Invisible City: Poverty, Housing, and New Urbanism

Chapter 7: Renewing and Remaking New Orleans (with Richard Layman)

ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü Chapter 7 ​ Renewing and Remaking New Orleans with Richard Layman Introduction In this chapter we explore how historic preservation can be a tool for creating affordable housing. Oddly, there has been a disconnect between historic preservation and housing affordability, but as we showed in Chapter 3, older housing stock provides a large array of affordable housing. In this chapter , we show how small inner-city lots with shotgun-style housing provide affordable housing and should be preserved. There is at least one upside when a monumental disaster strikes a great city. With a disaster comes hope that the city can be rebuilt so that it is even better than before. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the Great Fire in Chicago in 1871, while utterly destroying both cities, provided the opportunity for planners, architects, and municipal officials to resolve many of the physical problems the cities suffered prior to their respective catastrophes (Boehm 2004; Fradkin 2005). Historians often compare such situations to an artist with an empty palette. Without the encumbrance of having to consider the context of existing elements of the built environment, planners have the chance to avoid the ineffective and inequitable use of land. Water damage and the toxic sludge left behind by the floodwaters in New Orleans lamentably necessitate the demolition of thousands of structures, the majority of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Whole areas of New Orleans will have to be completely rebuilt. To a large degree the new physical form of these neighborhoods will be defined by the basic building block of the city: housing. Building inspectors in New Orleans have estimated the total number of Renewing and Remaking New Orleans 145 homes that will be demolished is 50,000 (Moe 2005). Currently, planners and officials in New Orleans are considering their options for the rebuilding of entire neighborhoods. In the politically, economically, and racially sensitive post-Katrina environment, there is the possibility that planning initiatives for the “new” New Orleans could shun the traditional, authentic , and historical residential housing type that particularly defines New Orleans, shotgun houses (Photo 7.1), in favor of more suburban-style dwellings . Along these lines New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced that his model for redevelopment for New Orleans’ devastated neighborhoods was River Garden, a vaguely traditional but suburban-looking HOPE VI public housing replacement project in the Lower Garden District (Knack 2006). In the reconstruction of poor neighborhoods in New Orleans, traditional design principles such as smaller lot sizes, shallower setbacks, and the use of indigenous architectural styles would perform well, but New Urbanist planners need to work with preservationists and community members to ensure that the cultural capital of the neighborhoods of New Orleans is not lost to what Southworth (1997) calls the sanitizing, suburban-like result of some of the new “traditional” developments. The prominence of shotgun houses throughout the various neighborhoods of New Orleans is impressive (Table 7.1). While New Orleans features a great diversity of historic-style building types, including the well-known 7.1 Historic shotgun houses in New Orleans. Photo by Jerry Kase. 146  Invisible City Italianate, French Colonial, Spanish Colonial, Queen Anne, Victorian, the most prominent is the shotgun style, which represents nearly half of the city’s building types. If you look at all building types, including commercial, in seventeen out of New Orleans’ nineteen historic districts (data for two historic neighborhoods were unavailable), shotgun-style houses range from a low of 8 percent to a high of 70 percent, with a mean of 46 percent of all building types being shotgun style. When considering variations of the shotgun houses—camelback and double shotgun—more than 50 percent of the housing stock would be part of this classification. Nearly three-fourths of the housing in New Orleans was damaged, even though an exact count does not exist for the kind of housing that was damaged from Katrina. Logan (2006) estimates that 73 percent of the housing stock was damaged and most of these units were occupied by the poor, minorities , and renters. Social scientists define “damaged” as ranging from the total house being destroyed to parts of the roof or floor being damaged. It is unclear how much of the housing can be saved, but preservationists argue that historic housing units can overcome water and wind damage, so all is Table 7.1. Shotgun Houses in New Orleans Neighborhoods Neighborhood Number of Shotguns...