Today's News is Yesterday's News* (New Orleans)

The headline in today's New Orlean's Times-Picayune is "Report says city squandering recovery opportunity for lack of Planning," according to the Urban Land Institute. From the article:

Without a citywide rebuilding plan or a central agency in charge of redevelopment, New Orleans is likely to squander its opportunity to make a strong recovery as billions of dollars head toward the Gulf Coast, according to top officials with the Urban Land Institute .

As the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina fast approaches, New Orleans lacks leadership from Mayor Ray Nagin and the City Council, said John McIlwain, the senior fellow for housing for the Urban Land Institute.

McIlwain was part of a panel of 50 specialists in urban and post-disaster planning brought in by Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission to help the city create a recovery strategy. The commission largely rejected the institute’s advice, particularly its recommendation to rebuild first on higher ground in the lesser damaged neighborhoods — a theory that turned into a hot debate over the city’s footprint and who would be encouraged to return.

“It’s virtually a city without a city administration and it’s worse than ever,” said McIlwain. “New Orleans needs Huey Long. You need a politician, a leader that is willing to make tough decisions and articulate to the people why these decisions are made, which means everyone is not going to be happy.”

Hmm. I know that the developers lobby, ULI, would like a czar, but in any case, making hard choices is necessary. It's also hard. And politicians aren't very good at it. Especially when they don't have an overarching development philosophy based upon the principles of:

1. urban design;
2. sustainable, asset-based neighborhood and commercial district revitalization;
3. historic preservation;
4. community economic development; and an
5. uncompromising commitment to quality.

This view from the trenches, from the Toulouse Street Blog in New Orleans, says something similar perhaps to Mr. McIlwain, but from the perspective of residents.

The New Orleans Recovery Process explained
Image © 2006 Mark A. Folse
I don't know all the acronyms, but they include the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Greater New Orleans Community Foundation, Greater New Orleans Foundation, and the Unified New Orleans Plan(ning Process).

Also, the residents in the Carrollton neighborhood continue to experience stonewalling by Walgreen's in their attempt to forge an urban-empathetic site design for a key redevelopment site in the neighborhood.

Apparently, the Unified New Orleans Plan kicks off with a weekend training this Sunday. In response to a New Orleans query about neighborhood-based planning, I wrote this earlier in the week:

My personal take is that you need to know a lot and argue for quality to get quality, even when the firms are good. You have to arm yourselves with knowledge to be "good consumers" of this kind of help.

I wrote a long blog entry comparing New Orleans and DC in terms of hopefully lessons learned in terms of launching an urban Main Street program in New Orleans. As I said, quoting Professor Kingsfield from the movie "Paper Chase":

"Good luck. You'll need it."

For neighborhood revitalization, the big learning over the last 20 years has been the need for comprehensive connected plans. Some are discussed in the book House by House, Block by Block: Rebuilding America's Urban Neighborhoods, by Alexander von Hoffman, which posits that there are five common threads to successfully stitching a challenged community back together:

1. A sense of place. A community has to see itself as worth saving. It needs a central idea around which people can coalesce - whether it's a history visible in cobbled streets and gaslights, a central church or school about which people who've stayed in the neighborhood have fond memories, or something as simple as a name.
2. A group of tenacious leaders, reflective of the whole community. Reviving neighborhoods need "people with a certain kind of courage - maybe even foolish courage - in the face of devastation," says von Hoffman. That doesn't mean one charismatic leader. It means a broad coalition, including the "usual voices" - activists, religious and political leaders, philanthropists, developers - and voices less commonly heard: members of all the area's major ethnic groups, ordinary citizens who've never been politically active in their lives.
3. A problem, and good conversation about it. Groups start with a shared sense that their community has a problem. They probably don't agree on what that problem is, and they certainly don't agree on what to do about it. So the first step is to facilitate an exchange in which every voice gets heard, every grievance aired. This is a slow process, as everyone who's taken part in such a conversation acknowledges, because fundamentally it's about trust, and trust doesn't happen on a deadline. If participants have the patience to see the process through, however, they almost invariably arrive at a common sense of the problem they're facing - and a common vision of how to tackle it.
4. A sustainable plan, and the people who can implement it. At some point, though, it's time to stop talking and get practical. Community groups that aim for less - rehabbing a single building, constructing a swimming pool, repaving a street - often stop there, having failed to look systemically at what their area needs and what steps might really get them there.
5. Political support. The strongest coalition with the best plan is worthless without political leaders who take it seriously. Realistically, Chrislip says, you can't expect politicians to be behind every new neighborhood initiative that starts up. But the sooner they start coming to meetings, seeing a group's seriousness about change, and being engaged in the process, the better for that neighborhood's future.

Other resources include those available from the National Main Street Center; as well as:

-- The Crandall-Arambula series of one-pagers on urban revitalization planning, which is on their website (the materials focus more on commercial areas, but the principles are directly relevant);

-- The How to Turn A Place Around workshop-manual from the Project for Public Spaces

-- The book Real Towns: Making your Neighborhood Work from the Local Government Commission

-- the Neighborhood Planning support website

-- The book Community Economic Development Handbook which covers commercial and economic improvement, not the improvement of the housing side of the neighborhood, but that needs to be included

-- talk to Stanley Lowe and the people from Pittsburgh who did their own neighborhood plans. They called this the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, but I don't like that name because it's the same as the Philadelphia initiative, which demolished a lot of historic buildings. (They did a presentation at the Trust Conference in Portland. One of the co-leaders of the presentation was Dan from the Young Preservationists Associaton of Pittsburgh.)

-- Pittsburgh's Community Design Center of Pittsburgh and the Community Technical Assistance Center assisted this planning process (these are two of the best community revitalization organizations in the U.S.)

-- The University of Wisconsin Extension program's Center for Community Economic Development has a great website for commercial district revitalization.

I don't know what's up with the "Preservation Development Initiative" of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but it's like the Main Street Approach + housing. So is the "Elm Street Initiative" of the State of Pennsylvania. I would see if their trainings (along with the basic MS101 trainings) could be offered as part of the proposed "neighborhood planning conference" suggested above.

Also, Minneapolis probably has one of the most truly neighborhood-based planning processes in the U.S. Because they are more than 15 years old, they don't have stuff on their website about "creating neighborhood plans," but modifying such plans. They are still worth contacting.
___________
* Lyrics from "Goodbye" by the Psychedelic Furs (sung in a slightly contempuous tone with a British accent)
hello to you hello to me
i've somewhere else to be
excuses i get all the time
your answers i don't see
today is easy isn't it so?
i sit and watch the radio
there's nothing coming on at all
hello to you hello to me
ah yeah i really care
i'll see you all around sometime
i hope that i'm not there
today's news is yesterday's news
you don't remember you forget
that's the way the stories all go
hello to you hello to me
and yes i really care
i'll see you all around sometime
if i ever go back there
goodbye to you goodbye again
i've got to get this train
it's nine o' clock already
and i'm twenty minutes late
goodbye to you goodbye again
problems don't exist
i'll see you at the station
you'll be standing in the rain
today is easy isn't it so?
the man says stop
the clock says now
it's exit time for me
goodnight to you goodnight again
i've somewhere else to be
i'll see you all around sometime
i hope you don't miss me
goodbye to you good bye to you
goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye
goodbye to you
goodbye

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization