources and Methods �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 341
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 351

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Book: “Aheadof the Curve”
Shirley Laska

1.1

Louisiana: A Whole State with Extreme Weather
Challenges

The coastal areas of Louisiana have been subject to extreme weather ever since theMississippi River began to create the Delta land 7000+ years ago (Roberts 1997).
The extreme weather first impacted the indigenous population that has lived here formillennia and, over the last 300+ years, multi-ethnic immigrants, refugees andenslaved peoples who settled among them (Owens 2015). While inland floods haveoccurred intermittently over the decades, the two very extreme rain events in thespring and summer of 2016 began to change the framing of the state’s extreme
weather experiences: No longer was Louisiana two “states” – the coast subject toextreme weather effects . . . and a safer inland. The image of the state in the eyes ofgovernment entities, of inland riverine residents, was changing, and likely observers
from outside of the state were also seeing the state differently: It is now a state subject to extreme weather throughout – urban, rural, coastal, and inland watersheds.
And that extreme weather is exacerbated by climate change. Weather specialists
declared that in Louisiana, both Hurricane Isaac in 2012 and the summer 2016
inland storms were enhanced by it – stalling the storms’ advance and thus generating their extreme precipitation effects (Wiel et al. 2017; Peterson et al. 2016; Kossin
2018).

S. Laska (*)
University of New Orleans Emerita and Lowlander Center, New Orleans, LA, USAe-mail: slaska@uno.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_1

1

2

S. Laska

When these inland floods occurred, it became evident to this book’s editor – a
researcher and adaptation1 practitioner studying Louisiana flood risk for about
35 years and having begun research on an inland flood of 1983 – that sadly, thewhole state had now moved into an extreme weather state category. I believe thischange warrants study of Louisiana as a unit: examining and understanding betterthe level of experience and response embodied within the geographic/political entityof an American state and its government bureaucracies, its communities and citizens.
It is hoped that this research will benefit both Louisiana and – as an exemplar – otherstates, whose extreme weather risk is increasing like Louisiana’s has done or is likely
to increase in the near future as the new US Global Change Research Committee
Report (Jay et al. 2018) portends.
The timeliness of a statewide “extreme weather” book became quickly obvious
when state and local officials initiated after the 2016 floods adaptation programs
additional to those focused only on the coast. As the book took form, some eightstate extreme weather adaptation programs and one city program began to takeshape. Also, adaptation as reflected in the new programs was no longer siloed in one
or another relevant state agency. The watershed program was created andimplemented by five state agencies, and the coastal restoration’s community/parish
capacity and capability study approached the project so that the findings could beshared with the watershed program and possibly expanded statewide (see Sect.
1.3.1). The evolving programs demonstrated an appreciation of the interconnectivity
organizationally and experientially of the challenges for the whole state. The“connection” had been made between coastal adaptation and inland adaptation to
begin to grow statewide adaptation as the goal.
This chapter has the following aims:
1.2 Introduce the key Louisiana extreme weather and climate-change induced
conditions that prompted the preparation of this book as well as demonstrate
adaptation and adaptation risk to Louisiana’s most current extreme weather
and disastrous flood levels of the Mississippi River, which are likely climatechange-enhanced threat.
1.3 Summarize the recent adaptation programs that have been created within thestate. Then argue that an effective way in which climate-induced extreme
weather adaptation can occur in the earlier stages of this climate adaptation
phenomenon is through existing federal disaster recovery programs – as the
new Louisiana programs are currently being funded. How to achieve climate
adaptation through this means is diagrammed, and the details are presented.
The process of exceptional recovery from disasters if successful results inessential resiliency – resiliency embracing “just,” comprehensive qualities –and “grows” climate change adaptation.
1
Climate change adaptation is adjustment in ecological, social, or economic systems in responseto actual or expected climatic stimuli and their effects or impacts. It refers to changes in processes,
practices, and structures to moderate potential damages or to benefit from opportunities associatedwith climate change (Burton et al. 2001). Climate change mitigation refers to actions that reduce
the human contribution to the planetary greenhouse effect (National Climate Assessment 2014).

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

3

1.4 “Place” the book’s chapters about Louisiana as expanding the exceptional
recovery/essential resilience model; about one-half of the chapters directly
address one of the two very related concepts. In addition, four chapters describe/
expand the topic of Louisiana’s new adaptation programs and are identified inTable 1.1. Finally, the chapters which analyze challenges of traditional disasterrecovery will be identified because these challenges will only be exacerbated byclimate-induced extreme weather events and thus must be appreciated and theirsolutions addressed. It is critical not to split the challenges and solutions to
traditional disaster recovery from those that are emerging from climate-induced
extreme weather events.
1.5 End the chapter with a challenge to the readers: Will the recommendations
offered by the chapter authors for extreme weather adaptation be more
successfully accomplished and achieve their goals if the states/communities –subnational units of government – are the true managers of the adaptation
process instead of the federal government which is emphasized at present?
While the consideration of community adaptation has been embraced in thetwenty-first century (Burton et al. 2001; NASEM 2018; Rockefeller n.d.), it isargued that the technical aspects and especially the financial aspects of turningfrom federal management/control to state and local units have not beenadequately considered. Therefore, I propose that shifting to subnational levels
is not adequately informed if these real issues are not considered and addressed.
This section will offer considerations –both pro and con– for this change tosubnational adaptation emphasis and encourage robust research to achieve thecritical “essential” adaptation success needed.

1.2

 he Louisiana Case: Extreme Weather and Climate
T
Change Experiences

The state of Louisiana’s twenty-first-century flood inundation is represented bynine individual extreme storm maps that were combined to create the composite map (Fig. 1.1). In addition to the 9 storms represented in the composite map,
another 14 storms occurred that caused additional flooding, mostly within the same
areas as the 9 storms represented (see Appendix 1 for the full list). No such map as
the composite in Fig. 1.1 was available for use in this book; it had to be constructed.
Not to have state-level composite maps that are kept up to date and readily available
for researchers, practitioners, and government officials, especially for states subject
to so much extreme weather flooding, is a significant gap of needed information
for addressing extreme weather events and adaptation to them. (See Appendix 1 for
expanded description of the types of data used for the included maps, the methodsof map creation, and the recommendations for enhancing map resources.)
The majority of Louisiana floods can be traced to 54 tropical weather events, thethird largest number that impacted a US state within the last 166 years. Texas (64)and Florida (117) are the only two states with more (National Hurricane Center

4

S. Laska

Fig. 1.1 Flood inundation coverage maps for selected hurricanes and intense rainfall events inLouisiana during the twenty-first century (top) and composite flood map (bottom)

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

52018). The inland flooding that prompted the creation of this volume (spring andsummer 2016 and December 2018) set river records for flood levels that ranged
from 15% to 30% higher than previous records that were set as far back as up to
66 years ago (Schleifstein 2019).
The most serious hurricane experience for Louisiana was Hurricane Katrina in
2005, the deadliest and costliest of mainland US storms ever (NHC 2018). Climatechange-related qualities of very warm Gulf of Mexico waters and increasing sea
level rise (Union of Concerned Scientists 2017a) exacerbated the storm’s impacts,
especially the significant storm surge that the public was not warned of adequately
because it was not included in the Saffir-Simpson scale.2 Unfortunately Katrina
became a “perfect storm” due to these storm and atmospheric qualities combinedwith weak storm protection (Day et al. 2007), and an ill-conceived ship navigation
channel cut through the marsh directly targeted to New Orleans (Freudenburg
et al. 2009).
Louisiana is also ranked number one in two other extreme conditions – coastal
land loss and sea level rise. Coastal Louisiana was built from sediment suspended in
Mississippi River waters flowing down the continent that was deposited in fanlike
patterns as the river swished back and forth on the Louisiana coastline that began at
the border with the Pleistocene uplands (see Fig. 2.2 in Boesch). However, levees
built by early settlers and strengthened after the massive 1927 flood restricted thecontinued capacity of these depositions to replenish the marshland created by theearlier flows (Couvillion et al. 2011). Resulting marsh subsidence and erosion areexacerbated by saltwater intrusion into the marshes via the thousands of canals created over more than a century of oil and gas exploration (Turner and McClenachan
2018; DeLaune and Pezeshki 1994). Saltwater intrusion via these canals kills thegrasses and other plants that hold the marsh soil, resulting in more soil eroding into
the water and being washed out into the Gulf, thus causing land loss. Since 1932,
approximately 2000 square miles of coastal Louisiana have been lost (Couvillion
et al. 2011).
Relative sea level rise is predicted to be higher in the coastal Mississippi Delta
than anywhere in the world by the end of this century (Parris et al. 2012). This is theresult of the subsidence just discussed combined with eustatic (global) sea level rise
(Rovere et al. 2016) caused by increasing freshwater input and temperature-induced
thermal expansion of the world’s oceans (Pahl 2016). New measurement techniques
identify even more sea level rise on the Louisiana coast than earlier described(Keogh and Tornqvist 2019). The ramifications of such an increase in elevation of
the Gulf of Mexico waters along coastal Louisiana are demonstrated by the dramatic
number of Louisiana communities expected to be chronically inundated by 2035 in
the intermediate sea level rise scenario: some 59 Louisiana communities, including
New Orleans, comprise two-thirds of the 91 US communities coast-wide predicted
to be so harmfully affected (Union of Concerned Scientists 2017b) if the state’s
2
The Saffir-Simpson scale failed to adequately consider the powerful storm surge caused by
Katrina. Seven years later surge measurement was added to National Weather Service forecasting
tools (National Weather Service 2012).

6

S. Laska

coastal restoration efforts are not adequately funded (Davis and Boyer 2016), implemented, and effective.
Finally, as this manuscript is being submitted to Springer in early summer, 2019,
the Mississippi River is in the midst of the longest period of high-flood stage in thehistory of its flood measurement and has surpassed the duration of the 1927 flood(from midwinter expected through midsummer). This event has been caused byextreme storm patterns in the upper Midwest resulting in record-breaking flood
elevations all throughout midcontinent rivers that feed the Mississippi. The
extremeness of the patterns is suspected to be caused by climate change (Stott2016). Discussing this particular example of Louisiana extreme weather risk
provides the bridge between the just-described presentation of Louisiana’s frequentand severe storms via the twenty-first-century storms and adaptation, including
adaptation risk, the two concepts that are the focus of this book.
There are three foci of the protection, i.e., adaptation, which the Corps ofEngineers provides to Baton Rouge and New Orleans beginning upriver: the Old
River Control Structure(s), the Morganza Spillway, and the Bonnet Carre Spillway.
The first maintains the percentage flow between the Atchafalaya Basin and thecurrent Mississippi River channel of 30/70%. Without it, the percentages would
reverse, and the two Mississippi River cities would no longer be able to support
ocean-going ships and river commerce as it is known today. Due to the extreme
importance of this structure remaining intact and providing that service, improvements were made to it in 1973. The Morganza Spillway reduces flood levels for
Baton Rouge and relieves flood level pressures on the Old Structure. Finally, theBonnet Carre permits the Corps to maintain the river below flood stage at New
Orleans. Thus, these adaptations serve the goals for which they were designed.
However, the diversions pose adaptation risks to the floodways through which
the diverted water flows; and it appears very clearly that with frequent and extreme
weather events, the risks which these adaptions pose to other communities andlivelihoods become disasters in their own right. The harmful impact of the twodiversions is on (1) the Atchafalaya Basin (the Morganza Spillway) and (2) Lake
Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Sound (the Bonnet Carre) as released water fromthe latter passes through the lake to the Gulf of Mexico.
Both spillway paths have been “threatened” by this year’s high water. While theCorps of Engineers announced a date for the Morganza Spillway opening, it
postponed it three times and then postponed it “indefinitely” when this manuscript
was going to the publisher; but it is known how the opening would have impacted
the spillway from the opening in 2011, only the second in the spillway’s history.
What is at risk if the Morganza is opened are parts of western Terrebonne Parish,
parts of Morgan City, and the Atchafalaya crawfish harvest, rice, sugarcane, cattle
farming, and wildlife. Similarly, the Bonnet Carre silted and freshened (added
freshwater to brackish) Lake Pontchartrain and, especially harmful, freshened theMississippi Sound where the freshwater infusion has put at extreme risk the oyster
harvest, dolphin and sea turtle populations, and tourism through these wildlife
mortalities. Public meetings of community leaders and commercial fishingorganizations seeking redress of this harm occurred in late May when the impacts

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

7

became clearly evident. Newspaper headlines tell the story: “Waveland (MS) ‘firstin line’ for damage from opening of the Bonnet Carre,” and “Fisherman outraged by
freshwater impact on the Mississippi Sound.”At a public meeting, May 29, 2019, near Biloxi, MS, the attendees wanted firstto describe the layering (Laska et al. 2015) of earlier event impacts that they had
experienced – beginning with the BP oil spill and the opening of the Bonnet Carre
the earlier time this year (and the third in 4 years) upon which they declared that thecurrent adaptation measures to protect Louisiana river cities posed additional(adaptation) risks to them. They clearly perceived the adaptation event as being so
harmful because it came on top of the other events in addition to being a serious
event itself, i.e., compounding harm. Although adaptation has been represented as apositive, constructive concept when used in the conversation of climate change,
equally important is the need to understand better that adaptation is not a concept
free from doing harm and that harm likely increases with the magnitude of climatechange. Considering adaptation risk is undertaken in several of this book’s chapters:
especially Chaps. 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.
Louisiana’s extreme weather history and its predicted future of extraordinaryrisks – this book does not even include heat waves and droughts that appear also to
be in the future of Louisiana – place the state “ahead of the curve” in experiences andthus make it a “poster child” for understanding climate change impacts and for learning about and improving adaptive responses. Extreme weather affects 4.5 million
Louisiana residents – rural as well as urban (25/75% population distribution) andcoastal as well as inland areas (60/40% population distribution). It impacts a wide
variety of communities, cultural groups, and economic activities, both local andnational, including farming, ports, fisheries, and tourism, which employ the state’s
residents. Additional impacts are found in oil and gas extraction/petrochemical production whose normal operations present the state with environmental risks – making their threat even more serious when impacted by extreme weather.

1.3

 raming Climate Change-Induced Extreme Weather
F
Adaptation

It would be better to consider and to implement adaptation to climate change-­
induced extreme weather in a methodical fashion, separate from immediate disaster recovery and separate from uncertainties and fluctuations in funding, with theproposed critical changes from previous extreme weather response clearly identified and included in the societal adjustments to extreme weather. It would be ideal
to refine systematically the adaptive responses applying the results of careful climate change social, physical, and atmospheric scientific research and engineering/
design and include more than one method in the same effort after considering thecompounded benefits (Bailey et al. 2017). What is different with climate change
dynamics taking all major vulnerability dimensions into consideration? How is it
different? What has caused the differences? What differences will bring the most8

S. Laskaharm to the social structure, to the social processes, and to the residents as well as
the land and ecosystem? How rapidly will these changes occur? What are the differences: magnitude, frequency, and changes from past extreme weather events suchas slow-moving storms when they had moved more rapidly in the past? Who is at
risk, more than before the extreme weather-induced changes occurred? How can
the identified useful adjustments be made economically, with deliberate speed, toprotect the largest number of communities and widest array of residents, especiallythose most vulnerable, and to protect them for the longest time into the future?
How can adaptive capacity (Gitz and Meybeck 2012) be enhanced with the new
responses? And, of course, how can the adaptation occur while not harming others
and other ecosystems?
I believe that those considering what climate change will bring – be they citizensor specialists – are naively assuming that such an adaptive response will likely
happen. If a challenge is seen, it is in understanding the likely changes and synching
our response successfully with them and in motivating the society to take thenecessary adaptive steps. Our society does not raise concerns that the response will
not occur as we do about the mitigation of CO2 gases, the other response believed to
be absolutely necessary in addressing climate change. With the new weatherchanges, it is believed that new adaptive responses will be determined andimplemented. “No problem” as the younger generation likes to say. On the contrary,
the chapter content in this book and the new adaptation programs which Louisiana
has introduced within the past few years assert that both climate adaptation andmitigation pose huge challenges to achieve success.

1.3.1

 ouisiana Adaptation Innovations and Proposed EarlyL
Climate Change Response3

Eight climate change-related adaptation programs came into existence and evolved
during the conceiving and preparation of this book (Table 1.1 and Appendix foragency descriptions of each). This was an increase of eight from only two evident
programs of significant size before that time and the beginning small steps of thenonstructural aspects of the Coastal Master Plan, which is a substantial amount ofgrowth. Previous programs included the environmental and physical structural
efforts undertaken by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority(LA-CPRA) entitled the Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable
Coast (Coastal Master Plan) and, one combination of structural and human dimensions, the Community Rating System (CRS) of the National Flood Insurance
3
Andrea Galinski, Assistant Scholar, Dept. of Landscape Architecture, College of Design,
Construction and Planning, University of Florida, had intended to contribute a chapter to this volume on the topic of new adaptation programs but was unable to do so due to a career change
from LA-CPRA to Florida. However, she enthusiastically volunteered to offer her assistancewith this section. I am appreciative of that willingness.

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

9

Table 1.1 Large, new (since 2016) LA state and local adaptation programs being implemented
currently
Localeemphasis Description (URL citation)
Coastal 1. Coast-wide wetlands and barrier islands
restoration efforts with addition of Flood
Risk and Resilience Program (CPRA 2017)(Hemmerling et al., in this book)(Birch and Carney, in this book)
2. Awarded Purpose (since modified):
Resettlement of Isle de Jean Tribe of
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw(La. Div. Admin. 2015; 2019, April 23)(Jessee, in this book)
3. Gentilly Resilience District Storm Water
Management Project funded for major
project implementation of the Greater New
Orleans Urban Water Plan developed during
the decade (New Orleans 2019)(Birch and Carney, in this book)Inland
4. Resettlement of Pecan Acres subdivision,
New Roads, near False River and Silverleaf,
City of Gonzales (La. Div. of Admin. 2019,
March)(Peterson, in this book)
Both
5. LA SAFE. Determination of 3-tiered
coastal areas risk– remove structures,
elevate, settle, and parish engagement
model projects to respond (La. Div. of
Admin. 2019, April)(Birch and Carney, in this book)
6. Adaptive capacity for resilience of
coupled coastal-inland system (LSU-CSS
2017)(Birch and Carney, in this book)
7. Framing riverine flood management
using watersheds (Office of the Governor
2018)(Birch and Carney, in this book)
8. Parish flood risk and resiliencecapability and capacity assessment (CPRA2018)

Govt. unit/program/funding
LA Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authorization(LA-CPRA)/2nd 5-year Master Plan/
multiple federal and state sources
LA Office of Community
Development (OCD)/Natl. Disaster
Resilience Competition (NDRC)/
HUD-CDBG-DR
City of New Orleans, Office ofResilience and Sustainability (ORS)/
Natl. Disaster Resilience Competition(NDRC)/HUD CDBG-DR

LA Office of Community Dev.
(OCD)/Buyout and Resilient Housing
Incentive. CDBG-DR from 2016
flood/2017 and Natural Resources
Conservation Service, USDALA Office of Community
Development (OCD)/Natl. Disaster
Resilience Competition (NDRC)/
HUD-CDBG-DR.

LSU-Coastal Sustainability Studio/
NAS Gulf Research Program andRobert Wood Johnson
Office of the Governor/Watershed
Initiative /CDBG-DR from 2016flood
LA CPRA/Flood Risk and Resilience
Program evolved to support CPRA
nonstructural and the watershed
Initiative/multiple federal and statesources

Program (NFIP), a voluntary program for recognizing and encouraging community
floodplain management activities that exceed the NFIP’s minimum standards.
While, as the title denotes, the Coastal Master Plan focused on the coastal storm andsea level rise, the participating Louisiana CRS communities, some 43 in number,are scattered throughout the state but still mostly in the coastal areas (FEMA 2018b).

10

S. Laska

There is likely limited data from other states with which to compare the large
number of new programs created so close together by Louisiana state agencies andone community. The emergence of such a number within a 4-year time span suggests
with little doubt that the different state government agencies, and the largest city,
New Orleans,4 have been recently rapidly growing in their appreciation of the needfor extreme weather adaptation. The recent 2016 floods, which damaged 146,000
homes and amounted to approximately $10 billion in economic damage, have likely
contributed to reframing adaptation efforts away from a coastal focus alone to astatewide need and effort. The following are (1) a summary of these programs, (2)the description of one for which there is no analysis in chapters contained within
this book, and (3) the challenges of such a “surge” of efforts occurring approximately
at one time. These topics, it is hoped, will contribute to understanding what we can
expect in other areas as they experience more climate change-related impacts or
how we can contrast what Louisiana is doing with what other states, communities,
and regions of the country are currently undertaking to grow in adaptation knowledge
and best practices.
The Louisiana programs are distributed among coastal, inland, and a combinedemphasis (Table 1.1). Three of the programs are as would be expected coastal
programs, one is specifically inland, and four are both coastal and inland or“coupled” coastal-inland systems. It may be hypothesized that the coupled arelikely to be the most fruitful – as is considered in Birch and Carney, Chap. 12, andPeterson, Chap. 7, in this book. However, more research needs to be done on thisconcept before more knowledgeable assessments of coupling can be described andeven better refinements made.
The organizations which created the new adaptation programs range from thestate’s coastal agency – La Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (which
includes several programs and initiatives – Coastal Master Plan, Flood Risk andResilience Program, and the Parish Flood Risk and Resilience Capability andCapacity Assessment) – to the agency which manages disaster response, the Officeof Community Development (OCD) (three programs – Community Resettlementfrom the National Disaster Resilience Competition, the LA SAFE program similarly
funded to engage and encourage communities and parishes experiencing different
gradations of risk from the coast inland to adapt appropriately, and the the inland
resettlement of two neighborhoods) to the Governor’s Office (Watershed Initiative)
and to Louisiana State University’s Coastal Sustainability Studio’s adaptive capacity for resilience of coupled coastal-inland systems.
This volume was not intended as an analysis of only new adaptation programs(as the programs did not exist/or exist in their current complexity when the bookwas conceived), but rather it has evolved to describing them and then benefittingfrom various chapter authors analyzing critical issues of the programs that impact
adaptive behavior (see Table 1.1 for the specific chapters that address the various
4
The work on effective water management began after Hurricane Katrina. The program mentioned
herein is an area-wide implementation of the ideas developed since that catastrophic event, especially after 2010.

1 Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

11

programs). Further research it is hoped will also be taken up by others, including
further research by the contributing authors of this book’s chapters. These programs
are, in effect, Louisiana’s “testing ground” for its climate-induced extreme weather
response.
Only the newest program, and one thus not described by the authors of the chapters, will be described as an example of where the state’s adaptation efforts stand at
publication of this volume after which there will be a beginning analysis of what
happens when eight adaptation programs are “gestated” at about the same time.
Obviously, the opportunity to follow these programs, to consider if and how they are
blending, complementing one another, and defining different areas of need and of
professional specialty, is a font of opportunity for those interested in climate change
adaptation research.
A number of Louisiana’s new programs for responding to climate change-­enhanced extreme weather have evolved out of the state’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan,
which includes recommendations for restoration projects, structural projects (likelevees and floodgates), and nonstructural flood mitigation projects (such as homeelevations or voluntary acquisitions) across the Louisiana coast. The 2017 Master
Plan provides a comprehensive assessment of how coastal storm surge-based floodrisk may change over the next 50 years, as well as offers recommendations on where
and to what extent nonstructural efforts would most benefit the resiliency of coastal
Louisiana. (The plan recommends approximately $6.2 billion in nonstructural
mitigation measures in multiple communities over the next 50 years.)
Importantly, the Coastal Master Plan shifts the state’s focus from post-disasterstorm recovery to planning for proactive flood risk reduction actions. In addition tothese mitigation project recommendations, the 2017 plan also lays the groundwork
for a state-led program that can better align federal, state, and local funding toadvance the implementation of such projects. The aim of CPRA’s Flood Risk andResilience Program is to prioritize areas for nonstructural mitigation and to develop
a state-led grant program that supports the implementation of such projects byparishes. The program encourages resiliency actions across a range of state, parish,municipal, and academic/NGO actors through a suite of resiliency policy
recommendations. Building more resiliently is also encouraged through funding
incentives for increased flood risk standards with up to 100% of a nonstructural
mitigation project potentially funded by the state. The program also more broadly
aims to advance awareness of current and future flood risk, promote greater interagency coordination, and provide resources to build local capacity.
One recent initiative developed under the Flood Risk and Resilience Program(Table 1.1, #8 program) includes the development of a capacity assessment forcoastal and near-coastal parishes to better determine their ability to implement
nonstructural projects as well as related plans and policies. Andrea Galinski, a former CPRA long-term staff member, explained:
We wanted to better understand what the current ability is to implement nonstructural projects (and broader resilience/flood risk reduction plans and policies). A capacity assessment
was also going to be part of a broader Watershed Initiative across the state, and so thisassessment was slightly modified and became framed as a “pilot” that could be used for thateffort. (Personal written communication, May 10, 2019)

12

S. LaskaGalinski also notes that this capacity assessment has helped CPRA to better
understand the existing gaps and local needs and has also been informative to otherstate agencies involved in watershed assessment including the Louisiana Departmentof Transportation and Development (DOTD), OCD, Governor’s Office of Homeland
Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOSHSEP), and the Department of Natural
Resources (DNR). One important lesson that emerged from the assessment included
parishes’ concerns with state coordination and actions, which has led to a significant
consideration of how state agencies can better coordinate both horizontally (acrossstate agencies) and vertically (between federal and local levels) to reduce flood risk.
What should be the initiation and implementation of a state-level movement
toward addressing a “new” problem – in this case extreme weather risk likely
associated to climate change and now being experienced by residents throughout
the state? Is a flurry of programs the usual way change happens? And then they
begin refining their missions, synching their goals, some achieving institutionalization
while others fall to the wayside. There is a lack of clarity about if/how these eight
human dimension programs will synch. It is not known that they will. Will some be
redundant but still stay in existence? Will they expend resources while not achieving
the needed integrated framing and implementation of the best adaptive efforts? That
the answers to these questions are not known is likely very “normal” for such
moments of crisis and a beginning of a broader society push to address serious risk.
However, these and similar questions are being asked about the evolution of thisnow “macro” adaptation response. Local WWNO public radio reporter Travis Lutz
(2019, May 26) queried the director of the La. Office of Community Developmentwith such a question about yet another program, the LA SAFE Program (#5 program in Table 1.1). The director of the Office of Community Development replied:“It is about a new way of thinking about investments we make every day. . .” Thereis no doubt with all of the energy, new bureaucratic structure, program content, andefforts to identify a path forward that Louisiana is in the midst of a “sea change” inadaptation. Only time and committed research will tell those interested if and how
the state succeeded and what can be learned by other states from Louisiana’s
responses, successes, and failures.

1.3.2

Today’s Reality of Climate Change Adaptation

To reiterate, all eight Louisiana significant innovative adaptation projects were, orwill be, funded as a result of a specific declared disaster: seven extreme weather andthe eighth the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Given that “tie” to a specific disaster,
there is no reason to believe at this time that adaptation innovations will occur
regularly, in large numbers and at great investment expense separate from a disaster’srecovery funding, its damage legacies. Much effort and resources will have to beinvested over a long period of time, and social change occur in major ways so that
continual successful adaptation takes place. The reason for such a strong negative
assessment by this author to the likelihood of stand-alone adaptation is due to the1Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

13

current resistance to implementing “normal” (not climate change induced) extreme
weather resilience efforts. Louisiana is a case in point but unfortunately not one outof the ordinary for US states. It is “nestled” within the norm: there has been very
little appetite in Louisiana and in other states for stand-alone extreme weather
resilience efforts, traditionally called “pre-disaster mitigation” by FEMA (The Pew
Charitable Trust 2018a, b).
Extreme weather adaptation typically occurs during the recovery period after
major disasters strike (The Pew Charitable Trust 2018b) as in the seven Louisiana
examples offered in this chapter. While “pre-disaster flood mitigation” is a term
embedded in the vocabulary of the Federal Emergency Management Administration(FEMA), commitment to adapting to an extreme weather threat before another
weather event occurs in a particular location is currently qualified as “aspirational,”
as indicated by the modest number of successful awards in FEMA competitions forstates, the small amount spent by state governments, their lack of interest incollecting data that would measure such pre-disaster mitigation effects (The Pew
Charitable Trust 2018a, b), and the modest interest in the FEMA Pre-disaster
Mitigation Program. Louisiana is no exception. For fiscal 2017, the latest year data
are available, Louisiana did not receive any funds from FEMA for pre-disaster mitigation (FEMA 2018c).5
While there are some new pre-disaster funding opportunities within the new
Disaster Recovery Act of 2018,6 state and local governments are currently challenged
to compete successfully and then to implement such systematic adaptation now(The Pew Charitable Trust 2018a). Therefore, if pre-disaster mitigation has not happened much to date with extreme weather disasters, how rapidly and successfully
will these funding enhancements lead to significant increases in pre-disaster adaptation in the future? While some of the qualities of the new climate change extreme
weather might prompt more pre-disaster adaptation – such as increased magnitude,frequency, clearly observable difference from earlier extreme weather – that link
has yet to be studied and, if found to be the case, may not occur repeatedly for quite
some time. As the data in the beginning section of this chapter demonstrated,
Louisiana has been subject to extreme weather events on the average of more than
one a year since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This rate of impact has not
motivated the state to successfully compete for pre-disaster mitigation funds as
mentioned above (FEMA 2018c). Now there appears to be changes in that response,
but the efforts are still being funded by resources tied directly. Research needs to be
conducted specifically on this question: Does a significant number of disasters, or
continual events, or extreme ones not experienced before or for a lengthy time
motivate states to seek pre-disaster mitigation (adaptation) funds more frequently
and to successfully qualify for them? If the results of such research lead to the5
The disposition of those submitted fell into categories: identified for further review, did not meethazard mitigation assistance requirements, and not selected.
6
Improvements in support of pre-disaster implementation for resilience include a reliable streamof 6 percent set aside for public infrastructure pre-disaster hazard mitigation (Section 1234)(FEMA 2018c).

14

S. Laska

answer “No,” then even more concern must be expressed about our culture’s
assumption that climate change adaptation will be significantly forthcoming. Right
now, we should assume that the challenge to adapt prior to disasters will beequivalent to the challenge to mitigate CO2 emissions.
It may be that the effort needed to recover from particular disasters or catastrophes such as Katrina consumes the citizens’ efforts and emotional energy such thatinterest in continual adaptation is just too much. Or the motivation to adapt is strong
while recovery is going on but it fades afterward. Meyer and Kunreuther’s recent
work (2017) tries to explain these barriers suggesting social psychological causes,
i.e., emotions, which discourage commitment to adaptation: myopia, amnesia, optimism, inertia, and simplification of threats and thus responses. The science toexplain resistance to constant attention to addressing risk needs considerable additional refinement. And the addition of the qualities of climate change extreme
weather – new magnitude, sudden, more frequent, unusual qualities,7 having bothtemperature extremes in same event and more media coverage – will also add new
dimensions to the needed research. It may be that these qualities will somewhat
overcome the impediments to adapt described by Meyer and Kunreuther (2017).
They are dramatic, “never have happened before,” and extremely damaging, andthose qualities beg for attention to a response.
However, given this lack of commitment now to continual extreme weather adaptation absent a significant disaster event to draw attention to the topic, I argue that a
resiliency framing that focuses on what adaptation is possible in the recovery froma particular disaster is the more appropriate focus for this early climate change
extreme weather adaptation period, to make these recovery funds as productive as
possible in achieving adaptive recovery, rather than merely addressing recovery as
putting it back the way it was.
Two new emphases of the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 (FEMA 2018b)
commit to enhancing resilience during the disaster recovery: Section 1235a ensures
the Hazard Mitigation grants must “increase resilience to future damage, hardship,
loss or suffering” (Section 1235a) and that damaged public facilities be repaired to
the latest codes and standards to strive for resilience (Section 1235b). In the spirit ofthese new federal “commitments,” I will now describe a revision of a recovery
framing that was first offered in an earlier publication (Laska 2012) to reflect theargument that disaster recovery must be the locus currently of much climate change
adaptation.

7
A Louisiana example reinforces the qualities of unusualness of weather events that bring residents’ attention to climate change: On December 29, 2018, as this chapter was being prepared,
inland flooding occurred in some of the same area flooded by the 2016 spring and summer floods.
Television news reporting quoted a victim: “We didn’t have any time to prepare for the flooding
because what happened in 24 hours in the spring of 2016 happened within a few hours this time.”

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

1.3.3

15

Exceptional Recovery for Essential Resilience

The extreme weather adaptation frame offered here combines two concepts – exceptional recovery and essential resilience (Laska 2012).
The exceptional recovery process has qualities that have been identified anddeveloped by the authors of this book’s chapters. The recovery process must:• Be based on a robust commitment to citizen participation• Honor community self-determination of recovery processes and outcomes• Have a deep commitment to social justice in the recovery processes at all levelsof government response• Expect a sophisticated recognition by government officials of historical experiences that have led to socially constructed vulnerabilities “causing” the current
disaster impacts (Tierney 2014; Wisner et al. 2004)• Appreciate the economics of the recovery process itself that do not support theenablement and adaptation of the entire community to future extreme weather
but rather the interest of the corporations that are used to address the damage andof the “growth machine” (Molotch 1976) putting developer interest ahead ofcommunity residents• Have a deep understanding of the institutionally induced harm that manifests
itself in the current government-managed recovery including the technocraticframing of disaster funding as dependent upon benefit/cost and to develop
recovery processes that are free of such harm
Without such a robust understanding, the recovery process will contribute toreproducing the vulnerabilities that caused the extreme weather event to generate
harm in the first place through a disaster or even a catastrophe from which the community or region is now recovering.
Adding the adjective essential to the sought-for resilience gives consideration to
the qualities of resiliency that must be part of the outcome of the exceptional
recovery. The prolific array of publications that have appeared in the last couple ofdecades speak to the enhancing of the qualities of the society that permit it to“bounce back” or change so that the form the community/region takes after adisaster enables life to go on effectively, e.g., “resiliently.” As has been repeatedly
affirmed, such resiliency extends way beyond preventing the physical event or
modulating generally what the extreme weather event can do to a community
physically. The use of essential resiliency in this discussion of climate change
adaptation is to encourage the consideration of what qualities of a society, of acommunity, are essential to the robust improvement of the community to withstandfuture climate change-induced extreme weather impacts. To reiterate, it is the robust,carefully considered essential improvements that redound to the benefit of all social
classes, races, ethnic groups, and the social organization that supports the fullcommunity’s ability to function satisfactorily that are the requirements of successful
adaptation.

16

S. Laska

By using such a reasoning, sometimes the improvements that are of focus indisaster recovery can appear to have little to do directly with recovery. However, thework of the chapter authors within this volume and their like-minded researchers
reminds us that resilient communities are socially and economically healthy
communities with continual efforts to prevent social class, race, and ethnic disparities
and discrimination. If, for example, as Andreanecia Morris and Lucas Diaz describe
in Chap. 9, lower-income families in a highly hazard risk community like New
Orleans are able to improve their income and/or reduce the percentage of theirincome spent on housing located near good employment, their resilience “when thenext storm hits” rises. And if the housing they rent has the ability to be physicallyresistant to storm winds and water, and to be repaired after the earlier storm, theirchances of returning to the community, to their social network, to their employment,
and to the contribution which they made before the event are greater, and therefore
the entire community is more resilient following the recovery and into the next
disaster if one happens. Thus, essential resilience, the outcome of the exceptional
recovery process, should be additive with deliberation and inclusivity. It should also
recognize at its core that much disaster vulnerability is social and economic, notphysical (Wisner et al. 2004).
The diagram created for the original concept in 2012 (Laska 2012) has beenrefined for this book (see Fig. 1.2). It visualizes the difference between the recovery
from a disaster undertaken in more traditional ways – support victims in recovery,
return their damaged houses to what they were before the event with minimalchanges except for elevation for those damaged over 50%, and assist in the repair of
the infrastructure of the community back to what it was before the storm other than

COMMUNITY
RECOVERYFROM EARLIEREVENTCOMMUNITY
RECOVERYFROM CURRENT
EVENT
Duration of Recovery“Essential” Resilience
Constrained Resilience

Improvedof} Level
Adaptation

Exceptional
Recovery
Traditional
RecoverytoFig. 1.2 Resilience deltas when community function is/is not enhanced by pre-event vulnerability
reduction measures, i.e., adaptation. (Figure adapted from Laska (2012))

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

17

some required improvements due to code improvements. The traditional response iscompared to a more adaptive, resilient approach – committing to understand boththe physical and especially the social vulnerabilities and undertaking recovery
approaches which adhere to the state-of-the-art regulations, community plans, land-­use planning, and other resilient qualities including the best scientific knowledge ofthe anticipated climate change-induced extreme weather effects. Such a process is
inclusive of citizens in the learning and decision-making processes.
With the traditional recovery being built from the last disaster recovery, the resilience that existed before a disaster will take longer to get back to, and no significant
improvement will occur. With exceptional recovery, the recovery from each extreme
weather disaster event will be more rapid, and the level of resiliency will rise to abetter level because the goal will be essential resilience (to prepare for the possible
next event). Kuhlicke and Steinführer (2010) state that the impact of these adaptations to the phase just before the next disaster, the new anticipation phase, would
differ from the one described above, in a way that reflects learning and socialchange, or, to put it differently, a new hazard cycle begins which is not a repetitionof the one previously experienced. It will be more resilient. And the community
officials and the citizens will be developing a capacity to function adaptively in thismore effective way.8 Diagrams such as the one contained herein help communities,
states, and federal government officials and staffs to visualize the simple outline ofthe process and the outcome. What each level of government might contribute
through the exceptional recovery process to the essential resilience goal will beconsidered in the last section of this chapter.
The irregularities of extreme weather events place the destruction and thus therecovery efforts in different time frames, sometimes the same and sometimes
different specific locations and at different levels of disaster – the vagaries of tornado
outbreaks in the upper South and Midwest being an example. These uncertain
conditions require that the capacity and focused attention of the exceptional recovery
be coordinated and documented by state-level or regional agencies within the staterather than only by local communities. One wants the lessons available to allcommunities and counties subject to a variety of extreme weather disaster events,
not just the ones who have experienced a disaster in the past.
Louisiana has the Office of Community Development (LAOCD) which functions primarily as the agency administering the federal disaster response funds. It
also sees itself as the state agency responsible for resiliency enhancement:
OCD-DRU manages the most extensive rebuilding effort in American history and works
closely with local, state and federal partners to ensure that Louisiana recovers safer, stronger
and smarter than before (Louisiana Division of Administration, Office of Community
Development n.d.).

8Note: Recommending this model of a resilience process is not done ignorant of the fact that disaster occurrence is highly uncertain. Tying adaptation to disaster events may not be the best way toachieve resilience. Just to reiterate, it might produce more resilience at this time than efforts independent of extreme weather events.

18

S. Laska

Additionally, Louisiana has eight regional planning districts and an umbrella association, Louisiana Association of Planning and Development Districts (LAPDD),
which declares interest in recovery and resilience (LAPDD 2018). These organizations can enhance the state’s efforts to share the exceptional recovery successes.

1.4“ Placing” the Chapters into Exceptional Recovery/
Essential Resilience Framework

Can what is learned from research about Louisiana’s experience make a contribution to better adaptation by those states growing in extreme weather experiences?
This book represents what the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS)
calls “science during crisis” (2019). All of the chapter authors and I hope that thiseffort adds long-term adaptation to the AAAS’s goal for scientists and practitioners
to “improve crisis response and recovery.” The crisis is climate change-enhanced
extreme weather impacts.
Part I of the book includes only one chapter that very successfully blends bio/physical/atmospheric analysis with the human/social dimensions of extreme
weather response, what is called the “coupled natural-human coastal system”(NASEM 2018). It is written fully in the spirit of the goal that the book honortransdisciplinary research and analysis. Donald Boesch, a native Louisianan with anational reputation for bioecological oceanographic research, academic
environmental science management, and environmental policy focused on climatechange adaptation, has honored the transdisciplinary goal with a fully integrated
discussion of Louisiana’s growing extreme weather challenges and their effects on
and response by communities and residents of the state.
The chapters in Part II consider methods (exceptional recovery) of achieving
successful essential resilience and what challenges are/have been encountered withthe efforts undertaken. Chapter 3 by Zachary Lamb is about the force of in theprocess of recovery planning, specifically the role of representing seriously flooded
neighborhoods as green dots on widely publicized maps that indicate whichneighborhoods were proposed “for sacrifice” to recovery redevelopment by turningthem into green spaces for holding floodwater. The maps reinforced a politicallyinsensitive representation of class and race privilege in the Katrina recovery planning
process contributed to by out-of-town planning consultants and city development
leaders. This public memory from Katrina recovery planning taints implementationof the current New Orleans Rockefeller-HUD $141 million resiliency grant forclimate change, almost 15 years after Katrina. It demonstrates that exclusion of
citizen participation in recovery planning is a mistake and calls into question
government legitimacy in response to one disaster and reduces the likelihood of
exceptional recovery occurring before the next.
Chapter 4 by Kevin Gotham and Megan Faust considers the benefits and drawbacks of national versus state/local responses to extreme weather in a comparison of
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and New York City after Hurricane Sandy.

1Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

19

Encompassing cases merge the combination of state/local and national efforts/policy and consider the benefits and drawbacks of each configuration. Given the
expected challenges with relying on federal solutions and aid for extreme weather
adaptation, especially for events impacted by climate change, such a comparative
consideration and refinement of the subnational level are critical for future
successes.
Chapter 5 by Scott Hemmerling, Monica Barra, and Rebecca H. Bond offers avery comprehensive description of the evolution of Louisiana’s coastal restoration
efforts. This chapter offers a picture of one, if not the largest, state-managed
environmental restoration program in the country and its evolution from a project-­to-­project process to an ecosystem modeling approach. If and how the citizen
participation process has improved to support the large, ecosystem-impacting
projects is framed in social justice terms. Similar to the green dot example, the risk
to rural residents of the project’s fisheries impact results in the authors arguing forthe importance of creating a planning process that offers an important role to citizen
participation and that trusts its importance and contribution to the success ofproposed policies and restoration projects.
Part III includes two very different chapters about the issues involved in moving
coastal residents inland. Chapter 6 by Nathan Jessee recounts the resettlement
process to date of an indigenous tribe that partnered with the state of Louisiana toseek funding for such after two earlier efforts at resettlement failed. The process andchallenges to a successful resettlement are presented, and the parallels to earlier
treatment of indigenous Americans are described. Resettlement has beenromanticized in American culture, while implementation contains parallel structural
violence consistent with past experiences of indigenous peoples.
Chapter 7 by Kristina Peterson examines a topic to date rarely found in the social
science literature: The dynamics of the relations of climate displaced populations
with the receiving communities and their existing challenges. Differences in cultural
backgrounds, race and social class are considered as challenges to overcome but
may also be seen as opportunities with a firm commitment to make them be so.
Peterson proposes approaches that could address these differences and ways
migration could be framed to achieve a positive acceptance by the receiving
communities including the focus of culture, food, and religion as unifying elementsof the “blending” cultures rather than barriers. She also examines issues ofidentifying environmentally healthy high ground to avoid the repeat victimizationthat occurred to Katrina migrants during the 2016 floods that hit central Louisianaand flooded them again in their new locales and encouraging receiving community
residents and the in-migrants to work together for an improved inland community.
Part IV is organized to include research on adaptation challenges that confront
communities of varying sizes, types, and geographic framings, including work on
urban, suburban, rural, and watershed communities.
Chapter 8 by Anna Livia Brand and Vern Baxter and Chap. 9 by Andreanecia
Morris and Lucas Diaz consider the extreme challenges of achieving urban exceptional recovery in the context of economies that understate risks to lower income
residents. They examine the way the government and the economy frame recovery

20

S. Laskain a neoliberal political economy paradigm. The authors demonstrate how social andenvironmental injustice were manifest in a racialized recovery of New Orleans thatstands as an extension of pre-Katrina forces and decisions. They recommend ways
to return to citizen participation and expanded citizen influence in the recovery process as ways to deracialize it. Chapter 9 provides a case study of the efforts of a
housing coalition to modify the “regime” of decision-making and implementation ofadequate affordable housing after Katrina by negotiating a compromise of vested
interests. Affordable housing, in crisis mode 14 years after Hurricane Katrina, isseen as a key element to a more resilient and disaster-adaptive populous.
Chapter 10 by Michelle Meyer, Brant Mitchell, Shannon Van Zandt, and Stuart
Nolan considers how a climate change-affected extreme weather event presents
different requirements for an adaptive recovery. First, the speed of the disaster –multiple inches of rainfall in a short period of time – requires the development ofdifferent response assistance as pre-event evacuation is not possible because there is
no known severe event predicted early enough to initiate evacuation. This new needis described. Second, the impact is discussed of how a storm with such a deluge offlooded areas outside of the floodplain contributes even more to housing shortages
post-event for renters who compete with flood victims in search of rentals, if only asa temporary habitation during rebuilding.
While the population in Louisiana is predominantly urban, coastal rural areas
have been subject to frequent destructive storms, while significant inland areas
joined this challenge after the 2016 floods. Research on Katrina was severely
criticized for its focus on New Orleans to the detriment of learning more about the
exceptional recovery challenges rural areas experienced. Chapter 11 by Alessandra
Jerolleman focuses on the theories of rural extreme weather risk and responsewith the spring 2016 flood as the case analyzed. Limited resources, distance fromthe state’s power brokers, and possibly being asked to serve as receiver communities while under rural stresses are clearly evident in rural extreme weather
challenges.
Design and planning principles explored through a resilience thinking lens caninform a science-based but socially grounded program to increase adaptive capacity, but they are not without their challenges. Chapter 12 by Traci Birch and Jeff
Carney offers a review and synthesis of adopted community planning principles
and processes that suggest disparate planning frameworks, and agencies are
addressing physical and social environmental needs, but a more holistic approach toadaptation is needed.

1.5

 ubnational Adaptation Management: What Each Level
Sof Government Might Best Contribute to the Exceptional
Recovery Process and Essential Resilience Outcome?

The theme of this book – a state’s experiences and responses to extreme weather
including that which is climate change-induced – will likely be a theme studied over
and over again as more states move into the trajectory of such challenges. California

1Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

21

is certainly a state that has a near-term robust history of extreme weather/climate
experiences and their responses to them like Louisiana, a recent comparison madeby Hayden and Cochran (2019). Others could also be mentioned – Texas, Florida,
North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York.
Undertaking a book about a state also gives me the opportunity to explore if/how
more emphasis on state and local adaptation response/control rather than federal
would be more effective. I asked specialists their opinion about the question. One
replied: “The role of states in hazard mitigation planning was a hot topic up until
about a decade ago, but there has been a real drop off.”9 Yet while the interest in thestate role has waned, Berke’s research itself showed that “federal policies do notmake a difference in local land use actions, but state policy exerts a strong influence”(Berke et al. 2014). The increases in climate-induced extreme weather suggest thatnew research on the combinations and leadership emphases of the government
levels are highly warranted. Reinforcing the critical nature of adaptation efforts,
former Regional Administrator for the US Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) in New York and New Jersey during the region’s recovery
from Sandy, Irene, and Lee, Holly Leicht, stated: “. . . it is a huge financial andadministrative challenge for cities and states to prepare for the ever-widening rangeof threats the future may hold” (Leicht 2017, p. 2). Note the emphasis on subnational despite her holding a federal agency administrative position.
While the chapter authors were not asked to consider specifically whether/if subnational adaptation would be more successful, they were asked to consider social
justice issues about their topics. I ask the reader to consider whether what you learn
from the chapter authors may contribute to your assessment of the role of subnational adaptation, including the benefits or not for social justice in extreme weather
response. For example, Scott Hemmerling and his co-authors consider the social
justice challenges of the state-level coastal restoration plan. That it is at the statelevel does not seem to have helped the program commit and implement social justice processes and outcomes systematically from the beginning as they have committed say for diversion sediment physical engineering modeling. One might haveassumed because the state coastal restoration efforts are closer to the residents andto the communities, that might have been the case. Continuing the thinking, would
a federally run coastal restoration program have done any better? Do we as a society
know how to fully engage citizens and communities in the critical decision-­making
process related to climate change extreme weather response that honors residents
and communities fully? It is an imperative that we learn how to do so: “Just recovery requires the full harnessing of communities’ transformative and adaptive capacity, honoring their definitions of resilience, in order to reduce risks for the future”(Jerolleman 2019, p. 99).

9Personal communication with Philip Berke, Director, Institute for Sustainable Communities,
Texas A & M University, March 11, 2019

22

1.5.1

S. Laska

 ualities of the Government Levels That Challenge/Q
Benefit Adaptation

How can the interaction of these three concepts – essential resilience, exceptional
recovery, and level of government – be framed for future research on the topic?
What has to be considered for each level and the interaction among them to beconsidered to answer this question? This section will reinforce the need to consider
the qualities and challenges of each level of government when deciding whether thefederal or the subnational level is best to lead the adaptation. Examples of pros andcons of emphasizing the various levels of government for successful climate change
adaptation are offered in Table 1.2. It is not the goal of this introductory chapter toimmerse the reader in the details of each of these positive or negative qualities.
Rather it is the intent to demonstrate the complexity of the answer to the question:
Which level? And, to add to that complexity, the question of which levels serves themost adaptations or the most important adaptations? Or the recovery trajectory, theexceptional recovery, or the utilization of the achieved essential resilience? MUCH
more research is absolutely necessary.

1.5.2

 voiding Harm While Improving Federal/State/Local
A
Adaptation Configurations

With this deeper exploration of improving extreme weather adaption by reconfiguring the role of the levels of government comes a serious conundrum, and it is flaggedby the recommendation I am making to continue to link adaptation with recovery –a federally overseen and funded effort – while I am asking you to think about howemphasizing state and local actions might generate more productive climate
adaptation than federal. Adaptation innovations must be conceived andimplementations attempted and evaluated at different levels of government while
the current government level in charge of recovery and mitigation is utilized torespond to current disasters and develop improved adaptations. And, there is notime to delay working on both adaptations – within the current federal system andadaptations managed by the lower levels of government.
An example of the challenge framed in this conundrum can be seen in the extreme
difficulties which the community and the state of Louisiana are having in trying toachieve just resettlement of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
Tribe (Jessee, Chap. 6, this book). The funding came from the innovative Rockefeller/
HUD CDBG-DR NDRC discussed in several chapters of this book. Thus, the funds
are federal funds governed by CDBG requirements. While the plan that was awarded
the $48 million proposes that the Tribe (local) be in charge of the implementationand follow the designs the Tribe created with design/experienced construction
implementers, some indigenous, chosen by them, the state has modified that plan toconform to the CDBG implementation process. The Tribe is not in charge; the1Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

23

Table 1.2 Pros and cons of different levels of government taking dominant role in climate change
adaptation
Pros
Federal Knows what practices work for
mitigation/adaptation and can give
guidance (Leicht 2017)
Can hone adaptation standards withnationwide data input and thenenforcement
Currently where most of the taxes arecollected for the country and thus thefunding is located (Bullock 2016)
Encourages adaptation actions when there
is insufficient local support for some suchas required elevation for residential
structures

State

Cons
Some states/communities may feel thatfederal requirements are meddling in local
and state efforts (Leicht 2017). Freeboard
elevation requirements are an example
One size fits all – but does it?
Mitigation (adaptation) outcomes lessflexible and thus may be less useful for
specific locales
Beginning to be overwhelmed by disasterevents and costs and thus threatening tolimit recovery funds (FEMA 2018a;
Becker 2019)
Extremely slow pace of providing recovery
response and showing no sign of improving
the pace turn locals against federal role inexceptional recovery (Laska et al. 2018)
Inadequacy of the federal disaster response
staff (GAO 2018; Montjoy et al. 2010). No
expectation that federal adaptation
management by them would be better
Heavy imbalance between recovery efforts
for homeowners versus renters/landlords(Hersher and Benincasa 2019). Why expect
otherwise for adaptation? Extreme social
justice challenges
Funding only the most secure protection
measures that are appropriate for all flood
hazards has been at the expense of
explaining and encouraging “less perfect,”
but much less expensive, efforts that can beeffective for shallow, slow moving floodand drainage problems (Wetmore 2019)
Can easily seek best practices from peers Possible infrequency of events occurring
reduces capacity to use the opportunities(states) with similar risks (Leicht 2017)
for adaptation due to loss of methods inPlace-based realities and appropriate
bureaucratic memory loss. Unfortunately,
approaches more evident (Leicht 2017)with the prediction of increased climate
Sharing adaptation ideas among its
constituent communities more proximate, change disasters expected, this concern
may wain
within some similar conditions, more
Resistance to adaptation due to perceived
personal sharing experience (State ofadditional costs of building construction by
Louisiana 2018)
developers such as resistance by theState is responsible for land-use
Louisiana Codes Council to require extra
regulations which will be even moreelevation when building residential
important with adaptation
structures (Smith and Booher 2017)
Limited state planning regulations
nationwide to address hazard mitigationthat would be supportive of climate change
adaptation (American Planning Association
2018)(continued)

24

S. Laska

Table 1.2 (continued)
Local

AcrosslevelsPros
Public/private partnerships may be more
doable at local level (Leicht 2017)
Better place-based approaches areachievable (Leicht 2017). In the context
of “agency,” residents can feel and further
develop the connection between theirknowledge, engagement, and resilience
adaptation outcomes to their community’srisks (Laska 1986, 1990)
Experiencing the climate change-induced
extreme weather event with all of its
specific extreme and unusual qualities
provides a direct link between experienceand impetus to adaptive action,
overcoming psychological resistance(Meyer and Kunreuther 2017)
Achieving adaptation successes or even
failures that induce adaptation revisions
builds resident capacity and feelings ofagency (Laska 1986, 1990)

Cons
Neoliberal capitalism encourages
benefitting the redevelopment class notnecessarily to the benefit of the community,
especially poor and racial, ethnic, andNative American minorities (Brand andBaxter, Jessee, both this book)
Before citizen capacity to participate isgrown, the citizens may not be enable tohave full participation in the decision-­making, and thus they can be harmed(Lamb, this book)
Disparate financial resources amongcommunities may put some at extreme riskeven though residents invest in considering
adaptation, rural communities, for example(Jerolleman, this book)Multiple administrative layers – at all thedifferent levels of government – hamper
efficient, effective, and timely use ofdisaster recovery funds (Sloan and Fowler2015). They may hinder climate change
adaptation even more due tononinstitutionalized nature of newactivities
At both federal and state levels, better
resourced states and communities andmore politically powerful ones – usually
co-occurring – likely will achieve mostadaptation opportunities

Note: Appreciation to Alessandra Jerolleman for contributing to refining this list. (Personalcommunication, May 9, 2019)

implementation process and outcomes are not what the tribe intended (Jessee, again,
Chap. 6, this book). Brunner and Nordgren (2016) suggest that past adaptation
successes succeeded in making incremental adaptation progress when and where
they could adapt their resources to the circumstances in a community.
Has this been done adequately with the Tribe? Despite the federal regulations,
could it have been done better, like Brunner and Nordgren (2016) propose? Adapt
the adaptation resources to the circumstances in a community as much as is currently
legally possible; and challenge the federal government to adjust their rules andregulations as climate adaptation opportunities emerge in configurations different
from the actions current federal programs and rules prescribe. Could climate change
innovation have been successfully implemented within the bureaucratic constraints?

1

Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

25

Merely coining it a resilience innovation was totally inadequate to facilitate an innovation. This example stands as a clear example of the challenges that the country,
the states, and the communities are/will have transferring from the earlier recovery
model to an adaptation one that is community- and state-based.
The Tribe’s cultural and interpersonal existence is being put at extreme risk
because the innovation they proposed to reduce their physical and cultural risks
from extreme weather, and for which the $48 million was awarded, does not fit thecurrent federal rules and procedures and goals of the state – that being a genericmodel for resettlement or any CDBG program’s implementation. The Tribal members and leadership are caught “dangling” between what they proposed to do –resettle from the physical coastal risk in a manner that would encourage tribal andlifeway survival – and what the federal and state governments are prepared to do,which are actually currently being carried out.
Extremely important, this conundrum was not recognized by the Tribe before thecompetition was implemented by a foundation and a federal agency; to this author’s
knowledge, it was not even considered adequately and without public communicationof the challenge by those who put the competition together and implemented it.
Innovation can seriously harm when it is not thoroughly thought through as much as
possible before the innovation is attempted to be implemented. Careful study of climate
adaptation innovation while it is being developed and during its initial/early implementation is an absolute requirement for just, equitable implementation of it. This holds
for whichever level of government is the lead as well as the partners at the other levels.
The Tribe’s innovative plan which got the proposal selected, the $48 million awarded,
was caught in a government system that could not handle the innovation.
The tension between innovation and government rules and regulations threatens
the most vulnerable more because it is they who need the adaptation the most andthe earliest. It is very, very likely that the Tribe will decline in maintaining its
cultural practices and tribal interpersonal dynamics that they had before participatingin the stressful Rockefeller/NDRC innovation application and ensuing project thathas not addressed the vision and the goals the Tribe articulated in their application.
We cannot accept this risk to them as the price they pay for the society not
approaching the Tribe’s climate change adaptation very, very carefully. Perhaps thelikelihood of increased risk and harm to the most vulnerable should have excluded
them from even seeking their resettlement through the competition? No more powerful a conundrum than that.

1.5.3

 peed of Recognizing Importance of Subnational
S
Climate Change Response

When the project of creating this case study book first began, the editor believed thatthe subnational response to extreme weather was not being adequately considered
for climate change-induced extreme weather response rather than just for “normal”

26

S. Laska

disaster recovery. I asked myself: Was there developing a statewide response? Were
those responding seeing the differences between previous extreme weather events
and what is occurring in the present? What challenges to adaptation were being
experienced in specific Louisiana regions and community types of the state? Whatclimate change adaptation efforts were being “birthed”? And their success? It was
believed that from such a realistic case combining pre-climate change response withclimate change response, recommendations would emerge for the utility or not of
subnational adaptation to climate change as it becomes a more powerful driver ofextreme weather. The chapter authors contributed their research on specific topics
related to this: human-natural system interface, resident engagement requirements,and social justice considerations for those most vulnerable, moving of residents outof coastal risk, and resilience considerations with new climate change risk.
What was not anticipated was how rapidly the recognition of the role of the subnational response was being recognized within Louisiana and also being recognizedaround the nation. As discussed in Sect. 1.3.1 of this chapter, eight Louisiana
adaptation programs were “birthed” during the preparation of this book. And, veryclearly from media reports during the same period, subnational leaders – mayors
and governors – are stepping forward to assume leadership of climate change adaptation and mitigation without being required to do so (Hersher 2018; Hirji 2019).
Media reports of two such responses that were reported during late 2018 confirm
this rapidly growing interest in subnational response.
The first example is the response to the release of the Fourth National Climate
Assessment, Vol. II in late November 2018. Created by government agencies andcitizens, it portended a future fraught with rapidly increasing climate/weather risks.
The next day a media story reported that newly minted US governors recognizedthat the response to such a threat must include state-level action. The AssociatedPress headline read: Natural Disasters Will Be a Priority for Incoming Governors(Mulvihill 2018).
Similarly, US mayors and governors challenged President Trump’s administration in their rejecting climate change by not sending an American representative to
the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in the fall of 2018.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto commented:
There are more than federal governments at stake now, and the sub-national level is really
where it’s going to get implemented anyway. . . It’s really nice when nations sign documents,
but what it really comes down to is what we do in our own neighborhoods and what we doin our own cities. (NPR 2018)

It is a critical time to consider how to accomplish the most successful essential
adaptation. To that goal it is hoped that this volume about Louisiana and its response
to extreme weather at the state and local levels engage other states and their government officials, residents, applied resilience research university and nonprofit
researchers and practitioners and college students considering their futures todevelop successful, just, equitable adaptations to climate-induced extreme weather,to achieve essential resilience. And the chapter authors and I have the same hope formore successful adaptation to essential resilience for Louisiana, for most of us arenatives or “adopted natives” of the state. Finally, in emphasizing the state and local
levels of response, we hope to have contributed to the very necessary body of1Introduction to the Book: “Ahead of the Curve”

27

research about which level of government is poised to best lead these adaptation
initiatives most successfully. There is no time to spare in appreciating the answer(s)to this question.

 ppendix: Sources of Descriptions of New State and City
A
Adaptation Programs (Numbers Coincide with Numberson Table 1.1 on Page 9)
1. Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). (2017). Louisiana’sComprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. Baton Rouge, LA: Coastal
Protection and Restoration Authority. Retrieved from http://coastal.la.gov/
wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-Coastal-Master-Plan_Web-Book_CFinalwith-Effective-Date-06092017.pdf
2. Louisiana Department of Administration (LDOA). (2015b). National Disaster
Resilience Competition Phase II Application. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
Department of Administration.
Louisiana Department of Administration (LDOA). (2019b). Substantial
Amendment 5: Introduction of new activities and project narrative clarifications
for the utilization of community development block grant funds under the
National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) Resettlement of Isle de JeanCharles. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana Department of Administration. Retrieved
fromhttps://www.doa.la.gov/OCDDRU/Action%20Plan%20Amendments/
NDR/IDJC_Substantial_APA_5_FINAL03272019.pdf
3. City of New Orleans. (2019). Gentilly Resilience District. Retrieved from https://www.nola.gov/resilience/gentilly-resilience-district/
4. Louisiana Division of Administration. Office of Community Development.
(2019a). Solution 4: Buyout & Resilient Housing Incentive. Retrieved fromhttps://www.doa.la.gov/OCDDRU/Presentations/CDBG-BootCamp-Restore_
Solution4_2019.pdf
5. Louisiana Department of Administration. Office of Community Development.
(2019b). Louisiana’s strategic adaptations for future environments (LA SAFE).
Retrieved from https://www.doa.la.gov/OCDDRU/NDRC/LASAFE_Report_
Final.pdf
6. Louisiana State University Coastal Sustainability Lab (LSU-CSS). (2017).
Inland from the Coast: A multi-scalar approach to regional climate change
responses. Available at https://css.lsu.edu/project/inland-from-the-coast/
7. Office of Gov. John Bel Edwards. (2018). Louisiana watershed initiative: A
long-term vision for statewide sustainability and resilience. Retrieved fromhttps://www.watershed.la.gov/
8. Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). (2018). Flood risk andresilience program: Parish flood risk and resilience capability and capacity
assessment, executive summary. Prepared by Foster, C., Sanlee, A. & Cottone,
J. Retrieved from http://coastal.la.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Parish
CapabilityCapacityAssessment-9.14.18.pdf

28

S. Laska

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Part ILouisiana’s Risks Anticipating the Future
Challenges to Other U.S. Coastal
Communities

Chapter 2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly
Changing Coastal Zone
Donald F. Boesch

2.1

Introduction

While both strategically important to the nation and bountiful in so many ways,
Louisiana’s coastal zone has always been difficult to access and risky to live in.
Much of its landscape consists of wetlands: bottomland forests, swamps, marshes,and mangroves that are continuously, seasonally, tidally, or meteorologically inundated. Most of what passes for dry land is just a few feet above sea level and subject
to episodic flooding from the mighty rivers – the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya –that flow through it, locally intense rainfall, and ocean storm surges. Powerful tropical storm winds and associated tornadoes pose additional weather threats to humancommunities and the built environment.
The complex and dynamic water world that is coastal Louisiana constrains where
people live and how they move across the landscape. Early European settlers wereconfronted by devastating river floods almost immediately after their arrival, and,despite the flood protection systems and elevated infrastructure that were developed
over the next 300 years, the threats of rising waters and damaging winds haveremained a fact of life for south Louisiana communities and enterprises. Both have
moved and adapted in response to extreme weather events in ways that havedecreased, but sometimes increased, their vulnerability.
While extreme weather events challenge social resilience, i.e., the ability of communities to cope with and adapt to stresses and disruptions, these transient phenomena are experienced against a background of powerful secular (in the sense of long
duration) trends that further test this resilience. Particularly since the mid-twentiethcentury, the coastal landscapes have been rapidly deteriorating as a net result ofgeological subsidence, human interference with the processes that build and sustain

D. F. Boesch (*)
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Annapolis, MD, USAe-mail: boesch@umces.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_2

35

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D. F. Boesch

the coastal landscape, and substantial modification of its hydrology. Moreover, thebody of science has made it abundantly clear that human activities are warming
Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and changing its climate in ways that are enormously
consequential for south Louisiana, including accelerated sea-level rise, intensification of precipitation, and more powerful tropical cyclones.
This chapter sets the biophysical stage for the case studies and perspectives onsocial resilience that follow in this volume. First, I provide an overview of the geomorphic fabric of coastal Louisiana, how it affects human society, and how humans
have modified it. I then summarize the kinds of flooding threats, the notable disasters that have occurred, and the flood protection systems that have been created.
From there I move to the strategic coastal protection and restoration that is being
planned and implemented in Louisiana, before considering global climate change asa threat multiplier that will also have to be addressed. Finally, I conclude with someperspectives on the implications of the rapidly changing coastal landscape for social
resilience within these other coastal regions of the United States.

2.2
2.2.1

Geological and Human Development
Creation and Evolution of Coastal Landscapes

The people of south Louisiana live on the youngest land in the United States, except
for a few small purchases built on barrier islands or filled shallows. As the massive
glaciers rapidly melted at the end of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, the levelof the world’s oceans rose by about 120 m (400 feet) over 12,000 years (Stanford
et al. 2010). Large areas of coastal land were submerged becoming continental
shelves, and shorelines retreated until sea level reached a relatively stable point
about 7000 years before the present. The level of the world’s oceans was nearly
constant or slowly declining during the period of European settlement of North
America (Kemp et al. 2011). Today, residents of most US coastal areas today live
along those same shorelines. But in Louisiana the escarpments marking those
7000-year-old shorelines are now far inland from the Gulf Coast, north of Lake
Pontchartrain, and just below Baton Rouge and Lafayette (Saucier 1994).
When the rapid rise in sea level finally slowed, a large marine embayment stood
between Baton Rouge and Lafayette into which the Mississippi and other great rivers flowed. With the inland march of the sea finally stalled, sediments discharged bythese rivers began to fill up the embayment and then reclaim the shallow Gulf of
Mexico by protruding successive delta lobes (Blum and Roberts 2012; Bentley et al.
2016). As a delta lobe grew through the deposition of river-borne sediments, it created branching distributaries, some of which left remnants as today’s bayous.
Sediments were deposited at river mouths and via overbank flooding, crevasse formation, and infilling of older distributaries (Roberts 1997). As flow gradients diminished, the river sought a quicker path to the sea, breaking out to begin a new delta

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

37

Fig. 2.1 Map of southern Louisiana showing important cities, water bodies, and geologic provinces. (Base map courtesy of Esri, HERE, Garmin, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS
user community)

lobe. The river’s flow did not switch all at once, and the flow was often conveyed
down both the old and the new delta.
Eventually, five or six major deltas – depending on how they are distinguished –were formed over the past 4600 years (Roberts 1997; Bentley et al. 2016) with theirremnants constituting the landscapes of the Mississippi Deltaic Plain (Fig. 2.1) from
Abbeville in the west to the border of the state of Mississippi in the east. The easternmost St. Bernard Delta was active between 2800 and 1000 years ago, extending
beyond today’s Chandeleur Islands and enclosing large coastal embayments, creating today’s lakes Maurepas, Pontchartrain, and Borgne (Fig. 2.2). The earlier Teche
Delta (3500–2800 years before present) and Lafourche Delta (1000–300 years ago)filled in the landscapes between the present Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers. The
towns lying along today’s bayous Teche and Lafourche sit on natural levee depositsof the past main channels of the great river. The presently active Plaquemines Delta
below New Orleans is only 750 years old, and its iconic extension to the edge of thecontinental shelf in the form of a bird’s foot (the Balize Delta) has only existed forabout 550 years or since shortly before Columbus discovered America.
A new delta complex began to emerge in Atchafalaya Bay with the 1973 flood(Roberts et al. 2003), more than 20 years after the Atchafalaya River had captured
more than 30% of the flow of the Mississippi and Red rivers and its vast swamp
basin filled with sediments (Piazza 2014). With the flow since 1963 regulated underlaw at 30% of water of the lower Mississippi, two delta lobes have been building in
the Atchafalaya Bay along central coastal Louisiana.
As the Mississippi river deltas switched back and forth to build southeasternLouisiana, sediments discharged into the Gulf or released from eroding shorelines
drifted to the west along the coast under the influence of currents and waves.

38

D. F. Boesch

Fig. 2.2 Delta lobes of the Lower Mississippi River Deltaic Plain numbered in chronologicalorder of formation. (Image source: McBride et al. 2007)

This also resulted in the development of new land in the form of a strandplain characterized by old sandy or shelly beach ridges running parallel to the coast and separated by marshes and swamps (Penland and Suter 1989; Bentley et al. 2016). This
Chenier Plain (Fig. 2.1), referring to the oak (chêne in French) trees growing on theridges, extends for 200 miles along the Louisiana coast from Vermillion Bay to
Galveston, Texas. Throughout much of southwestern Louisiana, the Chenier Plain
extends inland about 30 miles from the coast.
Once deprived of the river sediments that nourish them, the landforms of both theMississippi Deltaic Plain and Chenier Plain deteriorate under the effects of geological subsidence caused by compaction of the accumulated sediments and the exposure to forces of the waves, tides, and surges of the Gulf of Mexico. The outer edgeof the delta erodes, and the sand deposits remaining are reshaped as flanking barrier
islands and the inter-distributary wetlands open up as estuarine bays, such aspresent-­day Barataria and Terrebonne bays (Blum and Roberts 2012). Still, tidal
wetlands are sustained for centuries by trapping eroding sediments and growing
upward as the soil beneath them subsides (Reed 1989). The skeletal framework of
distributary ridges and barrier islands protect interior wetlands from marine forces
and saltwater intrusion (Salinas et al. 1986). Coastal ecosystems, consisting of tidal
wetlands and channels and shallow bays, are enormously productive of fish andwildlife during this phase (Twilley et al. 2016). Eventually, the barrier island arc
becomes detached from land by a broad sound, such as is the present condition for
the Chandeleur Islands to the east (Fig. 2.1). Finally, all that remains of the barrier
islands are submerged sandy shoals located miles offshore on the inner continental
shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. Subsiding and eroding, the deterioration of landforms
is exorable until a subsequent delta revisits the area.
The Chenier Plain also underwent periods of land building, when the river delta
had moved toward the west, and then erosion, when the delta shifted farther away
toward the east (Penland and Suter 1989; Bentley et al. 2016). The beach ridges

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

39

consisting of coarser sediments were formed during these erosional periods.
Deprived of delta sediments, wetlands in the Chenier Plain are currently subsiding
at a much faster rate that they are able to vertically accrete soils (Jankowski et al.
2017). In contrast, sediment supplies to the Deltaic Plain wetlands allow them toaccrete more soil.
Since human habitation, the expansive coastal zone of Louisiana has always
been young, low lying, wet, and highly dynamic, thus posing challenges to humansurvival, health, prosperity, and social fabric.

2.2.2

Human Settlement and Its Risks

Native Americans first occupied the dynamic Mississippi Deltaic Plain about
2000 years ago (McIntire 1958). They left remnants of their occupation in the formof shell middens and earthen mounds located near river channels or distributaries oron barrier ridges. The mounds accommodated their refuge during occasional riverand estuarine flooding, providing the community resilience required for living inthis bountiful but challenging wet landscape.
Although the establishment of the outpost of Natchitoches preceded it by 4 years,
the site of New Orleans was selected for the first French settlement in south
Louisiana in 1718 because it controlled the lower Mississippi River and also
afforded access via Bayou St. John to Lake Pontchartrain (Colton 2005). In making
this decision, Sieur de Bienville was well aware of the frequent risks of river flooding, but, as geographer Peirce Lewis noted, New Orleans was the “inevitable city”
in the “impossible” site. The early city was built on the natural levees of theMississippi River that rose no more than 12 feet above sea level. The colonists did
not have to wait long as floods the next spring slowed construction (Campanella2008). Then, in September 1722, hurricane winds knocked down shoddily built
structures, wiping the haphazard slate clean for laying out the street grid that exists
in the Vieux Carré today.
Also that year, construction of the first artificial levees to protect from riverfloods began. Still, frequent floods inundated farms that were spreading along thebanks of the river above New Orleans, destroying crops and damaging homes.
Moreover, floodwaters reaching the backswamps beyond the natural levees cause
backwater flooding of relatively developed areas otherwise protected by river levees.
Colonial laws in 1728 and 1743 required landowners to build and maintain levees
along their properties fronting the river. By 1763 these stretched 50 miles above thecity (Colton 2005). By the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, artificial levees
extended from as far north as the Red River to below New Orleans along the westbank and from Baton Rouge to below New Orleans on the east bank. Still, there
were occasional urban inundations during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century due to breaches in the levees fronting the city or its suburbs or resulting
from crevasses farther upriver that filled the backswamp and inundated the city fromthe rear. The most notable example was the 1849 crevasse at Sauvé Plantation that40

D. F. Boesch

displaced 12,000 of New Orleans’ 116,000 residents, the city’s worst flood until
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Campanella 2008).
Nonetheless, the increasing effectiveness of artificial levees along the lower riverprovided security that allowed expanded development of New Orleans and acrossthe river along the west bank. Paradoxically, it also elevated the threat of river flooding by reducing outlets for floodwaters either over the levees or through naturalchannels, thus raising the stage of the river for a given flow rate. This realization
initiated a nearly century-long debate over whether flood protection should continue
to rely on a levee-only strategy or also incorporate floodways to lower the riverlevels (Barry 1997).
This debate came to a head following the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927
that inundated 26,000 square miles from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf, displacing ahalf-million people and threatening New Orleans (Barry 1997). The Flood Control
Act of 1928 shifted policies from levees- only to include not only massive levees
and floodwalls but also control structures and spillways, all under the responsibilityof the federal government. Today, high stages in the lower Mississippi are constrained by opening the Bonnet Carré Spillway, sending water to Lake Pontchartrain,or the West Atchafalaya or Morganza floodways, sending water down the
Atchafalaya Basin.
As human settlements expanded from along the Mississippi River, across the
Atchafalaya Basin to the land of the Attakapas in southwestern Louisiana, and down
the bayous of the Mississippi Deltaic Plain, occasional river floods also threatened
them. Settlements along Bayou Teche were often flooded, particularly during the1927 flood (Bernard 2016). Bayou Lafourche carried a portion of the Mississippi
flow until it was dammed in 1904. However, there are only modest, if any, artificial
levees along these waterways; flooding has been mitigated through various flow
control structures.
As development began to extend into the backswamps, canals and levees wereconstructed to facilitate drainage. Eventually, this required the removal of rainwaterby perpetually operated pumps. The dewatering of the highly organic soils of theseformer swamps resulted in the loss of soil volume due to oxidation and enhanced
subsidence (Colten 2005; Dixon et al. 2006; Campanella 2008). Consequently,
much of the inhabited area of New Orleans and its suburban parishes lies below sea
level, although that land was originally at or slightly above sea level when development began. Similar loss in elevation occurred where there were failed attempts todrain wetlands for conversion to agricultural polders. The resulting urban and agricultural bowls became more susceptible to rainfall-driven flooding and reliant onlarge-capacity pumps that can keep up with heavy rainfall.
Even before wetland drainage and development, bald cypress and other swamp
and bottomland trees were mostly cut down for timber. The loss of tree cover, coupled with drainage and navigation canals (such as the Carondelet and New Basincanals through which commodities were transported into New Orleans), increased
the susceptibility of urban areas to winds, tidal incursions, and storm surges. Manyof these older canals were filled in or fitted with gates to reduce the risk of flooding
resulting from tidal and storm surges; however, massive navigational channels wereconstructed perpendicular to the coast during the latter half of the twentieth century

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

41

(Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet or MRGO, Houma
Navigation Canal, and Calcasieu Ship Channel to Lake Charles). They have hastened saltwater intrusion and the resulting loss of cypress swamps and facilitatedpropagation of tropical storm surges toward population centers distant from thecoast (Freudenburg et al. 2009b).

2.2.3

Broader Coastal Deterioration

The area of land, including wetlands, in the coastal zone of Louisiana more or lesscontinuously expanded after sea level stabilized about 7000 years ago. Surely, abandoned delta lobes subsided and eroded, but new lands created in newly active delta
lobes countered the resulting losses. The Chenier Plain lost ground when easterndelta lobes were most active but gained ground when the river switched it course to
the west. The multi-millennial trend in slow net land gain was dramatically reversed
during the twentieth century, with best estimates of land losses during the late 1970sof 32 square miles per year (83 km2/y), now slowed to 11 square miles per year
(28 km2/y). Altogether, over 2000 square miles of land were lost between 1932 and2016 (Couvillion et al. 2017).
Changes in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin are responsible for some of
the losses. The present Balize Delta is perched on the edge of the continental shelfand deposits much of its terminal load of alluvial sediments into deep waters of the
Gulf of Mexico, bypassing the coastal zone where these sediments could be held in
wetlands and on shorelines. Erosion associated with land clearing within the Basin
during European expansion increased the river’s sediment load during the nineteenth century, but then dams constructed throughout the catchment by the middleof the twentieth century trapped sediments upstream. That, coupled with improved
soil conservation practices, has resulted in a reduction by half of the suspended sediment of the lower Mississippi since the 1950s (Meade and Moody 2010; Heimann
et al. 2011) to loads probably less than those occurring when major delta lobes werebeing built (Chamberlain et al. 2018). More of the combined river flow began totravel down through the Atchafalaya Basin after Henry Shreve cleared the Great
Raft of logs clogging the Red and Atchafalaya rivers in the 1830s. This extensive
basin trapped a large share of the riverine sediments transported such that a newdelta did not begin to emerge in Atchafalaya Bay until 1973 (Piazza 2014).
Additionally, constraining the flow of the lower Mississippi with its channel by
effective flood protection levees and closure of distributary channels almost all theway to its mouth have prevented the broad contribution of riverine sediments to thesubsiding wetlands and shallow waters. Indeed, this was foreseen back as far as
1897, when an article on the Mississippi River Delta published in the National
Geographic (Corthell 1897) stated: “no doubt the great benefit to the present andtwo or three following generations accruing from a complete system of absolutely
protective levees excluding the flood waters entirely from the great areas of thelower delta country, far outweighs the disadvantages to future generations from thesubsidence of the Gulf delta lands below the level of the sea and their gradual aban-

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D. F. Boesch

donment due to this cause.” Unfortunately, we have already reached the fourth generation without a Plan B.
In addition to changes in the supply and distribution of sediment subsidies
required to sustain the coastal plain landscapes, other human activities have resulted
in land, and particularly wetland, losses. These include the kind of wetland “reclamation” and dredge and fill activities that caused wetland losses elsewhere, butparticularly notable in Louisiana have been the extensive dredging of canals throughthe coastal wetlands. This includes not only the larger canals constructed for commercial or industrial navigation mentioned earlier but also myriad smaller canals
mainly dredged for access to drilling sites and laying pipelines associated with oil
and gas production. Dredged canals were seldom backfilled and generally do not fillin naturally by themselves. The spoil banks left interfere with the tidal water-level
fluctuations needed for healthy, accreting wetland soils. The wetland losses associated with these indirect hydrological effects may be several times greater than the
direct dredge and fill effects, potentially accounting for most of the observed wetland loss (Turner 1997), although this has been questioned (Day et al. 2000).
Independent estimates suggest that the net effect of oil and gas canals has been
responsible for at least 30% and possibly 50% of the wetland losses during the second half of the twentieth century (Penland et al. 1996). Needless to say, these estimates were strongly contested by the oil and gas industry, and the industry’s
responsibility has been caught up in political debates and judicial cases concerning
liability for the costs of addressing the coastal wetland crisis.
Scientific evidence is also compelling that withdrawals of oil, gas, and associatedbriny water have increased subsidence rates and thus wetland loss rates in the vicinity of shallow oil and gas fields, such as those in Terrebonne Parish (Morton et al.
2006). The slowdown in fluid withdrawals from these old fields may be the principal
cause of the reduction in the rate of subsidence as evidenced in the Grand Isle tidegauge record (Kolker et al. 2011). Similarly, the substantial reduction in new oil andgas canal dredging may have contributed to the lower rates of coastal wetland loss
in recent decades (Couvillion et al. 2017).
In aggregate, the multiple consequences of human activities have resulted in deltaic deterioration over less than a century that would take a millennium due to natural processes, such as subsidence, delta lobe abandonment, and erosion due to winds
and hurricanes. After the scale and rapidity of coastal wetland loss became apparent
in the early 1980s, a succession of plans and programs were developed to slow, if
not reverse, the losses. The primary motivation was the restoration of the uniquecoastal environments and the important natural resources they produce. Protectionof coastal communities from flood risks proceeded on a separate, and sometimes
competitive, or even antagonistic, track. The disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina
and Rita in 2005 made it clear that deterioration of coastal environments had
increased storm surge risks and threatened the very existence of many coastal communities. This realization has required a more integrated and simultaneous approachto planning and implementation of the protection of society and restoration of theenvironment (Day et al. 2007). Projections of future land losses (Fig. 2.3) andincreased flood risks as coastal landscapes continue to degrade (Fig. 2.4) haveprompted the integrated planning discussed in Sect. 2.6.

