Neighborhood Recovery in Post-Katrina New Orleans

An Essay Presented

by

Thomas Shade Wooten

to

The Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for a degree with honors

of Bachelor of Arts

Harvard College

March 2007
 Table of Contents

Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1
Explaining Divergent Rates of Neighborhood Recovery ....................................................... 1
Why Study Neighborhood Recovery Efforts in New Orleans? .............................................. 4
The Course of This Thesis ...................................................................................................... 6

Chapter 1: Recovery Variables and Methodology........................................................................ 10

I. Explaining Disaster Recovery ............................................................................................... 10
Individual-Context Recovery Variables ............................................................................... 11
Group Context Variables ...................................................................................................... 17
II. Methodology ........................................................................................................................ 28
Comparative Analysis of Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview............................................ 28
Interview and Participant Observation-Based Research....................................................... 33

Chapter 2: Neighborhood Comparison ......................................................................................... 35

I. Introducing Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview.................................................................. 35
Broadmoor ............................................................................................................................ 36
Gentilly ................................................................................................................................. 37
Lakeview............................................................................................................................... 39
Katrina’s Effects ................................................................................................................... 41
II. Divergent Recovery Outcomes ............................................................................................ 42
III. Explaining Divergent Recovery Outcomes ........................................................................ 49
Rationale for these dependent variables ............................................................................... 50
Testing the variables ............................................................................................................. 52

Chapter 3: Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts.............................................................................. 62

I. Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts in Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Gentilly ......................... 63
Broadmoor’s Effort............................................................................................................... 63
Lakeview’s Effort ................................................................................................................. 69
Gentilly’s Effort .................................................................................................................... 73
II. Explaining Resident Return ................................................................................................. 78
Hurdles to Recovery ............................................................................................................. 79
Overcoming Recovery Hurdles............................................................................................. 81

Chapter 4: How and Why Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts Succeed ....................................... 91

Variables that Explain Movement Emergence and Success ................................................. 92
I. Leadership and Resident Mobilization .................................................................................. 93
II. Residents Generate and Implement Recovery Plans............................................................ 98
III. Partnerships and Outside Resources ................................................................................. 104
IV. Adaptive Capacity ............................................................................................................ 109

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 116

Sources Consulted....................................................................................................................... 120

 Introduction

Explaining Divergent Rates of Neighborhood Recovery

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview are three residential neighborhoods of New Orleans

that were badly flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In the two and a half years since the

storm, Broadmoor and Lakeview have mounted successful recoveries, with residents returning

and rebuilding their homes at consistent rates across both neighborhoods. In Gentilly, by

contrast, recovery has been inconsistent, with the most heavily damaged portions of the

neighborhood experiencing slow or stagnant rates of resident return. These divergent outcomes

are not easily explained by demographic differences between the neighborhoods, nor by any

difference in the degree of damage each suffered. Broadmoor’s success, for example, comes in

spite of the fact that its residents had by far the highest rate of poverty (31.8%) and the lowest

average household income ($36,400 per year) of the three neighborhoods prior to the storm

(GNOCDC).1 Lakeview’s success comes in spite of the fact that its homes suffered the most

consistent and severe damage of houses in the three neighborhoods, necessitating more than

three times the percentage of home demolitions (27.8% of Lakeview properties as of July of

2007) than was needed in either Gentilly (8%) or Broadmoor (2.3%), (Ahlers 2007; Jett 2007;

Lakeview 2007). Why then, have Broadmoor and Lakeview experienced consistent residential

recoveries, while Gentilly has not?

Some literature on disaster recovery would suggest that the explanation for these

divergent recovery outcomes lies in structural differences between the neighborhoods.

1
A substantial portion of the demographic data in this thesis was obtained from the Greater New Orleans Data
Center website’s archive of pre-Katrina data. The website provides comprehensive data from the 2000 census for
every New Orleans neighborhood, and was thus an invaluable resource.

