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There
is nothing like travel to clear one's mind and
provide a fresh prospective, especially when the
journey is through Mid-America. Specifically,
this trip involved assessing the economic,
social and physical impact of human settlement
patterns in what the residents call “Heartland
USA” – Central Missouri north of the
I-70 Corridor.
Unlike
the situation father west on the High Plains
where depopulation is pandemic, there is a
substantial population in Central Missouri. In
Heartland USA the main roads are known as “US
Route XX” and the urban enclaves look pretty
much like they did 50 years ago.
There
is deep, rich soil, so the Heartland is a place
where the John Deere dealer does 90 percent of
his business in big green machines. In Warrenton,
Va., the John Deere dealer recently estimated
that 80 percent of his business was generated by
lawn and garden tractors. Most of the rest comes
from farmers who are waiting to sell land to
developers or their development rights to the
government–directly
or indirectly.
The
Heartland is a place where citizens can drive
wherever they want, whenever they wish and
arrive in a timely manner. (The Private Vehicle
Mobility Myth is only a myth in large urban
agglomerations so long as gasoline is under
$5.00 a
gallon.) It is also a place with housing that is
affordable and accessible. In a community-scale
real estate flier the listings start with
“Under $50,000" – a sturdy 3 bedroom
rancher with municipal water and sewer. The
listings top out at “$200,000 and Above.”
Shelter that would bring $925,000 in Centreville
and $525,000 in Chesterfield would fetch
$165,000 in Moberly.
There
is a lot of water in the Heartland, including
the Missouri River, so they know a thing or two
about floods.
Returning
to “Megapolitan America” from the Heartland,
one has a refreshed perspective with which to
consider the stories that were the focus of
recent columns. Here are some quick takes:
The
Myth of Evacuation
The
Katrina-inspired attempt to evacuate Greater New
Orleans demonstrated that telling people who
have no place to go and no way to get there that
they must evacuate is a recipe for disaster. In
spite of all the self-congratulations by
governance practitioners in Texas, had Rita hit
Galveston / Houston as Category 5 storm on
Saturday as predicted on Thursday, one would
have found a lot of folks still in harms way, as
they were in Greater New Orleans. The
Rita evacuation of Greater Houston demonstrated
that in spite of the fact that this region is
the inland home of the superhighway, with one
fifth the density of Los Angeles, there is not
anywhere near enough highway capacity to
evacuate the population of 5-million +/- in a
specific direction. (See End
Note One.) The
Rita evacuation also demonstrated that first
responder tactics for “every day
emergencies” such as closing down a six-lane
road for hours when there is a single bus fire
could put tens of thousands in jeopardy during a
mass evacuation. The
lessons that citizens will take from these two
“made-for-TV-news” evacuation exercises
include:
None
of this suggests that mass evacuations are going
to be something citizens believe is in their
best interest. There is more.
The
Rita re-evacuation of Beaumont, Port Arthur and
other urban agglomerations show how fragile and
vulnerable recently constructed urban fabric is
and how long it takes to reestablish liveable
conditions.
The
bottom line is this:
There
is no viable mass evacuation strategy for
large urban agglomerations. This includes
evacuations due to storm events as well as
terrorist attacks.
The
market demonstrates that in spite of mobility
and cost-of-shelter advantages in the Heartland,
the large scale urban agglomerations of
Megapolitan America are a sine qua non of
contemporary civilization. Climate change and a
shift to more violent storm events is a reality;
so is the threat of terrorism.
Our
leaders must admit that a large number of
citizens are expendable or they must endorse
Fundamental Change and build defensible and
sustainable human settlement patterns.
“Defensible and sustainable” does not mean
walled enclaves for the rich or walled urban
agglomerations for all. It means Balanced
Communities in sustainable New Urban Regions.
Defensible
and sustainable settlement patterns are,
however, not enough. In the case of disaster,
individuals and families must rely on themselves
and their neighbors at the dooryard, cluster,
neighborhood and village scales. The
evolution of cluster-scale, neighborhood-scale
and village-scale governance as well as regional
governance is imperative to plan, organize and
support intelligent response to disasters.
The
reality of evacuation physics does not, however:
Settlement
Patterns on the Gulf Coast
“Shape
of the Future” columns often discuss the
ramifications of the evolution of dysfunctional
human settlement patterns over the past 50
years. See “Fire
and Flood,” Nov 3, 2003; “Take
Me Home, Congested, Non-Urban Roads,”
April 11, 2005; and “Solutions
to the Shelter Crisis,” July 25, 2005.
We
have had the opportunity to see air photos of
the naked foundations of former oceanfront
houses in Waveland, Miss., and Holly Beach, La.
Not as well recognized are the problems a little
farther from the shore where the less-well-to-do
live. After Rita came ashore, headlines
suggested that urban areas in the path of the
storm were “spared” and non-urban (aka,
“rural”) areas were devastated. By
“urban areas,” the headline writers meant
the organized settlement patterns with municipal
services areas. By “rural” they mean the
urban dwellings and businesses scattered along
roadways and hidden at the end of long
driveways.
The
media coverage documents that following Katrina
and Rita relief (water, ice and food) was
arriving in days or weeks, instead of hours in
these low-density locations. The reports also
noted that it will take months, not days, to
reconnect electric and telephone service.
Yes,
some of these places are the homes of those who
work on farms and in forests. Some of the
devastation included livestock that was not
provided with elevated flood refuges. But most
of the destroyed property and devastated lives
focused on scattered urban dwellings and
associated outbuildings, including
disaster-prone “mobile” homes.