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

43

Fig. 2.3 Predicted land change by 2067 along the Louisiana coast. (Land change data retrieved
from the Coastal Restoration & Protection Authority [CPRA]; base map courtesy of Esri, HERE,
Garmin, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS user community)

Fig. 2.4 Predicted inundation depths along the Louisiana coast resulting from a 100-year storm in
2067. (Flood depth data retrieved from CPRA Master Plan Data Viewer)

2.3
2.3.1

Extreme Weather Risks
South Louisiana’s Climate

Beyond the risks of flooding from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, there are
extreme weather risks associated with coastal Louisiana’s climate. South Louisiana
has a humid subtropical climate in large part due to the influence of the warm Gulf
of Mexico. It has long, hot, humid summers and short, mild winters. Average annual
rainfall increases from west to east, from 57 inches (145 cm) in Lake Charles to 64

44

D. F. Boesch

inches (163 cm) in New Orleans. Rainfall is prevalent during all months, with somewhat higher precipitation in the summer and winter. In summer the prevailing southerly winds provide moist, subtropical weather often favorable for afternoon
thunderstorms, sometimes resulting in flooding risks caused by extreme rainfall.
Typically, the most extreme rainfall (as much as 20 inches in a day) has been
associated with tropical storms. Even greater rainfall amounts (40–60 inches)
occurred in the Houston area when Hurricane Harvey stalled offshore in late summer of 2017 (van Oldenborgh et al. 2017). A similarly stalled depression dumped up
to 31 inches of rain in the Amite and Comite river basins near Baton Rouge just ayear earlier (van der Wiel et al. 2017). The devastation of these two flood events
acted as a wake-up call that, in addition to river floods and tropical storm surges,
Gulf Coast communities might be increasingly vulnerable to more extreme rainfall
events caused by global warming. The connection with climate change is discussed
later but has called into question the adequacy of existing floodplain managementand drainage infrastructure for present and future conditions of extreme precipitation. Areas under forced drainage are particularly vulnerable. In August 2017 almost
10 inches of rain resulted in extensive flooding, damage, and inconvenience in New
Orleans, which worsened because some of the city’s drainage pumps were offline
and the drains and catch basins had not be adequately maintained.
Extreme temperatures also pose both social and environmental risks. Historically,
New Orleans experiences an average of 75 days per year with temperatures 90 °F orabove. Prolonged heat waves or very warm and humid conditions that coincide withpower outages caused by tropical storms, such as happened in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina, pose very serious human health risks. Periods of very hot anddry conditions have been associated with sudden dieback of salt marsh, the so-­called Brown Marsh phenomenon that affected over 100,000 ha of salt marsh in theMississippi Deltaic Plain in the year 2000 (Visser et al. 2002). On the other hand,
hard freezes during the winter can kill or stress black mangrove shrubs that characterize some tidal wetlands very near the Gulf of Mexico. Conversely, expansion ofmangroves into salt marsh vegetation has been observed following a succession ofyears without killing freezes (Perry and Mendelssohn 2009).

2.3.2

Tropical Cyclones

Of course, coastal Louisiana is notoriously at risk from the storm surges and damaging winds of tropical cyclones, including depressions, tropical storms, and hurricanes. As was mentioned earlier, the first residents of New Orleans were introduced
to the ferocity of a hurricane just 4 years after the city’s founding. Over the periodof record, an average of about one tropical storm or hurricane per year met landfall
along the Louisiana coast (Roth 2010), but there have been periods where there arenone (recently 2014, 2015 and 2016) and other years where have been two or morein a year. The occurrence of two powerful storms each in 2005 (Katrina and Rita)
and in 2008 (Gustav and Ike) is etched in the memory of many south Louisiana
residents.

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

45

A strong hurricane hit New Orleans in 1837. While it flooded marshes adjacentto Lake Pontchartrain, the city itself was buffered from the storm surge because of
the largely intact marshes and swamps separating it from the lake, except around thetwo navigation canal basins (Campanella 2008). Another notable hurricane struck
the Isles Derniers in Terrebonne Parish in 1856, killing more than 218 vacationers
enjoying the relief of beach breezes without any warning of the approaching storm(Dixon 2009). Another hurricane in 1893 killed more than 2000 residents ofCheniere Caminada, between Grand Isle and Port Fourchon. Survivors abandoned
that settlement, moving north to other communities farther up Bayou Lafourche(Brasseaux and Davis 2017).
In 1947 a late summer hurricane struck New Orleans with over 100-mile-per-­hour winds, pushing modest storm surges inundating outlying areas to the east andin Jefferson Parish (Roth 2010). In response to this storm and one the following
year, there was additional levee construction along the Lake Pontchartrain shore andadjacent marshes. In June 1957, Hurricane Audrey came ashore near the Sabine
Pass, creating a 12-foot storm surge that destroyed the town of Cameron, causing
damage 25 miles inland and killing 526 people in Louisiana alone.
In 1965, Hurricane Betsy had its landfall at Grand Isle with 160-mile-per-hourwinds. Facilitated by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the recently completed
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, its large storm surge reached Lake Pontchartrain andbreached floodwalls to inundate much of the Gentilly, the Ninth Ward of New
Orleans, and the neighboring suburbs in St. Bernard Parish. In response, Congressenacted the Flood Control Act of 1965 that put the federal government in the business of storm protection by raising and constructing levees and strengthening floodwalls to provide Category 3-level storm protection (Campanella 2008). Now
protected, areas of New Orleans East subsequently experienced an explosive growth
in residences and businesses, in a “levee effect” that paradoxically increases futuredamages by luring homebuyers into floodplains (Freudenburg et al. 2009a). Despite
the protection by levees, the newly developed areas were not protected adequatelyfrom interior flooding due to poorly designed drainage (Baxter 2014).
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had effects that in many ways mirrored those of Betsy,
with a massive storm surge on the east side of the river assisted by the navigation
canals and meeting little resistance from the by now nearly nonexistent cypresses
swamps and deteriorated marshes. Post-Betsy levees in St. Bernard Parish and New
Orleans East were overtopped, and floodwalls failed along the Inner Harbor
Navigation Canal and the ungated drainage outfall canals penetrating into the city.
This inundated not only the Ninth Ward, including post-Betsy developments in New
Orleans East, and St. Bernard Parish but also the 80% of the city beyond the highground along the Mississippi River (McQuaid and Schleifstein 2006). Because of
the extent, persistence and devastation of the saltwater flooding and loss of power
and other services, most New Orleans residents had to relocate away from the city.
Many never returned. Altogether, 1836 people died directly as a result of Hurricane
Katrina (Bevan et al. 2008), 1577 of them in Louisiana, and Katrina’s total property
losses have been estimated at $125 billion (Vigdor 2008).

46

D. F. Boesch

There is a very voluminous literature on the events, effects, causes, responses,
and lingering impacts of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. To the audience of thisvolume, I recommend books by the veteran reporters McQuaid and Schleifstein(2006) and the deeply experienced social scientists Freudenburg, Grambling, Laska,
and Erikson (2009a). Both books emphasize that the disaster was as much human-­caused as natural.
Less than a month after Katrina in 2005, a second highly powerful storm struck
coastal Louisiana when Hurricane Rita came ashore near the Texas border. It caused
major damage to communities in Cameron Parish and elsewhere along the southwest Louisiana coast, damaged freshwater wetlands in the Chenier Plain by inundating them with saltwater, and resulted in storm surge felt along the entire Louisiana
coast. Some areas affected by Katrina were flooded again.
During September 2008 Hurricane Gustav came ashore in Terrebonne Parish,and Hurricane Ike had its landfall near the mouth of Galveston Bay just 2 weeks
later, flooding and re-flooding many coastal Louisiana communities from Cameron
to Plaquemines parishes. Two million people evacuated from south Louisiana inadvance of Gustav’s arrival, with its storm surge even splashing over newly installed
floodwalls in eastern New Orleans.
During the decade of 2000s, Louisiana experienced the effects of a record numberof tropical cyclones, including six hurricanes and six tropical storms. These disasters,
particularly the Hurricane Katrina disaster, prompted national and regional responses
to strengthen storm surge protection and to integrate protection with the rehabilitation of the degrading landscape. These responses are reviewed in the next two sections, starting first with the congenital Louisiana challenge of flood protection.

2.4
2.4.1

Flood Protection and Its Limits
Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers

The lower Mississippi River flood protection system developed after the Great
Mississippi River Flood of 1927 has remained secure and effective despite somechallenges. The biggest test came during the 1973 flood when Old River Control
Structure was very close to failing when a scour hole developed under the Low Sillstructure, causing part of the structure to collapse.
That year the Corps of Engineers opened the nearby Morganza Floodway for the
first time since its construction in 1954, and up to 300,000 cubic feet per second(8500 m3/s) of flow was diverted down the Atchafalaya Basin to reduce the flood
risks for Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Morganza Floodway was not opened
again until 2011, when up to 173,000 cubic feet per second (4900 m3/s) of flow wasdiverted. Opening the Morganza Floodway was also seriously considered in 2017.
The Corps has had to open the Bonnet Carré Spillway more frequently after
Hurricane Katrina than was typical since it was built in 1934: in 2008, 2011, 2016,2018, and 2019 (twice).

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

47

Whether more extreme Mississippi River flows will be experienced with thechanging climate remains to be seen, but multiple lines of evidence indicate that
artificial channelization upstream has been the predominant cause of the amplification of flood magnitudes over the past century (Munoz et al. 2018). As thePlaquemines-Balize Delta rapidly subsides at rates exceeding 1 cm per year and thelevel of the Gulf rises, the elevation gradient of the river decreases, slowing flows
and inducing sedimentation that further constrains the channel cross-section (Blumand Roberts 2009; Little and Biedenharn 2014). Conversely, because of the diminished elevation gradient, higher storm surges from the Gulf can propagate farther
upstream.
During Hurricane Katrina, storm surges overtopped not only the levees intended
to protect lower riverside communities in Plaquemines Parish all the way to Venicefrom hurricane storm surges but also the taller levees protecting from river flooding.
With continued subsidence and accelerating sea-level rise, the ability to protectthese lower river communities will diminish. The iconic bird-foot distributary system that has characterized the mouth of the Mississippi River over the last 500 years
will at some point cease to exist, thus requiring the engineering of a new navigational access to America’s great inland waterway. Already, an increasing proportionof the river’s flow is being lost above the head of the passes that constitute the toesof the bird’s foot, complicating the challenge of maintaining the main navigational
entrance by high-velocity flows.
While planning for the eventuality of a new navigational entrance to the river has
been put off by the Corps of Engineers and State pending completion of scientificand engineering investigations of lowermost river, a design competition called
Changing Course (2016) produced some intriguing concepts, all of which would be
expensive and require substantial changes in where and how people live downriverfrom New Orleans.

2.4.2

Greater New Orleans

Informed by extensive forensic analyses of Hurricane Katrina, the Corps ofEngineers launched an ambitious effort to repair and enhance the flood protection
system for greater New Orleans with a network of storm surge levees, strengthened
floodwalls, surge barriers, and pumps. Constructed at a cost of $14.5 billion, thesystem is designed to provide near-complete protection from 100-year storm surge
events and to significantly reduce flooding from a 500-year event. The levees were
designed to be resilient in that they would not wash away as they did during Katrina,
thus overtopping would only last a few hours rather than days. The new system
includes a massive barrier east of the city to block storm surges coming from Lake
Borgne and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet(MRGO). MRGO was also closed to traffic and an armored, earthen dam placed
across it.

48

2.4.3

D. F. Boesch

Exurban Coastal Regions

The exurban areas around greater New Orleans and smaller cities throughout coastal
Louisiana have not been afforded that same level of protection. Storm surge from
Hurricane Isaac in 2012 raised water levels in Lake Pontchartrain, causing flooding
in parts of LaPlace, upriver from New Orleans, and Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain.
Many former residents of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish had moved to thesecommunities after Hurricane Katrina and were flooded a second time. Extensions oflevees, floodwalls, and gates to enhance the protection of communities along theeast bank of the Mississippi from Lake Pontchartrain storm surge and communities
on the west bank from Barataria Basin storm surge are proposed, but only one has
been funded after decades of seeking funding, a $760-million project to protect theeast bank of St. John the Baptist Parish and parts of neighboring St. Charles and St.
James parishes (Bacon-Blood 2018). Even more expensive are the Morganza-to-­the-Gulf system and the Lake Pontchartrain Barrier discussed in the next section onprotection and restoration planning.

2.5
2.5.1

Coastal Protection and Restoration Planning
Evolution of Comprehensive Planning

Although there had been some earlier legislative or policy efforts to address thedegradation of Louisiana’s coastal environments, public and political attention to
the problem began to be galvanized with the 1980 assessment that the state may belosing as much as 50 square miles per year of its coastal lands (Gagliano et al.
1981). In 1990, Louisiana members of Congress succeeded in enacting the Coastal
Wetland Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) that produces a relatively modest, but steady, source of dedicated funding for wetland restoration. An
implementation plan was developed, but it was clear that a more comprehensive
framework was required that takes into account the dynamic geologic realities of
the Louisiana coast (Boesch et al. 1994). In 1998 a state task force produced a strategic plan entitled Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana (Louisiana
Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force 1998).
The year prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Corps of Engineers and the State released
the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) Ecosystem Restoration Study (USACE 2004),
and in 2007 the Congress authorized an overarching program that is, much like theEverglades Restoration Program, comprised of an array of separately authorized
projects and the first of the intended specific projects. However, the effects of
Hurricane Katrina made it clear that coastal restoration and storm surge protection
had henceforth to be evaluated, planned, and executed in consort (Day et al. 2007).
In response, the Corps of Engineers undertook the Louisiana Coastal Protection and
Restoration Study (USACE 2009), and the State formed the Coastal Protection and2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

49

Restoration Authority (CPRA). CPRA produced its first Coastal Master Plan in2007 and refined the plan in 2012 and again in 2017.

2.5.2

 ouisiana’s Comprehensive Master PlanL
for a Sustainable Coast

The latest Louisiana Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast (CPRA2017; also referred to as the Coastal Master Plan) was approved by the state legislature in June of 2017. The Coastal Master Plan is the product of an extraordinary
array of technical and economic analyses that considered varying assumptions
about future conditions, resource constraints, and a multitude of project proposals.
There was also extensive public consultation throughout its development and after
its release prior to its ratification.
The Coastal Master Plan is intended to serve as a blueprint for the State’s efforts
both in flood protection and ecosystem restoration over the next 50 years. The Plan
recognizes the reality of a smaller footprint of coastal lands in the future; thus “restoration” in this context is more of the rehabilitation of functions that sustain theecosystem and maintain as much land as possible than the return to some previous
condition. Implementation of the component projects would require $50 billion
both from state resources and through federal appropriations and partnerships. The
plan includes some 124 projects that could build or maintain more than 800 square
miles of land and reduce expected damages from storm surges and other flooding by
a purported $83 billion annually by the year 2067 and by more than $150 billion
over the full 50 years. These projects include restoration of barrier islands and headlands, sediment diversions from the two major rivers, hydrological restoration,
marsh creation using dredged sediment, ridge restoration, cultivating oyster barrier
reefs, shoreline protection, structural protection from floods, and nonstructural risk
reduction.
The Coastal Master Plan recognizes that not all needs are addressed by its current array of projects. More will be learned through further investigation and adaptive management of projects that are implemented. In particular, the Plan does notaddress the challenging questions related to lowermost Mississippi River management and how to maintain navigational access while using more of the river’s waterand sediment resources for restoration. Nor does it address changes in the allocationof river flow between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi river. These are issues of truly
national importance that will have to be resolved.
The 2017 Coastal Master Plan places greater emphasis on coastal communities,
incorporating understanding of “the cost of continued land loss and the potential
effects of restoration projects on local communities, local businesses, and regionaland national economies.” In particular, there is a greater focus on flood risk reduction and resilience, including different types of nonstructural options and policies tohelp communities become more resilient.

50

2.5.3

D. F. Boesch

Nonstructural Adaptation and Relocation

Nonstructural projects included in the Coastal Master Plan have the objective of
reducing risks by floodproofing nonresidential structures, raising the elevation ofresidential structures, and acquisition of residential property. Although it is anticipated that some funding would be provided, all nonstructural projects are considered voluntary. Nonresidential structures in areas with projected 100-year flood
depths of 3 feet or less could be renovated so they can be resistant to flood damage.
Residential structures located in areas with a projected 100-year flood depth of
between 3 and 14 feet could be elevated so that their lowest floors are higher thanprojected flood depths. Residential acquisition would be offered in areas where projected 100-year flood depths make elevation or floodproofing infeasible. The Coastal
Master Plan does not contain specific relocation projects.
Residential acquisition and relocation are obviously very sensitive issues. In
coastal Louisiana many residents have multigenerational ties to the places they liveand extensive contemporary family and social networks. Still, the reality is that
retreat of coastal inhabitants inland has been occurring for a long time, going backat least as far as the relocation of Cheniere Camanada families farther up Bayou
Lafourche after the 1893 hurricane. New Orleanians relocated north of Lake
Pontchartrain, to upriver communities, or to other parts of the country after
Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. Even less devastating tropical storms prompted
movement away from the coast as a result of property damage, insurance settlements, and the cost of complying with new flood insurance requirements. Can thisretreat be managed in a more considered manner that maintains the social fabric ofcommunities remaining in the coastal zone or as communities move en masse? Inparticular, can this be accomplished for marginalized communities that are particularly vulnerable but lack financial resources and political voice?
A current test case is the planned resettlement of a community of Biloxi-­
Chitimacha-­Choctaw people at Isle de Jean Charles, located on a shrinking ridge
south of Houma, to a new location 35 miles inland near Shriever. Subsidence attributable to oil and gas withdrawals had hastened the loss of land around Isle de JeanCharles (Morton et al. 2006). The Louisiana Office of Community Development ismanaging the resettlement with the assistance of a $48 million grant from the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with construction beginning in 2019. While the resettlement allows the prospect of keeping the community
intact, the residents, while retaining access, will be far removed from the fishing,oyster cultivation, and trapping that have been traditionally the basis of theirsustenance.
On a broader front, the State has created, from the same HUD resilience competition as the Isle de Jean resettlement, the Louisiana Strategic Adaptations for Future
Environments (LA SAFE) program to assist communities to take proactive steps foradaptation to the rapidly changing coastal environments and risks (Louisiana Officeof Community Development Disaster Recovery Unit 2017). The project expressly
accepts that some of the most vulnerable communities will need to contemplate2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

51

resettlement over the next 50 years and that migration is already occurring. Funding
thus far is for community engagement and co-design, and sources have not been
identified for the significant resources required for residential acquisitions andresettlement nor for the $6.1 billion specified in the Coastal Master Plan for nonstructural risk reduction.

2.5.4

Implementation and Controversies

Of course, the Coastal Master Plan will require the funding, public acceptance, legal
sufficiency, and engineering feasibility of its component projects. After Hurricane
Katrina the federal government provided over $14.5 billion to repair and improvestructural defenses against storm surge, and the State and local government haveinvested heavily in improving drainage. At the same time, despite the federal authorization of the LCA Ecosystem Restoration Program, only modest funding has been
made available for environmental restoration. However, as a result of payments,
penalties, and damage compensation stemming from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil
spill that occurred in 2010, the situation has now been reversed. Approximately $8
billion is likely to be provided from these sources for use in restoration in coastal
Louisiana over the next decade or so. As a consequence, the State is now advancing
planning and implementation of restoration projects without federal appropriations.
Meanwhile, even many Congressionally authorized structural protection projects
are slowed because of the lack of federal appropriations and limited state and local
funding.
Paramount among these authorized but underfunded structural protection projects is the Morganza-to-the-Gulf array of levees, floodwalls, gates, locks and pumpstations stretching 98 miles across Terrebonne Parish from to Gibson to Lockport.
Intended to protect population center around Houma, the project is proceeding
incrementally using State and local funding. At $8.3 billion, the Morganza-to-the-­Gulf protection system is the single most expensive project in the $50 billion Coastal
Master Plan. However, it confronts significant challenges with regard to the level ofrisk reduction that would be provided and the sustainability of wetlands enclosed by
the levees (Twilley et al. 2008), as well as the engineering feasibility and cost of
constructing significant earthen levees across the soft and subsiding substrates of
the Terrebonne Basin.
The Lake Pontchartrain Barrier at a cost of $2.4 billion faces its own challenges,
including the environmental effects of constraining tidal flows into Lake
Pontchartrain and increased storm surge likely to be felt along the Mississippi coastas storm surges are prevented from entering the lake. If structural protection projects are not completed, significant population centers around Houma and Slidell
would face increasing risks.
While the concept of coastal restoration enjoys substantial public support, individual projects face opposition from some members of the public or confront issues
raised in environmental reviews for permits. Prominent among these projects are

52

D. F. Boesch

diversions of sediment from the rivers to slow the loss and even build new wetlands
by recreating the processes that built the Mississippi Deltaic Plain in the first place.
Sediment diversions are thought by most coastal scientists to be foundational elements of any credible restoration strategy (Boesch et al. 1994; Day et al. 2007).
However, some shrimpers, oyster growers, and sport fishermen have raised opposition because the river flows would freshen brackish estuaries and change the distribution of targeted animals (Muth 2014). Local landowners and residents have raised
concerns about increased backwater flooding risks, and shipping interests have
objected to potential shoaling of shipping channels as river flows are reduced below
diversions.
Federal resource agencies have also raised concerns about the effects of estuarine
freshening on essential fish habitat and populations of protected bottlenose dolphins, despite the fact that the present estuarine bays are relatively fleeting features
resulting from coastal degradation and may be eventually converted to open Gulfwaters without intervention for restoration. Nonetheless, planning and engineering
for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion at Myrtle Grove are proceeding, armed
with funding from oil spill revenues, state political support, and federal commitments for fast-tracking of environmental permits.
Not only might sediment diversions from the river impact the interests of somestakeholders, but they also will likely take decades to build wetlands. Consequently,
there are strong proponents of marsh creation using dredged sediments. The costs ofmarsh creation projects in the Coastal Master Plan total an estimated $17.9 billionof the $50 billion total costs. Not only will funding be a limiting factor but also will
the supply of suitable sediment, at least for marsh creation projects located far fromthe resources of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. These will require long-­
distance pipelines, accessing sand resources from shoals on the continental shelf, or
dredging nearby bays, raising questions of the high energy as well as financial costs(Day et al. 2005). Furthermore, marshes created by dredged material require periodic renourishment with dredged sediment to counteract subsidence and relative
sea-level rise. Marsh creation may be accomplished more quickly than land building
by sediment diversions, but is less sustainable.

2.6
2.6.1

Climate Change as a Threat MultiplierChange Is Happening: Human-Caused and Dangerous

According to an overwhelming scientific consensus, global warming is occurring andis virtually all the result of human activities (USGCRP 2017). The six warmest years
on record, in terms of global mean annual temperature, have come in the decade of
the 2010s. Natural forces, such as solar activity, have played an inconsequential rolein the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century. At current rates of growthin emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, dangerous climatechanges would result before the end of this century, threatening the world’s

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone53

biodiversity, acidifying the oceans, amplifying extreme weather events, causing economic hardship, and accelerating sea-level rise to the extent that it would render
many low-lying islands and densely populated coastal regions uninhabitable.
These are mainstream scientific assertions (IPCC 2014; USGCRP 2017) that,while widely accepted around the world, are not as widely accepted within
Louisiana’s political leadership and the south Louisiana citizenry. There are various
reasons why this is the case, including perceived economic dependence on the fossil
fuel industry, mistrust in government solutions, resentment of the intellectual class,and the fear of cultural eclipse and economic decline about which sociologist Arlie
Russell Hochschild (2016) wrote in her book Strangers in Their Own Lands.
Enigmatically, she argues, those most at risk reject the needed solutions for thesereasons. Furthermore, even well-informed Louisianans perceive the current crises
as far more the result of natural processes and other human activities than of global
climate change in a distant future. In any case, the unwillingness to address the reality and causes of global climate change presents a significant challenge in how its
consequences can be brought into planning and action for coastal resilience incoastal Louisiana, both for the environment and for society.
While coastal Louisiana has long had to confront high rates of relative sea-level
rise as a result of subsidence, the oceans themselves began to rise beginning only inthe late nineteenth century (Kemp et al. 2011). The rise in global mean sea level
accelerated through the twentieth century (Dangendorf et al. 2017) and has averaged about 3 mm/year since 1993, when satellite-born altimeters have allowed us tomeasure the level of entire oceans (Nerem et al. 2018). In addition to the expansionof warming ocean waters and melting of glaciers, the melting of ice sheets perchedon Greenland and Antarctica is now contributing to global sea-level rise. Simply
projecting the acceleration of rate of rise observed in the satellite record would
result in a rise in global sea level of about 65 cm (2.1 feet) by 2100 compared with
2005. On top of subsidence, such a rise would be very challenging for the Louisiana
coast but, as will be discussed in the next section, should probably be regarded as
the minimum that will likely be experienced.
The scientific consensus at this time is that climate change is unlikely to increase
the frequency of tropical cyclones but is very likely to increase the intensity of thosethat do occur (Knutson et al. 2010). This may particularly be the case on the Gulf
Coast as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico continue to warm. A greater percentage
of hurricanes are likely to reach Category 4 or Category 5 level on the Safir-Simpson
scale. There are many other factors that will influence the trajectories of Atlantic
hurricanes, making it impossible to forecast whether the Louisiana coast will experience more or fewer in the coming decades, but those that do impact this coast willprobably become stronger.
Climate change also presents risk of increased flooding from extreme rainfall
events. Over the last century, precipitation has increased along the northern Gulf
Coast, both annually and in the summer (Kunkel et al. 2013). The frequency ofrainfall events of 1 inch or more is projected to increase by mid-century and, at thesame time, dry spells are likely to become more frequent.

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As mentioned earlier, climate change has been implicated in two record-­breaking
rainfall events and resulting floods, in the Louisiana deluge in the Baton Rouge areain August of 2016 and with Hurricane Harvey around Houston in 2017. Both eventsoccurred when low-pressure systems that developed in the Gulf of Mexico stallednear the coast – consistent with slowdown in tropical storm speeds that has been
linked to global warming (Kossin 2018) – allowing them to continue to draw energy
and moisture from the anomalously warm waters of the Gulf. Based on observational data and models, researchers found that an event like the Louisiana 2016
deluge is now likely to occur at least 40% more often than prior to the year 1900 andthat their precipitation intensity has increased by roughly 10% as a result of human-­caused climate change (van der Wiel et al. 2017). For the Houston flood, one study
estimated that the chances of observed precipitation accumulations had increased
by a factor of 3 and precipitation intensity increased by 15% (van Oldenborgh et al.
2017), while another placed these as a factor of 3.5 and 37%, respectively (Risser
and Wehner 2017).
While air temperatures in coastal Louisiana have not increased as much as manyother parts of the United States, warmer temperatures later this century are very
likely and will pose additional challenges to inhabitants of coastal Louisiana. While
there will be fewer killing freezes, an increase in the number of days with temperatures exceeding 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) is projected (Kunkel
et al. 2013). Cooling degree days (a measure of how much and for how long outside
air temperature is above 65 degrees Fahrenheit) are also projected to increase substantially, placing additional burdens on the poor who may have limited access to air
conditioning and on the well-being of the broader population when confronted bypower disruptions that result from major storms.

2.6.2

Avoiding the Unmanageable

At the end of 2015, virtually all nations of the world endorsed the United Nations
Paris Agreement, the guiding objective of which is to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities in order to keep global warming well below anincrease of 2 degrees Celsius in global mean temperature above preindustrial levels,with an ambition to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (Rogelj et al. 2016). We are atabout 1 degree Celsius above the preindustrial level today. The Paris Agreement
recognizes that substantial adaptation to the changing climate will be still required
but that as these levels of warming are exceeded, it will be very challenging forhuman society to adapt. In short, humankind must avoid the unmanageable, while
managing the unavoidable.
Limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius will require the rapid
reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions beginning very soon and reaching net
zero emissions by mid-century or soon thereafter (Figueres et al. 2017). Absent
dramatic breakthroughs in carbon capture and storage technologies, such large
and rapid emission reductions would necessitate a transition from a fossil fuel-based

2Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

55

economy far more quickly than the citizens and political leadership of south
Louisiana may be ready to consider. And yet the fundamental conundrum is thatsuch a global transition is as essential for the future habitation of coastal Louisiana
as it is for an imperiled Pacific island nation.
The existential threat to future habitation in coastal Louisiana is global sea-levelrise. First, keep in mind that the relative rate of sea-level rise there, half or more due
to subsidence, already poses substantial adaptation challenges. To its credit, the 2017
Coastal Master Plan considers three scenarios of environmental changes over the
next 50 years, representing sea-level rise (in addition to variable rates of subsidence)of 43, 63 and 83 cm by 2067 for the low, medium, and high scenarios (CPRA 2017).
Although the Plan does not link these scenarios to greenhouse emission pathways, it
should be obvious that the greater the greenhouse gas concentrations realized, thegreater the warming of the atmosphere and oceans and the greater the sea-level rise.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow through the century (theRepresentative Concentration Pathway 8.5 of the 2014 IPCC assessment), it isincreasingly apparent that a very substantial and unstoppable loss of Antarctic ice
would probably be triggered with dramatic effects on sea level later in the twenty-­
first century and beyond (Kopp et al. 2017). This would result in a range of possible
sea-level rise by the end of the century that includes the 200 cm (6.6 feet) by 2100
on which Coastal Master Plan’s high scenario is based. That would be just the
beginning, as the likely sea-level rise during the next century would range between
600 and 900 cm (20–30 feet). The Gulf of Mexico shoreline would retreat to where
it was 7000 years ago. Moreover, we would not be able to forecast this with great
certainty until it is too late to slow the rate of ice loss by reducing our emissions.
If, on the other hand, global society were to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement to keep the increase in global
mean temperature below 2 degrees Celsius (RCP 2.6), catastrophic loss of Antarctic ice
mass could be avoided. According to the recent probabilistic projections (Kopp et al.
2017), sea-level rise over the next 50 years would likely be less than what even the low
scenario of the Coastal Master Plan assumes and substantially less than the 198 cm by2100 on which scenario is based. In fact, there would be a 50/50 chance of sea-level rise
being less than 100 cm even in 2200, giving the embattled Louisiana coast a fighting
chance for adaptation that leads to “essential” social resilience (Laska 2012).

2.7

Implications for Social Resilience

2.7.1

Transient and Secular Disasters

The people, families, communities, and institutions of coastal Louisiana will continue to be confronted by transient disasters caused by river flooding, storm surges,
and deluges. Within limits, they have been proudly resilient in the past, but many
steps can yet be taken to improve social resilience in the future. However, now society is confronted with substantial secular (long duration) changes in the natural

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D. F. Boesch

environment and their attendant risks in the form of rapid coastal disintegration ofthis geologically young territory, compounded by global climate change. These“slow motion disasters” require a different kind of approach to social resilience, onethat fundamentally takes an intergenerational perspective but with substantialchanges even happening fast enough to be experienced within a lifetime.
Enhancing intergenerational social resilience will require that the people ofcoastal Louisiana have a greater awareness and acceptance of the biophysicalchanges that will be confronting them. They will have to understand the accommodations and solutions that are possible and their limits in order to effectively participate in civil society. The people of coastal Louisiana can no longer afford to remain“strangers in their own land” as Hochshield (2016) framed the dilemma. While
Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has expended considerable effort to engage the public and has secured political support for the Coastal
Master Plan to this point, much more extensive understanding by the public andincorporation of community concerns will be required. Because of the intergenerational nature of the challenge, there should be concerted efforts to raise the socio-­
environmental literacy of school children about their unique and dynamic coastal
landscape and how and why it is being altered, including by climate change.
Enhancing resilience to disasters during an era of rapid change will also requirea strategically developed capacity of natural and social scientists, engineers, designers and planners, and social workers. Higher education institutions should focus
faculty development and research and training programs with this in mind. New
kinds of boundary organizations (Cash et al. 2003) will have to evolve that linkknowledge with practice, transcend public and private enterprises, and engage both
citizens and decision makers.

2.7.2

Role of Natural Systems in Resilience

The concept of ecosystem services (Carpenter et al. 2009) has emerged with thegrowing recognition of the importance of natural environments to human well-­being. The values of coastal wetlands for protection from hurricane waves andstorm surges have been specifically assessed (Costanza et al. 2008; Barbier et al.
2013) and are among the many ecosystem services that support the socio-economy
of coastal Louisiana. The natural ecosystem resilience of coastal Louisiana isincreasingly recognized as an important contributor to social resilience.
Louisiana’s consecutive Coastal Master Plans have taken major steps in the right
direction by incorporating the benefits of coastal ecosystems in moderating wave
and storm surge risks and in integrating protection and restoration. There is clearlymuch more work to be done on this front for project-specific design and integration.
Future efforts will have to navigate the institutional obstacles regarding matching offunding sources, typically restricted to protection or to restoration, and coordination
among disparate responsible agencies.

2

Managing Risks in Louisiana’s Rapidly Changing Coastal Zone

2.7.3

57

Limiting Climate Change Inseparable from Adaptation

While not expressly linked to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, thesea-level rise rates embedded in the future scenarios of the Coastal Master Plan,
together with their logical extensions beyond 2067 as discussed earlier, make it
clear that the single most effective action to ensure the future well-being of people
in coastal Louisiana is the rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement. This is urgent: with each 5-year delay innear-term peaking of carbon dioxide emissions, sea level in 2300 would increase byan estimated 20 cm (Mengel et al. 2018). From the perspective of people desiring tolive in coastal Louisiana beyond the next 50 years, it is not an exaggeration to saythat effective mitigation to limit climate change is a sine qua non. The benefits ofmost of the protection and restoration we have undertaken or are planning over the
next 50 years would be rendered moot by 2 meters or more of sea-level rise. Climatechange adaptation and mitigation are not separate issues but must go hand in handin order to manage the unavoidable while avoiding the unmanageable.
Recognition of this reality by the public and political leadership in Louisiana isa challenging obstacle. Although there are some exceptions, many of those currently
in political leadership at the state and federal level are stationed somewhere between
denial (climate change is not happening or is mostly natural) and “lukewarmerism”(it will not be that bad or there is not much we can do about it). Improved publicawareness of the scientific realities and the technological possibilities will be
required to change this much.
Contributing to this reticence are concerns about impacts on jobs and the regional
economy of a phase out in the use of oil and gas as fuels. Production of petroleumhydrocarbons would still be required as feedstocks for chemicals and products thatsociety would use. Existing industrial and technological capacities could be useful
in developing renewable energy or in carbon sequestration in the vast deep saline
aquifers lying under the northern Gulf of Mexico (DeSilva et al. 2015). For example, the support structures for offshore wind turbines recently installed off Rhode
Island were built in an oil platform fabrication yard in Houma, Louisiana. Moving
away from energy and transportation systems that rely on fossil fuels also opens up
opportunities for creative approaches to coastal restoration and community resilience by the strategic brain trust mentioned above.

2.7.4

Defend, Adapt, or Relocate?

Difficult decisions are already here today regarding whether to structurally protect,
improve resilience where structural protection is infeasible, or relocate vulnerable
homes and communities (Bailey et al. 2014). Inclusive efforts that plan for the
future such as LA SAFE are critical, and there is much that social scientists cancontribute to and learn from these efforts and from planned relocations such as for58

D. F. Boesch

Isle de Jean Charles. After all, in coastal Louisiana the challenge is not just resilience to extreme weather events but also rational responses to substantial long-term
biophysical changes that ensure human well-being and sustain the sociocultural fabric of communities.

2.7.5

Coastal Louisiana as a Harbinger

The Deltaic and Chenier plains that characterize the Louisiana coastal zone differ inmany important ways from other coastal zones of the United States. They areyounger, exceptionally low lying, and generally subsiding more rapidly than most
coastal landforms. Yet, with relative sea-level rise accelerating and ocean storms
and extreme precipitation likely to intensify along most of US coasts, Louisiana
serves as a harbinger for the challenges to be faced in risk management for coastal
communities elsewhere.
From the increase in the frequency of high tide or so-called nuisance flooding,even on sunny days, in cities such as Atlantic City, Annapolis, Norfolk, Charleston,and Miami (Sweet et al. 2018), to the damages associated with the exceptional
storm surge of Superstorm Sandy (Halverson and Rabenhorst 2013), increased risks
to communities are more evident, and planning is beginning to take this into account.
Even California, which one does not usually think of having a low-lying coast, has
updated its sea-level rise guidance (California Natural Resources Agency 2018)
based on a rigorous scientific assessment (Griggs et al. 2017). With Louisiana’s still
massive, if underused, supplies of river-borne sediments, Louisiana might evenhave some advantages in contending with sea-level rise. South Florida, where huge
populations and economies are at risk, has no muddy rivers, and the porous limestone platform that underlies it can render earthen levees ineffective.
What coastal Louisiana is confronting today defines challenges surely to be
faced in other coastal regions around the globe. How can cities and towns contend
with more regular tidal water flooding, as well as greater storm surges, while at thesame time remove precipitation-driven stormwater? How can tidal wetlands bemaintained not only for their natural resource values but also as a buffer to storm
surges, during the coming period of more rapidly rising seas? How can state governments effectively integrate community hazard protection and coastal ecosystem restoration? How do communities and governments make rational and effective choices
among structural storm surge protection, nonstructural adaptation, and relocation?

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Part II

Climate Adaptation Challenges
and Solutions

Chapter 3

Connecting the Dots: The Origins,
Evolutions, and Implications of the Mapthat Changed Post-Katrina Recovery
Planning in New Orleans
Zachary Lamb

3.1

Introduction

On January 11, 2006, a little more than 4 months after the Hurricane Katrina-­
induced levee failures flooded New Orleans, the city’s major newspaper, the Times-­
Picayune, published a front-page story with the arresting headline, “4 MONTHSTO DECIDE”. Sub-headlines announced that the “City’s Footprint May Shrink”
and that “full buyouts proposed for those forced to move if the ‘hardest hit areas’
could not ‘prove viability’” (Donze and Russel 2006). Directly beneath these words
lay a map (Fig. 3.1) showing a sea of yellow over much of the city indicating theflood-damaged neighborhoods that would be subject to a proposed building permit
moratorium and therefore temporarily off-limits to rebuilding. The map showed six
areas of the city overlaid with solid bright green circles indicating areas designatedfor “future parkland” and 12 red-outlined zones identified for prioritized reconstruction. In text and in words, the map laid out a classification system for the reconstruction of New Orleans and the radical restructuring of land use in the city.
For thousands of displaced New Orleanians, scattered across the country, theseheadlines and this map represented a graphic manifestation of their worst fears oflosing their homes and the right to return to their neighborhoods. In both the popularpress and among the urban planning academy, the “green dot map,” as the newspaper’s map came to be known, occupies a near-mythical status for the role that it
played in changing the political landscape of post-Katrina planning in New Orleans.
The popularly understood story is that “with the publication of this map, entire
neighborhoods were instantly mobilized to protect their homes and communities
from environmental expropriation” (Fields 2009). The map was identified as a pivotal moment when “recovery planning power shifted decisively to neighborhood”based planning and away from a “heavy-handed” technocratic approach (Wooten
Z. Lamb (*)
Architecture and Urban Planning, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USAe-mail: zlamb@princeton.edu; zlamb@alum.mit.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_3

65

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Fig. 3.1 “The Green Dot Map” as published in the Times-Picayune, January 11, 2006. (© 2006
NOLA Media Group, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Times-Picayune &NOLA.com)3

Connecting the Dots: The Origins, Evolutions, and Implications of the Map…

672012). In the months and years after its publication, the map provided a unifying
enemy around which devastated neighborhoods could organize their resistance.
People spoke of their houses and neighborhoods being “green dotted,” wore green
dots made of paper plates around their necks at neighborhood rallies, and adopted
the color of the map’s dots in the logos of new community organizations (Wooten
2012; Nelson et al. 2007; Olshansky et al. 2010). Seven years after the map’s publication, the symbol retained such potency for the Broadmoor neighborhood (one of
the neighborhoods marked for “future parkland”) that, when the neighborhood’s
public library branch reopened in 2012, the coffee shop inside was defiantly christened the “The Green Dot Café.” While the intergovernmental power struggles andpolitics of early post-Katrina planning efforts have been well researched andreported (Olshansky et al. 2010; Nelson et al. 2007; Olshansky 2006), there has
been relatively little attention paid to the origins, evolution, and implications of the
map that is seen as playing such a pivotal role in this history.
The now infamous green dot map is widely regarded as having been the productof the Urban Planning Committee of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission(BNOBC), a group convened by then Mayor C. Ray Nagin in the fall of 2005 to set
the agenda for the city’s recovery. In fact, the map that appeared in the Times-­
Picayune that day in January 2006 was the newspaper staff’s synthesis and reinterpretation of maps and texts that the BNOBC presented in a press conference earlier
that same day. The maps and plans produced for the BNOBC by the landscape andplanning firm of Wallace, Roberts, and Todd were, in turn, substantially based on an
earlier report produced by a panel of national experts convened in November 2005
by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a national research and advocacy organizationthat is closely associated with the real estate development industry. Though thegreen dot map did become a powerful symbol, most discussions treat the map in the
abstract and take its catalytic power for granted. To better understand the role of the
map in reshaping the contours of post-Katrina decision-making, this chapter investigates where it came from, what power relations underlay its creation, what values
are expressed in its spatial classifications, and, finally, how the map and its reception
have shaped planning for water management in New Orleans in the years since.

3.2

Literature and Theoretical Context

Though the three primary documents of interest in the story of the green dot map
include only a single indirect reference to climate change (a reference to “relative
sea level rise” in the ULI report (Urban Land Institute 2005)), this chapter treats theepisode as an attempt at de facto climate adaptation. The Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate adaptation as “The process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects” by seeking “to moderate or avoid
harm”(IPCC 2014). As such, the early planning efforts to restructure New Orleans’
post-Katrina urban land uses to reduce flood vulnerability clearly meet the IPCC’s
definition of adaptation. Viewed as an attempt at climate adaptation, the68

Z. Lamb

development and dissemination of the green dot map provide insights into challenges facing more and more cities around the world as they attempt to adapt their
historically evolved urban patterns in the face of mounting flood hazards. To develop
a fuller understanding of how the green dot map episode might inform future urban
climate adaptation, this paper draws from a broad body of literature including work
on climate change adaptation, natural hazards research, and critical cartography.

3.2.1

Land Use Planning for Hazard Mitigation

Following pioneering work by geographer Gilbert White, natural hazards scholars
from a range of disciplines have produced research on the social and political components of vulnerability to flooding and other natural hazards (White 1945; Wisneret al. 2004; Cutter et al. 2003; Adger 2006). Planning scholars have contributed
significantly to exploring how various tools for land use planning and regulation canplay a role in reducing hazard exposure (Burby 1998; Burby et al. 2000; Godschalket al. 1998). Much of this work has advocated for more hazard-informed land use
patterns to reduce exposure through a range of federal, state, and municipal policy
and planning tools (Olshansky and Kartez 1998; Burby et al. 1999; Beatley 2012).
Using Burby et al.’s (1999) schema, the green dot proposal represented a shift in
New Orleans’ flood hazard mitigation strategy, away from the previous model combining “risk reduction” via levees and building elevation and “risk sharing” via
insurance and toward a new model emphasizing “risk elimination,” through targetedbuyouts and green space preservation in some of the city’s most low-lying
neighborhoods.
While the natural hazards literature does consider the ways in which planning fornatural hazard mitigation can facilitate consensus building (Burby et al. 2000), it
largely does not focus on the politics of disaster or land use change or on the distributive implications of such processes. The uneven production and distribution ofvulnerability are at the core of much research in human ecology and political ecology (Collins 2008; Pelling 1999, 2003; Gustafson 2015; Hewitt 1983; Wisner et al.
2004). Vale and Campanella’s The Resilient City explicitly assesses the political anddistributive issues that shape how cities recover from disasters (Vale and Campanella2005).
Of particular interest in this case, authors from a number of different perspectives have addressed the question of to what extent substantial changes in land use
are possible or desirable during post-disaster “windows of opportunity”? Much of
the early natural hazards planning literature regarded such “windows” as ideal times
for “targeting households and business firms to retrofit or relocate”(Olshansky and
Kartez 1998). Vale and Campanella, with their emphasis on the politics of resilience, are skeptical of the possibility of substantial change after disasters, observing
that it is very rare for post-disaster cities to adopt “visionary new city plans aimed

3

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69

at correcting long-enduring deficiencies or limiting the risk of future destruction”(Vale and Campanella 2005). Like Naomi Klein, who warns against “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2008), Vale and Campanella go further, questioning the desirabilityof dramatic post-disaster change given the track record of public and private interests “using devastation as a cover for more opportunistic agendas yielding less obvious public benefit” (Vale and Campanella 2005). Writing in the wake of the
post-Katrina levee failures, Berke and Campanella (2006) suggest something of a
middle ground, arguing that “Hurricane Katrina opened a window of opportunity
for creating more resilient communities” but pointing out that taking advantage ofsuch windows may require pre-disaster planning that actively seeks out the viewpoints of often marginalized communities (Berke and Campanella 2006). This tension – between viewing post-disaster planning as a “window of opportunity” forurban restructuring and concerns over post-disaster opportunism and land grabbing – is central to understanding the political conflict arising from the divergent
readings of the green dot map.

3.2.2

 limate Change Adaptation Through Land Use
C
Planning

The recent increase in critical attention to climate adaptation has invited renewed
attention to the relationship between flood hazards and land use planning. Whereas
many previous efforts to reduce flood vulnerability through land use planning wereseen as “fighting the last war” by reacting to the most recent disaster event(Godschalk et al. 1998), climate adaptation planning holds promise in inviting
approaches to land use planning that are more holistic, forward-looking, and cross-­scalar (Adger et al. 2005; Hallegatte and Corfee-Morlot 2011). With little substantial progress from higher levels of government, public and private entities acting at
the local and regional levels have taken the lead in local adaptation planning inmany areas around the word (Measham et al. 2011; Rosenzweig 2010). Land use
planning and regulation are central to many climate adaptation efforts, and they are
primarily the responsibility of local government entities in most jurisdictions(Measham et al. 2011). Research on climate adaptation planning has also focusedconsiderable attention on the equity implications of hazard mitigation and otherforms of adaptation (Wilson 2006; Hamin and Gurran 2009; Paavola and Adger
2006; Bulkeley et al. 2013). The concerns of poor and marginalized populations ofcities are too often underrepresented in climate adaptation planning given the disproportionate vulnerability of such groups to the impacts of climate change(Measham et al. 2011; Bulkeley 2006). Researchers have found that socially andeconomically vulnerable groups are often directly and indirectly harmed by adaptation efforts (Anguelovski et al. 2016; Sovacool et al. 2015). A range of efforts,
including those labeled community-based adaptation, have sought to increase

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Z. Lamb

participation and inclusion in climate planning and adaptation (Aylett et al. 2010;
Archer et al. 2014; Paavola and Adger 2006).
Adger et al. (2005) proposed four key normative criteria for assessing climate
adaptation efforts: effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and legitimacy (Adger et al.
2005). These four criteria provide a useful lens through which to understand theconflict which developed surrounding the green dot map, in which different actors
placed radically different levels of importance on each of the four criteria.

3.2.3

 lanning Representation, Maps, and the ShapingPof Social and Spatial Reality

This paper takes as a starting assumption that “maps are knowledge claims that are
inherently political”(Kim 2015). This is also the premise at the heart of emerging
studies of “critical cartography.” Critical cartography includes both analytical andprojective tools for questioning the underlying assumptions and power relations
behind cartography and developing new ways of using those tools to support alternative claims to knowledge and power (Crampton and Krygier 2005). Arthur
Robinson focused early attention on how maps function as communication devices
that operated through three distinct but related phenomena: sender (mapmaker),
medium (map), and receiver (map user) (Robinson and Petchenik 1976; Pickles
2003; Crampton 2001). In “Deconstructing the Map” (1989), J.B. Harley applies
the tools of social critique (Foucault and Derrida principally) to cartography (Harley1989). Harley’s work primarily focused on exposing the socially constructed natureof maps and their embeddedness in the power relations of their place and time.
While Harley’s analysis was largely historical and principally focused on the use ofmaps as tools of domination, subsequent scholars have gone beyond identifying
where maps come from to examine and critique how maps operate to shape social
life and power relations (Pickles 2003; Turnbull et al. 1993; Wood and Fels 2009;
Crampton and Krygier 2005). This second generation of scholars developed a more
complex view of power as “multivocal” and in a constant state of contestation(Pickles 2003). Much of this later critique draws heavily on the critical tools developed by Derrida, Habermas, and Barthes and tends to see maps as narratives or texts
that must be read (Crampton 2001). Wood and Fels widened the frame of analysis
to consider what they labeled the “paramap,” or “everything that surrounds andextends a map” (Wood and Fels 2009). This paramap material includes what theycall “perimap,” the titles, labels, charts, and borders that frame and situate a map. It
also includes “epimap” materials such as any texts or articles to which maps areappended (Wood and Fels 2009).
To date, there has been relatively little attention paid to critical assessment ofmaps, like the green dot map, which are intended as projective tools for reshaping
land use according to changing hazard conditions. While Wood and Fels (2009) do
address what they call maps of “threatening nature,” they focus more on popular3Connecting the Dots: The Origins, Evolutions, and Implications of the Map…

71

cartography of hazards than on hazard assessment maps or maps for land use planning. In several books, Mark Monmonier has analyzed how the representational
tools used in mapping floodplains and coastlines shape perceptions of hazard vulnerability (Monmonier 1997, 2014; Monmonier 2008). However, compared to othercritical cartographers, Monmonier tends to deemphasize the political implicationsof mapping and representation.
Maps are among the most important tools of analysis and communication usedby planners and urban designers. John Forester’s Planning in the Face of Power(Forester 1988) and subsequent work on “communicative planning” (Healey 2012;
Innes 1995) highlight the ways in which planners control communication and information to shape power relations. Scholars have long recognized that visual representation used in planning can powerfully shape how practitioners, policy-makers,
and the public perceive of planning challenges and proposals. Lisa Peattie analyzed
and critiqued the “representations of reality” deployed by planners and other professionals in planning Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela (Peattie 1987). Like Peattie,
Raphael Fischler recognized that planners “understand and represent the world incertain ways” that are “necessarily selective and partial” (Fischler 1995). Annette
Kim has used the interpretive strategies of critical cartography to analyze how maps
and other visual representations created by planners and designer reflected andshaped changing conceptualizations of property in Ho Chi Minh City (Kim 2012,2015). These and other analyses of visual representation in planning provide usefulprecedents for interpreting the production and popular reception of the green dot
map.
While much of the literature treats critical cartography as an interpretive activity
undertaken by scholars to decode the hidden social meaning and politics of maps,
some recent work has articulated a variant labeled “lay critical cartography” (Cidell
2008) that shifts the locus of critical analysis to consider explicitly the “social lifeof maps, the political responses they elicit, and the political possibilities they enable
and disable” (Gustafson 2015). Seth Gustafson, a geographer rooted in urban political ecology, has considered the lay critical cartography of landslide hazard maps inNorth Carolina which ignited intense political opposition from pro-development
forces (Gustafson 2015). Such analysis of how a map “provokes new political activities and environmental changes” is a useful precedent in making sense of the
response to green dot map.

3.3

Methods

The green dot map came to hold tremendous symbolic power because of the immediate context of its production, the chain of interpretation and reinterpretation fromwhich it emerged, and the broader social and historical conditions into which it was
projected. In seeking to make sense of this broader context, this chapter traces thecreation of the map through three different generations, each of which took different
approaches to classifying space and communicating through text and graphics. This

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Z. Lamb

chapter uses critical cartography and lay critical cartography to analyze the green
dot map and its precedents. It seeks to unearth the “design politics” of the maps toreveal how “social and political preferences are expressed and manipulated” (Vale2013). As such, it considers how the maps’ graphics as well as the “paramap” materials, such as the texts within and surrounding the maps, convey the values of the
makers. The analysis of each iteration of the map will address what Bowker and Star
call the “practical politics of classifying,” by which the maps “arriv(e) at categories”
of redevelopment land use and “what (is) visible or invisible” within the categorizations and abstractions of each map (Bowker and Star 1999). The chapter also draws
on contemporary media accounts and secondary literature to analyze how the maps
were received, both among planners and the public at large. Finally, the chapter
includes a brief discussion of the implications and impacts of the green dot map on
land use planning and water management in New Orleans. This section is based oninterviews with planners, designers, and decision-makers involved in recent andongoing planning activity in the city.

3.4

Analysis

Each of the three generations of plans and maps that lead to the green dot map
assumed that New Orleans’ post-Katrina population would be significantly reduced
and that some degree of “shrinking the footprint” or “neighborhood consolidation”
would be necessary to reduce the city’s exposure to future flooding (Olshansky et al.
2010). These policies were seen as necessary to ensuring that urban densities in thecity would be high enough to allow for efficient and safe delivery of municipal services. While all three presentations called for a smaller New Orleans, they differedin crucial ways, including the composition of the drafting bodies and their claims toauthority, their intended audiences, and the graphical and text language deployed tocommunicate their classification schemes for future land use. The following sections analyze the evolutions and changes through which the green dot map
developed.

3.4.1

 he ULI Plan: “New Orleans, Louisiana: A Strategy
T
for Rebuilding”

The ULI plan that was released in November of 2005 was the product of a convening of national experts on urban development and planning (Urban Land Institute2005). Reflecting the professional positioning of the members of the panel and the
ULI more generally, the report tends to frame the task of rebuilding in the languageof urban real estate development, finance, and administrative efficiency. The reportholds that “the city should be rebuilt in a strategic manner” in which the “feasibilityof investment” in damaged neighborhoods will be evaluated before public or private

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73

funds will be used to rebuild. While the report recognizes that such a strategic reinvestment approach will inevitably impinge on some residents’ property rights, they
propose a market-based remedy, stating that where property is deemed “unusable,”
people “should be given fair compensation for their property.” Expressing theimportance of “government effectiveness,” the report calls for the creation of a new
body, the Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation (CCRC) that would “provide expeditious compensation for those unable to build.”
While the overriding theme of the ULI report is a call for efficient redevelopmentthat would avoid “scattered, uncoordinated, dysfunctional redevelopment,” thereport connects these notions of efficient redevelopment to values of security, aesthetic beauty, and environmental balance. The plan calls for reducing the urban
footprint of New Orleans in order to “ensure the health and safety of the residentsof each neighborhood,” to create “functional and aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods,” and ultimately to create a city that is “in harmony with the natural environment,” particularly with respect to the relationship between urban space and thesurrounding waters.
Though the ULI report calls for a radical reconfiguration of the city to accommodate a smaller population on more flood-safe territory, the report does go to great
lengths to emphasize the importance of conducting inclusive planning processes toensure equitable results. Among the report’s “Key Findings” are a number of items
related to the importance of retaining the city’s unique culture. The report goes further to say that “planning for the rebuilding of each neighborhood must involve thecitizens from that neighborhood.”
Although the panel emphasizes the importance of equity and inclusive planning,they also make clear that, in the cause of reconstruction, diversity and pluralism
may have to give way to functional demands. The panel uses the language of equity
and security to justify the realignment of residents in saying, “every citizen has aright to return to a safe neighborhood” [emphasis added]. Implied in this formulation is that if a neighborhood is deemed unsafe, it may not be rebuilt. Similarly, thereport deemphasizes critical conversations about racial justice, an issue of deep
resonance in a city and region where planning has long been seen as a tool for
enforcing racial hierarchy and systematic prejudice. Though it states that “diversity,
equity, and cooperation are of critical importance,” the panel’s report holds that “therecovery must not be held back by the racial issues that have slowed progress in thepast.” In this phrase, the panel vaguely blames the contentious history of “racial
issues” for impeding progress, ignoring the enormous racial inequities in previous
planning actions and arguing for a recovery process freed from the impediments ofracial politics.
The only image in the ULI report that puts forward any form of spatial proposal
is a single map outlining a “proposed rebuilding framework.”1 The graphics and textof the map, like the larger report, is characterized by a focus on finance and­development. The map places the tourist-oriented French Quarter and central busi1
It has not been possible to include the ULI map in this manuscript. It is available at http://uli.org/
wp-content/uploads/ULI-Documents/2005NewOrleansPPT.pdf

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ness district at its center and is cropped to exclude a sizeable portion of New OrleansEast, a primarily African-American suburban neighborhood that sustained heavy
flood damages. The map includes very few streets or other landmarks by which one
might locate a specific site within the city to see how it might be affected by the
proposal. The territory that is included in the map is divided into three “investment
zones,” zones A, B, and C. The text that accompanies the map states that the investment zone classification should be done according to a broad suite of criteria including the extent of flooding damage, physical vulnerability, infrastructure capacity,historical significance, and housing occupancy and vacancy. In spite of the holistic
intention, the ULI map appears to define zones primarily on the basis of flooding
depths or topography, ignoring all of the other issues of existing adaptation, infrastructure, and vulnerability that they previously defined as critical. Even if one wereto accept topography as a suitable single criterion on which to define investment
zones, it is unclear how the panel determined what elevations or depths of flooding
constituted logical thresholds for zone classifications.
The panel makes strategic use of the passive voice and technocratic language ofurban hydrology to de-emphasize the impacts of their zone classification scheme onresidents and neighborhoods. The report indicates that, in Zone A, the most heavily
damaged areas, “open space (will) be programmed to reach its greatest capacity to
manage storm water retention, treatment, and flow.” Though such a statement suggests the replacement of residential areas with functional green space, the panelemphasizes that:In these areas, great care must be taken to work closely with residents to determine the exact
patterns of reinvestment necessary to restore and create a functional and aesthetically pleasing neighborhood.

Again employing vague, passive, and functionalist language, the report states that,in Zone B, the areas that are moderately damaged and presumably moderately vulnerable to repeated flooding:some reprogramming of open space probably will be needed to mitigate the impact offlooding and account for space that may not be rebuilt for any number of reasons.

According to the panel’s recommendations, only in Zone C areas, those areas withlittle or no damage, would building be allowed on a “parcel-by-parcel” basis.
In both text and graphics, the panel employs strategic imprecision to make clear
the preliminary nature of their recommendations. The fuzziness and low contrast
with which the three zones are rendered in the map are appropriate to the provisional nature of the plan. The accompanying text also expresses uncertainty regarding the spatial classification in saying,
The precise edges of the respective zones and their transitions cannot be established without
detailed on-the-ground surveys, which have yet to occur.

While it is wholly appropriate that such a preliminary report should leave room forrevision and refinement, this statement suggests that the missing data necessary tosolidify the investment zone classification could be gleaned by a physical survey,

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75

without consideration of the range of social, political, and economic factors thatwould be invisible to such a survey.
In addition to the designation of investment zones, the ULI map indicates“Development Sites” and a network of new proposed “Open Spaces.” The map designates sites for “economic development” and “mixed use housing,” using red andorange ovoid shapes. While neither the map nor the accompanying report provides
insights into how these zones were selected or what their designation would meanfor future development, they were intended to be what Monmonier calls “greenlined” zones in which the government would target investment and deploy special
incentives for development (Monmonier 2010). The network of designated open
space includes new greenways located along the city’s canals as well as a major
linear green space following the path of Interstate-10. Though the accompanying
text provides no clues as to the rationale for the configuration of the open space
network, indications elsewhere in the report suggest that the panel advocates the
expansion of open space in the city for functional, recreational, and aesthetic
purposes.
Though the ULI map and the report in which it is embedded lay out an agendathat would have sweeping implications for reorganizing the city, they also maintaina tone of strategic imprecision and deference to equitable and inclusive planning
processes. The plan takes for granted that a radical spatial reorganization of the city
will be necessary for reasons of efficiency and security. It uses the language ofdevelopment, finance, and investment and treats the city as an abstract administrative and financial institution first and foremost. The preliminary map categorizes
urban space according to development and investment potential with a mix ofappropriate fuzziness and unexplained precision.

3.4.2

 he BNOBC Plan: “Action Plan for New Orleans:T
The New American City”

Building on the recommendations made in the ULI report, the Urban Planning
Committee of the BNOBC issued their proposed plan and maps in a presentationdelivered in January 2006. If the ULI map and plan showed a degree of imprecisionand deference to inclusive planning processes yet to come, the BNOBC plan andmaps were less constrained by such signs of professional humility. From the very
name of the presentation, with its emphasis on “action” and “new”-ness, the commission’s report took on many of the ULI report’s recommendation and strippedaway the layers of uncertainty and deference to process. Where the ULI panel wascomposed of national technical experts, the BNOBC was made up of “knowledgeable community members and professionals” (Ehrenfeucht and Nelson 2011) witha strong bias toward “business and developers”(Allen 2013). The New York Times
referred to Joseph Canizaro, the local developer and financier appointed to head thegroup, as “the mogul who would rebuild New Orleans” (Rivlin 2005a). Both
Canizaro himself and many commentators emphasized his ties to both President

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George W. Bush and Mayor Nagin (Olshansky et al. 2010; Rivlin 2005a). Where the
ULI panel drew its authority from academic and technical credentials, the BNOBC’s
claim to legitimacy was rooted in financial and political resources.
From early in the formation of the commission, BNOBC members demonstrated
the more problematic side of the post-disaster “windows of opportunity,” issuing
public comments that emphasized the view that the devastation and mass evacuationof New Orleans was an opportunity to reshape the city. Less than a month after
Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Mr. Canizaro told the New York Times, “I think wehave a clean sheet to start again…And with that clean sheet we have some very big
opportunities” (Rivlin 2005a). Another commission member, James Reiss, thechairman of the Business Council of New Orleans, went further, explicitly linking
the spatial restructuring of the city to the creation of a new social order, telling theWall Street Journal that the rebuilding effort was an opportunity to rebuild the city
“in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically”(Wooten 2012). While the ULI report appealed to a sense of unity, smoothing over
New Orleans’ history of racial divisions and distrust, the final BNOBC presentation
makes no mention of race at all. To the extent that issues of racial justice or inclusion were discussed at all, they appear to have taken the form of pragmatic businessconcern. Canizaro was quoted as expressing the need for the “business community”
to work with “our African-American associates” to develop the plan, a phrase thatsuggests that African-Americans were not a part of the business community (Rivlin
2005a).
Drawing on the ULI plan that had been issued 2 months before, the BNOBC planframes the reconstruction of the city as, first and foremost, a problem of real estatedevelopment and finance. Where the ULI map and report uses the language ofinvestment, the BNOBC presentation focuses on property ownership, site control,
and acquisition. The report again assumes that the reconstruction of the city will
require a massive reshuffling of land use patterns and establishes categories of redevelopment according to levels of damage, vulnerability, and development potential.
Echoing the language of efficiency and equity used in the ULI discussion of planned
shrinkage, the BNOBC presentation emphasizes the need to “consolidate neighborhoods with insufficient population to support equitable and efficient service delivery” (Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Urban Planning Committee 2006).
Thus, in the BNOBC plan, equity is redefined as a matter of service delivery after aspatial reconfiguration of the city that may or may not be equitable.
The presentation given by the BNOBC on January 11, 2006, included several
maps along with accompanying text slides that lay out a four-part categorization of
the city’s lands. Though the scheme is based on the ULI report’s categorization of
investment and development zones, it differs in ways that came to be important bothsubstantively and symbolically. Where the ULI panel identified and categorized
spaces according to the level of “investment” and “development” that should betargeted for them, the BNOBC presentation added explicit consideration of property
acquisition and administrative authority in the form of the city’s authority to issuebuilding permits.

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The commission identifies “Immediate Opportunity Areas” as those areas with“little or no flood damage.” These areas, which roughly correspond to the ULIreport’s Zone C, are to have “expedite(d) permits for repairs and construction of
new housing.” The maps call for the “areas contain(ing) deeply flooded and heavily
damaged properties,” roughly corresponding to the ULI’s Zones A and B, to be collapsed into a single category known as “Neighborhood Planning Areas.” The nameof these zones emphasizes the “neighborhood planning process” that the commission urged be started immediately to “determine the future of the areas.” In spite ofthis emphasis on planning, the recommendation repeated elsewhere in the presentation that the city should “not issue building permits in heavily flooded/damaged
areas” led to fear of land grabs and redlining (Olshansky et al. 2010). The BNOBC’s
focus on properties rather than households or people as the most important unit ofanalysis for the determination of a neighborhood’s fate reinforced the impressionthat the Commission was primarily concerned with urban land as a legal and financial phenomenon substantially devoid of social importance. When the presentation
later gives recommendations for who should be involved in the neighborhood planning processes, “neighborhood residents” constitute only one of the eight named
groups identified for participation, with the other seven slots occupied by technicalexperts of various kinds. Treating people who lived in impacted neighborhoods asjust one among several relevant constituencies fits with the broader perception thatthe planning process was insufficiently attentive to the wishes of residents.
Again emphasizing the commission’s focus on development, the BNOBC identified both “Infill Development Areas” and “Targeted Development Areas.” The former are defined as those “underutilized sites on high ground” or areas “requiring
demolition and clearance that can be developed with houses, commercial, and institutional uses” to accommodate uses relocated from more flood-prone areas. On
these sites, marked by bright pink shapes on the maps, the commission recommends
an expedited course of development including “consolidat(ion) (of) public and private ownership,” “prepar(ation) (of) development plans,” and “issu(ing) (of) developer requests for proposals.”
Similarly, for the “Targeted Development Areas,” the commission recommends
that the city, “identify and facilitate financially responsible developers to develop
large numbers of houses quickly,” suggesting that financial capacity was the primary criteria of importance. While these sites are marked as numbered points on the
BNOBC maps, their exact location appears to be somewhat arbitrary; some lie inheavily flooded former residential zones, others in the city’s central business district, and still another in a largely industrial zone. The fact that the report does not
explain any rationale for the location of these sites raises the question of whether
this is a case of “the substitution of precision for validity”(Bowker and Star 1999)
or if members of the commission had specific, unstated reasons to target these particular sites.
As in the case of the inexplicably precise locations of the “Targeted Development
Areas,” the BNOBC employed unexplained spatial and graphical specificity in what
would become the group’s most infamous map. The “Parks and Open Space” map(Fig. 3.2) drew from the ULI map the idea that the city should develop a network of

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Fig. 3.2 The “Parks & Open Space Plan” as presented in Action Plan for New Orleans: The New
American City by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Urban Planning Committee inJanuary 2006. (Used with permission of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission)green spaces that roughly corresponded to the city’s drainage canals. In addition tothese linear green spaces, the map indicates, with six green dashed, but unfilled,
circles, “Areas for Future Parkland.”2 Text elsewhere in the presentation describes
the “Parks and Open Space Plan” employing the same functionalist language ofsystems and real estate acquisition that is favored throughout the document in
directing the city to “identify properties that can become part of the system andbegin assembly.”
To facilitate the assembly of the land necessary for the BNOBC’s ambitious
green space plan, as in the other development activities included in the plan, thecommission recommended the immediate creation of the CCRC. Like the ULI
panel, the BNOBC’s consideration of homeowners in areas slated for depopulation
was largely restricted to the administration of financial transactions. The presentation calls for the city to “aggressively support” legislation to “accommodate buyoutof homeowners in heavily flooded and damaged areas” including through the use ofeminent domain.
The BNOBC plan, like the ULI plan before it, presumed a radical realignment of
the city’s population and land use. This plan deemphasized the role of inclusive2
Perhaps on account of the furor that this map later generated, the word “potential” was amended
to the designation for these circled areas on a later version of the map that appeared in Architect
Magazine in 2007.

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planning processes and called for the immediate enactment of aggressive redlining
and greenlining to halt reconstruction in some areas and jumpstart development inothers. While the categorization schemes in both plans allude to the need to accountfor a wide range of criteria, both defaulted to “elevational determinism,” wherein
topography is the dominant driver of rebuilding decision-making (Wagner andFrisch 2009). The green space map that would become the commission’s most recognizable artifact combines the language of systems and functionalism with highly
diagrammatic abstract geometries. In all of these classifications, the BNOBC treats
the project of urban disaster recovery as a problem of efficiently maximizing realestate finance and public administration virtually devoid of considerations of publicconsensus or pre-Katrina cultural, social, and economic conditions.

3.4.3

The Times-Picayune Map: The Green Dots

On the same day that the BNOBC presented their plan, the city’s largest newspaper
ran extensive coverage of the plan along with their own interpretation of the accompanying graphics. The Times-Picayune’s coverage, like the BNOBC plan itself,emphasized the plan’s sweep and ambition, but it also took several critical steps toreframe the plan in order to address the concerns of readers and residents. The main
story’s writers, Frank Donze and Gordon Russell, characterize the plan as a “vastreworking of the city’s neighborhoods and housing patterns.” Rather than presenting this process through the lens of real estate opportunity or civic administration as
the previous framings had, the reporters recast the plan as victimizing a traumatized
population through powerful new bureaucracy. The story begins:
Residents of New Orleans areas hardest-hit by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters would havefour months to prove they can bring their neighborhoods back to life or face the prospect of
having to sell out to a new and powerful redevelopment authority. (Donze and Russel 2006)

The map that occupied the majority of the front page that morning included several
critical reinterpretations of the BNOBC’s graphics and text, which shaped the reception of the plan in powerful ways (Fig. 3.1; see the “Introduction” of this chapter).
First, the map cropped some of the furthest reaches of the eastern portion of the cityin order to zoom in on the more densely populated areas. It also included and labeled
major streets, allowing readers to more readily locate specific sites in the city.
Though the map includes most of the categorization scheme indicated in the
BNOBC maps, it does make some significant changes. Most importantly, the tentatively dash-outlined circles indicating future parkland on the BNOBC map here
appear as solid green dots, lending them more graphical prominence and visuallyassociating these areas with the existing parks indicated on the map. The linear
green spaces indicated in the ULI and BNOBC maps are omitted in the newspaper’s
version. Divorced from the “system” of functional greenways, the green dots appear
to be arbitrarily sited around the city. Presented in this more solidified form, among
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as a harsh form of “prohibitive cartography” demarking spaces that would be off
limits for return and reconstruction (Monmonier 2010).
While the graphical form of the newspaper’s map accentuated its prohibitive
character, the text that appeared in the map’s key and the accompanying story reinforced the conflicting values embedded in the map. With the labeling of each of theplan’s land use categories, the writers recast the BNOBC’s language of real estate
opportunity in terms of the impact on individual homeowners and residents. The
BNOBC’s “Immediate Opportunity Areas” are rendered as “areas where rebuilding
allowed now.” “Neighborhood Planning Areas” are labeled as zones where the city
will enact a “building moratorium until neighborhoods prove viability,” accentuating the prohibition and the proposed process of administrative viability testing. The
BNOBC’s “Infill Development Areas” are recast as “areas to be redeveloped, somewith new housing for relocated homeowners,” raising the specter of social reshuffling and intensive infill development.
The story that accompanied the map further reframes the plan, viewing its proposals from the point of view of homeowners. It includes a “Q&A” format thatposes and answers such questions as: “I live in an area that looks unlikely to berebuilt as it may be targeted to be park land. What’s in store for me?” In its direct
address and use of first-person pronouns, the story lifts the veil of abstraction andtechnical language that had characterized both the ULI and BNOBC plans to makeconcrete the impacts of this sweeping proposal for neighborhoods and residents.

3.5

Discussion

Proto-critical cartographer Arthur Robinson proposed that maps operate as communication devices through the interaction of three distinct, but related, phenomena: the mapmaker (sender), the map (medium), and the map viewer (receiver)(Pickles 2003). To the extent that the story of the green dot map has been told in theyears since its release, it has largely been a story about how the map was received,
the transformative impact that it had on the post-Katrina planning process, and, to alesser extent, the realities and perceptions of who was responsible for the maps. The
preceding analysis has clearly shown that, rather than viewing the Times-Picayune
map as a singular medium of communication that passed from sender to receiver, it
is critical to understand the map’s creation as an iterative, stepwise process shapedby at least three sets of institutional actors, each with their own vision, values, andpriorities for the reconstruction of the city. In the successive reinterpretation of thegreen dot map, first from the ULI plan to the BNOBC and then from the BNOBC to
the Times-Picayune, Robinson’s three-part schema becomes elongated and shifts
from a relatively simple, unidirectional linearity to a series of interpretive tangents.
To better understand the impact of the maps, it is important to consider all three ofthese components: the power structures and institutions that lay behind the creationof the maps, how each set of actors reinterpreted the ideas and images produced by

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the preceding mapmakers, and finally, the social and political conditions in which
the process and products were ultimately received.

3.5.1

The Mapmakers

Crampton and Krygier’s premise that maps “actively construct knowledge,” “exercise power,” and “can be a powerful means of promoting social change” highlights
the need to interrogate the identities and interests of the people and institutions
responsible for mapmaking (Crampton and Krygier 2005). In the case of the green
dot map, there are at least three sets of relevant mapmaking actors: the ULI expert
panel, the Mayor’s BNOB Commission and their consultants, and the reporters andstaff of the Times-Picayune.
According to the ULI report, in the autumn after Hurricane Katrina:
ULI assembled expert teams and an advisory panel of economic development, financial,design, redevelopment, land use, and urban planning professionals to work with Mayor
C. Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission. (Urban Land Institute 2005)

As this statement indicates, the ULI report and the BNOBC plan lean on one anotherfor their authority and legitimacy. The ULI draws its claims of authority largely
from the technical expertise of the assembled panel and then grounds its local legitimacy in the group’s political connection to the Mayor of New Orleans and the
BNOBC. The 41 experts listed as contributing to the ULI report include a range ofrespected public and private sector leaders in real estate finance, law, development,
construction, and planning, but none of the ULI experts listed New Orleans as theirbase of operations. While the outsider status of the assembled panel might be seen
as beneficial in some settings, in the context of New Orleans, a city whose residents
guard their distinctiveness with near-religious zeal, it made the panel and their recommendations immediately suspect.
Where the ULI report and maps drew their authority from the urban real estate,planning, and redevelopment expertise of the assembled group of national experts,
the BNOB Commission appointed by the mayor was firmly rooted in New Orleans.
The composition of the central committee of the BNOBC was clearly intended toaddress the city’s long-standing racial tensions; it was composed of 17 people, 8
white, 8 black, and 1 Latino. In spite of this superficial diversity, before the group’s
work had substantially begun, Barbara Major, an African-American activist and theCommission’s co-chair expressed skepticism, saying “I think some people don’t
understand that an equal number of black and white isn’t the same as equity” (Rivlin
2005b).
Reflecting Mayor Nagin’s long focus on improving the city’s business climate,
the group’s membership was skewed toward business and development interests.
The prevalence of business interests on the Commission served as a signal that thecity was pursuing a largely privatized reconstruction that would be in line with theneoliberal policy preferences of the federal administration at the time. J. Stephen

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Perry, president of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau at the time,
told reporters, “I think the importance of this group is that it will give the federal
government the confidence that the city is harnessing the private sector to do a lot of
its work” (Rivlin 2005b). Though the group’s business affiliations were seen as astrength by some, among many displaced residents and activists, they fueled suspicion that the Commission’s recommendations for recovery would not adequately
address the concerns of the city’s poor citizens (Nelson et al. 2007; Olshansky et al.
2010). Over the course of the fall of 2005, as the Commission undertook its work,
quotes from members alluding to the opportunity of the city’s post-Katrina “clean
sheet” and their desire for demographic restructuring only reinforced these suspicions (Rivlin 2005a; Wooten 2012; Gotham and Greenberg 2014).
While the ULI panel spoke from a position of technical expertise and outside
detachment and the BNOBC drew its authority from the wealth, political connections, and business acumen of its members, the Times-Picayune maps and accompanying text drew their legitimacy from the position of the newspaper and its
reporters as embedded members of the local community. With its urgent headlines
and personal tone, the paramap text surrounding the published green dot map reinterpreted the optimism and technical language of the earlier plans to reflect the fears
and suspicions of readers. In spite of the technical expertise and superficial diversityof the ULI and BNOBC, the fact that the two groups were widely perceived as not
representing the viewpoint of the majority of displaced New Orleanians meant that
their plans failed to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of the city’s residents.

3.5.2

Reinterpretations

The preceding analysis of the three maps considers how each successive generationof maps and plans leading up to the green dot map communicated the values andinterests of its makers through graphics and text. The final map reflects a processthat began with a deliberately imprecise and highly qualified preliminary planning
map produced by the ULI panel. While the ULI plan included recommendations fora planning process that would take account of equity and inclusion, their map andaccompanying texts categorized space primarily according to investment potential.
The ULI recommendations were then reinterpreted by the BNOBC as a real estatedevelopment proposal, largely stripped of the ULI’s language on race, equity, andparticipation. The graphics and texts of the BNOBC plan presented a reconstruction
process guided by a classification of real estate acquisition activities. The BNOBC’s
plans and maps were then finally recast by journalists and graphic designers at theTimes-Picayune to focus on the impacts on people and neighborhoods.
While the BNOBC proposal draws heavily on the ULI policy and design recommendations, the proposal does not reference the ULI directly anywhere in the text
or graphics. The omission of any reference to the ULI panel may have been an
attempt by the Mayor’s Commission to distance itself from the earlier report, which
had drawn local suspicion and resistance (Olshansky et al. 2010). On the other hand,3Connecting the Dots: The Origins, Evolutions, and Implications of the Map…

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though the map that appeared on the front page of the Times-Picayune on January
11, 2006, was substantially different in text and graphics from the BNOBC’s maps,
it includes a citation in the lower left below the map that reads, “Source: Bring New
Orleans Back Commission.” By presenting their editorially manipulated map as the
product of the Commission, the paper blurred the line between re-presentation andcommentary, exacerbating the already widespread distrust of the planning process.

3.5.3

Map Receivers

While the reception of and reaction to the green dot map have been by far the most
discussed aspects of the entire episode, it is nonetheless worth considering thesereactions systematically through the lenses of lay critical cartography. The map andthe categorization system that it represented were roundly rejected and attacked ona number of different fronts. The negative public reactions to the green dot map
included critiques of the plan on the basis of all four of the normative criteria forclimate adaptation laid out by Adger et al. (2005): efficiency, effectiveness, equity,and legitimacy.
Though the BNOBC maps and plan were presented as “a rational path to recovery,” they were widely critiqued as both rigid and arbitrary, attacking their claims toefficiency and effectiveness (Nelson et al. 2007). Many regarded the BNOBC map
and plans as overly rigid and formulaic in their use of a logic of “elevational determinism” to condemn low-lying neighborhoods (Wagner and Frisch 2009). Others
criticized the BNOBC proposals for arbitrarily condemning some neighborhoods
and not others even though virtually the entire metropolitan area is at risk of flooding (Nelson et al. 2007). Calling into question the factual basis on which the plans
were based, one Gentilly resident told reporters:
Unless they could prove to us unequivocally that we were placing ourselves and our children in danger – and they couldn’t – then we were not going to allow anyone to unilaterally
dictate where we couldn’t live. (Krupa 2010)

With its combination of schematic abstraction and unexplained precision, the graphics and paramap text of the Times-Picayune map played a significant role in shaping
the perception of the plan as both rigid and arbitrary.
While some critiques focused on issues of efficiency and effectiveness, most of
the critiques of the green dot map centered on issues of equity and legitimacy. TheULI and BNOBC plans were widely seen as having been the product of “top-down
process[es]” (Nelson et al. 2007; Wooten 2012) by “closed-door” committees with“little input from communities” (Irazábal and Neville 2007). Wade Rathke, a leading local activist and founder of ACORN, directly impugned the legitimacy of theprocess, decrying the “arrogance” of the recommendations and labeling the ULI andBNOBC “unelected and unaccountable”(Rathke 2006). One Ninth Ward resident
voiced a distrust of the municipal authorities more broadly in attacking the­legitimacy of the city’s planning process, saying “I was not going to let a corrupt
city government deny my right to return” (Gotham and Greenberg 2014).

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Charitable critiques of the green dot map and the plans behind it regarded theplans as naïve to the political realities of the city and inadequate in addressing theinterests of the historically victimized low-income and African-American populations of the city. Less charitably minded critiques saw the plans as deliberately
hostile to those vulnerable populations. For many critics, the perceived lack of legitimacy of the plans went hand in hand with their failure on the equity criteria. Political
distrust and social division between white and black populations in New Orleans are
deeply rooted, and they significantly shaped the response to the early post-Katrina
planning processes (Olshansky et al. 2010; Gotham and Greenberg 2014). As inmany disasters, the flooding of New Orleans disproportionately harmed African-­American and low-income populations in the city due to the heightened physicaland social vulnerability of some areas (Tierney 2006).
These same populations and neighborhoods had also suffered disproportionately
during previous infrastructure and urban renewal projects in the city (Breunlin andRegis 2006; Nelson et al. 2007). This history of displacement and victimization at
the hands of planners and developers led many in New Orleans to harbor a deep
distrust of both public and private sector powers seeking to remake the city after theflooding. Given the city’s history of racial animus and the racially tinged opportunism of statements from members of the BNOBC, the plan’s calls for targeted prohibitions on building permits and buyouts in heavily flooded neighborhoods raised
fears that the plan was an elaborate attempt to “keep many African Americans fromreturning” to the city (Nelson et al. 2007). So charged was the discussion of racialinequality in the proposed land use restructuring that activists labeled it an attempt
at “ethnic cleansing” (Nelson et al. 2007) and “class and racial redlining” (Gotham
and Greenberg 2014).

3.6

The Lasting Impacts of the Green Dot Map

More than a decade after the initial controversy surrounding the green dot map, theepisode still looms large in discussions about water management in New Orleans.
The swift and overwhelmingly negative response to the proposals presented in theTimes-Picayune in January 2006 decisively ended official discussions of large-scale
reshuffling of land uses to make way for stormwater-absorbing green space.
Nonetheless, city leaders and planning and design professionals in New Orleans
have continued to pursue “green infrastructure” strategies as one component in the“multiple lines of defense” against urban flooding (City of New Orleans 2015). A
series of convenings, plans, and pilot projects have sought to demonstrate the utilityof landscape-based stormwater retention and infiltration strategies. Key projects
include the Dutch Dialogues series (2006–2009), The Greater New Orleans Water
Plan (2013), the New Orleans Resilience Strategy (2015), and the Gentilly Resilience
District pilot projects supported by funds from the US Department of Housing and
Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) (ongoing). While these projects have made progress in bringing green infrastructure into

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the mainstream of flood mitigation discussions, many observers cite the green dot
map episode as having created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, against
post-Katrina planning generally and against green infrastructure specifically. Thissection recounts common themes regarding the lasting implications of the green dot
map episode as they emerged from interviews with government officials and planning and design practitioners who have been active in the city’s recent green infrastructure efforts. The interviews took place in 2016 and 2017.
While some responded to questions about the ongoing impacts of the green dot
map by saying that the city has moved “past it” (New Orleans-based landscapearchitect 2017) or that “you don’t hear much about it as much now” (Senior city
official 2017), even those who minimized the ongoing importance of the episoderegarded it as having substantially shaped planning over the last decade in New
Orleans. One New Orleans-based planning practitioner reported that the episodeconfirmed the preexisting suspicions that New Orleanians had regarding heavy-­
handed planning, saying:
The green dots really just cemented people’s skepticism about planning. It was that way
before, but it really just cemented it in people’s minds. (New Orleans-based planner 2017)

While the episode may have heightened preexisting suspicions of planning generally,it had an especially pronounced impact on efforts to advance green infrastructure
flood mitigation strategies. One local designer involved in these efforts reported that“everyone is super conscious of the green dot fiasco” (New Orleans-based designer2017). A planner working with the city said that when their agency recently initiatedseveral green infrastructure pilot projects, residents asked suspiciously “If you aredoing this (green infrastructure), does that mean that you are not going to build morehouses in the neighborhood?” (City official 2017). After the early post-­Katrina conflicts over green infrastructure, Dutch urban designers who have been involved inwater planning in New Orleans reported a wariness of proposals that might get entangled in “local politics” (Dutch water planner 2017). Another Dutch designer said thatthey avoided becoming involved in discussions of projects that would involve substantial displacement since, “As a Dutch firm, for us to be involved in these society
issues … didn’t feel safe… or appropriate” (Dutch urban designer 2017).
While there was widespread agreement that the green dot map episode had
negatively colored the public perception of post-Katrina planning generally andgreen infrastructure specifically, interviewees reported a range of different waysthat they perceived the episode as having shaped planning processes and projects
in the years since. Some described the failures of the green dot map as failures ofcommunication and translation. One urban designer pointed to the episode as “agood example of the danger of visualizations” and said that the major problem
was that a map that “was intended as a discussion… was interpreted as against thelower economic status people” (Dutch water planner 2017). Recognizing that thegreen dot map emerged from a process of translation as described above, a seniorcity official pointed out that the harsh reaction was to the map that “the TimesPicayune showed in the paper, which was not what the ULI actually showed”(Senior city official 2017).

