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This
has been deja vu week at SYNERGY/Planning what
with Katrina bashing the gulf coast, crude oil
passing $70 a barrel and gasoline moving up
toward $4.00 a gallon. No sane person would wish
a Category 4 hurricane on anyone. However, there
is critical history to understand and important
lessons to be learned.
Let's
start by being very clear: This is not a
“natural” disaster, it is a governance
disaster. Mother Nature did not build, nor is
she responsible for managing Greater New Orleans
or the rest of the urban development on the Gulf
Coast.
As
we noted in “'Collapse,'
An Appreciation," Aug. 8, 2005, Jared
Diamond believes that there are two overarching
causes for the collapse of societies:
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Diamond’s
first key to collapse is the failure to plan
for future contingencies. It turns out that
the citizens of Louisiana paid for a
long-range plan which, if implemented, would
have yielded a far different result from
Katrina, especially for Greater New Orleans.
The
question is: Will Katrina cause citizens, not
just those on the Gulf Coast but on the Atlantic
Coast, to develop and implement rational,
long-term plans and reconsider the
“traditional values” which turn out to have
a deadly cumulative impact on society as a
whole?
Background
In
the 1970s I was a Senior Vice President
responsible for planning division of RBA, an
Architecture and Engineering firm that
specialized in planning, design and
implementation of Planned New Communities. The
firm was quite good at what it did. We were
involved in the plans and applications for four
of the first eight Planned New Communities
approved nation-wide under title IV and VII by
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development.
Louisiana,
like other Southern States, has been adept for
at least a century at securing generous payouts
from Federal subsidy programs. That was
especially true in the Johnson/Nixon era. Thus,
it was not surprising that the State of
Louisiana hired RBA to help the state and some
of its land owners get Federal funds to
subsidize creation of Planned New Communities.
The prospect of federal money for politicians
and their friends with large land holdings they
wanted to develop was “a natural.” (For a
summary of Planned New Communities see “Balanced
Communities,” Aug. 23, 2005.
It
took RBA’s planning team a very short time to
determine that:
Any
development of these vast land holdings would
require huge infrastructure investments. That is
why the developers needed federal subsidy. But even
a fat subsidy would not suffice to create a
positive cash flow in the face of modest
environmental and safety criteria–especially
without a focused market.
One
Planned New Community site owned by Lady Bird
Johnson and others had already gotten four (yes,
four) full interchanges paid for with federal
funds to access Interstate-10. Even with this
windfall, “New Orleans East” never became a
viable Planned New Community.
RBA
considered itself to be on the front line of the
environmental movement having just collaborated
with Ian McHarg on the plans for The Woodlands,
Tex., Planned New Community. We were not about
to get into the alligator eviction business.
However, like any good planning firm with a
$250,000 contract and threshold conclusions
derived from $10,000 worth of staff time, we
looked for other tasks that fit within the
general scope of our agreement with the State of
Louisiana. We came up with the idea of a long-range,
ecology-based plan for the state.
The
young professional planners in the Louisiana
State Planning office agreed that such a plan
was needed and, thus, The Louisiana Growth and
Conservation Strategy was created. The strategy
that RBA developed involved Planned New
Communities -- without the alligator evictions.
Elements
of the Plan
Coastal
Louisiana and adjacent Texas, Mississippi,
Alabama and Florida are in a precarious
ecological context for intensive urban land
uses: e.g. Galveston 1900 and 1915 and
Mississippi/Camille in 1969. The New Orleans
urban agglomeration has dodged disaster by pure
luck over the past 250 years. One did not have
to go far to find ecologists, marine engineers,
and environmental planners who had articulated
the grave danger of expanding urban development
-- especially petrochemical and freight
transshipping -- on the fragile Gulf Coast. (For
an update of what was known and what has
happened since 1972 see “Drowning
New Orleans” in Scientific American, Oct.
2001.
New
Orleans did not recently become a large urban
place mostly below sea level. It was a disaster
waiting to happen in 1950 and in 1972. When
Katrina gained strength over the warm Gulf
waters and headed for the mouth of the
Mississippi we recalled The Louisiana Growth and
Conservation Strategy. This state plan was not
written with the focus or vocabulary I would use
today but the basic objectives are all there.
Stated in today’s vocabulary, the four core
elements of the Strategy can be summarized this
way:
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Pipe
the crude oil north to high ground from the
Gulf platforms, from coastal wells and from
supertankers off loading foreign crude. Over
design the extraction and transport
facilities if they must be built, but
refine the crude and produce the chemicals
on solid ground not in the bayous or behind
levies. (From 1972 to 1974 a facility to
offload supertankers was still being
debated. So was the wisdom of extensive
drilling in the Gulf and in the marshes.) In
summary: relocate petrochemical jobs and
create new petrochemical jobs in the
sustainable north, not in the fragile south.
(We argued that energy conservation should
eliminate the need for oil and gas
extraction in vulnerable locations–more on
that later.)
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Use
Planned New Neighborhoods and Planned New
Villages to augment the existing urban
places–Shreveport, Alexandria, Monroe, et.
al.– so that they evolved to became large
Balanced Communities or the cores of small
New Urban Regions.