1
Prevailing pre-disaster economic trends and available monetary resources among disaster-

affected populations, for example, have been found to be key predictors of the rate of post-

disaster recovery (Haas, 1977). Other demographic variables, including the portion of renters in

affected populations and the racial makeup of these groups, have been found to be important

predictors of the speed of recovery as well (Elliott, 2006). Conversely, other disaster recovery

literature would seek the explanation for the divergence in recovery outcomes between these

three neighborhoods by examining the structure and implementation of recovery efforts within

each. For example, the degree of control residents exert over recovery efforts, the nature of

leadership structures within each neighborhood, and the relationships between residents and

higher levels of government could all affect each neighborhood’s rate of recovery (Bolin, 1998),

(Nakagawa, 2004), (Peterman, 2000).

In this thesis, I show that structural variables do not convincingly explain the difference

between Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery and the consistent recoveries in Broadmoor and

Lakeview. Rather, I argue that the presence of successful resident-driven recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview and the absence of a similarly successful effort in Gentilly

convincingly explains why the former two neighborhoods have experienced more consistent

recoveries. Recovery initiatives in Broadmoor and Lakeview have sustained widespread resident

engagement and successfully implemented an array of concrete recovery initiatives – from

reopening neighborhood schools to hiring “case workers” to help individual residents return –

whereas Gentilly’s resident-driven recovery efforts have not. I show that the broad-based and

results-oriented recovery efforts in Lakeview and Broadmoor have substantially lowered

motivational, logistical, and material hurdles to resident return in these neighborhoods, whereas

efforts in Gentilly have not had similar effects. Specifically, I argue that the process of

2
undertaking recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview, which requires the involvement of

hundreds of residents spending thousands of hours working together to plan and implement

neighborhood recovery initiatives, has done as much to spur resident return in these

neighborhoods as the concrete outcomes that these resident efforts produce.

I also explain why and how efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have successfully grown,

sustained themselves, and achieved their goals, while Gentilly’s resident-driven effort has not. I

argue that the success of recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview stems from the existence

of residents’ associations in these neighborhoods prior to the storm, which provided residents

with both established leadership and repertoires of collective action in the storm’s wake that

Gentilly’s residents lacked. This prior organization, combined with a heightened sense of

urgency that residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview felt relative to residents of Gentilly, spurred

Broadmoor and Lakeview residents to take responsibility for their neighborhoods’ recoveries

themselves, whereas the absence of these factors in Gentilly caused residents to remain

dependent upon outsiders to spur and guide their neighborhood’s recovery. Resident

mobilizations in Broadmoor and Lakeview spawned recovery efforts that were characterized by

full resident control over planning, close connections between planning and implementation,

partnerships that supported resident efforts, and a great deal of adaptive capacity. These

characteristics allowed the efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview to sustain high levels of resident

engagement and achieve their stated goals, thereby helping to lower both motivational and

material barriers to individual resident return in the two neighborhoods.

My findings are important because they suggest that the recovery successes of

Broadmoor and Lakeview are not solely the product of any inherent structural advantages the

two neighborhoods hold, and could therefore be replicable in other residential areas of New

3
Orleans. Indeed, the similarities between the resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview, which I outline above and explore in subsequent chapters, suggest a formula for

successful neighborhood recovery in the otherwise stagnant post-Katrina environment.

Why Study Neighborhood Recovery Efforts in New Orleans?

Neighborhood recovery efforts in New Orleans are worth studying because they are

among the few forces within the city that have consistently driven its recovery forward.

Otherwise, few success stories have emerged from New Orleans in the two and a half years since

80% of the city was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The return of residents to the city

and the rebuilding of homes have been slow. The latest available figures show that over 58,000

addresses in the city (nearly 30% of Orleans Parish households) were still not receiving mail in

November of 2007, indicating the high number of properties that remain unoccupied in the wake

of the storm (GNOCDC 2008). In addition to abandoned properties and displaced residents, the

city faces a host of other problems. Murders in the city spiked after the storm, and the Orleans

Parish district attorney’s office found itself without the capacity to keep pace; it won just one

conviction for the 162 murders committed in all of 2006 (Brown 2007). Infrastructure

throughout the city is crumbling: roads are in severe disrepair, and sewer and gas lines that were

corroded by Katrina’s salty floodwaters are failing at high rates. Many public schools in the city

have yet to reopen, and in some cases, their empty buildings remained full of moldy debris even

two years after the storm (Reckdahi 2007). The city faces many daunting challenges to

overcome.