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Reflecting this understanding, that the problems with the green dot map were
attributable to failures of communication and representation, one urban designer
reported that in their subsequent work, they have “tried to be more specific thandashed circles” in their representation of new green infrastructure. They went on to
say that, to avoid the appearance of bias or arbitrariness, they base their recommendations on the “fundamentals of how soil and water interact” so as “to be moredefensible” (New Orleans-based designer 2017). Another city planner reported that,in making the case for more green infrastructure investment in a neighborhood, they
make a great effort in “connecting [the projects] to economic development andneighborhood revitalization,” “forefronting those goals with flood protection subsequent to that” to make the point that these new projects are “very different from thegreen dot scenario” (City official 2017).
In addition to the ways that the green dot map episode has changed how planners
and designers communicate green infrastructure proposals, the experience has also
substantively informed planning processes and projects in the years since. A seniorcity official reported that the BNOBC plan “was done in isolation, with no one in
the city.” From that experience, they reported that “everyone learned… how toengage with people” and that, “the engagement has gotten much better… partiallybecause of the green dot debacle” (Senior city official 2017).
Several practitioners and officials reported that, after the green dot episode, green
infrastructure projects have been more opportunistic and smaller in scale. Designers
and planners said that the efforts to institute landscape-based stormwater management have focused on using existing open space rather than advocating for large-­
scale projects that would require displacement of houses and neighborhoods. A
senior planner with the city remarked that:
Many of the places where we are prioritizing these kinds of projects are in areas that were
under the green dots. Without displacing people and without all of the negative connotations of the green dots.

They explained that, “where there is vacancy, you can use that [space]” for green
infrastructure. They went on to say, “This is not about taking something away. Thisis about adding to. We aren’t taking houses away, we are adding parks.” (Senior city
official 2017) These sentiments reflect both the strategic shift to an opportunistic
approach to green infrastructure that has characterized recent efforts in New Orleans
and the recognition that the legacy of the green dot map has required a reframing of
the communication surrounding these projects to address not only their effectiveness and efficiency but also their equity and legitimacy. It is important to note that,in some cases, the open space for this opportunistic green infrastructure approach
was made available for those purposes by leaving empty lots on which flooded
homes were purchased and demolished by the New Orleans Redevelopment
Authority with the decline and movements of New Orleans’ population following
Hurricane Katrina.

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Conclusions

The catalytic impact of the green dot map in shaping post-Katrina planning in New
Orleans has been widely recognized. However, scholars and other commentators
have paid little attention to where the map came from and how it communicatedthrough graphics and text. With analysis of the maps’ makers, the text-based andgraphical reinterpretations they employed, and the political and social context of thecommunity they meant to restructure, the story of the green dot map yields deeper
insights for future planning and adaptation research and practice. The map was a
product of multiple reinterpretations, each undertaken by different groups with distinct values and interests. Each of these iterations reflects a particular design politics
colored by the values and interests of its makers. The version of the map presented
to the public in the Times-Picayune in January of 2006 contains a confounding
combination of deliberate abstraction and misplaced precision that, when pairedwith radical policy prescriptions for reorganizing property and land use, became
highly inflammatory.
While public and scholarly critiques of the green dot proposal included concerns
related to all four of Adger et al.’s (2005) criteria for successful climate adaptation,issues of the legitimacy and equity were especially central. These equity and legitimacy critiques were rooted in decades of well-earned racialized suspicion and distrust of top-down planning intervention in New Orleans. These suspicions were
reinforced by the composition of the planning bodies responsible for the ULI andBNOBC proposals: outsider technocrats and representatives of the city’s white-­dominated business elite, respectively.
Apologists tend to describe the failure of the BNOBC as a problem of communication. Such a reading of the episode overlooks the fact that the reception of themaps as communication media was deeply shaped by the sociopolitical context into
which the maps were released. The communication failings of the green dot map aretightly intertwined with the substantive critiques of the proposals and the preceding
process. John Forester points out that the “technical problem-solving” functions ofplanning are inextricably linked to “planning as a means of processing informationand feedback” (Forester 1988). While the ULI and BNOBC experts regarded theirplans as reasonable attempts at effective and efficient technical problem-solving, for
critics steeped in the history of problematic planning interventions in New Orleans,the green dot map was visual confirmation of their suspicions that the planning
process was illegitimate and inequitable. For suspicious residents and critics, themap, with its bewildering combination of hard-edged geometric precision and highlevels of abstraction, reflected a top-down process that appeared at once arbitrary
and inequitable.
Though the problems with the green dot map run deeper than a benign failure ofcommunication, the particular form of the graphics and text of the map and paramap
materials presented in the Times-Picayune do matter. In the case of the explosive“green spacing” proposals, the ULI map’s fuzzy shapes, the BNOBC’s open dotted
circles, and the Times-Picayune’s solid green dots each communicate different lev-

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Z. Lambels of resolution and finality to the plans. Similarly, the shift from the ULI andBNOBC’s language of administrative and financial efficiency to the Times-­
Picayune’s resident-eye view of radical urban restructuring substantially coloredthe reception of the proposal. The green dot map episode makes clear that advocatesof such urban adaptation projects must be attentive to how their graphics and texts
will be reinterpreted, represented, and consumed. These processes are deeply place-­
specific and historically contingent and, thus, frequently may not be immediately
comprehensible to outside technical experts.
Perhaps more than any other episode in the recent history of planning in America,
the development and response to the green dot map demonstrate the need for greater
sensitivity to the design politics of maps and planning representations among scholars, practitioners, and decision-makers. Skillful graphic communication cannot
overcome deep substantive flaws in a planning process or proposal. However, byunderstanding how planning graphics and texts relate to the specific historically
imbedded contexts of a place, planners can communicate with the public anddecision-­makers in ways that facilitate rather than destroy the potential for effective,
efficient, equitable, and legitimate adaptation.

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Chapter 4

Antagonisms of Adaptation: Climate
Change Adaptation Measures in New
Orleans and New York City
Kevin Fox Gotham and Megan Faust

4.1

Introduction

Scientists increasingly point to the possibility of multiple abrupt negative consequences associated with anthropogenic climate change. Climate change poses risks
to many environmental and economic systems—including agriculture, public infrastructure, ecosystems, and human health—and presents a significant financial risk
to federal, state, and local governments (US Global Change Research Program
2011; National Research Council 2012a, b). Scientists expect climate change tothreaten coastal cities and ecosystems with rising sea levels, elevated tidal
inundation, increased storm and flood frequency and intensity, and accelerated
erosion and saltwater intrusion (Blum and Roberts 2009; Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change [IPCC] 2014; Karl et al. 2009). As observed by the US Global
Change Research Program (USGCRP), the impacts and costliness of weather
disasters resulting from floods, drought, and other events such as tropical cyclones
will increase in significance as what are considered “rare” events become morecommon and intense due to climate change (Karl et al. 2009). Overall, according to
the National Research Council and the US Global Change Research Program,changes in Earth’s climate—including higher temperatures, changes in precipitation,rising sea levels, and more intense and frequent severe weather events—areunderway and expected to grow over time. These risks not only imperil the long-­
term sustainability of cities and communities, but they could create significant fiscal
problems for local, state, and federal governments.
This chapter identifies climate change adaptation measures implemented in post-­
Sandy New York City and post-Katrina New Orleans and examines their conflictualand contradictory dynamics and impacts. Climate change adaptation measures are
an amalgam of government policies, socio-legal regulations, statutes, and laws to
K. F. Gotham (*) · M. Faust
Sociology and Urban Studies, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USAe-mail: kgotham@tulane.edu; mfaust1@tulane.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_4

93

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reduce current and future vulnerability to the negative impacts of climate change(e.g., global warming and sea-level rise) and strengthen social resilience (IPCC2014). As a risk management strategy, climate change adaptation represents
adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatechange. The broad goal is to help protect vulnerable sectors and communities thatmight be affected by changes in the climate (GAO 2013). For example, adaptation
measures include raising river or coastal dikes to protect infrastructure from sea-­level rise, building higher bridges, and increasing the capacity of storm water
systems. State and local authorities are responsible for the planning andimplementation of many types of infrastructure projects, and decisions at theselevels of government can affect insurance rates for businesses and homeowners aswell as influence patterns of economic development. While implementing adaptive
measures may be costly, policy-makers and elected leaders are increasingly
recognizing that the cost of inaction could be greater as damage from weather-­related events becomes more expensive (GAO 2009, 2016).
This paper addresses the ways in which the decentralized and fragmented structure of policy-making and implementation in the United States both constrains theprocess of formulating and implementing comprehensive climate change adaptation
measures and encourages cities to respond to climate change using their own distinctive policy measures. Much social science research has focused on the unevenmanner in which climate change adaptation agendas are unfolding in a diverse setof urban contexts (Dunlap and Brulle 2015; Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013;
Bulkeley and Betsill 2013; Burch et al. 2014; Dale et al. 2018; Morrison et al. 2017;
McCann 2017). In this paper, we adopt an “encompassing” comparative approach
to explain how local climate change developments in New York City and New
Orleans reflect, share characteristics with, and contribute to broader socioeconomic
and political trends in the United States. Encompassing comparison seeks to understand how local actions and events express the interaction of local-­global forces andrelations including institutional forms, regulatory strategies, and governance projects. We conceptualize the pairing of climate change adaptation measures as anencompassing comparison, which, according to Charles Tilly (1984, p. 83), “placesdifferent instances at various locations within the same system, on the way to
explaining their characteristics as a function of their varying relationships to thesystem as a whole.” While our comparison of two cities may lack sufficient scopefor statistical generalization, we believe our encompassing mode of comparative
analysis provides for breadth of generalization and depth of description that is notpossible in quantitative analyses. Our comparison provides an opportunity to reflect
upon how decisions surrounding climate change adaptation measures take place ina larger political economy of policy-making that shapes and constraints local
actions.

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95

Risk, Resilience, Mitigation, and Adaptation

Over the last decade or so, scholars and policy-makers have debated the steps governments can take to reduce risk of extreme events through climate change adaptation and align such adaptation with broader resilience efforts (Gotham et al. 2011;
Gotham and Campanella 2010, 2011). Risk refers to situations or conditions thatpose a threat to human health, quality of life, and community well-being (for an
overview, see Tierney 2014). Risk is a relational term that is closely connected to thenotion of resilience, which the National Research Council (2012b, p. 5) defines as
the “ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully
adapt to adverse events.” In the scholarship on climate change, resilience implies
regulatory and policy actions to reduce vulnerabilities to the effects of severe
weather and to adapt to the effects of climate change. Scholars theorize that two
related sets of actions—climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation—
may be able to enhance resilience by reducing risk. Mitigation refers to humanactions to reduce the sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that contribute to global
warming and, in turn, sea-level rise.
We follow climate change scientists in viewing climate change mitigation andadaptation as conceptually separate and analytically distinct. We recognize thatfederal agencies such as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers have used theterm hazard “mitigation” for decades to refer to activities designed to reduce hazard
risks. Flood risk reduction, for example, involves a combination of structural—
focusing on reducing the probability of flooding—and physical and nonphysicalnonstructural measures that focus on reducing the consequences of flooding (USArmy Corps of Engineers 2018). At the individual property level, nonstructural
mitigation options include elevating a building to or above the area’s base flood
elevation, relocating the building to an area with less flood risk, or purchasing anddemolishing the building and turning the property into green space. In addition,
nonstructural risk reduction measures would include flood insurance, floodplain
mapping, improving response capacity, improving post-disaster assessment andcommunication capacity, and developing more effective strategies to communicate
risk and mitigation activities to various stakeholders. Nonstructural mitigation isakin to adaptation. FEMA supports a variety of nonstructural flood mitigation
activities to reduce flood risk.
Because mitigation is intended to reduce the harmful effects of climate change,
it is part of a broader policy framework that also includes adaptation to climate
impacts. Climate change adaptation refers to actions taken by governments,
nonprofit organizations, and private firms to reduce the loss of life and property bylessening the impacts of adverse climate change events such as weather-related
disasters. Climate change adaptations can also be classed as either process-oriented
measures—aimed at developing information systems, social structures, andgovernance needed to support adaptation—or outcome-oriented actions, measurestaken to reduce vulnerability and exploit opportunities that arise from a changing
climate. Climate change adaptation measures can be effect-oriented in the sense of

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building flood protection or cause-oriented by adopting approaches such aschanging the location of areas for new housing development. Climate change
adaptation includes activities such as restoring wetlands and coastal areas to control
erosion, improving the quality of road surfaces to withstand hotter temperatures,protecting critical facilities against the negative effects (e.g., inundation) of sea-­level rise, and creating permeable surfaces and “green roofs,” or roofs partially orcompletely covered with vegetation, in cities to absorb excess rainfall, provide
insulation, and help lower urban air temperatures (Wise et al. 2014; for an overview,see IPCC 2014). Climate change adaptation measures can be proactive and/or
reactive. Governments may plan and adopt adaptation measures in advance,
establish them in the aftermath of a major disaster, or create them in response to
local pressures. In addition to large-scale infrastructure measures to adapt to climatechange, governments may also implement policies and regulations to incentivize
people to change their behaviors. This approach includes motivating them to use
less water, encouraging farmers to plant different crops, and urging more households
and businesses to purchase flood insurance.
Many researchers and policy-makers consider climate change a global problem
that demands international action and global solutions. But sociologists and others
have documented that the effects of global climate change will not be equallydistributed around the world, for “many of the countries least responsible for therise in greenhouse gases will be most likely to feel its impacts in changes in weather,sea-levels, human health costs, and economic hardships” (Nagel et al. 2010, p. 17).
The unequal burdens inflicted by climate-related disasters and limited disaster
response capacities will exacerbate these inequalities and likely generate unforeseen
consequences. Variations in individual, community, and national vulnerability to theimpacts of climate change are only part of this global structure of inequality. As the2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report notes, there is anunequal distribution of impacts and vulnerabilities to climate change associatedwith social class and age in both developed and developing countries: “vulnerability
to climate change can be exacerbated by other stresses. These arise from, forexample, current climate hazards, poverty and unequal access to resources, foodinsecurity, trends in economic globalization, conflict and incidence of diseases suchas HIV/AIDS” (2007, p. 14). Thus, the impacts of climate change are not spread
evenly, and its effects will be felt by different social groups in radically different
ways.
The ways in which climate change is closely intertwined with state policy-­making, institutional arrangements, and political economy is one of the reasons why
it has proven so unique an issue to address internationally as a global problem.
Conceptualizing climate change as a global-local issue and using comparative
analyses draws attention to different socio-spatial inequalities, local and regional
histories and geographies, and their implications for communities. These concerns
bring explicit temporal and spatial dimensions to our understanding of the local
impacts of global climate change. Climate change adaptation measures are activatedand reproduced through the concrete actions taken by state actors, elected leaders,economic elites, and other powerful organized interests. A core assumption of this4

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agent-centric approach is that the adoption of climate change adaptation actions
does not develop out of an inevitable and unalterable structural necessity but rather
in a contingent manner; it results from the conscious actions taken by individual
decision-makers in various institutions, organizations, and communities acting
under particular historical circumstances. This emphasis on contingency and agency
compels us to examine the actions of human agents, organizations, and interest
groups in an effort to grasp how larger climate change dynamics and effects occur
at the local level. Underscoring the importance of space and time in climate change
research means that any explanation of why and how climate change policy actions
develop will need to take account of where and when they develop.
In the sections below, we address the obstacles to climate change adaptation byfocusing on the dynamic ways in which antagonisms—incongruences andinconsistencies between goals, implementation strategies, and outcomes—develop
and persist. Scholars have used terms such as “barriers,” “obstacles,” “tensions,”
and “contradictions” to describe the difficulties that hinder the formulation andimplementation of climate change adaptation actions (Eakin et al. 2014). Lack ofresources to meet the costs of adaptation can be a financial barrier. Lack ofadministrative and/or political capacity can be an institutional barrier to adaptation.
Collective opposition and political mobilization against adaptation can be a social-­
cultural barrier. Finally, gaps in climate change knowledge and the transmission of
information can create an information barrier. Eisenack et al. (2014, p. 867) suggestthat the “growing literature on barriers to adaptation reveals not only commonly
reported barriers, but also conflicting evidence, and few explanations of why barriers
exist and change.”
In attempt to move beyond debates over discrete barriers to climate change adaptation, Pelling et al. (2015) have developed the concept of transformation “as an
adaptive response to climate change” that can open a range of novel policy options.
In their work, transformative adaptation is a multifaceted concept that researchers
can use to describe responses that produce nonlinear changes in systems or their
host social and ecological environments. The concept also raises distinct ethical andprocedural questions for decision-makers and “foregrounds questions of power andpreference that have so far been underdeveloped in adaptation theory and practice”(p. 113). The concept of transformative adaptation dovetails with the notion oftransformative resilience developed by Gotham and Campanella (2011) and suggests that we view climate change adaptation in a multidimensional fashion, forexample, as a political decision point, an opportunity for socio-spatial change, anda prospect for resistance to dominant developmental pathways.
Through a comparison of New Orleans and New York, our research helps to
explain the major antagonisms of adaptation and provides insights on how to
overcome them to enhance societal resilience to climate change risks. Following the
logic of encompassing comparison, we analytically juxtapose policy trajectories
and institutional arrangements rather than compare discrete units or fixed variables.
The chapter offers a sociological critique of the dominant approaches to adaptationand highlights the institutional and social antagonisms that are shaping theimplementation of climate change policy in each city.

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Our theorization of the facilitative and discouraging power of state action in thedevelopment of climate change adaptation measures focuses on the state as an actor
and as an institutional structure. The state comprises many actors that can formulate
and implement different policies and socio-legal regulations to respond to climatechange. State governments have special charters and can make property rights
decisions to alter the organization of firms and corporate hierarchies. Throughlegislative debate and compromise, the US Congress makes laws, holds hearings to
inform the legislative process, conducts investigations to oversee the executive
branch, and represents voting constituencies and states in the federal government.
Courts can determine the meaning and effect of laws passed by the state legislatures.
Over the decades, US judges have played aggressive roles in interpreting policy-­making and economic governance (Campbell and Lindberg 1990).
As an institutional structure, the state power and authority are fragmented andrestricted to the extent that state and local governments exercise political authority
within their own geographical areas. The existence of 50 separate governments
combined with hundreds of municipalities in metropolitan areas has played an
important role in the development of different markets, real estate financing, andland-use policies and regulatory strategies. For the most part, laws and regulations
pertaining to economic activity and investment are locally based. These laws andregulations include, among many others, recording regulations, banking laws,
zoning laws, subdivision regulations, private deed restrictions, land-use regulations,building codes, insurance laws, and property tax law (Feagin and Parker 2002;
Gotham 2006, 2009). At the same time, local laws and socio-legal regulations
establish institutional practices and rules of exchange that coordinate local economic
activity among organizations in a particular economic sector (residential,commercial, or industrial activity) and, more importantly, create distinctive locations
for policy-making, investment, and economic activity. The implication is that thedecentralized and fragmented institutional structure of the state has influenced thedevelopment of legal forms that reinforce the place specificity of climate change
adaptation measures thereby fostering local uniqueness and innovation (Gotham2006).

4.3

 lobal Climate Change Risk in New York City and New
G
Orleans

The New York City metropolitan area, with 23 million residents and approximately
3700 miles of tidal coastline, faces a severe social-ecological threat from climatechange-driven warming and sea-level rise. The New York City Panel on Climate
Change (NPCC), an organization that examines climate change vulnerability andprepares projections for the City and metropolitan region, contends that extreme
weather will increase in frequency and severity and that the climate will become
more variable. Climate projections encompass a wide range of possible outcomes:

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mean annual temperature is projected to increase between 4.1 and 6.6 °F by the2050s and between 5.3 and 10.3 °F by the 2080s; frequency of heat waves is
projected to triple by the 2050s to 5 to 7 heat waves per year; sea level is expected
to continue rising by 11 to 21 inches by the 2050s and by 18 to 39 inches by the2080s, a rate that exceeds the global average in relative sea-level rise. New York
City has experienced the devastating effects of coastal storms, most recently during
Hurricane Sandy, as well as flooding in low-lying areas during high tides. Sea-level
rise is projected to increase the depth, extent, and frequency of flooding fromstorm surge and during high tides (Horton et al. 2015; New York City Mayor’s
Office 2015).
Like New York, the New Orleans metropolitan area constitutes a highly cited
example of a region experiencing the leading edge of climate-related stresses thatare widely anticipated to affect coastal regions worldwide (Hallegatte et al. 2013).
Given its low elevation and susceptibility to storm surge, extreme storm events andsea-level rise stand out as two of the most severe consequences of climate change in
New Orleans and much of southern Louisiana. González and Törnqvist (2006,2009) show that the preindustrial millennium (600 to 1600 AD) witnessed a rate ofsea-level rise of −0.55 mm yr.−1 in coastal Louisiana. In contrast, the past century
has seen rates of at least 2 mm yr.−1, roughly in line with the global average and afourfold increase in the rate of relative sea-level rise (IPCC 2013). Moreover, modeling assessments consistently point toward an increase in hurricane intensity with
global warming. Hurricanes strike the Louisiana coast with a mean frequency of 2
every 3 years (Kolb and Saucier 1982). In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in US history with approximately 1.5 million
people evacuated from the Gulf Coast region. Using storm surge models, scientists
predict a doubling of Hurricane Katrina-magnitude events over the next century(Grinsted et al. 2013; Holland 2012).
For New Orleans, climate-related environmental change coalesces with othernon-climate stressors such as wetland loss and land subsidence. Louisiana harbors
approximately 40 percent of the contiguous United States’ coastal wetlands yet
accounts for almost 80 percent of wetland loss. Louisiana has been losing coastal
wetlands since at least the 1930s, but the long-term rate of land loss has slowed
since its peak in the 1970s, according to the Department of the Interior’s US
Geological Survey (Couvillion 2017). In addition to subsidence and accelerated
sea-level rise, the dredging of about 15,000 km of canals in the Mississippi River
Delta area, primarily for oil and gas infrastructure, has led to widespread saltwater
intrusion and ecosystem degradation. However, the fundamental cause of wetland
loss is the isolation of the delta plain from sediment input due to the embankment of
the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers by artificial levees. Since embankment wascompleted in the 1930s, the majority of the Mississippi River sediment load has
been lost to the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where the mouth of the riverdebouches at the shelf edge rather than near shore and inland areas that would
replenish the delta plain (Campanella 2017).
Our comparative analysis of climate change adaptation measures in New Yorkand New Orleans suggets two sets of intersecting factors that pose interesting

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conditions for studying climate change responses. On the one hand, both urban
regions represent global climate change’s “canaries in the coal mine” in the UnitedStates. These highly sensitive regions face a future of rising relative sea level,
increased frequency and destructiveness of storm events, extreme vulnerability toflood trauma, and potential for major displacement. Scientists view the two regions
as harbingers of climate change impacts to come for coastal ecosystems worldwide(Kent 2012; Reed et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2011). On the other hand, both cities
constitute the leading edge of socio-legal experimentation, regulatory inventiveness,and policy innovation that will likely offer new approaches and strategies to help
other cities adapt to climate change. Currently, planners and policy-makers debate
various policies to reduce coastal risk, and major coastal restoration projects,
climate change adaptation, and mitigation efforts are currently underway (Gotham
2016a, b; Gotham and Cheek 2017; Gotham and Cannon 2018; Gotham and Powers
2017; Peyronnin et al. 2013; Fischbach et al. 2012). Yet the level at which electedleaders and policy-makers understand the causes and consequences of climatechange, as well as the extent to which they regard climate change as harmful to theecological and economic sustainability of the two cities and regions, is not known.
These concerns underpin the need to examine the local and regional dynamics ofclimate adaptation policy-making and implementation in detail.

4.4

 ong-Term Sustainability Challenges Facing New York
L
City and New Orleans

Both New York City and New Orleans face long-term sustainability challenges
related to the distinctive and peculiar system of local, state, and federal relationships
and financing arrangements in the United States (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). Asa distinctive configuration of organizations, the agencies of the different branches ofthe federal government, as well as agencies at the state and local government levels,
are predisposed to struggle and conflict over funding amounts and mechanisms offinancing. Insofar as the different parts of local, state, and federal governments haveoverlapping responsibilities for policy-making, contradictory policy actions andpolitical stalemate are possible. Indeed, the institutionally fragmented nature of US
federalism has systematically produced a variety of conflicts and contradictions inmany areas of policy-making including economic policy, defense policy,transportation policy, housing policy, regulatory policy, hazard mitigation anddisaster response policy, and so on (Campbell and Pedersen 2014; Gotham 2012;
Gotham and Wright 2009; Hogan and Howlett 2015). As long as different parts oflocal, state, and federal governments provide different arenas of access to politicalactors and organized interests, then political conflict and struggle are possible.
Moreover, we can expect conflicting policy actions and policy outcomes to theextent that these actors pursue their interests in different arenas.

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Over the last decade, the US federal government has developed a number of climate change adaptation plans that have intersected with local efforts to address
urban resilience. In June 2013, President Obama issued the Climate Action Plan,
which describes the federal government’s existing and planned efforts to prepare forthe impacts of climate change and set strategic priorities for the country. For
example, the plan directs federal agencies to take appropriate actions to reduce risk
to federal investments, specifically calling on them to update their flood risk
reduction standards. The plan also established a federal flood risk management
standard in January 2015, and implementation guidelines were issued in October
2015 (Executive Order No. 13690). In November 2013, President Obama also
issued Executive Order 13653, which directed federal agencies to develop or update
comprehensive adaptation plans by describing how they would consider improving
climate change adaptation and resilience measures. By 2014, almost 40 federal
agencies had created climate change adaptation plans. In addition, several
crosscutting interagency plans had been developed to address challenges andimprove resilience to climate impacts (Interagency Climate Change Adaptation
Task Force 2011).
One example of the antagonistic nature of the formulation and implementationof climate change adaptation measures is the efforts the Trump Administration took
to rescind the two Obama Administration executive orders mentioned above. On
March 28, 2017, President Trump revoked Executive Order 13653 that aimed topromote (1) engaged and strong partnerships and information sharing at all levels ofgovernment; (2) risk-informed decision-making and the tools to facilitate it; (3)adaptive learning, in which experiences serve as opportunities to inform and adjust
future actions; and (4) preparedness planning. On August 15, 2017, President Trump
revoked Executive Order 13690 in an effort to streamline federal environmental
review and approval of major infrastructure projects located in flood-prone areas.
The Obama Administration’s Executive Order 13690 (2015) required federally
funded projects to incorporate flood risk management standards that account for
sea-level rise. By revoking this executive order, the Trump Administration adopts a
new floodplain risk management strategy that restricts the definition of floodplain,
thereby allowing more real estate development in flood-prone areas, rejects
determinations of risk based on “a climate-informed science approach,” and nolonger requires federal agencies to incorporate climate science into the analysis.
The decisions of the Trump Administration are not only inconsistent with pastdecisions of the Obama Administration on climate change adaptation but are at odds
with prevailing science-based risk management measures advocated by scientists
and policy-makers.
During the Obama Administration, the President’s Climate Action Plan directedfederal agencies to support climate-resilient investments. For example, the plan
directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to require
grant recipients funded with supplemental appropriations for Hurricane Sandy
response to take sea-level rise into account in their projects and activities. Federal
agencies have made other climate-resilient investments. HUD, for example, initiatedthe Rebuild by Design competition and provided $930 million to fund projects that

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enhance disaster resilience in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. One such project
proposed building deployable walls attached to the underside of roads that could be
used during flood events in Manhattan. In addition, several Federal Emergency
Management Authority (FEMA) programs fund hazard mitigation measures toassist states and local governments in their efforts to enhance disaster resilience
before disasters occur. Activities eligible for grants include property acquisition,
elevation, and retrofitting. Programs such as the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program,
Hazard Mitigation Assistance, Pre-disaster Mitigation Grant Program, Flood
Mitigation Assistance, Repetitive Flood Claims, and Severe Repetitive Loss
undertake these projects (Gotham 2012).
Several federal agencies and funding sources have played major roles in post-­
Katrina and post-Sandy rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and New York. Following
Hurricane Katrina, Congress authorized the US Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”)
to design and construct the $14.6 billion Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk
Reduction System (HSDRRS) for southeast Louisiana. Over the past 10 years, theCorps has strengthened the levees, floodwalls, gated structures, and pump stations
that form the 133-mile Greater New Orleans perimeter system in addition to
improving approximately 70 miles of interior risk reduction structures (Gotham2018). In Louisiana, state officials used $10.5 billion in HUD funds from theCommunity Development Block Grant (CDBG) program to create the Road Home
program, which provided homeowners with up to $150,000 to repair or rebuild
damaged homes. Other Road Home funds were used to elevate homes (for a critical
overview, see Gotham 2014a). Like FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant program,policy-makers designed the Road Home as a resilience-enhancing program, thoughscholars have raised questions about the overall effectiveness of the Road Home
program in achieving resilience goals and outcomes (Gotham 2014b).
Other federal funding sources including the Water Resources Development Act(WRDA) and the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act(CWPPRA) (authorized by Congress in 1990) have been instrumental in funding
coastal restoration and protection efforts in southern Louisiana. Following
Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, the federal government provided $27.4 million
to Louisiana for coastal protection and restoration projects that help communities
recover from the storms and better withstand future hurricanes. The CDBG funds
went to the Louisiana Office of Community Development’s Disaster Recovery Unit,
which has partnered with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA)
to identify potential flood protection projects such as levee construction or
improvements, floodgate installation, critical infrastructure, and shoreline
protection. Through Fiscal Year 2015, the CPRA built or improved approximately
250 miles of levees, moved over 150 projects into design and construction phases,
approved constructed projects in 20 parishes, and approved construction of 45 milesof barrier islands and berms. These projects represent a total state government
investment of nearly $477 million in FY 2015 (CPRA 2017).
In New York, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the State of New York raised$450 million to construct new armored levees and other infrastructure along Midland
Beach and Staten Island’s East Shore. Funds were also allocated to invest in coastal

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protection in the Rockaways and the communities surrounding the Jamaica Bay
area. In addition, HUD allocated $4.21 billion in disaster aid through the Community
Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) to create to the Business
PREP (Preparedness and Resiliency Program). This was a new program to help
small businesses better prepare for emergencies and enhance the resiliency of theiroperations, assets, and physical space. The $4.21 billion in disaster aid helped spur
new investment in several urban neighborhoods including the Rockaways, Staten
Island, Coney Island, and Hunts Point (New York City Mayor’s Office 2014). In
2015, New York City announced that it was using funds from HUD’s Rebuild by
Design, referred to above, to begin preliminary design work on the Lower East Side
to implement a $335 million integrated, neighborhood-sensitive flood protection
system to mitigate risk. This project is “intended to be just the first phase of a larger
project that will ultimately provide coastal resiliency for all of Lower Manhattan,”according to the New York City Mayor’s Office (2015).
The generation and distribution of climate change adaptation resources are mediated by the decentralized, fragmented structure of American federalism. This decentralized and fragmented structure localizes the funding mechanisms to generate themonetary resources to support climate change adaptation measures. State governments and localities have historically remained responsible for generating funds forurban revitalization. Consequently, uneven metropolitan development has been apermanent feature throughout US history (Gotham 2014c; Gotham 2001). Moreover,for most people, climate change is distant and remote compared to the everyday
concerns of urban health, crime and safety, education, and housing. Governments
have typically not included adaptive measures in their planning because they tend to
focus their attention and resources on competing, shorter-term priorities like sustaining government services and raising funds to deal with infrastructure upkeep,
repair, and long-term challenges. Adaptation is a relatively low priority comparedwith more traditional and immediate concerns such as managing aging infrastructure systems, sustaining current levels of service, protecting public health andsafety, and maintaining service affordability (GAO 2013). Short-term competing
priorities make it difficult for decision-makers to address the impacts of climatechange, especially since many state and local governments responsible for infrastructure investment face immediate funding and staffing challenges. Given these
institutional challenges, the formulation of coherent climate change adaptation policy remains elusive and extraordinarily difficult.

4.5

Contradictory Roles of the Federal Government

Recent years have witnessed three ominous developments that threatened to obstructprogress on reducing climate change risks. First, in March 2017, President Donald
Trump, as part of his Fiscal Year 2018 budget request, introduced plans to eliminate
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Sea
Grant College Program, a 50-year old program that funds scientific research focused

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on climate change adaptation initiatives that will prepare coastal communities forthe predicted impacts of climate change. In prior years, the program received $73
million per year. Under the Trump budget, the program would have received nofunding at all. The Sea Grant program oversees a network that includes the National
Sea Grant Office, 33 university-based state programs, the National Sea Grant
Advisory Board, the National Sea Grant Law Center, the National Sea Grant Library,and hundreds of other participating institutions. Also in his budget, Trump
announced major cuts to NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research,where climate research programs are housed. The office would see a $150 million,
or 19 percent, budget cut. Other NOAA programs to be zeroed out as part of theadministration’s budget request included the National Estuarine Research Reserve
System, Coastal Zone Management Program grants, and the Pacific Coastal Salmon
Recovery Fund. Over the past year, Congress has followed President Trump’s leadby pushing for major budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
such as $513 million in cuts that would effectively terminate climate change
adaptation programs such as the Climate Resilience Fund as well as broader
environmental programs and management (Meade 2018; Thwaites 2018). While theHouse ignored the President’s budget request, rather increasing funding for Sea
Grant and NOAA, the examples continue to be relevant because they reflect a lackof consensus between the legislative and executive branches on funding for climatechange mitigation and adaptation.
Second, in President Trump’s first budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018, he proposed major cuts in federal funding for coastal restoration and protection efforts inLouisiana. The proposal upends the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA),
which is a commitment from Congress to share offshore energy revenues with fourof the Gulf states that are impacted by its production. GOMESA is projected toprovide approximately $100 million per year beginning in 2017. Congress has dictated that GOMESA funds be used for projects and activities for the purposes ofcoastal protection, including conservation, coastal restoration, hurricane protection,and infrastructure directly affected by coastal wetland losses. President Trump’s
proposal follows Obama Administration 2016 and 2017 budgets for the Department
of Interior that contained language to redirect GOMESA revenue to broader national
programs. GOMESA is a revenue-sharing program that, while estimated to provide
substantial long-term funding for climate change adaptation, is not guaranteed
across a multi-decade time horizon. A major contradiction in relying on GOMESA
to fund climate change adaptation efforts is that GOMESA revenues depend on thecontinued profitability of offshore oil and gas production, a major producer of
GHGs that are the source of global warming and subsequent sea-level rise (Mogensen
2018; Reardon et al. 2017; Selby n.d.).
Third, closely related to recent executive branch efforts to erect roadblocks to
climate change adaptation has been a strong political consensus among electedleaders to deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of climate driven
sea-level rise, its significance, and its connection to coastal erosion. In Louisiana,
many elected officials have been prominent climate change deniers, calling into
question the science behind global warming and adamantly opposing legislation to4

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reduce GHGs that contribute to rising sea levels. Over the years, Louisiana’s
congressional delegation has voted against legislation that would have factored
global warming into federal project planning; voted in favor of barring the EPA
from regulating GHGs; voted against enforcing limits on CO2 global warming
pollution; voted against tax credits for renewable electricity; voted for tax incentives
for fossil fuel energy production; voted against tax incentives for renewable energy;
voted against removing oil and gas exploration subsidies and against keeping a
moratorium on drilling for oil offshore (outside of Louisiana); voted for authorizing
construction of new oil refineries; voted for barring GHGs from Clean Air Act rules;
voted for letting the wind energy production tax credit expire; voted against reducing
oil usage by 40 percent by 2025 (instead of 5 percent); voted against factoring
global warming into federal project planning; voted against implementation of the
Kyoto Protocol; voted against including oil and gas smokestacks in mercury
regulations (September 2005); and voted to appoint Scott Pruitt—a climate change
denier who has sued the EPA over emission regulations—to head that agency(Marshall 2017).
In 2011, US House of Representative member Steve Scalise helped pass anamendment to the Agriculture Appropriations Bill prohibiting funds from being
used to implement a new US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulation
requiring agencies to spend taxpayer dollars to study and implement climate change
policies and initiatives. The amendment passed by a vote of 238 to 179. Senator
Scalise signed the No Climate Tax Pledge and voted for amending the Clean Air Act
to prohibit the EPA from promulgating any regulation on the emission of agreenhouse gas to address climate change. He also voted against proposed legislation
to require utilities to supply an increasing percentage of their demand from a
combination of energy efficiency savings and renewable energy. In 2009, he signed
HR 391 to amend the Clean Air Act to declare that nothing in the Act shall be treatedas authorizing or requiring the regulation of climate change or global warming. As
one journalist put it:
No landscape in the nation is more threatened by global warming, yet our delegation has
consistently voted against carbon legislation at the urging of industry and have voted forbills that would prohibit federal agencies from even studying global warming. Naturally,that has congress people in other states asking the question: Why should we pour billions
into rebuilding Louisiana's coast, if their own delegation isn't going to address one of themain causes of its loss? (Marshall 2012)

Climate change denial expresses the mounting political and economic stakes ofdealing with the risks of anthropogenic climate change. Conservative think tanks,
conservative media, corporations, and industry associations (especially for the fossil
fuels industry)—domains dominated by conservative white males—havespearheaded the attacks on climate science and policy from the late 1980s to thepresent (Dunlap and McCright 2011; Freudenburg and Muselli 2010; Lahsen 2008;
McCright and Dunlap 2003, 2010, 2011a, b; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Organizedclimate change denial has an elective affinity with established conservative thinktanks that promote free-market conservatism and front groups promoting industry
interests. Sustained climate change denial, promoted largely by the American

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K. F. Gotham and M. Faust

conservative movement (Dunlap and McCright 2011; McCright and Dunlap 2003,
2010), contributes to political polarization on climate change beliefs (McCright andDunlap 2011b). This organized “climate change denial movement” has mobilized toundercut public belief in climate science and discourage political support for climatechange risk reduction measures and adaptation measures (Dunlap and McCright2011; Oreskes and Conway 2010; McCright and Dunlap 2010; Powell 2011). The
political effect of climate change denial is to off-load the cost of paying for climatechange risk reduction to other more vulnerable groups while simultaneously
protecting the profiteering interests of the GHG production economy.

4.6

Conclusions

Since the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988,
the potential impacts of global climate change have captured the attention of thenatural and physical scientists, the international research community, and the policy-­
makers around the world. As the human causes and consequences of climate change
have become increasingly apparent, scholars and government leaders have called onsocial scientists to contribute to the scientific understanding of the role of humans in
global climate change (for overviews, see Dunlap and Brulle 2015; Nagel et al.
2010). Social scientists debate the short-term and long-term climate impacts on
cities and communities around the world. Different nations will have to balance avariety of value-laden considerations related to the impacts of climate change itself,
potential costs of mitigation and adaptation, and collective struggles over theappropriate societal response. The difficulty of these tasks is compounded by theneed to develop a consensus on fundamental issues such as the level of risk thatsocieties are willing to accept and impose on others, strategies for sharing costs, andplanning for unforeseen consequences. These tasks and issues are intertwined withrelations of domination and subordination. Different actors and organized interests
have varied political-economic prerogatives, and the political system offers
differential and unequal access to decision-making power. Thus, any examination of
the global social problem of climate change must address the question of adaptation“for whom” and “for what purpose.”
In spite of the federal disaster resources directed to New York and New Orleans,the federal government has an inherently limited role in the project-level planning
processes central to adapting infrastructure to climate change because these are
typically the responsibility of state and local governments. That is, state and local
authorities are primarily responsible for prioritizing and supervising theimplementation of climate change adaptation measures and projects. Therefore, forthe foreseeable future, both New York and New Orleans as well as US cities ingeneral face a constrained situation of poor funding and limited options for raisingmoney. On the one hand, different communities can use a variety of sources to fundcapital projects, pay for operations and maintenance costs, and sustain programs.
These funding sources can include (1) taxes such as property, sales, and income

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levies; (2) fees such as charges for inspections and permits; (3) state and federal
grants such as those that support improvements to drinking water, wastewater, andstorm water systems; (4) bonds which enable communities to borrow money to pay
for projects; (5) loans to pay for projects and programs; and (6) public-private
partnerships that entail contractual agreements between a public agency and a
private sector entity allowing for cooperation and collaboration in the financing,planning, design, construction, and maintenance of water infrastructure.
On the other hand, the particular mix of funding sources and the amount they arecapable of generating varies across communities depend on the level of wealth of
the tax base, environmental circumstances, and specific community needs. In the
United States, the formulation and implementation of climate change adaptation
measures work through a complex system of multilevel governance that involves aplethora of statutes, laws, financing mechanisms, administrative capacities, andmultiple overlapping and interconnected horizontal and vertical lines of authority.
According to a 2010 National Research Council study, no one-size-fits-all adaptation option exists for a particular climate impact because climate change vulnerabilities can vary significantly by infrastructure category, region, community, or
institution. Thus, the scale of the urban is of central importance in understanding
similarities and differences in the process and patterns of climate change policymaking as well as the outcomes of climate adaptation measures (Bulkeley and
Betsill 2013). That is, cities are not only the targets of climate change policy-making but are the locus of political conflicts over the nature and character of climatechange adaptation. Cities are creatures of state governments, and state governments
are, in turn, constituted by the laws and statutes of the US federal government.
Conflicts and struggles over climate change policy and action do not take place indiscrete local, national, and international arenas. Rather, climate change politics andpolicy outcomes express changing cross-scale interactions and complex verticallinkages between local actions, state government institutions, and the higher levelsof the US federal government.
Today, many cities in the United States face a situation of chronic fiscal retrenchment, declining federal resources to fund climate change adaptation efforts, andbroad hostility to the science of climate change. What the cases of New York and
New Orleans show us is that taking steps to implement climate change adaptation
measures is difficult for several reasons. Adaptation efforts tend to be expensive andrequire long-term, concerted planning and consensus building. More important,political and economic elites and elected officials typically oppose adaptation
investments until faced with response and recovery expenditures once a disaster has
occurred. Additionally, of critical importance is the fact that within the US federal
system, the adoption and implementation of many adaptation activities fall within
the purview of local governments, and those governmental units are typically
influenced by powerful and organized economic development interests that are most
likely to oppose adaptation. Moreover, it has only been in the last decade or so thatfederal funds for adaptation became available to communities, but the future ofthose funds is uncertain. Consequently, the current US climate change adaptation
landscape is a patchwork of differing approaches in which some communities and108

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regions are afforded some protection from some climate risks (but not others), whileothers remain highly vulnerable to the negative impacts of global climate change.
We conclude with several policy recommendations to facilitate and enable more
informed decisions about adaptation. Current efforts include raising publicawareness of the adverse impacts of climate change, improving infrastructure
decision-makers’ access to and use of available climate-related information,
providing increased access to local assistance, and considering climate change inexisting planning processes (for overviews, see GAO 2013; Dunlap and Brulle2015). These are important, but we think policy recommendations should embrace
an equity-oriented and social justice-based focus. That is, the goal of climate change
adaptation cannot lie just in consciousness raising through public awarenesscampaigns or in the implementation of conventional systems of financing (bondprograms, tax incentives, etc.). Rather, climate change adaptation requires an effort
to integrate and coordinate housing, infrastructure, and economic development
programs with comprehensive, publically financed, and democratically run
programs with clear accountability systems. Cross-scale, collaborative governancecould enhance the flexibility and spatial targeting of incentives to reduce vulnerability
and also provide an institutional foundation for direct participation of community
residents in program design, implementation, and oversight responsibilities. The
creation of jobs that pay a living wage, adequate benefits for those who cannot
work, access to affordable health care, and increased supply of affordable housing
might also improve the effectiveness of climate change adaptation programs,
especially for low-income and moderate-income communities that face the highest
levels of vulnerability to climate change impacts. Developing public and private
sector funding criteria to match communities’ evolving vulnerability pressures,combined with public works programs, could enhance prospects for achieving equitable climate change adaptation for communities.

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Chapter 5

Adapting to a Smaller Coast: Restoration,
Protection, and Social Justice in Coastal
Louisiana
Scott A. Hemmerling, Monica Barra, and Rebecca H. Bond

5.1

Introduction

Louisiana’s coastal zone (Fig. 5.1) is a naturally dynamic area that has undergone
many changes over the past 8000 years coinciding with the shifting deltaic lobes ofthe Mississippi River (see Fig. 2.2 in Boesch). Recent decades, however, have seen
a rapid acceleration of rates of land loss and transitions of habitat types resulting
from increasing sea level rise and land subsidence, saltwater intrusion, reduced
sediment flow, increasing eutrophication, large storm events, and habitat clearing
and alteration due to infrastructure development along the coast (Carruthers et al.
2017). Over this same time period, coastal residents have become increasingly anddisproportionately dependent on the coastal zone for living space and recreation,
ports and harbors, oil and gas production, commercial and recreational fisheries,
marine construction, ship and boat manufacturing, tourism and recreation, andmarine transportation (Hemmerling et al. 2016; Weinstein et al. 2007). Most ofthese economic activities are based on local renewable and nonrenewable natural
resources and are therefore largely immovable and highly sensitive to natural andhuman-induced changes, including fluctuating global economic conditions, environmental stress, climate change impacts, coastal habitat destruction, and increasing social and economic pressures. Shoreline erosion and coastal land loss also
threaten the onshore infrastructure that supports these activities, including the

S. A. Hemmerling (*)
The Water Institute of the Gulf, Baton Rouge, LA, USAe-mail: shemmerling@thewaterinstitute.org
M. Barra
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USAe-mail: mbarra@seoe.sc.edu
R. H. Bond
Independent Researcher, Washington, DC, USA© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_5

113

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Fig. 5.1 Map of southern Louisiana showing major cities and the coastal zone. Base map courtesyof Esri, DeLorme, HERE, MapmyIndia, © OpenStreetMap contributors and the GIS community.
(Data retrieved from Louisiana Department of Natural Resources)

extensive network of oil and gas infrastructure and pipelines that cross the coastalzone (Hemmerling et al. 2016).
The extent of societal dependency on these activities in the face of increased
levels of environmental, economic, and social vulnerability has made managing
coastal resources for the public good more challenging than at any time in the past
(Weinstein et al. 2007). Recent decades have seen a number of shifts in coastalmanagement priorities: from local problem-solution approaches to broader ecological restoration strategies and, most recently, to large-scale, unified restoration plansthat are no longer constrained by political boundaries, embracing multiple jurisdictions and watershed-ocean gradients (Reed 2009). Each of these regimes has astrong science or engineering foundation and seeks to produce predetermined ecological outcomes (Colten 2017) and ultimately results in a shifting of the distribution of the benefits of protection and restoration to greater spatial and temporalscales. In the case of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a science-driven restoration
plan that relies heavily on numerical models to optimize project selection and location, the benefits of restoration and protection are anticipated to be widely distributed among a larger, but more abstract, coastal population. Further, numerical model
results are able to examine the expected distribution of benefits to future
populations.
State policy makers acknowledge that the restoration and protection benefits
derived from the numerical model results are spatially variable, owing to both funding and biogeophysical constraints. In some locations of the coast, even with full
implementation of the Master Plan, land area is expected to greatly diminish, whilein others the land area will be largely maintained. Further, planners acknowledge
that implementation of structural protection projects may not be feasible for some

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coastal communities and areas outside the major levee systems. In some cases, residents of these areas will require nonstructural protection, while in others the adverse
future environmental conditions may ultimately displace people, infrastructure, andpossibly even the entire communities. With these consequences in mind, coastal
planning in Louisiana raises several issues of social justice, many of which arise
from the techniques and practices state coastal policy makers use to select restoration and protection projects. The main concern is the extent to which the voices andvalues of residents bearing the greatest burden of coastal restoration are integrated
into planning practices.
This chapter traces the history of coastal planning and the social justice implications of the shift from piecemeal to comprehensive, coastwide planning. It tackles
these questions through a close examination of several key topics. First, it traces the
emergence and evolution of coastal planning processes, focusing on the shift towardscience-driven, numerical models and how and to what extent public engagement
contributed to planning processes and the development of conceptual frameworks.
Next, the chapter examines three different aspects of social justice – distributive,
procedural, and contextual – asking how each might or might not be impacted by
the activities of coastal restoration planning in Louisiana. Finally, the chapter ends
with a close examination of recent efforts by state policy makers to enhance public
participation for the development of the 2017 Coastal Master Plan and analyzes towhat extent new techniques for public engagement potentially translate into moresocially just selections for future coastal proposals geographically, socially, andeconomically.

5.2

 istorical Evolution of Coastal Restoration PlanningH
in Louisiana

To more fully understand the costs and benefits of coastal restoration and how theseare distributed among coastal residents, it is important to understand the historicaldevelopment of restoration polices and the restoration planning process itself. The
coastal protection and restoration planning process has continuously evolved over
several decades as local, state, and federal agencies developed a number of plansand policy proposals to combat the persistent loss of land that has affectedLouisiana’s coastline since at least the 1930s. The most expansive plan developed
thus far has been the 2017 update to the state’s 50-year Coastal Master Plan.
Unanimously approved by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority (CPRA) in April 2017, this plan significantly expanded upon the original
2007 Master Plan as well as the 2012 update. As part of the plan, state officials
proposed 124 projects that would maintain or build approximately 800 square milesof land and could save as much as $150 billion in flood damages over the next
50 years. The CPRA estimates that the state would lose another 2250 square milesof land by 2067 if not able to fully implement the Master Plan in the coming decades,

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resulting in over $12 billion in annual flood damages (Schleifstein 2017). The state
acknowledges that, even if fully implemented, the Coastal Master Plan will be
unable to protect the entire coast of Louisiana and that the combination of land loss,
sea level rise, and subsidence will continue to take a toll on Louisiana’s coastal communities for decades to come. Just as the impacts of the state’s coastal crisis will be
more pronounced in some communities than in others, the degree of protection
afforded by the Coastal Master Plan will not be evenly distributed across the coast.
The planning process itself will necessarily result in the establishment of winners
and losers in coastal protection and restoration, raising the possibility of social andenvironmental injustices and outcomes.

5.2.1

 re-Katrina: From Piecemeal Projects to Broad-ScaleP
Ecological Planning

Though the 2017 Coastal Master Plan contains a number of grim warnings about the
future of the state’s coast, Louisianans are not unfamiliar with the risks posed byshoreline erosion. As early as the 1970s, scientists and researchers began warning
government officials and the public about the potential impacts of losing the marshes
and swamps that make up large sections of the state’s coastal topography. In 1972
and 1973, the Louisiana Advisory Commission on Coastal and Marine Resources
published three reports examining the loss of coastal wetlands and the potential
negative consequences (Louisiana Advisory Commission on Coastal and Marine
Resources 1972, 1973a, 1973b). Five years after the commission’s reports, legislators passed the State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act of 1978 in aneffort to manage development in 19 coastal parishes and help protect the wetlands(“Managing Our Coastal Resources” 1980). Two years later, the federal government
approved a coastal management plan (CMP) that included a Coastal Use Permit
system to provide additional oversight of activities in the coastal zone (Louisiana
Department of Natural Resources 1980).
Although the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 increased the ability
for residents to challenge projects based on environmental and social impacts
through the Environmental Impact Statement process, these early coastal policies
and practices in Louisiana largely adhered to the more traditional public input process of having comments made on a report instead of public involvement in thedesign of projects. These initial efforts produced single-purpose project designs that
restricted the vision of engineers and scientists to addressing the primary objective,
whether it was flood protection, converting wasteland to productive real estate, or
species perpetuation (Colten 2017). Initial efforts to manage coastal resources inLouisiana, for example, focused on species-specific habitat enhancements and often
involved the manipulation of tidal regimes to maintain water levels to provide accessand encourage growth of particular forage vegetation (Reed 2009).

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After the CMP’s acceptance in 1980, relatively few significant advances in policy implementation or administration of coastal restoration occurred for the next
9 years. However, at the end of the decade, two important policy proposals becamelaw. First, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment in 1989 that
established the Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Trust Fund (WCRTF),
which was intended to provide a reliable source of money for restoration projects inthe state (McMahon 1989). The second notable policy development took place insummer of the following year when Senators John Breaux and J. Bennett Johnston
ushered a bill through Congress that finally brought federal dollars to the state’s
coastal erosion crisis. Signed by President George H.W. Bush in November 1990,
the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA or
Breaux Act) provided dedicated funding, meaning the state would not have torequest money from Congress every fiscal year. However, the amount of moneyCWPPRA could deliver was relatively small in relation to estimates for a fully
funded restoration program reaching several billion dollars in the early 1990s(McKinney 1989).
While the limited amount of funding was a concern, CWPPRA did make somepositive steps in other areas of coastal management and restoration. The legislation
created a bureaucratic framework that could bring order to the piecemeal administrative regime that had troubled wetlands policy during the previous two decades.
CWPPRA established a task force comprised of officials from the state of Louisianaand five federal agencies, including the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE),
Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department ofAgriculture, and Department of Commerce. Each agency’s secretary appoints a representative to serve on the task force, and every year the group selects a certain
number of restoration projects to be funded under CWPPRA (Louisiana Coastal
Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force 1993). Furthermore, the law
encouraged Louisiana to develop a conservation plan that included the goal of “nonet loss” for wetlands in future developments along the coast. The two plans – conservation to prevent future losses and restoration to address ongoing losses – wereintended to be complementary with regulations and allow for more comprehensive
management of the coast (Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration
Act 1990).
Unlike the majority of previous efforts, the CWPPRA process depends on project nominations from the public, state and federal agencies, coastal parishes, andother coastal entities such as ports. These project nominations are then reviewed byregional planning teams and technical teams and ultimately brought to the task force
for funding decisions. This gives local communities the ability to have initial input
into project selection before engineering and design even begins. During its first few
years, CWPPRA tended to fund small, localized projects that primarily benefitted
the immediate vicinity. Those smaller projects were successful, but they could notstop wetlands loss on a large scale over a long period of time (Louisiana Coastal
Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force 1996). As the severity of coastal
land loss became apparent, broad-scale ecological restoration emerged as the dominant management regime in coastal Louisiana. A primary focus of ecological118

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Fig. 5.2 Map showing existing restoration projects in the Louisiana coastal zone symbolized byfunding source. Includes projects completed as of April 2018. (Project data retrieved from theCoastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) CIMS database)r­estoration is to re-establish wetlands to a condition that will protect the region’s
ecology and major economic interests in the state (Colten 2017). Despite the broadening focus, however, these projects have tended to address single missions such as
coastal protection or coastal restoration or were focused on geographically limited
locations (Hemmerling 2017). Ultimately, these piecemeal efforts (Fig. 5.2) have
had limited success and have not resulted in a net gain of wetlands (Peyronnin et al.
2013). In 1995, groups such as the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL)
and members of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources began to advocate
for bigger projects that could address losses across the entire coast. In September ofthat year, the CWPPRA task force agreed that large-scale projects such as freshwater diversions and barrier island restoration should receive priority status on annual
project lists. Going forward, the task force would dedicate two-thirds of its yearly
project funding to large-scale projects and the remainder for small-scale projects(Anderson 1995a, b).
The shift to prioritizing large-scale projects was an important step toward more
effective restoration projects, but officials still needed a single vision for Louisiana’s
coast to help officials oversee protection and development. In the mid-1990s, dozens of agencies had authority in and around the wetlands, and there was no unifying
vision to guide their activities (Schleifstein 1996b). Both Louisiana and the federal
government’s approach remained piecemeal, even after several years of project
development under CWPPRA. If the current approach were to continue, the estimates were that only 22% of future losses could be avoided (Anderson 1997;
Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force and Louisiana
Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Authority 1998; Schleifstein 1996a, b).
In response to such predictions, political officials in Louisiana’s government andrepresentatives from federal agencies initiated a series of meetings in 1997. TheCWPPRA task force and the state’s Wetlands Authority in the Governor’s Office led

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the process of developing a unifying strategy including inviting agencies such as the
National Marine Fisheries Service and the Louisiana Department of Environmental
Quality to participate in the process. The group’s goals were to build a consensus
about what Louisiana’s coast should look like in the year 2050, ensure cooperation
among the variety of agencies involved in coastal management, and determine how
to administer a unified restoration plan (Horst 1997a, b; Louisiana Coastal Wetlands
Conservation and Restoration Task Force and Louisiana Wetlands Conservation and
Restoration Authority 1998). Over the course of 18 months, public officials met
with concerned citizens 65 times to determine what coastal users wanted to see in a
restoration plan (Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task
Force 1999).
The Coast 2050 task force built on previous plans but also made sure that the best
available science guided their decision-making for future restoration policies. The
Coast 2050 Plan was largely a vision document that pointed out challenges andpotential solutions. However, it stopped short of listing specific projects and instead
focused on strategies such as “maximize land building in Atchafalaya Bay” or“lower water levels in upper Penchant marshes.” The final proposal emphasized
striking a balance between wetlands protection and economic development and recognized there were multiple interests invested in using Louisiana’s coast for a variety of purposes (Dunne 1998). Participating agencies agreed that there was no way
to return Louisiana’s coast back to the way it had been prior to the 1930s, but there
was a consensus that a smaller, sustainable wetlands ecosystem was possible(Gagliano 1994).
The official response to the Coast 2050 report was largely positive. All 20 coastal
parishes formally endorsed the plan, and Governor Mike Foster voiced his support
for the adoption of Coast 2050 as a unified coastal management strategy (Schon1998). In 2002, the state partnered with the US Army Corps of Engineers to further
refine the Coast 2050 plan and develop a coastwide comprehensive restoration planunder the existing Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) planning authority (Day et al.
2007; Reed 2009). The resulting LCA Study produced detailed analyses of the costs
and benefits of various groupings of restoration projects and included a list of critical restoration projects, many of which had already undergone planning through the
CWPPRA process (Reed 2009).
Despite the scientific advances made in these early unified plans, there was still
the issue of who would pay the billions of dollars necessary to implement a coastwide restoration and management plan. Some progress was made in funding
Louisiana’s coastal restoration efforts in summer 2005 when Congress approved thepassage of a Coastal Impact Assistance Plan (CIAP). The program was designed toprovide revenues to states that contributed to oil development in the Outer
Continental Shelf (OCS), and nearly $1 billion in expected revenues would be split
among six states. Louisiana’s share was estimated to be around $540 million. The
funds would be distributed starting in 2007 and could only be used for projects
related to coastal erosion and mitigation of the impacts of Outer Continental Shelf(OCS) oil and gas development (Alpert 2005; Radtke Russel 2007).

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However, just a few weeks after Congress approved the law containing CIAP, thedevastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita changed the trajectory of coastal
restoration in the state. The hurricanes led to the loss of approximately 1800 lives inLouisiana and resulted in $200 billion in damages along the Gulf Coast (Louisiana
Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness 2015). New
Orleans was submerged under water when the city’s hurricane protection levees
failed during Katrina, and removing the floodwaters took over 40 days. More than
one million Louisianans were displaced from their homes in the aftermath of thehurricane (Knabb et al. 2005). This displacement was not equally distributed acrossthe population, nor was recovery. In New Orleans, for example, it was found thatblack residents were less likely to return to their homes after the storm than white
residents primarily because the storm did the most damage in those low-lying areasof the city disproportionately populated by black residents (Groen & Polivka 2010).
This in turn reflects historical environmental inequities as black residents were relegated to the low-lying and more vulnerable areas long before the storm ever hit,
highlighting that social justice for the future depends on decisions that are made in
the present. Katrina thus brought issues of social vulnerability and justice to theforefront of coastal protection and restoration science and marked a dramatic shift
in the state approach to coastal planning and urgency of generating more effective
policies.

5.2.2

 ost-Katrina: Establishing CPRA and Louisiana’s
P
Coastal Master Plan

While residents fled to other locations or struggled to rebuild in the wake of thestorms, state officials took action to address some of long-standing administrative
issues regarding coastal restoration. Governor Kathleen Blanco signed Act 8 into
law in November 2005, which created the Louisiana Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authority to replace the Wetlands Restoration and Conservation
Authority. The new body was directed to coordinate “the efforts of local, state, andfederal agencies to achieve long-term comprehensive coastal restoration and hurricane protection.” Act 8 also charged the CPRA with creating a “Master Plan that
presents a conceptual vision of a sustainable coast based on the best available science and engineering.” Projects related to CWPPRA, the LCA near-term plan, andfunds from the CIAP were forthwith to be organized “toward a common goal”(Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2007). Legislators asserted
that “the state must have a single agency with authority to articulate a clear statement of priorities,” and that “without this authority, the safety of citizens, the viability of state and local economies, and the long-term recovery from disasters such as
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita remain in jeopardy” (Louisiana Act No. 8 2005).
In fall 2006, voters approved a constitutional amendment that replaced theWetlands Conservation and Restoration Trust Fund with the Coastal Protection and5Adapting to a Smaller Coast: Restoration, Protection, and Social Justice in Coastal…

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Restoration Fund. They also approved a measure that directed all potential income
from any OCS revenue-sharing scheme into wetlands conservation, coastal restoration, and hurricane protection (Sentell 2006). The revenue-sharing amendment was
passed in anticipation of Congress authorizing the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security
Act (GOMESA) in 2006. In contrast to CWPPRA or the 2005 CIAP, GOMESA wasdesigned to provide a much larger scale of funding over a longer period of time(Walsh 2006). Though GOMESA promised another important source of funding forrestoration in Louisiana, coastal advocates warned even that large amount of money
was insufficient for the scope of the problem. Mark Davis, then with CRCL, praised
the new revenue from GOMESA and said it was “hugely important, but it’s alsohugely important to know that it’s only a down payment” (Shields 2006).
Another significant development happened in 2006. The state legislature hadcharged the CPRA with developing a Coastal Master Plan to be updated every
5 years, and the committee worked throughout the year to accomplish that goal. To
maximize the benefits of coastal projects and comprehensively address both restoration and protection, the CPRA began to focus on the development of unified restoration plans that acknowledge the systematic complexity of interrelated issues inLouisiana’s coastal zone and developed more coordinated, integrative frameworks.
These frameworks utilize a multiple lines of defense strategy that incorporates abroad suite of structural, nonstructural, and coastal restoration features, including
the Gulf of Mexico shelf, the barrier islands, the sounds, marshland bridges, natural
ridges, manmade ridges, flood gates, flood levees, pump stations, home and building
elevations, and evacuation routes (Lopez 2009). The unified restoration plan
approach has culminated with the development of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan
for a Sustainable Coast, a numerical model-driven plan built on previous efforts andbased upon a theoretically unbiased evaluation of hundreds of previously proposed
projects, including nonstructural measures, under both current and future conditions(Fig. 5.3; Peyronnin et al. 2013). While this plan involved extensive public comment periods, public meetings, stakeholder meetings, and presentations, the science-­
based numerical models do not incorporate these comments. Instead, the comments
are made after the plan is drafted and adjustments are made at that time. The difference between outreach, which the planning effort does well, and community
engagement, which is still lacking, can make it difficult to meaningfully include
social justice issues into the decision-making process.
A preliminary draft of the 2007 Master Plan was released in November 2006 andincluded a tentative vision for merging coastal restoration and hurricane protection.
The draft also proposed some recommendations that had been previously seen aspolitically toxic such as closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO). The
state had requested that the Corps close the MRGO before the 2005 hurricane season, but the federal agency had been reluctant. A small number of shippers still usedthe channel; however, after Katrina, decommissioning the MRGO seemed morefeasible. There were concerns that the navigation corridor had acted as a “superhighway” for storm surge, and officials in St. Bernard Parish welcomed the closure(Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 2006; Freudenburg
et al. 2009; Schleifstein 2006). Other proposals in the initial draft report faced

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Fig. 5.3 Map showing Master Plan 2017 projects symbolized by project type. (Project data
retrieved from the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) CIMS database)c­ riticism, particularly in relation to the heavy emphasis placed on using levees for
hurricane protection. Indeed, levees had contributed to coastal erosion and thenfailed to perform adequately during Katrina due to improper designs and maintenance and because Congress had not appropriated the necessary funds so there wereincomplete portions of the system. In response to the critiques that the CPRA
received in regard to its initial draft release, the committee revised the Coastal
Master Plan to rely less on levees for hurricane protection and pursued somethingcloser to the multiple lines of defense strategy which envisioned a series of speed
bumps from barrier islands to interior marsh restoration and to restorations of ridges
and including levees.
Much of the 2007 Master Plan was visionary rather than a list of specific projects
to pursue, and in that sense, the document resembled Coast 2050. There were somespecific suggestions such as closing MRGO or building the Morganza-to-the-Gulflevee system (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2007).
Overall, the CPRA’s first Master Plan, which was accepted by the state legislaturein March 2007, was a blueprint for the future (Schleifstein 2007). To implement
more specific actions, the CPRA would release annual reports with more targetedsuggestions (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2007). All
ongoing projects – including ones conducted under the CIAP, the CWPPRA, andthe Corps – needed to be consistent with the state’s Master Plan (Louisiana Coastal
Protection and Restoration Authority 2008).
Overall, reception of the 2007 Master Plan was mixed. Though the plan was nota radically innovative proposal, integrating restoration with hurricane protection
was a new step. Further, there seemed to be an increased commitment to funding a5Adapting to a Smaller Coast: Restoration, Protection, and Social Justice in Coastal…

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plan that treated both activities as related after Hurricane Katrina. However, a review
panel criticized the state over the “breakneck pace” at which the CPRA’s Integrated
Planning Team “attempted to craft solutions for a complex and all-important task.”
Other observers took issue with some of the proposals in the plan that were basedon questionable scientific evidence. Technical reviews made clear that more complex modeling and scenario analyses were needed and in response the CPRA
ramped up its scientific analysis and modeling efforts (Wiegman et al. 2018).
In preparation for the 2012 update to the Coastal Master Plan, the CPRA developed several new models that were linked to predict change in the Louisiana coastal
system under two types of future management strategies: a future without the implementation of future protection and restoration projects and a future with implementation of individual projects (Peyronnin et al. 2013). This systems-based numericalmodeling approach relied heavily on a decision support tool designed to provide ananalytical and objective basis for comparing projects and developing alternative
groups of projects for consideration in the final plan. Candidate projects wereselected by mining earlier studies, reports, presentations, and plans to develop a
final list of 397 candidate projects.
In 2012, the state released its first legislatively mandated update to the 2007
Master Plan, which included an assessment of the progress achieved in coastal restoration. Over the previous 5 years, the CPRA had administered projects related tobuilding or improving 159 miles of levees, constructed 32 miles of barrier islands or
berms, placed 150 in design or construction, and benefitted over 19,000 acres of
wetlands (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2012). By 2014,
45 miles of barrier islands or berms had been built, and coastal restoration and protection programs had benefitted 26,241 acres of land. As of 2015, the state planned
to monitor or maintain 230 projects, while overseeing the design and constructionof 79 more (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2016). Overall,the CPRA reported that the rate of shoreline erosion was down significantly from its
height in the 1970s. Despite the progress made, however, the state was still losing
approximately 16 square miles of land per year, highlighting the importance of continued coastal restoration planning (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority 2012).
The 2017 update to the Master Plan was largely based on the same framework
established in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2012. Coastal restoration projects will remain
under the oversight of the CPRA, but the latest iteration of the Master Plan does
contain an increased emphasis on nonstructural means of combatting storm-related
flooding (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority 2017).
Furthermore, officials appear to be less optimistic about the future of the coast in the2017 update, citing increasing concerns about climate change. New Orleans andother low-lying areas in southern Louisiana are expected to become even more vulnerable to flooding and storm-related damages as sea levels rise in response to thewarming planet (Marshall 2017). Worse, the funding problems that have undermined coastal restoration efforts since the 1970s have not been resolved. Louisiana
has long been planning to use GOMESA funds to help pay for projects beginning
after 2017. The state expected to get approximately $140 million in the first year but

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is currently slated to get half that amount. As a result, projects scheduled to begin in
the 2019 fiscal year may have to be scaled back or placed on hold while officials
search for additional funding (Schleifstein 1996b).

5.3

 hifting Costs and Benefits of Protection
S
and Restoration: Coastal Planning as a Matterof Social Justice

The benefits of the Master Plan and other similar unified restoration plans are without a doubt broad and sweeping. These plans do, however, acknowledge that it is notpossible to provide the same level of benefits to all coastal communities. Coastalmanagement literature argues that while structural defenses can be justified in urban
areas, they often fail to meet the cost-benefit test in thinly settled, rural locales(Colten et al. 2018). In coastal Louisiana, for example, much of the at-risk Native
American populations reside in the small rural communities located along the land-­water interface, as do many other minority communities who rely on subsistence
fishing to supplement household resources. These communities, due to their proximity to the coast and their rural nature, make them especially vulnerable to natural
hazards and risks (Dalbom et al. 2014). They also reside in locations where theconstruction of structural protection features is largely untenable. But it’s not only
geography that makes them vulnerable. Histories of displacement, segregation, andpolitical disenfranchisement have made many Native communities economicallyunder-resourced and comparatively less politically powerful than urban, white populations in south Louisiana.
When taken together, the historical and contemporary contexts that situate thenegative outcomes for residents residing in small rural communities in the coastalzone are potentially magnified in areas that are highly dependent upon fisheries andother natural resources for their economic well-being. Changes in the distribution
and abundance of species, for example, will likely have socioeconomic effects on
fishers, hunters, and other harvesters who use the wetlands for commercial, subsistence, recreational guiding, and recreational activities. Fish and wildlife will likely
adapt quickly, whereas it is harder and takes longer for resource harvesters to adapt(Peyronnin et al. 2017). This is a particular concern in coastal Louisiana, where
projects focused on protecting the maximum number of residents over the long term
are also projected to disrupt ecological conditions that sustain the natural resourcesthat many coastal residents rely in the short term, creating a number of unique social
justice concerns (Colten et al. 2018).
The shift from small-scale, localized projects to a science-driven, unified restoration plan has the potential to dramatically change the appearance of the coastal
landscape, both natural and human (Table 5.1). Broadly speaking, numerical models are used to identify a suite of protection and restoration projects that will synergistically derive the greatest benefits for the greatest number of residents. In this5

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Table 5.1 Restoration planning and policy outcomesType ofrestoration
planning
Small-scale
projects

Louisiana
examples
CIAP,
CWPPRA(pre-1995)

Large-scale CWPPRA
projects(post-1995),
state ofLouisiana,
USACE
Unifiedcoastalrestoration

Coast 2050,
CoastalMaster Plan
for a
Sustainable
Coast

Policy outcomes
Local areas
benefit;short-term
impacts

Broader areas
benefit;short-term andlong-term
impacts
Mixture of area
sizes benefit, butemphasis is oncoastalecosystem;
short-term andlong-term
impacts

Advantages
Individual
communities benefit
directly; multiple
points of view
considered

Disadvantages
Multiple agencies
involved in execution,
which results inconflicting agendas;
unable to stop net lossof wetlands over timeMultiple agencies
Individual
involved in execution,communities andbroader areas benefit which results inconflicting agendas;
directly; multiple
unable to stop net loss
points of viewof wetlands over time
consideredViewpoints ofStreamlined
individual communities
administration;
have less influence andcoastal ecosystem
receive less attention;prioritized to slow
unable to stop net loss
overall losses
of wetlands in the nearterm

approach, each numerical model derived for the analysis provides input to othermodels, produces outputs, and estimates how the landscape.
might change and how projects might perform on the landscape over time
(Peyronnin et al. 2013). The idea that the final model outputs potentially identify
that suite of projects that provide the greatest level of social benefit presents a powerful justification for comprehensive master planning efforts. An analysis of the2012 Master Plan estimated that, if fully implemented, the planned risk reduction
projects would provide heightened protection to over 86% of families and nearly
85% of poor families in Southeast Louisiana (Dalbom et al. 2014). This same study
reveals that, by extending protection to the majority of the population residing in thedeveloped areas of the coastal zone, the 2012 Master Plan will simultaneously
reduce the anticipated level of risk for the urban African American, Asian, andHispanic populations of the region.
However, there are social costs associated with the shift to a purely science-­
based approach to project selection. While all restoration and protection plans
accept that change is inevitable across the coast, more recent science-driven plans
are less constrained by the impacts of these changes on local populations (Reed2009). As a result, some of the poorest and most geographically marginal coastalgroups are often outside the purview of restoration and protection. This situation
raises the question of how policy makers can fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of coastal restoration (Colten et al. 2018). As a result of a purely science-driven
planning process, the impacts of protection and restoration projects on individual

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communities are devalued as building and maintaining land and reducing risk on abroad scale become the key decision drivers for selecting projects (Peyronnin et al.
2013). Indeed, while Louisiana’s Master Plan is couched in terms of sustainability,
it does not propose sustainability for all (Colten 2015). Because one of the primarygoals of the Master Plan is to provide protection to the greatest number of individuals, many of the proposed projects will prioritize providing protection to urban residents and those residing in more densely populated areas. In short, as many coastal
residents attest to, this approach to project selection runs the risk of sacrificing
remote coastal areas home to already socio-spatially marginalized groups for theprotection of environmentally viable urbanized coastal regions. This impacts a disproportionate number of small business and subsistence fisherfolks from Native
American, African American, southeast Asian, and other minority groups as well as
white residents with long histories of occupancy of the rural coastal areas.
Mapping onto existing geographies of racial and ethnic difference and economic
inequality, the uneven distribution of risk and anticipated siting of protection projects raises the issue of social justice to the fore of contemporary coastal planning.
An issue largely unexplored in Louisiana (Colten et al. 2018), social justice is comprised of three key elements, each of which can be impacted by coastal restoration
programs in distinct ways: distributive justice, procedural justice, and contextual
justice. The degree to which the outcomes of environmental projects address eachof these elements can have a decisive impact on both the overall equity of the outcomes of the program and ultimately whether these efforts succeed or fail (Fischer
et al. 2015).

5.3.1

Distributive Justice

Scholars have noted that the last several decades of research into social justice havefocused largely on one key dimension: distributive justice (McDermott et al. 2013;
Schlosberg 2004). This dimension focuses on the allocation of material goods,
including environmental quality, and generally conceives of social justice and distribution as equivalent concepts (Dobson 1998; Foster 1998; Pulido 2000) .
Distributive justice, as it relates to coastal restoration and protection, focuses on the
allocation among coastal residents of costs and benefits resulting from environmental policy, resource management decisions, and environmental modifications(McDermott et al. 2013). Advances in high-end computing, numerical modeling,
and geographic information systems (GIS) have allowed coastal researchers todevelop innovative analytical techniques to measure and forecast the impacts ofenvironmental change on broad spatial and temporal scales. Through these techniques, the efficient distribution of social costs and benefits can be measured andused to assess the ability of environmental programs to maximize the social welfare
that can be achieved under given biogeophysical and financial constraints.
Under the distributive justice framework, the costs and benefits of environmental
adaptations may be unequally distributed among individuals for the sake of net

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social gain for the entire population (McDermott et al. 2013). Socioeconomicallyneutral coastal adaptation planning refers to the advancement of protection and restoration projects on the basis of scientific processes. This approach overlooks racialand economic inequality and the history of environmental inequity in both settlement and risk patterns. Climate change adaptation plans based upon socioeconomically neutral, physical science-driven numerical models can create winners andlosers, potentially shifting the distribution of benefits or risks from one group toanother (Lebel et al. 2009). The purely distributive focus of these models – greatest
good for the greatest number of people – obscures the role that social structure andinstitutional context play in determining the patterns of distribution (Foster 1998).
If such contextual issues go unrecognized, adaptation planning built upon science-­
driven numerical models may lead to restoration and climate change adaptationplans that benefit some populations while abandoning others (Hardy et al. 2017).
Such measures may even exacerbate injustice, as when actions designed to maximize protection in urban areas or protect critical assets and infrastructure makesome disadvantaged groups even more vulnerable than they were before (Lebel
et al. 2009).

5.3.2

Procedural Justice

The limitations of a distributive justice framework for understanding environmental(in)justice are elaborated by scholars concerned with the ways existing and newsocial and economic inequalities are entrenched by practices for managing environmental hazards (Pulido 2000, 2015). By downplaying or ignoring the historical processes and causes that result in an inequitable distribution of risks and benefits
across the coast, science-driven adaptation plans may inadvertently exacerbate
existing inequities. The question then becomes whether promoting procedural justice by instituting inclusive, participatory processes within coastal restoration planning makes it possible to correct for any unfair distributional outcomes andpotentially address causal origins (McDermott et al. 2013). The concept of procedural justice shifts the focus from the actual distribution of the costs and benefits ofcoastal restoration projects to the fairness of the process by which these costs andbenefits are allocated and decisions are made (Clayton 2000). It involves recognition, inclusion, representation, and participation in the decision-making process by
local residents and potentially impacted stakeholders (Ishiyama 2003; McDermott
et al. 2013). Ultimately, reducing the risk of exposure to coastal hazards, both physical and economic, requires engagement with residents and stakeholder groups likely
to be affected by policy actions and those who are especially vulnerable to risk.
Engagement, in this sense, goes beyond legally mandated public comment protocols. Instead, aspirations to procedural justice would aim to give significant weightand representation to marginalized voices at all levels of the planning process andfinal decision-making.

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S. A. Hemmerling et al.

Contextual Justice

To accurately assess the social impact or fairness of a project or program, it is necessary to identify not only the outcomes and processes of implementation but also theinitial social conditions and origins of any existing environmental inequities(McDermott et al. 2013). Coastal planners need to understand current political processes and distributive outcomes within a historical context and address the fact
that, in many cases, the playing field is already highly skewed against local communities due to a number of economic and social disadvantages (Larson and Ribot2007). Such disadvantaged communities face a number of technical and bureaucratic hurdles that other communities may not face, often compounded by a lack ofaccess to vital information and an inability to pay for needed technical expertise.
For example, the lower a resident’s income level, the less likely they are to be familiar with proposed restoration projects that could directly impact them and the more
likely they are to think that the project will not change fisheries (Gramling et al.
2006). Without a clear understanding of the historical processes that have led tothese disadvantages, coastal policy and implementation practices run the risk of
exacerbating existing environmental inequities. An understanding of contextual justice, as it relates to coastal protection and restoration, takes into account those preexisting conditions that limit a community’s access to decision-making procedures,
resources, and benefits, effectively serving as a link between distributive and procedural justice (McDermott et al. 2013). Ultimately, to navigate these issues and effectively redress historical injustices while also promoting effective coastal planning,
more and better knowledge is required about the development of those preexisting
political, economic, and social conditions that limit people’s capacity to engage inand benefit from the coastal planning process (Fischer et al. 2015). By incorporating
aspects of contextual equity into the planning process, policy makers are more
likely to identify uncover impacts that are harder to measure but are often crucial tolocal welfare (McDermott et al. 2013).