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Enhance
the natural buffers against natural
forces–healthy marshes and swamps. The
wetland between Greater New Orleans and the
Gulf had been eroded, dredged, filled, canalled
and subdivided over the prior 70 years.
These natural buffers needed help to renew
themselves. Improved air and water quality
standards were noted as being critical to
healthy humans and to a healthy environment.
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To
support the tourism, entertainment and
transshipping as well as the traditional
fishing, shrimping and related industries in
the southern part of the state, the strategy
called for hardening and enhancing the
defenses against natural forces of wind and
water. This started with evolving a smaller
urban footprint for Greater New Orleans and
for the other urban enclaves along the south
coast. But it also meant building higher and
better dikes with better pumps and better
engineering–like the polders in the
Netherlands. The object was to keep a
smaller area dry and provide more area for
flood relief both from the Mississippi River
and from storm surges off the Gulf of
Mexico. There is no better example of the
need for a Clear Edge around urban land
uses.
The
four elements of the Growth and Conservation
Strategy would shift new urban development to
areas that could support it and protect the
historic and ecological resources of the south.
There was ample evidence of the need to expand
the protection of low-lying urban enclaves. Yes,
in the 1970s there was discussion of climate
change and the need to prepare for rising sea
levels and for more intensive storms.
Our
reports suggested that continued
Business-As-Usual -- in Louisiana they call it
laissez-faire and it is a core traditional value
-- would result in the collapse of the marsh and
swamp ecosystems and depletion of the fresh
water aquifers. These eco-collapses have not
occurred in the time frames we suggested.
There
is ongoing “political” debate about the need
for and the health of both saltwater marshes and
freshwater swamps. The same is true for
protection of fresh water aquifers and the need
for better air quality standards. There is no
question that the area of functional wetlands
has continued deteriorate as noted in the Scientific
American story cited above.
The
ecological head line has been the “Dead
Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of
the Mississippi. This ecological Dead Zone has
dramatically impacted the traditional fishing
and shrimping industries of the Bayou County.
The Dead Zone is not due just to dysfunctional
settlement patterns and lax environmental
controls in Louisiana but is the cumulative
result of similar conditions in the watershed of
the entire Mississippi/Tennessee/Ohio/ Missouri
River System. Had Louisiana taken bold steps to
plan a more sustainable future it would have the
moral high ground to encourage better land,
water and environmental management in the other
states drained by the Mississippi River System.
RBA
proposed a number of new institutional
arrangements such as transferring development
rights from south to the north. During the
Louisiana project I did my first rough
calculations of how much land at Planned New
Community densities would be needed to support
the population of Louisiana. The potential
Planned New Community sites–10,000 acres here,
24,000 acres there, 50,000 acres somewhere else,
etc. –added up to enough land at 10 persons
per acre at the Planned New Community scale to
relocate the entire population of the state. It
turned out that even in 1972 much less land was
needed for urban land use at sustainable
densities than was already committed to these
land uses.
Political
Reality
Because
RBA staff was very circumspect–perhaps even
obtuse–in how it framed the imperative of
Fundamental Change, the politically sensitive
State of Louisiana staff liked the initial
report and authorized Phase II examining a range
of policy issues. These documents were
perhaps more obscure than they should have been
but the client did not want to make it appear
that the political leadership had been negligent
in not having already addressed these issues in
1973.
The
Phase III that followed
was an innovative citizens education effort with
a workbook that required participants to
consider economic, social and environmental
goals before and after an audiovisual
presentation. RBA staff and consultants
put together a three slide-projector
presentation with a synchronized sound track
that was as slick any contemporary PowerPoint
product roll-out. The education program
was called something like “Hindsight: 2020”
and had, as the title implies, a "Looking
Backward" theme.
The graphics were
powerful. I recall that there was a
dramatic sunrise over the Atchafalaya Basin set
to Richard Strauss’s Overture to “Also
Sprach Zarathustra.” It was symbolic of
the power of nature and the morning after “The
Big One” hit Greater New Orleans if there were
not Fundamental Changes in human settlement
pattern.
The focus groups that
viewed the program usually opted for the
sustainable, conservative goals over the
laissez-faire (aka Business-As-Usual) settlement
pattern practices of the past. But the new
ideas did not convince everyone. After one
showing, a cagey political insider said he liked
the ideas but had one question: “Who is going to make a lot of money in the
short run from this strategy?”
“Well, no one. This is the way for
everyone to be prosperous and safe in the long
term.”
He said, “Son,” (I
was a lot younger then) “you do not understand
the way things work here in Louisiana. If
there is not someone who stands to make a lot of
money in the short term, no politician is going
to touch these ideas with a 10-foot
pole.”
Others were more blunt:
“Politicians will wait for a catastrophe and
then blame God. The relief effort will
provide lots of money to pass around to their
friends.”
We tried to find a
way to have friends of those in power make a lot
of money in the short term–other than by
corrupt practices–but we could not think of
one. After all good government should be
its own reward, right?