Unfortunately, leadership and support from all levels of government since the storm has

left much to be desired in the face of these challenges. Three citywide recovery planning

processes – the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) plan, the Lambert Plan, and the Unified New

4
Orleans Plan (UNOP) – have been undertaken in attempts to create unifying visions to guide the

city’s recovery, but few of the initiatives these plans propose seem likely to receive funding

(Ikeda and Gordon 2007: 5; Reichard 2007: 9). In 2007, the budget for the city’s Office of

Recovery and Development Administration, which spearheads recovery projects in flooded areas

of the city, was only $117 million (Krupa 2007). By contrast, repairs on the city’s football

stadium alone were projected to cost $140 million (SMG 2006: 1). Moreover, a federally funded

program to compensate homeowners for flood damage faced a $6.6 billion shortfall in September

of 2007, and though the gap was eventually closed by Congress, tens of thousands of applicants

have yet to see the money they were promised (Hammer 2007). In all, leadership and resources

for the New Orleans recovery have not been readily forthcoming from the city, state, or federal

governments.

New Orleans is a city made up of well defined neighborhoods (Campanella 2006: 164),

and residents in many of these neighborhoods have organized in Katrina’s wake to fill the void

of government initiative and spearhead their own recovery initiatives. Residents’ associations

across the city have done everything from forming neighborhood school committees to reopen

public schools as charter schools, to spearheading thorough inventories of infrastructural

problems within their borders, to opening recovery centers that aim to ease returning residents’

renovations of their flooded homes and transitions back into their neighborhoods. In a sign of

how much power and initiative has shifted away from the city government and into the hands of

organized neighborhoods, Broadmoor’s Community Development Corporation recently hired a

5
worker to oversee the city government’s handling of grant money the neighborhood received

(Hal Roark, February 29, 2008).2

The level of resident organization and initiative that has sprouted up from New Orleans

neighborhoods is certainly unprecedented in the city’s history, if not in the history of the United

States (Ikeda and Gordon 2007: 11; Irazabal and Neville 2007: 131). Irazabal and Neville

describe the frequent use of the term “citizens’ revolution” to describe active resident

involvement in recovery initiatives, and note that resident-driven efforts in the storm’s wake

have not been well studied or documented (Irazabal and Neville 2007: 131). My research,

therefore, focuses on a significant but largely unstudied phenomenon in the New Orleans

recovery process. As a result, although my writing remains in dialog with currently-existing

literature about disaster recovery, urban neighborhoods, and community-based development, its

primary aim is to explore the neighborhood-based recovery work being undertaken by New

Orleans residents, and to explain why and how some resident-driven recovery efforts in the city

are succeeding. This work is well worth undertaking, as it has direct practical significance to

Gulf Coast communities currently trying to rebuild, as well as to communities that fall victim to

future disasters.

The Course of This Thesis

In Chapter 1, I draw from literature about disaster recovery to identify a number of

variables that could explain the divergent recovery outcomes between Broadmoor, Gentilly, and

Lakeview. I show that these potential factors include variables that affect recovery on an

individual-by-individual basis and also variables that affect the emergence and eventual success

2
A complete list of interviews is available at the end of this thesis. Unless interviewees granted me explicit
permission to use their names, I have given them single first name pseudonyms. In this case, Hal gave me
permission to use his real name.

6
of collectively-based recovery efforts. I then argue that my comparative methodology and

reliance on interviews and firsthand observation provide an optimal basis upon which to test the

variables I identify while also developing in-depth qualitative pictures of the realities of each

neighborhood’s recovery.

In Chapter 2, I introduce Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview. Then, I show that

Broadmoor and Lakeview have experienced residential recoveries that are both spatially and

temporally consistent, while Gentilly’s residential recovery has been “spotty.” Subsequently, I

undertake a rigorous cross-neighborhood comparison of variables that potentially affect the rates

of recovery in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, and through this comparison, identify

variables that could explain the neighborhoods’ divergent recoveries. I posit that the success of

resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Gentilly at maintaining broad bases of resident

involvement and implementing an array of recovery initiatives, versus the failure of Gentilly’s

efforts on these fronts, explains Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s more consistent rates of rebuilding

and resident return.

In Chapter 3, I substantiate my argument that the difference in recovery outcomes

between the three neighborhoods is attributable to the success of resident-driven efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview at maintaining high resident involvement and implementing a number

of projects to spur recovery within their borders. I first lay out the sequence of events by which

residents in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview mobilized in the wake of the storm, planned

their responses to the disaster, and then, in the cases of Broadmoor and Lakeview, implemented

their plans. Drawing on interview data from conversations with residents, I then show that

resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have substantially lowered both motivational

and material hurdles to resident return, whereas Gentilly’s effort has not. Specifically, I show

7
that widespread and active resident engagement in these efforts increased residents’ confidence

and motivation to move back to Broadmoor and Lakeview, and that the outcomes of these efforts

lowered material and logistical hurdles to resident return in both neighborhoods. I argue that this

difference in outcome provides a compelling explanation of the difference between Gentilly’s

inconsistent recovery and the consistent recoveries taking place in Broadmoor and Lakeview.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I explore why and how efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have

successfully maintained high rates of resident engagement and implemented an array of recovery

projects, while Gentilly’s effort failed in this regard. I show that the prior existence of residents’

associations in Broadmoor and Lakeview gave residents of both neighborhoods established

leadership and repertoires of collective action that Gentilly’s residents lacked. I argue that these

initial advantages, combined with several specific “focusing events” that instilled residents with

a sense of urgency, led Broadmoor and Lakeview residents to mobilize rapidly and realize that

they themselves would be largely responsible for driving their neighborhoods’ recoveries

forward. Their senses of urgency and responsibility, in turn, led them to undertake recovery

efforts characterized by resident control over neighborhood planning, a close connection between

planning and implementation, the formation of an array of constructive partnerships to support

neighborhood efforts, and a great deal of adaptive capacity. It was these characteristics, I argue,

that allowed recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview to maintain high rates of active

resident involvement and achieve their goals. In Gentilly, by contrast, I show that the lack of an

existing residents’ association, combined with the lack of a defining event to quickly draw

residents together and instill them with a sense of urgency, led to a gradual mobilization in which

residents did not fully grasp that Gentilly’s fate lay largely in their hands. As a result, their

attempts to spur recovery forward remained largely dependent upon the initiative and guidance

8
of outsiders, and they failed to develop the capacity to implement projects themselves.

Consequently, I argue, their efforts failed both to implement recovery projects and to maintain

widespread resident engagement – the two key ways in which this effort could have lowered

hurdles to resident return.

9
 Chapter 1: Recovery Variables and Methodology
In this chapter, I draw from literature about disaster recovery, neighborhood-driven

development, and the particular recovery dynamics in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. I

use this review of literature to argue for the relevance and appropriateness of my focus on

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, my explicitly comparative analytic framework, and my

dependence upon interviews, participant observation, and readily available demographic and

repopulation data for the bulk of my research. I show that current literature about disaster

recovery suggests a number of variables that can both aid and hinder disaster recovery, and argue

that my analysis of Broadmoor, Gentilly and Lakeview through a comparative framework allows

the effects of many of these variables to be tested. Specifically, I argue that this approach allows

me to simultaneously test variables that affect recovery on an individual-by-individual basis and

variables that affect the emergence and success of collective recovery efforts which implement

initiatives to expedite individual recovery. Finally, drawing on Peterman’s “criteria for doing

successful neighborhood development”, (Peterman 2000: 155), I argue that my methodology

must not only allow me to establish whether or not neighborhood-based recovery efforts are

affecting recovery, but why and how they are successful if this is indeed the case. I show that my

choice of neighborhoods, my “on the ground” research, and my comparative analytical

methodology are well suited to this task.

