My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

5. Imagining a Future Out of Mud: A Recovery Plan

43 5. IMAGINING A FUTURE OUT OF MUD: A RECOVERY PLAN MAyOR NAGIN WAS ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA. HE HAD to decide among at least three competing recovery plans: one promoted by the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) commission; the second, a scheme of neighborhood plans put forward by the consulting firm of Lambert and Associates ; and the third, an initiative by the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) to synthesize all the plans from all over the city into one consolidated monster plan covering everything the city ever needed or wanted. BNOB was developed primarily by the business community with the mayor ’s agreement. It used soon-to-be-infamous “green dots” to represent vast tracts of land that had been repeatedly flooded. The BNOB and its advisory team, to recall, had proposed that these areas not be rebuilt, but instead should be converted to parks or other uses. The BNOB team recognized that the extreme post-Katrina abandonment would force city residents to move to higher ground and repopulate the central areas. Although that was logical in terms of land use and economic development, the green dot areas targeted for conversion appeared largely on low-income, predominantly black areas of the city where homeownership was high. As a result, a lot of black-owned properties would be sacrificed. The black community thus characterized BNOB as a “whitey land grab,” and it seemed that Mayor Nagin’s hand-picked group had sanctioned that solution. The city council, with President Oliver Thomas and other African American members taking the lead, reacted to BNOB. They employed Lambert and Associates to develop a neighborhood-based recovery that preserved the essence of all neighborhoods. Lambert’s approach was based on old boundaries 44 Chapter 5 and had been assembled hastily to foil any attempt to use the BNOB plan. I discovered on one of my trips with my friend MT that African American community leaders were nervous about the competing plans because the BNOB group—the “shadows,” as MT and black leaders called the local establishment and its mouthpiece, the Times-Picayune—were always inserting themselves into various processes to establish the BNOB approach or some semblance of it as the official plan for New Orleans. The result would be a smaller black population. To resolve the mounting competition and the escalating racial tensions over plans, the GNOF proposed to use its good offices as a neutral party to merge all the proposals into a unified, overarching document that would serve as the basis for a new, citywide master plan. The Rockefeller Foundation got involved behind the GNOF plan. Searching for a way to serve the city in this crisis, the Foundation discerned enough interest from the mayor and others to try to forge a final, unified effort, and the GNOF’s offer seemed to be the best way to proceed. The vehicle for the plan (in keeping with the alphabet soup of the entire recovery) was the Unified New Orleans Plan, UNOP. Unfortunately, some black civic leaders viewed this approach as nothing more than a back-door reimposition of the BNOB plan. Some BNOB volunteers were also involved in the UNOP process. Moreover, the mayor, although distancing himself from the green dots and many other aspects of the BNOB plan, said publicly that he wanted parts of BNOB incorporated into UNOP. In addition to being a plan, UNOP was an enormous project to reach out to the New Orleans diasporas. The Greater New Orleans Foundation spent millions from the Rockefeller grant to hold civic forums, not only at large gatherings around the city but also at key locations around the nation by way of video conferencing and live videocasting. Rockefeller had paid America Speaks to help facilitate a similar process for New york’s Ground zero recovery plans. America Speaks tries to find common themes and threads to help professional planners and decision makers forge a workable agreement. To increase the chances of success, Rockefeller temporarily posted two of its people to the GNOF staff. The UNOP program was sizable. It went well beyond the physical recovery of the city to embrace social, educational, and other longstanding civic issues, with most of the attention paid to non-city government concerns such as schools. It was a good summary of needs but not really a plan. ■ ■ ■ Imagining a Future out of Mud 45 Mytaskwastobuildsomethingusefulandusablefromalltheplansubmissions, and to implement the UNOP goals...