A
good way to establish parameters for these
losses is to compare the settlement patterns
that have agglomerated since Audrey hit western
Louisiana in 1957 and Camille hit Gulf Coast
Mississippi in 1969. The scatteration of urban
land uses is not unlike what has happened in
every county in Virginia since 1950. Some of
this urbanized land has evolved into functional
urban fabric; most of it is characterized by
widely scattered urban land uses.
These
scattered urban land uses present a clear and
present danger. On the Gulf Coast there is
physical danger from floods, tidal surges and
hurricane force winds. In all parts of the
United States including the Gulf Coast,
Megapolitan America and Heartland USA, there
is an economic danger–the loss of cheap
energy.
The
recent hurricanes brought this reality into
sharp focus. Even if they escaped the wind and
water, most of the citizens living in scattered
locations on the Gulf Coast (as they do
elsewhere) rely on private automobiles to
acquire almost every component of daily, weekly
and monthly subsistence. When they run out of
gasoline, they run out of luck.
The
disaggregated lifestyle is acceptable with cheap
gasoline. With no gasoline it is impossible to
survive. With expensive gasoline, it is not a
viable lifestyle, especially for those near the
bottom of the economic food chain.
This
reality illuminates the imperative of functional
human settlement patterns and the fact that
individuals and families must rely on themselves
and their neighbors at the dooryard, cluster,
neighborhood and village scales. Disaggregated
settlement pattern meets some citizens desire
for “privacy” but is contrary to the
imperatives of survival. The separation and
distance caused by scatteration destroy the
nexus for reliance and affinity needed to
overcome disaster.
This
is why the evolution of cluster-scale,
neighborhood- scale and village-scale governance
is needed to plan, organize and support
intelligent response to disasters. This brings
us back to the role of governance and of
government, right? Well, not quite yet.
The
Private Sector Role
Before
we consider the role of government, we need to
look at the private sector’s role. While there
are many private sector actions that could be
pursued, we focus on one that could make all the
difference: Insurance.
Many
of the problems caused by dysfunctional human
settlement patterns on the Gulf Coast have their
roots in the insurance strategy cobbled together
for flood-prone areas. In a clear exposition of
the Law of Unintended Consequences, federal
government flood insurance has subsidized
building the wrong structures in the wrong
locations. Collectively, these structures create
a dysfunctional settlement pattern.
The
federal insurance program is yet another
bottomless pit into which the current
administration will be forced to pour billions of
dollars. To make matters worse, insurance
companies, mortgage holders and municipal bond
attorneys are lining up for even more corporate
welfare. But that is not where we want to go.
Let others sort this out. Let's start with a
clean slate.
Let
the private sector handle the insurance issue.
Government just needs to be sure no one gets a
building permit without insurance. Just as with
registration of a car: No insurance means no
building. Once the buildings are up, no
occupancy permits can be acquired without safe
water, functional sanitary facilities and
insurance.
Leave
it up to the insurance companies to see that the
buildings are well located and that the cost of
insurance reflects the risk of destruction.
Government must guarantee that there is
competition among insurance carriers. In the
Gulf States that will be an invitation to graft
and corruption but no more than the current
conditions have proven to generate. An
appropriate amount of sunlight will wipe out
mold and corruption.
Governance
and the Hurricanes
Now
we get to governance and the lessons from the
events of the past month for governance and
government organization.
We
hate to say “I told you so” so soon but in
our September 5 column, “Down
Memory Lane With Katrina,” we quoted a
Louisiana political operative on the
“solution” to the danger of catastrophic
floods: “Wait for the disaster and then get
federal money.” WaPo in the lead
editorial on 27 September attacks the
“Louisiana Looters.” These are not the New
Orleans police who are now being investigated
for stealing Rolex watches but the politicians
who are asking $50,000 per capita in federal aid
to fix the problems that they allowed to
accumulate over the past 50 years.
Anne
Applebaum’s column in WaPo the next day
was titled “Corruption as Usual.” Enough
said.
Michael
D. Brown, the former head of FEMA, is absolutely
right: Louisiana’s state and New Orleans’
municipal governance is “dysfunctional.”
Brown left out the fact that there is no
regional governance at all. He also omitted the
fact that the most important levels of
governance – at the cluster, neighborhood,
village and community scale–do not exist
either. On the other hand Governor Kathleen
Babineaux Blanco and Mayor C. Ray Nagin are just
as right to blame dysfunctional federal
governance response.
The
bottom line is that Politics-As-Usual is not
equal to the job ahead in the face of Climate
Change and Terrorismm-- not on the Gulf Coast,
not in Florida, not in Virginia not even in
the Heartland.
The
events of the past month provide the opportunity
to drive home lessons on the necessity of
Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns
and Fundamental Change in Governance Structure.
The sustainability of human civilization depends
on learning from these events. [See End
Note two.]
End
Notes (1).
A good way to demonstrate the futility of trying
to evacuate a 5-million population urban
agglomeration in a short time would be to do a
full scale demonstration by moving a 5-million
person military force over the same routes in 24
hours. A military convoy of this scale
would overwhelm the roadway system. Mass
evacuation would be impossible for a civilian
population without the organization, chain of
command, communications and the shared vehicles
each with extra cans of gas. (2).
Some help is on the way. Duke and Honey are
decamping from Al Amok, Iraq and are headed for
New Orleans. They bring a skill set that will
help keep us amused even if they do not find an
effective way to restructure Greater New
Orleans.
--
October 3, 2005
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