I. Explaining Disaster Recovery

What drives recovery from a disaster? What variables can speed it along, or conversely

hinder it? A number of authors have weighed in on these questions, and their work provides a

diverse array of sometimes contradictory answers. All of their insights are valuable, however,

10
because they propose variables that could affect recovery, which I must in turn test. For the

purposes of presentation in this chapter, I separate these recovery-affecting variables into two

broad categories: variables that apply at the neighborhood or city level but primarily affect

recovery on an individual by individual basis, and variables that affect the emergence or

effectiveness of collectively-based responses to disaster. Ultimately, if I am to prove that

resident-driven recovery efforts in the neighborhoods I study are having profound effects upon

their recoveries, I must provide a convincing account of why an array of potentially important

“structural” variables do not sufficiently explain the recovery outcomes in Broadmoor, Gentilly,

and Lakeview. I must also explain how and why Broadmoor and Lakeview have seen their

resident-driven recovery efforts succeed, while Gentilly’s effort has floundered. To undertake

these tasks, I must take account of variables that could be used to explain both of them.

Individual-Context Recovery Variables

Several authors have posited explanations of disaster recovery that place little emphasis

on direct human agency within disaster-affected communities, arguing instead that the speed and

thoroughness of recovery is largely a function of pre-existing economic trends, the immediate

availability of recovery resources, and pre-existing social and political structures. As the authors

conceive them, these factors apply throughout a disaster-affected area or population, but

primarily affect recovery on an individual-by-individual basis. In this section, I identify of such

variables in order to put their explanatory power to test in the next chapter.3

In a comparative study of the recoveries of 44 Southern Italian villages conducted after a

severe 1980 earthquake, for example, Ino Rossi concludes that only “structural” variables affect

the rate of recovery between communities. Rossi employs a dataset that was collected five years

3
I include a chart at the end of this section summarizing the variables and the authors who propose them.

11
after the earthquake took place, which consists of 43 variables for each of the villages under

study (Rossi 1993: 2-8). These variables include both dependent measures of recovery

outcomes and independent variables that could have some bearing on recovery. Within the

category of independent variables, Rossi further differentiates between what he calls “action”

variables, such as measures of perceptions of mayoral leadership in the disaster’s wake, and

“structural” variables, such as per capita reconstruction funds assigned by the government to

each village (Rossi 1993: 29-30). Via regression analysis, Rossi measures the effects of selected

independent variables upon selected dependent indicators of recovery, with the goal of

determining the relative effects of action and structural variables upon village recovery.

Rossi’s regressions, though limited in scope and arguably flawed, show that only so-

called “structural” variables had a measurable effect upon recovery outcomes. Rossi selects the

percentage of public and private reconstruction projects completed as a variable to measure

“recovery”. He then chooses two “action” variables for his regression. The first, a measure of

residents’ opinions about their mayors’ qualifications, seeks to gauge “leadership effectiveness.”

The second, a measure of residents’ perceptions about their fellow citizens’ propensities to take

legal action – presumably to secure more resources for personal rebuilding, although Rossi does

not specify – acts as a measurement of “individual initiative.” Finally, Rossi selects three

“structural” variables: “institutional strength” as measured by the number of public services in

each village, “economic resources” as measured by the number of lire per capita allocated to

each village for recovery, and “political culture” as determined by whether the mayor’s

leadership style was “democratic” or “clientelistic” (Rossi 1993: 35). The regression shows, on a

99% confidence interval, that the structural variables account for “26% of the variation in the

12
dependent variable.” The action variables, by contrast, do not “explain significant additional

variation in the dependent variable” (Rossi 1993).

Rossi’s undertaking is remarkably close to my own – we both aim to explain the origins

of differences in recovery outcomes across disaster affected communities – and his approach and

conclusions provide a number of insights. Rossi’s choices to identify dependent and independent

variables across cases, and to define his dependent variable as “recovery” as measured by the

percentage of buildings reconstructed, anticipate my own structuring of this thesis. His

identification of “institutional strength” and “political culture” as “structural” variables also

provides a valuable reminder that societal variables affecting neighborhood recovery in New

Orleans may well have been in place before the storm. Finally, his conclusion that “action-

based” variables such as “leadership effectiveness” did not affect recovery after the earthquake

provides a direct challenge to my attempt to explain neighborhood recovery through resident-

driven recovery initiatives.

