As part of a Sustainable Growth webinar series for Climate Resilience Month in August, Smart Growth America’s Vice President of Land Use and Development, Katharine Burgess, participated in a webinar conversation that reflected on how the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has shaped housing and community resiliency in both the Gulf Coast region and our national landscape at large.
Hurricane Katrina exposed deep socioeconomic and environmental inequities across Greater New Orleans, revealing the vulnerabilities that persist in the region’s housing infrastructure and the legacy of discriminatory land use policies that put communities of color and low-income communities in harm’s way. The Maryland Department of Planning’s “Post Disaster Housing Resilience in Greater New Orleans” webinar on August 27 focused on how property insurance, risk information, and evolving community engagement and planning efforts shaped immediate recovery efforts and the longer-term resilience of housing in Greater New Orleans.
The webinar opened with Dr. Carlos Martín and Dr. Claudia Solari, two of the authors of a new research initiative on housing resilience in post-Katrina Louisiana for the Urban Institute, who discussed their research methods and key findings as relevant to community engagement and the insurance landscape. They emphasized the compounding effects of discriminatory land use policies and the dysfunction of multiple planning processes in New Orleans. The lack of clear, accessible information for residents often led to “planning fatigue,” further hindering recovery efforts.
Despite these challenges, resident-led community-based organizations (CBOs) demonstrated a commitment to rebuilding their communities. Their efforts reveal the importance of grassroots engagement in the recovery process. The discussion on the webinar also highlighted a critical gap in the planning process—a lack of explicit focus on climate change. While infrastructure preparedness is essential, they noted how it must be integrated with broader climate resilience strategies to ensure all residents have access to safe and secure housing in the face of increasingly severe climate impacts.
SGA’s Katharine Burgess added a broader perspective and personal experience, discussing how community organizations and public sector officials nationwide are adapting to increasingly extreme weather conditions. Managing post-Katrina hurricane recovery charrettes through the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP) planning process and Louisiana Recovery Authority’s “Louisiana Speaks” program, Katharine saw firsthand the dysfunction and overlap within planning initiatives in New Orleans during the two years after the storm. Observing the planning fatigue and overall lack of clear information for residents in post-disaster New Orleans drove her to get more involved in land use and development planning processes and advocate for reform.
“As a young practitioner, I was especially moved by community commitment, culture, and love for the city. People lost everything and still took the time to engage in processes that were often asking too much of them.” she said during the webinar.
With an existing nationwide housing access crisis coupled with post-disaster recovery, there is a clear need for more equitable, transit-oriented development and housing, which will be more prepared for future climate risk. Housing costs have skyrocketed in New Orleans since the pandemic, and housing supply has not kept up with demand. The New Orleans Housing Ecosystem Plan, launched earlier this summer, proposes land use reform strategies to invest in affordability and strengthen the housing ecosystem.
The insights from New Orleans serve as a valuable lesson for cities in the Gulf Coast and beyond, offering strategies to avoid and lessons learned for building more resilient communities in the face of climate change. As Greater New Orleans continues to develop, the increased acknowledgment of the climate crisis and its disproportionate impacts and opportunities to identify funding for climate adaptation will result in greater efforts to build a more resilient, equitable future for residents in the Gulf Coast region.