5.4

Public Participation in Coastal Planning

Within a procedural and contextual justice framework, those most at risk should begiven opportunities to participate in reshaping and reducing risk to which they are
to be exposed (Lebel et al. 2009). Echoing work in environmental justice (Checker
2011; Ishiyama 2003), such an approach must go beyond participation and token
integration of marginalized voices to generate meaningful and politically efficacious modes of interaction in policy development that does eschew or co-opt the
self-determination of less populated and economically marginal coastal areas.
The importance of public participation in the restoration planning process has
been acknowledged by the state of Louisiana in the development of the Master Plan,
which developed a set of four key outreach and engagement principles to ensure

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structured and transparent interactions with the public as well as key businesses andindustries, federal agencies, nonprofits, academia, and fisheries interests. Key goals
outlined for the state in both the 2012 and 2017 Master Plans include:
1. Stakeholders and citizens should be given opportunities to learn about and comment on the 2017 Master Plan tools and the processes that assist in creating theplan – not just the finished plan itself.
2. Comments and ideas should be received, reviewed, and incorporated while the2017 is being developed, not after the fact.
3. Not every stakeholder or citizen preference will be included in the 2017 Master
Plan. However, the state promises that each idea will receive a fair hearing andthat questions will be answered promptly and with care.
4. The state has an obligation to provide a variety of ways for stakeholder and citizens to learn about and participate in the master planning process, including
small group gatherings, web offerings, direct communication with local and state
government, and public meetings (Speyrer and Gaharan 2017).
These goals highlight CPRA’s desire to capture a wide swath of public feedback on
the Master Plan. Further, they reflect that the state understands the persistent frustrations of citizens across the coast that they are engaged too late in the planning process and that their comments make little difference to what the state decides to do.
In developing the 2012 Master Plan, the CPRA attempted to respond to thesestaunch and persistent critiques through the development of numerous stakeholder
groups and citizen outreach tactics. Stakeholder groups engaged with in the planning process included the following: (1) a Master Plan framework development
team, residents from Louisiana representing federal, state, and local governments,
NGOs, business and industry, academia, and coastal communities (this group wascomprised of 33 members that met on an almost quarterly basis to review ongoing
research and project selection processes for the Master Plan; (2) a fisheries focus
group composed of approximately 15 members in the commercial fishing industry;(3) a group of about 10 members representing the oil and gas industry; and (4) agroup of approximately 15 members representing navigation interests. These groups
were variously consulted over the development of the 2012 Master Plan in order toassess the impacts of potential projects upon these industries. There were a handfulof coastal citizens who participated in these groups, but the majority of participants
were selected because of their professional and political affiliations.
The process for public engagement entailed numerous public meetings and official hearings for the 2012 Draft Master Plan. At the outset of the planning process,the CPRA held ten regional community meetings throughout the coast.
Approximately 600 citizens participated these meetings, which were designed togather local knowledge and identify public priorities and concerns. Additionally, theCPRA conducted a statewide telephone poll to elicit information from over 1000
additional residents. The results of the initial community meetings and polling indicated that, regardless of where they live, citizens were concerned about land loss,
reducing flood risk, and the future of coastal fisheries (CPRA 2012). Input fromthese meetings was catalogued and posted to their public site alongside suggestions

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for citizens to become involved in the planning process. In total, community meetings, public forums, civic presentations, a community survey, and a telephone poll
were used by state decision-makers to gather information on citizen preferences andideas that could be incorporated into the decision-making process (Peyronnin et al.
2013).
Upon completion of the draft Master Plan in January of 2012, the CPRA hosted
three additional public hearings to receive comments on the plan. The state received
over 100 formal comments during these hearings and over 2200 additional comments received subsequently via email, website, and mail. After collecting comments, the CPRA had approximately 1 month to evaluate and address project-specificconcerns before sending off a finalized version to the state legislature to vote on for
approval. Comments related to both policy and implementation were also evaluatedand catalogued to help guide the state as Master Plan projects and programs begin
to be implemented in the future.
Accounting for how public comments become incorporated into and/or influenced the Master Plan was addressed in 2012 through specific tactics the CPRA
used to test particular projects. As the Master Plan notes, projects were adjusted“based on local knowledge and stakeholder input where appropriate. The changes
were principled responses to the feedback we received, grounded in science, andresponsive to the needs of our coastal communities” (CPRA 2012, 112). The state
noted that they considered all public comments, categorized them by major theme,
and provided responses to each theme, specifically identifying the policy- andproject-­level adjustments to the final plan (CPRA 2012). Changes were reflected
explicitly in several structural protection and flood risk reduction projects that were
either added or adjusted in the final plan, based upon a combination of policy constraints, public input, and scientific models. For example, the CPRA used publiccomments to test preferences for and against large-scale river sediment diversions.
Using data generated by seven integrated predictive models, nine decision criteria,
and various project implementation constraints, the CPRA evaluated the presence
and removal of several sizes of river diversions and evaluated what different public
preferences for diversion sizes and locations would be.
Goals and approaches to the 2017 Master Plan were similar to 2012, but withseveral key changes. First, the state introduced a community focus group as one of
the handful of advisory groups they met with regularly during the plan development. Community groups included leadership from local Native American tribes,
community organizations serving Vietnamese fishermen, and organizations serving
predominately African American communities in rural coastal areas. They met fourtimes between April 2013 and October 2016, having anywhere from 4 to 15 members in attendance. Beyond CPRA presentations, participants in the focus groupprimarily discussed interest in attaining small grants for local community organizations to help with CPRA education and outreach, explicit concern for projected land
loss in certain Native American communities along the coast, and how projectionsof future flood risk might impact low to moderate income populations on the coast(Speyrer and Gaharan 2017). Concern for expanding the geographic scope of community engagement was also a frequent topic of discussion between community

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focus group members and CPRA officials as was defining the scope and content ofwhat nonstructural projects – such as home elevation, flood proofing, and relocation – would be. This latter point is particularly important among the community
focus groups as most participants are residents of small coastal communities locatedoutside the extensive levee and flood wall protection.
While the community focus group was not framed explicitly by the CPRA as an
attempt to engage minority communities, in practice it was the most consistent andstrategic engagement the state made with representatives from minority communities. In the context of coastal planning in Louisiana, there is no explicit representation or study of minority or economically marginalized communities within researchthat informs the Coastal Master Plan. Meetings with the community focus groupreflect the ethos of socioeconomically neutral planning techniques that utilize a
non-specified, generic notion of “community” as a stand-in for representing theexperiences of marginalized communities without naming racial, ethnic, economic,
or other forms of difference – let alone social justice – as a key motivation for thegeneration of the community focus group. For example, the needs and challenges
inside bay subsistence and small-scale commercial fisherfolk face with impending
coastal restoration projects and their changes to regional ecologies are distinct fromthose that local homeowners face: For one group, environmental changes for restoration mean potentially going out of business or taking on the financial burden ofdeveloping new fishing practices. For the other, those same environmental changes
point to the possibilities of high flood risks for private property, a financial burden
many might not be able to shoulder. Beyond these basic examples of difference
within the generic category of “coastal communities,” review of CPRA documentsshows that it is unclear how and if this particular focus group, or any of the advisory
councils CPRA engages, actively shapes the projects and decision-making frameworks that the state utilizes to develop coastal policy.
The CPRA also established several other focus groups, including landowners
and parish floodplain managers. Inclusion of these groups reflects the state’s gradual expansion of the stakeholder and resident types who they believe need to have asustained engagement in the master planning process beyond limited public hearings. The state also began to publish materials in Vietnamese, Spanish, and Frenchand developed a series of online flood risk and other informative tools in order toreach more diverse audiences around the coast. While communication techniques
are crucial, they do not necessarily equate a more robust engagement with thecoastal public or incorporation of social justice concerns into planning. They might,
however, increase the likelihood that state representatives will develop a more consistent relationship to different groups and perhaps incorporate changes to Master
Plan projects derived from coastal communities in concert with numerical models
and scientific expertise.
As with master planning initiatives in 2012, the CPRA partnered with NGO
groups to organize public meetings and series of open houses prior to the official
public comment period that commenced in January 2017. In October and November
2016, the CPRA held community meetings in several coastal communities to solicit
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response to increasing public pressure to give individual citizens who are not members of select advisory or focus groups more opportunities to vet Master Plan ideas
prior to the production of the draft Master Plan. According to CPRA, approximately
500 people attended 7 meetings held across the coast (Speyrer and Gaharan 2017).
There is no information on the demographic or geographic composition of thecrowds, and it is difficult to assess how, exactly, more meetings correlate to a planthat more effectively represents the diversity of values and interests associated withprotection and planning projects.
Establishing new focus groups that include community organizations, landowners, parish floodplain managers, and commercial fishing interests and doublingengagement efforts (including expanding the range of linguistic outreach to accesssoutheast Asian and Latino residents) reflects a recognition that the impacts of the
Master Plan are geographically and economically diverse. Reluctance to namesocial, racial, or economic justice as a matter of concern for coastal planning, however, reflects that the state envisions coastal restoration as something that operates
outside of explicitly racial, economic, geographic, and social disparities and histories. Recent efforts by the CPRA strive to achieve social justice through a scientificmodel-based distributive justice framework but often do little to address historicaland ongoing power inequalities that circumscribe small coastal communities to disproportionately bear the burdens of environment risks. While public participation
has been ramped up from 2012 to 2017, the extent of addressing social, economic,
and spatial inequity in coastal planning remains vague.

5.5

More Meetings and Public Participation, More Justice?

Despite ongoing efforts by the state of Louisiana to actively engage with local residents and incorporate aspects of procedural justice into the restoration planning
process, many community groups have condemned the process as exclusionary andundemocratic (Gotham 2016a). Additionally, many residents feel disenfranchisedby what they perceive to be a repetitive and ambiguous public engagement processthat often leaves them feeling fatigued, frustrated, and ignored by state policy makers and coastal planners (Carruthers et al. 2017). The stark contrast between thegoals of the state’s outreach and engagement plan and the experience of somecoastal residents highlights an essential dilemma faced by CPRA and other coastal
policy makers. Debates over coastal protection and restoration are not just aboutrisk but represent struggles over access to resources and the power of residents todefine and defend cultural forms (Gotham 2016b). The current focus on developingworld-class, science-driven numerical models is perceived as coming at the expenseof taking residents’ concerns seriously. These same residents feel ignored or left tofend for themselves against the forces of nature and the economy because they areoften the inherent “losers” of land loss and coastal planning. When used as a tool tosubstantiate the integrity and power of the state to make “decisions in the best interests of Louisiana’s citizens,” the coastal restoration planning process runs the risk of5Adapting to a Smaller Coast: Restoration, Protection, and Social Justice in Coastal…

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reinforcing a longer history of state and federal governments justifying their powerover environmental management practices in the United States that frequently
results in the political, economic, and geographic displacement of politically andeconomically disenfranchised groups (Kosek 2006; Spence 1999; Hardy et al.
2017). The question of whether or not the government intends to have disproportionate impacts on socially, politically, and geographically marginalized groups isdifficult to answer and obscures the fact that supposedly objective decisions about
where and how to protect the coast often struggle to move beyond limited notions of
distributive justice to address broader social justice and equity issues.
To be sure, coastal restoration has not historically been designed to remediate or
define ways to cultivate social justice and equitability when it comes to addressing
Louisiana’s coastal land loss crisis. Instead, planners and scientists have usednumerical models to justify and legitimize the selection of specific risk reduction
techniques to protect broad swaths of the coast, while residents often use perceptions of increased threat and a fundamental distrust of government at all levels as ajustification for locally rejecting many of these techniques (Colten 2015; Gotham
2016b). While Louisiana’s most recent iterations of the Coastal Master Plan boost
extensive public engagement efforts operating in parallel with the systems-based
scientific analysis of coastal projects that forms the backbone of the protection andrestoration plan, the capacity to effectively integrate these streams is not readily
apparent to many frontline coastal communities nor is it apparent to external scientific working groups (Wells et al. 2015). Coastal residents continue to struggle withbureaucratic processes related to how restoration projects are nominated, prioritized, and selected and understanding where restoration efforts and funds are spent(Carruthers et al. 2017). This highlights the fact that simply increasing the numberof people touched by public engagement may reduce levels of procedural injusticeinherent in the restoration planning process, but it is not a guarantee that social justice can be achieved for socially or economically marginalized groups. Instead,increasing levels of outreach and engagement often appears to recapitulate notionsof distributive justice which, by and large, does not resolve the fact that there willbe, as state officials are partial to saying, “winners and losers” in coastal restorationand protection planning. The decision-making process is still largely top-down andguided by scientific models that do not reflect or have the capacity to change thepower dynamics inherent in the restoration planning process itself. While the state
has significantly increased and documented the number of public meetings that havebeen held as part of the restoration planning process, a mechanism of accounting for
input derived from these meetings has yet to be generated. It is therefore difficult toassess the extent to which holding more public meetings, or creating different interactive formats for public meetings, will result in any change in outcomes for groups
who disproportionately bear the greatest risks from coastal hazards and land loss. In
short, increased engagement is not a guarantee of risk reduction.
At a minimum, outreach and engagement attempts can build trust with citizens,trust on the part of citizens that state officials have their best interests in mind. As
the introduction to the 2017 Master Plan succinctly captures, “our goal is to develop
public confidence that CPRA is the primary technical authority on coastal ­protection

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and restoration for Louisiana and is making decisions in the best interests ofLouisiana’s citizens” (CPRA 2017, p.1). More outreach and engagement efforts
aspire toward increased procedural justice and accountability to diverse coastal
population and a genuine concern for coastal Louisiana’s well-being. However,merely increasing levels of procedural justice does not necessarily result in increasedsocial justice. If public participation drives the selection of certain specific projects
that protect a small number of residents at the expense of a greater number of residents elsewhere on the coast, then it will have reduced the level of distributive justice, which is focused on maximizing net social gain for all residents of coastal
Louisiana.

5.6

Mapping a Path Forward

Despite the power of incorporating local knowledge into the coastal planning process, to date it has been challenging to broadly implement due to difficulties inachieving scientifically rigorous, replicable, and widely accessible methods of datacollection. In large part, projects that have taken such an approach have been wholly
qualitative in nature, which, though valid, are still not as easily accepted across thesciences. However, with advances in geospatial technologies, a growing acceptanceof mixed methods research, and awareness of the validity and importance of local
knowledge, this situation is changing (Curtis et al. 2018). There is a growing literature on the potential of combining local knowledge systems with technical scientificknowledge to manage both ecosystems and resources, including the evaluation ofclimate change impacts and the management of fisheries, biodiversity, and landscape dynamics (Folke et al. 2005). The people who live and work in coastal communities are becoming recognized as repositories of valuable local knowledge ofconcentrated community risks that reduce capacity in preparedness, such as issuesof safety, health, and education, as well as on the critical social infrastructure network that they would access in response and recovery. Community members also
hold perceptions of risk that shape their preparedness and mitigation activities, suchas which places in their community are dangerous and which are thought to be safe.
Such local knowledge and environmental perceptions are often geographically
explicit and are powerful influences on behavior (Curtis et al. 2018). It is essentialthat coastal planners account for these data to form a more complete evidence basein guiding the development of resilient coastal communities.
Several recent methodological advances that allow for the input of qualitative
local knowledge into mathematical models have provided tangible ways to evaluate
potential outcomes and shortcomings of ongoing and planned restoration and protection projects against projected results which can allow coastal planners to makeadjustments that respond to the real-time needs of impacted communities. Methods
such as local knowledge mapping, social return on investment, and competencygroups have all been used in coastal Louisiana to collect, analyze, and map qualitative data with the goal of characterizing local community members’ understanding

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of what ecological restoration has historically achieved, as well as a suite of potential short- and long-term outcomes of emerging ecological restoration projects identified by residents. Results from these approaches provide a new, geographicallytargeted, evidence base for planning strategies, especially those focused on coastal
protection and restoration. These approaches are not designed to directly address
issues of social injustice or change public policy. Rather, they present examples forstate agencies and policy makers to follow as a means of anticipating, understanding, and attempting to alleviate unequal impacts before they occur, an important firststep in addressing many of the social justice issues faced by coastal residents.

5.6.1

Local Knowledge Mapping

Many science-driven planning processes, including Louisiana’s Coastal Master
Plan, rely upon quantitative, geospatial datasets as model inputs and to derive metrics as criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of protection and restoration projects.
While these datasets are effective at locating any number of nonresidential, residential, and infrastructure assets at risk within an area, they are not able to specifically
identify places that have social or cultural value to residents and communities. Stateplanners recognize that protecting such places of value is vital to preserving theculture and identity of Louisiana’s various coastal communities (Louisiana Coastal
Protection and Restoration Authority 2012), yet modeling efforts have focusedlargely on the more tangible aspects of cultural heritage that can easily be captured
by existing geospatial datasets, such as the presence of ethnic minority groups or
historic properties. The overreliance on such datasets in the planning process, particularly when presented with no additional context, may result in any number ofsocial justice outcomes. Local knowledge mapping is an approach that aims toencourage community member participation in sharing knowledge and perceptionsof a given area and has been shown to provide an effective means of incorporating
community and traditional ecological knowledge into a coastal protection and restoration framework. The incorporation of these data into the planning process would
represent an important first step in ameliorating the impacts of past environmental
inequities while reducing the risk of future disproportionate impacts on particularsocial or cultural groups. While local knowledge mapping typically involves having
local stakeholders mark locations on paper maps, recent advances in mapping andin GPS-enabled technology that are low in cost, widely available, and accessible tothe public have allowed researchers to directly gather geospatial data from local
knowledge experts, which is particularly important when the pace and geographic
scale of change is dynamic (Curtis et al. 2018). Qualitative data collected duringlocal knowledge mapping exercises have been used to create a geospatially explicit
baseline dataset allowing researchers to incorporate local knowledge into an assessment of ecological restoration projects. When incorporated into a GIS environment
and assessed in combination with biophysical data, the resultant “Sci-TEK” data
can potentially be used to refine the large conceptual footprints of restoration

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projects and aid in the identification of future restoration projects and identify associated areas of consensus and potential conflict between local stakeholders andpolicy makers (Bethel et al. 2011, 2014, 2015). The information gained in this way
has also been used to determine the geographic specificity of local perceptions anddevelop community-informed prioritization tools that can be used to plan future
ecological restoration projects (Barra 2017; Carruthers et al. 2017).

5.6.2

Social Return on Investment

Ecological restoration and other activities that interact with environmental systems
have typically relied on scientific analysis to predict the impacts of these projects
and have operated on the assumption that good science could reveal and remedy
potential problems (Colten and Hemmerling 2014). Because coastal planning isfundamentally a human activity, however, effective predictions of human impacts
demand equal attention to the social, political, cultural, and economic systems inwhich environmental management takes place (Ludwig et al. 1993). Protection andrestoration projects deliver variable costs and benefits to Louisiana coastal communities and the economies they depend upon, such as navigation and fisheries (Caffey
et al. 2014). Residents impacted by these projects have recognized these variabilities, valuing some projects as vitally important and highly desirable, while questioning or opposing others (Colten 2014). Qualitative data analysis can successfullyclassify differences in the ways stakeholder groups potentially impacted by ecological restoration projects engage with the project sites and identify a suite of outcomesunique to each stakeholder group. Identifying these outcomes is integral to defining
both the specific objectives and variables needed to develop a comprehensive assessment and monitoring framework.
In order to quantify locally specific social impacts and develop a framework
amenable to measuring social change resulting from ecological restoration, qualitative data derived from focus groups, surveys, and one-on-one interviews with aselection of key stakeholders have been used to develop empirically grounded forecast and retrospective assessments of protection and restoration projects(Hemmerling and Barra 2017). Recent restoration work conducted in coastal
Louisiana by the Restore the Earth Foundation used qualitative research to informthe calculation of economic, recreational, cultural, educational, and ecological values of ecological restoration projects on numerous stakeholder groups (Hemmerling
et al. 2017a, b). Interviews, survey methods, and focus groups were centered aroundthese discrete topics to develop a consistent analysis across groups and a frameworkfor future research and monitoring. Conversations with participants were analyzed
to determine which qualities or concerns were important to participants as well as
how they weighted different social and environmental values derived from the restoration projects. The qualitative data derived through this process can provide new
insight into the social impacts of restoration that cannot be gained through traditional scientific approaches and identify potential inequities in the distribution of

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costs and benefits. This knowledge can help to bound the uncertainty of a purely
quantitative analysis and therefore makes it more useful in setting public policy andmaking cost-benefit decisions between different environmental interventions. The
suite of methodologies used in this research can be translated into a longer-termmonitoring program, tracking where and how different economically and geographically situated communities are unequally impacted by the changing material conditions that accompany restoration projects over time. Empirically derived information
on residents’ perceptions of the values – positive, negative, or otherwise – of restoration projects grounds anticipated social impacts in the material experiences of theresidents themselves.

5.6.3

Competency Groups

Despite recent efforts by public officials and scientists to actively engage withcoastal residents and stakeholders, many of these residents still feel that their local
knowledge is not ultimately accounted for in the coastal restoration planning process within their own communities (Carruthers et al. 2017). This is due in large partto the fact that science-based knowledge, including such expert devices as predictive models, risk indicators, monitoring instrumentation, environmental services
calculations, and cost-benefit analyses, is still a priori granted priority overexperience-­based knowledge (Landström et al. 2011; Whatmore 2009). When thisprevailing scientific expertise contradicts the direct experience and knowledge ofcoastal residents, knowledge controversies may develop, generating conflict anderoding public trust in both scientists and public officials. In coastal Louisiana, onesuch knowledge controversy has developed around the planned reintroduction ofMississippi River water and sediment into the Breton Sound Estuary in an attempt
to mimic the natural functioning of the river delta (Barra 2016). Public opposition
to this and other large-scale sediment diversion projects has developed around anumber of perceived threats, including the over-freshening of coastal estuaries, displacement of fisheries, and assertion that nutrients in the river water will lead towetland deterioration (Day et al. 2018). This location recently served as a pilot toinvestigate the utility of an innovative competency group approach to predictivemodeling that utilizes a collaborative process to redistribute expertise between local
residents and resource users, hydrological modelers, experts in numerical modeling,
and members of an interdisciplinary project team. The scientists participating in thecompetency group were experts in numerical modeling who played key roles in theinitial modeling of the sediment diversions, while many of the local residents werefishers, shrimpers, and oystermen who utilize the estuary on a daily basis. The competency group met on a regular basis over a 6-month period to define the scope andpriorities for the creation of a new nature-based defense model (Fig. 5.4). The effort
culminated with the co-development of a Delft3D flexible mesh model that incorporates local knowledge and input from the local community on preferred nature-­
based defenses and criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the tool for cultivating

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Fig. 5.4 Coastal protection and restoration projects designed and modeled by a competency groupconsisting of coastal residents and scientists. (Used with permission of The Water Institute of theGulf)coastal resilience in different geographic regions (Hemmerling et al. 2019). While
the resultant model may bear a superficial resemblance to other scientifically derived
models used in efforts like Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, it is qualitatively different in that the model was co-designed to specifically address current and historicalinequities identified by local resource users and residents. By bridging the information gap between local and technical knowledge experts, the competency groupprocess provides a mechanism to bring issues of social justice to the foreground of
the planning process.

5.7

Conclusion

Ultimately, for coastal protection and restoration to proceed in a socially just manner, the coastal planning process will need to strike an effective balance between
science-driven processes and engagement with residents and stakeholder groups
who are especially vulnerable to risk as well as those who are likely to be affectedby policy actions. A central goal of restoration and protection planning should

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therefore be to create and sustain a process that is just, transparent, and accountable
to those affected by its actions (Olsen et al. 2006). Many coastal residents feel that
their local knowledge is not ultimately accounted for in the coastal restoration planning process, even within their own communities, and that new, meaningful, andactionable ways of accounting for and integrating community input into the management, planning, and decision-making process were seen as necessary to increase
local support of restoration projects (Carruthers et al. 2017). It is not enough tosimply introduce participation into a system that has historically been considered
unfair or biased (Larson and Ribot 2007). To be both effective and sustainable,
coastal management programs must be supported by the generation and incorporation of reliable knowledge that allows affected stakeholders and the project management teams to better understand and anticipate the consequences of different coursesof action. This knowledge should be drawn from both the scientific community andfrom the observations and local knowledge of community members who reside andwork in the systems of which they are a part. The participation of local knowledge
experts in the planning process can provide insight into social, ethical, and politicalvalues that cannot be gained through scientific approaches alone and allows coastal
planners to generate more alternatives, resulting in flexible actions and mutual benefits (Stringer et al. 2006; Zedler 2017). Such a participatory process should create
opportunities for coastal planners and project managers, residents, and key stakeholders to assess project outcomes through every step of the process. To begin toameliorate social justice issues, engagement needs to involve residents as full partners in the process. If their voices are heard but do not impact the process, then theprocess will fail to even begin to address deep-seated justice issues. By incorporating data derived from two-way dialogue with local knowledge experts into thecoastal planning process, coastal managers will be able to more effectively adapt tolocal needs and changing circumstances, particularly when knowledge is transferredhorizontally between stakeholder groups and vertically to higher institutional levels(Zedler 2017). It may be this institutional acceptance of the validity of local knowledge as an important data source, one on par with technical scientific knowledge,
determines the ability of local residents to effectively influence the protection andrestoration process. Ultimately, if the results of the engagement process are not usedby coastal planners, then the engagement effort will be to no avail because it will fail
to contribute to a better and more just coastal restoration.

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Part III

Relocation and Resettlement:
An Extreme Adjustment

Chapter 6

Community Resettlement in Louisiana:
Learning from Histories of Horrorand Hope
Nathan Jessee

6.1

Introduction

It was a warm evening in early May of 2016. I made my way up two flights of stairs
to Victor’s wooden wraparound porch. His family’s house is a comfortable prefabthat looms 12 feet above the banks of Bayou Pointe-au-Chien on the border ofLafourche and Terrebonne parishes in Southeast Louisiana. It was built in 2008
after Hurricane Gustav blew the roof off their previous one—which itself hadsustained extensive flood damage and needed to be raised after Hurricane Lili in
2002. I met Victor a little over a year earlier when he participated in a series of film
screenings and panel discussions I co-organized in the Northeast United States. The
events were coordinated to raise awareness about the recurrent disasters affecting
his tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of Louisiana(IDJC), and their plans for the future. Victor and the rest of the IDJC Tribe trace
their heritage to Choctaw, Biloxi, and Chitimacha ancestors who, by the early
1840s, had escaped Indian Removal-era violence and resettled on a ridge of land
90 miles southwest of New Orleans called the Isle de Jean Charles, referred to
locally as “the Island.”“This is not the first time we have had to resettle. Our ancestors were displaced by treaties andIndian Removal. My papa’s generation was displaced from the Island. We’re already a displaced
Tribe. That’s why we’ve got to get it right.”
Tribal member, Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe“The question of migration and climate change is not a contingent problem to be solved (or thatcan be solved) by some technocratic protocol—but rather a metaphor carving out space to pose,contest and struggle for the highly political questions about the climate, mobility, economy, andthe society we want.”
Giovanni Bettini (2017, p. 90)
N. Jessee (*)
Department of Anthropology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USAe-mail: nathan.jessee@temple.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_6

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For generations, the people of Isle de Jean Charles fished, hunted, trapped,
tended to livestock, and grew their food. Today, adults longingly remember
shrimping and crabbing with their families in the bayou that ran the length of theIsland—a sanctuary in an area once considered “uninhabitable swampland” bygovernment officials. The Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians
are one of the many indigenous nations who inhabit the land currently occupied by
the state of Louisiana. They are one of 15 tribes recognized by the state government,
and though they have yet to be formally recognized by the US Bureau of IndianAffairs, the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe has participatedin programs administered by multiple federal agencies including the Environmental
Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation
Service, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. As someone who
was raised and lived as a young adult on the Island, Victor maintains intimate
knowledge of how life and landscape have changed there. And after having moved
about 6 miles “up the bayou” to nearby Pointe-aux-Chenes in large part due to therecurrent flooding of the one road that connects the Island to the rest of Louisiana,
he knows what it means to leave as a result of changing environmental conditions.
Additionally, as the son of a former Chief and someone who has been active within
their tribal-driven plans to resettle inland, Victor is able to speak to the long historyof organizing to bring resources and support to the Island Tribe.
Upon entering his house, I was greeted by a number of familiar faces sitting
around the supper table for an informal meeting: Victor and his family, Tribal Chief
Albert Naquin, two teenagers who have represented the Tribe at a number ofconferences and in media coverage of land loss, and their father. Also sitting at thetable were Dr. Shirley Laska and Dr. Kristina Peterson, co-founders of the Lowlander
Center—a nonprofit advocacy and education center who in 2010 established apartnership with the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council
to support their plans to reunite their displaced people and rejuvenate their traditional
ways of life together on higher ground. The Tribal leadership and Lowlander Center
were finalizing plans for an upcoming trip to Washington D.C. where Chief Naquin
was invited to share his experiences of coastal land loss and resettlement planningas part of a congressional forum entitled “Confronting a Rising Tide: The Climate
Refugee Crisis.” At first the conversation was mostly light-hearted and speckledwith jokes and laughter, meandering from the teenagers’ college plans to food andfamily updates. As the discussion began to focus on the upcoming trip, the tribal
members in attendance began to discuss their uncertainty as to the future of theresettlement, despite securing recent financial support through the state ofLouisiana’s application to the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC).
“It’s hard to know what to say to people, because we don’t hear anything,” Chief
Albert explained. “We haven’t really heard what the state wants to do since they got
the money over three months ago. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe
they want to make our tribal resettlement into just another subdivision? We don’t
know.” Responding to the concern, Dr. Laska asked, “What do you think is mostimportant for you to convey on the climate migration panel?” Chief Albert reflected,“You know, treaties are made to be broken,” he said with a pause. “Well, they aren’t6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope149

supposed to be broken, but they always are. This is going to be the same old forced
relocation again. The white people pushed the Indians out. We came down here, andsome would say we were cowards. Others would say we were smart. Then they had
white people drilling up the oil and so now they’re pushing us back. We hope this is
not another treaty made, another treaty broken.” Everyone listened intently, andafter a moment, Victor responded. “Let’s tell them.” He went on to suggest that on
the upcoming panel, they should be direct in explaining how their uncertainty as to
how the state planners will approach their resettlement builds upon a long history of
being excluded from the decisions that affect their peoples’ lives. “They need tohear what’s been going on,” he said.
This moment was not the first or the last time that I heard someone from theIsland reference historical violence and the colonial history of the United States
while explaining land loss or their efforts to adapt. A number of Native American
tribes and communities of color who have been pushed to what is now the edges ofLouisiana’s coastal zone—in large part due to histories of violence and forced
displacement—are grappling with land loss, extreme weather, and the various
institutional responses to those hazards as part of their long-standing efforts toward
collective survival and justice. Contemporary experiences of environmental
catastrophe and approaches to governing them are not experienced within a bubble.
Rather, they are encumbered by memories and legacies of historical injustices.
Meanwhile, state-level policy-oriented conversations about resilience planning, andcommunity resettlement in particular, have emerged during a moment of stark
realization regarding the state’s capacity for coastal ecological restoration, increasing
extreme weather, and future flood risks. Louisiana’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan
identifies a number of locations where coastal erosion, subsidence, and recurrent
flooding due to extreme weather threatens traditional ways of life and future humanhabitability (Clipp et al. 2017). In response, scientists and planners have advanced
ambitious plans to restore what is possible of the wetlands while beginning toreimagine development along the coast. Louisiana’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan,
however, makes clear that conservation and restoration will not always be possible,
and while restoration can be expected in some areas, others will sink or wash away(see also Jankowski et al. 2017). Human and nonhuman residents of the region must
continue to adapt to a shrinking coast and increasingly extreme weather. For many,
this means navigating exceedingly complex policy worlds and relocating out ofharm’s way.
This chapter explores one of the most pressing challenges that risk reduction
professionals, scholars, policy-makers, and Louisiana residents face during theimplementation of community resettlement planning activities in Louisiana: theneed to reckon with, on the one hand, the increasing risks to flooding and extreme
weather and, on the other hand, the experiences and initiatives advanced by those
whose vulnerability to these risks is connected to histories of forced displacement,
dispossession of land and resources, and social marginalization. In the following
pages, I describe some tensions that have emerged as long-standing tribal-driven
resettlement efforts have been incorporated into state-level “coastal retreat” planningutilizing existing federal funding sources. I first describe some background to local

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policy conversations focused on resettlement as a strategy for adapting toenvironmental change in coastal Louisiana. Through the Louisiana Strategic
Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) and state support of the Isle deJean Charles resettlement, Louisiana’s government has begun rethinking floodplain
and coastal development in anticipation of increasing future flood risk and exposure
to extreme weather. In their work, however, there remains a risk of disconnecting
current and future exposure to coastal hazards with the development practices andlegacies that have produced vulnerability unevenly among particular groups ofpeople, such as indigenous peoples and coastal communities of color. I refer to suchdisconnections as ahistorical adaptation. Then, drawing on my work following theresettlement efforts of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal
leaders, I suggest a number of histories salient to adaptation and resettlement policyin Louisiana. I also consider the impacts of avoiding local histories of injustice andconclude with some ideas for honoring experiences and initiatives of local
communities and tribes.
It is important to disclaim that my goal is not to dismiss buyout programs, community resettlement, or efforts to critically rethink floodplain and coastal development as a whole. These are important pathways for reducing exposure to hazardous
environmental conditions. The multiple severe hurricanes to make landfall on the
Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts over the last 3 years make these tools more
important and urgent than ever before, and investing predominantly on structural
flood protection and environmental restoration without adequate planning for thecommunities in coastal Louisiana at this point would be foolish. Rather, I hope thischapter encourages reflection on a particular problem, the ahistorical framing ofresilience, adaptation programs, and disaster recovery policy. This chapter also provides additional support for the growing demand for climate change and environmental adaptation policies that protect the rights of indigenous peoples and provide
adequate resources to local and tribal-driven plans for resettlement.

6.2

Context of Recent State-Level Resettlement Planning

Since 1932, Louisiana has lost over 1866 square miles of coastal wetlands—an area
nearly the size of Delaware (Couvillion et al. 2017). Floodplain development andindustrialization have exacerbated subsidence and erosion throughout the state’s
coastal zone. An expansive web of oil and gas pipeline and shipping canals crisscrossthrough the coastal wetlands allowing saltwater to seep into freshwater marshes andcreating ecologically disruptive sediment deposits, killing flora and breaking up thesoil (Turner and McClenachan 2018). Meanwhile, flood protection levees and rivercontrol structures have prevented the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers from
replenishing the sinking delta with new sediments (Barry 1997). The loss of land
and marsh has increased Louisiana communities’ exposure to hurricanes, whichthen erode more of the marsh as well. On top of these factors, global climate change

6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope151

poses an increasing risk of more extreme weather and sea level rise in the region(Carter et al. 2018).
As the effects of climate change become more visible, there is an emerging
debate about the number of people who risk displacement as a result of climate-­
related hazards (Bronen et al. 2018; Wilson and Fischetti 2010). Displacement fromcoastal areas has long been expected to increase due to the impacts of climatechange. However, projections have recently become more dire. Rigaud et al. (2018)
estimate as many as 143 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, andLatin America could be displaced by 2050 due to environmental changes associatedwith climate change. Meanwhile on the US coasts, Crowell et al. (2010) found that
8.6 million people, about 3 percent of the US population, inhabit the 100-year floodzone, and Hauer et al. (2016) estimated that as many as 13.1 million people living
in coastal counties could be at risk of displacement due to sea level rise by the next
century. Recent news coverage of extreme weather also speculates the massive
displacements that may be anticipated due to rising seas and extreme weather (e.g.,
Cusik and Aton 2017; Gohd 2018). In the aftermath of every flood, fire, or hurricane,journalists and editors dub the people facing these challenges as the next potential
climate refugees—a term without legal meaning that can render the coordinatedresponses of communities and their collective agency invisible by implying
individuals in need of saving.
A number of migration scenarios, however, already occur after, during, and in
anticipation of environmental disasters—some of which empower, and are even led
by, local efforts, while others marginalize and disempower those resettling.
Scenarios exist for a variety of social units from individuals, to families, toneighborhoods to communities of different sizes and with varying degrees ofplanning. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, many relocations that were
unplanned before the floods turned into more permanent resettlements as families
relied on distant relatives and social ties around the country for support (Weber andPeek 2012). Residents of St. Bernard Parish, for example, moved as households tonearby areas on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain where family members,
friends, and former neighbors already relocated (Lasley 2012). Liz Koslov’s work
after Hurricane Sandy documented another migration pattern during which activists
organized buyout groups in Staten Island, New York, to advocate for their dispersal(Koslov 2016). The Allenville, Arizona, resettlement in the early 1980s (Perry and
Lindell 1997) and the relocation of Pune, India (Cronin and Guthrie 2011), wereadvanced by extensive community-oriented activism and with the aim of keeping
people together. There are also more than a dozen other resettlements currently
being planned by indigenous communities and tribal nations of North America(Keene 2017). International frameworks for planned resettlement and the sensational
media representations of so-called climate refugees rarely unpack the tensions
between community-based or tribal-driven resettlements and government-led
planning processes. Moreover, the divergent migration scenarios mentioned above

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exist simultaneously and within overlapping geographies in coastal Louisiana—adynamic that deserves further scholarly attention.1
There is currently no singular national agency or policy framework that guides
community resettlement despite growing calls for one (Bronen 2011; Maldonado
et al. 2013). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers theprimary form of resettlement support available pre- and post-disaster, though this
support is only available for the relocation of individual households, not the entire
communities (Bronen 2011; Marino 2012). The Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s Community Block Grant-Disaster Recovery can similarly be used
to fund buyout programs. The US Army Corps of Engineers has coordinated anumber of group resettlements in response to riverine flooding and the impacts ofpublic works. These efforts have resulted in varying outcomes for the people resettling (Perry and Lindell 1997; LDOA 2015a).
Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, design competitions sponsored by philanthropic-­
public partnerships have been highly publicized for potentially offering newopportunities for communities working toward resettlement as a form ofenvironmental adaptation. The Rockefeller Foundation and the US Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) partnered to sponsor the Rebuild by
Design competition. This effort has been celebrated for spurring innovation andprioritizing public input throughout the design process (Collier et al. 2016). Basedon perceived successes of the Rebuild by Design process, the Rockefeller Foundationand HUD administered the National Disaster Resilience Competition, which offeredcities and states the opportunity to compete for part of approximately $1 billion
Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds left over from thepost-Hurricane Sandy expenditure. Despite the innovation engendered by thesecompetitions, however, HUD and local jurisdictions who implement funded projects
or programs have guidelines, planning conventions, and regulatory frameworks that
constrain such innovative designs. As this chapter describes below, and Laska
explains in the Introduction to this volume, Chap. 1, moving from the old regulations
to ones that embrace adaptation is a clunky and uneven process that involves anumber of legal contradictions and potential harm for communities or tribes who
have invested so much throughout their lives and potentially during the program
design processes. Additionally, more research is needed to investigate the various
dimensions of post-design implementation processes (for some initial critiques of
Rebuild by Design, see Dawson 2017 and Flemming 2019).
Louisiana’s state government is only beginning to meaningfully devote attention
and resources to resettlement as an approach to environmental adaptation. Thoughthe 2017 Coastal Master Plan incorporates nonstructural risk reduction strategies,
robust investment and planning for social and cultural preservation and adaptationon our shrinking coast is much needed. The plan identifies 11 locations where,
within 50 years, “flooding will be high enough to make daily life next to impossible,
even without future hurricane damage” under a medium scenario of sea level rise
1
I am indebted to Dr. Shirley Laska for pointing out the importance of and lack of scholarshipaddressing this dynamic.

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153

without future restoration and mitigation efforts. The identified locations from east
to west are Delacroix, St. Bernard Parish; Venice, Plaquemines Parish; Grand Isle,
Lafitte/Crown Point/Barataria, Jefferson Parish; Paradis, St. Charles Parish;
Kraemer and Leeville, Lafourche Parish; and Cocodrie, Dulac, Isle de Jean Charles,
and Lower Pointe-aux-Chenes, Terrebonne Parish (Clipp et al. 2017). Additionally,
2400 structures are targeted for potential voluntary acquisition due to their being
in locations where the flood depths are forecasted to exceed 14 feet. The Coastal
Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA)‘s work has received criticism,however, for not articulating a detailed buyout planning program or notifying those
who live in the areas that would be targeted if one existed, and at the time of thiswriting, the state has yet to secure or invest the estimated $1.2 billion necessary forthe acquisitions (Wendland 2018). Policy-makers here, like elsewhere around thecountry, have been reluctant to embrace coastal relocation for fear of upsetting theircoastal constituents as well as the administrative burdens that a relocation program
would entail (Manning-Broome et al. 2015). Additionally, many communities andtribes throughout coastal Louisiana themselves do not plan on relocating and instead
envision continuing to adapt in-place. Though the writing in the plan indicatespeople will need to move, there is no robust plan for what that process actually looks
like, especially for those who plan on resettling while enhancing communal social
structures or building upon traditional ways of life together in a new location.
In 2014 Louisiana’s Office of Community Development began applying forfunds available through the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC), an
initiative that has been viewed by some as an essential step in developing a morerobust land-use policy to supplement the shortcomings of the Coastal Master Plan
(LDOA 2015a). Among the primary goals of the competition was “to create multiple
examples of local disaster recovery planning that applies science-based and forward-­
looking risk analysis to address recovery, resilience, and revitalization needs” (HUD2015). The state’s NDRC funding is allocated for two programs: the Isle de JeanCharles resettlement—discussed at length below—and the Louisiana Strategic
Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) program which advances
resilience planning in six parishes affected by recent tropical storms and hurricanes.
Louisiana’s LA SAFE policy framework draft refers to areas that will experience+14 feet of flooding during a 100-year flood scenario within the next 50 years as“resettlement zones,” while those that will experience between 3 and 14 feet offlooding are seen as “retrofit zones,” and locations that can expect less than 3 feet ofwater “reshaping zones,” in which development and growth will be encouraged(LDOA 2017a).
With regard to resettlement, the state “envisions a systems-based approach tocommunity-led planning and group migration” and advances nine principles forcommunity resettlement (LDOA 2017a, p. 14–15). The principles foreground theneed for community resettlements to (1) be community-driven and voluntary; (2) be
responsive to future risks and opportunities; (3) build social networks; (4) “whereprudent, appropriate, and desirable, approaches should envision scenarios by which
resettled communities retain access to abandoned lands for cultural, social, or
economic reasons”; (5) reduce current and future risk; (6) migrations should stay154

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within a single jurisdiction; (7) “embody worldwide best practices in water
management, energy conservation, wetlands restoration and habitat preservation”;(8) approach development holistically to include “cultural, social, and economic
growth opportunities and techniques”; and (9) consist of a “total residential
abandonment of original community” (LDOA 2017a, p.15).
These principles represent a strong foundation, though there is much room for
improvement in the specificity of the language used and there remain major
questions as to their implementation. First, we cannot rely on bureaucratic good willand discretion. Rather, there must be legally binding policies. Second, what does
risk actually entail? According to the Louisiana Budget Project, Louisiana iscurrently tied for second highest poverty levels in the nation, with nearly 20% of the
population living in poverty, and fourth in the nation in racialized income inequality(Louisiana Budget Project 2018). Racialized and classed health disparities also
persist throughout the state (Macklin 2009). The unemployment rate is higher than
the national average (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018), and many who areemployed work in contingent, part-time, or low-paying positions that do not provide
a living wage. Louisiana renters have long faced an affordable housing crisis, andthe state was recently ranked fifth highest rent-stressed state in the country(Louisiana Housing Corporation 2019). (See Chap. 9 of this volume by Andreanecia
Morris and Lucas Diaz for expanded discussion of housing risks.)
The goal of “reducing risk” cannot be isolated from broader political, economic,
and social conditions. These conditions not only stand as risks themselves but
exacerbate capacity to respond to extreme weather events. Regarding the fourthprinciple—retaining access to original land—who defines “prudent, appropriate,and desirable” and what does “access” actually mean? What other types of land
tenure must be honored, including collective land ownership or continued ownershipof original lands for those whose ways of life and identities are so deeply rooted inplace? Finally, within these principles, there is no commitment to the protection ofhuman rights and no reparative, restorative, or regenerative measures for thehistorical social production of risks and vulnerabilities that have led some people toneed to resettle in the first place. The second principle even seems to discourage
consideration of historical atrocities and their legacies by explicitly orienting state
community resettlement activities around future opportunities and risks.

6.3

Ahistorical Adaptation

The above context for policy-oriented work on community resettlement demonstrates how such efforts are situated within a future-facing discourse of disaster risk
reduction that contributes to the technocratic politics of climate change adaptation
and resilience (see Swyngedouw 2011). Due to the severity of existing and expectedenvironmental hazards, investing in mitigation and adaptation is necessary. There is6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope155

also an urgent need to alter coastal and floodplain development practices and addressa lack of adequate land-use planning and policy at local, state, and federal levels.
When taken together, however, future-oriented discourses may reduce the complex
community-oriented and tribe-driven adaptations, which are responsive to socialand environmental experiences, to a technocratic process of encouraging people tomove solely in relation to future flood risk as outlined in the Coastal Master Plan.
When social complexities are acknowledged by state adaptation and resilienceplanners, they are often devoid of historical context. For example, Louisiana’s
policy framework draft discussed above describes their approach to resettlement as“a small-scale, targeted strategy for culturally-sensitive at-risk communities andspecial needs groups, including the disabled, the elderly, disaffected minority
groups and very low-income populations” (LDOA 2017a). The framework does not,however, point to any processes or conditions that have led some groups to become
so-called culturally sensitive or at-risk. Though the document briefly cites theatrocities of previous federal and state relocations as part of the bad “track record”
of forced relocation (ibid. pp.14), it offers no examination as to why so-called
minority groups and very low-income populations may have become “disaffected”
in the first place.
Recent scholarship has pointed to some of the ways in which practitioners andpolicy-makers avoid fraught social and political histories that produce environmental
risks. Katrina Kuh (2016) examines how government-sponsored adaptation
strategies and outreach must sometimes separate pro-adaptation behaviors from thecauses of climate change in order to engage climate change deniers, a process she
dubbed agnostic adaptation. Drawing on information provided to farmers by theUnited States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency Climate Change
Adaptation Strategy, Kuh describes the ways in which adaptation tools are promoted
by deemphasizing the human factors that contribute to climate change by only
briefly referring to anthropogenic causes of global warming while devoting moreelaborate descriptions to geophysical explanations of warming. Kuh advances
important research questions as to the efficacy of agnostic adaptation and how it
might create barriers to climate justice. Meanwhile Hardy et al. (2017) coined theterm colorblind adaptation as a way of understanding, “vulnerability, mitigation,
and adaptation planning projects that altogether overlook racial inequality—orworse dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing
racial disparities to non-racial causes.” Their work demonstrates some of the waysthat legacies of forced migration, chattel slavery, exclusionary employment andhousing policies, and local politics affect risk and adaptation possibilities for African
American residents in coastal Georgia.
With the spectacular media narratives of impending massive climate displacements and the future orientation of resettlement planning as a strategy for risk
reduction or climate resilience, it is worth restating what social scientists have beenyelling from the rooftops for four decades: Vulnerability to natural hazards, disasters, and displacement cannot be disentangled from harmful historical social and156

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political-economic processes (O’Keefe et al. 1976; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman
1999; Wisner et al. 2004). Anthropologists and other social scientists havedemonstrated many of the ways that coastal governance, disaster policies, andenvironmental adaptation are fraught with legacies of injustice and human rights
violations (Burkett et al. 2017; Hardy et al. 2017; Jerolleman 2019; Maldonado
et al. 2013; Marino 2015; Whyte 2016). In an effort to address these legacies,
scholars, practitioners, advocates, and resettling communities have urged
government officials to guide any framework for planned resettlement by anapproach that affirms and protects the human rights of those resettling (Bronen
2011; Ferris 2012; Maldonado et al. 2013).
The above scholarship demonstrates the unevenness of vulnerability, whereby
people with certain social characteristics or belonging to marginalized groups are
made more sensitive to the effects of hazards due to the broader inequitable political
economy. Hardy et al. (2018) argue that understanding local histories is critical forrecognizing (1) the ways that exposure to hazards has unfolded, (2) the unevensensitivities of different groups within a region, (3) the cultivation of adaptive
capacity, and (4) rationales for particular kinds of local adaptation. Historicalperspective can also reveal barriers or constraints to future possibilities (ibid.).
According to the authors, by ignoring local histories, “we risk missing many factorsthat contribute to vulnerability and suboptimal adaptation measures” (Hardy et al.
2018, p. 10). Ignoring these histories also implicitly blames those who must deal
with the immediate impacts of unsustainable aspects of our civilization for the risks
they face (Tierney 2014). Inspired by the important critiques above and the questions
raised by Kuh as to the efficacy of agnostic adaptation, in this chapter I hope tocontribute to a conversation about how the institutionalization of environmental
adaptation as an ahistorical discourse actively produces new kinds of vulnerability
while aggravating existing experiences of injustice.

6.4

Historicizing Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Planning

In the following sections, I reflect on my work following the Isle de Jean Charles
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders’ resettlement efforts to consider how
particular historical processes are relevant to current community resettlement
planning in Louisiana. Not all of the potentially important local, regional, national,
and international historical threads that could help one understand adaptation andresettlement are reflected in this chapter. However, I have found that the following
histories are especially salient within the particular context in which I did myresearch: (1) legacies of environmental injustice, (2) recent experiences ofdisplacement, (3) US settler colonialism, and (4) the Tribal-driven planning processthat immediately preceded and directly contributed to Louisiana’s successful
application to the National Disaster Resilience Competition.

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

6.4.1

157

Extraction, Exclusion, and Injustice

There is no way to really understand the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement effort
without reckoning with the tragic social and environmental impacts of extractive
industries and regional development on and around the Island. Over the last 75 years,
regional oil and natural gas infrastructure and development has transformed theplace (Austin 2006). Companies like Apache, BP, Texaco, Chevron, and Shell havedevastated the surrounding landscape with pipeline canals and oil and gas
infrastructure (Maldonado 2018). (See Fig. 6.1 for a map of oil and gas infrastructure
density throughout the region.) The Island itself sits between multiple oil and gas
fields and is surrounded by pipeline canals, and those from the Island point to a long
history of land grabs by land and oil companies preceding the current environmental
crisis (Maldonado 2018). Since 1955, 98% of the Island’s landmass has sunk or
washed away (CPRA 2017). Over 22,000 acres of land and surrounding marsh havebeen lost (LDOA 2015a). According to the summary of a satellite imaging study
conducted by the Earth Resources Observation and Science Center and UnitedStates Geological Survey, “Once 5 miles wide and filled with lush cypress grovesand cow pastures, barely a half square mile of the Island remains above water”(USGS 2017). A former state senator explained that the Island road (built in 1953)
sits on “some of the most unstable land in all of coastal Louisiana” (Reggie Dupre,
personal communication, November 2017). According to Tribal leaders, the Island
flooded from six major storms and multiple less severe storms since 2005.
Maldonado et al. (2015) and other critics have referred to the region as a “sacrificial
zone of resource extraction” due to the exploitation and subsequent disasterproduced by industrial development.
Flood mitigation projects have also had devastating social and environmental
consequences, and the Tribe’s resettlement efforts are actually rooted in impacts ofFig. 6.1 Maps showing historical change in oil- and gas-related infrastructure density in southernLouisiana between 1960 and 2010 as presented in a 2016 synthesis report by The Water Institute of
the Gulf

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one effort to address coastal hazards regionally. In 1998, the US Army Corps ofEngineers rerouted designs for a 98-mile levee, the Morganza to the Gulf Risk
Reduction System. The new route excluded the Island and a number of othercommunities down the bayou further materializing and intensifying theirvulnerability (Maldonado 2018). The realignment increased the risk of flooding for
those who remained outside of its protection (USACE 2013) and, along with thesevere 2002 storms, led the Tribal Council to begin planning their resettlement toreunite their Tribe and ensuring the survival and growth of their culture together(Maldonado 2018). The US Army Corps offered to relocate the Island residents but
backed out after demanding a 100% consensus in favor of relocation among Island
residents (Simon 2008)—a naive ideal given the complexities involved in any
relocation decision-making process. Without social scientists in Corps staffs (otherthan economists and archaeologists), the Corps could not have appreciated theunrealistic nature of the demand.2 Then in 2008, Tribal leaders appealed to
Terrebonne Parish for CDBG funds to support a resettlement that would reunite
their already displaced tribal citizens and support their cultural and social
revitalization, but the effort fell apart when confronted with resistance from thewhite residents adjacent to where they were hoping to move (Maldonado 2018).
Tribal leaders continued to organize both for resettlement and sustaining the Island
despite these disappointing setbacks from potential government partners.
The above histories of injustice are often obscured within state restoration andresilience planning. Colten (2017) compared how the causes of wetland loss are
discussed in a number of reports released since 1990. He found that over time thesereports have reframed oil and gas companies from culpable damage to the wetlands
to those also in need of support and protection from environmental change.
According to Colten, more recent reports emphasize the role of subsidence whilerefusing to acknowledge the impact of oil and gas pipeline and navigation canals in
destroying the marsh (Colten 2017, p. 706). The Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority has continued to obscure causes in their efforts to build broad public
support for restoration. The Coastal Master Plan, and subsequently the LA SAFE
framework, emphasizes the importance of “the working coast” and euphemisticallyprovides support for the interests of industrial actors. Over 20% of the nation’s oil
and gas, and 90% of the offshore oil, comes from or passes through the region forprocessing and refinement, and many of those made most vulnerable by oil and gas
industries rely on them for their livelihoods (Clipp et al. 2017). This bind may
discourage critique and makes the movement for a just transition from fossil fuelsparticularly relevant to coastal Louisiana.
Adaptation strategies that avoid addressing these histories of injustice while
highlighting the “working coast” dynamic accommodate oil and gas industries by
not holding them accountable for the destruction they have caused (Randolph 2018;
Turner and McClenachan 2018). They also potentially stifle support for a much-­needed just transition from fossil fuels in a key place of extraction, production, andtransport. Moreover, these frames reproduce the notion that federal investment in
2

Personal communication with Shirley Laska

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159

resilience and resettlement planning may constitute a “handout” by neglecting theprice that the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe and othercoastal communities who have been made vulnerable by extractive industries andflood protection measures have already paid (Jessee 2016). They also obscure
rationales and thus potential support for many of the social dimensions of theresettlement, which, for the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe,
have included reuniting those who are already displaced or have moved from theIsland, building energy and food independence, and bolstering the Tribe’s capacity
to assert their rights of self-determination and sovereignty (LDOA 2015a).

6.4.2

 ngoing Displacement and the Complex Notion
Oof Community

Another challenge for resettlement as a form of environmental adaptation involves
addressing recent histories of displacement and complexities surrounding the notionof community. Displacement has dramatically changed life on the Island, anddecades of outward migration have transformed the composition and social
dynamics of the Isle de Jean Charles community. There were 78 houses andapproximately 325 people living on Isle de Jean Charles in 2002, and 10 years later
only about 25 houses and 70 people remained there (Maldonado 2014). Over 75
percent of the Island community have been displaced over this multigenerational
environmental catastrophe of land loss. Many tribal members moved from theIsland because regular flooding on the road kept them from off-Island jobs, whileothers recounted moving due to a decline in regional industries like shrimping andtrapping in the 1980s. Though some Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw Tribal Council and elders still live on the Island, much of the tribal
leadership now lives just a few miles away in Pointe-aux-Chenes and Houma.
Displaced Tribal members however maintain important social connections with
their family and former neighbors who remain on the Island. The Island remains acohesive aspect of displaced Tribal members’ identities and social memory, and the
expansive networks of former and current Island residents remain an essential
aspect of resilience (Simms 2016).
Many self-identified communities and tribes in Louisiana who may consider
resettling are likely already experiencing this kind of displacement (Colten et al.
2018). Numerous locations along the state’s coast have seen extensive outward
migration over the last 20 years: Dulac has lost 29%, Golden Meadow 3%, Lafitte
31%, and Buras-Triumph 67% of their populations between the years 2000 and2010 (see Fig. 6.2). Coastal storms most often diminish local populations in “waves”
after strong hurricanes rather than one event causing the abandonment of a locationin one storm (Laska, personal communication, April 16, 2018). Dr. Shirley Laska
likens it to the rate of coastal land loss which occurs in “waves” during powerfulstorms, not a little each year, but rather surging. Relocation decisions are often

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Fig. 6.2 Map showing regional population shifts in southeast Louisiana between 2000 and 2010.
(Image source: LA SAFE)

linked to the accessibility of schools or work, as younger people often leave, whileelders have remained in place (Colten et al. 2018). Additionally, long-time residents
often cannot afford to elevate their flood-impacted homes, continuing theirvulnerability and preventing them from affording the flood insurance. According to
Hobor et al. (2014), Louisiana residents who work in coastal industries increasingly
travel from residences inland to their coastal job sites. Those who work on the coast,such as fishers, must assess how far inland they might live for safety while
commuting in reverse for work (Laska et al. 2015). Meanwhile, since the 1970s,
coastal areas like Cocodrie and Isle de Jean Charles have also seen an influx ofwealthy white “weekend warriors” who can afford to maintain camps along thecoast and enjoy the landscape for recreational activities—a dynamic that stirs
concerns of coastal gentrification among the historic residents (Peterson andMaldonado 2016; Solet 2006).3 Additionally, research into development-forced
displacement and resettlement has revealed the risk of further severing social ties
mediated by relationships to place, a process described by Michael Cernea (1997)3
For readers unfamiliar with “camps” in Louisiana, they are often more like lavish fishing vacation
homes with docks and modern amenities than, say, a tent or a yurt. There is an incentive for parishes to encourage camp development for more tax dollars than low-lying homes, which are often
valued at much less and have homestead tax exemptions.

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope161

as social disarticulation. Displaced people who experience disrupted networks,
shared rituals, religious institutions, kinship structures, and social cohesion
experience consistently worse outcomes during resettlement processes (Oliver-­Smith 2009). In coastal Louisiana social disarticulation caused by displacement
may already be underway and indeed has been a major rationale for Isle de JeanCharles Tribal leaders to use resettlement to reunite their Tribe.
“Community” is a slippery and contested concept in any context, and manyscholars have debated its utility and application (Titz et al. 2018; Williams 2002).
Brett Williams (2002) reviews the myriad of ways community can be produced
through shared experiences, senses of place, cultural practices, memories, andrelationships but describes how bonds of community are constantly negotiated,
contested, and adjusted. State agencies and international frameworks, however,often advance narrow notions of risk and vulnerability that emphasize geographic
exposure to hazards over social risks (Faas 2016). These frameworks also inscribe
notions of community as bounded geographic units (e.g., Clipp et al. 2017; LDOA
2019a). Media coverage of land loss that relies on particular visual tropes, like aerial
shots of the Island, may also reinforce such notions of vulnerability and community,
obscuring broader political-economic causes of vulnerability and geographically
expansive yet intimate social networks of care critical for resilience in the region.
After reviewing the use of “community” throughout development and disaster risk
reduction, Titz et al. (2018) conclude that the term should be abandoned in suchcontexts because of the harm that can be caused by its vagueness. They argue that
more specific identifiers should be used. The ambiguities of “community” are partof a set of conditions that has potentially enabled state planners to reduce theircommitments to and partnership with the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw Tribe after the award money for the resettlement was garnered. Divergent
notions of “community” as location-specific versus based on tribal identity havetroubled the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement process (Jessee Forthcoming). While
the Office of Community Development considered geographic exposure to hazards
at length in their application for NDRC funds, they also importantly operationalized
the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe as the community during
application phases, building on the long-standing tribal resettlement efforts that had
preceded the competition.
Community resettlement planning efforts need to take careful steps toward therearticulation of potentially fragmented or strained already displaced self-identified
communities. Investing in the enhancement of communal structures and honoringcollective identities and their histories early and throughout resettlement processes
may provide a pathway to addressing social disarticulation. After Hurricane Katrina,
those who relocated clustered into family and neighborhood groups in their new
locations (Lasley 2012). The same is true among the tribes of lower Terrebonne
Parish (Maldonado 2018). Clustering might be instrumental in the long-term well-­being of coastal peoples as they move inland to a somewhat foreign culture. The
historic migrations of Europeans to US cities over the last two centuries often also
led to clustering of the new migrants in urban enclaves, which informally supported
social networks, economic needs during transition, and personal preferences (Logan

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et al. 2002). Over the first 3 years of the state’s administration of federal support for
the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement, there has been much more attention devoted
to outreach to individual households on the Island, residential options, and theoverall site design, rather than specific planning for the continuation of tribal andcommunal institutions and organizations from the Island (Jessee Forthcoming). The
tendency to focus on individual households at the expense of complex social realities
of community is documented in the administration of other community resettlement
processes as well (Wilmsen and Webber 2015). According to Cernea (2000), one
way to mitigate social disarticulation, which I think might also support clusteringand nurture social networks that may have grown distant throughout the years ofdisplacement, is to establish common property and communal facilities andprograming at new locations early on in the process and to engage with community-­oriented or tribe-based organizations rather than having the focus be so oriented
around individuals throughout the planning processes.
Despite the trickiness of defining community, social scientists have also stressed
the importance of existing community-based institutions, organizations, leadership,and expertise. Meaningful partnerships with community leadership have been
essential during post-disaster recovery (Nelson et al. 2007; Laska et al. 2010).
Indeed, the successes attributed to well-known community resettlements in North
Bonneville, Washington, and in Valmeyer, Illinois, can be attributed to the ability ofexisting leadership to maintain continuity throughout the planning processes(Comstock and Fox 1993). Perry and Lindell (1997) also found that the ongoing
efforts of a nonprofit, the Allenville Citizens for Progress, representing theunincorporated people of Allenville, Arizona, were essential in the successes of
their relocation from the Gila River floodplain. Existing leadership, like that of theIsle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council, is invaluable, andoften demonstrate a history of influence and resource provision, maintain sharedmemories and knowledge about local worldviews and higher incomes, and haveaccess to social networks for further support into the future. Moreover, local community-based or tribal leadership is likely more committed to the future well-beingof community members than government planners whose investment is typicallylimited to a grant, program, or employment timeline.

6.4.3

 eshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: From DoctrineRof Discovery to Climate Catastrophe

Contemporary environmental adaptation, US settler colonization, and struggles forindigenous self-determination are deeply intertwined. First of all, as Chief Naquin
explained in Victor’s kitchen, the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
Tribe descends from ancestors who survived Indian Removal Act-era violence by
resettling down the bayou, away from and invisible to the nearby settler society. In
addition to indigenous peoples, Vietnamese families, who resettled in the Mississippi

6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope163

Delta through the 1970s through wartime refugee programs; Cajuns, whose
ancestors were displaced from Canada; and African American communities who
trace their histories to those who escaped the atrocities of chattel slavery also live inpotential resettlement zones of coastal Louisiana (Dalbom et al. 2014; Laska et al.
2015). Legacies of forced displacements have long-term social, economic, andhealth consequences, as researchers have demonstrated by examining thelongitudinal and intergenerational effects of Indian relocation (Walls and Whitebeck2012), Japanese internment (Nagata et al. 2015), the holocaust (Matz et al. 2015),
and urban renewal (Fullilove 2005). The histories of colonialism, forced migration,
slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other forms of racialized dispossession continue
to shape where people live in relation to coastal risks, how sensitive communities
are to hazards, and the extent to which oppressed peoples have the resources toadapt.
Additionally, the archaeological record indicates a long history of regular indigenous migrations that involved the movements of small kinship units and muchlarger political groups between coastal areas, along bayous, and further inland formany reasons including as a response to regular flood events (Sassaman andAnderson 2004; McCintire 1954). Recent anthropological and social science
research has examined this longer history of migration as an adaptation strategy
among indigenous peoples, the impact of settler colonial formations, and the needto recognize the wisdom passed on intergenerationally among indigenous peoples(see Marino 2012; Whyte 2016; Wildcat 2009). Elizabeth Marino (2012) draws on
ethnographic work alongside the Inupiat people of Shishmaref, Alaska, documenting
how colonial infrastructures like roads, post offices, and schools led to sedentarizationof previously mobile communities and created risk by developing increasing
reliance on now failing infrastructure. Kyle Whyte (2016) expands upon Marino’s
work describing how 500 years of colonial treaties, laws, and institutions havethreatened indigenous adaptation by imposing regimes of containment and theerasure of indigenous social institutions. These scholars demonstrate both thatcolonial development has produced conditions that have exposed indigenous
communities to climate change-related hazards and undermined traditional effectivemodes of adaptation. They also describe the harm that is produced when colonialmodels of communal life, which align more with individualism and capitalist social
relations, are imposed and replace indigenous modes of social organization.
Contemporary initiatives to adapt as a whole tribal community and throughtraditional forms of organizing, like the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw resettlement, extend and build upon the survival and adaptation to socialchange throughout histories of violence, forced displacement, and physical andsocial marginalization.
The historic and ongoing dispossession of lands from indigenous peoples provides necessary historical context to current issues of land tenure and migration insettler colonial states like the United States (Tuck and Yang 2012; Wolfe 2006). US
claims to sovereignty are rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery—a set of principles
established among European monarchies in the mid-fifteenth century that attaches
land rights to the “act of discovery.” As recently as 2005, the Doctrine of Discovery

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was referenced by the US Supreme Court in a challenge to the land rights of the
Oneida Nation (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014). A fundamental history of the United States has
been one of treaties, legal actions, and genocidal violence by European and WhiteAmerican settlers aimed at the dispossession of land from indigenous peoples andestablishing the conditions for white supremacy, capitalist, and imperial expansion
in the United States and around the globe (Ibid.). This history has created apocalyptic
conditions for the indigenous nations who previously and still inhabit this land
(Estes 2019; Whyte 2016). France, Spain, and the United States have all establishedcolonial governments in the region of Isle de Jean Charles, and colonial infrastructure, private property regimes, and land grabbing by developers and oil and gas
companies established key conditions for the current ecological crisis and the tribaldriven efforts to resettle.
Restoring capacity for seasonal habitation, communal gathering, subsistence,and the reinvigoration of traditions are thus potentially essential resettlement
planning activities. Such considerations and the retaining of Island land have long
been prioritized in the discussions among the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw Tribal leaders and their partners (Maldonado et al. 2015; Peterson andMaldonado 2016). Retaining previously held territory is seen as critical for thecultural survival of many indigenous communities and nations like the Isle de JeanCharles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (Burkett et al. 2017; Marino 2015). The
fundamental logic behind CDBG and FEMA buyout programs, however, is that aplace has been identified as geographically, physically at risk to recurrent damage
and therefore should not sustain future habitation. FEMA and HUD’s generalapproach to buyouts for hazard mitigation in floodplains aims at returning residential
areas exposed to repeated disasters to open space (see 44 C.F.R. § 79.6 2018 andNotice of National Disaster Resilience Competition Grant Requirements 81 Fed.
Reg. 109, June 7, 2016). Typically, this involves demolishing structures and residents
giving up their property in exchange for the buyout funds. The Isle de Jean Charles
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council’s adaptation goals have included thecontinued ownership of family parcels and protection of the Island while also
investing in their collective future elsewhere therefore clash with federal agency
expectations and regulations. After pressure from Tribal leaders and Island residents,
state officials in charge of administering NDRC funds for the Isle de Jean Charles
resettlement have taken some steps to ensure the continued “access” to the Island“for ceremonial, cultural, historic and recreational purposes” (LDOA 2019a, pp.7).
At the time of this writing, however, there remain important questions regarding thefuture of Island properties, and tribal leaders have concerns as to restrictions on thataccess and potential continued ownership.
There are a broad set of questions engendered by the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement and the historical dispossession of indigenous lands. In terms of immediate
planning, what may motivate those who administer federal grants to advocate foramendments that embrace adaptation innovations when they depart from established regulations, and how might tribal and community leaders inform that process? More importantly, what will it take to institutionalize the legal and governanceinnovations needed to implement plans developed by communities and tribes? How6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope165

will policy-makers ensure that adaptation programs will not perpetuate the dispossession of tribal lands or further fragment traditional relationships to place? How
can adaptation planning support and extend indigenous peoples’ traditional formsof land tenure? And how will such programs provide reparations for the historicalforced migrations and dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands sponsored by the
US and local governments and private sector?

6.4.4

Between Recognition and Retreat

Political recognition of tribal sovereignty has become important to many indigenous nations as they adapt to coastal land loss (Katz 2003; Ferguson-Bohnee 2018;
Sneath 2018). The policy worlds of tribal recognition are complex and contested,
and many indigenous leaders and scholars have criticized both the intentions andimpacts of the federal recognition process in the United States. One set of criticisms
points to the petition process administered by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. The
agency demands that petitions for acknowledgment rely on written historicalevidence despite the oral traditions of many indigenous nations and themisrepresentations that proliferate among colonial record-keeping and academic
analyses (Miller 2004). Additionally, the petitions must present narratives that
demonstrate community, political influence, and other specific criteria in a way thatsatisfies what the US government considers legitimate indigenous identities,
histories, and forms of social organization. The criteria for petitions for federal
recognition are often seen as rooted in racist colonial ideologies rather than theexperiences, expressions, notions of belonging, and social institutions maintained
traditionally by diverse groups of indigenous peoples (Barker 2011). Additionally,
the petitions are judged by ambiguous standards that seem to shift depending on
who is applying for recognition (Miller 2004). There is also a set of criticisms thatpoint to the many examples of federal recognition processes dividing indigenous
groups over limited resources (Miller 2004). Moreover, once a Tribe has submitted
a petition for recognition, they must wait sometimes years for a response, andcrafting a compelling submission requires enormous investment of time and money
for legal and archival research that can influence, overwhelm, and undercut
indigenous leaders and indigenous social efforts (Den Ouden and O’Brien 2013). In
1992, anthropologist William Starna referred to the federal recognition process as“administrative genocide.”
Despite these critiques, federal recognition may also provide needed resources toLouisiana’s coastal and bayou tribes. Federal recognition might enable local tribes
to protect what remains of their eroding and subsiding homelands (Katz 2003;
Rivard 2015). It would also open up the possibility for further partnerships among
the tribes and government agencies to implement adaptation and resilience planningor for disaster assistance. A number of regulations describe federal recognition aspart of the eligibility for various kinds of disaster recovery and other kinds of public
support (see 44 CFR § 201.2, Emergency Management and Assistance, and 2 CFR

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N. Jessee§ 200.54, Grants and Agreements). Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
tribal leaders have been pursuing federal recognition while also planning theirresettlement, devoting an enormous amount of time and resources to both. For
example, while Tribal leaders were grappling with the various components of thestate’s planning process, they continued archival research and confirmed theirrolls—a core requisite of the federal recognition petition process that also provided
proof to the state that the Island residents were overwhelmingly members of theTribe. The urgency and logistic demands of both resettlement and recognition weighheavy on Tribal leaders, leading to a dilemma as to where to devote energy at any
given moment.
Some state governments, including Louisiana, have also formally recognized theexistence and rights of indigenous nations, even when they are not federally
recognized tribes. The processes by which recognition is administered and the rights
ensured by so-called state recognition vary among those states (Koenig and Stein2013). The Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe is one of 11 non-­federally recognized tribes currently recognized by the state government (LA IndianAffairs 2018), having first been acknowledged by the state legislature in a 2004
senate resolution passed to provide the Tribe access to education and healthcare
opportunities (Sen.Con.Res. 105 2004). They are also one of the 15 indigenous
nations recently invited to participate in the Louisiana Native American Commission
by recent state legislation (LA ACT 102 HB 660 2018).
The state of Louisiana, however, has been inconsistent in their approach to recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples. Koenig and Stein (2013, p. 133) observedthat state recognition in Louisiana was described by the former director ofLouisiana’s Office of Indian Affairs as establishing a “government-to-government
relationship” between the state government and the tribes that lived within thestate’s borders. At some point after their interview, during Bobby Jindal’s time asgovernor, the Office of Indian Affairs became inactive. In 2017 and 2018, theEdwards administration and state legislature took some initial steps to further
develop and clarify the meaning of state recognition (e.g., LA ACT 102 HB 660
2018). During a recent interview, however, one Louisiana state planner working on
the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement pointed to the limits of state power inrecognizing tribal sovereignty and rights to self-determination. He explained that
only if the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe were federally
recognized, “We would have government to government relations. But we cannot
approach it that way. It is not legal.” This reported inability of state government,
however, runs counter to interpretations of the US Constitution and Indian law bygovernment officials in at least one other state (see Lindemuth 2017) and forecloses
an exploration of how state planners and policy-makers can honor the inherent
sovereignty of non-federally recognized tribes. Legal scholars have argued that state
governments have considerable flexibility as to how they approach and honor therights of state-recognized tribes (Cohen 2005). For example, some states maintainspecial programs to serve non-federally recognized tribes, and one has evenestablished a legal process for devoting land to non-federally recognized tribes(Cohen 2005).

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope167

The state’s inconsistency with regard to tribal recognition has haunted the Isle deJean Charles resettlement process. During a recent state-held resettlement planningmeeting, I asked an Office of Community Development planner about the minimalreferences to the indigenous heritage of the Island in recent resettlement program
guidelines and designs. As a counterpoint, he pointed me to a recently produced
document, which, according to him, appreciated this important history (LDOA
2019a). The document, however, presents a very narrow historical overview in threebrief bullet points that begin in 1979, neglecting a much longer documented history
of indigenous habitation of the Island and any celebration of indigenous adaptationand life ways. Moreover, according to tribal leaders, they were not consulted incrafting this representation of their history. The final bullet point in the document—
which, again, was conveyed to me as evidence that the Office of Community
Development appreciates the indigenous heritage of the Island—explicitly calls into
question the state’s recognition of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw Tribe by pointing out the specific aims and scope of the 2004 state senate
resolution to ensure their access to educational and healthcare opportunities, as if tonotify readers that state recognition is irrelevant to the Tribe’s resettlement efforts.
The same 2004 senate resolution, however, also articulates a broader state policy “toprovide for recognition of Indian tribes within its borders, to support their tribal
aspirations, to preserve their cultural heritage and improve their economic condition
and to assist them in the achievement of their just rights” (Sen.Con.Res. 105 2004).
Why did the Louisiana Office of Community Development emphasize the narrowfocus of one aspect of the legal act in their resettlement background and overview?
Tensions over the role of state and federal recognition reflect the difficult position in which tribal leaders have been placed. Disparate “opportunities” within complex and contradictory policy worlds constrain actual possibilities for indigenous
planning and resilience. The Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
Tribal Council is struggling for self-determination while caught between notions ofcommunity, between a state agency and the ambiguities of state and federal policy,
between state and federal government approaches to recognizing indigenous
sovereignty, and between the politics of tribal recognition and the liberal and colonial politics of so-called “managed retreat.” Ahistorical adaptation enables the continuation of administrative barriers and prevents indigenous peoples’ in the UnitedStates from realizing their rights to self-determination, historic lands, and culturalpreservation in times of climate change. In order to provide a meaningful opportunity for coastal and bayou tribes in Louisiana to protect their heritage and land andensure their cultural survival for generations to come, state and federal governments
must quickly and fully recognize the sovereignty of each of the tribes, who are seeking formal recognition. The United States must also become a full signatory andlegally adopt the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples andprotect the rights described therein, which include the right to self-­determination,right to land, right to protect historic sites, and the right to receive redress fromexperiences of land dispossession, forced assimilation, and the deprivation of distinct cultural values or ethnic identities (UN General Assembly 2007).

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6.4.5

N. JesseeReframing Resettlement

The most urgent form of ahistorical adaptation, however, for Isle de Jean Charles
Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders has emerged as government planners
and their contractors have not adequately honored the existing resettlement plans
driven by tribal leaders long before resources arrived. Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-­
Chitimacha-­Choctaw Tribal leaders had been actively working on resettling inland
and reuniting their displaced Tribe for over a decade prior to the National Disaster
Resilience Competition. The Tribe’s pre-NDRC resettlement efforts are documented
extensively by journalists, academics, and filmmakers (Jessee 2015; Maldonado
et al. 2015; Simon 2008). Despite multiple setbacks in the previous efforts the US
Army Corps and Terrebonne Parish described in a previous section of this chapter,
the Tribal Council has continued to search for resources and pathways to reunite
their people and ensure their future inland—an effort described by Tribal Executive
Secretary, Chantel Comardelle, during an interview as “creating a living and active
bridge from our ancestral land to the new Isle de Jean Charles Tribal community.”
Secretary Comardelle had lived on the Island until she was 4 years old. Her
mother and father—the current Deputy Chief of the Tribe—left in the mid-1980s
after Hurricane Juan. She had developed chronic respiratory problems from moldthat proliferated from repeated flooding. Secretary Comardelle has a full-time job
outside of her unpaid role supporting the Tribe and regularly works all hours of thenight on resettlement planning, federal recognition, and other tribal-driven
initiatives. She often participates in planning conference calls while at her children’svarious sports practices and gymnastics meets. In addition to all of this, in 2017
Chantel completed a Museum Studies Certificate Program from the Institute ofAmerican Indian Arts. Her aim has been to learn curatorial skills that will help
future generations absorb their heritage and maintain relationships to their ancestral
Island, even if the land mass erodes away. Secretary Comardelle is someone I often
think of when I encounter the term “climate refugees” attributed to her Tribe. The
term fails to capture the amount of time, work, planning, and passion that she andthe Tribal Council have put into their resettlement over the years. It dehumanizes
the Island people by representing them only in terms of vulnerability andenvironmental risk, rather than as whole human subjects with multiple dimensions,experiences, relationships, aspirations, fears, and dimensions of their identities. Nordoes it capture the reality that the effort is with the entire tribal social organizationand cultural survival in mind, not individuals fleeing one particular hazard.
According to Secretary Comardelle, “For us, resettlement is an act of culturalsurvival.”
In 2010, Tribal leaders began working with long-time collaborators at the
Lowlander Center—a nonprofit organization that uses participatory action researchto support the efforts of a number of bayou communities and tribes. Together, theyassembled a team of academics, architects, indigenous leaders, and otherprofessionals who could provide resources, support, collaboration, and fellowship
as the Tribe pursued their resettlement. The Tribe, Lowlander Center, and other6

Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope169

Fig. 6.3 A conceptual plan for the relocated Isle de Jean Charles community includes about 100
homesites and a village center. (Image courtesy of Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture)collaborators planned for key tribal institutions like a museum, tribal cultural andcommunity center, health facilities, and gardens. Their planning efforts embraced
renewable energy, mitigation standards for infrastructure and design, tribal
governance capacity building, and tribal-driven economic development principles(see Fig. 6.3 for one pre-NDRC rendering produced by Evans & Lighter Architecture
in collaboration with tribal leaders and their resettlement partners). When I began
working with Tribal leaders and their resettlement partners in late 2014, they werein the midst of conducting extensive outreach to build support for their tribal
resettlement plans and synthesizing existing literature in sustainable development,
resettlement, and resilience to use as a baseline for critically analyzing their own
planning process (Jessee 2015). The tribal-driven resettlement work has beencelebrated internationally as the Tribal leadership has garnered awards like theMississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium’s “Spirit of the Community” Award,
the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “Guardian of the Gulf Award forEnvironmental Justice,” and the Rising Voices “Bob Gough Climate Justice in
Action Award.” Additionally, the Lowlander Center was one of five awardees of the2018 Climigration Network Award for their approach to community relocation.
After years of struggling to secure financial resettlement support, in 2015 the Islede Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe and the Lowlander Center
partnered with Louisiana’s Office of Community Development (OCD). The Tribal
Council, Lowlander Center, and their network of scholars and architects attended
public meetings and multiple planning sessions with the state agency, contributing

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N. Jessee

extensive time and labor to the State’s process of crafting a successful submission
to the National Disaster Resilience Competition—an effort that garnered $48.3
million in federal funds to support their tribal resettlement (LDOA 2015a). The
application importantly spoke to the social as well as environmental concerns oftribal leaders by assuring that “All factors of design and process will help to supportand enhance tribal identity, sovereignty, and dignity” (LDOA 2015b, pp. 107). Oncethe award was granted, the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribeand Lowlander Center each received partnership letters from Louisiana’s Office ofCommunity Development (OCD) that thanked them, acknowledged theircontributions to crafting a winning application, and ensured a continued partnership.
It appears as though state planners and US Department of Housing and Urban
Development officials, however, did not thoroughly understand the social andhistorical complexities of the Island or the contested space that had emerged fromdecades of land grabs, displacement, gentrification, and the social demands on
multiple tribes who inhabit the region. Soon after the NDRC award was announced,
some of the complex realities of the Island as a social space became evident to state
officials by way of a letter to the Governor from the Chief of the United Houma
Nation—another indigenous nation from the region—expressing their concern overbeing excluded from the State’s plans for using federal resilience funds despite theiralso having ties to the Island (Batte 2016).4 The reason the United Houma Nation
was not included in Louisiana’s initial NDRC application remains unclear, though
Crepelle (2019, pp. 27–28) suggests it might be the result of the United Houma
Nation having not sent a representative to state-led meetings during the application
process. State documentation portrays at least one person from the Tribe inattendance at a phase II workshop (LDOA 2015c, p. 350). However, thedocumentation does not capture the rationale behind the state’s phase II outreachprocess or the content of specific conversations during that period. This confusion
points to how critical it is for state agencies to more fully appreciate local histories
and complex social relations before developing and committing to programs,
something that the timelines of design competition application processes and thepace of grant cycles discourages.
Louisiana’s Office of Community Development began redefining the character,scope, and beneficiaries of the resettlement after the letter from the United Houma
Nation. What was in the application framed as a tribal resettlement that included
current and former Island residents (most of whom also live in low-lying areas in
the region that also experience flooding) became predominantly focused on thecurrent Island residents as individuals, regardless of tribal identity. According to afact sheet circulated by the office:Phase II of the state’s NDRC application specifically references the Isle de Jean Charles
Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. This reference was made under the belief that all
inhabitants of the Island affiliate with this tribe. There are apparently also members of theUnited Houma Nation living on the Island, and there may be Island residents who don’t
4
The experiences and aims of the United Houma Nation’s Tribal government and citizens arebeyond the scope of the research that informs this chapter.