Rossi’s focus on “structural” variables was likely informed by the work of

Haas, Kates, and Bowen, editors of the 1977 book “Reconstruction Following Disaster,” which

was the first substantial work to attempt to explain the process of disaster recovery.4 The authors

based their work on analysis and comparison of four cases: the recovery of San Francisco after

its 1906 earthquake and fire, the recovery of Anchorage after its 1964 earthquake, the recovery

of Rapid City, South Dakota after its 1972 flood and finally the recovery of Managua, Nicaragua

following its 1972 earthquake. Haas et al suggest that nature and rate of disaster recovery is

primarily governed by structural variables. They assert that “[t]he reconstruction process is

ordered, knowable, and predictable”(Haas, Kates et al. 1977: 262), and argues that much of the

4
The editors were able to find only four sources – two of them unpublished – that attempted to move beyond
individual case analysis and understand and explain recovery in broader terms Haas, J. E., R. W. Kates, et al., Eds.
(1977). Reconstruction Following Disaster. Environmental Studies Series. Cambridge, Ma, MIT Press..

13
pace of post-disaster recovery is determined by three variables: “the extent of damage, the

available recovery resources, [and] the prevailing predisaster trends” (Haas, Kates et al. 1977:

xxviii). They find prevailing economic and demographic trends to be of particular importance:

[W]e find strong evidence for acceleration of predisaster trends in recovery. Simply stated, rapidly
growing cities recover rapidly; stable, stagnant or declining cities recover slowly and may even have their
decline accelerated. (Haas, Kates et al. 1977: 19)

However, they also note that “leadership, planning, and organization” likely play roles in

determining the rate of recovery. While they acknowledge that this speculation is primarily

based on intuition or is anecdotes, they conjecture that leadership and planning spur recovery by

reducing uncertainty and thereby inspiring confidence, prompting populations to reinvest and

rebuild more quickly (Haas, Kates et al. 1977: 19-22).

Like Rossi, Haas et al provide valuable insights into variables that could be affecting the

rates of recovery in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview. Although they take entire cities as their

units of analysis, the primary variables they identify – degree of damage, available resources,

and pre-disaster trends – certainly apply at the neighborhood level as well. Moreover, their

insight that leadership could affect rates of disaster recovery by increasing confidence among

populations that are otherwise hesitant to rebuild begs further investigation.

Adding to the list of variables that could be affecting residential recovery rates in

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, early research emerging from New Orleans suggests that

race, class, and homeowner status have profound effects on individuals’ recoveries. In a study

based on a Gallup poll of Katrina Survivors conducted one month after Katrina, Elliot and Pais

find that “both race and class played important roles” in determining survivors’ disaster

experiences and post-disaster life situations. Both variables were critical, the authors found;

“neither [could] be readily reduced to the other” (Elliott and Pais 2006: 317).

14
 Of particular interest to this thesis were the author’s findings about the effects of race and

class on variables that would help individuals and families to return to the city and rebuild their

lives. Overall, the study indicated that race played a significant role in determining individuals’

emotional stress and degree of social support after the storm, that class was an important

determinant of individuals’ post-storm access to their homes and their intentions to return to the

city, and that both variables were significant predictors of individuals’ access to their pre-storm

jobs (Elliott and Pais 2006: 305-316). The findings have profound significance for neighborhood

recovery in the wake of Katrina, as geographical segregation by race and class is widespread in

New Orleans.

The authors found that another demographic variable – homeowner status – was also

having a marked affect on resident return.

