Economic development consultant and MIT lecturer Karl Seidman was one of the many researchers that descended upon New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. From data gathered during his intermittent stays in New Orleans between 2006 and 2010, which included providing planning assistance for several neighborhood groups, he has written a book evaluating “grassroots rebuilding” efforts in six neighborhoods and what lessons can be drawn for more effective post-disaster recoveries.
Chapter one recounts the storm’s trajectory, the lack of an adequate evacuation plan, the abysmal conditions at the Superdome and Convention Center encountered by those unable to evacuate, the lives lost, and the extent of damage inflicted on infrastructure, public facilities, and homes. But, in a recurring problem, Seidman fails to even acknowledge critiques of an elite agenda, pursued by officials in Washington, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, to use the storm as an opportunity to privatize public services and how this affected recovery. Using the passive voice he explains that the public hospital, Charity, that served the region’s large uninsured population, “was closed with extensive damage” (pp. 10–11). In fact the Democratic Governor closed Charity in the immediate aftermath of the storm despite, as documented in various accounts, only facing basement flooding while hospital staff, Oklahoma National Guard, and German engineers were in the midst cleaning the facility to accept patients (Brad Ott, The Closure of New Orleans' Charity Hospital After Hurricane Katrina: A Case of Disaster Capitalism, 2012).
Chapter two covers the “top down” planning process carried out by officials at the federal, state, and municipal levels, as well as foundations, which set the context for the “bottom up” planning and decisions at the neighborhood level that is the focus of his book (p. 18). Seidman recounts the origins of the three post-Katrina rebuilding plans and outlines the various forms of federal disaster aid, including how the routing of much of this assistance through the state government created planning problems at the local level.
The discussion of post-Katrina planning efforts and federal aid sets the stage for analyzing what Seidman calls the “third gear of a three gear rebuilding machine”: “the city’s capacity to implement and coordinate hundreds of recovery projects and programs” (p. 52). The latter responsibility fell on the city’s newly created Office of Recovery Management, led by Ed Blakely, and Seidman identifies the various constraints (including federal red tape and the routing of funds through the state) that gummed up the “third gear.” Yet, his critiques of the state and federal programs avoid any discussion of privatization and how it undermined recovery. For example, he argues that the private contractors that administered the Road Home program—federal monies for uninsured homeowners to rebuild—were consistently hamstrung in distributing funds because of “CDBG rules [that] slowed and confounded” (p. 46). Yet, he fails to even mention critiques, such as those made by Vincanne Adams (Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, 2013), that the profit needs of the politically-connected contractor resulted in denials, bureaucratic delays, and insufficient funds being awarded to rebuild. In one brief section the author acknowledges what Adams termed the “inefficiencies of profit,” by explaining how mayor Landrieu ended a contracting-out arrangement for oversight of recovery projects and had it done in-house, resulting in the city saving money and “more effective procurement” (p. 57). Yet, the larger problems of privatization of disaster assistance, and how this undermined recovery efforts, are left unexplored by the author.
Chapter three, four, and five, the empirical heart of the book, provide case studies of six neighborhood recovery efforts that are used to evaluate how “grassroots and neighborhood-scale rebuilding advance the post disaster recovery” (p. 256). The author deems Broadmoor (Chapter 3) and Village de L’Este (VE) (Chapter 4) as the most successful neighborhood recovery efforts, with both cases benefiting from forceful leaders and neighborhood organizations that spearheaded recovery, assuring that the community was coming back, and at least in the first year after Katrina, organized protests against threats (green spacing plan, landfill in New Orleans East) to neighborhood recovery. Both organizations then move to establish non-profit Community Development Corporations backed by foundation funding, develop local rebuilding plans, recruit volunteers to assist with rebuilding homes and other duties, and found charter schools on the remains of the dismantled public system.
While the author provides a helpful chronicle of neighborhood initiatives, I was left wanting to know more about the conflicts within the “community” and what that could tell about the recovery effort. For example, in Broadmoor, a majority black, low-income neighborhood that also had a significant affluent white component, the neighborhood association had three groups that met separately, with the black middle class president engaging in “shuttle diplomacy” to work out differences (p. 71). Yet, we never learn about the race/class components of these three groups nor what policy differences they had. Also troubling was the uncritical choice of metrics to measure a successful bottom-up planning based on establishing a CDC, on generous foundation funding, a charter school, and the use of volunteers. In fact these initiatives all followed what private and public elites saw as “best practices” for recovery. So were these examples of a grass roots initiative, or indicative of the way that elites—including those at the neighborhood level—were able to fit local demands into a neoliberal recovery project? The author is so enamored of these initiatives, especially charters schools, that he cannot even raise this question. Finally, Seidman does recognize that a localist agenda can be in contradiction to recovery on a citywide scale, but does not explore this with respect to free, volunteer labor. On page 96 he provides data showing that Broadmoor volunteers alone contributed 371,000 hours gutting homes, which if paid $18.75 an hour would mean $7.5 million in wages. Homeowners welcomed volunteers, especially those shortchanged by the private contract-administered Road Home program, but these could have been paid jobs for Katrina survivors, especially the disproportionally black and poor New Orleanians that had not returned due to the lack of job and housing opportunities. Would advocating for a public works program for Katrina survivors to rebuild their community—as some community groups advocated—be a better measure of neighborhood demands contributing to an economically and racially egalitarian recovery?
The final chapter, drawing on the lessons from the case studies, calls for “dual collaborative” efforts between the “top down” and “bottom up” planning efforts, combined with loosening of constraints on the use of federal disaster aid for cities, and tinkering with the tax credit program to allow for smaller targeted initiatives to create more equitable post-disaster recoveries (p. 281). But wasn’t this the problem of post-Katrina New Orleans—too much cooperation with the top down agenda that has left a path of privatization, mass firings, raging gentrification, and 100,000 people, disproportionally poor and black, who have not returned? These type of technocratic recommendations are to be expected from a writer employed as an economic consultant promoting localist, neoliberal-compatible initiatives. While this book makes an important historical contribution by documenting the on-the-ground rebuilding efforts, readers we will have to look elsewhere for a critical assessment of these efforts.