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

171

affiliate with any tribe. As such, specific tribal membership will not be a requirement forinclusion in the resettlement, as the state’s objective is the resettlement of all willing
members of the Isle de Jean Charles community, irrespective of any familial, cultural or
tribal affiliation. (quoted in Crepelle 2019, p. 28)

The Office of Community Development began referring to the Tribal Council as“stakeholders” rather than partners. They imposed a more conventional top-down,
rather than tribal-driven or participatory, planning process beginning with a needs
assessment predominantly based on land-use data collection on the Island andoutreach with individual households who remained on the Island rather than thecollective needs of the Tribe as a community (LDOA 2017b). Tribal leaders began
to question the state’s commitment to their efforts and read their actions as divisively
exacerbating tensions on and around the Island—what some Tribal citizens referred
to as a process of “divide and conquer.” Moreover, instead of relying on the existing
efforts of the Tribal Council whose planning and outreach was critical to the state
being awarded the NDRC award, they slowly began to roll out new leadership
structures to govern the planning process, such as a project steering committee,
composed of indigenous and nonindigenous Island residents, representatives fromboth the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and United Houma
Nation, and state employees to give input in the planning process (LDOA 2019a).
The steering committee met six times over a 9-month period in 2018 (LDOA
2019a). The meetings then stopped abruptly confusing at least some steeringcommittee members who began to hear about resettlement activities in the press
rather than directly from the state planners themselves (Jessee Forthcoming).
State planners and their subcontractors have also rendered the extensive work of
the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council has devoted tothe process invisible in planning materials and public statements. From after theaward announcement in 2016 until at least late 2018, the state’s resettlement website
displayed a project timeline with no reference to any pre-NDRC resettlement workthat the Tribe had conducted or their extensive contributions to the successful
NDRC application (LDOA 2018a). Timelines posted at public community planningmeetings also omitted the tribal-driven history of resettlement planning (Jessee
Forthcoming). Additionally, in one article written for an online planning publication,Louisiana’s Resilience Policy and Program Administrator makes no mention of theTribe’s name or the indigenous heritage of the Island (Sanders 2018). Instead, hereferred to the people of the Island as “pioneers”—an odd phrase to describe Native
Americans given the historical role of European and American pioneers in theoccupation and dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands. The article, entitled
Don’t Label Them Climate Change Refugees, says a Louisiana Planner, They’re
Pioneers, importantly rejects the paternalistic and problematic “climate refugee”
discourse explicitly. It does so, however, while reproducing an ahistorical reframingof the resettlement that erases the indigenous heritage of the Island and the Tribal
leaders who have advanced resettlement as a way of saving the Island’s heritage.
According to the article, “Many of the Island’s residents are leaning in bycollaborating with a project team of state officials, planners, engineers and architects
to plan the look, feel, function and composition of the new community.” However,

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it was Louisiana state planners who “leaned in” to collaborate with an existing
Tribal Council who established and maintained a set of existing partnerships that
produced clear plans for a tribal community resettlement—which was funded.
In early 2019, 3 years after tribal leaders began to feel excluded from the state’splanning process—and nearly 3 years after Chief Naquin initially suspected thestate was trying to transform their tribal resettlement into a subdivision—the Stateannounced an action plan amendment to the US Department of Housing and Urban
Development for a “project narrative clarification” and “introduction of newactivities,” formalizing a shift that began almost immediately following the award
announcement. The proposed amendment replaces the section of the funded NDRC
application that commits to “supporting and enhancing tribal identity, sovereignty,
and dignity” and the tribal community center (LDOA 2019b). Despite their statedgoal to “create an opportunity” for former residents to join the resettlement, thestate’s outreach has been focused predominantly on current Island residents, andonly as of early 2019 did they begin to publicize the basic terms under which former
Island residents can claim a spot in the new location. According to the proposed
amendment, eligibility of former Island residents to claim a plot of land in theresettlement location would be restricted to those who currently own a home and“can demonstrate the financial ability to build a new home” (LDOA 2019b). The
state’s program amendment would enable anyone “who lived in a Hurricane Isaac
federally-declared disaster parish on Aug. 28, 2012” to receive a lot in the newlocation and would allow the state to publicly auction lots that do not get claimed byformer island residents (LDOA 2019a, p. 10). Additionally, there remain questions
as to how those who could not afford to relocate on their own will afford the newcosts of owning and maintaining a home, insurance, taxes, utilities, etc. given theparameters established by the Office of Community Development. Three years after
the award, there is immense uncertainty as to how one of the primary goals of the
Tribal leadership over the years of resettlement efforts—to reunite scattered Tribal
citizens in order to ensure the Island’s traditional cultural survival and growth—will
be achieved.
The redefinition of the scope of the resettlement and lack of commitment to theexisting tribal vision has estranged Tribal leadership from the planning process andlimited the potential resources for the resettlement garnered through their advocacy.
The NDRC was one of many mechanisms Tribal leaders hoped would support theirlong sought-after resettlement goals. In addition to working with the state’s Officeof Community Development toward the NDRC funding, Tribal leaders and theirresettlement team secured planning support from multiple programs including theCitizens Institute for Rural Design, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Healthy
Places for Healthy People, the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices grant, and the
National Academy of Sciences to enhance the planning process, directed toward
ensuring a number of plan elements including a health clinic, honoring traditional
ecological knowledge, and building their organizational capacity after years of
struggling with the strains of displacement. Tribal leaders remain uncertain as towhether or not the outcomes of these efforts will be realized, because the state ofLouisiana has retained ownership over the land they purchased with NDRC funds

6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope173

for the resettlement and have not committed to the incorporation of these other
Tribal-driven initiatives on that land. Moreover, while the Tribe envisioned owningand governing communal spaces of the resettlement site, the recent proposed
amendment states that infrastructure and recreational spaces will be “maintained bya governing nonprofit or unit of local government” (LDOA 2019b, p. 10),exacerbating questions as to how the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­
Choctaw Tribe as a distinct community might plan for their future on the lands
purchased for their relocation with a grant they contributed extensively to garnering.
One tribal member summed up these concerns during an informal interview after
hearing in the newspaper about a state planning meeting to be held the next day,despite their serving on the state-created project steering committee:“This ain’t no Road Home Program. We wanted them to help us, not take over the wholething. My spirit aches knowing they are going to try to get people to sign up for a spot intheir resettlement, while not explaining what they will have to pay since the Tribe is getting
pushed out. It ain’t free. We don’t know what they tell people when they talk on theirporches. We don’t know if the people hear from the state that they will need to pay taxes orflood insurance on this new house, and it will be more than they pay now on the Island. My
spirit aches because the whole tribe and tribal leaders were not invited to their meetings,
and the state people do not trust us. We don’t know if we should even advise our people.
This was for our children. We want what is best for the future of our people as a whole. But
now we are stuck between a rock and a hard place of not doing anything… But who’s going
to be there after 2022 when this grant ends?”

The state’s approach to administering NDRC funds has produced immense uncertainty and threatened to alienate and undercut some of the most compelling advocates for the Island people—who also happen to be arguably the most effective
advocates for coastal resettlement in Louisiana for nearly two decades. What doesthat do for future coastal planning? What will other community and tribal leaderslearn when they reflect on how this process has unfolded? Will they have to choose
between adaptation and identity? Between relocating out of harm’s way andmaintaining their collective self-determination? Or between safety from coastal
flooding and justice? At the time of this writing, Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-­
Chitimacha-­Choctaw Tribal leaders are concerned that public perception will bethey have benefitted from the $48 million investment in their resettlement andtherefore do not need continued or future support. In reality, the state’s process has
been incredibly painful for tribal leaders and has led to new kinds of uncertainty for
the Tribe’s future.
Scholars and journalists are beginning to raise questions as to the ability of public-philanthropic-sponsored design competitions to grapple with the social and historical complexities amplified by disasters and climate change. While competitions
may offer resources for some jurisdictions but do not support others, they run therisk of creating divisions rather than solidarity among communities struggling toadapt (Spanne 2016). I hope that this section has highlighted that the concerns,
plans, and visions advanced by tribal leaders or activists embraced by government
agencies in design stages of these competitions may not transfer throughout implementation. First, the state’s ambiguous approach to community—articulating both

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N. Jessee

geographic notions inherited from the CPRA plan and risk reduction conventions
that highlight physical exposure to hazards as well as tribal notions of community
inherited from existing Isle de Jean Charles resettlement efforts—throughout theirapplication and implementation processes along with regional politics have derailed
the commitment of state actors to some of the most important social and cultural
aspects of the initial application. Additionally, the innovation of resilience designcompetitions seems primarily focused on design with minimal attention to the innovations needed in governance. Local jurisdictions may draw on conventional
approaches to spending federal dollars, constraining the innovation harnessed during the development of applications to those competitions. Design is not a replacement for governance, and the problems raised in this chapter should demand
government agencies find new ways to support the initiatives of those already working to support community-oriented and indigenous resilience. I often wonder how
things would be different today, with regard to the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement,
if state policy-makers and planners had remained committed to the values and ideas
embraced in initial application and their initial partnerships when they realized thesocial complexity of the Island, even if it meant pursuing additional funding anddeveloping additional partnerships to accommodate other tribes and those whose
visions of the future departed from the one long-advanced by the Isle de JeanCharles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe?

6.5

 eyond Beneficiaries: Resourcing Community
B
and Tribal-Driven Resettlements

Given the historical and contemporary tensions described in previous sections of
this chapter, policy-makers, planners, and funders should concentrate on adjustingplanning conventions, grant implementation processes, federal regulations, andexpectations in order to engage in participatory processes that ensure community
leaders—or in the case of tribal resettlement, tribal leadership—remain in control of
their complex and dynamic adaptation processes. What should the Tribe have been
told about their rights to maintain ownership over the resettlement ideas that they
had been honing for about 20 years when they shared them with the state, thinking
the state was going to support their existing efforts to lead their resettlement? Whatrole should the state have taken to support those tribal leaders already mobilizing toresettle their communities en groupe? Once tensions between notions of communityand goals for resettlement emerged, what would have been a better process for harmonizing divergent adaptation aims?
One resource for policy-makers, scholars, and practitioners engaged with thosealready working on resettlement planning processes is The Peninsula Principles on
Climate Displacement Within States—a policy document produced by Displacement
Solutions in 2013 based on consultation with international experts in human rights,
international law, refugees, and migration. The principles highlight the agency and6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope175

dignity of those experiencing displacement and frame the role of state agencies as
resource providers and advocates more so than leaders of resettlement processes.
According to the principles, national policies should institutionalize the government’s
role as providers of resources, assistance, and protection against human rights
abuses. Mackinnon and Derickson (2013)‘s “politics of resourcefulness” is also
useful. Their work highlights the need to distribute resources with the goal ofaddressing inequalities, to institutionalize and commit to democratic andparticipatory processes and capacity building within communities, to value
traditional indigenous knowledges (ecological and other forms of expertise), and toensure the political and cultural recognition of communities and tribes. As indicatedearlier in the chapter, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples is also a critical resource.
There is also a need for planners and policy-makers to enhance organizing capacity when it is not fully developed. Though many community and tribal leaders, likethe Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council, have long
begun planning their resettlements to ensure a future for their people in the wake ofclimate-related hazards and disaster, they likely also need various kinds of support
to fully realize their visions and in dealing with the effects of existing displacement.
Government representatives have access to many resources that might be useful toresettling communities including knowledge of agencies, laws, and procedures;
people to serve as staff; letters of support; and grant writing skills. State or federal
agencies could also provide financial compensation for time spent on resettlement
activities, office space for community or tribal use, and guidance for people togather additional resources themselves. Providing material support to existing
community-to-community and tribe-to-tribe knowledge exchanges and to existing
relationships of solidarity among community-based organizations would enhance
resilience and might also supplement governmental deficiencies (Lazrus et al. 2016;
Maldonado et al. 2015). Access to professional networks, like the American
Planning Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, Rising Voices, and the
Rural Sociological Society, are also potentially valuable.
Outcomes of any knowledge-generating processes related to resilience or resettlement planning are hot commodities at the moment. There is widespread demandfor publications of “best practices” or “lessons learned” of resilience and adaptation
processes. Indeed, one of the goals of governmental support for the Isle de JeanCharles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw resettlement was to develop a conduit for
future learning about resettlement processes and sustainable development. The
Tribal leadership and their team of partners had embraced that role using theirresettlement to create a teaching and learning community for sustainable
development. The state of Louisiana has indicated they envision a resettlement
process which is a “scalable” and “replicable” model (LDOA 2018b). Louisianastate planners have presented their work on this resettlement at numerous conferences
including the American Planning Association, American Association of Geographers,
and others around the world without including Tribal leaders and their knowledgeof the long road to resettlement. For more just processes of resettlement knowledge
sharing, it is critical that local activists and Tribe-based partners have real power and176

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authorship in the activities through which their experiences, struggles, and activism
are represented, objectified, commodified, and circulated for multi-societal benefit.
These kinds of presentations and any reports produced should be crafted incollaboration and co-authored with community-based organizations and Tribal
leaders, and the resources acquired from the circulation of documented outcomesshould directly benefit those community-based organizations monetarily andthrough recognition. This is especially important during Tribal resettlements, whereintellectual property issues and representations of identity, ancestry, and socialorganization are so often conditioned by historical colonial social relations and canbe used to threaten cultural survival or political recognition.

6.6

Conclusions

In this chapter I have argued that historical atrocities and intergenerational experiences of injustice influence the lived experiences of contemporary adaptation policy
and resettlement planning efforts. The refusal of risk reduction professionals toadequately address past injustices and their social and environmental legacies—
what I refer to as ahistorical adaptation—can disrupt efforts to build meaningful
partnerships between communities or tribes and government agencies. A lack ofawareness and explicit acknowledgment of local and national histories of race andracism, the politics of disaster, or struggles for self-determination, for example,
might be felt as an invalidation of peoples’ experiences, suffering, perseverance,
and wisdom. Without meaningfully addressing broader social, cultural, andhistorical contexts, climate change adaptation policies may serve as just another site
for the continued oppression of already marginalization peoples.
In order to avoid ahistorical adaptation, I call on risk reduction professionals,
state planners, scholars (myself included), and others engaged in hazard mitigationand environmental adaptation—especially community resettlement processes—toconceptualize and conduct their work through wider timelines and notions of risk
and adaptation than they may be accustomed. Many of the state planners I havespoken with during the course of my research who are working on administering
National Disaster Resilience Competition funds for the Isle de Jean Charles
resettlement acknowledge the histories discussed in this chapter and their legacies
within individual conversations. Also, the final LA SAFE regional adaptation
strategy, which was released as this chapter was headed to press, briefly acknowledges
the legacies of colonialism and racism and how they contribute to current risk
(LDOA 2019c, p 96–97). This evolution from earlier drafts of the framework might
demonstrate an increasing sensitivity to the historical production of vulnerability.
Future research might explore 1) the suitability of the recommended strategies
advanced in that document for addressing the scope of risks that Louisiana residents
face, 2) the extent to which the strategies lead to the redress of injustices mentioned
in the “Race and Ethnicity” blurb, and 3) the appropriate role of oil and gas industries
in resilience and adaptation policy in Louisiana. In order to meaningfully adapt to6Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope177

the socio-ecological risks that threaten coastal habitability in Louisiana, state andfederal policy-makers, scholars, planners, and others working on environmental
adaptation must reckon with the entangled roots of risk: settler colonization, racism,
capitalism, and the environmental destruction caused by industrial development.
Inequalities and violence related to gender and sexuality should also be consideredin this context though it is regrettably missing from the analysis in this chapter.
Policy and planning approaches must provide adequate resources for the implementation of community-based and tribal-driven adaptation initiatives, especiallywhen, as in the case of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-­Choctaw Tribe,
those efforts have been underway for nearly two decades. Resilience and adaptation
policies and practice should bolster existing environmental and social justice efforts
by finding ways to provide financial and other needed resources to those doing thisessential work. Tribal and community resettlement processes evoke disparate legal
and policy worlds that relate to grant administration, property law, and the rights ofindigenous peoples—making public support for just resettlement processes incredibly complex and potentially impossible without significant social, cultural, legal,
and bureaucratic transformation. Institutionalizing the kinds of support most needed
will likely require changes in federal and state regulations, budgets, and more serious conversations about holding extractive industries accountable. Providing reparations for legacies of forced displacement, slavery, land grabs, and impacts ofdeforestation and oil and gas development should be investigated as resilience andadaptation strategies. While the focus of risk reduction professionals and policymakers may remain transfixed on the future—imagining new relationships to placeand habitation in flood zones—we must simultaneously reckon with the past.
“Reshaping” coastal Louisiana must include reshaping the colonial social relations
that have devastated this landscape and many of the people who have lived, and who
currently live, here.

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Chapter 7

Sojourners in a New Land: Hopeand Adaptive Traditions
Kristina J. Peterson

Somos el barco, somos el mar,
Yo navego en ti, tu navegas en mi
We are the boat, we are the sea, I sail in you, you sail in me
The boat we are sailing in was built by many hands
And the sea we are sailing on, it touches every land- chorus
So with our hopes we set the sails and face the winds once moreAndwith our hearts we chart the waters never sailed before - chorus
Lorre Wyatt (1983)

7.1

Introduction

The Louisiana State flag has a mother Pelican caring for and protecting the next
generation. Like the pelican on the flag, the task in Louisiana is to provide care forand protection of generations yet to come. The task facing us now, however, isrejuvenating rural communities that are suffering from inadequate physical andsocial structures. This rejuvenation will benefit and heal the current communities as
they prepare to become areas of hospitality for those who are and will becomesojourners from Louisiana coastal and riverine areas. At the core of hospitality ofreceiving the stranger are the acts of welcoming, supplying food, storytelling, andrelationship and community building (Buber 1970). Culture, which includes “artand literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions, andbeliefs,” is an overlooked element in rebuilding cities and rural areas, ravaged bydisasters, war, and other forms of distress, according to a joint World Bank and
UNESCO report (UNESCO 2018). This chapter explores the role of culture in theresettlement inland of coastal Louisianans.

K. J. Peterson (*)
Lowlander Center, Gray, LA, USAe-mail: Kristina@lowlandercenter.org© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_7

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Humans are now in a new and critically different relationship with the world(Morton 2013). Called the “new anthropocene era,” it is a relationship where humanactivity impacts the world at a planetary level seen most clearly in both slow andsudden weather events contributing to drastic shifts in population (Hawken 2017).
In this new era, a radical extension of hospitality will be a necessity (Newman2007). This new and radical hospitality will involve hosting and showing appreciation
for all life, not just humans (Ogletree 2003; Morton 2017).
The 2016 floods confirmed that most of Louisiana is at risk to riverine, extreme
rain events, and coastal flooding. As the population of the state works to adapt to thechanging geography of and increased risks of such extreme weather, there will beshifts in living patterns and reworked understandings of dwelling place or home
place (Brown 2011). The relocation of Louisiana coastal residents is already taking
place (Dalbom et al. 2014). The research that has been done helps to understandinternal post-disaster displacement but has focused mostly on urban areas. Little
attention has been given to internally displaced rural communities and to the rural
receiving communities (Hauer 2017).
Historically, individuals, households, neighborhoods, and communities do not“just pick up and move.” Relocation is usually spurred by some critical need or setof circumstances that ends in the difficult choice of leaving a home place to become
landless and placeless (Fullilove 2004). To experience the extremes of diaspora, or
sojourning, it is most likely that all other resources or options for staying have been
exhausted before leaving. The out-migration is likely to happen in stages as serial
events prompt such personally critical decisions at each juncture. The lack of justiceor the transgressions against justice are often connected with the impetus for goingin many migration situations. Leaving becomes a hope that the situation mightchange and provide a just future in the new locale. It is imperative that the sojourner
not be considered an object of charity, but a full and just participant in the new community. Notably for people in a deeply religious state (Cooperman 2015), the Bible
addresses very similar circumstances. The principle from Judaic law that thesojourner must not be deprived of justice and be paid fair wages is apropos forLouisiana (Smith-Christopher 2002). Thus, for the receiving community to be readyto extend hospitality, it must first be healed or made whole by having obtained justice and economic security itself (Rom-Shiloni 2013; Escobar 2008). This chapter
explores the possibilities for “just” sojourning and radical hospitality. Addressing
immediate needs while understanding long-term implications of current choices anddecisions involves creative living, hope, and a massive scale of collaboration andcooperation, brought together under a comprehensive state master plan of rejuvenation. A visionary plan will call upon the work of the various communities in the state
to create real, appropriately aspirational rejuvenating designs. After all, we, throughour history, were all once sojourners (Brasseaux and Davis 2017).
The first part of this chapter will highlight the challenges, or so-called wicked
problems (Rittel and Webber 1973), facing people who live in receiving regions.
Communities receiving the newcomers face not only the problems of extending
services to the new arrivals but doing so in the context of chronic and layered
problems that already make their home places precarious, which the arrival of more
people can exacerbate. The challenge of the inward migration can also present

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opportunities for the in-migrants bringing skills and abilities to these new locations(Woods 2018). Planners will be challenged by the magnitude of potentially a million people displaced from the coast over the next 50 or so years (Hauer 2017). It
is predicted that a majority of coastal Louisiana residents will migrate within
the bounds of the state (Hauer 2017). Yet, the carrying capacity of some of theinland rural regions of the state is already stretched to collapse, racial tensions still
exist, and fear of diminished quality of life likely make hospitality to receive more
people difficult (Brown 2011; Derrida 2000; Kearney and Semonovitch 2011;
Ogletree 2003).
The second part of the chapter suggests that both faith and culture can be utilized
as assets for a comprehensive master plan that stresses innovation, collaboration,and inclusion of all regions of the state. Rejuvenation of neglected rural areas cantake place through judicious work of boundary organizations1 and cross-boundary
networks utilizing social and cultural assets (Hufford 1994). The rejuvenation ofcultural arts and social assets, food, faith, music, stories, and family networks canretain and share historical knowledge to those who are leaving flooded areas, thesojourners, and those who are receiving the sojourners. Collaboration andrelationship building can contribute to problem-solving and can be addressed
through cultural networks (UNESCO 2018). The benefits of utilizing cultural assets
within the restoration and rejuvenation of a people and place during and following
social and physical disruptive events are increasingly being used by governments
and institutions (CIRD 2018).
This discussion is focused on a rural to rural relationship of “historied” communities and “communities-of-place” who understand themselves as part of their surroundings and as responsible for the shared commons of their home, a sense ofshared community that Tonnies famously called gemeinschaft (Tonnies 2001).
Rural communities, in many cases, are self-organizing or managed and are built
around shared lifeways and an ethical code of caring for and sharing with each otherand their shared dwelling place (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). By exploring theways faith, tradition, food, music, and storytelling intersect within rural areas of thestate that have different religious and historical traditions, models of hospitality canbe discovered and constructed. Through cross-boundary work and trust networks,
the task can be the building of new community through co-learning (Maida 2007).

7.2

“Wicked Problems” and Racial Divides

The term “wicked problem” was coined by Horst Rittel to describe the challenges
and complexities of problematization, the search for root causes and the necessary
planning required for social issues that are out of the ordinary (Freire 1996; Fullilove2004). Two defining characteristics of wicked problems that seem appropriate to1
A boundary organization is one that helps collaboration, information, and facilitation between
diverse entities such as research disciplines, public policy, and community participants.

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Louisiana’s current situation are the endless varieties of actions and approaches that
could be taken, and the reality that any actions taken are likely to have irreversible
consequences. If these actions generate more, new problems instead of addressing
the existing ones, “wicked problems” will be exacerbated rather than mitigated.
Because every action has an impact, best knowledge and principles have to be
applied with each intervention, preferably in anticipation of the change (Rittel andWebber 1973).
The process of locating areas or regions in the state conducive for population
growth is complex. Rural folks, for the most part, want to be with rural folks withsimilar shared social values.
When my people moved from Plaquemines to Amite all they wanted was a place to callhome and a welcoming church and not to be afraid.2

The racial divides that have kept neighbors from knowing neighbors is still present
in the state. Pushback from communities to resist “the other” happens all too
frequently. In conversations with people in several of these locations, there is asense of fear that permeates from stereotypes seen on the news and in entertainment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks changes in hate group behavior and hasreported a rise in hate-related activity in Louisiana toward minority groups (SPLC
2018).3 Racial tensions can increase with additional people and diminishedresources. Without a counter-narrative to highlight hospitality and creativeinterventions, there will be resistance to the in-migration. Following the 2016
flooding in New Roads, Louisiana, state recovery officials identified a predominately
Black community that had flooded severely. They worked with the residents whowanted to move together to a less flood-prone area in a different section of town.
The initiative experienced resistance from white residents who opposed their
moving near them (Jones 2018). More recently, the community of Schriever was
critical of the state’s planning of the HUD-NDRC-IdJC Tribal4 grant, not wanting
an open door policy of who could live in the Schriever community (DeSantis 2019).
Another example occurring in the same area is the construction of slab-on-grade
subdivisions in the Gray, Louisiana, area for residents moving from closer to thecoast, with opponents claiming that the development is turning the quiet ruralcommunity into suburban “sprawl.” Their argument is that the development is
contributing to changing the density and identity of the receiving community andincreasing the original residents’ flooding.
A male resident whose family dates back to the original Acadian settlers stated:
My house and yard now flood with all the houses they stuck to the ground; they even took
down the trees the kids played in. Those trees helped stop the water. It ain’t right to do thatto us. We can’t even sit on the front porch…52
Personal communication with Rev. Tyronne Edwards, March 28, 2019. Deep appreciation isextended to Rev. Edwards and the other friends who offered stories, advice, editing, and critique tohone this chapter.
3
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map
4
Housing and Urban Development—National Disaster Resilience Competition Award for Isle deJean Charles Tribe.
5
Personal communication with a Bayou Blue resident, April 22, 2018.

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Whether it is racial or economic fears or flooding from increased development, theoutcomes are similar: Those who are at risk and need to relocate have fewer options
to make informed choices of safe and healthy living places for their children becauseof the real and feared risks of the original residents.
The concerns expressed by rural communities about “newcomers” contain multiple issues. The landscape, the sounds, the way of life have forever changed andrestructured the social networks of the historied families and the way their land wasused for essential lifeways (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). One oft-voiced
concern is the lack of protection of farms and forestlands that put rural lifeways, andall whom they serve with food, at risk. Common concerns heard from the Bayou
Blue area are:
1. More flooding with the increased development (as quoted above)
2. More noise, less silence, quiet, and peace
3. More issues of road safety, not able to either walk or ride bikes
4. “Can’t let the chickens run free” as farm life diminishes
5. Higher property taxes
6. Fear of crime and drugs as more people move into the area6

7.3

Development Impacts on Rural Lifeway

People moving in incremental steps trying to stay close to their former residence
and extended family are attracted to the new development on former rural tracts ofland. The demand for new housing is placing a demand on all available properties.
Speculation of land by investors and realtors of larger parcels of rural/farmland
property is occasionally causing friction between neighbors and in the families ofcommonly held land. Family members wanting to retain the land within theirfamilies can be in conflict with other family members who would like to sell for
financial reasons. Because of increased land values, family members who would
like to retain the land for family often do not have the financial means to “buy out”
their extended family members. Conflict arises when the property sold becomes aconvenience store, gas station, or development, contributing to a diminished rural
lifestyle of the older homestead family next door.7
Rural areas in Louisiana are being gentrified by new housing developments thathave changed the landscape and challenged the lifeways of rural families. “No place
to park when gathering for crawfish boils at Mama’s home” is not just an
inconvenience. It is a significant change of family dynamics and community
celebrations. Feeling left out of the conversation in preserving or negotiating their
way of life has created harsh feelings not only toward the Parishes and the State but
6
Self Development of People, Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), Bayou Blue correspondence/meeting, April 23, 2017.
7
Self Development of People, Prebyterian Church (PCUSA), Bayou Blue correspondence/meeting, April 23, 2017.

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also toward the newcomer. For example, when a local farmer went to the Parish
Council meeting to raise concerns of the amount of building and the cutting downof cypress trees causing additional flooding, he was told that the developer knew
what he was doing and it was okay. There is now chronic flooding in the location ofconcern.8
Some families who are being hemmed in or overwhelmed by the new developments and wanting to maintain their rural lifeways have encouraged their children
and grandchildren to move to rural areas further inland and obtain land before it
becomes too costly or is bought for new development. This process of moving fromone rural spot to the next is not new. Over generations as the coast has slowly
migrated inland, there has been a reconfiguration of fishing villages and small
enclaves that meander up the bayou onto the next small village or town (Hemmerling2017). Like many rural lifeway areas, in order to stay “rural,” a bit of land is needed
to grow food for an extended family and subdivide or share space for children as
they grow up and live on the family enclave. In coastal Louisiana a tradition datingback to French colonial times, long narrow pieces of land measured by “arpents,”
were given to families so they could access the river or bayou as well as the woods
and agricultural land.. In order to find space large enough to continue to engage in
the giving of resources, food, and mutual aid, families now have to leapfrog over thetowns and head further north and inland. As people move north, there are new setsof problems, many unexpected.
Louisiana families from coastal areas who headed inland following 16 years of
disaster events from the time of Katrina believed they were making sound choices
to avoid flooding. The people already living in the inland areas and the newcomers
were not told that flood insurance was needed; thus, they assumed the area was safe.
They had land and resources to share when their extended family needed a place tostay, grow crops, and raise animals. Some who purchased “safe” land foundthemselves flooded by the 2016 events. Believing they were moving to protect
family and their future assets, they again were severely impacted by an “unexpectedflooding event.” Now separated from their original home base and again having
their subsistence way of life taken by flooding, they are finding it more difficult torecover. The move inland brings with it other possible risks new residents will
experience. One sojourner now returns to the bayou to sustain his inland family byhelping others with shrimp, crab, and oyster harvesting. Others who have moved
inland frequently return to maintain family connections, to participate in the life of
the community, and to share food resources, such as taking sweet potatoes and kaleto the bayou and taking shrimp back to the inland families.9
Many inland rural regions, as potential receiving regions, are coping with limited
resources and bearing the burden of socially and economically constructedvulnerabilities with little attention to them, or public awareness from the more
populated areas of the state. Information regarding the challenges to various parts of
8
9First Peoples’ Conservation Council meeting notes March 162,018.
Community conversations with Placquimines Parish residents December 2016.

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the state are not often part of public discourse and thus the needs are overlooked or
not understood. There has been however, over the past several years, a growing
public awareness as the online Lens and the New Orleans Advocate newspaper havehighlighted failing infrastructures in the central and northern rural areas of the statesuch as the investigative reports on the condition of water systems (Ballard 2017;
Wright 2019). The non-profit Together Louisiana10 has helped share and advocate
as a voice with rural areas (Jones 2018).
The failing inland infrastructures have not been mitigated nor the risks of flooding conveyed adequately. The current flooding patterns caused by climate-change
induced extreme weather may not follow historical patterns of events thus the local
knowledge to predict and respond may be dimish. A Tallulah resident shared that
her community was well aware of the infrastructure issues but lacked a voice or the
resources to address them, so they “make do together” with what is on hand.11
Awareness of and attention to the risk conditions that exist in many rural areas, bothon the coast and inland, have to be justly addressed. The carrying capacity of many
parishes is at its limit, contending with bad water and overall failed health standards
and flooding in their own right. These “layered” social, environmental, historicaltraumas and physical infrastructure deficiencies can be understood as a “wicked
problem” (Laska et al. 2015). Environmental and social justice principles need to be
applied in addressing the substandard conditions.
The displacement and transition of population, business, industry, and social
functions from the coast is sometimes a hope to get to higher, drier, and safer places.
Lasley has explored the organic self-transition of people from Saint Bernard to St.
Tammany following Katrina utilizing social networks (Lasley 2012). As some partsof the community resettle to a particular locale, others in the social network
including restaurants and businesses are drawn to the same area to continue oldneighborhood patterns. As these new self-directed enclaves develop, such as in St.
Tammany, they can either be stigmatized as outsiders or be socially merged into
cultural fabric of the new location.
When one part of the population moves “up the bayou,” it leaves a hole in the
fabric of the community it left behind. Fewer people mean fewer relationshipresources and declining population numbers threaten the doors of schools, churches,
community buildings, and retail facilities (Lowlander Center 2017). Small
businesses are stretched to doing “self-subsidizing” of their own businesses in order
to serve their extended network of customers, family, and friends.12 Often a local
void in services, goods, and community connections happens when a rural businesscloses placing extra hardships on the population remaining.

Together Louisiana, www.togetherla.org
Personal correspondence with Tallulah resident and church leader, March 2019.
12Group discussion with Appalachian College Students, bayou residents, and business owners,
March 14, 2019.
10
11

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7.4

K. J. Peterson

Carrying Capacity of Coastal and Inland Communities

In many rural areas of the state, be they inland or coastal, communities are experiencing sporadic or continual disruptions to the systems that impact their well-­being.13 Coastal communities find themselves at the end of the road or bayou forservices as the coast erodes their familial home and life-place. Inland communities
are experiencing dysfunctional water systems and lack of social services withlimited capacity to address the diminished services impacting their population(Ballard 2017; Wright 2019). For both the inland and coastal communities there aresimilar issues with dissimilar settings, inland and coastal, communities are reachingor are past their carrying capacity, and thus are approaching their tipping points(The Sustainable Scale Project 2003). The carrying capacity refers to the ability tomaintain social, environmental, and physical infrastructure for a population.
Strangely, because of the magnitude of problems facing Louisiana, the state is at
the forefront of problematizing the many risks and vulnerability issues, and thus has acritical leadership role to play in being visionary. The choice is dramatic and not overstated—the people, institutions, and communities of Louisiana can provide criticalaspirational and visionary leadership by example or become a whole sacrificial stateeven beyond the coastal sacrificial zone (Freire 1996; Bowen 2009; Maldonado 2018).
• Resources for holistic problem-solving and planning in rural areas are not as
prevalent as they are for small towns and urban regions, thus increasing rural
areas’ vulnerability (Cutter et al. 2016). As illustrated in Chap. 11 of this book by
Alessandra Jerolleman, resources are not plentiful and capacity is lacking toapply and execute grant programs in rural areas. The lack of capacity is sometimes
as basic as having no or limited access to Internet. Specialized rural organizations
have taken the lead to assure rural areas are not left behind but their efforts are
not always supported with equal political clout or voice to secure adequate
proactive funding. Philanthropy is reluctant to fund rural programs especially ifthey do not see a strong outcome to their investments. One small familyfoundation shared that there is a stereotypical image of rural folks that tends tokeep funders and resources away (Swierzewski 2007). Often these overlooked
places will need long-term resources that support capacity building, staff support,
and operational program funding. Lack of initial capacity or size should not be afactor in the allocation of funds.
With the state’s loss of population in 2018 (Hauer 2017) and the anticipatedfuture loss of population due to climate and economic patterns, needed revenue
sources will be scarce. Rural and small communities already suffering from thedownturn in the oil fields and agriculture industry will have to make cuts in services
affecting the well-being of their immediate jurisdictions and the surrounding rural
enclaves. The loss of revenue accompanying the loss of population will be intensified
The interactions between human choice, physical infrastructure, and environmental stressors are
key determinants for tipping points leading to systems collapse.

13

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with the next big hazard event, stretching recovery dollars and burdening the state
further. Communities of color will be the most impacted in rural areas where political agency is ignored (Doherty 2004).
Additionally, changes in environmental conditions will impact all varieties ofwildlife and their movements and habitats. Human and non-human habitat adaption
to weather and climate stressors will become increasingly challenging to traditional
agricultural practices and ecological preservation. The “community” that is intransition includes all the wildlife and plants. Planning for transition is for the entire
population, human and non-human. Hunters and fishers, a large economic
recreational industry, are paying close attention to these changes and are often
advocates in preservation practices. Decision-making processes become networks
or a web of life that is complex (Morton 2017). In short, how the lifeworld andnatural resources are hosted and carefully managed in the “retreat” from the coast
will have a direct impact on all species native to the entire area.

7.4.1

Health as Indicator

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health report gives Louisiana a low score on
overall wellness and well-being. The map (Fig. 7.1) highlights the severity of healthconditions in Louisiana (University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute 2018).
The conditions for determining the health score include individual choices in healthbehavior such as exercise, tobacco, diet, drug use, and social and economic factors
such as access to limited quality care, education, employment, social support,
community safety, and income and the physical environment attributes that include
air and water quality, housing, and transit (University of Wisconsin Population
Health Institute 2018). Inadequate housing, weatherization, and inability to maintainand repair housing contribute to vulnerability (Tierney 2014). Mitigation for
deteriorating housing stock is challenged by lack of rural funding (Horney et al.
2017). Physical health indicators reveal that the state ranks toward the bottom of allstates in many functions critical for a vital population (Horney et al. 2017).
Indeed, Concordia Parish, north of Baton Rouge on the border of Mississippi,
has been singled out as having the worst health conditions in the country (Belluz2016). The Parish is lacking in many of the essentials including access to cleanwater, sanitation, affordable healthy foods, and safe housing (Doherty 2004). Other
inland communities south along an 85-mile stretch on the Mississippi River between
Baton Rouge and New Orleans, often referred to as “Cancer Alley” (Bullard 1994;
Blackwell et al. 2017), are surrounded by 25 percent of the nation’s petrochemical
production (Jackson and Chapple 2018). The map (Fig. 7.1) shows toxic release andsuperfund sites that have a bearing on health factors of the surrounding communities(Bullard 1994). Communities of color and those of lesser means are the ones who
suffer most with the contamination in many places causing abnormally high cancer
rates, asthma, miscarriages, and other health-related issues (Bullard 1994). Jonathan

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K. J. Peterson

Fig. 7.1 Map showing health factors rankings by parish and locations of toxic release inventory
and superfund sites in Louisiana. The ranks are based on four types of measures: health behaviors,
clinical care, and social and economic and physical environment factors. (Data retrieved fromCounty Health Rankings & Roadmaps and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA))

West, a UNO student, described being weary from the grief of having seen cancer
in every one of his friends’ families in Norco, LA.14

7.4.2

Water Quality

The conditions that make for either a vulnerable or a sustainable population include
the capacity of different communities to address the long-term and chronic everyday
disasters they face (Bolin and Bolton 1986). Families need safe water to drink,cook, and bathe with. Purchasing water is not an option for people living in areas
with high unemployment and underemployment. People want to be generous but it
14

Personal communications at University of New Orleans, May 18, 2006.

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is difficult with limited resources. Ms. Ancar, a resident of Grand Bayou, Louisiana,
often said to visitors “Come join me for some coffee and if I don’t have coffee wewill have water” (personal communication April 9, 2003). For inland communities
desiring to give hospitality, some residents have no water to share.
The quality of water is threatening the health of the most vulnerable, elderly andchildren, sick. The physical infrastructures vital for water delivery in the central partof the state are close to collapse (Ballard 2017). In 2013, the American Society of
Civil Engineers gave Louisiana an infrastructure grade of “C,” after finding that 62
percent of the state’s roads were of mediocre to poor condition, 3815 bridges werestructurally deficient or functionally obsolete, 33 dams were considered “high hazard,” and drinking water and wastewater systems were in need of $10.9 billion in
improvements during the next 20 years. Many of these drinking water and wastewater systems are located in rural areas (Schliefstein 2013). The combined conditionsof inadequate storm water drainage, potable water, and sewage, accompanying nuisance flooding, will soon make coastal communities uninhabitable (Ruppert 2019).
“I turn on the tap and the water is sludge,” a Tallulah resident shared with the author. “ I had
to move my mama since that is all she had to drink.”15

Safe clean water is clearly essential to basic health standards (Steingraber 1998), yetwater required for daily use may be one of the state’s biggest challenges (Adeniyi
et al. 2016). The now-closed England Air Force Base in Alexandria, Louisiana, is an
EPA superfund site that has the highest detected deadly PFAS16 levels in groundwaterof any PFAS contamination site in the nation. Water from the site has 10,970,000
parts per trillion (ppt), l million times more than the risk level determined by Harvard
public health and that the Agency for Toxic Substance Disease Registry (ATSDR)
recommends as safe (Reed 2018). The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reporton drinking water by zip codes showed that potable water in all of the Parishes inLouisiana contained either carcinogenic chemicals or metals. Despite the EWG
report of carcinogenic and other contaminants in potable water, the water districts
are still in compliance with legally mandated federal standards (EWG 2015). The
map (Fig. 7.2) delineates cities and development, 2018 coastal predicted flooding
moderate risk scenario with no action, rural farmland under cultivation, open
territories either forested, or held by government entities and in gray, the water
infrastructures in immediate need of repair.
My baby said his eyes were burning when he brushed his teeth. I told him to turn off thewater. Your eyes shouldn’t burn from the tap water when brushing your teeth!.17

This and the previous quote come from communities in distant parts of the statefrom locations that will have to relocate or receive families. Water quality in thestate for many people is a present concern for their health and an economic hardshipin obtaining alternative safe water for drinking, food preparation, and personal
hygiene.
Personal communication with Tallulah resident, March 16, 2019.
Perfluoroalkyl substances www.health.re.gov/water/about/pfas
17
Personal communication with Chief Shirell Dardar at Knights of Columbus Hall, March 14, 2019.
15
16

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Fig. 7.2 Map showing where select land cover categories in Louisiana overlap with dysfunctional
water infrastructure and which areas would be at risk of flooding in the near future. (Data retrieved
from National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2011 edition; Rural Water Infrastructure Committee(2018), & Coastal Protection & Restoration Authority CIMS application)

7.4.3

Resilience and Tipping Points

How do you know when you reached a tipping point, only when you passed it (Ann Claire
Phillips, Rear Admiral, USN (Ret.) October 2017).

Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb shocks and adapt. In ecological terms,
when the stressors have reached the tipping point, the system enters into a new
regime (Walker and Salt 2012). Some rural areas within the state have surpassed
their ability to absorb additional shocks. It is similar for rural communities that haveendured chronic and sudden social impacts where a tipping point happens and therural community either dissolves or has to reinvent itself through creative andradical actions (Nored 1999; Akuno et al. 2017). Examples of such radical holistic
remakes come from Kali Akuno’s work in Jackson, MS, and the work of Rev. Noredin a rural enclave outside of Birmingham, AL. In order for high-risk areas of thestate to avoid becoming a “sacrificial zone,” radical hospitable plans of rejuvenationmust become priority activities (Maldonado 2018).

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Fig. 7.3 Map showing updated definitions of Louisiana’s coastal zone. (Image source: Louisiana
Department of Natural Resources, Office of Coastal Management)

Moving from rural place to rural place is difficult and made more complicated by
the unknowns of risks and climate. This map (Fig. 7.3) shows the delineation ofwater management areas. Each area will have different regulations in accordancewith federal agencies and with them the availability of agency resources. The rate ofacceleration, which the coast is moving inland, has been increasing faster than
predicted and will probably continue to do so in the near future (Goodell 2017). As
seen in the maps portrayed in Figs. 7.1 and 7.2, most of Louisiana is rural. The
serenity and beauty of the rural areas have provided forest products, potatoes,
peanuts, cotton, poultry and poultry products, soybeans, strawberries, and sugarcane.
It would seem that finding high ground and open area would be easy enough when
considering locations for sojourning populations. But it is not so simple to find agood safe place, as seen in the first two maps that indicate land loss, health concerns,
and crumbling infrastructures (Curth 2018). The first two maps show existing
stressors to health and safety, while the third map shows the new coastal managementchanges that will require different permitting within the zones. With the inclusion of
more inland areas within the coastal permitting area, it too will add time and burden
for the extra expense of permitting. Given the gravity of challenges to all regions of
the state, it begs the question of how and where to start.

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K. J. Peterson

Desperate Times Call for Creative Measures

The development of comprehensive inclusive statewide frameworks and working models is required to address the problems. Contemporary planner and political philosopher Iris Young (1990) argues that the paradigm of “development
justice” is through people’s capacities for free and autonomous decision-making
in inclusive democratic engagement and processes (Harvey 1996). Ideally, theinclusion of the entire community with all of its social differences together musthave a voice in the problematization and planning process even if the community
members/families do not move together as a community. The community, especially those with local and traditional knowledge, can give voice and representation to the non-human inhabitants that will also be migrating. The trajectory
Young is suggesting is in alignment with the work of planners over the past
100 years such as Benjamin Marsh, Arturo Escobar, and Dennis Goulet who
have all posited that planning has to be for the benefit of the people and thehealth of the whole community, human and non-human (Marsh 1909; Escobar
2008; Goulet 1995).
To democratize the process and the work of planning, the ones most impacted by
the decision-making, the vulnerability-bearers must be included (Krajeski 2018).
By involving those who are most likely to bear the consequences of extreme events,
the visioning of the future can be inclusive and the quality of the planning will
benefit from a variety of knowledge, backgrounds, and experiences. The inclusionof vulnerability-bearers in problematization and problem-solving often leads tocreative alternatives and healthier outcomes as well as a broader base of support forthe project. The “down the road” game plan for possible relocation teeters between
the imagined scenarios that will be possible and the triggered event. Each formal orinformal planning process, given the limits of people’s time and the resources of acommunity, must solve the most critical issues impacting people as defined by thecommunity of vulnerability (West et al. 2008).
Wisner et al. (2004) posit that the disaster following on a hazard event is directly
related to the amount of socially constructed vulnerability, the capacity of thejurisdiction, and the extent of mitigation (“adaptation” in the climate change
vocabulary). The disaster that follows a hazard event can be minimal or extensive
depending on these three variables, all of which can be addressed through humaninterventions that include enhancing the capacity of a community and eliminating
historical and socially constructed vulnerabilities. These types of interventions for ahealthy community are not enough unless they infuse adaptation into the physicaland social fabric of the communities (Highfield et al. 2014). Without theinterventions, both the sojourner and the receiving community will have increased
risk and diminished social health conditions.

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7.6

199

 ounter-Narrative Frameworks and Problem-Solving
C
Approaches

This section of the chapter will suggest counter-narrative frameworks from historical models that achieved innovation in spite of grave challenges (Scott 1990). It will
also explore current problem-solving approaches that place citizen engagement at
the core of a local and larger state model. By utilizing core strengths and assets ofeach region of the state and by collaborative and cross-boundary networks, the work
can start building relationships with the already existing networks of family, faith,food, and music groups within the state (Malsale et al. 2018). Starting with what
Friere calls problematization—finding root causes and doing critical thinking of
problems—collaboration by kindred groups and communities-of-interest can build
alternative futures through co-creation of knowledges (Freire 1996; Foucault 2009).
Problematization helps understand the underside of wicked problems, as they are
symptoms of other problems (Rittel and Webber 1973).
Addressing population relocation through shared cultural experiences opens
conversations in a “safe place” that builds relationships (Woods 2018). In thisvisioning process, as conversations about transitions of populations are happening
within the faith community, similar discussions are taking place in government (topdown) and non-profit agencies (grasstops), but not necessarily taking place between
and with community members at the grassroots. There will be many sojourners
within the state, and there will be many who will receive the stranger. It should be aslow, long, and intentional process through which trust and relationships will beforged. And modeling of successful efforts is shared among communities. Bybuilding relationships of trust first, with and between the populations that are mostimpacted, difficult issues and topics can be broached with openness for problem-­solving (Park et al. 1993). Giving attention and support first to the vulnerability-­bearers is necessary for building capacity and for the community’s engagement withthose who can provide support, for example, faith communities, universities,
agencies, or non-profits (Krajeski 2018). Vulnerability-bearers will be both in themoving and in the receiving populations.
Building on community connections and strengths alone will not be sufficient torectify the complex issues that have caused and maintained the wicked problems
outlined in the beginning of the chapter. A robust master plan for the state isdesperately needed that takes on the qualities of a New Marshall Plan, understood
like the WWII Marshall Plan, as an effort to rebuild infrastructure lost, remove
contamination, and rekindle a safe economy and agriculture. Louisiana’s current
plight needs nothing less than such a robust plan. A New Marshall Plan can embraceasset-based planning with imagination to harness every possible resource available
within the receiving regions from the cultural strengths and inclusive of the faith,NGO, and business and governmental communities. It could counter the lack ofcarrying capacity of the state with a new ethic of a caring capacity. The key iscomplex integrated thinking and resourcing (Thomas 2014). The plan would be alarge-scale model for the state, much like what Bob Becker, CEO of New Orleans

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City Park, used for post-Katrina recovery and redevelopment of one of the largest
parks in the country: have a vision, get it into workable components that augmenteach other, and attract resource providers to complete those outlined components as
through interest in supporting the plan develops and grows (Pope 2013). The visionitself draws resources; it must be innovative with a strong commitment to a caring
capacity, one that rejuvenates and restores community with community.
And, because Louisiana is “ahead of the curve” in needing such a large-scaleplan, that the state is an innovator on this New Plan, it will attract donors.
If they are done well, innovations in society have the capacity to gather a following because they are visionary, they can give hope, they can be just, and they offer away for people to be involved (Rogers 2003). The innovations also often have thequality of large thinking even though their implementation begins small. The innovation as experienced in intentional planned communities offered needed hope andjustice in difficult times of segregation, housing needs, economic exploitation, andchallenged agricultural land use (Howard 1965). Models are shared from the faithcommunity in the following section. They were and are models that defied theimpossible. They can give hope and understanding for the tremendously large task
ahead for Louisiana.

7.6.1

Faith-Inspired Models for Change

People in Louisiana continue to have strong faith connections, tied with Alabama,with the highest percentage of people in the USA who are linked to faith organizations(Cooperman 2015). The map on religious preference from the 2010 US Religious
Census data shows a clear distinction of faith preferences in Louisiana (Fig. 7.4).
Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist are the two dominant faith groups, followedby the United Methodist Church (ASARB 2012).
A sharp geographic dividing line between Catholic and Baptists is based on historical migration patterns. Historical colonial dominance of the coastal area by
Spanish missionaries and Catholic French and Catholic Canadian18 settlers stillinfluences the southern coastal region. The northern region was influenced byProtestant itinerate preachers and missionaries and settlers from the central and east
coast once Louisiana became a state and has been designated by many as part of the
Bible Belt (Tweedlie 1978; Zelinsky 1972). As populations shift, so will the religious mix in the central and northern parts of the state. Catholic and protestantcongregations will need to find ways to carry their traditions as they find places toestablish congregations, schools, and other faith-based facilities in new areas. They
will be sojourners in a new land and will look for hospitality in the place they resideand their faith practiced. Both the sojourner and those extending hospitality will
The predominance of French rule and the Catholic Church manifest themselves into the currentday Napoleonic Law still practiced throughout the state and the county units of government, called
parishes.

18

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Fig. 7.4 Map showing Louisiana’s main folk regions and nine cultural subregions. (Image source:
www.louisianafolklife.org)

find a rich tapestry of history intertwined with traditions of music, stories, and outreach ministries of service that can benefit the new communities.
Protocols of faith practice are different between Protestants and Catholics including the judicatory structures and modes of worship such as liturgy and the adherence to Holy Days. Denominational leadership will be essential in helping to create
a welcoming situation for all faiths. Ecumenical organizations like the Louisiana
Interchurch Conference and Church Women United can be instrumental in finding
common ground through shared faith values and faith stories.
Over the years, faith-based initiatives and faith-based work have birthed innovation during times of distress and turbulence offering hope and alternatives. These
initiatives include leaders such as Rev. Abraham Lincoln Davis, founder of Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.19 Others also helped usher in new ways of being
within community. Not waiting for government to take action, the faith community
has often taken the lead to advocate and/or provide education, health, housing, andenvironmental witness and social justice in general.20
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/southern-christian-leadership-conference-sclc,
Rev. Davis from Bayou Goula was the first Vice President of SCLC.
20
National Council of Churches: www.nationalcouncilofchurches.us
19

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K. J. Peterson

The following are some illustrations of faith-based initiatives that can be helpful
to the work on leaving and receiving communities.
• Koinonia Farms in Plains, Georgia, started as a racially integrated community
land trust in 1942. It was the utopian dream of Clarence Jordan, a farmer andBaptist preacher, devised to promote sustainable agriculture and animalhusbandry. It helped poor rural residents move away from cotton, the crop
equated with slavery, and have a healthy life. The ecologically diverse farmexperimented in various forms of affordable housing and water system techniques(Jordan 1972).
• Through Millard Fuller’s experience at the cooperative, he founded Habitat for
Humanity. The experiment outlasted the cross burning and threats on others
connected to a radical idea of social and economic justice. Jimmy Carter, aneighbor, was inspired by the achievements of Koinonia.
• While Jordan was addressing economic and racial justice at Koinonia, Dan Westwas developing what has come to be known as the Heifer Project International.
It started with a simple idea to send cows to Europe, restoring farms that had
been destroyed during World War II. Through partnerships with US government
agencies, a steady supply of animals of all varieties was provided to European
farmers. The first born of every animal was gifted to another farmer, leading to aslow but continual recovery (Kettering 2003). Following Katrina, the Heifer
Project helped restore the fishing fleet at Grand Bayou, an indigenous community
in Lower Plaquemines Parish, and extend crop resources to Afro-American
farmers in the north central part of Louisiana.
• Likewise, Serrv, another innovation of the era, still flourishes today. It addressed
the postwar economy of local families in Western Europe to help displaced
refugees trade their handcrafts for income. Today, fair trade has become a norm.
Serrv is a founding member of the World Fair Trade Organization and the Fair
Trade Federation and employs 8000 artisans and farmers in 24 countries. Bothideas were visionary for the time (Serrv n.d.)• Grand Bayou Native Village located in Plaquemines Parish initiated a
Participatory Action Research project in 2002 following Hurricanes Lili and
Isadore through the support of Church World Service and PCUSA. Afterestablishing their vision of “saving their culture and land,” the project partneredwith many experts from various disciplines and backgrounds, being awarded a
National Science Foundation Grant to do the cross-boundary work necessary torebuild their village and establish and enhance their political and cultural voice.
It was heralded by the then disaster program director of NSF, a cutting edge
success (Peterson 2011).
Each of the above programs were not only innovative but they also responded toan immediate human crisis with effective problem-solving. Each program also
created a network of collaborators that helped support the vision that is necessary tohave long-term sustainability. Following in the tradition of dialogue, the Louisiana
Interchurch Conference (LIC) is in an excellent position to help bridge geographic
and religious boundaries. Its board of directors spans the state, representing

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203

leadership of both Catholic and Protestant traditions. LIC can and has been aboundary and facilitating organization addressing issues pertinent to most Louisiana
residents, such as housing, farms, children’s welfare, disasters, and the environment.
Many of the faith leaders involved with LIC are involved with ecumenical andinterfaith projects that contribute to the well-being of the state and become a link
between stakeholders to address issues. For example, Rob Gorman from Terrebonne
Parish, previous chair of the LIC Environmental Taskforce, helped in the creation of
the Coastal Coalition and has been a coastal leader for many years.
A recent sign of hope of a faith-based initiative in Louisiana is the work of Mary
Queen of Viet Nam Church. Following Hurricane Katrina, Mary Queen of Vietnam
Catholic Church (MQVN) under the leadership of Fathers Vien Nguyen and Luke
Dung21 became the hub for recovery of the New Orleans East area. The efforts of thecongregation resulted in the development of a master plan for the immediate community that includes community gardens, economic endeavors, elder housing, aCommunity Development Corporation (CDC), and health services.22 Youth and elderly
were a critical part of the recovery and of the continuing work of New Orleans East.
Faith Influenced Land Trusts to Address Social and Environmental JusticeInspired by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (Coles 1987) that
promoted equality and justice, Chuck Matthei envisioned farm settlements and land
trusts as an innovative tool that can be used to address distressed rural communities(Matthei 1992). Community and conservation land trusts can be used in creative
ways to heal environmentally distressed sites and act as protection against
gentrification for traditional and historied communities. While community land
trusts are primarily focused on human community, the conservation land trust
focuses on the non-human environmental setting. Both types of trusts are necessary,
one to protect land from gentrification and the other to provide necessary buffer andhealing for green space. In Louisiana, one possibility is to have conservation trusts
that buffer areas that have been heavily contaminated over the years from oil, gas,and farming practices. The conservation trusts can help in the rejuvenation from theimpacts caused by the by-products of those practices. Conservation trusts can help
restore healthy water systems, air, and habitat for outdoor activity that is loved
throughout the state (Davis 2010).
Community land trusts provide protection from gentrification for communities
that are rejuvenating themselves.23 Creative uses of community land trusts havebeen utilized in communities of color to preserve and protect community, culturaland heritage, that sometimes gets disrupted by various development strategies suchas economic renewal projects. The Albany, Georgia, land trust is an excellent
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/29/140036221/turning-toward-faith-during-hurricane-aftermath
Mary Queen of Viet Nam Community Development Corporation, mqvncdc.org
23
See, for example, New Orleans’ Central City Community Land Trust that serves that exact purpose: https://www.ccclt.org/how-we-work/
21
22

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K. J. Peterson

example of an established community that has weathered time and endured racial
injustice (Davis 2010). Louisiana could create a trust to take on an innovation of“climate land trust,” land held for restoration and renewal until it is needed by atransitional community or transitional families for resettlement. The innovation ofsuch a land trust can lend itself to the regeneration of damaged land and water helping to address the wicked problems mentioned earlier in this chapter.

7.7

Folk Traditions as Rallying Points

Louisiana’s population reflects the state’s historically diverse economy. Being on
the Mississippi River and having a major port on the Gulf, the access to the state
resulted in various diversities. The state’s connection with sugar in the Caribbean
and bananas and coffee from Central America gave variety to music and foods. The
horrific years of the slave market centered in New Orleans brought knowledge andrich traditions from Africa. The multiple derivatives of places of French-speaking
people brought traditions and foods from around the world. Figure 7.5 shows thecultural distribution of people who carried their traditions that helped create thediversity of festivals, food, faith, and music.
The map illustrates the predominance of Euro-American and Afro-American
population in the central and northern regions of the state while the southern region
has a greater ethnic diversity. Notice that the historied Cajun and German enclaves
are not well represented in the northern regions of the state (Brasseaux et al. 2005).
There are many cultural groups that are not indicated on this map such as the significant Vietnamese population in New Orleans and southeast delta region. The map
does not reflect the 79 self-identified indigenous tribes within the state. It is not an
exhaustive representation but gives an indication of the larger ethnic populations.

7.7.1

Power of Cultural Festivals

The state of Louisiana is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country.
Contrary to the low ratings on social health factors, the state excels in offering food,
hospitality, happiness, music, and faith (Newport 2017; Cooperman 2015; Mortonand Lagrave 2018). The people and communities of the state offer a celebratory
culture that is sought by visitors and relished by its residents. With over 520 festivals
listed within the state in 2018, there were themes that helped build knowledge while
highlighting the strengths of the state’s cultural diversity.
Louisiana Office of Tourism’s “Feed Your Soul”24 advertising campaign highlights the joys of multiculturalism, food, festivals, and music. The listings ofmonthly activities throughout the state are evidence of the wealth of cultural talent
24

www.Louisianatourism.com

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Fig. 7.5 Map showing the prevalence of Catholicism and Baptism by parish in Louisiana.
(Adapted from 2016 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Conregations & Membership Study(Association of Religion Data Archives 2016)

and ingenuity garnered by local and regional groups. Utilizing the natural convergence of food, music, festivals, and faith at work in the state organically builds
relationships and trust.
The festivals are testimony to the capacity, imagination, and hard work of thecommunities. The organizational coordination and resources that are expended tohost the festivals often take a year of work. Krewes for Mardi Gras coordinate andraise their own funds, the wooden tinder bonfire structures along the Mississippi
River in Lutcher for Christmas Eve beacons to St. Nick take months to build and areworks of art.25 Even a local congregation’s fundraiser for a cancer patient can takeimmense work and coordination. Self-organization is a skill and asset seen in thefestivals and community celebrations. The altruism that Ostrom (Ostrom and Walker
2003) speaks of within communities is witnessed in these festival events. Grassroots
mobilization and altruism can be quick and swift when there is a disaster as seen ingroups like the Cajun Navy. Grassroots ability and capacity are present in the state,often in informal networks.
25

Christmas Eve Bonfires: www.festivalofthebonfires.org

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K. J. Peterson

Although there is capacity to mobilize within the state, there are other interpersonal dynamics that will restrict successful relocation such as racial challenges,
regional biases, and prejudice. Recently in April 2019, three Afro-­AmericanChurches in St. Landry Parish northwest of Baton Rouge were burned as hatecrimes. These issues cannot be ignored, including when relocation is being considered. Addressing them must be part of the needed reconciliation and healing aschanging inland communities reconfigure themselves.
Prejudice is real and experienced in the daily lives of people throughout the state
but can be confronted and addressed through shared cultural connections. Throughthe work of youth and local congregations, for example, proms in northern parish
high schools have moved beyond outdated codes of segregation as recently as
10 years ago and are now integrated.26 Another example is found in Arizona. Tucson
Meet Yourself was created to showcase the many cultures and faiths residing in
Tucson. The event began for cultural awareness, understanding, and dialogue thatcan overcome prejudice. Louisiana Folklore Society has initiated a project called
Bayou Culture: Moving Traditions Forward27 to help support the bayou region to
discuss what traditions communities want to take with them as they move. The
discussions have brought a diverse working group together to identify core culturalvalues people want to save.28 Events that bring a mixture of backgrounds together
help people become less apprehensive of other cultures, customs, and practices andlay a strong foundation for trust.29

7.8

Cross-Boundary Work: Trust and Relationship Building

Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate, examined the concept of trust and conducted extensive research on the topic to determine if people were apt to be trusting, especiallyin a relationship of reciprocity and mutual caring. Her work was explored acrossgeographic and cultural boundaries and found that the more understanding people
had of each other, the greater the levels of trust. The research showed that generosityand good will were extended even at a minimal level of interpersonal knowledge(Ostrom and Walker 2003). Her interest in mutual support was fundamental to her
understanding of the “commons” and how we can restore a society and economy tobe equitable and just. This understanding of “commons” is seen in the mutual aid
and stability of the population within the rural areas of the state and in its communities’ self-care, generosity, and hospitality (Peterson & Krajeski 2011). Many folks
in the bayou region refer to their community as a “giving” lifeway based on a webof life that is both sacred and joyous and full of awe. It is situated or place-based
Jonathan Coats, May 1, 2008, Outdated separation ends with integrated high school prom. www.
NOLA.com
27
Louisiana Folklore Society, www.louisianafolklore.org
28
www.Tucsonmeetyourself.org
29
Louisiana Folklore Society, www.louisianafolklore.org
26

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knowledge, as in “the shrimp are giving” and “we are giving to family” (Regis
2019). The experienced knowledge of the rural communities supports the conceptsof Peter Park, and the development of relational knowledge to build networks andcollaboration for problem-solving, as well as Ostrom’s concepts of altruism (Parket al. 1993).
Projects that emphasize the co-creating of place, knowledge, and a healthy future
can and will build trusting relationships between the displaced and the receiving
community (Hillier and Rookby 2005). As trust is gained and projects honed,
resources to bring them to fruition can be secured through the efforts of acollaborative team. Especially for small rural communities, teaming small
communities together gives more clout or voice in the securing of resources. It
serves to maximize human resources as well as people are often overtaxed andwearing many hats.
In Louisiana in the early twentieth century, an innovation brought together bestpractices held by government agencies at the time to create the Terrebonne Project,a planned community in Terrebonne Parish (Conn 2009). It was one of the hundredcommunities created all over the country, including Alaska, planned by the Federal
Resettlement Administration. It addressed the massive displacement of tenant
farmers and small business owners as a result of the Great Depression, the great
flood of 1927, and the Dust Bowl. Using ideals set by Sir Ebenezer Howard’s“garden city” movement, Rexford Tugwell used all available resources in President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Cabinet, from agricultural, health, arts and folk life,
housing, and industry to create resettlements for displaced families (Lash 1988).
Using best knowledge of sustainability from around the world, new communities
were birthed and families were given the means of sustainability with a small
farmstead and involvement in a larger community enterprise.
The formal Resettlement Administration was short lived due to the need ofresources for the impending war. However, in spite of the lack of continued funding
and support, many of the communities survived by the participants’ initiative to
make the planned community work (Holley 1940). The popularity of healthyplanned greenbelt communities of the New Deal continued to grow, as seen in thework of James Rouse in places like Columbia; Greenbelt, Maryland; and Green
Hills, Ohio (Chappelle et al. 1986).
Cross-boundary organizing can help facilitate linking programs like Louisiana
Watershed Initiative30 and EPA’s Sustainable Healthy Communities Initiative31 tosupport projects that reduce natural hazards while emphasizing water quality benefits. Quality of life can be lifted up as a starting point for rejuvenation of a community. EPA’s program encourages cross-boundary work including the faith andcultural community as active planning participants in community projects.
One at risk community suggested that a watershed festival hosted by communities distressed by water issues could coincide with the watershed planning thatthe state has initiated. The festival could link communities along a watershed for30
31

Louisiana Watershed Initiative, www.watershed.la.gov
https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/about-sustainable-and-healthy-communities-research-program208

K. J. Peterson

storytelling, food, and faith traditions while celebrating the common source ofwater. Telling the water’s story together is a way to start the relationship building
between different people and the trust needed to work on other issues that emerge
from the stories. Examples of local community problem-solving through the convergence of people’s experienced lifeways, stories, and problematization are abundant (Peterson 2011). Networks organically built around extended family and theirpractices of food, faith, celebrations, and music provide the building of the connectional web to establish relationships (Park et al. 1993).
Collaboration and asset building work is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up
approach to planning and usually multidimensional in scope. The in-between
entities sometimes called boundary organizations can act as facilitators, interpreters,
and resource advocates. They can help facilitate the linkages for collaborative workand can serve as connectors of resources between and within grassroots, grasstops,
and formal organizations, be they academic, philanthropic, or government (Taylor
et al. 2012; NASEM 2018). When inter−/intra-organizational connections andrelationship are developed and collaboration is established with a non-hierarchal
structure, each organization increases in strength and effectiveness. All participating
entities can claim the co-ownership of the work and the co-learning process (Laska
and Peterson 2011).
A New Plan for Louisiana is to get creative with resources, to think with ingenuity while addressing the issues at hand. Using a process similar to what Bob Becker
used for the New Orleans City Park recovery post Katrina could result in creativeacquisition of resources for projects and to have projects prepositioned for grants
when they are available (Borrup 2006). Addressing a particular issue such as cleanwater links people of place with each other as an affinity group, regardless if someare natives to the area and others are recent arrivals. The affinity group’s interest in
a particular topic that is critical to the group’s well-being can generate the interestfor learning and action. The EPA Healthy Community Program and the Citizen
Institute on Rural Design (CIRD)32 are national entities that can help in resourcing
a community’s vision in addressing an issue. Each helps the community build theircapacity for well-being. Using a similar strategy as Becker’s City Park planning andrecovery model would help link these efforts with and to an overall State plan toprioritize and monitor all the components for evaluation and achievement.
Developing “new communities” or rejuvenating fading communities can offer
positive outcomes for people still in place and those who want to remain rural intheir living orientation, connection to the land. Relying on old ideologies andpractices has placed the state on the bottom rung for education, health care, potablewater quality, as well as other physical, economic, and social indicators (US Newsand World Report 2019). It is critical now with the coastal and inland threats to havea vision and to be aspirational; it is possible to have caring capacity through climate
land trusts and the full utilization of our cultural assets. Cross-boundary networking

32

CIRD: www.arts.gov/partnership/citizens-institute-rural-design

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209

can be enhanced and increased through relationships of established cultural
networks to achieve both of these goals.

7.9

Conclusions

The approaches shared in this chapter, utilizing the faith and cultural richness of thestate, can enhance and celebrate the depth of shared and appreciated values ofmusic, food, family, and faith. The deep-rootedness of various cultural communities
has contributed to the food, music, and festival traditions that make Louisiana
attractive to tourism. Thus, the biblical notion of sojourner and the reciprocal one ofgiving of hospitality are keys to how the migration can be framed to achieve a
positive acceptance by the receiving communities.
Geographical population shifts can be an opportunity for the state to address diresocial, health, and human dimension issues while in the mire of coastal land loss
and forced displacement. If all issues are not addressed together, the consequences
will likely repeat former patterns of built vulnerability and diminished humancapacity (Taylor-Ide and Taylor 2002).
The coordination, knowledge, expertise, and skill sets for creating and hosting a
festival of any type “takes a village.” The skills used are the same as those used incommunity planning and simply in community functioning. They can be harnessed
as valuable resources in problem-solving. For an inclusive discourse in holisticplanning, the participants need to go beyond non-profits, agencies, academics, andbusiness communities to include the arts and faith communities and essential at thecore—the people themselves, especially the youth (Taylor et al. 2012; Esteva andPrakash 2014). As witnessed in the work of the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-­
Chitimacha-­Choctaw Tribe resettlement planning process, children and youth were
eager to participate in what will be their future (Hart 1997).
Strong cultural and faith traditions are assets often overlooked for problem-­solving larger issues such as water, contamination, and relocations (Aldrich andMeyer 2015). Asset-based planning uses community-driven practices, racial equity,transparency, and participation. It also applies accountability in governance of thework process (West et al. 2008). Through formal and informal networks of family
and festivities, these affinity groups can help create relationships/friendships andbonds while bringing joyful celebration into problem-solving (Kretzmann and
McKnight 1993).
A New Plan for Louisiana must be inclusive and multidimensional, using best
principles and wisdom from every knowledge discipline and practice. It must havegoals that bring the state’s health and well-being up to an exemplar of good living for
its people, a caring capacity. And concurrently the plan will need to consider land
usage and its benefit for restoring the health of the environment through climate land
trusts, while giving a future location for future displaced populations in resettlement.

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Part IV

Types/Locations of Communities andTheir Responses to Extreme
Weather: Urban

Chapter 8

Post-disaster Development Dilemmas:
Advancing Landscapes of Social Justicein a Neoliberal Post-disaster LandscapeAnna Livia Brand and Vern Baxter

8.1

Introduction

Disasters like Hurricane Katrina generate deep debate about human vulnerability
and the viability of built environments. Fundamental questions raised in the aftermath of disaster include how could they live there, why would they live there? It isdifficult for those facing the impacts of disaster to field unwelcome questions about
connections to home and place. We all have connections to the places we live that
go beyond rational measurement and plumb the depths of emotion. Well-understood
psychological reasons draw people home to an imaginary state that existed before
lifeworlds were rendered unrecognizable by disaster (Burley 2010). But there is nogoing back after Katrina. The storm and ensuing levee failures left an enduringmark on the city. It displaced over a million people, devastated the Gulf Coast, andclaimed the lives of over 1000 Louisiana residents (Plyer 2016).
While there is no going back, the road forward is unclear. Post-disaster planning
is often framed as a moment from which a new future landscape might be imagined.
The wake of disaster invites imaginings of more socially just settlement patterns
and inspires radical alternatives to what was there before. Myriad individuals andgroups invested time and energy shaping a positive recovery imaginary in New
Orleans, from the scale of neighborhood meetings patched together in churches andschools, homes, and front porches to the scale of city-wide meetings that spanned
nearly 10 years after Katrina.
A. L. Brand (*)
Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning,
University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USAe-mail: annalivia@berkeley.edu
V. Baxter
Department of Sociology, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USAe-mail: vbaxter@uno.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_8

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For many, this future landscape was imagined as resilient, green and sustainable,socially just and equal. Yet policy makers and urban designers who raised questions
about how, why, and where resettlement should take place in the wake of Katrina
often excluded the deeply unequal and settled patterns of a racial state, geographies
developed, and resisted over different racial formations and political economies ofurban development across the city’s history. Further, they often failed to imagine
how processes like advanced capitalism and racism work geographically in thetwenty-first century or might work in a disaster context. Therefore, outside of specific and even narrow instances, the larger post-disaster story fails to meet thesehopes, despite moments where more racially and socially just solutions prevail.
Indeed, many questions remain about what the future might bring and whatshape vulnerability might take. Hurricane Katrina and more recent environmental
disasters (e.g., Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria) transpired under the hegemonic
reign of a neoliberal political economy. Neoliberal doctrine above all advances individual freedoms and social well-being within an institutional framework defined bystrong private property rights and free markets, where the state generally assists andfacilitates business and private development goals (Harvey 2005, p. 2). A tilt towardprivate sector solutions to planning and urban development problems pre-dates
Katrina and aptly characterizes recovery and rebuilding efforts over the past dozen
years. Contemporary human, social, racial, and environmental justice claims are
made on the state within a dominant neoliberal paradigm, whose colorblindness(Omi and Winant 2014) makes it difficult to advance the type of equity work neededto address the deeply racialized disparities that characterized the city before thestorm. Perhaps more concerning, the social justice limitations of neoliberalism
make it imperative that we not only articulate its operation as a foundation for disaster response and future planning but we also unsettle its often unquestioned position
as the dominant economic paradigm of our generation.
Deep racial and social inequality and concurrent patterns of geographic expression are not new to New Orleans, but the moment of Katrina and ensuing years of
redevelopment reflect compounding development dilemmas that make it hard toadvance social justice claims. The larger political economy within which a disaster
unfolds helps shape possible and probable responses. Disasters also unfold on raciallandscapes that unequally affect people of color. Finally, a deeper environmental
development history contextualizes both disaster and rebuilding. Separately, thesedevelopment dilemmas are at odds with goals of a more socially, racially, economically, and environmentally just landscape. Together, they solidify a rebuilding basedon elitism and reproduction of privilege carried over from long historical trajectories of racism, political economy, and a skewed environmental landscape on whichclaims for social justice are lodged.
This chapter explores these interrelated and compounding development dilemmas and argues that these dilemmas, both on their own and together, impede theadvance of social justice as a normative claim on urban planning and the state. The
three development logics that dominate post-Katrina New Orleans—neoliberalism,
racialization, and land/environmental development—set the stage for how planners
imagine and rationalize the future trajectory of the city. Although post-Katrina

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development was also shaped by resistance to these frameworks, we explore howsocial justice claims were fundamentally limited by these dominant logics.
In the following sections, we explore how particular strategies of a neoliberalpolitical economy and neoliberal ideology shaped planning and recovery in New
Orleans after Katrina. Next, we argue that racialized landscapes and the long historyof race as development logic have also shaped planning and reenvisioning the city’s
future. We then turn to a discussion of how the longer history of unequal environmental vulnerability presents specific post-disaster development dilemmas. We thendiscuss how these development dilemmas compound one another to shape normative ideas of state action and equity in a post-disaster moment and argue that toenvision a more just landscape requires further articulation of how the three dilemmas work in concert to reproduce inequality.

8.2

Neoliberal Disaster LandscapesMore attention is warranted to the ways neoliberal ideologies prevailed in the urban
planning process before and after disaster and, therefore, to one of the main forums
through which recovery ideas, representations, and development agendas areshaped. Raising questions about how neoliberal ideologies work in recovery planning requires that we think through ideological shifts at work in late capitalism andhow these shifts emerge in the disciplines and logics of urban development andplanning. Understanding the embeddedness of neoliberal ideologies like personal
responsibility, entrepreneurialism, and primacy of private over public solutions tocollective problems, as plausible responses to disaster and post-disaster urban planning, requires that we resituate the moment of Katrina as it unfolded from a much
longer trajectory of unequal development.
The neoliberal moment in post-disaster New Orleans was foreshadowed by anearlier tilt toward private sector solutions to planning and urban development problems that created a context for disaster capitalism and rebuilding after the storm(Klein 2007). Manufacturing decline and the oil crisis of the late 1980s brought a
deep recession, high unemployment, and incarceration rates of mostly black residents that reached the highest in the world, while a narrative of individual failure
accompanied an attack on public housing as the site of social problems and urban
decline. The oil bust, coupled with the larger retrenchment of the social welfare
state (Peck and Tickell 2002), further solidified an urban geography of white population loss, poorly performing and racially segregated public schools, and segregated and deteriorating housing stock (Lewis 2003). While certainly these shifts
were resisted at every turn (Woods 2017), racial geographies of the city calcified
prior to Katrina through a complex renaissance of downtown development andabandonment (Campanella 2006) that had gentrified much of the historic higher
ground. By the 1990s, advance of the city’s tourist economy was marked by a hotelboom downtown and increased gentrification on high ground (Campanella 2006).

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The city’s long stigmatized and ignored public housing developments invited
market-based alternatives and public-private partnerships, both before and after thestorm, to replace publicly funded housing. Much like other cities, the federal
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) failed to adequately maintain public housing projects in New Orleans as part of a decade-old strategy toengender crisis and justify demolition of public housing. Since the 1980s, the federal government supported solutions to low-income housing problems with a seriesof programs (e.g., Business Improvement Districts, Community Development
Block Grants, New Market Tax Credits, Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC))
committed to private initiatives, while moral entrepreneurs trumpeted individual
solutions to problems of the poor (Peck 2006; Wacquant 2010). An ethic of selfsufficiency and entrepreneurialism accompanied creation, in 1974, of the Section 8
housing voucher program and the use of LIHTC and Hope VI programs to support
demolition of public housing and subsidies for low-income homebuilders instead of
low-income housing residents (Hackworth 2007, pp. 47–8). In New Orleans, the St.
Thomas housing project met the wrecking ball in 2002 to clear land in the Lower
Garden District for gentrification (Arena 2012). Tax Incremental Financing (TIF)
helped fund the new mixed-income River Gardens Apartments and Walmart store at
the former St. Thomas site as a blueprint for the demolition of public housing after
the storm (See Fig. 8.1).
Like other U.S. cities, a retrenchment of social welfare provisions and publicly
funded health care in New Orleans before Katrina accompanied growth of a disadvantaged population reliant on non-living wage jobs in an increasingly touristdependent city (Gotham 2007). Additionally, increased privatization of public
facilities and institutional infrastructure preceded Katrina, as did other forms ofdevaluation and destruction (Brenner and Theodore 2002). The transfer to the state’s
general fund for 10 years before the storm of federal money (under Disproportionate
Share program) appropriated to maintain and upgrade Charity Hospital is an example of degrading public facilities in preparation for privatization and the roll out ofgentrification (Ott 2012). Plans to abandon Charity Hospital and develop a biomedical district in the Mid-City neighborhood adjacent to downtown were proposed
prior to Katrina. Like public housing, maintenance on the hospital was deferred,
which helped create a crisis in public sector health care. Minimal flooding during
Katrina enabled Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to close the hospital andappoint Louisiana State University to oversee it. Blanco’s successor, Governor
Bobby Jindal, hired private contractors in 2013 to manage the rest of the state’s
public hospitals, while the federal government agreed to spend $625 million for a
new Veteran’s Administration Hospital to anchor gentrification and poverty removal
across the Mid-City neighborhood (see Fig. 8.1).
Privatization also impacted the City’s public-school system prior to Katrina. Just
before the storm, poor overall performance on standardized tests by students in the
New Orleans public school system prompted a shift in control of the system fromthe local School Board to a state contractor, the private accounting firm of Alvarez

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Fig. 8.1 Map of Orleans Parish, LA, showing neighborhoods and the locations of major public
housing developments as they were before Hurricane Katrina. (Data retrieved from City Planning
Commission of New Orleans and Google Maps. Base map courtesy of Esri, DeLorme, HERE,
MapmyIndia, © OpenStreetMap contributors, & the GIS community)and Marcel. Days after the storm shuttered the city’s schools, 7500 public school
teachers were laid off, their unions broken, and their schools reopened as charterschools or as private schools funded by state vouchers (Brown 2015; Akers 2012).
More flexible employment conditions now prevail and tenure protection wasremoved for teachers in a decidedly neoliberal transformation of New Orleans public education.
The advance of private profit and individual solutions to collective problems inthe years prior to Katrina effectively calcified deep social, economic, and environmental inequalities and normalized what would be a flood of neoliberal policy measures advanced in the wake of Katrina. While racial and environmental equity andsustainability were fought for locally, particularly by African-American residents inthe years preceding Katrina, “the disaster before the disaster” laid the groundwork
for what would unfold later.

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A. L. Brand and V. Baxter

 eoliberal Ideology and Urban Planning in Post-KatrinaN
New Orleans

The slow entrenchment of multiple crises prior to Katrina was coupled after thestorm with actual destruction. The moment of Katrina was a window, or a “momentof creation” (Brenner and Theodore 2002) within which reconfiguring of the city’sland-use patterns became possible. This formerly declining city was reimagined asa city with a resilient future, but this future was promised by a market-based logic
that guided public housing reform, public education, environmental resilience,
racial integration, and gentrification. The localization of larger neoliberal spatial
and privatization paradigms that took root in New Orleans in the years following thestorm reshaped the city through multiple sectors and mechanisms, including urban
planning (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Johnson 2011).
As Peck (2006) notes, much of the post-Katrina moment was shaped by the slow
pace of immediate recovery efforts and by narratives formed about the city and its
residents. Despite adherence to color-blind ideology, post-Katrina narratives, inboth the media and across conservative think tanks, were dominated by depictionsof the black, urban poor as “savages who resorted to murder, rape, and destruction
during a time of crisis” (Peck 2006; Whitehall and Johnson 2011, p. 60). This depiction extended larger narratives about New Orleans as a crime-ridden and immoral
city in decline, but it also played out an individualized racist depiction of the urban
poor and working-class residents of many neighborhoods. These conservative narratives defined the city’s problems (and its residents) and, from this perception ofdelinquency, crime, welfare-dependency, and government corruption, proposed
policy orientations for rebuilding the city that centered the private market, limited
federal initiative, and demanded individual accountability in exchange for government support.
The advance of a “common sense” neoliberalism at the local level informed
redevelopment policies at all scales and influenced which neighborhoods weredeserving of recovery efforts and dollars (Johnson 2011). In the months following
the storm, then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin initiated a planning process when hecreated the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB 2006). The BNOB urban
planning committee promoted a limited return of residents to the city and proposed
a reduced geographic footprint at the same time that they recommended deploymentof resources to areas and residents least affected by flooding rather than to areas andpeople hardest hit by the storm (Brand 2007; BNOB 2006). Although the Mayor
backed away from his own committee’s recommendations, the lingering focus onneighborhood scale redevelopment occupied a central place in subsequent planning
efforts, as did unresolved concern about who could return home after the storm. Of
course, a lack of citizen participation in this planning effort and its limited analytical
rigor limited the plan’s capacity to address the uneven racial geography of the city,
not to mention the city’s environmental vulnerability. However, subtle support forremoval of unwanted residents (areas proposed for return to green space were8

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racially mixed or predominantly black) was rationalized as a more suitable andsustainable development plan. The BNOB logic of prioritizing rebuilding based on
depth of flooding and likelihood of residents to return reveals how the neoliberaldiscourse of individual market power can extend to redevelopment plans that prioritize the upper middle class and their right to the city over that of poor residents ofcolor (see also Chap. 9 of this volume).
Indeed, residents of many neighborhoods were told that they had to prove their
viability to rebuild and were forced to compete for public resources such as publicschools and street repairs. Each of the city’s subsequent major planning efforts promoted individualization of neighborhood recovery and reinforced market-driven
redevelopment agendas. Much of the post-disaster planning and development process proceeded with a competitive approach that pitted neighborhood against neighborhood, combined with targeted recovery zones meant to incentivize private
investment. Community-level planning was one way that residents engaged thisdilemma and resisted limitations of a neoliberal recovery paradigm (Brand 2007).
However, while neighborhood-level input and participation were critical to thecity’s master planning and zoning efforts, what remains missing from city-led planning is a deeper consideration of the distributional consequences of recovery spending in each neighborhood and how residents’ ideas about equity reflected theirvarious privileges (Brand 2015; Reardon et al. 2009).