75% of all homeowners who reported their properties as ‘damaged but still livable’ had already returned
to them one month after the storm. Among renters, the same return rate was less than 25%....this lower
rate may reflect not only lower attachment to place among renters and boarders but also less power over
decisions about whether to re-enter and or re-develop damaged properties. (Elliott and Pais 2006: 309)

Thus, neighborhoods with a higher portion of renters might well be expected to experience

slower or less complete recoveries. Indeed, in the two and a half years since Katrina, landlords

flood-affected neighborhoods with high portions of rental properties, like the 7th Ward, have

been selling their rental properties to the state’s Louisiana Recovery Authority through The Road

Home program, and then re-investing those funds in properties elsewhere (Cynthia Hedge

Morrell, August 1, 2007).

Class and homeowner status also interact in their effects on resident return. The authors

found that income as an isolated variable was correlated with intention to return, with richer

residents slightly more likely to plan to return to the city than poorer residents (Elliott and Pais

15
2006: 316). Their most important finding, however, concerned the relationship between income

and intention to return among homeowners:

Generally speaking, we would expect these two indicators of class resources [home ownership and
income] to point in the same direction, but here they do not. Instead, they indicate that lower-income
homeowners are more likely to report plans to return to their pre-Katrina communities than higher-
income homeowners, both of whom are more likely to report plans to return than renters. (Elliott and Pais
2006: 315)

Wealthier homeowners are less likely to be tied to their properties with restrictive mortgages, the

authors point out, and also have greater access to the financial resources that facilitate a move.

Their finding suggests that both relatively wealthy and relatively poor flooded neighborhoods

might have a significantly more difficult time recovering from post-Katrina flooding than

working-class neighborhoods with high rates of home ownership.

Race-based variation in access to employment also has significant implications for

neighborhood recovery in New Orleans, given racial segregation in the city. The author’s

findings were stark. “[A]ll else equal, black workers from New Orleans were 3.8 times more

likely to report having lost their pre-Katrina jobs than white workers (Elliott and Pais 2006: 315).

Moreover, within the population of black workers, those with pre-storm incomes between

$10,000 and $20,000 per year were twice as likely to have lost their jobs after Katrina as workers

with annual incomes between $40,000 and $50,000. The authors conclude that “low income

blacks specifically – not blacks or low-income workers generally – have the most tenuous hold

on their jobs” (Elliott and Pais 2006: 310). Access to employment can be an immediate draw

back to the city, (Hank, July 19, 2007) and eventual access to employment is also critical to the

long-term process of rebuilding one’s home and restoring one’s life (Will, June 14, 2007). Thus,

neighborhoods with a high portion of poor, black residents could be expected to be significantly

hindered in their recoveries because of employment prospects for their residents.

16
 Finally, the authors’ findings about racial variation in long-term optimism amongst New

Orleans residents could well have implications for neighborhood recovery. The authors reported

that “race, not class, has a strong influence on post-disaster stress associated with Hurricane

Katrina, with blacks generally reporting higher stress levels than whites, all else equal” (Elliott

and Pais 2006: 312). Moreover, the authors found that the largest difference between whites and

blacks occurred when respondents were asked to rate their stress when looking five years into the

future, with blacks significantly less optimistic about the long-term future than whites (Elliott

and Pais 2006: 312). While significant research has not been performed on the subject, many

who have been following the New Orleans recovery believe that individual residents’ optimism –

whether grounded or groundless – plays an important role in their decisions to return to the city

(Virginia Saussy, June 18, 2007). Thus, significantly lower levels of optimism about the future

among black residents could well be a further strike against predominantly black neighborhoods

in their attempts to recover. In sum, Elliott and Pais’s findings suggest that race, class, and

homeowner status play a substantial role in individual-by-individual recovery.