The massive
construction projects required to implement the
Growth and Conservation Strategy would result in
an honest profit but no windfalls. More
important, there was no obvious source of money
to implement the Strategy without public
expenditure, and that smelled of taxes.
Twenty five years of scattered urban development
and scattered, vulnerable petrochemical
facilities had already made Fundamental Change
expensive.
Sure enough: No one in
power would touch the Growth and Conservation
Strategy with a 10 foot pole. They waited
for a catastrophe. There may have been
other plans that were shelved. I only know
about the one which has my signature on the
transmittal page.
Katrina's
Impact
Katrina did not
make a direct hit on the core of the New Orleans
urban agglomeration but it still washed over Greater New Orleans.
In many places, a 10-foot
pole would not reach half way to the flooded
street. The Corps of Engineers says it
will take a month to repair the levies and pump
out the water. And then what?
If the Growth and Conservation Strategy had been
implemented and Katrina had hit in 1985, the
strategy would not have helped much. But
by 2005 implementation of the four elements of
the strategy would be well along and the result
would have been far different than the last
week’s headlines.
We have had
occasion to visit the New Orleans New Urban
Region often over the past three decades.
We have had some wonderful times in the Big
Easy: Great food, a World's Fair with a nifty
entrance feature, architecture and urban fabric
unrivaled in the Untied States. Denizens
of Louisiana love to boast of a lifestyle based
on laissez-faire and laissez les bon temps
rouler.
We watched as swamps were
filled and cut apart by canals, as urban
development spread across the lowlands, as low
bid drilling rigs sprouted in the Gulf and as
land was wasted in the uplands.
It
is important to keep in mind that it is not just
Louisiana that has made grave mistakes.
One media report said that a resident of Boloxi,
Miss., watched as his neighbors house was
washed off its pilings. Hello?
Pilings? Why was there a house on pilings?
What could you expect when you built houses on
the beach at Waveland with no barrier
island–or even with one.
What were
enterprises and governance practitioners
thinking when they paid for/allowed barges with casinos
on them to be tied up to the sea
wall? We address this issue on a
nation-wide basis in “Fire and Flood,”
Nov. 3, 2003.
From the
Southwestern tip of Texas to the Everglades,
dysfunctional settlement patterns have
agglomerated on the Gulf Coast. And then
you have the Florida Keys and the whole Atlantic
Coast which, with few exceptions, is ripe for
disaster from a Category 4 or 5 storm. These storms are not rare, at least not in
recent times. Two Cat 4 or 5 storms hit
the Gulf Coast last year and this is the second
one this year and the official Hurricane season is
only
half over. Cat 4 and 5 storms are not
something new. There were big storms in
1900, 1915, 1926, 1944 and three in the 60s.
What
Besides Katrina is a Reminder of the '70s?
Katrina got us thinking about
other sound initiatives that we worked on in the
1970s. The first thing that comes to mind
when one hears about $70-a-barrel crude oil
is 1973. You may have heard of the 1973
Arab Oil Embargo and the need for energy
conservation? Last Thursday’s WaPo has a
headline: “70s Conservation Measures May Make
a Comeback.” Hello! Who thought there
was a reason to abandon them so a “comeback”
was needed?
In the
'70s we worked on
creating energy efficient patterns and densities
of land use. We also worked on Modular
Integrated Utility Systems (MIUS) that were
promoted by HUD. These were recycling and
waste recovery systems that provided self-contained heating and cooling at the
neighborhood scale instead of inefficient unit
scale systems. A new chilled water system
proposed for Toronto this week would reduce
energy costs by 90 percent.
We also
promoted Telework in the '70s, moving work to
people instead of people to work. We
argued that Telework would reduce travel demand
until settlement patterns evolved to require
less vehicular travel especially private-vehicle
trips.
When Jimmy
Carter proposed a 50-cent gas tax he was laughed
out of office, and that ended concern for energy
conservation and real conservatism. In
came the answer to malaise: tax cuts and
hyper-consumption to drive the economy.
This left citizens vulnerable to “natural
disasters.”
As Zonker said in
Doonesbury: “Only the poor suffer and they are
used to it.” Well, guess what it is not
just the poor who are suffering even though a
disproportionately large number of them are left
with nothing, no place to go and no way to get
there. Is that civilization?
What
Comes After Katrina Besides Hurricane Lee?
What will citizens and their
governance representatives learn form Katrina?
Will the hurricane cause citizens, not just those on
the Gulf Coast but on the Atlantic Coast, to develop rational, long-term plans and
reconsider “traditional values” that turn out to be deadly for society as a whole?
The President, FEMA spokespersons, the Governors
and Mayors are calling Katrina a “natural
disaster.” When there is so much sound
evidence of an impending disaster and when
nothing was done about if for 100, 50 or even 30
years, can it be called a “natural” disaster?
How about one of these:
A political disaster
A governance disaster
A societal disaster
Any of them
would be more accurate than “natural” disaster.
Have
you bought your copy of "Collapse" yet? Have
you contacted Professor Freeman about signing up
to help out with PROPERTY DYNAMICS?
--
September 5, 2005
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