8.2.2

Post-Katrina Development Outcomes

Policies and ideas associated with neoliberal urban reform and a new form of unevendevelopment define redevelopment strategies and landscapes after Katrina. A further focus on entrepreneurism in the post-disaster city reinforced individual responsibility for recovery while also supporting a free-market redevelopment landscape.
In addition to a full-scale restructuring of public education and public/affordable
housing, transformations of the city also include massive land clearance, the redevelopment of a Bio-Medical district in Mid-City, and a reworked racial and economic landscape that privileges gentrification, expansion of racial privilege, andnew forms of exclusion and abandonment.
Thousands of public housing residents were displaced without access to theirbelongings when slightly flooded and historically undermaintained public housing
projects were closed after Katrina. The revalorization of public housing sites inpost-Katrina New Orleans relied not only on discursive strategies that devalued andstigmatized these properties but also on neoliberal urban development solutions
designed to privatize public property (Weber 2002). The federal department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local Housing Authority of New
Orleans (HANO) announced plans in June, 2006, to demolish the “Big Four” housing developments (C.J. Peete, Lafitte, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper—see Fig. 8.1),
home to 4500 people before the storm (Tulane School of Architecture 2007). Local

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residents and preservation activists struggled mightily to convince authorities torepair and reopen public housing, but in a dramatic 7–0 vote on December 1, 2007,
the New Orleans City Council endorsed demolition.
Public housing projects demolished after the storm were replaced by an expansion of Section 8 low-income housing vouchers and mixed-income developmentsthat featured a combination of market rate, subsidized, and a reduced number ofpublic housing units. A federal Gulf Opportunity Zone (GoZone) designation
enabled allocation of New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) and other public funds to
private firms like Capital One, Enhanced Community Development, Whitney New
Markets Fund, Crescent Growth Capital, and other “tax credit equity investors” that
could partner with private developers like HRI, Columbia Residential (St. Bernard
Development), Providence Community Housing, L + M Development Partners(Lafitte Development), and others to build mixed-income developments where mostunits command market rents (Novogradac 2015). Before the storm, the St. Bernard
Public Housing Development contained 1464 public units; its replacement,
Columbia Parc, has 221. C.J. Peete public housing contained 1403 public units; its
replacement, Harmony Oaks, has 198. Guste public housing contained 993 publicunits; its replacement has 577 (Webster 2016a). The over 3300 fewer families now
living in public housing were low-income, mostly black residents displaced by neoliberal post-Katrina housing policies to make way for gentrification of large swathsof Central and Mid-City, Treme, and the Lower Garden District (see Fig. 8.1).
The same publicly subsidized private companies that built mixed-income housing on sites made vacant after demolition of public housing often built off-site private housing near the vacated sites (e.g., Enterprise Community Partners and L + M
Development built near former Lafitte public housing development (see Fig. 8.1)).
These companies also did commercial developments nearby (e.g., L + M developed
Whole Foods in Mid-City) to claim increased rents available from poverty removal
and gentrification. A prominent example of publicly subsidized private commercial
and community service property development is Crescent Growth Capital, which
lined up NMTC financing for New Orleans Culinary Hospitality, Ursuline Academy,
NOMMA School, NOCCA, Myrtle Banks, Carver Theater, Joy Theater, St.
Margaret’s Daughters Home, Belleville Assisted Living, New Orleans Healing
Center, Transportation Consultants at Port of New Orleans, and others—all part of
the neoliberal strategy of using the tax code rather than government grants as amarket-driven approach to incentivize private sector investment in low-income
communities (Crescent Growth Capital 2018).
The Section 8 voucher program was expanded after Katrina to replace public
housing and meet housing needs of other low-income residents. In 2005, Housing
Authority of New Orleans (HANO) served 14,129 families—8981 received vouchers and 5148 lived in public housing. In 2016, HANO served 19,175 families andonly 1820, or 9%, lived in public housing (Webster 2016a). Higher rents and ashortage of rental housing meant more residents needed housing assistance after thestorm. The Section 8 waitlist currently stands at 20,000 and is closed to additional
residents in need of housing assistance (HANO 2019). Available federal assistanceunder the Section 8 program pays landlords favorable rents and places additional

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cost burdens on poor residents. Section 8 housing costs are higher than public housing costs because residents must pay deposits, utilities, and up to 30% of theirincome in rent (Webster 2016a). Most Section 8 vouchers pay for housing in­low-­income black neighborhoods, many in the large residential area called New
Orleans East, and most are located away from higher-ground neighborhoods along
the river. One report concluded that 82% of landlords, most in more affluent neighborhoods, refused to accept vouchers or placed unreasonable demands on tenants,
which suggests that the Section 8 program reinforced racial residential segregation
after the storm (Webster 2016a).
While both the closure of public housing and precariousness of public educationand public transit make it harder for working-class or poor families to thrive in thecity, these moves are rationalized by past failures of the state and the continuing
criminalization of the poor. As expected, neoliberal urbanism is reflected in a newurban form that, as discussed above, includes large-scale redevelopment, new urban
housing markets, and an intensification of gentrification (Barrios 2010; Brenner and
Theodore 2002). New forms of gentrification and uneven development intersectwith the appropriation of black sociospatial culture and environmental sustainability. It is important to point out here that the frontiers of development in post-Katrina
New Orleans have been unevenly distributed across neighborhoods. Affluent, white,
but heavily flooded Lakeview received instant endorsement for rebuilding after thestorm while post-Katrina environmentalism prompted near abandonment of black
neighborhoods in New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward. Gentrification andattraction of new white residents to “authentic” black areas like Treme were accompanied by near abandonment by publicly organized rebuilding efforts of other predominantly black, less gentrifiable neighborhoods (Brand and Bailey 2017).
Cultural gentrification and tourism-based promotion of black culture in the historic
Treme neighborhood may bring benefits to individual residents, but it simultaneously displaces producers of local culture (Kelley 2003). We move next to locate theneoliberal transformation of post-Katrina New Orleans within the re-racialization of
the city’s inhabitants and landscapes.

8.3

Racial Landscapes, Racial Processes, and Racialization

It is unquestionable that pre-Katrina New Orleans was not a socially just or equallandscape. This does not imply that residents in the city’s most neglected neighborhoods did not have strong connections to place or that their sociocultural and spatial
practices did not signify alternative interpretations and imaginations about theirbuilt and social landscapes (Brand 2018). It does mean that residents long sufferedfrom failing public schools, poor access to living wage employment opportunities,
and urban development histories that left many poorer and predominantly black
urban areas particularly vulnerable to flooding, environmental/developmental racism, and disinvestment. Although the emergent city can be understood in a neoliberal framework, the cementing of market logic and individualized solutions to226

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collective problems must also be framed both as an extension of deeper historical
geographies and as (re)racialization of the city’s landscapes. The landscape within
which Katrina unfolded was unequal by nearly every metric that urban planners use
to measure a place and its people,1 presenting a post-disaster development dilemma
that, while not new or even unique in the larger American context, reflects the depth
and expansiveness of racial/spatial formation. The sheer historical depth of racial
geographic expression in the United States, now exacerbated by disaster and a political economy that limits claims based on racism, presents specific development
dilemmas for those wishing to attend to racial, spatial, and socioeconomic justice.
In this section, we rely on a conceptualization of racial processes as inherently
spatial (McKittrick 2006). The spatial formation of race can be tracked and understood just as racial processes can be tracked and understood through their ideological and practical shifts over time (Omi and Winant 2014). An inquiry into the raciallandscapes of New Orleans requires resituating our analytical/temporal frameworkto grasp the rise of neoliberal space making and the “as is” essentialism and reduction of black lives that informed post-Katrina narratives (McKittrick and Woods
2007, p. 6). The time and space of race at the moment of Katrina are therefore complexly arranged geospecific contexts represented not by their settled contours but by
their shifting enactments of ongoing racial processes. The New Orleans racial landscape, like that of most Southern American cities, is rooted in the formation of thecity and its longer history of colonization, slavery, and post-emancipation segregation. Patterns set forth by both slavery and freedom are set deeply into neighborhoods like Central City, the Lower Ninth Ward, Treme, and New Orleans East,
where the city’s majority black population lives.

8.3.1

An Historically Racialized Landscape

The landscape of New Orleans is thoroughly racialized. White settlement of thehistoric high ground between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain required
removal of indigenous Native Americans and forced migration of enslaved Africans
into the city. Enslaved Africans were bound both to the land and to their masters ina primitive state of incarceration. This was a racial dictatorship protected by religious ideology that prevailed for more than 250 years (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 65).
The toil of enslaved bodies transformed the landscape and embodied wealth thatengendered profit, status, and credit for the enslaver. Antebellum historians largely
1
Part of the dilemma for urban planners are the metrics used to measure place and people. As
McKittrick and Woods (2007) argue, while identifying and mapping racial inequalities is criticalto the task of naming racism, this effort, when not accompanied by efforts to see and understandhow black geographies are made through struggle and resistance (6), reifies and naturalizes racialized inequality and uneven racial geographies. While a fuller discussion of this dilemma is out of
the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that many of the measurements served up as evidenceof the city’s failures were used to further neoconservative and neoliberal redevelopment agendas(see Peck 2006, etc.) in the wake of Katrina.

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recognize the combination of enslaved labor and collateral as fundamental to development not only of the landscape of New Orleans but of global industrial capitalism
and the industrial revolution (Baptist 2014; Du Bois 1962 [1935]; Johnson 2013).
Enslaved Africans in antebellum New Orleans were concentrated uptown along
the Mississippi River near white plantation owners, while free people of color
mostly lived downriver and “back of town” in Treme and the Seventh Ward (Morse
2008; see Fig. 8.1). Renegade enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and other outcasts occupied the back swamps of the city. After reconstruction, scientific theoriesof racial inequality legitimated race-based segregation and most black people weresegregated into squalid dwellings in low-value, flood-prone swampland like Gert
Town and Broadmoor (see Fig. 8.1).
The invention of the wood screw pump in 1917 permitted drainage of the backswamps of Mid-City and the Lakefront area which prompted white flight to theseearly suburbs and reinforced the location of whites in better drained parts of the city
(Colten 2005, p. 77; Spain 1979). While shaped by the rationality of progressive era
approaches to public works, and public health concerns of planners, development of
the city’s drainage and sewer system during the Jim Crow era of racism meant that
newly expanded urban “territories” were racially and economically segregated asthey emerged from the swamps (Colten 2002, p. 239, 2005; Lewis 2003). Black
areas were cordoned off by commercial and industrial corridors (e.g., Dryades
Market) laid out in the first Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance of 1929 and by
restrictive covenants that blocked blacks from white neighborhoods (Hastings 2004,
p. 300, 326; Morse 2008). Chronic housing shortages plagued the black community
after World War II when passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1949 extended thefederally funded public housing program to construct segregated housing in cities
across the country (Von Hoffman 2000). The location of federally funded housingdevelopments built for blacks only in New Orleans in the 1940s and 1950s further
concentrated the black population in the Second (B.W. Cooper/Calliope), Seventh(St. Bernard), Ninth (Desire), and Eleventh (Magnolia) Wards, creating a black residential belt off the river, much of which was formerly back swamp (Spain 1979).
Civil rights struggles and the emergence of a more democratic racial ideology
failed to challenge the racialization of space in New Orleans. The official collapseof the separate but equal doctrine that justified Jim Crow segregation until the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision of the US Supreme Court coincided withconstruction of separate but equal suburban housing in 1955 at Pontchartrain Park—
walled off from surrounding white suburbs by canals and a railroad line, one road inand one road out (Baxter and Casati 2019). Segregation was further reinforced byconstruction of the Desire housing project in 1956 in the Upper Ninth Ward on low
ground next to the Industrial Canal. The Ninth Ward served generally as a landscapefor blacks displaced from their homes by construction of Armstrong Park, Union
Passenger Terminal, City Hall, the Superdome, and Interstate 10 (Spain 1979;
Crutcher Jr 2010). Initially supported by construction of the I-10 expressway along
Claiborne Avenue (through the city’s historically black Treme and seventh Wards),
the construction of lower-income subdivisions and later white flight from formerly
integrated neighborhoods during the oil crash and recession of the late 1980s made

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New Orleans East yet another black area located on “reclaimed” swamp land.
As previously noted, the geography within which Katrina unfolded was criticallyand indelibly marked by generations of urban development paradigms that werethemselves inherently raced. The deeper history was of course always marked bystruggle and the resistant spatial ontologies of communities of color, as Woods(2017) argues in his historical analysis of the pre-Katrina city. Yet, while a nascentneoliberal bent would harden through post-Katrina development, the colorblindnessof neoliberalism would recalibrate the city’s racial geographies through new modesof abandonment, asset-stripping, and gentrification (Woods 2017).

8.3.2

Newly Racialized Landscapes

Post-Katrina racialization takes place through multiple sectors: including tourism,
the demolition of public housing, public education reform, gentrification, public
transportation investments, and tourist-centered redevelopment. It also included
hyperdevelopment and abandonment. This framework accounts for abandonment of
the Lower Ninth Ward and much of New Orleans East, as well as for unprecedented
levels of development and gentrification pressure in Treme, Mid-City, and highground neighborhoods along the river such as Bywater (Brand and Bailey 2017).
Population shifts after Katrina are one indication of changing racial demographics.
Between 2000 and 2016, the city lost over 95,000 black residents (U.S. Census
2000; 2010; U.S. American Community Survey 2016). Geographically, this loss isrepresented in black population decline in areas along the river and adjacent todowntown, particularly in high-ground neighborhoods like Bywater, the Marigny,
Central Business District (CBD), and Lower Garden District (see Fig. 8.1).
Pre-Katrina land tenure and valuation trends recalibrated in many ways after
Katrina. Several majority black housing projects were constructed on lower groundand anchored low-income black neighborhoods with low rents and low house values. The historical context of racialized neighborhoods is that blacks are less able
than whites to obtain home mortgages either because they are excluded from housing markets or because they have, on average, much less money and less stable jobs
than whites. That means black residents are more likely than white residents to rent
as opposed to purchase a home. This left many black residents without a real voicein a recovery process after Katrina that was heavily tilted toward homeowners (Reed2006; Morse 2008). Residents of poorer black neighborhoods (typically on lower
ground) with more renters and lower house values were also considered less likely
to return and rebuild after the storm than residents of wealthier white neighborhoods
like Lakeview.
Land formerly occupied by public housing sites (St. Bernard, Iberville, Lafitte,
St. Thomas), and by majority black residents, was coveted by developers and potential white residents because of its elevation and proximity to employment downtown. Indeed, the advance of mixed-income and market-rate approaches toredeveloping sites on historic and largely unflooded high ground significantly

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reduced black population. The storm allowed closing of this racially based rent gap
and displacement of low-income black renters so gentrification could proceed, leaving “symbolic” numbers of black residents within the subsidized portion of newfederally backed housing built in the wake of the storm.
Beyond renters, black homeowners were also short-changed as the Road Home
program funded by HUD and the State of Louisiana to help homeowners not covered by the National Flood Insurance Program initially allocated grants based on thevalue of the house pre-Katrina rather than the cost of repairs to the house after thestorm. That meant houses in Lakeview neighborhoods occupied by whites received
much larger average rebuilding grants than houses in Gentilly and the Lower Ninth
Ward occupied by blacks. This inequity was remedied by a later court case, but mostblack homeowners were never made whole given that the court decision was not
retroactive for property owners who had already made claims.
Asset-stripping describes well the allocation of disaster funding after the storm(Woods 2017). The statute that authorized Community Development Block Grant(CDBG) funding for New Orleans originally required that 70 percent of all money
be awarded to support persons of low to moderate income. The State of Louisiana
obtained waivers from the federal government after Katrina and ended up granting
only 34 percent of CDBG money to low- and moderate-income residents.
Homeowners received 79 percent of the grant money while the 34 percent of residents identified as renters received only 20 percent of CDBG grant money (Morse
2008). CDBG funding was also used for projects such as the Lafitte Greenway andCrescent Park, supporting public space expansion in areas experiencing rapid land
revaluation and green gentrification (Anguelovski, Connolly and Brand 2018). This
exemplifies the compounding dilemma of market-based economic logic rooted indeeply racialized systems of spatial inequality.
Snapshots of reinvigorated racial inequality include the continued lack of a grocery store in the Lower Ninth Ward and lack of sustained redevelopment in New
Orleans East. Both areas continue to exhibit the slowest rate of return after Katrina.
The slow rates of return reveal the intertwined workings of racialized capitalism anddevelopment given the direct prohibitions on residents’ return (particularly in theLower Ninth Ward) but also the ways that racial geographies unfold along with newcontexts of geographical abandonment, continued inequalities in access to resources,
and market-based development ideologies that typically avoid lower-income communities of color.
Racial processes are also evident in the return of middle-class and white elites tothe city through production of luxury housing stock on high ground near the riverand in the revaluation of property in the CBD and Mid-City neighborhoods. It takes
place through the reconfiguration and aspatial reorganization of public educationdelivered by charter schools, the focus on tourist-oriented transit development(Lowe et al. 2018), and further calcification of the city’s tourist economy (Gotham2007). It also takes place through the abandonment of a dedicated public hospitalfor the city’s poor and low-income residents as disaster recovery money was spentin the biomedical district to facilitate economic redevelopment in Mid-City.

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A final point on racial landscapes that is underexamined in urban planning,
including post-disaster planning, is the continued emphasis on economic opportunity, which obfuscates how white supremacism and privilege operate spatially.
Many planning scholars advance platforms for racial equity and highlight claims on
the state and on our collective urban imaginary for more racially just landscapes,
and these views go above and beyond economic opportunity (Bates et al. 2018). Our
point is that more work is needed in urban planning on how racial geographic structuring and white supremacism work in and through our discipline.

8.3.3

Racialized Space as Development Dilemma

The endurance of the city’s racialized geography poses specific development dilemmas often overlooked and ill-conceived in the realm of post-disaster urban planning.
The seeming intractability of the city’s unequal racial geographies was used as fuelto advance neoconservative spatial and fiscal ideologies in the months and years
following Katrina (Peck 2006). Despite the hegemony of racial neoliberalism as thecity’s redevelopment paradigm, urban planning and numerous participatory processes in the years following Katrina promised possible avenues for eliciting morejust visions for the city’s future. Yet, when racialized space is so deep, it cannot be
simply solved by existing urban planning paradigms (Omi and Winant 2014; Peckand Tickell 2002; Brand 2015).
This latter point is critical because urban planning, despite its normative commitments to social justice, lacks a clear framework for equity in the late twentieth andearly twenty-first centuries (Zapata and Bates 2015). The types of policy making
and redistribution of power, wealth, and spatial arrangements required to amelioratea history of inequality experienced by the city’s black population raise criticalclaims for the state and urban planning policy makers in the neoliberal era (Reardon
et al. 2009). There are, to be sure, planners whose work highlights these claims andwho work to ameliorate intersecting conditions of racialized/spatialized inequality.
Even if urban planning re-embraced policies oriented toward equity and redistribution, as many planners and policy makers did in the 1970s and 1980s (Krumholz
2003), market-based hegemony makes these types of claims less tenable. In thissense, we must understand New Orleans’s racial geographies as both evidence ofthe ongoing work of a racial state and racial formation and also as geographies
resynthesized under the guise of neoliberal space-making (Omi and Winant 2014).
Racial geographies are reworked in the neoliberal era, but they are not new. The
not-newness of racial geographies underlines the hegemony of a racial state whose
development and planning has always been enacted through space. Although manyscholars point to this “fatal coupling” (Gilmore 2002) of race and space, the central
development dilemma posed by racial geographies is not only that they are not new
but that they are normalized in moments such as Katrina and alternatives proposedby black residents have been largely muted under neoliberal colorblindness(Reardon et al. 2009.) Yet, the effects of political economies and racial landscapes

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cannot be extracted from the development modalities that produced the pre-Katrina
moment and the deep environmental injustices that existed prior to the storm. The
environmental and development landscape underlies how racial justice was spatialized and it is to this development dilemma that we now turn.

8.4

Unjust and Unequal Environmental Development

New Orleans is an “impossible but inevitable city” (Lewis 2003, p. 19) born of thelogics of economic expansion and the management of nature, both of which coincide with a racialized development history. The city is located on an unstable deltaic
plain that features the dangerous convergence of sea-level rise and shrinkage of theland (subsidence). This convergence is made more dangerous by reduced rates ofsediment supply to rebuild land due to the construction of an extensive levee andcanal system to protect the city from flooding (Blum and Roberts 2012). Put anotherway, construction of levees and drainage canals increases subsidence and flood risk
and therefore contains an environmental contradiction because they dry out land
and reduce the ability of the Mississippi River to deposit sediment required to makenew land (Baxter 2014). Consequently, further drowning of land in the deltaic plainof New Orleans is inevitable, which means every citizen of New Orleans is at considerable risk of future flooding (Blum and Roberts 2012).
Not every citizen of New Orleans confronts an equal risk of exposure to future
flooding because of the city’s history of unequal and uneven development. Structural
patterns of inequality and racism created and sustained unequal power relations andincreased disaster vulnerability for poor black citizens shunted into more floodprone parts of the city; this is a condition that has not abated post-Katrina (Susman
et al. 1983; Freudenberg et al. 2008).

8.4.1

 History of Environmental Vulnerability in New
A
Orleans

New Orleans is a flood-prone city where, after the demise of slavery, blacks, indigenous peoples, criminals, and outcasts largely populated marginal lands with inferior drainage near industrial areas and in back swamps located beyond the thinteapot or, “sliver by the river,” that lies above sea level (Lewis 2003; see Fig. 8.1). It
is well documented how the city expanded toward Lake Pontchartrain when invention of the wood screw pump enabled drainage of former back swamps (Lewis
2003; Colten 2005; Campanella 2008). Subdivisions sprang up across the centerand back of town, some of which carried racial covenants to keep out blacks andother so-called undesirables. The city became reliant on pumping floodwaters out ofthese flood-prone areas whenever there was a hard rain. However, pumping stations

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and drainage canals were not enough to protect the city from storm surge associatedwith a major hurricane. That required federal intervention.
Congress authorized federal involvement in levee protection for New Orleans in
1955 when it ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to develop plans for a Lake
Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project. Substantial funding for the
project became available in 1965 when Congress allocated $56 million for hurricane protection in New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy flooded 6600 homes, many ineastern New Orleans (Seed and Bea 2006, p. 4–22; Shallat 2006). Political wrangling continued for decades between real estate investors, environmental activists,and other community groups, over the extent and type of levee protection to construct. A “high-level” barrier plan that required raising, strengthening, and extending existing levees was finally adopted in 1985 and produced the hurricane protection
system that failed catastrophically when Hurricane Katrina struck the city (Seed andBea 2006).
Construction of a hurricane protection system for New Orleans suffered with theroll out of the neoliberal policy regime in the 1980s. Sporadic funding and costcutting private contractors delayed completion of the levee system as corners were
cut on site preparation and building materials, especially on levees built along major
outfall canals that drain water out of the city and along the Industrial Canal (Seedand Bea 2006). The mark of neoliberalism was also evident in rollbacks of environmental regulations after the election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan consolidated government power in favor of financial and land-use deregulation to stimulate
real estate investment as a cornerstone of national economic policy (Hackworth2007). Federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Administration(FEMA) and the National Flood Insurance Program provided insurance that softened oversight of local land-use policies and increased federal responsibility forflood risk, which empowered real estate developers and resulted in a 50 percent
increase over 30 years in floodplain construction across the country (Burby 2001).
New Orleans was no exception as construction of subdivisions flourished on illprepared swamp land in New Orleans East and on the West Bank of the Mississippi
River (Baxter 2014).
Katrina flooded eighty percent of New Orleans and the damage raged acrosssocial class and racial lines, though low-income black areas were most likely to bedamaged by floodwaters (Logan 2006) and black residents were the most impacted.
Post-World War II migration of whites to Lakeview, Gentilly, and parts of New
Orleans East placed them in slab houses built at grade below sea level, so failure of
the Army Corps to construct adequate levees, and inadequate land-use regulations,
made these affluent areas vulnerable to extreme flooding as well. While many affluent whites suffered flood damage from Katrina, the white population had had asignificant out-migration from New Orleans East before Katrina, thus reducing theirvulnerability. White residents also dominated the high ground along the river andthe river bend in Algiers, the French Quarter, Bywater, and Marigny neighborhoods
that largely escaped the flood as well as the artificial high ground created at the
Lake’s edge by using lake dredge (see Fig. 8.1). If we recall that many black neighborhoods are located in a belt located off the river (Central City, Mid-City, Gentilly,

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Upper Ninth Ward) that severely flooded, racial inequities in exposure to flooding
are clear (Logan 2006).

8.4.2

 ace and Environmental Justice in Post-Katrina New
R
Orleans

Concerns about environmental justice in post-Katrina New Orleans are multi-scaled
and multifaceted. The development dilemma posed by the city’s daunting environmental future is twofold. First, the environmental development history of the city
created sociospatial vulnerability to large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina
and to everyday flooding events like the rain-event flood in August, 2017, which
dumped 8–10 inches of rain on the city within 4 hours. These concerns are notequally dispersed across the city nor are residents equally situated to respond toenvironmental crises, making non-white and lower-income residents more vulnerable than others. Second, rational responses to recovery that attempted solutions
abstracted from larger sociopolitical and racialized contexts largely failed to attend
deeper racial and political economies. Not only were residents geographicallyunequally vulnerable prior to the storm; those vulnerabilities were exacerbated bysolutions posed for rebuilding different areas of the city after the storm.
Environmental vulnerability is coupled closely with racialized environmental
injustice in New Orleans. Toxic sites such as landfills and industrial plants are more
likely sited in the city’s black geographies. The Ninth Ward is bisected by theIndustrial Canal, constructed in the 1920s to improve shipping along the Gulf Coast.
On one side of the Industrial Canal lies the Agriculture Street landfill, a toxic sitethat festered for decades under the HUD funded Press Park housing development,
constructed for low-income blacks in the late 1960s (Webster 2016b). The local
school, Moton Elementary, also sat above the landfill, and the former Desire public
housing development was not far away. Before the storm, low-income black homeowners on the east side of the Canal in the Lower Ninth Ward were protected by aninferior sheet pile levee built only 3 feet above grade on a small berm of land thatwas overwhelmed by Katrina’s tidal surge (Seed and Bea 2006).

8.4.3

Post-disaster Redevelopment and Environmental JusticeKatrina’s levee breaks not only devastated tens of thousands of properties; they
exposed the city’s deep and multi-scaled environmental dilemmas. Despite calls by
activists across the city, the massive work required to rebuild levees after Katrina
and to analyze the city’s environmental vulnerability remains incomplete. The city
is reliant on a drainage system with outdated pumping technologies and an unreliable pumping system. It also relies on a levee system and coastal restoration

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programs whose locus of control lies outside the scale of the city, which reveals themultifaceted scales of hurricane protection and seemingly intractable problems
associated with land loss and climate change.
A proposal advanced by planners to move entire communities, such as the Lower
Ninth Ward, to higher ground through land swap programs designed to keep residents together failed to gain real traction after the storm. What has gained traction
are efforts to utilize urban planning to catalyze stormwater management alternatives
across the city. This is mainly contained in the city’s master plan, comprehensive
zoning, and water planning efforts. The Master Plan, completed in 2010, and theComprehensive Zoning Ordinance, completed in 2015, handle stormwater management by private development incentives. The Water Plan, which the city largely
adopted as its resiliency plan, is primarily focused on subsidence and “living withwater” via new stormwater management systems, such as bioswales and blueways.
As Fisch (2014) shows, the water plan has largely failed to address underlying racial
equity concerns and, outside of raising property values in a city already plagued byaffordable housing issues, has failed to consider the alignment of stormwater management issues associated with racialized landscapes and a right to place. For
instance, one of the proposals in the Water Plan would replace a large swath of the
Lowe Ninth Ward with a blue way in an area where some residents have alreadyrebuilt their homes. The failure here is not necessarily in thinking that big changes
are necessary for more environmentally just landscapes, but in not recognizing theways that these landscapes intersect with racial processes and other forms of dispossession that Lower Nine residents have faced.
The city’s environmental injustice geography has deepened along racial fault
lines since Katrina. For instance, in the wake of the storm, the city pushed to open a
new landfill next to the Vietnamese community of Village de l’est in New Orleans
East (See Fig. 8.1). In addition, the Army Corps of Engineers renewed planning
efforts to redesign the Industrial Canal lock, despite continued opposition fromLower Ninth Ward residents who, citing the repercussions of disrupting toxic canal
mud and then dumping newly cut fill into Bayou Bienvenue, continue to fight thelock redesign after decades of doing so.
Environmental injustice concerns connected to the historical development of thecity, subsidence, and increased vulnerability to climate change and land loss present
an imposing set of physical and environmental dependencies that are difficult toaddress in a political climate where climate change denial prevails at high levels ofgovernment. Centrality of an environmentally just landscape to our thinking aboutsocial justice agendas and how to actualize them is also hindered by ongoing racial
projects at work in redevelopment that fail to account for the nimble ways racialization is deployed and redeployed spatially. Much like Colten’s (2002) analysis of themutual evolution of racial and geographic landscapes, and Hardy et al.’s (2017)
understanding of racial landscapes and vulnerabilities as always in formation, we
think of rational approaches to post-Katrina resettlement (e.g., BNOB Commission,
Urban Land Institute, Rockefeller-backed resiliency plans) as bound up in contemporary “color blind” racial processes and structures. These rational approaches togreen redevelopment largely fail to deal with the political economy of disasters and8

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the deeper racial terrain within which new modes of “environmentally just” landscapes are promoted.
Rational policy proposals to focus development on higher ground that is lessprone to flooding and extreme environmental events do not actualize racially equallandscapes unless all metrics of access to these high-ground neighborhoods areworked out. It is evident that increased green gentrification along high-ground areas,
including rising land values and an increase in green amenities, has reproduced ageography where white and affluent residents are better protected and black residents are more vulnerable (Anguelovski et al. 2018; Brand and Bailey 2017).
Without mechanisms that center racial equity and access to affordable housing andcommunity development support, market-led approaches to high-ground resettlement can lead to less affordable housing and increased displacement of economically vulnerable residents (Brand and Bailey 2017).

8.5

Discussion: Cumulative and Compounding Dilemmas

It is impossible to extract environmental vulnerability from the larger social systems
within which it takes place. As Laska and Morrow (2006, p. 16) argue, social vulnerability “comes not so much from exposure as from the manner in which humanenvironment systems are coupled.” More recent work by Hardy et al. (2017, p. 63)
argues further that “racial formations are also environmental” and that the “socioecological relations of racialized space” are produced over time through racial projects. What we see in the post-disaster city are a new series of interdependent
elements of a twenty-first century racial project built on a veneer of rationality andcolor-blind decision-making.
Each of the development dilemmas discussed above enables a general perpetuation and intensification of the types of social and environmental injustices prevalentin New Orleans prior to Katrina. The onset of a racial state committed to the reproduction of white privilege after the demise of slavery concocted various strategies toisolate black and other minority residents on lower, less well-drained land in New
Orleans. Efforts to remedy racial residential segregation in the late twentieth century largely failed as market-oriented and color-blind spatial logics ostensibly
replaced race with wealth and income as criteria to allocate home mortgages andrebuilding funds. Promotion of color-blind, market-oriented governmental interventions, and a slow withdrawal of the state from social services, helps some residents
while abandoning others. At the end of the day, life is harder for economically andsocially disadvantaged residents that lived in New Orleans prior to the storm andwhose efforts to return were often blocked.
Neoliberalism can be examined as racial structuring that reinvigorated and transformed racialized landscapes that existed prior to the storm, but not in ways that
attenuate racial injustice. Put simply, poor African-American residents that made up
the majority of the city’s population before Katrina are faced with daunting obstacles, not only in terms of day-to-day living in an unequal city but also in terms of the236

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complex dimensions of resettlement and claims making on the state that could center the reality of racialized politics and contexts of life before and after Katrina.
Color-blind racism and individualized solutions to collective problems post-Katrina
are further complicated by tensions between the history of environmental development, environmental justice, and future development plans.
We find Colten’s (2002) framing of “mutually evolving patterns” useful forthinking about how these dilemmas compound one another. Neoliberalism marked
recovery and rebuilding of the city, yet this color-blind approach is itself blind tounderlying racial structures. Historically, we see this in Colten’s analysis of progressive era approaches to constructing the City’s drainage systems where, despite
racially progressive development goals to extend drainage to all residents, land reclamation intersected with and created new, racially segregated geographies toward
the lake. The rational approach, at the time, extended the geographies of racial residential segregation and uneven development. This pattern repeats post-Katrina, but
in particular ways that reproduce a geography of racialized environmental vulnerability in an era of increasing climate change vulnerability. Here, we suggest thatwhiteness and white supremacist systems are reworked geographically in the postKatrina city along environmental, developmental, and racial fault lines.
Claims for racial justice and equity made by residents in the Lower Ninth Wardand New Orleans East are not easily settled by rational approaches to planning or bydecisions about where development should or should not happen. Lower-lying areas
such as the East and the Lower Ninth Ward are more vulnerable to flooding, but so
too are the Lakeview and Gentilly areas of the city. The point is that the longer history of who settled where reveals more complicated histories that require attention
if we are to imagine and promote more socially, racially, economically, and environmentally just landscapes.

8.6

Conclusion

This chapter rests within a volume which argues that Louisiana is ahead of the curve
regarding what it can teach us about post-disaster redevelopment. New Orleans is
14 years past a devastating human-made catastrophe that brought existential threats
to the city. The incredibly hardworking and engaged efforts of residents and supporters, aided by billions in disaster aid and insurance money, rebuilt the city, albeit
in ways that largely reinforced preexisting inequities and development dilemmas.
Perhaps, if New Orleans is ahead of the curve, it is in the demonstrative confrontation with and illumination of the types of development dilemmas that we outlined
above. Scholarship on neoliberalism, racial geographies, and environmental justiceabounds, but at the nexus of the three lie specific entanglements that make dreams
of a socially and racially just and resilient city incredibly difficult to realize—if
attention to racialized geographic formations and reparations for these formations
are not centrally attended to in our future imagining and day-to-day decisions. If
New Orleans is ahead of the curve, it is ahead in its illumination of the depth of

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these dilemmas and the ease with which racial inequality is reproduced throughdisciplines committed to equity.
Despite ominous warnings, we do not wish to squash dreams of a more resilient,
green, sustainable, socially just and equal landscape, nor are we convinced of theimpossibility of these claims and visions. Lessons learned from rebuilding New
Orleans after Katrina contain many seeds for hope. However, what we do suggest isthat the paradigms within which we operate matter in terms of shaping disaster
response. Further, what post-Katrina development shows is that the moment of
Katrina provided an opening through which a highly racialized neoliberalism powerfully framed what happened to the city and what should happen next. The velocity
and multidimensionality of this redevelopment trajectory itself poses dilemmas forenacting more racially just landscapes unless these paradigms are called to task.

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Chapter 9

Reimagining Housing: Affordability Crisisand Its Role in Disaster Resilienceand Recovery
Andreanecia M. Morris and Lucas Diaz

9.1

Introduction

From a housing perspective, the New Orleans levee failures brought about by
Hurricane Katrina and the weakness of the levees can be perceived as a boon and acatastrophe, simultaneously. While it is well documented that the flooding
devastation after the storm destroyed a significant portion of New Orleans homes(Pistrika and Jonkman 2010), the same devastation also created new opportunities
for a potential real estate renaissance. Unfortunately, with opportunities in realestate development have come the risks of continued status quo in housing
inequalities, rearticulated through similar historically entrenched patterns andpractices (Germany 2007), ensnaring policymakers and decision-makers at alllevels of governance in a familiar game.
For residents and developers in positions to benefit, the post-Katrina New Orleans
housing environment has been a boon that has brought new attention and renewedenergy to the real estate market (Williams 2018). Some of the factors that havecontributed to increased real estate market prices over the past 12 years include
Katrina-generated citywide increases in federally funded investments forinfrastructure (from roads to local parks and school buildings), coinciding withincreased interest in New Orleans after the storm as a retirement and leisuredestination for the wealthy, and an affordable place for newcomer entrepreneurs andmillennials. These Katrina outcomes benefitted well-positioned real estate owners
up to the most recent market slowdown (Thompson 2018). This renewed sense ofenergy in the area, coupled with a strategically inadequate distribution of tax
A. M. Morris (*)
Housing NOLA/Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, New Orleans, LA, USAe-mail: amorris@housingnola.org
L. Diaz
ABD Department of Sociology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USAe-mail: ldiaz5@tulane.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_9

241

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incentives doled out to new development projects, also helped create sorely needed
new housing stock in the city (Gotham 2015).
Unfortunately, this uptick in development activity and real estate market pricegrowth has done little to alleviate New Orleans’ need for housing that is affordable
to the city’s local workforce. Instead, a housing affordability shortage, createdlargely by the floodwaters that flowed through the levee breaches, continued to growwithout adequate attention from decision-makers, advancing into the crisis the city
now faces. In our estimation, the resulting influx of new, wealthy residents, thegrowth of luxury downtown living units, and the growth of speculative real estatedevelopment within popular or trendy neighborhoods have not only addressed thecity’s growing housing affordability crisis, these factors have exacerbated it, aided
in no small part by local and state legislators and housing policy officials who havecontinued to misunderstand or misdiagnose the reach and impact of this issue. The
resulting lack of coordinated, focused attention on the City of New Orleans’ growing
housing affordability issue at decision-making tables, we argue, poses a risk to thecity’s ability to develop the essential resilience needed for the type of exceptional
recovery required if the city is to keep future disasters from becoming catastrophes.
This chapter provides a praxis-oriented interdisciplinary exploration of how
post-Katrina’s housing boom has contributed to a growing housing affordability
crisis and how advocates and service providers have tackled the challenges andopportunities to provide affordable, safe housing for the local workforce. After abrief review of theoretical literature supporting data, analysis, and interpretation, we
provide a snapshot of the elements constituting the housing crisis and then explore
how the creation and efforts of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA)
have led to the growing power of this group to inform and influence housing
decision-making in the city. We provide a set of recommendations for groups andlocalities interested in addressing housing affordability issues, as well asrecommendations for further interdisciplinary research, and conclude that ensuring
housing affordability for low- to moderate-income families helps build the essential
resilience families need to face future disasters.

9.2

From Theory to Praxis

This chapter relies on a combination of sociological and political science theories
that enable the authors to locate their interpretations within a well-establishedtradition of disaster resilience and recovery and urban and social movement
scholarship. Additionally, we rely on our own praxis as social justice advocates, aswell as the praxis of others in power-building work, to provide both data andinterpretation, making use of qualitative methodologies in the social sciences.
We first frame our discussion through a disaster resilience lens, using concepts
that focus on human-oriented abilities to rebound well from disasters (McNicoll
1996; Tierney 1999; Laska 2012). In particular, we work from Laska’s
conceptualization of essential resilience as a necessary component of exceptional

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recovery (2012), which we utilize to connect the role housing affordability plays
in low- to moderate-income families’ abilities to build the type of resilience needed
to help mitigate exposure to future disasters. Essential resilience here corresponds
to families’ abilities to rebound well from future disasters, which we posit is directly
related to housing affordability.
Relying on concepts from the “urban growth machine” theory, we assume therole of economic growth and its corresponding logics of a market-centric approach
to urban social problems and policies (Molotch 1976; Molotch and Logan 1983).
According to Molotch and Logan, the potential negative consequences of a given
economic agenda in an urban setting become secondary, or may not be consideredat all, in decisions focused on ensuring economic growth (1983). Economic growthlogic influences key stakeholders and power players in an urban setting in such a
way as to cause them to advance business elites’ economic interests at the expenseof, or without adequately weighing, potential or actual negative social impacts onvulnerable populations (1983). As Tierney points out, urban growth logics points
toward local power relations focused on market-oriented approaches, which apply
in disaster planning and response, further exacerbating historical socioeconomic
inequities when left unchecked (Tierney 2010). This understanding helps us
recognize the role of power dynamics in exploring how housing-related policy andprogram decisions play out in a given urban setting, which leads us to further
consider the roles of different players within a given field and how they operate
within that field (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
Fligstein and McAdam advance decades of social movement theories to arrive at
a model that accounts for individual (micro) and regional/national (macro) factors
interacting with each other in a given field for the purposes of advancing social,political, economic, or even cultural agendas (2012). The power dynamics, politicalinteractions, and efforts undertaken to advance any group’s agenda can be better
explained and understood when connecting individual and group actions to theenvironment in which these actions take place (the field). Finally, in our explorationof GNOHA’s growth, actions, and evolution, we highlight implications and potential
steps for others to consider, which rely on our application of concepts from regime
politics theory (Stone 1989, 1998, 2006). According to Stone, regimes in urban
spaces succeed in advancing agendas when cooperation across group interests
coalesces into actionable items that the majority of power brokers (across civic,
business, and government) agree to support (1989, 1998, 2006).
Finally, we apply reflexive (Pensoneau-Conway and Toyosaki 2011) and institutional ethnography (Campbell 1998) in order to account for and enable the lived
field expertise of the authors as data for analysis and interpretation. This methodology allows us to locate our praxis expertise as interpretable data, both as it relates toour experiences as individuals working in the housing universe and as it relates toour experiences within the institutions through which the work is conducted, as wellas the field in which it takes place.
Our approach to describing this case and its analysis provided in this chapter islimited in its scope, requiring that we make explicit some of the most salient ofthese. First, the interpretations in this chapter are not generalizable to a broader

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population. Our insight is limited to the specific field of housing in New Orleans,
and any lessons our interpretations may provide will be mostly of use to practitioners
rather than to scholars. Second, this chapter’s aim is to promote further discussion
and lines of inquiry rather than to fully test a hypothesis. Thus, it is intended toprovide potential insights for practitioners rather than theoretically connect causal
factors to effects. As such, we encourage both praxis and academic readers to
explore this chapter with an eye toward strengthening and advancing both future
praxis and scholarly work related to housing affordability and its relationship todisaster resilience. It is a critical topic, we believe, after a disaster and especially ina catastrophe such as was Hurricane Katrina.

9.3

A Housing Affordability Crisis in the Shadow of Katrina

New Orleans is renowned for its culture and tourist attractions. More important to
New Orleans locally are its neighborhoods and people. Residents perceive
themselves through the lens of their neighborhoods first. To retain what we believe
is our most precious asset, our residents, efforts must be made to ensure thateveryone has an affordable place to call home. From first responders to hospitality
employees, teachers, child care workers, and culture bearers, all New Orleanians
deserve access to safe, affordable places to live. Unfortunately, today more andmore of our working-class residents who work in the heart of the city find it difficult
to attain and keep affordable housing that keeps them close to their jobs.
Before we highlight some of the key figures outlining the contours of today’s
affordable housing crisis, we must first define the term affordable housing. There
are two definitions, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), for affordable housing—one for renters and one forhomeowners. Affordable housing for renters is housing in which households spend
less than 30% of their gross monthly income on housing costs, which includes rent
and utility payments. For homeowners, affordable housing is defined as housing inwhich households spend less than 30% of their gross monthly income on mortgage,
utility, property taxes, and insurance payments. Families who spend more than this
30% threshold are said to be cost-burdened, and families who spend more the 50%
of gross earnings are said to be severely cost-burdened.1 Families who are housing
cost-burdened at any level struggle to meet other financial obligations that are part
1
Understanding the concept of cost burden is critical to making the connection to building a resilient New Orleans because we have already learned from Hurricane Katrina that it is not enoughthat people are able to have a roof over their heads. Being able to make the rent, or make the mortgage, or make the electricity bill (if there is outright ownership) without being able to save andhaving money for transportation, medical expenses, and/or food do little to build up the essential
resiliency needed by low- to moderate-income families. Cost-burdened families are exactly thosefamilies who are unable to do that because their incomes are too low, and their rental/mortgage
payments are too high, and the region provides little recourse for this imbalance to shift in a waythat enables these families to find relief in the future.

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of life, such as health insurance, food, and transportation, to name a few. In addition,
cost-burdened families struggle to save funds for rainy day emergencies, such as
the type of funds needed for hurricane evacuations or other emergency needs aftera disaster when weekly paychecks disappear.
It is important to note that many advocates and policy experts in housing arefamiliar with and make use of this definition in the work they do to advanceaffordable housing policies.2 However, most people (and often elected officials notfamiliar with the housing universe), particularly if they hail from middle- to upper-­income communities where potential affordable developments are targeted, perceive
affordable housing as a proxy for substandard or slum housing. Discussed more
fully below, work to advance affordable housing strategies in New Orleans has
required giving considerable attention to this misunderstanding with resident
leaders, as well as elected and appointed decision-makers, in order to ensure theirsupport rather than their opposition when enlisting them to help advance housing
affordability measures and policies.
New Orleans has changed dramatically from 2000 to 2015, experiencing substantial shifts in population, households, income, and housing principally from thecatastrophic jolt of Katrina. Some of the significant changes are as follows: thepopulation decreased by 28%, and households decreased by 21%, with the average
size of households dropping slightly by 6% from 2.48 people per household in 2000
to 2.33 in 2013; the African American population has declined 34% (112,315
African American residents) since 2000, principally after Katrina in 2005. In 2013,
60% of the city’s population was African American, down from 67% before Katrina(GNOHA 2015). Additionally, the number of people living alone has increased by
6%, and the number of non-family households has increased by 7%; meanwhile, thecity’s poverty rate remains incredibly high at 28% compared to 15% nationally, an
overall increase of 2% since 2000 (GNOHA 2015). Despite this increase in poverty,
the proportion of high-income households increased dramatically in the city, while
the proportion of very low-income households also rose slightly. Housing costs
have risen dramatically for both renters and homeowners when compared between
pre-Katrina and post-Katrina levels, with home values increasing 54% and rents
increasing 50%, while homeownership rates have remained relatively unchanged,
decreasing from 46% to 45%, still well below the national average of over 60%(GNOHA 2015).
This post-Katrina housing picture of decline in many indicators combines poorly
with employment statistics. The majority of jobs in New Orleans’ key economic
sectors, tourism and medicine, pay wages below the citywide area family median2
In addition to the affordable housing definition, HUD designates area median family income(AMFI) as the baseline family income measurement used for determining affordability for a given
geographic unit. Using AMFI, HUD designates families as follows: earning 50%–80% of AMFIin a given geography as low-income (LI) families; earning below 50% of AMFI as very lowincome (VLI) families; and earning no more than 30% of AMFI (or families who fall below thefederal poverty level) as extremely low-income (ELI) families. Using HUD’s affordable housing
definition and its area median income categories, we can present a snapshot of the New Orleans
housing crisis.

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A. M. Morris and L. Diazincome of $33,600 (for one person household), and the housing affordability crisis
starts to become apparent (GNOHA 2015). Low monthly incomes and high costs ofliving, including housing costs, put a strain on working New Orleanians’ and theirfamilies’ abilities to find and secure safe, affordable housing. Consider New
Orleans’ musicians, culture bearers, and tourism workers who are key to attracting
tourism to the city and who do not earn wages that match the cost of living in New
Orleans. According to Ramsey (2013), in 2012, New Orleans musicians reported
earning an average of $17,800 a year, but 39% of those surveyed reported making
less than $10,000 per year. The average income for musicians has not increased
significantly since 2008, while housing prices have steadily increased.
Similarly, 33,801 people work in the Accommodation and Food Services industry in New Orleans, and these housekeepers, bartenders, fast-food employees, andhotel desk clerks earn less than $23,000 a year, on average (Committee on Financial
Services 2015). For these workers, the most they can afford to pay monthly as
renters or homeowners is $575 (including utilities, taxes, and insurance). Housing
prices, however, have skyrocketed between 2000 and 2015. In 2015, at the time of
the GNOHA’s first-ever housing plan, a one-bedroom, market-rate apartment priced
at $767 per month (2015), well beyond hospitality workers’ ability to cover this costwithout worrying if they’ll have enough to cover other living expenses.
Based on the information analyzed in the HousingNOLA plan, GNOHA anticipates a need for 33,600 new or rehabbed housing units over the next 10 years, withthe highest homeowner/buyer and renter demands among low- to moderate-­income
families (2015).3 This means that a family of two with a combined household incomeof $44,575 can afford approximately a $125,000 mortgage (assuming $0 down and
excellent credit). In the neighborhoods increasingly becoming desirable by either
newcomer permanent residents, real estate flippers, or short-term rental operators,
median sales prices were $131,000 in 2018, already beyond what the average New
Orleans family can afford without experiencing financial strain (Williams 2018).
The result of these changes is an evolving New Orleans. Though the total population number still remains below pre-Katrina levels, New Orleans was one of thefastest-growing cities in America during the 10 years after the storm. It remains oneof the most attractive cities for millennials (Larino 2017). Evidence shows that thegrowing population is not just the result of returning residents but also an influx of
new residents (Larino 2017). The changing demographics contributing to highhousing demand, particularly with regard to newcomer, higher-income residents,
create additional challenges to housing affordability, often compounding preexisting
housing inequities around the city. These changes contribute to a large portion of
New Orleans families who increasingly find themselves unable to afford homes thatwere affordable before Katrina. Working-class families, in particular, who
experience severe cost burdens, face the toughest challenges. When these families
purchase or rent housing today, the bulk of their gross income is consumed by
3
The highest homeownership demand is by families earning between $29,717 and $44,575 fortwo- and three-bedroom homes, and the highest renter demand is by families earning less than
$11,143 and more than $37,146, for one- and two-bedroom units (GNOHA 2015).

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housing costs, making them so cost-burdened that there is little room left financiallyto build the essential resilience that can mean the difference between poor andsuccessful recoveries.
Before Katrina, New Orleans was a relatively insular city, a city where many
people were “from here,” deeply rooted in their neighborhoods, traditions, history,
and unique culture, with multiple generations living in the same neighborhoods. As
the city continues to change, partly as a continued effect of Katrina-related rebuilding
efforts, many long-time residents are concerned about the economic effects
newcomers are having on the city—especially regarding housing affordability.
When analyzed through a racialization lens (Omi and Winant 1994; Mills 1997),
we find that African American households in New Orleans disproportionately pay
more of their income toward housing costs than other racial and/or ethnic groups(GNOHA 2015). African Americans also comprise the majority of workers
highlighted in the low-paying industries discussed above, making them one of themost cost-burdened groups in the city. New Orleans is now almost evenly divided
between homeowners (47%) and renters (53%), but renters disproportionately pay
more of their income toward housing costs.4 Racialized inequities show up within
this population, as well, in which more than 60% of renting African Americans are
cost-burdened in New Orleans compared to just 45% of whites (GNOHA 2015).
These differences along racial lines are not new. On the contrary, racialized housing
inequities is a well-documented social problem that has been traced to social,governance, and economic policies orchestrated by white elites and government
agencies throughout the twentieth century (Massey 1993, Anderson and Massey
2001; Gotham 2000). Unfortunately, recent and current policies and practices havecontinued to fail to adequately account for these historical realities, continuing toexacerbate low- to moderate-income African American communities’ abilities tobuild the essential resilience needed to contribute to the possibility of an exception
New Orleans recovery from the next disaster.
Elected and appointed officials have been purveyors of historically racialized
housing inequalities, whether unwittingly or otherwise, throughout the past 12 years.
Consider the federally funded $9 billion homeowner assistance program, labeled“the Road Home” program, managed by the then-newly formed state agency, theLouisiana Recovery Authority, specifically for the purpose of helping residents
rebuild their damaged homes. From its inception, the program had design flaws that
disproportionately affected working-class African American New Orleanians.
Those who have not returned are often from poorer or minority neighborhoods in
New Orleans, and their lack of resources was compounded by such design flaws.
For example, to determine the award amount for rebuilding damaged homes, theRoad Home program used either the pre-storm market value of a home or the costto repair it, whichever of the two was lower. Two houses with the same square4
In 2013, 58% (46,433) of households spent more than one-third of their income toward housing
costs, and 37% (29,271) paid more than half of their income toward housing costs. New Orleansranks second in the nation for the percentage of renters paying more than half of their income on
housing, as described in the HousingNOLA report.

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footage and the same damage, but in different neighborhoods—for example, one in
Lakeview, an affluent area of the city, and one in Gentilly, a mixed-income area ofmore modest homes—would have received dramatically different Road Home
awards. Since many black homeowners lived in neighborhoods with lower market
values, this resulted in awards much less than the cost to repair their homes. Other
program rules, such as a 30% penalty for lack of flood insurance, affected
homeowners with more sporadic incomes who were more likely to let policies lapse
when budgets tightened. Duplication of benefits rules also reduced Road Home
awards; housing assistance from FEMA was used to reduce Road Home awards,
even if rebuilding was not physically possible when the FEMA assistance wasdistributed. Failure to account for the racialized disparities in locations of properties
and household incomes, for example, at state policy-making levels resulted in a
racially biased program that required court-mandated changes (Fletcher 2011;
Beam 2012; Gotham 2014a).5
Other challenges included the tremendous burden of documentation. Many
homeowners and renters lost important documents during the floods caused by thelevee breaches after Katrina. Compiling enough proof to satisfy program
requirements was a challenge that caused delays throughout the process. Even for
homeowners who received a (smaller than anticipated) grant and were able toperform the construction work themselves, additional costs prevented homes frombeing fully repaired. Working on a house a little bit at a time leaves many elements
exposed, creating mold from humidity, or unexpected water leaks from rain. Copper
theft, especially in neighborhoods with few residents, meant that some owners had
to replumb their homes or buy one air conditioner after another. Commuting costs
were high in the years immediately after the storm, with many residents staying inaffordable rentals outside the New Orleans area and returning to the city on
weekends to work on their homes (Sheehan 2015). The barriers to recovery werenumerous and compounding.
With rising housing prices and stagnant wages, it is becoming evident that the
New Orleans housing market is increasingly unable to provide a sufficient supply of
quality, affordable units. Further exacerbating these disparities in New Orleans is
the recent private real estate sector boom, which has ushered in a process ofgentrification6 that has spread beyond the limited geographic borders of trendy
neighborhoods. Affluent individuals and families, as well as real estate flippers andshort-term rental investors, have been purchasing and rehabilitating housing in
5
It is important to note here the state’s role in contributing to and advancing racialized inequitableapprovals of Road Home funds that further hindered low- to moderate-income African American
families to recover. Important in this is the almost full decade of families of limited resources
attempting to rebuild without the same support given to middle-class or more affluent families until
the lawsuit wins but also the state’s descaling practices by using private partners to administer the
program (see Gotham 2014b).
6
We rely on the predominant usage of the term, which incorporates the idea of lower-income population displacement through either built environment upgrading, economic upgrading, or social
upgrading, or a combination of any of these, in a given neighborhood (see Lees et al. 2010; Smithand Williams 1986).

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traditionally working-class African American neighborhoods all around the city,such as Hollygrove, Leonidas, Gentilly, the Upper ninth Ward, Black Pearl, andsegments of the seventh Ward, pushing housing prices to levels well beyond thereach of the working folks who are being forced to look for affordable housing
further out from the metro center where they have historically lived and worked.
Cities facing similar dilemmas have explored several potential solutions, fromattempts to increase income, increase housing supply, or increase subsidies forhousing. This issue is even more critical for New Orleans, with an economy that
depends heavily on tourism. New Orleans’ working-class families simply have notexperienced earnings growth capable of meeting growing housing costs. With nosign of wages dramatically increasing in the very near future, it is critical that New
Orleans creates housing that is affordable for the workers who support the backboneof the New Orleans economy. Doing this, however, is no easy task, as the housing
universe is a field in which numerous competing interests from civic, business, andgovernment spheres, all operating often at cross-purposes between local and statelevels, do not seem to fully grasp what a wicked problem is collectively faced.

9.4

Building a Broad-Based Regime from the Ground Up

In 2007, just 2 years after Katrina, a group of nonprofit community development
leaders came together to strengthen their abilities to help each other during the earlyyears of recovery and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. Over time, this groupcoalesced into the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA), an
organization of housing advocates, developers, educators, and public office decision-­makers who collectively perceived a significant gap in housing affordability
leadership and coordination in the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana.
Andreanecia Morris, serving as lead organizer of the group, assumed a leadershiprole and in 2012 led the formal incorporation of the coalition into an advocacy andlobbying organization.
GNOHA’s evolution (from monthly learning and information sharing gatheringsin 2007 to monthly political influence and housing affordability policy discussions
in 2012), rose out of a deepening understanding that the overly complex housing
field, rife with competing power players, strong personalities, shifting political alliances, and fluctuating economic forces, needed a steady, mission-oriented7 leadership voice. However, desiring to have or build such a voice does not guarantee
attainment of the power to influence anything. While we cannot say that today
GNOHA is a representative example of the type of political regime required toadvance a particular social justice agenda, we do believe that GNOHA can be

7
The word mission used here is to be understood as an antithesis to a profit agenda. That is, mission-oriented work pursues the mission of the organized group (in our case, housing affordability
for GNOHA) as its goal and not profit-making for a particular group or business.

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A. M. Morris and L. Diazviewed as an example of how steps can be taken toward building such a regime.8
The following brief overview of GNOHA’s work and ongoing challenges highlights
the essential work required to build the type of political power needed to advancehousing affordability strategies, especially after an extreme weather catastrophesuch as Katrina posed.

9.4.1

A Lesson from the Battle for Public Housing

In 2007, the New Orleans City Council voted to allow the Housing Authority of
New Orleans (HANO) to approve the demolition of “the Big Four,” the four largest
public housing developments in the city, to the displeasure and chagrin of an
unhappy and boisterous crowd in attendance (Nossiter and Eaton 2007). Advocates
who had looked to the City Council to stay the tide of a decades-long HUD initiative
known as HOPE VI (mixed-income housing) felt betrayed by their locally elected
officials, anticipating that the City Council would use its power to grant demolition
permits to convince HANO to turn a ship around that had sailed some 10 years prior.
The advocates’ logic was simple: they wanted affordable housing immediately forthe displaced low-income families of New Orleans who had yet to return by 2007,
due to the severe shortages in housing stock in the years immediately after Katrina.
Advocates relied on the moral high-ground demand to elected and appointed
officials to “do the right thing,” having little to no power as a collective group to
influence any of the decision-makers.
Herein lies the key point that the remainder of this section highlights. Many
advocates on the ground doing the work to bring affordable housing to theircommunities fail to appreciate the complexity of power brokers in a given urban
setting, specifically how these power brokers interact and how market-oriented
logics overwhelm socially oriented logics. At the time of the 2007 City Council
decision to approve demolition of the “Big Four” public housing developments,
GNOHA was little more than an initial set of welcoming meetings in which nonprofit
housing developers, service providers, and advocates were getting to know eachother and primarily reacted to experiences and changes in the field. While somemembers of the then-nascent group participated in activities designed to influence
council members, GNOHA at that time was not in a position to participate
meaningfully as an organized collective of organizations. The specter of the “BigFour” battle, however, may have provided the impetus to the group to begin to thinkin a more proactive manner.
8
In applying regime politics theory, we recognize that GNOHA has initiated the process of building such a regime in New Orleans, but in its current iteration in 2018, this remains a work inprogress that the organization hopes to achieve within the coming years. The expected outcome ofbuilding such a regime is more robust, sustainable policies that deeply engender housing affordability opportunities for low- to moderate-income families in the city.

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9.4.2

251

The Start of Something Different

In 2008, with nearly a full year of regular convenings and no clear direction yet as
to which direction these gatherings would lead, participants of the meetings began
to push for a strategic direction to the group. Some highlighted the potential powerof a unified voice of housing professionals, pointing to how such a voice could help
the efforts of the individual organizations assembled. Others pointed to the direct
issues housing organizations were dealing with in helping residents navigate theRoad Home program. Knowledgeable with first-hand experience, the group openly
discussed its combined frustrations with the program’s design and the lack of astrong enough voice to bring these issues to the attention of Road Home
administrators at the State Capitol.
Conversations changed from reactive information sharing to participants asking
for government officials to be invited to the meetings. This simple request may seem
innocuous, but for advocate groups, this can be a highly polarizing line, with thosein favor of including government officials pitted against those not in favor of suchaction, often on the grounds that members of government are not trustworthy
partners. At the heart of this polarization lies a key philosophical position about how
to effect social justice change as an advocate, stated simply as either working withgovernment officials or working against them. Not everyone at the table was of thesame opinion, but after some deliberation, the group agreed that it was worthwhileinviting government officials to meetings if only to educate the group on the mostcurrent thinking about housing policies and programs. With this agreement,
GNOHA opened the door toward acceptance of, and ultimately adherence to, key
foundational frameworks in its ongoing work to this day, research deeply, build
broad relationships across the field, and work with government officials.
Between 2008 and 2009, GNOHA shifted its meetings from learning about participating members’ organizational challenges to learning from government officials at different levels of governance about their housing work. The now
better-­organized group spoke to city, state, and federal officials across agencies,
inviting them to speak at monthly meetings, ensuring ongoing learning and communication about housing policies and programs being considered and/or implemented. Through this initial effort, GNOHA began to build relationships with
officials and learned about opportunities to provide input, give feedback, and present our ideas. The coalition members learned, for example, that there were consistent gaps in knowledge, with government officials lacking sufficient data and/or
policy ideas that could help inform their work and local advocates and practitioners
lacking clarity about decision-making parameters, timetables, and opportunities.
During these learning opportunities, GNOHA leaders realized that if they could
conduct the research, it could provide data-driven solutions to the same government
officials with whom the members were beginning to build relationships.
The next step in development as a coalition evolved from this realization that thegroup could engage in policy analysis and recommendation, doing so in partnershipwith government officials, wherever possible. By the end of 2009, GNOHA evolved

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A. M. Morris and L. Diazagain, embarking on policy research, analysis, and writing, as well as agreeing toinclude government officials as members of the coalition (a decision that holds stillin 2019). However, through 2015, GNOHA remained a small organization, despite
having an average 40–50 annual member roster of organizations that included
housing professional advocates, service providers, nonprofit developers, andgovernment officials.9 Compared to the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) model ofcommunity organizing, which has more than eight decades of successful organizing
across the United States, the group was certainly not broad in its membership(Chambers 2003).

9.4.3

Toward a Broad-Based Regime10

Before moving further, it is important to clarify what we mean by the phrase broad-­
based regime. Beginning with the word regime, we want to emphasize the theoretical understanding of this word, borrowed from and framed upon Stone’s
conceptualization (1989, 1998, 2006), which refers to an organized coalition of
power brokers across sectors in an urban setting who/that have agreed to pursue ashared vision through a set of programmatic and/or legislative policies. We cannot
say that GNOHA and its sister organization HousingNOLA11 in 2019 constitute a
regime in the housing field, but it is the direction in which the organizations areintentionally heading. Without meaningful participation across business, civic, andgovernance sectors at local and state levels in the intentional pursuit of affordable
housing solutions, GNOHA will not have the requisite power to see ideas reachadoption and implementation. Building such a regime requires dialoguing, wherever
possible (we note that sometimes it is not possible), across ideological lines, acrosspolitical partisan lines, and certainly across advocate-government lines, in an effort
to bridge understanding and build the needed unified voice that enables solutions
that benefit cost-burdened families who are quickly running out of affordable
housing options in New Orleans. We conceptualize a broad-based regime as
involving not only the power brokers mentioned above but also the volunteer public
involvement of everyday residents.
In 2015, it had one full-time staff member and two fellows. The 2-year GNOHA Road Home
Liaison Group contract with the State of Louisiana added three full-time contractors from 2015 to2017. The volunteer Board of Governors oversees policy and advocacy efforts and the chair serves
as president managing the day-to-day activities.
10
The concept builds on the IAF idea of a broad base and the regime politics theory of a powerfulpolitical regime base by combining the two to incorporate four distinct groups: everyday residents,
political decision-makers, business leaders, and professional nonprofit leaders. Everyday residents
comprise all folks interested in being civically involved but who are not professional nonprofit
staff.
11
The HousingNOLA plan initiated by GNOHA also gave rise to the creation of a 501(c)3 organization that could focus on the civic involvement and education of everyday residents on housing
issues. This new organization, created in 2015, is named HousingNOLA (sharing the title of thereport also mentioned here).
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Through the years, GNOHA has had some successes in this building effort and,of course, many failures. One highly significant, if only temporary, recent successinvolves Governor John Bel Edwards and Louisiana Senate Bill 462. Louisiana
Senate Bill 462, from the 2018 Legislative Session, targets municipalities attempting
to create affordable housing units by legislating that such units be included in new,market-rate developments. This strategy is generally known as inclusionary zoning.
The bill bans mandatory inclusionary zoning policies outright at the municipal
level, effectively eradicating a municipality’s ability to act locally in dealing withhousing affordability issues (Louisiana Senate Bill 462). GNOHA members andHousingNOLA partners were aware of the bill and actively worked with otherlegislators, aides to Governor Edwards, and other channels to keep the bill frompassing, as GNOHA deemed it severely harmful to its ability to promote one of the
key strategic tools in the housing affordability toolbox. Thanks, in part (GNOHA
members believe), to these efforts, Governor Edwards vetoed the bill, which had
made it out of the Senate floor (Edwards 2018). However, this veto depends on acity making use of an inclusionary zoning policy before the 2019 Louisiana
legislative session, with a stipulation that the governor would sign a similar bill in2019 if it reached his desk and no city has shown a need for such a policy. While
GNOHA rightly views the 2018 veto as a small win for affordable housing advocates,
the governor’s caveat serves as a reminder that the power to influence government
officials that GNOHA’s members have cultivated since 2008 remains limited inscope and reach. The work is far from done.
Of course, GNOHA members went to work locally, holding conversations with
the Mayor of New Orleans, as well as New Orleans City Council officials, the City
Planning Commission, and respective staff for each. Through this work, GNOHA
recently experienced a partial victory when on November 13, 2018, New Orleans
City Planning Commission approved a set of recommendations for zoning changes
that included inclusionary zoning incentives for future multi-housing development(Evans 2018). As a follow-up to this approval, on January 24, 2019, the New Orleans
City Council passed a motion to draft new ordinances. This vote rejected
recommendations from the City Planning Commission that would have not included
mandatory inclusionary zoning as the centerpiece of the Smart Housing Mix. Whilethe new policy is being drafted, the Council requires data from an as-yet unfinishedfeasibility study that was being conducted at the time in order to determine the mostviable option to consider next (Litten 2019). This brings New Orleans closer to a
mandatory inclusionary zoning policy to the City of New Orleans, and if we are able
to accomplish a city council vote before a similar bill to 2018’s Senate Bill 462
passes through committee, house, and senate floors in 2019, then GNOHA will haveaccomplished a significant piece of its multi-pronged solutions recommendations(GNOHA 2015).
GNOHA’s recommendation on inclusionary zoning comes directly out of our2015 HousingNOLA plan, in which the coalition articulates a 10-year strategy andimplementation plan for creating more affordable housing for New Orleans residents(GNOHA 2015). However, this plan could easily remain a shelf ornament were it
not for the intentional work GNOHA began in 2012 to engage non-housing

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A. M. Morris and L. Diazprofessionals in our efforts. Without a base that includes residents from all walks oflife, GNOHA would simply be a coalition of housing professionals in the business,government, and civic sectors. While a feat in and of itself to bring these disparate
professional groups together, GNOHA members agreed early on that inclusion ofresidents needed to be a priority, which began in earnest after incorporating as a 501(c) 4 in 2012.
After agreeing to create a housing plan, GNOHA intentionally set out to build abroad base, hosting a housing summit in 2014, which served as the launching point
for a set of community meetings held throughout the city, in which GNOHA
members and residents codeveloped a housing plan. In 2017, GNOHA andHousingNOLA launched a multi-year campaign, titled Put Housing First, designed
to secure 80,000 pledges over the next 10 years, and in 2018 implemented a housing
affordability awareness march in order to bring attention of the issue to a broader
audience. These efforts combined have the intention of informing and including
residents who are not housing professionals in the effort to build a unified voice forhousing affordability.
Today GNOHA continues to explore and expand ways of incorporating more
residents, as the base can never be broad enough. Members of GNOHA are certainthat had the group not intentionally included residents in this work, the type ofactions taken by the New Orleans City Council in the last 3 months may not haveoccurred at all.

9.4.4

Work on the Buy-In

Ten years after convening with housing-oriented nonprofits, GNOHA has developed into a significant voice on issues of housing affordability. However, this work
is far from over, and continues to present endless challenges. As mentioned above,
GNOHA is moving toward building an affordable housing regime, but it is not there
yet. One major reason for this is that the very term affordable housing fails to elicit
a unified response. There are still many constituents, be they residents, government
officials, or private developers, who scoff at the idea that New Orleans needs
affordable housing, or who believe that affordable housing is a dirty word, or who
simply fail to understand the basic concept that families cannot afford basic, decent,and safe housing because of external social forces. Not everyone, unfortunately, hasbought in to this issue as requiring attention, despite a 2018 survey of mayors acrossthe United States recognizing insufficient living-wage jobs and high housing costs
as the top two obstacles to social mobility (Initiative on Cities 2019). We would add
that, in our estimation, these are the top two obstacles to building essential resilience
to disasters: housing cost burden and lack of living wages.
Building buy-in requires intentional work that targets not just housing advocatesand providers, but also the general public, the business sector, government officials,
and other non-housing advocates and service providers. As housing advocates, wehave a clear definition for the term affordable housing that we believe everyone can9Reimagining Housing: Affordability Crisis and Its Role in Disaster Resilience…

255

understand, but it is not universally understood, much less accepted. In order toexplore the types of solutions that can support cost-burdened families at local levels,
affordable housing as a real issue needs to be better understood by cities so that
discussions can incorporate the disconnects among cost-burdened families, low
wages, and poor transportation, for example. GNOHA’s efforts through the Put
Housing First campaign, the march in 2018, and ongoing participation on local
radio and television talk shows help promote this understanding in New Orleans,
which we believe contributes to mitigating against traditional skepticisms.

9.5

Recommendations

The following set of recommendations for advancing housing affordability in cities
is directly copied from the 2015 HousingNOLA Plan created by GNOHA, theMayor’s Office of Community Development and the Foundation for Louisiana. The
plan can be downloaded directly from www.housingnola.org/main/plans. The
recommendations fall under five priorities, which are as follows.
1. Preserve existing supply and expand the total supply of affordable rental andhomeownership opportunities throughout your city. A recommended strategy
includes creating a working partnership among city officials, other government
officials, housing advocates, and housing providers to increase create/update
housing stock, with time-limited targets in 5-year increments to evaluate andmeasure.
2. Prevent future displacement through development activities and continued study
and policy review. A recommended strategy includes creating standard zoning
polices and working with key stakeholders to develop workforce housing
strategies and other creative ideas that assist cost-burdened families dealing withthe pressures of higher costs brought about by gentrification. For example, in
New Orleans, through work with the Assessor’s Office, a referendum passed in
the 2018 local elections to allow homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods toease into their increased taxes over time rather than immediately upon newassessments reflecting rapid neighborhood changes.
3. Enforce and promote fair housing policies throughout your city. This work,
while not new in the affordable housing toolkit, remains underutilized. It requires
comprehensive, coordinated work across sectors to improve fair housing
practices in renting, selling, buying, safety, and so on. Rather than leaving thisissue up to chance, cities are encouraged to actively and intentionally work withadvocates and businesses to engage proactively.
4. Encourage sustainable design and infrastructure for all residents in your city.
Working collaboratively with private, civic, and government leaders, study yourcity’s market, and determine feasible incentives to consider for local or statelegislative sessions.

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A. M. Morris and L. Diaz

5. Increase accessibility for all, including residents with special needs in your city.
Housing affordability is not an issue for just one group of people, as it affects
individuals and families across all walks of life. Ensure that housing affordability
policies intentionally include and align with other city policies aimed ataddressing the issues faced by special needs population.

9.6

Discussion

This chapter provides a brief snapshot of the complexity behind understanding
housing affordability factors (both historical and current), how these factors interact
at the local New Orleans level, and how advocates, along with business andgovernment leaders, can work together with residents to build regimes with enoughpower to implement policies that address affordable housing inequities. As such, we
hope the chapter can inform future research into the roles and relationships of andamong different players in local housing fields and how these interact and build
regimes capable of implementing desired policies aimed at creating housing
affordability. With mayors across the country recognizing the connection between
wages and housing affordability as vital to the economic vitality of their residents,
we hope more cross-disciplinary channels are explored by practitioners who
advocate for affordable housing and living wages throughout the United States,
particularly as it relates to considering housing affordability as a key strategy forbuilding extreme weather essential resilience among cities’ residents.

9.7

Conclusion

A true broad-based political regime that (1) is cognizant of how housing cost-­
burdens keep a significant portion of the population from building the required
essential resilience to respond to disasters and (2) makes housing affordability forlow- to moderate-income families its goals has the potential to counter the traditionally and historically market-oriented and racialized approaches to housing that has
plagued most cities and enhanced its residents’ vulnerabilities. We see a key policy
opportunity not just for New Orleans, but also for other cities, to install policies thattackle the growing housing affordability crisis in such a way that it can enable thethousands and hundreds of thousands of working families in all cities to be able toafford a safe, decent home that does not cost-burden them in any fashion.
Accomplishing such a feat would enable families to focus on building the essential
resilience they need to deal with future disasters without such disasters becoming acatastrophic event for them and the cities in which they live. If housing affordability
isn’t intentionally addressed post disaster, Katrina has shown us that traditional market forces left unchecked will simply push vunerable working families to the fringesof society by exacerbating and even expanding socioeconomic inequalities, which
in turn contribute in converting disasters for these families into catastrophes.

9

Reimagining Housing: Affordability Crisis and Its Role in Disaster Resilience…

9.8

257

Postscript

Our brief snapshot in this chapter provides a glimpse into the growing cost burdenof working-class families in New Orleans, and within this group we want tospecifically close with a brief mention of the impact gentrification is having on our
culture bearers. Culture bearers include musicians, artists, Black Masking Indians,
Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and a host of other creative individuals who contribute to the cultural experience packaged and sold around the world as being uniquely
New Orleans. The majority of our culture bearers hail from working-class families
who before Katrina lived in the same neighborhoods across the generations. Housing
before the storm was deeply affordable, allowing culture bearers who earned lessthan $20,000 a year to remain home and continue to keep New Orleans culture alive.
With housing prices going up, these same families and individuals are increasingly
finding it difficult to stay in the neighborhoods they historically called home, straining their abilities to continue to create the cultural texture so many tourists enjoy
when they visit. If we are not successful at creating the affordable housing stock
these folks need, we indeed run the risk of losing what is “New Orleans.”

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Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is notincluded in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted bystatutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly fromthe copyright holder.

Part V

Types/Locations of Communities andTheir Responses to Extreme
Weather: Suburban/Mid StateChapter 10

The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana
Flood: With Special Focus on the Different
Rescue and Recovery Responses It
Engendered
Michelle Annette Meyer, Brant Mitchell, Shannon Van Zandt,
and Stuart Nolan

10.1

Introduction

When the Great Louisiana Flood occurred in August 2016, it was the worst disasterto affect the USA since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (Yan and Flores 2016). However,it was largely overlooked by those outside of the area due to a lack of a “name” thatis common to tropical storms (Scott 2016). The unprecedented amount of rain
resulted damage or destruction of more than 90,000 homes (including 28,000 rental
units), more than 40,000 homes without electricity, emergency sheltering of 11,699
residents, rescue of more than 28,000 people, and 13 drowning deaths during the4-day disaster (GOHSEP 2016; Rhoden 2016; Terrell 2016). The USA saw thisextreme flooding eclipsed by Hurricane Harvey and the rest of the devastating 2017
hurricane season barely a year later.
The Louisiana flooding in 2016, though quickly overshadowed, set the stage fora variety of innovations in both disaster response and recovery – making Louisiana
the test bed, once again, for disaster activities, organizations, programs, and policies.
In this chapter, we discuss this flood event to showcase some of the adaptation
strategies Louisianans began that provide insights for addressing large-scale
M. A. Meyer (*)
Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, Department of Landscape Architectureand Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USAe-mail: mmeyer@arch.tamu.edu
B. Mitchell · S. Nolan
Stephenson Disaster Management Institute, Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge, LA, USAe-mail: bmitch9@lsu.edu; snolan7@lsu.edu
S. Van Zandt
Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University,
College Station, TX, USAe-mail: svanzandt@tamu.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_10

263

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M. A. Meyer et al.

flooding and disaster-related needs across the country. We review two particularinnovations that grew dramatically in 2016. The first is the exponential rise ofcivilian, water-based rescue teams. The second is multiple efforts at affordable
housing recovery, particularly for renters, which is often an overlooked aspect ofoverall disaster recovery.

10.2

The Setting for a Perfect Storm

The August flooding in southern Louisiana set numerous records for rainfall in theregion and extended across 26 parishes (which are county-equivalents) (GOHSEP
2016; Di Liberto 2016). The areas in and around Greater Baton Rouge (population
approximately 829,000) tend to have a relatively flat topography and rely on threerivers, the Amite River, the Comite River, and the Tangipahoa River, to transport
excess rainwater into Lake Pontchartrain to the south. Hundreds of tributaries andbayous also drain surface water from neighborhoods to these rivers. During the first
36 hours of the rain commencing on the afternoon of 11 August 2016, the rivers
quickly filled and reached major flood stage, which is summarized by the National
Weather Service as potential catastrophic flooding with the possibility to harm lifeand property (NWS 2017). Before the event was over, four rivers (Amite, Comite,
Tangipahoa, and Tickfaw rivers) shattered previously recorded high water levels by
as much as 6 feet at 11 different locations (Table 10.1) (Di Liberto 2016).
Precipitation finally diminished about 2 days later. Throughout the Greater Baton
Rouge and Lafayette areas, localities recorded 10–20 inches of rain over a 48-hour
period (Table 10.2). Some of the hardest hit areas – North Baton Rouge neighborhoods
and South Lafayette –experienced 20–30 inches of rain, while the hardest hit parish,
Livingston, recorded rainfalls reaching 32 inches. According to the National
Weather Service’s Hydrometeorological Design Study Center, these 48-hour rainTable 10.1 River gauge records set during the August 2016 flood event organized by day therecord was set
Gauge
Comite – Olive BranchAmite – Darlington
Amite – Magnolia
Tangipahoa – Amite
Tickfaw – Holden
Comite – Joor Rd
Amite – Denham Spring
Amite – Bayou Manchac
Tangipahoa – RobertAmite – Port Vincent
Amite – French Settlement

Old record (year)
23.37 feet (1961)
22.05 feet (1990)
51.91 feet (1977)
24.73 feet (2016)21.04 feet (1983)
30.99 feet (2001)
41.50 feet (1983)
18.85 feet (1983)
27.10 feet (1921)
14.65 feet (1983)
7.40 feet (1977)

New record (year)
26.96 feet (8/13)
22.54 feet (8/13)
58.56 feet (8/13)
26.28 feet (8/13)
22.16 feet (8/13)
34.22 feet (8/14)
46.20 feet (8/14)
21.50 feet (8/14)
27.33 feet (8/14)
17.50 feet (8/15)
9.21 feet (8/16)

Difference+3.59 feet
+0.49 feet
+6.65 feet
+1.55 feet
+1.12 feet
+1.23 feet
+4.7 feet+2.65 feet
+0.23 feet+2.85 feet
+1.81 feet

10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…
Table 10.2 Rainfall amounts
observed over a 72-hour
period (National Weather
Service 2019)72-hour rain totals
Livingston
Norwood (East Feliciana Parish)
Zachary (East Baton Rouge Parish)
Baker (East Baton Rouge Parish)

265

25.5 inches
22.0 inches
26.1 inches
21.2 inches

Fig. 10.1 Map of Louisiana showing the percentage of homes damaged in the 2016 floods by parish. (Adapted from the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute and Louisiana State University)

fall totals in Louisiana exceeded a 0.2% annual probability (GOHSEP 2016).
Overall, the impacted area was roughly 180 miles in length and 80 miles widespread
across inland South Louisiana. Figure 10.1 shows the affected areas and the percent
of homes affected in each parish.
This flooding is not unique to Louisiana. Predictions across the country with achanging climate indicate that many more inland areas will see increasing numberof days with extreme rainfall (Di Liberto 2017). The Fourth National Climate
Assessment (Reidmiller et al. 2017) describes increasing likelihood of extreme
rainfall events across nearly the entire USA, which when coupled with decaying anddamaged stormwater and flood-related infrastructure will produce higher risks of266

M. A. Meyer et al.

flooding throughout the country. Extreme rainfall in Southeast USA, specifically, is
expected to double or triple the current average frequency. The total rainfall witnessed in Louisiana in the 2016 floods was barely less than the totals witnessed ayear later during Hurricane Harvey, in which the highest recorded rainfall was 48
inches and many Texas coastal areas experienced between 20 and 40 inches of rain
in just a few days (Di Liberto 2017).
Extreme rainfall events produce challenges for emergency management andcommunity hazard planning. These events, in comparison to tropical coastal storms,
lack the lead times for populations to evacuate or to prepare their homes for thewater. Also, in comparison to riverine flooding, extreme rainfall also lacks the leadtime to prepare sandbags and attempt to reduce the flood impacts. Thus, residents
are often caught by surprise. This “unexpected” inland flooding from extreme rain
is soon to be a regularity for many parts of the USA. Two innovations we discuss
grew in response to the immediate needs and extreme damage of the 2016
Louisiana flooding – water-based rescue and rental housing recovery. These ideas
provide ideas for other locations across the country that will soon also be adapting
to extreme rainfall disasters.

