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Architectures of mis/managed retreat: Black land loss to green housing gains

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Abstract

Hurricane Katrina submerged thousands of single-story, slab-on-grade homes in low-lying New Orleans, disproportionately displacing African Americans they sheltered and sustained. Critical disaster studies cast charitable individuals and organizations as sponsors of Black survival, yet nongovernmental aid programs remain marginal to scholarship on environmental justice and Black geographies. This paper sheds light on the funding programs, public-private partnerships, and design-build projects by which philanthropies and charities aid Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) in retreat from flood hazards. This nested case study of HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization program and the Salvation Army’s EnviRenew program shows Black developers, planners, and architects of retreat from New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park Historic District gained public, private, and philanthropic sponsors at steep costs: the loss of land, life, and leadership in sustainable development. Drawing on administrative data, legal documents, and stakeholder interviews, the mixed-methods analysis finds new housing built above projected base flood elevations inside flood hazard zones not by choice or by chance, but in compliance with aid programs requiring Black participation in land buyout programs (Road Home) and Black facilitation of green home building and buying (Build Back Better). The Pontchartrain Park case of “management failure,” which included rescinded grants and land takings, not only illuminates the macroeconomics and microaggressions that restrict where and how Black resettlement takes place. Ultimately, this article reveals climate mitigation patrons relocate BIPOC households and heritage from endangered places in theory, yet, in practice, their relief formulas may house marginalized minorities in precarious places above measured risks.

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Notes

  1. Description and analysis of governmental partnerships with public charities such as Habitat for Humanity and Salvation Army or private foundations (i.e., Surdna, Kresge, etc.) are beyond the scope of this paper. But, recent research exploring what and how nonprofits perform critical functions for government inform this case study of managed retreat (Dunning 2018).

  2. Still in existence, the Louisiana Land Trust now manages land that the state has bought from and for “climate refugees” currently participating in its Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project, funded by a HUD National Disaster Resilience Competition grant award (Louisiana Land Trust 2020).

  3. The Lower 9th Ward’s Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, an environmental justice and historic preservation advocacy organized and led by residents of the Lower 9th, received support from Global Green, ACORN, Salvation Army, plus the Kresge, Surdna, and Make it Right foundations (Allen 2011: pp. 235–37).

  4. SRP estimated the modular home building costs averaged $265,000 compared to $188,000 for “stick-built” on-site construction. PPCDC took on the task of securing gap financing to make up the difference between these costs and the appraised value of the homes upon completion—a value surely to come in no more than the value of Pontchartrain Park properties pre-storm (Knudsen 2019).

  5. $1M of the $1.8M grant for redeveloping places of repetitive loss for resettlement returned to the EnviRenew Fund, which supported similar projects in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. $850,000 paid for builder subsidies already encumbered by prefabrication of 10 homes. (Rainey 2013).

  6. The EnviRenew Fund for New Orleans amounted to $12M, but the EnviRenew program was three times as much, since it served Washington, D.C. and San Francisco as well (Salvation Army 2011).

  7. The “Pontilly” community of Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods began taking shape as a cultural landscape in the 1980s, when white flight from the latter commenced. The Pontilly Neighborhood Association gained official recognition from the city as a representative body before Katrina, but it has yet to supplant the Pontchartrain Park Neighborhood Association. Decades earlier, a US Supreme Court ruling in 1948 rendered racially restrictive deeds unenforceable, but, when the City of New Orleans commissioned the development of Pontchartrain Park, Gentilly Woods homeowners successfully secured other racial restrictions that the state and the market could render, namely a canal separating the two subdivisions and termination of thru streets (Hirsch 2000).

  8. Notably, in 2008, NORA’s board approved with plan to use $4.3 million in federal community development block grant funds for disaster recovery to outbid private developers interested in the commercial property not in nearby residential populations. The board reported approved a proposal to coordinate restored retail services at the strip mall with the recovery of the nearby Pontchartrain Park subdivision, where state and local governments were pouring millions into residential and recreational redevelopment grants (Hammer 2011).

  9. Tellingly, NORA’s Executive Director wrote off the company’s financial struggles to convert Letters of Interest from major retailers (TJX and Albertson’s) into cash and credit, citing some of the same reasons for Pontchartrain Park developers’ creative financing proposals: “The market is a challenge, it’s the economy” (Krupa 2011).

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    Fallon S. Aidoo

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Aidoo, F.S. Architectures of mis/managed retreat: Black land loss to green housing gains. J Environ Stud Sci 11, 451–464 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00684-3

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