10.3

 esponse Challenges and Innovations: The GrowthRof Organized Civilian Rescuers

The speed of rainfall onset and the lack of a coastal storm to warrant evacuation
orders generated challenges for first responders from the state to local levels. These
challenges led to emergency managers calling for help from civilians, and many
civilian rescue teams answered this call. Often lumped together under the name“the Cajun Navy,” this multitude of organizations and individuals operated often
independently of emergency officials to rescue thousands of lives.
Response operations are normally a very centralized effort coordinated by state
leaders from the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC). At the time theprecipitation began to accelerate on 11 August 2016, the Louisiana Governor’s
Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) had in place
its Crisis Action Team consisting of members of its Operations Staff actively
monitoring ongoing events as they were being reported by local officials. State andlocal officials began lifesaving actions as early as 06:00 Friday morning on 12
August 2016. However, due to the rapidly deteriorating conditions and the immediate
nature of the requests from local officials for lifesaving equipment and personnel,
the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries agents, Louisiana National
Guardsmen, Louisiana State Police troopers, and State Fire Marshal agents wereimmediately pressed into service to augment local first responders without theformalities of the usual memorandums of understanding or standard operating protocol for support requests (GOHSEP 2016). At the end of the day, 237 human rescues had been reported in 6 different parishes. Among the lifesaving actions taken

10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

267

this day included the full evacuation of 145 nursing home residents in the city of
Denham Springs as well as the evacuation of a housing authority that included 19
individuals with access and functional needs and 11 caretakers in the city of New
Iberia (GOHSEP 2016). While the exact number of people who were rescued is
impossible to be determined, the State After Action Report (AAR) states that the
SEOC alone coordinated the rescue of more than 15,000 people and 2200 pets with
the Louisiana National Guard and their high-water vehicles responsible for the
majority of those rescues.
Further recognizing the escalating need, the state called for help from civilians,a call that would foreshadow the same type of call for help by Texas jurisdictions
during Hurricane Harvey (McCausland et al. 2017). The AAR acknowledged that
more than 13,000 citizens were rescued by local first responders who were aided byvolunteers equipped with their own flat-bottomed boats. These volunteers havesince become more organized as part of a growing “Cajun Navy Movement,” which
includes several different nonprofit and for-profit organizations, some using the
Cajun Navy moniker, who travel across the country to do water-based rescues(Meyer et al. 2018). These organizations and other civilian rescue groups have since
responded to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017 and Florence and Michaelin 2018, along with other smaller-scale flooding in Texas.
Helping behavior in disasters, like that of civilian rescuers, takes a variety offorms, ranging along a continuum from spontaneous and informal efforts to moreorganized emergent group activity to, finally, formal organizational response(National Research Council 2006). Disaster research has long shown that survivors
are most likely to be rescued and offered aid first by other survivors in close
proximity (Noji 1997; Aldrich 2012; Kendra and Wachtendorf 2016). This individual
or small group rescue scenario can be enlarged to emergent spontaneous groups thatquickly organize to address a specific need without a formal, bureaucraticorganization. They begin to perform many different types of activities quickly
following a disaster impact, including providing emergency assistance, identifying
and registering survivors, and engaging in cleanup and community restoration
efforts (Forrest 1978; Dynes 1974). Although classic and contemporary scholarshiphas described spontaneous volunteer behavior in disaster settings (e.g., Barton
1969; Fritz 1961; Steffen and Fothergill 2009) as well as formal and informalorganizational response (e.g., Dynes 1974; Kendra and Wachtendorf 2003; Aguirre
et al. 1995; Clarke and Short 1993; Perry and Lindell 2003), as Tierney et al. (2001:
113) noted, “we know relatively little about spontaneous volunteers and even lessabout the other patterns of volunteer behavior” such as loosely organized, volunteer
rescue efforts like that which occurred in 2016 and since.
The “Cajun Navy” is the popular moniker of outdoorsmen (and women) who
began as groups of civilians mostly from southern Louisiana who used their personalflat-bottomed boats to conduct volunteer rescues. Some of these groups claim
origins during Hurricane Katrina, while others began or diverged during the Baton
Rouge floods in 2016 and then in storms in 2017 and 2018 (Ancelet et al. 2013).
While neighbor-to-neighbor rescues during disasters are not uncommon, the Cajun

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Navy Movement has quickly grown from emergent spontaneous response to an
extending network of more or less structured organizations that coordinate bothestablished and spontaneous volunteers during emergency rescue and response.
These groups claim origins in Hurricane Katrina where they boated through New
Orleans calling out for those in need of rescue. With the growth of social media
giants Facebook and Twitter and the introduction of Zello (the walkie-talkie, two-­way communication application for smartphones, zello.com), these groups wereable to change their rescue tactics during the 2016 flooding to identify those in needof rescue and then coordinate with their members to get a volunteer to that person(Personal Interview 2018; Raja 2017).
This emergent and volunteer behavior is known to occur in all types of natural
disasters, but the use of social media and the rise of smartphone applications allowed
the Cajun Navy Movement to coalesce and spread, making it an innovation in
civilian response but also a challenge to official emergency management practices.
Emergency management commonly uses a command and control format in whichan Emergency Operations Center, led by emergency managers, police, fire, andother essential government personnel, directs government and private resources(Dynes 1983; Schneider 1992; Siegel 1985). Emergency managers and their
protocols follow strict lines of authority and maintain standard operating proceduresand predetermined divisions of labor (Schneider 1992).
The Incident Command System (ICS) is the official model for command andcontrol in emergency management and represents paramilitary, top-down,
centralized rigid structure of authority in disaster response. There are 12 essential
features that define how ICS is implemented, 2 of these essential features areaccountability and dispatch/deployment. Accountability requires that all deployedresources must check in when they arrive to a disaster, and resource tracking isrequired by operations to ensure all known assets conducting operations areaccounted for by command to avoid duplication of effort, among other concerns. In
addition, dispatch/deployment explicitly states that personnel and equipment should
not self-deploy to an event. Any self-deploying personnel and equipment to disasterareas may cause unintended stress on the established and formal command andcontrol structure unless properly coordinated in advance.
In these systems, spontaneous behavior, including normal volunteer helping
behavior, can be viewed as problematic and is prevented or, at minimum, controlled.
The civilian rescuers represent a direct challenge to these traditional emergency
management operations. Volunteers commonly self-deployed and often did not
check in with local officials (Personal Interview 2017). For example, the officials insome areas of Texas refused to allow them into their communities so the boat
rescuers circumvented the main entries to participate in rescues anyway. State andlocal lawmakers both encouraged rescue groups, via providing gasoline to support
their efforts (Hilburn 2017), and also expressed concerns particularly around issuesof liability and risk (Ballard 2018). This led Louisiana as a state, and local
jurisdictions, to consider legal adaptations that could facilitate, coordinate, or,conversely, control these civilian efforts (Crisp 2018; Grueskin 2017). As rescue
groups rise and make use of social media and new technologies, jurisdictions across10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

269

the country will need to prepare for this coordinated influx of volunteers. And as
more powerful unpredicted extreme rainfall storms increase in number, thechallenges will have even more of an urgency to be addressed.

10.4

Housing Recovery Challenges and Policy Innovations

After rescuing ended and civilian and formal emergency responders returned home,residents across the state began the usually long recovery process. Gutted but
unrepaired homes abutted properties with FEMA trailers and repairs underway
throughout parts of East Baton Rouge Parish in December 2017, roughly 16 months
following the flood. Other parts of the parish looked as though a 500-year flood
event never happened, with homes completely rebuilt. Recovery, especially housing
recovery, is the most understudied and misunderstood stage of a disaster (Rubin2009). Recovery is uneven across neighborhoods and within neighborhoods, which
may seem random, but research shows some predictable patterns (Hamideh andRongerude 2018; Pais and Elliott 2008; Phillips et al. 2010). Affordable housing
especially affordable rental housing (that which costs no more than 30% of ahousehold’s income, including utilities (HUD 2018)) is often damaged the mostduring disasters, making existing affordable housing crises much worse (Tulane
School of Architecture 2007). Yet, little research or recovery programs address
housing affordability issues or housing tenure after floods (Lee and Zandt 2018).
Hurricane Katrina showed that social stratification across class and race greatly
affected return and recovery of housing. Those who returned to their previous homes
the soonest following Hurricane Katrina were predominantly white, older, better
educated, and homeowners and sustained less damage to their property compared tothose who were displaced for longer periods of time or permanently displaced(Fussell et al. 2010). Even with equivalent amounts of housing damage, wealthier
individuals, especially homeowners with insurance, returned more quickly. Higher
socioeconomic status entails the financial resources to rebuild and also the cultural
knowledge to maneuver the complicated US disaster aid process and political andsymbolic capital to garner rebuilding assistance (Finch et al. 2010).
These disparate housing recovery outcomes from Hurricane Katrina are notunique. Social vulnerability to disasters describes how “social inequalities andhistoric patterns of social relations” generate differential disaster impacts and recovery trajectories (Phillips and Fordham 2010, p. 4). When disaster impacts are filtered through the US social structure of race, class, gender, nationality, and disability,
for example, they create “multiple and highly unequal processes of resettlement”(Fussell and Elliott 2009, p. 389). Evidence from numerous disasters across the
US and the world shows that social vulnerability affects population return andhousing recovery following disasters (Thomas et al. 2013; Peacock et al. 1997,
2014; Van Zandt et al. 2012).
Social vulnerability highlights how preexisting inequalities and existingsocial patterns, such as the current housing affordability crisis and declining

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M. A. Meyer et al.

Table 10.3 Housing types before the flood (American Community Survey 2016, 5-year estimates)a
Total housing
units
United States
134,054,899
All 22 parishes
775,544
Acadia Parish
25,867
Ascension Parish
44,127
East Baton Rouge
191,397
ParishEast Feliciana
8177
ParishIberia Parish
30,077
Iberville Parish
13,009Jefferson Davis
13,596
ParishLafayette Parish
97,847
Livingston Parish
53,673
11,298
Pointe Coupee
ParishSt. Helena Parish
5157
St. James Parish
8702
St. Landry Parish
36,172
St. Martin Parish
22,536
98,916
St. Tammany
ParishTangipahoa
52,513
ParishVermilion Parish
25,869Washington
21,284
ParishWest Baton
10,078
Rouge Parish
West Feliciana
5249
Parisha

Percent
single-family
detached units
61.6
69.1
73.4
72.1
63.6

Percent
Percent boat/ multifamily
RV/van units units
0.1
32.0
0.2
10.2
0.2
8.0
0.4
7.2
0
33.3

Percent
mobile
homes
6.3
20.5
18.3
20.4
3.1

67.8

0.1

4.0

28.1

66.4
71.3
75.3

0.1
0.7
0

11.3
7.7
6.8

22.2
20.3
17.9

65
66.3
72

0.1
0.4
0.1

23.8
7.0
6.1

11.1
26.3
21.7

58.3
75.4
68.9
66.3
77.8

0
0
0.1
0.2
0.1

3.6
9.0
9.3
6.3
14.2

38.1
15.6
21.7
27.2
7.8

62.1

0.1

15.6

22.2

71
70.4

0.6
0.2

6.2
5.7

22.2
23.7

70.5

0

9.0

20.6

69

0.2

9.5

21.3

Bold italics indicate greater than US value

homeownership rates, create disparate disaster effects across population groups.
The population that often recovers the quickest from disasters – homeowners withinsurance – is declining nationwide. The Great Recession starting in 2008 began adecline in US homeownership to a 50-year low (Rohe 2017). Consequently, renting
is rising across all income groups, to nearly 40% of the US population (Table 10.3).
The corresponding increase in renters quickly outpaced the amount of available rental
housing and drove up rental costs. In 2011, for example, there was a shortfall of 4.8
million rental units that would be affordable to persons making less than about$19,000 (Fernald 2013). Recent analysis by Freddie Mac (a federal mortgage
agency) shows that newly constructed rental units, for example, are serving a

10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

271

greater proportion of higher-income renters than they were in 2010 (Freddie Mac2017), even though nearly half of all current renters make less than $30,000 a year
(Fernald 2013).
The affordable housing crisis is worsened by disasters in several ways. First,
affordable housing, both owned and rented, often receives the most damage indisasters because it is usually located in more hazardous areas, such as floodplains,is of lower quality that doesn’t withstand disaster impacts, and often lacks the
mitigation upgrades to prevent disaster damage (Fothergill and Peek 2004; Peacocket al. 2018). Housing that is affordable to the lowest-income renters, furthermore, isoften more than 50 years old and more likely to be of inadequate quality according
to today’s building standards (Fernald 2013).
Second, tenants and landlords alike have fewer incentives to undertake mitigation that would prevent disaster damage (Burby et al. 2003). Renters are dependent
upon their landlords’ permission to reoccupy their previous housing, which heightens the risk of displacement (McCarthy et al. 2001; Burby et al. 2003; Morrow
1999; Fussell and Harris, 2014). Landlords may not rebuild or may rebuild theirproperties to higher market rates (Comerio 1998). Zhang and Peacock (2009) andPeacock et al. (2014) found that rental housing came back the slowest following
Hurricanes Andrew in Florida (1992) and Ike in Texas (2008).
Third, rental rates and housing costs rise due to reduced supply of affordable
housing. In Baton Rouge, for example, fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment
increased from $728 to $789 between 2016 and 2018 (Grueskin 2018a; Grueskin2018b). Disasters ignite “recovery machines” in which pro-economic growth coalitions take advantage of recovery funding to rebuild neighborhoods with higher priced
housing and amenities. These efforts make it more difficult for lower-income survivors to acquire post-disaster housing (Elliott and Pais 2010; Gotham and Greenberg2014). Political will and local funding to support fair and affordable housing andcounter the recovery machine are often lacking (Weil 2009). Galveston, Texas, following Hurricane Ike, and New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina, both madechanges to their public housing structures and availability, which significantly
reduced the number of affordable units (Tulane School of Architecture 2007; Walters2018). Four large housing projects in New Orleans, for example, were replaced bymixed-­income housing therefore reducing the number of fully subsidized units(Henrici et al. 2010). Evidence from longitudinal research following Hurricane
Katrina showed that low-income African American mothers living in subsidized public housing were the least likely to return to their same housing, followed by renters(Fussell and Harris 2014). In East Baton Rouge Parish, 753 families using Section 8
public housing vouchers were flooded in the August 2016 floods. About 42% of thosewere unable to locate another unit to use their voucher in the 6 months after the flood(Jones 2017). Renters, beyond having lower income on average, also are less likely
than homeowners to have various financial investments, such as retirement accounts,
life insurance, stocks, certificates of deposit, or savings bonds that can be useful incrises to fund new housing options (Fernald 2013).
Fourth, and importantly, recovery programs through the government or nonprofits
are overwhelmingly targeted at owner-occupied housing (Comerio 1997; GAO
2010). Louisiana, for example, allowed eligible homeowners of any income level to272

M. A. Meyer et al.

receive 100% reimbursement for repairs, providing an additional $110 million tohomeowners from their Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery(CDBG-DR) provided by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD) (Grueskin 2018b). Nonprofits that also address recovery housing often limit
their programs to homeowners. For example, the Housing First Alliance of theCapital Area is a collaboration of about 30 local nonprofits that formed following
the 2016 Louisiana Floods to address housing issues. They concentrated on restoring single-family homes first (Gallo 2017a; Gallo 2017b). Case studies have shownthat governments lack clear policy strategies to address renters or rental housing
issues in contrast to homeowner programs, and rental programs implemented areoften ad hoc (Mukherji 2015). Government options attempted include rental subsidies or vouchers to renters to find their own housing elsewhere, temporary housing,subsidized public housing, economic incentives to rental property owners to rebuild,and homeownership programs. All these programs are often slow to begin following
disaster. The “Road Home” program following Hurricane Katrina that supported
owners of rental property to rebuild began 2 years after the disaster (GAO 2010).
Some programs even have unintended (or intended) consequences of spatially isolating low-income populations from others, as occurred in Japan following the 1995
earthquake (Hirayama 2000), or increasing racial and economic segregation, suchas following Hurricane Katrina. Furthermore, these programs often do not address
the long-term, exacerbated issue of the lack of affordable housing. As noted by
Gotham (2008), many market-centered recovery programs lack coherency and sustainability and may intensify existing housing issues.
Providing or developing affordable housing, especially rental housing, is a
growing post-disaster challenge for jurisdictions large and small across the country. This housing issue corresponds with a variety of other social differences thatlead to heightened vulnerability to disaster (Lee and Zandt 2018). Renters, forexample, are more likely than owners to be younger, unmarried, and racial minorities (due in part to discriminatory mortgage lending practices) and have lower
overall incomes. Renters also are less likely to have social capital connections
important to disaster recovery, have lower place attachment, and, importantly, areless politically engaged to demand attention to post-disaster needs (Aldrich andMeyer 2015; Lee and Zandt 2018).
Louisiana attempted new and expanded options following the 2016 floods toaddress the affordable housing concerns, including rentals. State officials specificallydeveloped programs to address affordable housing, targeting rental housing andmanufactured homes. To understand the need for affordable housing, Table 10.3
depicts total housing units and housing types for the US and for the 22 parishes thatreceived individual assistance from FEMA (i.e., locations where households could
apply for direct support from FEMA for housing). These parishes had higher
percentages than the US average of single-family detached homes, mobile homes,
and boat/RV/van housing. Nine of the 22 parishes receiving individual assistancefrom FEMA had higher rates of nontraditional housing such as boat, RV, or vansthan the national rate. Multifamily units are less common in these parishes than in
the nation as a whole, except for East Baton Rouge Parish, where 1/3 of housing
units were in multifamily structures. The most striking statistic is the high rates of10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

273

mobile home occupancy in the affected parishes. All parishes except East Baton
Rouge exceeded the national rate of mobile home occupancy, a common type ofaffordable housing that is understudied, but extremely vulnerable, in disaster. The
percent of all housing that was mobile homes ranged from 3.1% in East Baton
Rouge Parish to 38.1% in St. Helena Parish, with an average of 1/5 of all housing inthese parishes being mobile homes.
The 2016 flooding impacted over 28,000 rental households, of which 17,000
were very low income (Louisiana Office of the Governor 2016). The amount ofrental housing needs across the affected parishes varied. Table 10.4 shows homeownership and housing costs compared to the US averages. Only East Baton Rouge
Parish had a higher percent of renters than the US average, with 41% of the parish

Table 10.4 Home ownership and housing costs before the flood (American Community Survey
2016, 5-year estimates)a

United States
All parishes
Acadia Parish
Ascension Parish
East Baton Rouge
ParishEast Feliciana Parish
Iberia Parish
Iberville Parish
Jefferson Davis Parish
Lafayette Parish
Livingston Parish
Pointe Coupee Parish
St. Helena Parish
St. James Parish
St. Landry Parish
St. Martin Parish
St. Tammany Parish
Tangipahoa Parish
Vermilion Parish
Washington Parish
West Baton Rouge
ParishWest Feliciana ParishaPercent whose monthly costs
exceed 35% of monthly income
Owner-­
Owner-­
occupied
occupiedwith awithout amortgage Rentersmortgage
11.1
23.3
42
7.62
20.0
40.1
6.4
13.2
37.5
5.5
14.3
34.5
7.6
20.6
45.7

Percent
renter-­occupied
36.4
26.14
28.9
19.4
41

Percent
owner-­
occupied
63.6
73.86
71.1
80.6
59

Percent
owner-­
occupiedwithout amortgage
35.9
50.06
57.4
35
36.2

18.5
30.2
24.2
28.9
35.1
20.4
24
18
22.9
30.5
20.7
22.9
32.2
24.7
29
26.9

81.5
69.8
75.8
71.1
64.9
79.6
76
82
77.1
69.5
79.3
77.1
67.8
75.3
71
73.1

54.6
53.2
53.6
56.4
40.2
40.2
53.6
67.4
53.5
57.6
53.1
35.2
44.4
56.4
57.9
46.4

11.2
5.9
5.2
6
8.7
7.6
9.9
11.6
8.3
9.5
4.7
8.1
9.2
7.3
8.5
3.4

18.5
18.6
22.2
22
19
15.5
21.8
26.8
18.6
24.7
22.6
22.5
21.6
12.7
30.9
17.6

31.2
40.4
44.4
43.1
41
32.8
34.4
41.8
41
53.6
38.3
41.8
48.4
35.1
45.3
43.5

24.4

75.6

48.9

7.8

17

27.9

Bold italics indicate greater than US value

274

M. A. Meyer et al.

population renting their housing. Owner-occupied housing ranged from 59% in
East Baton Rouge Parish to 82% in St. Helena Parish. Owning a home without amortgage was much more common in these parishes than the US, with an averageof 50% of parish homeowners living without a mortgage. Mortgages are importantto understanding flood disaster recovery specifically because a mortgage requires
insurance and flood insurance as a condition of the home loan if that loan is federally
sponsored and located in a floodplain (FEMA 2018). Persons without a mortgage
are able to let their homeowner’s and flood insurance lapse, making them more at
risk of being unable to rebuild on their own.
Renting is seeing a resurgence across the country across income categories, but
in most parts of the country, it is still predominantly undertaken by low-income
households (Fernald 2013). The affordability standard is 30% or less of income
spent on housing costs (HUD 2018). Comparing housing costs across renters,
homeowners with a mortgage and homeowners without a mortgage, a much larger
percent of renters nationwide spend over 35% of their monthly income on housing
costs (Fernald 2013). Five of the affected parishes had a higher percent of theirrenters with cost burdens than the national average.
The Louisiana Housing Corporation began with two programs targeted at ownersof rental properties affected by the floods of 2016, which were funded through
CDBG-DR from HUD. Some local governments have similar programs (Hardy
2017). Awardees for both programs must meet various affordability requirements(http://restore.la.gov/program-detailstimeline/). These programs include both loans(which may be entirely forgivable) and grants, depending on the applicant qualifications (Gallo 2017b). Landlords must qualify for the state program and have a bank thatis willing to extend construction financing. The programs following Hurricane Katrina
faced trouble due to the financial crisis of 2008, during which banks were unwilling toprovide loans to landlords to qualify for the rebuilding support (Gallo 2017b). The
state established agreements with three banks before the program began to counter
some of these issues. To counter other problems experienced with the “Road Home”
program following Hurricane Katrina, the flood recovery programs for the 2016
floods are run by the Louisiana Housing Corporation (a state agency created in 2011)
rather than by contractors like the “Road Home” program (Gallo 2017b).
One program, the Multifamily Gap Program, offered zero-interest loan gap
financing to multi-housing (at least 20 units) of both affordable and market rate
housing (http://restore.la.gov/multifamily-gap-program/). The program started with
$38.25 million for developers or housing authorities (Gallo 2017b). Agencies
involved in public housing or affordable housing could receive up to $40,000 per
flooded unit, and market rate rental owners could receive up to $65,000 per flooded
unit. All who accepted the funds must maintain the affordability requirements for atleast 5 years after renovation. This program, as of September 2018, had distributed
funds totaling $1.5 million including two public housing authorities and two market
rate complexes that were transitioning to affordable housing (Grueskin 2017).
A second program targeted landlords of smaller multifamily housing with sevenor fewer units. The Neighborhood Landlord Rental Program provided financial
assistance in taking out a loan for rebuild, repair, or new construction. If applicants10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

275

comply fully, the “loan” may be completely forgiven. The program aimed to support
recovery of 1,200–1,500 rental units across the state with original allocation of $36
million (Gallo 2017a; Gallo 2017b). The program specifically required landlords tokeep the properties affordable for 5 years following renovation (Gallo 2017b).
Nonprofits that build affordable housing can apply to rebuild flooded housing orbuild new affordable housing. For-profit landlords could only apply to repair flooded
housing (Gallo 2017b). This program, as of September 2018, had allocated almost$36 million covering 340 units.
A third program was added in 2018 called The Piggyback 2018 program. The
multifamily program received less interest than expected, and it was assumed to be
so because large multiunit facilities may have had insurance. The five million dollars
left in this program was transferred to the more popular Neighborhood Landlord
Program. A larger amount ($17.7 million) was transferred to the Piggyback programfor developers who are already using low-income housing credits to build mixed-­
income complexes (Grueskin 2017). This program requires more than half of thedevelopment be “affordable” to those making 80% or less of the area’s medianincome and remain at below market rate rents for 35 years (much longer than theother two programs). Five percent of the units must be affordable to those withchronic health conditions or very low incomes. It was expected to create 500
affordable units by the definition of 80% or less of the area median income. Priority
goes to parishes that were flooded in 2016 and have high rent costs relative toincome. East Baton Rouge Parish, which has the most rental properties of theaffected parishes, meets both requirements. The Louisiana Housing Corporation
had 1804 units in their tax credit-financed portfolio damaged by the August 2016
floods. Of those, about half (974) were repaired in the first 16 months of post-flood.
As of September 2018, 870 units were to begin construction in early 2019.
Another program, the Baton Rouge Rebuilds Program, provides forgivable loans
for repair and reconstruction of rental housing also funded by HUD. Its three main
goals are (Louisiana Housing Corporation 2017):
1. Eliminate blight and stabilize neighborhoods impacted by the floods
2. Repair damaged rental housing stock that will be made available at affordable
rental rates for low-income households
3. Increase the available rental stock in flood-damaged East Baton Rouge
The program is available to owners of rental property located in the city of Baton
Rouge or unincorporated East Baton Rouge Parish at the time of the flood, who arein good standing with various housing programs. Priority was given to low- tomoderate-income applicants who are under 120% of area median income. One-­
person households making less than $57,120 and four-person households making
less than $81,480 would receive priority, for example. This program targets the
specific types of rental housing common to the area. Site-built, modular, andmanufactured housing were all eligible, a unique aspect to this program. Also, theapplications were aimed for smaller rental housing developments, specifically sevenor fewer units. The rental properties can be located in Special Flood Hazard Areasor not, which addresses the extreme impacts of this disaster.

276

M. A. Meyer et al.

The above programs targeted owners of rental properties. As noted, these programs are slowly building or repairing some affordable housing units, many taking
over 2 years to begin construction. What do renters do in the meantime? Some programs aimed to support displaced renters find or afford housing. Rebuild Livingston,for example, is a nonprofit supporting displaced renters through a Rapid Re-Housing
program funded also by HUD’s CDBG (Grueskin 2018a; Grueskin 2018b). The
targeted population was specifically renters still living in FEMA-manufactured
homes. Rebuild Livingston managed rental vouchers and case management to help
those households find new rental housing. The program, though, already had a waiting list in early 2018 even as 180 renter households remained in FEMA-supplied
housing. The main issue remains that there is not enough affordable housing forrenters to use their rental voucher. Renters face tough decisions of taking higher cost
units with the help of the voucher, but knowing that when the voucher ends in a year,
they will have to move again. As of January 2018, 653 households received thesevouchers, and 417 used the vouchers (Grueskin 2018a; Grueskin 2018b). By
September 2018, 1217 households had applied, 151 had completed the program,and 661 were in leased housing. The rest were waiting to find affordable homes.
Without affordable units, voucher programs may not be useful or may result in temporary housing of displaced low-income renters in unaffordable units.

10.5

Moving the US Forward

The 2016 Louisiana Floods were the worst US disaster since Hurricane Sandy in2012. Then, they were quickly eclipsed by the more damaging Hurricanes Harvey,
Irma, and Maria, along with wildfires in California. What Louisiana knows well isthat changing weather patterns result in more “unexpected” events and more “worst
ever” events. The intense, short-duration storms that happened in Louisiana are
increasing in frequency. Their effects are occurring in areas outside of the traditional
100-year floodplains and in areas with ill-equipped drainage systems for these
extremes. More flood damage has and will likely occur outside of historic floodplains
given the atmospheric dynamics – thus we need more analyses of flood and rescue
needs along with social vulnerability, especially housing tenure, and hazard mitigation planning in areas that may face these similar impacts.
Following the catastrophic flooding, some indicated that you cannot plan for thisextreme of an event. And, furthermore, that such an unusual event should not affectthe floodplain designations or building practices. FEMA actually does not change
flood maps because of these less frequent events. Residents of Central Louisiana,
for example, won a case against FEMA to have about 2000 homes removed fromthe high-risk flood zone in August 2016 just before the catastrophic flooding. A
majority of those homes were underwater a few weeks later. As Central Councilman
Moak quoted to the local paper, “This is an ungodly, extenuating circumstance, andI pray that it doesn’t happen again, but I still believe the studies are correct; I do.
They weren’t arbitrarily set. They were mapped out and reapproved by FEMA”

10 The 2016 Unexpected Mid-State Louisiana Flood: With Special Focus…

277(Allen 2016). The city and residents, even many of those flooded in 2016, wanted torebuild without changing their practices or increasing mitigation mechanisms.
Others though continue to push for greater flood mitigation standards and innovative
practices. Moving forward, disasters across the country are going to raise similar
important questions about risk and planning and bring more people to the table todiscuss what should be done and how do we help, including in civilian rescue andrental housing.

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Part VI

Types/Locations of Communities
and Their Responses to Extreme
Weather: Rural

Chapter 11

Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery
in Rural Areas
Alessandra Jerolleman

11.1

Introduction

Although disaster losses frequently occur in rural and agricultural areas, a significant
majority of the existing disaster research has focused on urban areas and coasts, often
overlooking rural populations and communities (Cutter et al. 2016; Tierney 2013).
Our research-based understanding of the recovery of housing post disasters in rural
areas is even more limited, again with much of the current scholarship focused on
urban areas and cities (Ganapati et al. 2013). Furthermore, the majority of the limited
studies that have taken place in rural communities have focused on environmental or
technological disasters, such as mining-related incidents, and not on more frequently
occurring events such as disaster losses from flooding (Scott et al. 2012).
Rising disaster losses and increasing frequency of events across the United States
coupled with a current political climate that does not result in a national consensus
demand more local responsibility for disaster recovery, when less federal aid isoffered as a result, making rural disaster studies a particularly pressing issue. Even
if recommendations to address climate change are taken, communities will continue
to experience increasing impacts and will be expected to take on a greater percentageof the burden for disaster recovery (Coppola 2016). Research has shown that disaster
impacts can best be mediated at the local level, where the most effective risk
reduction measures can be undertaken and the most effective policies enacted. Thus,
there is a “silver lining” to shift to more local disaster recovery and adaptation
attention. Unfortunately, achieving success in risk reduction is far more challenging
for communities that lack sufficient resources to ensure the success of thesemeasures and much less have the resources to fund their own adaptation programs(Haddow 2016a, b).

A. Jerolleman (*)
Department of Emergency Management, Jacksonville State University,
Jacksonville, AL, USA© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_11

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Even in larger urban areas, resources are often scarce at the local level, where thegovernment is facing pressures to balance budgets and cut expenditures while also
experiencing reductions in federal support. The limited tax base of more ruralcommunities makes these pressures even more acute, exacerbating many of these
impacts and lessening the community’s ability to invest in resilience. These
challenges can result in underinvestment in preparedness and hazard mitigation, at
a time when those investments are most needed (Skertich et al. 2012). This createsa magnifying effect on what is already a classic example of a “wicked policy
problem” (Aldrich and Meyer 2015). The term “wicked problem” denotes thosepolicy challenges for which solutions are not definitive; there is no means to fully
test a solution; there is no ability to learn from trial and error because theconsequences of attempts at solutions are high; there is no clear set of potential
solutions; the problem can be considered a symptom of other problems; multiple
explanations exist for the problem and may be contradictory; and the government isliable for the consequences of the actions generated (Rittel et al. 1973).
Crises and catastrophes often have no clear technical or policy solution, a characteristic of wicked problems. They also involve multiple stakeholders and present
ripple effects. In other words, a wicked problem is without a clear solution, in acontext that further limits the available responses to the issue.
This chapter will begin by summarizing the current literature on post-disasterrecovery and resilience in rural areas, followed by presenting a case example from
Northern Louisiana,1 and concludes with some recommendations for strengthening
the resilience of rural areas. In order to begin this discussion, it is important todefine just what is meant by rural. There are several definitions that might beconsidered, all of which are premised upon being outside of an area defined asurban. The US Census has utilized various definitions over time, with the earliest
definition being simply places outside of cities and towns with populations of under2500 persons (Ratcliffe et al. 2016). More recent definitions also consider density,
but the basic definition remains that of areas outside of urban areas. According to
the US Census, rural populations declined from 54.4% of the overall US populationin 1910 to 19.3% in 2010 (Ratcliffe et al. 2016). This chapter will use the term ruralin the broader sense, simply taken to mean areas that are not defined as urban incharacter. A more specific definition is not feasible given the wide range of definitions utilized within the limited literature and the failure of much of that literature
to clearly delineate the bounds of rurality. What is clear, however, is that many ruralcommunities are losing population and in some cases economic viability, a challenge to their ability to adapt to the increasingly frequent and diverse disaster events.
The following map (Fig. 11.1) illustrates the location of rural census tracts acrossLouisiana.

1
The abbreviated case study included in this chapter is based upon an ongoing recovery effort. As
a result, there is limited data available regarding final outcomes of the recovery process. Over the
span of 2017–2018, the time frame during which this chapter was being written, the impacted communities have continued to seek ways to work with the federal and state government to continue
their recovery and to improve their adaptation. I would like to thank Olivia Porter for her assistancein locating media and reports about the community’s progress.

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Fig. 11.1 Map showing the distribution of rural and urban areas in Louisiana. Both urban areas(>50,000 people) and urban clusters (2500–50,000 people) are defined by the 2000 US Census.
(Data retrieved from the 2000 US Census Summary File 3)

The state of Louisiana received a disaster declaration on March 13, 2016,
DR-4263, based upon several days of flooding that had primarily impacted thenorthern portions of the state. The flooding began in the northwestern portion of thestate, sweeping from Shreveport down through Central Louisiana and along the I-20
Corridor, causing extensive damage across both smaller urban areas and rural areas.
The following map (Fig. 11.2) illustrates the extent of the flooding.

11.2
11.2.1

Literature Review
Is There a Difference Between Rural and Urban Areas?

The current literature broadly presents two differing views of the inherent differences between urban and rural areas when it comes to disaster vulnerability andrecovery. Some researchers describe rural communities as having more limited
capabilities than urban areas, significantly lacking in resources, unable to fully benefit from the resources made available after a disaster, failing to deliver basic

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Fig. 11.2 Louisiana flooding in March 2016. (Flood map from Fig. 1.1)

services day-to-day, and quickly losing social support systems in the face of systemic pressures such as shrinking local economies (Downey 2016; Mogle 2017;
Tierney 2013; Doherty 2004). This particular view of rural communities is succinctly stated by Tierney, who describes rural communities as “under resourced
places in which the capacity to anticipate, cope, and adapt has been seriously compromised (Tierney 2013, p. xv).”
Seen through this lens, larger jurisdictions, such as those in urban areas, have an
inherent advantage in terms of larger budgets and staff capacity for building code
enforcement. These larger and more resourced jurisdictions can also engage in otherresilience promoting actions such as having a “rainy day” fund or investing inresilient infrastructure (May 2013). Communities that are able to maintain a rainy
day fund, for example, can begin work without waiting for federal dollars to bemade available and can afford to wait several months for reimbursements (Landy
2008). They are also better able to participate in more effective emergency
management networks, characterized by crossing sectors and organizations, whichhave been found by much of the research to improve recovery outcomes (Demiroz
et al. 2013). In rural areas, particularly those further for urban centers, these
networks, when they exist, have a tendency to be more centralized and include
fewer actors (Demiroz et al. 2013).

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The second view presented by the research is that rural communities can, insome cases, have a greater sense of self-reliance, stronger social bonds, a defined
sense of community, and access to natural resources (Cutter et al. 2016). In otherwords, rurality can confer certain advantages when it comes to resilience. Cutter,
Ash, and Emrich used an index titled the Baseline Resilience Indicators forCommunities (BRIC), a model that looks at six different capitals (social, economic,
community, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental), in order to analyze
whether the rural nature of a community had an impact on resilience. These different
capitals align with many of the key elements discussed in the resilience literature,
and with several areas in which distinctions are drawn between larger and smaller,
or urban and rural communities.
In their research Cutter, Ash, and Emrich found a great deal of variation fromregion to region and rural community to rural community. However, they did findthat community capital variables were generally more prevalent in rural communities,
while economic resilience variables were more prevalent in urban areas. Suchfindings support the assertion that rural communities often possess greater levels ofsocial capital but are also facing extensive challenges relative to their economic basewhich detract from the benefits of the greater social capital.
However, an interesting finding of the study was the extent to which there wasregional variation. Across the United States, the research found pockets of lower
economic resilience along the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana border, as wellas increased housing vulnerability due to a prevalence of mobile home building
stock in the south. It is worth noting that North Louisiana is included in one of theregions of the country where a greater correlation between rurality and vulnerability
was found. Cutter, Ash, and Emrich speculated that the increased vulnerability incertain areas had to do with a history of economic disparities along racial lines andthus the weaker social capital that results from the subcommunity economic
differences (2016). The role of racial and economic disparity has been explored byother researchers in the context of disaster vulnerability and will be discussed
further below. Given prior experience of the author working within North Louisiana,
as well as upon informal conversations she has had with local rural leaders, both ofthese factors can be said to be present in the flooded areas of North Louisiana.
Another area in which rural communities are at times described as having an
advantage is in the complexity, or lack thereof, of local governance structures. In
other words, although larger governments with more departments may be more able
to provide manpower for disaster recovery, a more centralized and flexible
governance structure can present certain advantages. Rural communities may often
have a less complex local government landscape to navigate in disaster recovery, butthey are also far more cash strapped, have a less diversified economic base, and areless able to maintain a rainy day fund (Caruson and MacManus 2011; Waugh 2013).
This advantage may be eliminated by the concurrent difficulties that arise ininteracting with disaster recovery mechanisms that require a certain amount of cash
reserves and staff capacity.
Recent research into disaster recovery by Mogle found that recovery committees
can be more difficult to establish in communities that lack a lot of manpower and are

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already reeling from the resources required to navigate complex governmental
recovery processes (2017). These committees are a key component of the nationalframework for disaster recovery and are expected to mirror state and federal
frameworks, serving as the key mechanism for receipt of technical assistance. A
recovery committee was established in North Louisiana following the 2016 flooding
and was negatively impacted by the lack of personnel available to serve the necessaryfunctions. Under the National Disaster Recovery Framework, there are six Recovery
Support Functions (RSFs), each focused on a different aspect of recovery, such as
economic recovery and housing. These RSFs each require staffing and local
engagement in order to successfully participate in a recovery process.
Mogle also found that recovery committees have a very steep learning curve
before they can become effective, a challenge exacerbated by limited pre-disastercapabilities (2017). Jurisdictions that have been able to invest in pre-event planning,
relationship building, and training around recovery have an inherent advantage.
Unfortunately, this is not feasible in communities that are already stretched far too
thin. This lack of institutional capacity can have negative impacts on families andhouseholds, particularly in the context of a federalist structure that leaves the primary responsibility for emergency management at the local level (Mogle 2017). In
fact, comparative research into international disaster recovery has found that recovery in a democracy is negatively impacted by variations in institutional quality, leading to more disparate outcomes than might be found under a more centralized
government structure (Persson and Povitkina 2017).
Returning to a broader comparison of urban and rural areas, Caruson and
MacManus argued that urban areas might be more vulnerable due to having a wider
range of vulnerable populations, infrastructure with greater vulnerabilities, andother limitations (2011). However, even this research recognized some advantages
for urban areas, such as greater eligibility for grants and better access to financial
resources. These advantages may be more readily available to rural communities
that are in sufficient proximity to urban areas so as to participate in regional
partnerships or benefit from collaboration and partnerships. In fact, Waugh foundthat rural populations on the fringe of urban areas could access more assistance thanthose located at a greater geographic distance, observing empirically the impacts of
distance from the urban core that had been reported anecdotally in North Louisiana(2013).
Similarly, Brody and Gunn, looking at community resilience through the lens ofdevelopment along the Gulf Coast, found that rural jurisdictions contained more
pervious surfaces, an indicator of reduced flood risk correlating to the environmental
capital included in the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities index, butwere also experiencing a greater percent loss of wetlands (2013). This finding could
also be explained by the fact that the urban areas had already destroyed much of theprevious wetland cover which exacerbated their flood risk, while the rural areas
were perhaps embarking down the same path. It is interesting to note that although
limited development may confer some advantages to rural areas, the lack of building
codes may mean that the development, when it does occur, will have even greater
detrimental impacts. This is particularly concerning in terms of disaster recovery,11 Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

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because research in rural areas following disasters have found a greater increase in
housing growth in rural areas as opposed to suburban. This is sometimes a functionof post-disaster migration away from urban areas, such as what occurred after
Hurricane Katrina. This type of migration often drives the most vulnerable away
due to rising housing costs as disasters often have a detrimental impact on theaffordability of housing (Ganapati et al. 2013). Ganapati found that growth in ruralcounties after Hurricane Katrina was impacted by domestic migration and resulted
in an increase in the percentage of mobile homes. One unfortunate downside toefforts to increase resilience through building codes can be the inability of former
residents to afford to rebuild at the new improved standards. This can drive
gentrification of urban areas and push the urban poor out to the suburbs or further
out to rural communities, both to lower-lying areas and in flood plains. Areas inlandfrom New Orleans received urban residents, some from the iconic Lower Ninth
Ward, after Hurricane Katrina only to have these resettlers experience flooding
during Hurricane Isaac in 2012 and the August 2016 storm.
Yet another framing of rural resilience involves utilizing the lens of adaptive
capacity, built upon the assumption that rural communities are more likely to havea culture of adaptation to challenges and of living with the environment. Cox andHameln, looking at adaptive capacity in rural Canada, described resilience as thefoundation of rural life (2015). In their analysis, rural resilience is treated largely as
an offshoot of a broader ethos of adaptation. However, they did find that many ruralcommunities lacked the civic infrastructure to fully participate in resilience planningand that this type of planning effort might not be realistic for smaller ruralcommunities, even when efforts are made to make the process accessible andresources are provided. This finding speaks to the need to adopt a wide range ofresilience strategies that can take into account the unique nature of different
communities, including the presence of civic infrastructure and governancestructures, many qualities which are assets if appreciated and supported in ways
possibly different from urban. It is not just offering what is offered to the urban
communities but investing the effort to determine what approaches would be
supportive of the adaptive skills the rural areas already have as well as the different
challenges they experience.
In the communities with which Cox and Hameln interacted, they found governance issues, economic issues, and limitations in capacity that limited the ability toengage for resilience. These limitations, although in the Canadian context, are strikingly similar to the findings from other researchers in US rural jurisdictions. Thesesimilarities perhaps open the door for lessons from international contexts and not
simply from the United States, arguing that the challenges faced by agricultural andrural communities across the world may share certain similarities and provide valuable lessons.
This chapter will argue that rural communities are in fact facing different challenges in terms of their ability to increase disaster resilience, practice risk reduction,and successfully recover following a disaster. These challenges are exacerbated by
the increasing media and policy focus on cities, as the leaders in the climate resilience movement, with much less attention paid to the successes and challenges in292

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rural America (Haddow 2016a, b). While it is certainly true that cities have been
innovative and influential in the climate adaptation movement, it must also be recognized that urban leaders often have greater control over the physical infrastructure, stronger social connections (particularly those that garner resources), andaccess to more financial resources (Haddow 2016a, b). Furthermore, while direct
property losses are much worse in urban areas, due to the concentration of population and the financial value of the built environment, relative impacts are far worse
in rural communities (Cutter et al. 2016). This results in a challenge for drawing
comparisons, as most damage data is considered in terms of the number of units or
the population impacted, with little consideration for the percent impacts upon aparticular community. These impacts can be assumed to be magnified in a closeknit, smaller community. However, as the literature has shown, rural communities
do have strengths upon which to focus when building resilience, and these should
not be discounted in favor of a simplistic assumption that rural jurisdictions are at asignificant disadvantage in terms of disaster recovery and resilience.

11.2.2

Challenges Faced by Rural Communities

One of the primary challenges faced by rural communities, even before a disaster, isa more limited ability to not only provide basic services, such as health care andaccess to broadband, but also extensive limitations in their ability to take action to
reduce risk through hazard mitigation (May 2013, 2016). Rural areas in the UnitedStates often lack zoning and building codes or lack the capacity to fully enforce
existing codes (May 2013; Schwab 2016). At a more fundamental level, ruralcommunities have been struggling to maintain even basic government services inlight of economic conditions and changing rural environments and economies, suchas the loss of jobs and displacement of small farms (Doherty 2004; Waugh 2013).
Rural populations have been declining, with a drop of nearly 200,000 people
between 2010 and 2016, due to factors such as outmigration of young adults, fewer
births, and an aging population. At the same time, job growth in rural counties
following 2011 was substantially lower than in urban counties and the poverty rates
much higher (USDA 2017). This has led to the disappearance of support and social
systems, at the same time that necessary services such as health services are
becoming less available (Doherty 2004).
These challenges have been described as a slowly growing crisis, even outside ofa more traditional natural disaster. According to Doherty, even among communities
with high levels of social capital and cohesion, a crisis can disrupt the sense ofbalance and negate the benefits of social capital (2004). This can be particularly
problematic when there are competing narratives regarding the origins of the crisis,such as when there are questions around responsibility and impacts and when the
detrimental effects are concentrated on particular segments of the population(Aronoff and Gunter 1992). At times the benefits, such as those from economic
development, can be concentrated solely in particular segments of the population

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while exacerbating vulnerabilities of other segments. Questions of responsibility,
particularly around industrial accidents or hazardous materials incidents, can havedetrimental effects on rural communities’ social capital and on the ability to recover.
The preexisting capacity deficits, coupled with the long-term impacts of sustained crises, leave rural communities unable to fully take advantage of the resourcesthat become available following a disaster (Downey 2016). Bolin and Bolton foundthis to a be a problem as far back as the late 1980s, finding that rural disaster victims
tended to receive aid from less government sources and less total aid (1986). For
example, one rural community in Texas struggled to recover following a tornado
due to the lack of nonprofit organizations and infrastructure needed to both accept
and distribute funds and donations to the victims (Mogle 2017). As with previous
examples, the experience of this community illustrates the value of adaptive recovery
models that do not demand as much inherent staff and organizational capacity at the
local level.
One study of local governments in Pennsylvania, primarily rural governments,
by Skertich, Johnson, and Comfort, found four key contributing factors related tothe demands and constraints placed upon the provision of public safety and publichealth services, despite the legal requirements that these services be provided. These
contributing factors are (1) the actual legal requirements for the provision of these
services, (2) reductions in available economic resources as a result of fiscal stress,(3) cutbacks in personnel as a result of efforts to balance municipal budgets, and (4)increasing demand for services as infrastructure ages and increasing numbers ofvulnerable people are living in regions (Skertich et al. 2012). Limitations in levelsof household and individual preparedness were also found to have an impact on the
success of public safety and public health efforts. As the research shows, communities
are facing legal requirements to provide services which they lack the resources toprovide while also facing extensive pressures to further cut budgets and staffing.
These challenges are difficult to navigate without the added strain of a disaster on
aging infrastructure and a vulnerable population.
In their study, Skertich, Johnson, and Comfort found that local governments hadturned to both consolidation and privatization as a solution to the complex demands
and constraints described above. This approach, which also included utilizing
volunteers and placing personnel in dual roles, served to mask the actual limitations
that the communities faced. These limitations become glaringly obvious when adisruption occurs. Communities in Pennsylvania were found to have utilized one ofthree key strategies: (1) increased reliance on technology, (2) reduction ofengagement with community participation and preparedness efforts, and (3)increased reliance on larger organizations such as regional or neighboring
governments. These three strategies all carry different implications for disasterrecovery. The second and third strategies, in particular, can be seen to have very
negative impacts on the ability to recover, as in the case of lessened preparedness
and reduced community participation that might also negatively impact social
capital and civic engagement but, also in case of the third strategy, should the larger
organizations have impacts that exceed their own abilities and therefore be less able
to render assistance to the smaller jurisdictions that have also been impacted.

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Overreliance on partners who may not always be available can result in further
decreasing local capabilities. The third strategy, in particular, might be less viable
for rural areas that are further removed from larger urban centers.
Revisiting the broader question of whether there is a tangible difference between
urban and rural communities, it is clear that the resource constraints describedabove impact all communities in some way. However, as shown by the current
literature, they may have particularly devastating impacts on rural communities
where the demands placed upon local government far exceeded its ability to perform.
Cutbacks in personnel and other resources are likely to have a direct impact onresilience, as well as on the ability to recover following a natural disaster. Simply
stated, when resources are strained during day-to-day operations, there is no
capacity to absorb the added demands created by a disaster. Planning is another area
in which these constraints have a disproportionate impact.

11.2.3

Constraints to Planning

Another challenge that rural jurisdictions face is limitations in their ability to plan
successfully for hazard mitigation and for post-disaster recovery. As might be
expected, lower capacity for planning and program management related to hazards
has been found to be a concern in rural areas (Waugh 2013). Research by Berke andCampanella found that more immediate and pressing concerns, such as thosedescribed in the preceding paragraphs, eclipsed efforts to plan for longer-term issues
such as disaster recovery (2006). This inability has detrimental effects on successful
recovery management, either because a plan has not been developed or due to thelack of a knowledgeable constituency, as can be created by a robust planning
process, who are more likely to support sound risk reduction policies. In fact, thisrelates directly back to the finding that government capacity to protect its population
has direct impacts on the degree of human suffering following a disaster (Persson
and Povitkina 2017). If a community cannot effectively plan or prepare, then loss oflife and other impacts will be greater.
Most federal assistance programs are premised on risk sharing and risk reduction, both of which require extensive preplanning and a full understanding of risk.
In other words, communities that are unable to successfully engage in risk reduction
through robust planning and forward looking policies face a substantial disadvantage,even in their interactions with federal programs. This is in keeping with the findings
from Persson and Povitkina that disaster prevention can be considered a public goodto which access is uneven (2017). They found that democratic institutions fail toprotect their populations well in the face of poor planning or incompetence in public
administration, both of which can arguably be said to be more prevalent in rural
areas due to a lack of capacity and resources. In other words, inadequate planning
processes significantly impact government’s ability to protect the population.
In keeping with this concern, research into hazard mitigation plan quality foundthat rural communities faced significant disadvantages in the development of their

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plans, including an aging population base, fewer resources, greater isolation, a lackof in-house expertise, limited resources for hiring consultants, inferior housing
stock, and poverty (Horney et al. 2017). These challenges impact both infrastructureand social structures, going beyond the traditional scope of a hazard mitigation
planning process but clearly impacting the jurisdiction’s ability to successfully
implement a hazard mitigation strategy. Difficulties in not only hiring consultants
but doing so effectively are particularly problematic, given how limited local
resources are. Research by Mohr et al. found that smaller rural communities had themost challenges with contracting for services (2010). This is the result of several
factors including the fact that smaller governments receive fewer bids, therefore
losing the advantages of competition, and have a more difficult time enforcing
contract provisions with limited staff or volunteers. Regional planning, as well as
regional project implementation, may provide a usable alternative for somecommunities, but rural jurisdictions are often at a disadvantage in terms of resource
allocation through regional mechanisms (Horney et al. 2017).
Program management, in particular, is negatively impacted by the limited borrowing ability and low revenues that small governments often face. However, otherorganizations such as faith-based organizations may play a key role in supporting
local government when they are present and have sufficient capacity (Horney et al.
2017).

11.2.4

Social Capital

The literature on disaster recovery and resilience indicates that social capital plays
a key role in a successful recovery and is perhaps particularly vital when otherresources are lacking. The suggestion that social capital might play a larger role inrural disaster recovery is an important consideration for this chapter. In order tofully discuss social capital, it is important to begin with an operational definition.
This chapter will utilize definitions from Aldrich and Lalone, two leaders in theacademic discourse regarding social capital and its applications to the disaster
context. Aldrich defines social capital as “networks that connect individuals to eachother through weak or strong ties” (2017, 358). This definition emphasizes theconnectivity and relational aspect of social capital.
Lalone provides the following definition, which is similar to Aldrich’s framing,but also explains some of the mechanisms through which social capital becomes
beneficial: “Social capital refers to the resources of support that are embedded
within social networks, and that are cemented and reinforced through relationshipsof trust and social norms emphasizing reciprocity and mutual assistance” (2017,p. 3). This framing of social capital as mutual assistance is one that is seen in muchof the literature regarding the beneficial nature of social capital in rural disasterrecovery. The literature further distinguishes between bridging and bonding capital,
in which bonding capital links similar individuals, such as family members, andbridging capital links people with different backgrounds, typically through296

A. Jerolleman

institutions or other organizations. These types of institutions and organizations areoften more prevalent in urban areas than they are in more isolated rural communities.
A third type of social capital, linking, will be discussed later in this chapter.
Reciprocity, a key component of social capital, has historically been a norm inmany farming and mining communities across the rural United States where families
supported each other with labor, food, and other resources when employment andcrops fluctuated (Lalone 2012). This history of reciprocal assistance can have atremendous impact on the ability of a community to come together following acrisis and provide support to each other. Bonding social capital, in particular, canincrease the prevalence of emergent social action but can also have the unintended
effect of reducing the likelihood of seeking external or formal aid, a problem when
impacts exceed the capacity of local resources to fully address all needs (Aldrich
and Meyer 2015).
A 2012 study of the mobilization of social capital in a rural Appalachian regionin Virginia following a 2011 tornado found mobilization of labor and supplies in the
response to the event. Local churches quickly came together to provide goods andshelter, families and neighbors stepped into assist with debris, and people camefrom across the region to provide assistance. In fact, the community response wasso successful that formal shelter only remained open for 2 days and the level ofcommunity support overwhelmed the state emergency management structures,
particularly by the number of volunteers and donations. Local government inneighboring jurisdictions including emergency managers also stepped in to help
(LaLone 2012).
This is a clear example of a tradition of reciprocity, between neighbors and also
across a broader geographic region, laying the foundation for a more successful
disaster recovery. At the same time, it also serves as an example of the difficulty thatformal emergency management structures have in coordinating with these existing
structures. In this instance, the formal mechanisms do not appear to have impeded
the informal recovery mechanisms, but that is not always the case. In some instances,
there is a direct conflict between the formal and informal structures, with
opportunities for utilizing local capital discarded or, at worst, detrimental impacts
on existing social capital as a result of disaster recovery. A highly publicizedexample of the rural social capital confronting the official urban is the “Cajun
Navy” – boat owners from rural Louisiana coastal areas who rushed to New Orleans
to help rescue those marooned on rooftops after Hurricane Katrina only to be turned
away at the parish line because they had no official role and could have been subject
to liability cases. Some managed to get through the barriers to help and now they are
considered an emergency group and continue to respond to events such as the recent
floods in North Carolina from Hurricane Florence.
Aldrich writing about the role of social capital in disaster recovery described the
majority of the post-disaster needs as collective action challenges, situations inwhich a collective identity and willingness to work together becomes crucial (2017).
Social capital, which provides a mechanism for informal mutual aid, is a key asset
for collective action challenges. Strong networks, particularly those that include
bridging capital, can provide access to resources and information regarding the11 Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

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trustworthiness of different actors and the best means to both access and utilize
resources. Rural communities in closer proximity to urban areas or in larger regions
may benefit more from these types of networks. In some cases, bonding social
capital can even act like informal insurance. However, by that same token, a disastercan negatively affect social cohesion due to displacement, the extent of losses, or
uneven impacts – leading to the creation of a corrosive community (Aldrich andMeyer 2015).
As previously mentioned, researchers have argued that the bonds from social
capital are stronger in some rural communities than they are in urban areas becauseof the prevalence of long-standing relationships based upon reciprocity and mutual
assistance, both creating these relationships and becoming stronger as a result ofthem. This might result in an advantage for communities that do possess strongsocial capital, as access to social capital can provide resources when other resources
are lacking and can correlate to civic engagement which has tangible benefits for the
economy and recovery more broadly. Research following an earthquake in Tokyo
found that voter turnout was a better indicator of post-disaster population growththan other economic indicators, damage levels, or population density (Aldrich andMeyer 2015).
In fact, research has found that community ties, shared goals, and other intangibles can matter just as much as political and government infrastructure in terms of
successful disaster recovery (Ireni-Saban 2012). There is also a documented positive correlation between the number of nongovernmental organizations and socialgroups active within a community and post-disaster population recovery (Aldrich
and Meyer 2015; LaLone 2012). Social capital can also have an empowering impact
or even a therapeutic impact for groups that are often considered vulnerable such as
women (Ganapati 2012).
In the context of a disaster, these ties can serve to connect communities to power
structures and decision-makers, through linking capital – a third type of social
capital that extends beyond the immediate community. Social capital can also allow
groups to mobilize far more easily and to assist their members through informal
assistance and insurance mechanisms. However, social capital may also haveoccasional negative impacts as it can prevent people from leaving disaster-impacted
regions and can support the mobilization of certain groups that might utilize theircapital and access to the detriment of others. This is seen in the frequent resistanceto post-disaster placement of temporary housing by those neighborhoods in which
temporary mobile home parks or to the placement of trailers on personal property
while homeowners repair their damaged homes. This is more often the case in more
affluent neighborhoods, for example, where the resistance can be based in part upon
the exclusion of particular groups such as renters but also upon fear that homevalues will be reduced (Aldrich and Meyer 2015).
One of the most immediate and important decisions following a disaster iswhether to stay or go. Strong community bonds reduce exit, an effect that may haveboth positive and negative impacts on disaster resilience and recovery. On the one
hand, a community in which people come together with a shared commitment torecovery will have certain advantages in terms of the mobilization of resources and298

A. Jerollemanmanpower, as well as in community reinvestment and the maintenance of a tax base.
On the other hand, an unwillingness to consider leaving may have a negative impact
on individual and family recovery, particularly when the community is unable tofully recover and support the recovery of housing, infrastructure, and the economy.
Unfortunately, all of these factors have the potential to impact household recovery
negatively.
Although social capital plays a key role in effective disaster response and recovery, researchers have found that a failed response can have a detrimental impact oncommunity bonds (Ireni-Saban 2012). This is a concern due to the fact that as communities face an ever-growing array of threats, the potential for a failure becomeseven greater and the resulting erosion of social bonds can further damage the community’s ability to respond in the future. Given the more significant challenges
faced by rural communities, and the value of social bonds within those communities, this is a particularly pressing concern. Furthermore, the erosion of social capital may have longer-term detrimental impacts upon the community as a wholeeroding the day-to-day systems of reciprocity, which enable the success of the ruralcommunity.

11.2.5

Vulnerability

Much of the research on post-disaster recovery has looked at the exacerbation ofsocial vulnerability as a result of the disaster, as well as at the disparate impacts that
result across socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Although the majorityof this research has not explicitly considered differences between rural and urban
areas, it is possible to apply the lessons from this research to the rural context. One
particularly relevant finding is that recovery in rural areas tends to concentratesocially vulnerable populations in a different physical displacement pattern thanwhat is seen in urban areas (Cutter et al. 2016). This concentration of vulnerability
has cascading impacts on the ability to successfully recover, much less to build
resilience. Caruson and MacManus argued that true assessments of vulnerability
should also consider the ability to manage events and their impacts, not just thesocioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the survivors (2011). In otherwords, the impacts of vulnerability may be exacerbated within the rural context
where there is a concentration of socially vulnerable populations coupled with alessened ability to manage events and their impacts.
Minority racial status and lower-income social class, which have been shown
empirically to correlate with higher levels of vulnerability, may also have disparate
impacts in rural areas, particularly those with complex histories of racial andeconomic disparities, as well as ongoing tensions. Research by Highfield, Peacock,and Van Zandt looking at the impacts of Hurricane Ike on Houston found that hazard
exposure, structural characteristics, and socioeconomic characteristics were all
predictors of structural damage (2014). However, “…even after controlling for [allof] these factors areas with higher proportions of non-white residents and lower-­11 Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

299

valued homes received more damage than their counterparts in predominantly whiteareas despite being further from or outside high-risk areas” (p. 289). In other words,
the increased damages and impacts to nonwhite residents and lower-valued homes
were found to be the case even outside of the areas of highest risk. This finding isparticularly troubling, as it shows that the greatest correlation with disaster impacts
was not the characteristics of the event or the condition of the structure but the raceof the impacted households. The authors speculated that these disparate impacts had
to do with a history of lack of investment by local government in infrastructure andmaintenance within the minority communities.
Similarly, a comparison of economic recovery in New Orleans and Gulfport,
Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina, and focusing on the effects of race andpoverty, found a greater negative effect on recovery from race outside of urban
areas. The research found that community heterogeneity had a positive impact onrecovery and that the plight of minorities outside of urban areas did not garner the
media coverage and attention that it did in urban areas (Downey 2016). This has
significant implications for rural communities that are not heterogeneous and havecomplex histories of economic and racial disparities. In fact, the social capital of thewhite residents may enable their recovery at the expense of others.
Perceptions of recovery both within one’s own socioeconomic group and looking
across groups also appear to be impacted by race and class. A 2017 study of therecovery from the 2011 tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama,found a distinct difference in the ways in which white residents and residents ofcolor perceived the impacts of race, class, and gender on recovery (McKinzie 2017).
The study found that white people reported a leveling effect, in which they felt thatrecovery and disaster impacts rendered community members equal, while people ofcolor often disagreed. The researchers speculated that the history of race relations inboth of the cities had an impact on the ways in which race impacted recovery
perceptions across the two cities. These differing perceptions of recovery, including
the assumptions that a leveling effect has taken place, may in fact contribute to thecreation of a corrosive community.
Aranoff and Gunter in their research on communities that successfully avoided
the creation of a corrosive community found that three key factors were crucial to
avoiding the corrosive community: (1) effective prior leadership, (2) self-­
identification as a “survivor community,” and 3) ties of residence and occupation. In
other words, the perception of having social capital as well as the existence ofbonding capital had a positive impact on the community’s ability to avoid becominga corrosive community (1992).
Another important consideration relative to the nexus between perceptions andvulnerability is the role that subjective perceptions of individual vulnerability play,
particularly in terms of human decision-making around preparedness and risk
reduction. Kusenbach and Christman found differences in the perception of risk andsocial inequalities between experts and individuals within the community 2013).
This difference in perception has real implications for populations, such as the
population they focused on – that of individuals and families living in mobile
homes – because these populations can be considered vulnerable based upon their

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A. Jerolleman

housing stock and economic characteristics but may not see themselves in that lightand may not respond positively to messaging that requires them to see themselves
as a vulnerable population. Rural coastal Louisiana residents who experienced theimpacts of the BP oil spill resisted strongly the characterization of being vulnerable,or victims, a requirement of receiving compensation for their fisheries being “oiled”(Laska et al. 2015).
In their research of at-risk mobile home communities, Kusenbach and Christman
found that some of the respondents felt a sense of agency and control that did notnecessarily align with their risk-reduction efforts. In fact, many respondents had
undertaken little to no preparation and had very limited resources but still considered themselves to not be vulnerable (2013). This perception may have to dowith resilience characteristics that were not visible to the researchers, but they may
also have to do with a lack of understanding regarding the actual level of risk. In
other words, the perception of resilience might negatively impact preparedness andself-­protective behaviors. The authors go on to suggest that the perception of vulnerability is itself a component of vulnerability, as a condition has to be seen as aproblem in order to be responded to. This raises the question of whether or not ruralcommunities might perceive themselves as being more vulnerable than urban. In
the case of the communities impacted by the 2016 flooding, there was a definite
understanding that their resilience was impacted by a lack of resources and accessto power structures, both of which correlated to distance from the capital (Personalcommunication 2016).2
This also creates a nexus with considerations around social capital and perception of inherent resilience and self-sufficiency, such as those held in some ruralcommunities. It may well be the case that focusing on a message of resilience,
which is in closer alignment to individual perceptions of the community, will be
more effective. This aligns with Aranoff and Gunter’s finding, mentioned previously,that self-identification as a resilient community has a positive impact on resiliency.
Aranoff and Gunter identified three key strategies that communities utilized inorder to navigate a lack of resources, a component of the community vulnerability
described above, in the face of larger needs: (1) making do, (2) taking charge, and(3) working within the system (1992). These strategies have clear applications to
disaster recovery, but making do in particular is relevant to this discussion ofperceptions, as its utilization required recognition of the community’s preexistingsocioeconomic place and acceptance that inequities would remain. This recognition
may have negative impacts on the resilience of a community, as it may impact thecommunities’ perception of its own resilience.

2

Personal communications with local officials and community members in late 2016.

11 Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

11.2.6301

 ocal and State Responsibilities: The RoleLof Federalism in Rural Recovery

In the context of disaster impacts that exceed a local jurisdiction’s capability to successfully respond, there is often an assumption that the next level of government,
state, and the federal will intercede and assist. As a result, many assume that an
overwhelmed local government can simply request assistance. Although federal aid
can be considered generous, it is surrounded by false expectations regarding speed
and the needs it can meet (Landy 2008). It also often includes requirements for local
match and administration that can be very challenging for a small local jurisdiction.
In order to fully understand how to improve recovery and resiliency, it becomes
imperative to truly understand the role that our federalist system plays. In the context
of homeland security, there is a good bit of confusion regarding the federal and state
roles, much less the distinction between local and state. Outside of warfare, public
safety is a state and locally incorporated city or county responsibility when theimpacted area is not incorporated. Police, fire, and public health all reside with thestate itself, although local governments can be granted rights and responsibilities by
the state constitution. The federal government may provide training and equipment,
as well as occasional grants, but the states serve as intermediaries (Eisinger 2006).
Generally speaking, the US Constitution only recognizes the federal and state
governments. The states are sovereign jurisdictions with their own constitutions that
establish local government rights and responsibilities. The extent to which the state
can intervene in local decision-making varies, with home-rule states enforcing strict
limitations (Col 2007). The federal government tends to provide aid to the state,
which then can assist localities. This can be done through block grants, grant
programs, and other mechanisms (Landy 2008). The state is the primary decision-­making entity. In some cases, feuding between local entities has a negative impact
on assistance received as competition between entities can harm the relationshipwith the state.

11.2.7

Cooperation and Networks

Recent research in emergency management has found that effective disaster recovery, particularly in communities that are lacking in resources, requires a shift inmind-set towards interagency cooperation. Cooperation and regional networks canalso be a mechanism through which local communities can support each other inmeeting their responsibilities relative to public safety. However, maintaining suchnetworks can be very difficult and require extensive, continual resource investments(Bowman and Parsons 2013).
This constitutes a paradigm shift for many government departments or the entire
communities, particularly when they are used to sharing some minimal information
but not sustaining consistent action-based involvement with partners (Bowman and302

A. Jerolleman

Parsons 2013; Skertich et al. 2012). However, integrated emergency management,
which is characterized by the use of networks, is far more effective at coordinatingwith other entities, both locally and vertically. Resources-strapped rural communities
can benefit greatly from this kind of coordination and may help communities learn
how to collaborate in post-disaster recovery when the emergency response
collaboration is practiced.
Research by Bowman and Parsons into what constitutes functional and effective
emergency management networks found that the best partners are often otherjurisdictions and state agencies (2013). They found that the most successful
networks function as performance regimes with a focus on actions and goals. They
also found that counties with higher capacity tend to interact less with smaller towns
and jurisdictions, a missed opportunity for the smaller governments, and thatcounties win geographic proximity to state actors engage more fully with the state.
These findings have real implications for rural communities seeking to engage infunctional networks.
As this indicates, rural communities face certain disadvantages when attempting
to work within network structures, including negative impacts from population
instability and economic downturns (Bowman and Parsons 2013; Caruson and
MacManus 2011). One study by Choi and Kim found that power, defined as the ability to get things done, is a determinant of network effectiveness (2007). The researchlooked at several types of power within networks: structural (formal power within
the design of the network), resource, actor, cognitive, and political. Unfortunately,
rural emergency managers operating within a network that includes larger partners
may be lacking in all of these forms of power. Cognitive-based power, stemmingfrom local knowledge, might be an asset in some situations. However, formal emergency management structures, including the systems for engagement with the nonprofit sector, often fail to really utilize local knowledge or to take into accountcommunity values and norms. This results in an inability to make the best use of
local nonprofits and community-based groups that are best suited to serve theimpacted community. Ireni-Saban identified this phenomenon following Hurricane
Katrina, and it is a recurring concern across other disasters (2012). For rural communities, where informal actors are most important, the lack of appreciation for
local knowledge and community values and norms is particularly problematic.

11.3

2016 Louisiana Flooding

The flooding in March of 2016 impacted many communities in the northern areas ofLouisiana. Although there are some larger population centers that were impacted,
generally speaking, Central and Northern Louisiana communities have more of an
agricultural and industrial economy than Southeastern Louisiana. These
communities, like much of rural America, have suffered from the economic
downturn and general changes in the national and state economies. A review ofexisting hazard mitigation plans, such as the one for Ouachita Parish (the county11 Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

303

upon which this case focuses), reveals a backlog of needed infrastructure work. The
parish, and its incorporated jurisdictions, also struggles with blighted properties anda general lack of safe and affordable housing (Ouachita Parish 2018).
The storm-impacted communities suffered extensive damage to housing, infrastructure, agriculture, and economy – all of which were already strained. Ouachita
Parish reported an estimated 9500 flood-damaged homes, with around 5400 homes
reported to have been completely flooded (Robichaud 2017). FEMA approved
approximately $94 million in housing and other needs assistance through its
Individual Assistance Program relating to the March flooding (FEMA 2017).
Infrastructure impacts throughout the northern region were severe as many accessroads, highways, waterways, and railways in these rural communities were reported
flooded due to record river crests (Vagell 2016). Damage to these transportationroutes caused cascading impacts to the many industries dependent upon them (USEconomic Development Administration 2017). Road flooding also affected ruralschool bus routes and caused school closures across the region (Associated Press
2016). In total, FEMA reported having provided more than $47 million to repair
infrastructure and conduct emergency work in the communities affected by the
spring flooding (FEMA 2017).
Impacts on the agriculture industry were also significant, partly due to the rain
event having occurred just after the state’s corn planting season (Gautreaux 2016).
Thus, impacts to agriculture included lost revenues from damaged crops and thecost of replanting flooded fields, as well as crop yield losses, lost livestock, andcosts associated with relocating surviving herds (McClure 2016). Total impacts tothe agricultural industry from the March flooding event totaled over $80 million(Louisiana Office of Community Development Disaster Recovery Unit 2019).
In addition to the damage to the agricultural industry, economic impacts of theflooding in the northern region were also felt by the area’s small businesses.
Businesses having to evacuate during the rain event suffered lost revenue as well as
damage from floodwaters. By December 2016, the Small Business Administration
had approved over $15 million in Business and Economic Injury Disaster Loans tobusiness in the region affected by the flooding (Louisiana Office of Community
Development Disaster Recovery Unit 2019). Additionally, Louisiana Economic
Development approved 698 loans of more than $36 million in assistance to small
businesses affected by the flooding (LED 2016).
The rural nature of many of the impacted communities, coupled with the distancefrom the state capital and a lack of experience navigating the federal public
assistance process, led to a failure to fully document damages. Local officials andvolunteers reported limited assistance from the state in damage documentation andrepeatedly voiced concerns that they were not equipped to fully document damages.
Although local officials did request additional assistance and did work to bringpolitical pressure to bear, the subsequent flooding of more populous areas closer to
Baton Rouge further impacted their ability to access the needed technicalresources (Personal communication 2016).33

Personal communications with local officials and community members in late 2016.

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The distance from the capital followed by the flooding of communities withmuch stronger linkages to the state government led to a perceived lack of investment
in Ouachita’s recovery and to the perception that other areas of the state constituted
a higher priority for the state government (O’Donoghue 2016). This was reflected inchallenges around damage assessment, in variations in resource allocation forstudies, and in direct access to key decision-makers.
These disparities were further exacerbated when areas closer to the capital,
including many suburbs, were flooded in August of 2016. The August flooding
diverted attention from the remaining needs in North Louisiana and re-impacted
some of the areas that had flooded in March (Grueskin 2018). Although there is little
data currently available regarding the status of the recovery, anecdotal data indicatesan ongoing struggle to fully recover including many of the challenges that theliterature would indicate might be expected.
Efforts at the state and local level to address regional resilience to extreme
weather events like the March 2016 floods are underway, yet much of this planningis still in the development stage. Following the March and August 2016 flooding, astate agency initiative to develop regional “watershed coalitions” was created by the
Louisiana Resilient Recovery Initiative. In 2018, Governor Edwards issued the
Executive Order JBE18–16 that formally created the Council on Watershed
Management. The council is comprised of individual parish government entities,
OCD, CPRA, GOHSEP, the Department of Transportation and Development, andthe Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The council is tasked with creating afloodplain management plan based on watershed data. The plan is in the development stages, with an implementation goal of March 2019 (Louisiana Watershed
Initiative 2019).
Ouachita Parish has successfully worked with the state and federal government
to initiate a recovery planning process. Public meetings took place in July of 2018,
over 2 years after the flooding. They were focused on how the parish might become
more resilient (Merritt 2018; Ouachita Strong 2018). This process is still ongoing,
but local officials hope that it will lead to greater investment in the resilience of thecommunity (Personal communication 2018)4 . Thus, it is evident that efforts at thestate and local level are underway to address future resilience to flooding events likethat experienced by Northern Louisiana in March 2016. It is too soon to know how
successful they will be.

11.4

Conclusion and Recommendations

There are three key recommendations that emerge from the research: (1) planningfor community resilience should consider means to build upon existing social capital while also increasing local social capital; (2) networks and interaction between
peers may be the best means to improve recovery outcomes in under-­resourced
4

Personal communications with local officials and community members in 2018.

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305

communities; and (3) disaster recovery processes must take into account the differences between communities and actively strive to ensure equitable access toresources as well as equitable outcomes.
These recommendations support the increased resilience of all communities, notjust rural, but they are particularly relevant to communities that have a shortage ofcapacity or financial resources.
Recommendation #1
Both informal social capital networks and formal policy/planning channels are critical to achieving community resilience (LaLone 2012). These channels are often
overlooked by traditional emergency management actors, who focus more oncommand and control and do not understand the contributions that arise from social
capital (LaLone 2012). Social capital can be increased through the nurturing ofcommunity relationships of reciprocity and trust (Ireni-Saban 2012). Aldrich andMeyer found that social capital can also be increased through what they termed timebanking, building a history of time spent together at regular gatherings, andsupported through spatial design (2015). In other words, it is simply creating spaces
and reasons for individuals to spend time interacting with each other and building a“bank” of time spent together. It can also be built through face-to-face interactions,
supportive policies, institutional support, and leadership programs. The Ouachita
Strong Resilience Strategy planning process has sought to identify ways in which tofoster community relationships but has also brought to the forefront several
preexisting tensions.
Several key barriers to resilience can be overcome through the increasing ofsocial capital. As Rivera and Settembrino observed, a community may face few
environmental hazards but still suffer from social and economic pressures andproblems that have a negative impact upon their resilience (2013). Key barriers tobuilding resilience in the face of these pressures are mistrust of the government andthe lack of access to resources. These barriers can be mediated through an increasein bonding and bridging social capital, as individuals foster relationships that
increase their access to resources and personal connections to those within thegovernment. Furthermore, focusing on community capacity building has beenfound to be more effective than focusing on reducing administrative shortcomings(Ireni-Saban 2012). Such an approach might be tied into existing planning processesor might be accomplished through partnerships and networks.
Recommendation #2
Research has shown that informal peer-to-peer and bottom-up interactions can be
more effective at building resilience than formal planning processes and that thesetypes of interactions can be crucial to the success of even formal processes (Brunner2016). These interactions can take place at any time and are most effective when
there is a long history of network building. The resulting relationships can provide
direct assistance but can also assist impacted communities with navigating the large
amounts of information that are made available following a disaster. In fact, there
are multiple clearinghouses purporting to provide information vital to disaster
resiliency and recovery, but the filtering of that information is largely left up to the306

A. Jerolleman

users (Brunner 2016). When that user is already operating at diminished capacity
and struggling to meet basic demands, the time necessary for successful filtering is
simply not available. Peers can provide a much-needed source of input regarding
what resources may be most useful, as well as what the trade-offs might be for any
particular resource being considered, both during planning processes and following
a disaster.
This begs the question of how these types of interactions can be promoted andwhether government can work to develop empathetic relationships with community
members in order to facilitate collaborative actions when disaster strikes (Ireni-­
Saban 2012). These types of collaborative relationships will support the creation of
emergency management networks, an invaluable resource at any phase of theemergency management cycle, while also increasing social capital. A workshop in
2012, comprised of 80 practitioners in the field of climate adaptation, found thatbuilding relationships, having the right people at the table, and promoting
collaboration within and across groups was the most successful at promoting the
adoption of adaptation measures (Brunner and Nordgren 2016).
Additionally, the government can also make policies that show that local knowledge is valued and that focus on the community as a whole and do not just treat
households and individuals as being without social context.
Recommendation #3
Whenever permissible through programmatic and regulatory mechanisms, recovery
resources should be targeted towards building local capacity (Downey 2016). These
resources should also be rendered flexible and adaptable, in order to meet distinct
local needs (Brunner and Nordgren 2016).
One of the key recommendations that emerges from the research is to identify theways in which recovery processes can become better able to meet a wider range ofcommunity needs.
There are various ways in which the state government can assist local jurisdictions that are suffering from a lack of resources. One strategy, utilized after Hurricane
Katrina by the state of Mississippi, is to assist local governments with borrowing
money for recovery (Landy 2008). This can help local jurisdictions to weather theimmediate shortfalls and to be able to remain solvent while awaiting reimbursement.
Landy goes so far as to suggest that all localities be required to have a rainy day
fund but perhaps to receive assistance in creating one. Additionally, partnerships
with the state government along with coordination with regional entities can help toensure that local and regional projects do not compete against each other for similar
pots of funding (Brunner and Nordgren 2016).
One means through which differing community needs might be addressed isthrough additional empowerment of local FEMA representatives, allowing for
greater use of bureaucratic discretion and for decisions to be made at the local level.
This would require moving away from the strong oversight mentality and towards a
focus on improving recovery outcomes (Landy 2008). Another means of increasing
local adaptability and flexibility might be to create a version of CDBG that includes
fewer requirements.

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Part VII

Types/Locations of Communities andTheir Responses to Extreme Weather:
Coupled Coastal-InlandChapter 12

Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive
Capacity and Community Well-Being
Across Louisiana’s Dynamic
Coastal–Inland Continuum
Traci Birch and Jeff Carney

12.1

Introduction

Climate change impacts pose significant risk to both coastal and inland communities.
This is particularly true in Louisiana, which has lost 1900 mi2 of coastal wetlands
since 1930, and another 1750 mi2 are estimated at risk of loss over the next 50 years(Couvillion et al. 2017; CPRA 2012, 2017b). Coastal Louisiana is a young anddynamic landscape, built over the last 8000 years through regular Mississippi River
spring floods, which left rich sediment behind as the waters receded (Couvillion et al.
2017). As the river migrated east or west searching for the path of least resistance to
the Gulf of Mexico, wetlands developed along coastal edges, bayous, and estuarine
landscapes (see Fig. 2.2 in Boesch). Land loss is a result of several complex factors,
but the primary culprits are levees separating the deltaic plain from the sediment-rich
Mississippi River, hydrological alteration from oil and gas exploration, and accelerating eustatic sea level rise (Day et al. 2007).
Land loss is profoundly changing the nature of Louisiana’s social and naturalenvironments, and diminishing many of its benefits, including storm protection,
fisheries habitats, and distinct cultural practices (Costa 2018; Groves and Sharon2013). Land loss increases community flood risk because healthy coastal wetlands,
swamps, barrier islands, and ridges provide a critical buffer against slow-onset andabrupt climate change impacts. While migration away from the most vulnerable
areas is ongoing, 47% of Louisiana’s population still lives in the coastal zone.
T. Birch (*)
Coastal Sustainability Studio, School of Architecture, Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge, LA, USAe-mail: tbirch@lsu.edu
J. Carney
School of Architecture, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER),
University of Florida, Gainsville, FL, USAe-mail: j.carney@ufl.edu© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0_12

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T. Birch and J. Carney

When extended to encompass coastal watersheds, more than 70% of Louisiana’s
population are coastal dwellers – in large part because this is home to the bulk of
the state’s economy. Louisiana’s coastal zone is a major locus of seafood, oil andgas, maritime, and petrochemical industries for the nation – what Laska et al.
(2005) refer to as “immovable industries.” This includes major cities, vast suburbs,
and small villages along south Louisiana’s rivers and bayous – all of which rely on
healthy coastal marshes and forests for flood protection. Coastal flood risks include
sudden catastrophic impacts from tropical storms and hurricanes, as well as lesssevere but more common blue sky tidal flooding exacerbated by low topography,
relative sea level rise, and land loss.
Inland communities far from the coastal edge but connected ecologically, infrastructurally, and culturally as part of the Lower Mississippi River Delta Plain also
face risks from severe rain that overwhelms riverine floodplains. This is exacerbatedby the increasing convergence of coastal and inland processes from a retreating
coastline (Birch and Carney 2019). This was made apparent by a series of floods
experienced by inland communities across the state from March to August 2016.
Research across disciplines suggests these impacts will continue to increase in frequency and intensity over time (Kolker et al. 2011; Prein et al. 2016; Vermeer andRahmstorf 2009). However, entrenched industry coupled with residents’ deep place
attachment developed through generational tenure and intimate knowledge of local
environments requires adaptation for survival in the face of coastal change (Burley
et al. 2007). Sustainability of the overall ecological, infrastructural, economic, andsocial systems of this and other coupled coastal–inland regions rely on local capacity for incremental adaptation and replicable design strategies, in addition to thelarger-scale structural protection and ecological restoration efforts.
In the face of these challenges, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority (CPRA) developed Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a
Sustainable Coast (2017 Coastal Master Plan), defining a 50-year strategy forcoastal flood risk reduction and sustainable natural landscape production. The
Master Plan reflects the state’s environmental complexity and climate change reality, proposing economic, ecological, and hydrological adaptation priorities to ensure
long-term coastal resilience and viability. Built on a platform of infrastructural protection, hydrological and ecological restoration, and hazard mitigation, the plan
proposes to reduce community and economic risk through engineered defenses,
both built and natural. However, a heavy reliance on ecological and engineered
solutions calls into question whether the Master Plan provides an effective framework for community-scaled resilience. This chapter highlights resilience thinking
as a critical but underdeveloped element of risk reduction and protection in the state.
Coordinated community planning and innovative design may hold the greatest long-­
term risk reduction potential against the impacts of climate change but are generally
underutilized (Lyles et al. 2014). This chapter examines coastal design and planningin Louisiana, providing an overview of existing large-scale efforts with an eye totheir achievements and barriers. Further, there is an investigation of current
community-­based frameworks addressing resilience and adaptation gaps at thearchitectural, neighborhood, and community scales. Finally, the authors identify

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315

points of opportunity to further integrate community planning and design into thecoastal protection and restoration framework to protect the health, safety, and welfare of coastal and inland communities. While Louisiana’s situation is extreme (inboth the scale of the problem and the extent of the proposed solution), it provides ameaningful bellwether to planners, designers, and others for identifying both coastal
vulnerability, restoration approaches, and community level impacts. As coastal hazards increase, regions from Texas to New York are contemplating large-scale restoration and protection efforts proportional to those in Louisiana, and much can belearned from this experience.

12.2

 iterature on Resilience Thinking for Community
L
Resilience and Adaptation

In the face of increasingly costly human and environmental disasters, resilience hasrisen to prominence in community planning and design scholarship related to mitigating hazards and enhancing capacity to cope with environmental change and disturbance. While a recent addition to the disciplinary lexicon, it is not a new concept.
Coming from the Latin root resi-lire, meaning to spring or bounce back, it was firstused by physical scientists to describe the stability of nonliving materials and resistance to external shocks. Through this lens, resilience measures structural elasticity
and the speed by which an engineered design returns or bounces back to a previous
equilibrium after a disturbance (Gunderson 2000). It is widely recognized that
Holling (1973) extended the concept of resilience to include ecosystem stability andchange. Rather than bouncing back to a previous state, Holling (1973, 1996) emphasized ecological complexity and the evolutionary capacity of natural systems toadapt and transform over time. Hence, this measure of resilience rejects a single
state of equilibrium, measuring not just how long it takes a system to return toresume normal functions but also how much disturbance a system can take before it
fundamentally changes (Davoudi 2012). Davoudi (2012, p. 301) notes what underpins both perspectives is the “belief in the existence of equilibria in systems, be it apre-existing one to which a resilient system bounces back (engineering) or a newone to which it bounces forth (ecological).” An increased awareness of the interconnections between environment and society, resilience has since been redefined andextended to encompass ecological, socio-ecological, and economic systems (Folke
2006; Holling 2001; Walker and Salt 2006). Equilibrium resilience has been highly
influential across a range of social science disciplines, including environmental psychology, economic geography, disaster studies, and environmental planning, as away to predict or model socio-ecological change.
Resilience thinking proposes a systems approach to human–environmental
relations, having evolved mainly through the application of ecological concepts tosocial systems (Cote and Nightingale 2012). Resilience thinking emerged out of a
dissatisfaction with models of ecosystem dynamics that (a) focused too heavily on

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T. Birch and J. Carneya return to previous states and (b) paid too little attention to interactive dynamics
between human and biophysical systems (Berkes and Folke 1998; Berkes et al.
2000). Within this work, humans and their environment are not conceived as separate systems but rather as a single dynamic, adaptable, and interrelated socio-­
ecological system (SES). In this perspective, resilience is understood not as afixed asset, but as a continually changing process as systems are confronted with
disturbance and stress. This means that, for example, people might become more
resilient not in spite of adversities but because of them. Emphasis on the fundamental role of adaptive capacity and transformation in the analysis of SES allows
change to happen and systems to adapt rather than trying to control and avoid it(Folke et al. 2010).
Within resilience and SES thinking, there is a recognition that resilience is an
important counter-narrative to conventional anthropocentric approaches such as“maximum yield” or “carrying capacity,” which separate human actions from ecosystem impacts. As noted by Cote and Nightingale (2012, p. 478), resilience thinking plays an important role in shifting the focus away from the quantitative
availability of resources and toward a more dynamic and forward-looking approachto human–environmental change that is defined by ecological rather than politicalboundaries. Innovations in resilience thinking provide genuine promise to thedomain of planning for changing urban and environmental conditions. This is due
mainly to the field’s emerging commitment to complexity as seen through the integration of a diversity of knowledge holders (Cote and Nightingale 2012).
While expressed in new nomenclature, the resilience discourse is in fact similar
to the positivist methods applied across the planning fields to address urban infrastructure (Mehmood 2016). Planning is inherently a systems-based endeavor – promoting the scientific, aesthetic, and orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities,
and services with a view to securing systemic physical, economic, and social efficiencies. In particular, land-use planning and design is intended to promote moredesirable social and environmental outcomes while minimizing conflicts between
uses. However, within multijurisdictional regions, planning is also highly fragmented across decision-making bodies with different goals. Each has authority todetermine its own land uses, development practices, and management strategies toachieve locally determined objectives. Financial solvency, for example, is a primaryconcern of each jurisdiction and results in radically different land-use strategies. As
noted by Brody (2008, p. 21), while natural systems are “intricately connected overbroad spatial and temporal scales, the land-use decision-making framework is limited to local jurisdictions and some limited input from regional planning councils.
Uncoordinated local land use decisions have cumulative negative impacts on thesystem as a whole.” Fragmented planning has often yielded undesirable results
including wasteful land-use patterns, degraded air and water, loss of biodiversity,
displacement of the poor, and natural disaster losses. Also noted by Brody (2008,
p. 22) is that “having the ability to look at the entire ecological system, even if it
extends beyond a planner’s jurisdiction is a critical aspect to effectively managing
ecosystems.”

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While the translation of resilience from ecology to social systems can be p­ roblematic,
as we will discuss, it provides a framework to embrace complexity and extend planning boundaries to ecosystems rather than maintaining the politically defined units that
perplex planning. The incorporation of adaptation and transformation as the rule rather
than the exception undermines the assumptions of the steady state on which the linear
extrapolations of planners often rely. This provides opportunities for collaboration andinnovation as components of any system must be conceived to allow change to happen,
rather than requiring control to avoid it (Davoudi 2012).
Another promising aspect of resilience thinking is the genuine commitment tointegrating professional disciplines and nontraditional stakeholders. Resiliencescholars recognize that an ecosystem of knowledge includes information and experiences from researchers and decision-makers, as well as knowledge gained throughextensive personal observation shared among local resource users. The inclusion of
local ecological knowledge (LEK) is key to understanding ecological and institutional change, which can in turn modify the way resources are managed, and thereby
the landscape itself (Berkes and Folke 1998; Folke 2006; Cote and Nightingale2012). LEK is a cumulative body of knowledge handed down through generations
about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another andwith their environment (Berkes and Folke 1998, p. 3). The use of LEK in coordinated land-use and community design can play a key role in augmenting ongoing
scientific modeling efforts, galvanizing support for coastal restoration projects,
employing traditional adaptive measures, and developing compromises given thereality of limited resources (Tompkins et al. 2008). LEK builds upon the historic
human experiences and adapts to social, economic, environmental, spiritual, andpolitical change. Grumbine (1994, 1997) notes that ecosystem management must
include recognition that people are embedded within natural systems and that societal values play a dominant role in ecosystem management. Ecosystem frameworks
entail understanding natural system properties and processes and understanding
systems as dynamic while promoting stakeholder engagement and coordination
between partners (Armitage et al. 2009).
While there is great promise, it is important to note that the application of ecological concepts to social concerns in the name of resilience problematicallyassumes that social and ecological dynamics are essentially similar. Recent extensions of ecological resilience to social systems have given rise to the concept ofsocial resilience, defined as “the ability of groups or communities to cope withexternal stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, and environmental
change” (Adger 2000, p. 347). The rise of social resilience in theory has also givenrise to critical literature due to the perceived overemphasis on the role of physicalshocks and an underemphasis on history, economy, and power dynamics that perpetuate inequality (Davoudi 2012; Fainstein 2015). In ecological literature, there are
no rewards or punishments, just consequences. In society, there are always rewards
and punishments. Resilience building means that some will gain while others lose.
Cote and Nightingale (2012, p. 475) argue that an analysis of the SES capacity toadapt and change must be framed within an understanding of cultural values,

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historical context, and ethical standpoints of the kinds of actors involved. It is lessabout “getting the rules right” and more about subjective identities, effective relationships, and lay knowledge as a better way of understanding human–environmental processes and change – the resilience of what and for whom. Planners anddesigners must engage in discussions of power and social difference that are central
to critical social science research, because resilience planning has as much to dowith who shapes the challenges as it does how to responding to them (Davoudi2012). With regard to community development, the heavy focus on adaptive capacity is more likely to encourage small incremental change rather than significant
systemic transformation, which disadvantages socially marginalized groups(Cretney 2014).
While reconceptualization of planning to embrace some sort of evolution andchange broadens the potential for resilience thinking across disciplines, some argue
clarity and practical relevance have suffered (Brand and Jax 2007; Cutter 2016a;
Davoudi 2012; Fainstein 2015). The intent and foundation of resilience as both astate of bouncing back and jumping forward has given way to a blending of contradictory descriptive aspects that make definition, operationalization, and assessment
difficult – what Markusen (2003) refers to as “fuzzy conceptualization.” Cutter(2016b, p. 110) observes “such vagueness has its merits, especially in the policy
world where the goals and motivations of proponents are highly variable and politicized.” However, Markusen (2003) points out that fuzzy conceptualization also
makes implementation challenging. Matyas and Pelling (2014, p. S1) note the ambiguity surrounding resilience means “it is a concept caught between the abstract andthe operational.” From the planning and design perspective, resilience frameworks
call into question whether traditional planning tools (i.e., toolkits, etc.) are adequate
to address complex challenges – or whether they are doomed to solving yesterday’s
problems (Taylor 2005). Others note that malleability creates flexibility and opportunity to foster communication between science and planning practice (Brand andJax 2007; Davoudi 2012).
Communities, however, face challenging economic, social, and environmental
changes requiring attention. There is a growing need for effective ways to support
adaptation-related decision-making due to both slow-onset and rapid environmental
change. Government agencies, businesses, and individuals increasingly find themselves fundamentally unprepared for meeting the challenges of climate change.
Typically, local decision-making such as infrastructure construction and the types ofzoning and development regulations implemented assume environmental stability.
Yet many coastal and inland communities are faced with increasing uncertainty andvulnerability associated with climate change. Local governments also have coreregulatory powers in the land-use, transportation, and waste sectors critical to comprehensive climate change responses (Trisolini 2010). Building flexibility, adaptability, and durability into local decision-making is key to building resilience(Beatley 2009; Godschalk 2003; Vale and Campanella 2005). The National ResearchCouncil (2012) notes enhancing community resilience and sustainability requires
both “bottom-up” approaches at the individual and community level and the “top-­down” strategies at the federal and state levels. Further, Beatley (2009) notes the12Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community Well-Being…

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qualities of resilient communities include hazard mitigation of the built ­environment,strong and diverse economic conditions, and a robust social infrastructure including
strong social systems and networks. The following discusses how the State ofLouisiana is attempting to build resilience into ecological and social systems
through both top-down and bottom-up approaches.

12.3

 ouisiana’s Comprehensive Master PlanL
for a Sustainable Coast

As early as the 1970s, researchers and coastal residents recognized that flood protection and industrial interventions in the Louisiana landscape were increasing
coastal land loss (Barrett 1970; Chabreck 1972; Gagliano 1973; Gagliano and Van
Beek 1975). In response to land loss, Louisiana has developed a series of restorationplans since the 1990s prioritizing hydrological and ecological restoration as thecenterpiece of ecosystem management (CPRA 2007, 2012, 2017b; LCWCRTF
1998; USACE 2004). Each successive plan has added new data, science, and innovation to emphasize the perilous state of the coast and the need for restoration toprevent total ecological and economic collapse (CPRA 2017b, p. ES-10). However,the dual impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 proved too much for established coastal governance in the state. After these devastating impacts, which
affected coastal and inland communities alike, Louisiana consolidated the tasks ofcoastal restoration and hurricane protection under one agency called the CPRA. At
the same time, the state redefined the coastal zone to include all lands subject tostorm or tidal surge. The expanded inland boundary was determined by a range oflandscape-based calculations (e.g., tidal influence, vegetation, topography) and varies from 20 to more than 100 miles inland (La. Rev. Stat. § 49:214.24 2015) (seeFig. 7.3 in Chap. 7.)
The authority to protect coastal property and restore coastal ecosystems firstcame together in CPRA’s 2007 Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a
Sustainable Coast (2017 Coastal Master Plan) and has been expanded in subsequent
5-year updates (2012 and 2017). The Master Plan builds upon the Multiple Lines of
Defense Strategy, which proposes a coastal management structure of both naturaland man-made features to hold back storm surge, maintain threatened habitats, andpromote landscape resilience (Lopez 2009). Written primarily by engineers andecologists, somewhat logically the Master Plan embraces both the “bounce-back”
and “bounce-forward” resilience scenarios of its authors (Bahadur et al. 2010;
Pendall et al. 2009). In particular, coastal protection measures are designed to resist
storm impacts and maintain structural integrity, while enhanced coastal landscapes
can adapt and transform over time to absorb climate change impacts. There are eightprotection and restoration typologies (Fig. 12.1) providing a range of proposed projects phased in near- (1–10 years), mid- (11–31 years), and long-term (31–50 years)
timeframes. Projects in the near-term are relatively close to engineering and320

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Fig. 12.1 2017 Master Plan proposed projects. (Image source: Louisiana Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authority (CPRA))

construction, while middle- and long-term proposals are more speculative. The
effort is supported by state and federal resources, but settlements from the 2010 BP
oil spill provide a significant down payment of $8B on the plan’s $50B price tag.
Following the 2012 Master Plan, the CPRA estimates roughly $1B annually has
been spent on restoration and protection measures across the state’s coastal zone
(CPRA 2017b). As noted by the CPRA (2017b, p.ES-2), “the master plan identifies
a long-term program of construction, operations, and maintenance, and adaptive
management…to be implemented as funds become available.” The state recognizes,
however, that even if all Master Plan projects are implemented, land will continue
to erode and landscapes will change in unexpected ways due to impacts from restoration projects (CPRA 2017b). Further, risk to both coastal and inland communities
will continue as coastal waters encroach and thus stronger, engineered protection
measures will be needed to maintain community and economic interests in the
coastal zone.
The Master Plan takes a systems approach to coastal restoration and management, broadening the scope of traditional coastal planning to consider a wide rangeof ecological and economic interactions within an ecologically defined region(Boesch 2006). Restoration and management units are defined by watershed andhabitat boundaries and functions rather than political designations, requiring greaterintergovernmental coordination to manage complex restoration scenarios. The
Master Plan computationally models, synthesizes, and evaluates projects designed
to protect coastal infrastructure, habitats, and settlements against natural hazards(Groves and Sharon 2013). Restoration actions are intended to reestablish coastal
landscapes to protect regional ecology and major economic interests (Colten 2017).
This ecosystem approach emphasizes regional biophysical ecology and hydrologic
processes, but has generally not been expanded to include social and cultural dimensions (Colten 2017; Peyronnin et al. 2013). While significant scientific knowledgeof landscape change is employed to project how the natural system – hydrology,
flora, and fauna – will transform and adapt, the properties of human-centered systems are far less studied and modeled in a systems context. Structural protection

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focuses on building or enhancing physical barriers against storm surge and sea level
rise to protect existing communities and infrastructure. Nonstructural hazard­mitigation reduces risk to human settlement through flood proofing, elevation, andlimited voluntary acquisition of at-risk structures (CPRA 2017b, p. ES-15). Yet
there are few if any proposed changes to traditional community development patterns or future growth scenarios. CPRA contends this is the largest risk reduction
program in the country, recommending mitigation of 26,000 structures coast-wide –with an estimated $6B price tag (CPRA 2017a, p. 18). Unlike other proposed Master
Plan projects, however, community-based components are voluntary, relying on
local political will and policy change for implementation. A number of problems
emerge from this strategy, including a lack of planning and design capacity inunderserved communities, disincentives for local communities to reduce populationin the floodplain and potentially displace residents from their community, and adearth of accurate information related to environmental and social conditions.
Further, no funds budgeted for coastal protection and restoration have been awarded
for nonstructural projects since 2007. And it is unclear whether BP oil spill funds
will be dedicated to this effort. Using federal disaster recovery funds appears to be
the only possible source.
To support the Master Plan, CPRA developed a modeling approach reflecting
both the environmental complexity and climate reality of the state (Groves andSharon 2013). Modeling efforts reflect ecological, hydrological, and geologicalcomponents of the region, but there is no comparable accounting of acceptable restoration compromises given limited resources or societal disruptions that willaccompany ecological restoration. Local community members often possess abundant ecological knowledge. As noted by Burley (2010), Louisiana is one of a handful of locations in the USA where most trace their familial ties generations back,and many are engaged in natural resource-based activities providing a lifetime ofenvironmental observation and experience. However, current models of stakeholder
engagement generate extensive transcripts of public opinion but are limited in termsof scope and genuine stakeholder contribution (Bethel et al. 2014). Public meetings
often present technical information in a form to which laypersons do not easily
relate and in an atmosphere that can limit useful input into the process – a complaint
voiced by residents regarding the 2012 Coastal Master Plans (Colten 2014). As aresult, public hearings and stakeholder group meetings may do little to empower the
public in helping to shape decision-making. Further, there seems to be an increasing
mistrust in scientific findings about resource management. Such skepticism undermines the public perception regarding the integrity of scientists and the scientificprocess (Ko et al. 2017).
A resilience thinking approach to Louisiana’s coastal ecosystem therefore
involves not only a shift in resource management practices but also a fundamental
restructuring of the historical practices of community engagement, land use, andurban design (Beatley 2000; Brody 2003; Montgomery et al. 1995). The ability toovercome the politics of land use and the exclusion of local knowledge holders toachieve collaborative solutions will be the key to successful ecosystem restorationand community resilience in the coastal zone. While some states provide mandates

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and resources for local planning and design, the majority (including Louisiana)
leave decisions of land use and community development to local authorities. The
Master Plan (2017a, p. 4) fully supports local planning, recognizing that improved
land use and community design “should emphasize resilience, systems thinking,community engagement, equity, implementation, and adaptation in order to meetthe challenges today’s communities face.” However, a lack of dedicated funding
underscores the disjunction between community resilience and an agency whose
mandate and expertise are more closely aligned with engineering and natural sciences (2017a, p. 10). Rather, CPRA makes policy recommendations and calls uponother state agencies to develop programmatic initiatives and write community resilience policies. Despite statements of protection and restoration in the name of preserving coastal communities, the Master Plan’s primary focus on ecologicalrestoration and avoidance of community-based planning and design in many ways
overlooks key elements of social resilience. Colten (2017, p. 699) notes managing
Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is a human endeavor, “but the responsible government
bodies sometimes carry out their task as if the environmental processes they direct
were detached from the local society.” Without resources and technical support forresilience, there is a lost opportunity to drive elements critical to comprehensive risk
reduction, such as (1) where to (and not to) develop in coastal areas based on future
loss and restoration strategies, (2) need-based capital expenditures and infrastructure investment, and (3) LEK, priorities, and acceptable trade-offs.
In Louisiana, there is much debate about governmental responsibility for working with communities on issues related to resilience and retreat. In 2010, following
Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development
and the Louisiana Office of Community Development, Disaster Recovery Unit
(OCD-DRU) set aside $10M in disaster recovery funds to enhance community resilience through innovative planning and design. This competitive grant program – aprecursor to ensuing design competitions such as Resilient by Design and the
NDRC – supported hazard mitigation and sustainability measures. Thirty impacted
communities received funding for projects ranging from comprehensive planningand zoning to design-driven housing and water resource management. Notably,
these funds were used to write the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, a comprehensive, integrated, and sustainable water management strategy for the New
Orleans region.
In 2016, Governor John Bel Edwards issued an executive order calling for allstate agencies to align major infrastructure investments and coastal restoration
objectives. This effort prioritizes interagency and intergovernmental coordination to
support community planning, floodplain management, and hazard mitigation.
Following the 2016 floods, the state recognized weaknesses in floodplain management that stopped at the coastal zone boundary, and it is in the nascent stages of
expanding intergovernmental coordination across watersheds reaching hundreds ofmiles inland. In a state with a relatively weak history of planning, these are positive
steps, but questions remain about which agencies and policies are capable of coordinating community resilience, floodplain management, and coastal restoration
moving forward. This also recognizes that the Master Plan is not likely to be the12Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community Well-Being…

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place where community resilience is addressed, nor is it able to address regional
issues with origins outside the coastal zone. Parishes and city governments r­ ecognize
a lack of capacity and resources to implement resilience planning measures within
their own boundaries and little if any ability to address systems outside their jurisdiction (Manning-Broome et al. 2015). There is a call for useful guidance on impacts
and mitigation measures for both projected land loss and coastal restoration measures. There is also a belief that there will be less backlash from constituents if
community design directives come from the state rather than local government
agencies (Manning-Broome et al. 2015). While there is a trade-off between exercising strong state government authority and allowing greater local autonomy,Louisiana has chosen the latter in matters of coastal ecosystem restoration. In lightof this, it is imperative that the state establish an effective and enforceable framework supporting land-use planning, risk reduction, and the development of bestpractices for regional urban and ecosystem management.
Community-based planning and design are in many ways the best tools available
to address regional infrastructure coordination, coastal restoration impacts, and necessary compromises that are equitable, just, and adaptable for Louisiana communities. However, traditional land-use planning is not without critiques in its ability tosimultaneously address regional environmental and community development issues.
In comparison with the restoration and protection processes put forth by the CPRA,
there remains a question of whether traditional methods of urban planning anddesign are sufficiently scalable to reduce risk coast-wide. Successful solutions
achieved through architecture and urban design are time intensive and unique tospecific conditions of place. Often, the desirable “bottom-up” qualities of design,
without a mechanism for scalability, make large-scale implementation unfeasible.
Projects underway through the NDRC and research emerging from the grant Inlandfrom the Coast (IFC) provide two innovative planning and design frameworks being
implemented in Louisiana that may serve as precedents for others as they tackle
climate change, ecological restoration, and flood recovery issues. Within the context
of the Master Plan, these planning and design methodologies provide improved
information and guidance related to community-level hazard mitigation, strengthening of economic conditions, and strong social network support.

12.4

 ational Disaster Resilience Competition: Sowing
N
the Seeds for Adaptive Planning and Community
Design in Coastal Louisiana

Following devastating disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in2012, federal, state, and local emphasis has shifted to developing community risk
reduction strategies through building-, community-, and regional-scaled design.
Following the success of Rebuild by Design (2013) and the ongoing 100 Resilient
Cities initiative, the US Department of HUD and the Rockefeller Foundation

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T. Birch and J. Carneydeveloped the NDRC to provide meaningful support for enhancing community
resilience. NDRC was a two-phase competitive process awarding $1B to help
communities across the USA with disaster recovery and the development of replicable resilience frameworks. The competition encouraged “American communities
to consider not only the infrastructure needed to become resilient, but also the socialand economic characteristics that allow communities to quickly bounce back after
disruption” (HUD 2015, p. 2). The competition encouraged multidisciplinary
approaches that considered equity and long-term environmental stability alongsideinnovative engineering and design responses to hazard mitigation. In January 2016,
HUD awarded the State of Louisiana $92M to address climate change impacts incoastal communities facing sea level rise, wetlands loss, and severe hurricane damage. Of that, $41M was dedicated to adaptation planning efforts known asLouisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) and $48M
for the relocation of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi–Chitimacha–
Choctaw tribe (See Chap. 6, Jessee, of this book). HUD also awarded the City of
New Orleans $141M for the Gentilly Resilience District – a neighborhood-scale
effort to reduce flood risk, slow land subsidence, and encourage revitalization. The
following provides a general overview of these efforts and how each incorporates
key elements of resilience thinking.

12.4.1

 ouisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future
L
Environments (LA SAFE)

In its application for NDRC funding, the state recognized that structural and ecological proposals contained in the Master Plan are essential to long-term occupationof the coastal landscape, but it is also crucial to develop a process of locally determined design, planning, and decision-making (OCD-DRU 2015). LA SAFE introduced CPRA ecosystem management approaches into community-based design
processes to create a replicable framework for developing catalytic adaptation projects. The community planning and design effort was led by Louisiana’s OCD-DRU
in partnership with nonprofits and design professionals. The challenge facing
coastal and inland planners is providing for the movement of coastal residents incrementally as land loss continues or in larger waves of migration following storms.
Out-migration will have significant impact on communities as they depopulate but
will also have effects across the entire state as pressures to accommodate additional
population mount (see also Chap. 7, Peterson, of this book for discussion of thislatter challenge). The state, through LA SAFE, recognizes the need to migrate,though this discussion has primarily focused on moving people within the coastalzone (OCD-DRU 2015). As seas rise and homes and communities are abandoned,
research shows that people are likely to migrate along existing infrastructure pathways taking them inland and away from coastal areas rather than moving incrementally a few miles at a time (Black et al. 2011; Findlay 2011). Considering theflexibility and adaptive capacity of the overall coastal region requires a systems
approach that considers communities as part of the complex coastal ecosystem.

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Enabling communities to move within a regional network following storms,
economic disruptions, or long-term change can help the region thrive even as theenvironment becomes increasingly dynamic.
Between 2017 and 2018, LA SAFE engaged six parishes (counties) – Jefferson,
Lafourche, Plaquemines, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, and Terrebonne – allrecently impacted by coastal storms and facing significant land loss. In a context oftremendous Master Plan investment in coastal ecosystems, LA SAFE sought to fill
the gap between increased risk and the eventual benefits of coastal protection andrestoration projects (OCD-DRU 2015). The program set goals to teach people about
their current and future vulnerabilities: (a) build projects to address this and (b)change the minds of development community to reimagine development patterns
for the long-term (OCD-DRU 2015). By 2022, LA SAFE will culminate in the construction of six adaptation projects, each developed by community-based planningand design processes within each of the six parishes. LA SAFE adopted a codesign
planning process that integrated planning expertise, science, and LEK to develop a
range of adaptation strategies. Meetings were facilitated by local community members to build trust and gather LEK, and proposed projects were chosen throughcommunity consensus. Projects include a business incubator, resilient housing prototypes, and a wetland education center. While most assessments of LA SAFE arefavorable, there are concerns about the larger framework. First, from the very beginning, there was not the political will to cross parish boundaries or consider fundamental shifts in development patterns that might move people away from the coastalzone (Birch and Brand 2019). When faced with the realities of climate change andprojected land loss, consensus between community members and decision-makers
was to focus on the narrow problems of today rather than dealing with the problemsof tomorrow (OCD-DRU 2015). Given the project-based nature of the funding dictated by HUD, LA SAFE projects can neither systematically address climate
impacts nor breach the imperative need for large-scale resettlement. Second, the“reshape, retrofit, or resettle” concept of adaptation was developed before a series
of inland floods, calling into question whether areas below 3’ BFE (Base Flood
Elevation) are appropriate for densification (Fig. 12.2). The reality is that climate
impacts are moving many from coastal locations further inland to urban centerssuch as Baton Rouge, Hammond, Lafayette, and Houston, low-lying inland communities that have flooded since 2016 due to severe rain events. As this program
moves from planning to construction, additional questions have emerged about economic development priorities related to the projects, pilot project scale related to thescale of climate-related issues, and lack of overall regional coordination.

12.4.2

Gentilly Resilience District

When HUD awarded NDRC funds to the City of New Orleans for the Gentilly
Resilience District, it validated over a decade of innovative water resource planningsupporting the city’s ongoing recovery. Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
recognized the devastating impacts of the “levee effect,” where flood risk is actually

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Fig. 12.2 Current flood risk in participating LA SAFE parishes influencing reshape, retrofit, or
resettle scenarios. (Image source: Louisiana Office of Community Development-Disaster Response
Unit)

increased by the compaction/sinking of land behind the levees which also offer a
false sense of security, despite well-documented environmental, technical, andsocial weaknesses (Tobin 1995). In an effort to sustain the city in spite of increased
climate risk, the design community in partnership with philanthropic organizations,
set out to reimagine New Orleans’ management of, and relationship with, water.
Beginning with the 2006 Dutch Dialogues®, teams of practitioners developed aseries of ambitious water management and resilience strategies culminating in thefederally funded projects Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan and subsequent
Resilient NOLA. These efforts were realized primarily through a sustained period ofengagement between city government and community design professionals todevelop fundable landscape-scale mitigation interventions. The Gentilly Resilience
District includes multiple water management and community development projects
designed to reduce flood risk, slow land subsidence, and encourage neighborhood
revitalization. The centerpiece of this effort is the Mirabeau Water Garden – a
25-acre site formerly owned by the Catholic Church – redesigned to provide open
space and storage for 10M gallons of neighborhood stormwater (see Fig. 12.3). In
total, the seven water management projects showcase efforts to improve social well-­being in some of New Orleans’ most floodprone areas. Though reflective of nearlya decade of urban design and planning, the effort to present landscape-scale solutions has been criticized for lacking meaningful local community engagement indecision-making throughout the process (Anguelovski et al. 2018). Such a critiquehighlights the significant challenge this work presents to design practitioners.
Together, these projects represent an emergent ecosystem approach embracing
design and renewal projects. However, the strength of these effo1ts appears more

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Fig. 12.3 The Mirabeau Water Garden, currently in the design phase, in New Orleans’ Gentilly
neighborhood, during both dry (left) and rainy (right) conditions. (Image source: Office ofResilience and Sustainability and 100 Resilient Cities)

dependent on individual designers than on integrative, replicable, and scalable
design processes. The design competition and design workshop models demonstrated through these projects have achieved significant progress in resilience planning and design. However, it remains unclear how these processes can be scaled up,
repeated, and quantitatively valued for implementation through mechanisms likethe Master Plan.

12.5

I nland from the Coast: Providing Opportunities
for Coupled Coastal–Inland Resilience Thinking

In August 2016, a low-pressure system dropped 22–31” of rain in 2 days acrossLouisiana’s capital region. Resultant flooding took 13 lives and caused damage toan estimated 145,000 structures. The region was brought to a standstill due to multi-­
day closures of Interstates 10 and 12, leading to transportation and economic disruption across the Gulf Coast. Touted as a “one-in-1000-year flood,” this was thethird such event in 2016 to hit the southeastern USA and one of nine since 2010(NOAA NWS 2016). Climate change predictions indicate these severe precipitation
events are likely to increase in frequency and intensity in the future (Prein et al.
2016). Through the Coastal Master Plan, Louisiana has demonstrated large-scalerisk reduction through structural protection and ecological restoration. However,significant inland flooding places like Baton Rouge indicate that coastal restorationand protection alone are not sufficient to reduce flood risk within coupled coastal–inland systems (Birch and Carney 2019). While there has been an expansion ofresiliency-based design projects, there remains a sizable gulf between demonstrated
community needs and the systematic deployment of new practices at sufficientscale. Recognizing a need to bridge the gap between restoration, protection, andadaptation, the authors, through the Louisiana State University Coastal Sustainability
Studio (LSU CSS), launched a multidisciplinary research effort known as Inlandfrom the Coast: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Regional Climate Change Responses

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T. Birch and J. Carney(IFC). Founded in 2009 in the wake of a series of devastating hurricanes, LSU CSS
is a transdisciplinary research center engaging a core group of architects, landscapearchitects, planners, coastal scientists, and civil engineers to research and respondto issues of resettlement, restoration, and socioeconomic sustainability. In 2017, theGulf Research Program of the National Academies of Science, in partnership with
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, funded IFC as part of the Thriving
Communities III program. The three-year grant expanded the LSU CSS collaborative model to include faculty and students from geography, psychology, and social
work. The expanded group also includes researchers from the University of New
Orleans Department of Planning and Urban Studies, Louisiana Sea Grant’s Law and
Policy Program, and the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER)
at the University of Florida. The grant requires innovative approaches to applying
research directly through practice. To achieve this, the collaboration also includes
members from the local chapters of American Institute of Architects, American
Planning Association, and American Society of Landscape Architects.
IFC poses three fundamental research questions to address specific needs not
currently met by the Master Plan or other planning efforts: (1) How is climatechange impacting or likely to impact communities connected across a coupledcoastal–inland system? (2) How can greater understanding of environmental risk
and community well-being increase adaptive capacity? (3) How can well-being andadaptation scholarship be incorporated into community design? The project takes amulti-scalar approach to present and future environmental conditions modeling,
community well-being research, and applied community design for ongoing flood
recovery and long-term resilience. Unlike the Master Plan and NDRC projects,
which are relegated to the coast and near-coast inland Parish of St. John the Baptist,
IFC addresses ecological, social, and infrastructural issues across the Amite Riverbasin, which spans a region that includes coastal, transitional, and inland communities (Bilskie and Hagen 2018). Efforts are structured to develop adaptive design
opportunities in flood-damaged communities facing increased coastal and riverine
flooding. The project takes an iterative approach, linking university researchers withdesign professionals, policy makers, and community members throughout the process to (1) improve understanding of coastal–inland environmental conditions andvulnerabilities, (2) define current and future community health and well-being, and(3) develop design and planning best practices for reducing risk and increasing
regional adaptive capacity.

12.5.1

 odeling Coupled Systems for Stormwater
M
Management

On August 12, 2019, meteorologists began sounding the alarm that a low-pressure
system would move inland from the Gulf of Mexico and deliver significant rainfall
over the south central portion of the state. While tropical in nature, had this unnamed
storm been a hurricane, there would have been advance warning and time to let

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329

people prepare. Instead, the storm moved inland quickly and paralyzed the Baton
Rouge and Lafayette regions with historic rainfall and flooding. While considered
today to be unprecedented, this was actually the second storm of 2016 to catch stateand local agencies and residents off guard. In March 2016, a one-in-500-year event
impacted areas slightly east of Baton Rouge – in many cases flooded the same residents twice. It is notable that many of the communities flooded in 2016 have experienced significant growth in recent years, in part due to in-migrations fromvulnerable coastal communities who, along with community development professionals, presumed these areas were safe from flooding (Fig. 12.4). In reality, as
many as 91% of homes damaged were not identified by FEMA as within Special
Flood Hazard Areas, thus requiring flood insurance. As a result, the majority of
impacted homeowners lacked flood insurance coverage. Bookended by Hurricanes
Matthew in 2016 and Harvey in 2017, this storm has largely faded from national
consciousness, but its impact provides evidence that migration inland from vulnerable coastal areas does not necessarily reduce overall risk (OCD-DRU 2015). The
Amite River is a shallow, slow-moving river running from southern Mississippi
through southeast Louisiana before emptying into Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf
of Mexico (Fig. 12.5). Over time, channelization, resource extraction, and urban
development have drastically altered the capacity of the river. One of the greatest
impacts to the system not previously accounted for was the construction of Interstate
12 (I-12) through the region. As the Amite River moves north–south through theregion, it is intersected by I-12, greatly restricting natural flow and capacity and acting as a levee in many areas. In August 2016, this constraint of the river was apparent as extreme rainfall north of the roadway filled drainageways and was unable toFig. 12.4 Suburban
expansion of Baton Rouge
starting from the historiccore along the Mississippi
River high-ground to thelowlands of the Amite
River watershed. (Image
source: LSU CSS)

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T. Birch and J. Carney

Fig. 12.5 Three scales of the Inland from the Coast Project: coastal–inland flood interface, watershed–parish boundary conflicts, and local projects. East Baton Rouge, Livingston, and Ascension
Parish are all within the Amite River watershed. (Adapted from LSU Coastal Sustainablity Studio)

drain, causing significant backwater flooding into communities north of theinterstate. Ultimately, I-12 was overtaken in numerous spots by stormwater flows,
stranding those trying to evacuate flooded communities.
To address uncertainty about current and future environmental conditions, IFC
researchers from the LSU Center for Coastal Resiliency and Center for River Studies
are developing a hydrodynamics model of the Amite River watershed to inform
stormwater management. Concurrently, cultural geographers completed focus groups
with LEK experts (e.g., floodplain managers, planners, long-time residents, elected
officials) to understand how the system reacts under varied conditions. Conversations
with local experts provide more than a check on the veracity of a model – they arebeing used to inform and improve mathematical assumptions by inserting information related to landscape obstruction, temporal change, and cumulative impacts. Thisapproach enables researchers to model future hydrological conditions at a level ofdetail appropriate for design intervention at the scale of the neighborhood and building and to test these models against the experience of residents.

12.6

 nderstanding Current and Future CommunityU
Well-Being

When disasters strike, disparities in community health and resilience become glaringly apparent. In few places has this been better demonstrated than south Louisiana,
where coastal land loss, human-made disasters, and extreme weather impact the12Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community Well-Being…

331

region at regular intervals. The circumstances that people are born into, grow up
with, and live in greatly impact well-being and overall ability to cope and adapt overtime. Prolonged or repeated exposure to negative environmental impacts or crises
result in physical and mental tolls to both individuals and communities. Repeatedimpacts from catastrophic events produce a social crisis context that disrupts all
aspects of daily life, in line with what Picou et al. (2004) refer to as “corrosive communities.” Building adaptive capacity to respond to disruption and become more
resilient requires a framework that allows communities to define their own well-­being and prioritize those environmental, cultural, and social values essential forrecovery. Community well-being is a complex combination of physical, mental,
emotional, political, and socioeconomic conditions contributing to one’s ability tocope with the normal stresses of life (McCrea et al. 2015; Wiseman and Brasher
2008). Central to IFC is that community well-being is spatially related to flood risk.
In Baton Rouge, large-scale alteration of the environment, through flood control
projects and unrestricted suburban development, has resulted in significant alteration of the environment and a “muddling” of residents’ understanding of environmental conditions and risk. This leads to reduced capacity among community
members to respond to and effectively cope with flooding leading to reduced community resilience.
Improved modeling of the Amite River watershed allows floodplain managers toaddress flood risk and planners to guide development as described previously.
Similarly, enhanced knowledge of specific indicators of community well-being
informs and enhances future recovery and resilience needs. IFC researchers developed a Community Well-being Index weighing social, environmental, and healthindicators to provide a quantifiable measure of a communities’ pre- and post-­disastercapacity to recover. The foundation of this index uses the methods of Burton (2015)
and Cutter et al. (2010) (Fig. 12.6). However, IFC researchers determined that simply measuring social vulnerability is too narrow, missing many vulnerabilities associated with disaster risk and impacts. For example, many heavily flooded
communities north of I-12 appear to be fairly resilient according to traditional social
vulnerability indices due to higher incomes, education, and property values.
However, these are also the areas where more than 90% of homeowners were without flood insurance, and thus income alone likely doesn’t capture economic stressexperienced by residents. IFC researchers compiled through literature review,geo-­spatial data analysis, and survey results over 100 variables relating to wellbeing in East Baton Rouge (EBR), Ascension, and Livingston parishes at the census-tract level. Missing were measures related to disaster impacts (i.e., mental
health concerns, financial impacts to those without flood insurance) included in the
IFC index. Geo-spatial data sources measuring pre-flood baseline conditions andpost-flood recovery progress include US Census counts and estimates, environmental quality measures, public health data, mental health survey results, and both personal and community-wide economic figures. Data gathered and analyzed by IFC
researchers was useful in creating well-being profiles for communities that consider
unique characteristics as well as commonalities across the region and in providing
new evidence of risk factors threatening well-being and community resilience.

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Fig. 12.6 The resilience index builds a composite understanding of well-being both before andafter the 2016 floods. (Image: LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio)

12Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community Well-Being…

12.7

333

Design Application and Policy Framework

Connecting research and practice requires prolonged and sustained engagement of
stakeholders, including vulnerable populations, with locally engaged practitioners
committed to the long-term resilience of the community (Abendroth and Bell 2015).
Applying new concepts and techniques (e.g., coastal–inland flood modeling, place-­based well-being research, and design best practices) within communities, especially following a disaster, requires trust and community support. Design andplanning professionals with knowledge of the local context and culture offer abridge to community members through a professional lens that can measurably
improve community resilience and build future professional capacity to implement
projects (Nassauer and Opdam 2008; Perkes 2009). This component of IFC engages
faculty and students from architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and law
with design professionals affiliated with the AIA, ASLA, and APA, regional policy
makers, and community members who participate in design workshops applying
flood conditions and community well-being priorities at the design project level.
Communities are engaged at the site, neighborhood, and city scales in specific,
locally championed, design projects to identify opportunities for increasing a­ daptive
capacity in inland communities.
Local engagements (particularly with vulnerable populations) in design activities considering community-driven definitions of well-being are important to urban
resilience and successful adaptation to the impacts of climate change (Beatley 2009;
Doherty and Clayton 2011). IFC public agency partners include the EBR
Redevelopment Authority, the cities of Baker and Denham Springs, Ascension
Parish, and the Capital Area Transit System. Working groups are organized around
specific local and regional design challenges to infuse the consideration of stormwater management, public health, and social equity into community planning anddesign decision-making. While the projects are ongoing, outcomes will include six
community-specific strategic urban design and implementation plans, each addressing an issue generalizable to other communities (e.g., green infrastructure, stream
restoration, or corridor redevelopment). Results will be compiled into a regional
best practices compendium – highlighting interventions at architectural, neighborhood, and community scales.
Throughout the course of the project, changes to the National Flood Insurance
Program, including its proposed reauthorization (expected October 2020) and new
Community Rating System Manual are being researched and evaluated for community impacts. In-depth legal research and outreach includes potential local government liability for development decisions in light of improved hydrologic
modeling, policy options for translating mapping into land use directives, and issues
related to takings and stormwater management. Though local governments havebroad legislative authority to implement land-use decisions based on public health,safety, and welfare, the ability of local governments to regulate based on futureclimate conditions is less clear. The processes and partnerships developed throughthe design, planning, and policy work are intended to build capacity and implement

334

T. Birch and J. Carneychange at the site, neighborhood, and community scales. Also, and perhaps mostimportant, is the evaluation of such interventions for their scalability and collective
impact on the greater region. To achieve a measurable impact on the resilience ofthe coupled coastal–inland system, successful projects cannot afford to be limited toindividual success; they must be scalable and translate through improved governance policies coast-wide.

12.8

Discussion and Conclusion

In this work, we examined several planning and design efforts addressing issues ofrisk and resilience in Louisiana. This includes top-down and bottom-up strategies
focused in varying degrees on physical hazard mitigation and building social infrastructure. Given current and future risk facing Louisiana’s coastal and inland communities, and the emphasis on risk reduction and resilience at state and federal
levels, we evaluated Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable
Coast (2017 Coastal Master Plan) as an effective framework for community resilience and how effectively other community planning and design frameworks arebeing employed in Louisiana to fill resilience gaps. While the Master Plan isunequivocal in its support of local planning and design, the lack of committed
resources underscores the disconnect between community resilience and the actionsof an agency whose structure and mandate is more closely aligned with engineered
solutions. Unlike protection and restoration efforts which can be modeled to informfuture risk reduction and selected by a cost/benefit ratio, the translation of architectural- and urban-scaled design into broader quantified values is more difficult.
Social dynamics present sometimes contradictory responses to seemingly straightforward challenges and rational solutions. Such “wicked problems” will not be easily resolved through the technical apparatus of the Master Plan and may challenge
the cost/benefit model driving Master Plan decision-making in the future. Social
challenges are often not solved through such rational solutions but through education, consensus, and trust (Lazarus 2009; Rittel and Webber 1973).
The LA SAFE focus on reshaping, retrofitting, and resettlement demonstrates
the state is willing to take on difficult community-based associated with climatechange and land loss. The Gentilly Resilience District in New Orleans demonstrate
a skillful approach to complex design challenges and an ability to follow through.
However, these approaches alone are not sufficient to reduce risk in coupled coastal–inland systems (OCD-DRU 2015). As demonstrated by the Baton Rouge flood of
2016, the process of inland migration has already begun, and movement away fromthe coast does not automatically reduce risk. To overcome this gap, CSS’s IFC
research initiative has adopted a multi-scalar regional to local systems-based
approach, recognizing the integrally linked nature of coastal and inland environmental processes (Birch and Carney 2019). IFC is enhancing hydrological modelling to understand the region’s complex environmental flows, adding fidelity to the12Regional Resilience: Building Adaptive Capacity and Community Well-Being…

335

layers of community wellness and social complexity surrounding risk and the benefits of resilience to the overall process of adaptation. Most importantly, the project
engages designers not in the final expression of scientifically based decision-­making
but as a partner throughout the process. Through this work, the tools, the knowledge, and the ability to demonstrate greater resilience through design is emerging(Birch and Carney 2019).
The Rockefeller Foundation (2018) defines resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive,
adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks theyexperience.” There is no one answer to achieving community resilience, beyond theshared recognition that physical environment and social communities reach temporary thresholds between stability and change. Engineering resilience and ecologicalresilience illustrate different perspectives that, when bound together, form an
improved basis for a robust and adaptive built environment. Louisiana’s Master
Plan proposes a range of top-down engineering and ecological solutions to encourage coastal sustainability. What is needed are equitable bottom-up approaches that
support community-based resilience and adaptation planning and design at thearchitectural, neighborhood, and community scales. A range of frameworks, including IFC, are being implemented in Louisiana addressing architectural and urban
challenges and providing community-based resilience benefits. While none of theseapproaches meet all of the needs of coastal and inland residents, they provide meaningful paths forward for bridging large-scale ecosystem restoration together with
community-based design and adaptation.

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 ppendix 1: Twenty-First-Century FloodingA
in Louisiana: Sources and Methods
Julie Torres

All attempts were made to collect similar flood inundation data for the nine storms
featured here. However, this was not possible as there is no comprehensive database of major flood footprints in Louisiana. We used multiple sources to create theflood maps in this chapter, each with their own method of collecting the flood
data. These methods include the observation of high-water marks by persons on
the ground, the use of satellite imagery to detect the land-water interface, and theanalysis of detailed data collected at gaging stations run by governmental organizations. Here we provide detailed descriptions of the sources used and how we
extracted the data.

Flood Event Selection
The nine floods presented in the figure are the only ones for which we could finddata and whose footprints weren’t completely overlapped by a larger flood.
Unsurprisingly, they also happen to be some of the largest events in terms of
Louisiana flooding since 2000. While maps showing forecasted flooding, flood
watches and warnings, local flooding, recorded rainfall, and FEMA flood insurance
information were readily available for most or all 28 twenty-first-century flood
events (Table 1.1), maps of or data pertaining to the actual footprint of flood inundation that occurred during those events was limited.

J. Torres (*)
Independent Researcher, New Orleans, LA, USA© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0

341

19

16
17
18

15

13
14

11
12

10

9

5
6
7
8

1
2
3
4

Event
Tropical Storm Allison
Tropical Storm Bertha
Hurricane Isidore
Hurricane Lili
(Cat 1)
Tropical Storm Bill
Hurricane Ivan
Tropical Storm Matthew
Hurricane Cindy(Cat 1)
Hurricane Katrina(Cat 3)Hurricane Rita
(Cat 3)
Western/Northern River Flood
Hurricane Humberto(Cat 1)
Tropical Storm Edouard
Hurricane Gustav(Cat 2)Hurricane Ike(Cat 1)
Tropical Storm Bonnie
Tropical Depression 5
Mississippi & Atchafalaya River
Flood
Tropical Storm Lee

Sept 2011

Vermillion Bay, LA

Mouth of MS River
LA-MS border–

Point Bolivar, TX

Sept 2008

July 2010
Aug 2010
Apr 2011

Gilchrist, TX
Mouth of MS River–
Vinton, LA

LA-TX border

Mouth of MS River

Central LA coast
Cameron, LA
Central LA coast, Frenier, LA
Grand Isle, LA

Landfall location
Morgan City, LA
Mouth of MS River
Grand Isle, LA
Vermillion Bay, LA

Aug 2008
Sept 2008

Oct 2006
Sept 2007

Sept 2005

Aug 2005

June 2003
Sept 2004
Oct 2004
July 2005

Date
June 2001
Aug 2002
Sept 2002
Oct 2002

St. Tammany, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Jefferson

Washington, W. Baton Rouge
Orleans, Avoyelles
Avoyelles, Iberville, W. Baton Rouge, Pointe Coupee, Iberia

Cameron, Vermillion

Calcasieu
Most coastal parishes

Vermillion, Cameron, Calcasieu, Vernon, Beauregard, Jefferson Davis,
Allen
Vernon, St. Landry, Calcasieu
Lafayette, Beauregard

Most coastal parishes

Terrebone, St. Tammany
Cameron, Calcasieu, Caddo
Terrebone, Lafourche
Orleans

Parishes with flooding
Cameron, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, E. Baton Rouge
St. Tammany, E. Feliciana
St. Tammany, upper Jefferson
Vermillion, Acadia

Table 1.1 The 28 major LA flood events of the twenty-first century, including those we were able to map (in bold)

342
J. TorresHurricane Isaac(Cat 1)
Red River Flood
Mississippi River Flood
Northern LA Rivers Flood

Eastern LA Rivers Flood

Tropical Storm Cindy
Hurricane Harvey

Red River Flood
Hurricane Nate(Cat 1)

21
22
23

24

25
26

27
28

20

Mar 2018
2017

June 2017
Aug 2017

Aug 2016

June 2015
Jan 2016
Mar 2016

Aug 2012–
Mouth of MS River

LA-TX border
Cameron, LA

–

–
–
–

Port Fourchon, LA
Caddo, Bossier, Natchitoches, Rapides
W. Baton Rouge, W. Feliciana, Pointe Coupee
Tangipahoa, St. Tammany, Washington, Livingston, Ascension,
Calcasieu, Beauregard, Vernon, Ouachita, Caldwell, Richland,
Madison, Bienville, Natchitoches
Ascension, Livingston, E. Baton Rouge, W. Baton Rouge, Tangipahoa,
St. Helena, Rapides, Pointe Coupee, Vermillion, Acadia, Evangeline,
St. Martin
Cameron, Calcasieu, Vermillion, Iberia
Cameron, Jefferson Davis, Acadia, Vermillion, St. Martin, Acadia,
Lafayette, Calcasieu, Iberia, Terrebone
Natchitoches, Bossier, Caddo
St. Tammany

Most coastal parishes

Appendix 1: Twenty-First-Century Flooding in Louisiana: Sources and Methods
343

344

J. TorresFig. 1.1 An example of CERA’s ADCIRC hindcast of inundation depth above ground for
Hurricane Rita

Data Sources(a) The Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment (CERA) utilizes the Advanced
Circulation (ADCIRC) model to conduct hindcast simulations of tropical storm
surge with high levels of accuracy (Fig. 1.1). Researchers enter known orclosely estimated inputs for past flood events into the model to see how well the
output matches the known results. This tool has the “maximum inundation
depth aboveground” shapefile polygon data for many named storms since 2004,
including Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Isaac.
(b) The Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) provides to the public satellite-based
measurement of surface water. For three of our nine mapped floods (Hurricane
Ike, March 2016, Hurricane Harvey), we were able to access the DFO Rapid
Response Inundation Map and associated shapefiles (Fig. 1.2). While DFO data
was available for October 2006 flooding in extreme southwest LA, this flood
footprint was completely overlapped by several other floods. Additionally, DFO
has flood maps for Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina, but only local,
zoomed-in areas of flooding are available as opposed to statewide coverage, andthe shapefiles are not available. Aspects of the DFO website are still in an experimental phase.

Appendix 1: Twenty-First-Century Flooding in Louisiana: Sources and Methods

345

Fig. 1.2 Screenshot of flooded area (red) as a result of Hurricane Harvey as identified by DFO(c) The US Geological Survey (USGS) published two scientific investigations
report characterizing peak streamflows and flood inundation of selected areas ofLouisiana for the March and August 2016 flood events (Breaker et al. 2016;
Watson et al. 2018; Fig. 1.3). For each event, the USGS documented hundredsof high-water marks in areas bordering the flooding rivers. The high-watermarks were used to create inundation maps for selected Louisiana communities
intended to estimate the aerial extent and depth of flooding.
(d) The Stephenson Disaster Institute (SDMI) flood map for the August 2016 flood
event (Fig. 1.4) was created by taking reported addresses (when available) thathave been flooded and general reported flood areas and creating a projected
aggregate flood area. The newly compiled flood area is then refined to elevation
data derived from Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, imagery to create
an elevation-appropriate flood area which was then mapped.

346

J. TorresFig. 1.3 Map of selected river flooding (yellow) as a result of the August 2016 event from the
USGS publication Breaker et al. (2016)(e) The only flood map we were able to locate for the spring 2011 event was in a
Louisiana Geological Survey (LGS) report of investigations by Carlson et al.,(2011) assessing inundation and damage that occurred in the Atchafalaya Basin.
The report includes a map of estimated areas impacted by the spring 2011
flooding of the Atchafalaya River (Fig. 1.5). Extensive flooding occurred along
the lower Mississippi River as well, but there are no maps available of thisflooding.

Data Extraction and Application Techniques
Flood shapefiles were available and easily downloadable from the CERA tool for
Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Isaac. These were imported into ArcMap andlayered on a shaded relief base map of Louisiana.

Appendix 1: Twenty-First-Century Flooding in Louisiana: Sources and Methods

Fig. 1.4 August 2016 flooding as mapped by SDMI

347

348

J. TorresFig. 1.5 Atchafalaya flooding during the spring 2011 event from LGS publication Carlson et al.
(2011)For Hurricane Ike, March 2016, and Hurricane Harvey, flood imprint shapefiles
were downloaded from DFO (http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu) and imported
into GIS software for standard map generation. However, the shapefile for
the March 2016 event seemed incomplete to those with firsthand knowledge of theflooding extent. The shapefile omitted significant river flooding located on Lake
Pontchartrain’s north shore. The flood map in the USGS publication Breaker et al.
(2016) showed this river flooding based on high-water mark reporting. We therefore
decided to combine the two sources to create a composite map for this event. To
extract the flood imprint from the USGS map, polygons were traced with great careand thoroughness (Fig. 1.6), imported into ArcMap, and georeferenced. The sameprocedure was used to extract the flood footprint for the August 2016 flood from
Watson et al. (2018). Again, this source only mapped the flooding around major rivers, so we used an additional source for the August 2016 flood. The SDMI floodmap (Fig. 1.4) had enough color contrast that in a program, such as PowerPoint, one
can remove the background, or unwanted portion, with good accuracy (Fig. 1.7); we
were unable to catch only the smallest specks of flooding. With backgroundremoved, the remainder was georeferenced and combined with the USGS map
footprint.

Appendix 1: Twenty-First-Century Flooding in Louisiana: Sources and Methods

349

Fig. 1.6 To supplement DFO flood footprint for the March 2016 event, the flood polygons (yellow)
in Watson et al. (2018) were traced (red) and combined

Fig. 1.7 To supplement the USGS flood footprint for the August 2016 event, the flooded areas inblue were separated from the gray background in the SDMI map

350

J. TorresComplications and Recommendations
We were surprised at how difficult it was to find statewide flood inundation maps for
major flood events. Those we used were created using different methods of datacollection. Additionally, different methods had to be used to extract the useful datafrom the maps. We understand that tracing polygons and georeferencing them issubject to human error, which is why a reliable database of flood inundation data for
all major floods should exist. A database of this kind should:
•
•
•
•
•

Be frequently updated
Include all types of floods (storm surge, flash floods, and river floods)
Use data collected from a standard source(s) (i.e., satellite imagery)
Cover all areas, urban and ruralBe accessible from a central location

Forecasts and simulated hindcasts certainly have their places as they warn people ofpotential danger and help improve weather model inputs. However, it is only byhaving access to standardized flood data that we can accurately detect trends andlearn from past events.

References
Breaker, B. K., Watson, K. M., Ensminger, P. A., Storm, J. B. & Rose, C. E. (2016). Characterizationof peak streamflows and flood inundation of selected areas in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas,
and Mississippi from flood of March 2016 (No. 2016–5162, pp. 1–33). US Geological Survey.
https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20165162.
Carlson, D., Horn, M., Van Biersel, T., & Fruge, D. (2011). 2011 Atchafalaya Basin inundation
data collection and damage assessment project. Retrieved from https://www.lsu.edu/lgs/publications/products/report-of-investigations-series.php
Watson, K. M., Harwell, G. R., Wallace, D. S., Welborn, T. L., Stengel, V. G. & McDowell, J. S.
(2018). Characterization of peak streamflows and flood inundation of selected areas in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana from the August and September 2017 flood resulting from Hurricane Harvey (No. 2018–5070). US Geological Survey. https://doi.org/10.3133/
sir20185070.

IndexA
Accommodation and Food Services
industry, 246
Adaptation
climate change-induced extreme weather(see Climate change-induced
extreme weather adaptation)
coastal, 2inland, 2
subnational (see Subnational adaptation)
Adaptation risks, 6, 7
Adaptive capacity, 291
Affordable housing, 264, 269–276
advocates and policy experts, 245
African American population, 245
copper theft, 248
cost-burdened families, 244, 245, 255
costs, 245, 246
demographics, 246
documentation, 248
economy, 249
external social forces, 254
New Orleans, 244
prices and stagnant wages, 248
racial/ethnic groups, 247
racialized inequities, 247
social mobility, 254
working-class families, 246
After Action Report (AAR), 267
Agency for Toxic Substance Disease Registry(ATSDR), 195
Agriculture Appropriations Bill, 105
Ahistorical adaptation, 168
American Academy of Arts and Sciences(AAAS), 18

American Association of Geographers, 175
American Society of Civil Engineers, 195
Amite River, 264
Antebellum historians, 226
Anthropological and social science research, 163
Archaeological record, 163
Army Corps of Engineers, 95
Asset-based planning, 209
Asset-stripping, 229
Atchafalaya flooding, 348
Atchafalaya River, 46
B
Balize Delta, 37
Baseline Resilience Indicators forCommunities (BRIC), 289, 290
Baton Rouge, 36
The Baton Rouge Rebuilds Program, 275
Berke’s research, 21
Bible Belt, 200
Biophysical ecology, 320
Black community, 227
Bottom-up interactions, 305
Bounce-back and bounce-forward
resilience, 319
Bring New Orleans Back Commission(BNOB), 67, 222, 223
Broad-based regime
adoption and implementation, 252
coalition members, 251
learning opportunities, 251
market-rate developments, 253
nonprofit community development, 249
policies and programs, 251© The Author(s) 2020
S. Laska (ed.), Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather,
Extreme Weather and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27205-0

351

352
Broad-based regime (cont.)
policy analysis and recommendation, 251
programmatic/legislative policies, 252
public housing, 250
social justice change, 251
type of political regime, 249
Bureaucratic discretion, 306
Business community, 76CCajun Navy, 266, 267, 296
Cancer Alley, 193
Catastrophic flooding, 276
Central Councilman Moak, 276
Chenier Plain, 38, 41, 46
Citizen Institute on Rural Design(CIRD), 208
City Planning Commission, 253
City’s Footprint May Shrink, 65
Civic infrastructure, 291
Civilian rescuers, 266–269
Civil rights, 227
Clean Air Act, 105
Climate Action Plan, 101
Climate change, 151
adaptation (see Adaptation)
adaptation risks, 6
coastal and inland communities, 313
coastal land loss, 5flood inundation coverage maps, 3
hurricane experience for Louisiana, 5layering, 7Mississippi River, 6Morganza Spillway, 6
Saltwater intrusion, 5
sea level rise, 5, 6
Climate change adaptation
agent-centric approach, 97
broader socioeconomic and politicaltrends, 94
cause-oriented, 96
collective opposition and politicalmobilization, 97
communities, 107
comparative analyses, 96
contingency and agency, 97
effect-oriented, 95
environmental and economic systems, 93
federal disaster resources, 106
financing, 108
flooding
consequences, 95
policy framework, 95

Index
probability, 95
weather-related disasters, 95
global-local issue, 96
HIV/AIDS, 96
institutional and social antagonisms, 97
institutional structure, 98
large-scale infrastructure, 96
laws and regulations, 98
long-term sustainability, 93
natural and physical scientists, 106
New Orleans, 98–100
New York City, 98–100
outcome-oriented actions, 95
policies and socio-legal regulations, 98
policy-making and implementation, 94
policy recommendations, 108
process-oriented measures, 95
quantitative analyses, 94
researchers and policy-makers, 96
risk management strategy, 94
state and local authorities, 94, 106
storm water systems, 94transformative adaptation, 97
urban air temperatures, 96
urban contexts, 94
US federal system, 107
Climate change-induced extreme weather
adaptation
citizens/specialists, 8differences, 8essential resilience (see Essential
resilience)
exceptional recovery (see Exceptional
recovery)innovations
Coastal Master Plan, 11
coastal programs, 10
flood risk and resilience program, 11
LA state and local adaptation programs,
8, 9Local WWNO public radio, 12
sources of descriptions, 8, 27
state government agencies, 10
state’s coastal agency, 10
watershed assessment, 12
reality, 12–14
societal adjustments, 7
Climate-informed science approach, 101
Climate change mitigation, 95, 104
Climate change risk, 97, 103, 106
Climate Resilience Fund, 104
Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana(CRCL), 118
Coastal adaptation, 2IndexCoastal and inland communities
carrying capacity, 192
climate and economic patterns, 192
environmental conditions, 193
health as indicator, 193
holistic problem-solving andplanning, 192
resilience and tipping points, 196, 197
risks and vulnerability issues, 192
sporadic/continual disruptions, 192
water quality, 194, 195
Coastal emergency risks assessment(CERA), 344
Coastal land loss
coastal zone, 113
economic activities, 113
social justice implications, 115
state policy makers, 114
Coastal management plan (CMP), 116
Coastal Master Plan, 11, 49, 50, 55
Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority(CPRA), 48–49, 102, 115, 153, 314,
319–324
Coastal restoration, 133, 322
Coastal restoration planningbenefits, 124
CMP, 117
Coast 2050 task force, 119
coastal communities, 116
CPRA, 115, 129
CRCL, 121CWPPRA, 117
federal government’s approach, 118
Katrina and Rita, 120
MRGO, 121
public participation, 128
revenue-sharing amendment, 121
science-driven planning process, 125
scientific analysis and modeling efforts, 123
social and environmental injustices, 116
socioeconomic effects, 124
state legislature, 121
2012 and 2017 Master Plans, 129
Coastal restoration projects, 123
Coastal storm, 266
Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection,
and Restoration Act (CWPPRA),
48, 102
Coastal Zone Management Program, 104
Colorblind adaptation, 155
Color-blind ideology, 222
Comite River, 264
Communicative planning, 71
Communities in Pennsylvania, 293353
Community adaptation
and resilience, 315–319
Community-based planning, 322, 323
Community Development Block Grant–
Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR),
103, 272
Community Development Block Grant(CDBG) funding, 102, 229
Community Development Corporation(CDC), 203
Community Rating System (CRS), 8
Community-level planning, 223
Community resettlement
climate change and environmental
adaptation policies, 150
displacement, 159
environmental catastrophe andapproaches, 149
historical atrocities, 154
human and nonhuman residents, 149
injustice, 150
language, 154
oil and gas industries, 158
Community resettlement planning, 161
Community resilienceand adaptation, 315–319
Community-scaled resilience, 314
Competitive grant program, 322
Compounding harm, 7Contemporary environmental adaptation, 162Contextual justice, 128
Corrosive community, 299
Cost-cutting private contractors, 232
Coupled coastal–inland resilience thinking,327–330
Coupled natural-human coastal system, 18
Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation(CCRC), 73
Crescent Growth Capital, 224
Critical cartography, 70DDartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO), 344,
348, 349
Deconstructing the Map, 70
Deltaic and Chenier plains, 58
Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), 101
Department of Natural Resources (DNR), 12
Department of Transportation andDevelopment (DOTD), 12
Development Sites, 75
Disaster capitalism, 69

354
Disaster recovery, see Housing policy
Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, 14
Disaster resilience, see Housing policy
Distributive justice, 126, 127E
Ecological concepts, 315
Ecological restoration, 136
Economic growth logic influences, 243
Economic recovery, 299
Ecosystem frameworks, 317
Ecosystem management, 319
Effectiveness, 83
Efficiency, 83
Emergency management, 268
Enhanced Community Development, 224
Environmental Impact Statement process, 116
Environmental injustices, 235
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 104
Environmental sustainability, 225
Environmental vulnerability
equal risk, 231
history, 219, 231–233
post-disaster redevelopment, 233–235
in post-Katrina New Orleans, 233
structural patterns, 231
unstable deltaic plain, 231
Environmental Working Group (EWG), 195
EPA Healthy Community Program, 208
EPA’s Sustainable Healthy Communities
Initiative, 207
Equilibrium resilience, 315
Equity, 84
Essential resilience
additive with deliberation and inclusivity, 16
climate change adaptation, 15
and exceptional recovery, 18–20
LAOCD, 17
LAPDD, 18
new anticipation phase, 17
qualities, 15
subnational adaptation (see Subnational
adaptation)
Everglades Restoration Program, 48
Exceptional recovery
extreme weather disaster, 17of essential resilience (see Essential
resilience)
identification and development, 15
infrastructure, 16
reasoning, 16
subnational adaptation (see Subnational
adaptation)

Index
Executive order, 101
Extreme weather
and climate change, 3–7
essential resilience (see Essential
resilience)
exceptional recovery (see Exceptional
recovery)
Hurricane Isaac, 1inland floods, 2Mississippi River, 1safer inland, 1
state category, 2statewide, 2watershed program, 2
whole state, 1–3
F
Federal agencies, 232
Federal Emergency Management
Administration (FEMA), 13, 95,
102, 152, 232
Federal Government
climate change denial movement, 106
GOMESA, 104political and economic stakes, 105
Federal Housing Act of 1949, 227
Federal recognition, 165
Federal Resettlement Administration, 207
FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant
program, 102
Financial solvency, 316
Flood Control Act, 40, 45
Flood Mitigation Assistance, 102
Flood mitigation projects, 157
Floodplain development andindustrialization, 150
Floodplain management, 304, 322
Florida Institute for Built Environment
Resilience (FIBER), 328
Fourth National Climate Assessment,
26, 265
Fragmented planning, 316
Fuzzy conceptualization, 318
G
Gemeinschaft, 187
Gentilly Resilience District, 325, 327
Gentrification, 225
Geographical population, 209
Governance structures, 291
Government representatives, 175
Government-to-government relationship, 166

IndexGovernor’s Office of Homeland Security andEmergency Preparedness(GOHSEP), 12, 266, 267
GPS-enabled technology, 135
Grand Bayou Native Village, 202
Great Mississippi River Flood, 46
Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance(GNOHA), 242, 249
Greater New Orleans Water Plan (2013), 84, 326
Green dot map
communication and translation, 85
designers and planners, 86
green infrastructure, 84, 85
local politics, 85
process of translation, 85
water management, 84
Green infrastructure, 84, 86
Greenhouse gases (GHGs), 95
Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, 47
Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act(GOMESA), 104, 121
Gulf Opportunity Zone (GoZone), 224
Gulf Risk Reduction System, 158
H
Habitat for Humanity, 202
Hazard mitigation, 322
Hazard Mitigation Assistance, 102
Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, 102
Helping behavior in disasters, 267
Historical and contemporary tensions, 174
Hospitality, 185, 187, 188, 195, 200,
204, 206
Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 50,
152, 223
Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO),
223, 224, 250
Housing crisis, 242, 244
Housing policy
flooding devastation, 241
floodwaters, 242
from theory to praxis, 242, 244
infrastructure, 241
policymakers and decision-makers, 241
recommendations, 255, 256
Housing recovery
affordability requirements, 274
affordable (see Affordable housing)the Baton Rouge Rebuilds Program, 275
before the flood, 270
FEMA trailers and repairs, 269
government options, 272
home ownership and housing costs, 273, 274

355
landlords, 271, 274
Louisiana Housing Corporation, 274
and manufactured homes, 272
Multifamily Gap Program, 274
The Piggyback 2018 program, 275
programs, 271, 272
public housing structures and availability, 271
rebuild livingston, 276
rental housing (see Rental housing)rental rates and housing costs rise, 271
renters, 272
Road Home program, 272, 274
socioeconomic status, 269
social inequalities and historic patterns ofsocial relations, 269
social stratification, 269
social vulnerability, 269
tenants, 271
understudied and misunderstood stage, 269
Human-centered systems, 320
Human ecology, 68
Human vulnerability, 217
Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction
System (HSDRRS), 102
Hurricane Harvey, 44
Hurricanes, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 56
Hydrologic processes, 320
I
Immediate Opportunity Areas, 77
Incident Command System (ICS), 268
Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) model, 252
Industrial plants, 233
Infill Development Areas, 77
Infrastructure investments, 322
Inland adaptation, 2Inland communities, 314
Inland floods, 2Inland from the Coast (IFC), 323, 327–331,
333–335
Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, 45
Institute of American Indian Arts, 168
Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task
Force, 101
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), 67, 93, 96
International disaster recovery, 290
Investment potential, 82
K
Knowledge-generating processes, 175
Koinonia Farms, 202

356
L
La Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority, 10
Lafayette, 36
Lafourche Delta, 37
Lake Pontchartrain Barrier, 51
Land loss, 313, 314
Landfills, 233
Land-use planning, 316
Large-scale redevelopment, 225
Lay critical cartography, 71
LCA Ecosystem Restoration Program, 51
Legitimacy, 84
Local disaster recovery, 285
Local ecological knowledge (LEK), 317, 322,
325, 330
Longer-term monitoring program, 137
Long-term sustainability challenges
American federalism, 103
federal government, 100
policy-making, 100
Louisiana
coastal areas, 1
extreme weather (see Extreme weather)twenty-first-century flooding
complications, 350
data extraction and application
techniques, 346, 348
data sources, 344–346
event selection, 341–343
maps, 341
recommendations, 350
satellite imagery, 341
2016 unexpected mid-state Louisiana flood(see 2016 Unexpected mid-stateLouisiana flood)
Louisiana Association of Planning andDevelopment Districts (LAPDD), 18
Louisiana Budget Project, 154
Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA), 48, 119
Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority (LA-CPRA), 8
Louisiana Comprehensive Master Plan for a
Sustainable Coast (CPRA), 49
Louisiana Economic Development (LED), 303
Louisiana Geological Survey (LGS), 346
Louisiana has the Office of Community
Development (LAOCD), 17
Louisiana Interchurch Conference (LIC),
201–203
Louisiana Office of Community
Development, 50
Louisiana Resilient Recovery Initiative, 304
Louisiana state planner, 166, 175

IndexLouisiana State University Coastal
Sustainability Studio (LSU CSS),
327–329Louisiana Strategic Adaptations for Future
Environments (LA SAFE), 50, 150
Louisiana Watershed Initiative, 207
Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, 114
Louisiana’s coastal zone
broader coastal deterioration, 41, 42
climate change
avoiding, unmanageable, 54
human-caused and dangerous, 52, 53
coastal protection and restoration planning
evolution, comprehensive planning, 48
implementation and controversies, 51, 52
nonstructural adaptation andrelocation, 50
complex and dynamic water, 35
creation and evolution, 36–38
flood protection and limits
Atchafalaya River, 46
exurban coastal regions, 48
greater New Orleans, 47
Mississippi River, 46
flood protection systems andinfrastructure, 35
human settlement and risks, 39, 40
infrastructure hydrology, 36
Mississippi and Atchafalaya, 35
social resilience, 35, 36
South Louisiana’s Climate, 43, 44
tropical cyclones, 44–46
wetlands, 35
Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master
Plan for a Sustainable Coast, 314,
319–323, 334
Louisiana’s Office of Community
Development, 170
Louisiana’s policy framework, 155
Louisiana’s state government, 152
Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future
Environments (LA SAFE), 324, 325
Lower-lying areas, 236
M
Manufactured homes, 272
Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church(MQVN), 203
Master Plan framework, 129
Mayor’s Office of Community
Development and the Foundation
for Louisiana, 255
Minimal flooding, 220

IndexMining-related incidents, 285
Mirabeau Water Garden, 327
Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, 150
Mississippi Deltaic Plain, 37, 39, 44, 52
Mississippi River, 1, 6, 45, 46, 113, 193, 204
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO),
47, 121
Mitigation of CO2 gases, 8Morganza Spillway, 6Multifamily Gap Program, 274
Multijurisdictional regions, 316
Museum Studies Certificate Program, 168
N
National Disaster Recovery Framework, 290
National Disaster Resilience Competition(NDRC), 148, 153, 168, 176
community risk reduction strategies, 323
Gentilly Resilience District, 325, 327
HUD, 324
LA SAFE, 324–326, 334
two-phase competitive process, 324
National economic policy, 232
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 116
National Estuarine Research Reserve
System, 104
National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP),
8–9, 232
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s (NOAA), 103
National Research Council, 93, 95, 107
National Sea Grant Advisory Board, 104
National Sea Grant College Program, 103
National Sea Grant Law Center, 104
National Sea Grant Library, 104
National Sea Grant Office, 104
National Weather Service (NWS), 264
Neighborhood Landlord Rental Program,
274, 275
Neighborhood Planning Areas, 77
Neoliberalism
entrepreneurialism, 220
ideologies work, 219
Map of Orleans Parish, 221
minimal flooding, 220
mutually evolving patterns, 236
oil bust, 219
in post-disaster New Orleans, 219
post-Katrina development, 223–225
private profit and individual solutions, 221
privatization, 220
public housing developments, 220
publicly funded health care, 220357
racial structuring, 235
self-sufficiency, 220
social justice limitations, 218
social welfare provisions, 220
TIF, 220and urban planning, 222–223
New Market Tax Credits (NMTC), 224
New Marshall Plan, 199
New Orleanians, 65
New Orleans, 81
post-Katrina (see Post-Katrina New
Orleans)
New Orleans City Council, 250
New Orleans City Park, 199–200
New Orleans East, 225
New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, 86
New Orleans Resilience Strategy (2015), 84
NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and AtmosphericResearch, 104
No Climate Tax Pledge, 105
Nontraditional housing, 272
O
Obama Administration, 101
Office of Community Development (OCD),
10, 169, 171
Office of Community Development, Disaster
Recovery Unit (OCD-DRU), 322,
324, 325, 329, 334
Oil and gas production, 42
Oil bust, 219
Old River Control Structure, 46Open Spaces, 75
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), 119P
Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, 104
Paris Climate Agreement, 55
Parks and Open Space, 77Particular disasters/catastrophes, 14
Peer-to-peer interaction, 305
Perfect storm, 264–266
Policy and planning approaches, 177
Political ecology, 68
Political-economic processes, 156
Political recognition, 165
Political regime theory, 249, 256
Politics of resourcefulness, 175
Post-disaster development
deep racial and social inequality, 218
environmental disasters, 218
future landscape, 217

358
Post-disaster development (cont.)
human vulnerability, 217
Hurricane Katrina, 218
neoliberal disaster landscapes(see Neoliberalism)
post-Katrina New Orleans (see Post-­
Katrina New Orleans)
psychological reasons, 217
racial landscapes/processes/racialization(see Racial geographies)
unequal and settled patterns, 218
unjust and unequal environmental
development (see Environmental
vulnerability)
Post-disaster migration, 291
Post-disaster planning, 230
Post-disaster recovery
climate change, 285
cooperation and networks, 301, 302
crises and catastrophes, 286
emergency management networks, 306
environmental/technological disasters, 285
federalism, 301
flooding, 302, 304
formal policy/planning channels, 305
government, 306
in rural and agricultural areas, 285
local FEMA, 306
location of rural census, 286
Ouachita Strong Resilience Strategy
planning process, 305
planning, 294, 295
programmatic and regulatory
mechanisms, 306
research, 304, 305
resilience, 305
rural communities, 292–294
social capital, 295–298
state government, 306
urban and rural areas, 287, 289–292
the US Census, 286
vulnerability, 298–300“wicked policy problem”, 286
Post-Katrina New Orleansland/environmental development (seeEnvironmental vulnerability)
neoliberalism (see Neoliberalism)
racialization (see Racialization)
Post-World War II migration, 232
Power-building work, 242
Pre-disaster adaptation, 13
Pre-disaster flood mitigation, 13
Pre-disaster mitigation, 13
Pre-disaster Mitigation Grant Program, 102

Index
Preparedness and Resiliency Program(PREP), 103
Privatization, 220
Providence Community Housing, 224
Public engagement, 115
Public housing developments, 220
Public housing projects, 224
Q
Qualitative data analysis, 136
R
Racial formations, 235
Racial geographies
asset-stripping, 229
CDBG funding, 229
colonization, 226conceptualization, 226demolition of public housing, 228
gentrification, 228
history, 226–228
land tenure and valuation trends, 228neoliberal framework, 225
occupied by public housing sites, 228
population shifts, 228
post-emancipation segregation, 226public education reform, 228public transportation investments, 228
racialized space, 230, 231
reinvigorated racial inequality, 229
return of middle-class, 229
Road Home program, 229
slavery, 226
tourism, 228
tourist-centered redevelopment, 228
underexamined in urban planning, 230
urban areas, 225
Racialized space, 230, 231
Rainfall amounts, 264, 265
Real estate acquisition activities, 82
Rebuild livingston, 276
Receiving communities, 186, 188, 198, 202,
207, 209
Reciprocity, 296
Recovery planning, 304
Recovery Support Functions (RSFs), 290
Red River, 39
Redevelopment
Bio-Medical district in Mid-City, 223
compounding development, 218
definition, 223
economic, 229

Indexand environmental justice, 233–235
market-driven, 223
policies, 222
public housing sites, 223
tourist-centered, 228
Reflexive and institutional ethnography, 243
Reframing resettlement, 168
Rental housing, 266, 269–273, 275–277
Repetitive Flood Claims, 102
Representational politics, 18
Representations of reality, 71
Representative Concentration Pathway, 55
Rescue, 266–269
Resettlement policy, 150
Resilience
adaptation, 315–319
community, 315–319
community-scaled, 314
CPRA, 314
design application, 333, 334
ecological and engineered solutions, 314
IFC, 327–330
inland communities, 314
land loss, 313, 314
Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan
for a Sustainable Coast, 319–323
NDRC, 323–327
policy framework, 333, 334
well-being, 330, 331
Resilient NOLA, 326
Restoration planning and policy outcomes, 125
Restoring capacity, 164
Rising disaster losses, 285
Risk elimination, 68
Risk reduction, 68
Risk sharing, 68
River gauge, 264
Road Home program, 229, 251, 274
Rural areas
and urban, 287, 289–292
Rural areas of Louisiana
collaboration and relationship building, 187
communities-of-place, 187
counter-narrative frameworks, 199
creative measurescommunity, 198
decision-making, 198
development justice, 198
formal/informal planning process, 198
types of interventions, 198cross-boundary work, 206–209
development impacts, rural lifeway,
189, 191
displacement, 186, 191, 207, 209359
Euro-American and Afro-American
population, 204
faith and culture, 187
faith-inspired models, 200–203
inland rural regions, 187
justice and economic security, 186
new anthropocene era, 186
out-migration, 186
physical and social structures, 185
power of cultural festivals, 204, 206
problem-solving approaches, 199
racial divides, 187, 188rejuvenation, 187
trust and relationship building, 206–209
wicked problems, 186–188
Rural communities, 289, 291–294
Rural disaster impacts, 285, 299, 301
Rural disaster response, 298
Rural flooding, 302, 304
S
Saffir-Simpson scale, 5
Saltwater intrusion, 5
Scholars and journalists, 173
Science-driven planning processes, 135
Segregation, 227
Self-deploying, 268
Self-reliance, 289
Smartphone applications, 268
Social and environmental justice, 203, 204
Social capitalbonding and bridging, 305
Cajun Navy, 296
and civic engagement, 293
component, 296
definition, 295
disaster recovery, 295
disaster-impacted regions, 297
in disaster recovery, 296
levels, 289, 292
mobilization, 296, 298
nongovernmental organizations, 297
racial lines, 289
reciprocal assistance, 296
reciprocity, 296
resilience, 295
rural Appalachian region in Virginia, 296
rural communities, 293, 296–298
social networks, 295
Social injustices, 235
Social justice, 126
Social justice limitations, 218
Social media, 268

360
Social movement theories, 243
Social networks, 295
Social resilience, 317
adaptation, 57
role of natural systems, 56transient and secular disasters, 55
Social vulnerability, 235, 269
Socio-ecological relations of racialized
space, 235
Socio-ecological system (SES), 316, 317
Sociospatial culture, 225
Solar activity, 52South Louisiana’s Climate, 43, 44
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 201
Spontaneous volunteers, 267, 268
Sporadic funding, 232
Stakeholder groups, 129
State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC),
266, 267
State-held resettlement planning meeting, 167
State-level resettlement planning, 150–154
Stephenson Disaster Institute (SDMI), 345,
347–349
Stormwater management, 328, 330
Strangers in Their Own Lands, 53
Structural protection, 320
Subnational adaptation
Berke’s research, 21
climate change response, 25–27
coastal restoration program, 21
federal/state/local adaptation
configurations, 22, 24, 25
HUD, 21
mitigation planning, 21
qualities, government levels, 22–24
resilience, 21
social justice, 21
Systems-based numerical modelingapproach, 123T
Tangipahoa River, 264
Targeted Development Areas, 77
Task, 237
Tax credit equity investors, 224
Tax Incremental Financing (TIF), 220
Teche Delta, 37
Terrebonne Basin, 51
Terrebonne Parish, 42
Terrebonne Project, 207
Territories, 227

IndexThriving Communities III program, 328
Times-Picayune Map, 80
Top-down process, 83
Tourism-based promotion, 225
Traditional disaster recovery, 3
Traditional recovery, 17
Tribal leaders, 169, 172, 175
Trump Administration, 101
2012 Draft Master Plan, 129
2016 Unexpected mid-state Louisiana floodchanging weather patterns, 276
disaster response and recovery, 263
housing recovery (see Housing recovery)
perfect storm, 264–266
rescue, 266–269
unprecedented amount of rain, 263
2017 Coastal Master Plan, 1152017 Master Plan, 130
U
United Methodist Church, 200
University of Wisconsin Population HealthInstitute 2018, 193
Urban areas
and rural, 287, 289–292
Urban Development’s National Disaster
Resilience Competition(NDRC), 84
Urban growth machine theory, 243
Urban Land Institute (ULI), 67
Urban planningaggressively support, 78
business and developers, 75
climate adaptation, 67
climate change adaptation, 69
community organizations, 67
design politics, 72
economic development, 75
efficiency and equity, 76
elevational determinism, 79
financial transactions, 78
green dot map, 65
hazard mitigation, 68, 69
heavy-handed technocratic approach, 65
investment and development, 76
investment zones, 74
Key Findings, 73
knowledgeable community members andprofessionals, 75
land use planning, 68, 69
map receivers, 83Index
Mapmakers, 81
mixed use housing, 75
municipal services, 72
neighborhood consolidation, 72
neighborhood planning process, 77
neighborhood residents, 77
and neoliberalism, 222–223
paramap materials, 72
parcel-by-parcel basis, 74
proposed rebuilding framework, 73
racial issues, 73
racial justice, 73
radical reconfiguration, 73
reinterpretations, 82
shrinking the footprint, 72
social and spatial reality, 70
spatial classification, 74
task of rebuilding, 72
urban hydrology, 74
windows of opportunity, 76
US Army Corps of Engineers, 102, 152
US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
regulation, 105
US Department of Housing, 84
US Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), 21, 244, 272

361
US Geological Survey (USGS), 345, 346,
348, 349
US Global Change Research Program(USGCRP), 93
V
Voucher program, 224, 225
Vulnerability, 298–300
W
Water-based rescues, 267
Water Resources Development Act(WRDA), 102
Watershed planning, 314, 320, 322, 330, 331
Weather events, 3
Well-being, 330, 331
Wetlands Conservation and Restoration TrustFund (WCRTF), 117
Wetlands Restoration and Conservation
Authority, 120
Whitney New Markets Fund, 224
Wicked policy problem, 286
Window of opportunity, 69, 76
Wood screw pump, 227