The below list summarizes the “individual context” variables that the authors identify:

Individual Context Variable Authors

Institutional Strength / Available Public Services Rossi
Economic Resources Rossi, Haas
Overarching Political Culture Rossi
Pre-Disaster Economic and Development Trends Haas
Race Elliott
Class Elliott
Homeowner Status Elliott

Group Context Variables

Thus far, the studies I have considered focus upon variables that affect recovery on an

individual by individual basis. These variables affect community or citywide recovery when

they are aggregated over a population. They do not, however, directly account for the role that

17
collective efforts can play in spurring recovery. Another body of literature exists, however, that

does consider why such movements emerge and what makes them effective. These studies

suggest an array of variables that can affect the emergence and success of such collective

recovery efforts, and given my ultimate argument that divergent recovery outcomes in

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview are due to the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview and the failure of Gentilly’s effort, these studies and the variables they

propose are important for my consideration.5 The first, a study of community recovery efforts in

California, demonstrates that recovery can hinge on a community’s internal capacity to respond

to the disaster, and suggests that community-based disaster responses are uniquely suited to drive

recovery because of their flexibility and local knowledge. The second, a study of recovery

efforts in the wake of Japan’s Kobe earthquake and India’s Gujarat earthquake, suggests that a

community’s pre-existing social capital and leadership capacity can be critical to its ability to

mount an effective response to a disaster in the first place. The third, a study of the recovery of

the process of two flooded Midwestern towns, illustrates that recovery outcomes depend on the

process by which decisions are made about recovery. The fourth and final study, which

examines neighborhood-driven development in non-disaster settings, suggests that community-

driven development efforts succeed if they arise from resident preferences, have adequate human

and monetary resources, form diverse arrays of supportive partnerships, and exist in “creative

tension” with city government. Insights from these articles are important because they demand

that my own research methodology be able to test their applicability in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and

Lakeview. Indeed, I argue in Chapter Four that these factors do a great deal to explain these

neighborhoods’ divergent recovery outcomes.

5
As in the last section, I provide a chart at the end of this section identifying these variables and the authors who
propose them.

18
 A study of community-based responses to California’s 1994 Northridge earthquake in

the low-income Ventura County towns of Piru and Fillmore conducted by Bolin and Stanford

suggests that especially in low-income communities, recovery can depend on a community’s

ability to mount an organized and internally-driven response to the devastation (Bolin and

Stanford 1998). The towns were less immediately resilient in the earthquake’s wake than

surrounding communities not because they had sustained more physical damage, but rather

because their populations of poor recent immigrants were unable “to cope with the losses and

burdens imposed by the disaster” and recover on an individual level (Bolin and Stanford 1998:

23). Earthquake insurance, the authors point out, was limited to “a minority of primarily higher-

income homeowners” who lived in adjacent communities (Bolin and Stanford 1998:24). The

communities’ lack of initial resilience also stemmed from their high portions of recent Latino

immigrants who lacked “knowledge about federal bureaucracy and their own legal entitlements

[and] were reluctant to avail themselves to public resources to assist in their disaster-related

needs” (Bolin and Stanford 1998: 26). Thus, the poor immigrant populations of Fillmore and

Piru lacked the personal resources to recover, and were also unable to tap into well-established

recovery channels on an individual-by-individual level.

The authors report that innovative community-based recovery efforts were the means by

which these hurdles were overcome. Three local organizations, Affordable Communities in Piru,

along with Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation and Rebuild: Hand to Hand (also

known as Mano a Mano) in Fillmore, worked to foster recovery in the two towns. They secured

substantial federal relief funds to assist with ongoing homeowner repair efforts, as well as to

build new affordable housing units (Bolin and Stanford 1998: 30-31). These community-based

19
efforts, the authors report, helped to make up for the shortfall of relief that individuals in both

towns were receiving, and played an important role in fostering recovery in both towns:

The NGOs, by using local knowledge and expertise, and establishing progressive working relationships
with the city, county, and federal agencies, were able to implement programs that connected victims with
unmet needs to a diversity of resources. By targeting poorer households that were not adequately served
by standard FEMA / SBA disaster programs, they were able to promote timely recovery. (Bolin and
Stanford 1998: 34).

The authors further assert that the locally-based nature of these groups was critical to their

success:

These community-based programmes have generally used local knowledge and capabilities and been
more flexible and sensitive to local conditions than standard technocratic federal disaster-assistance
programmes are able to be. (Bolin and Stanford 1998: 22)

The cases of locally-driven redevelopment in Fillmore and Piru thus provide a precedent for the

potential of community-based disaster recovery efforts, showing that these efforts can utilize a

synergy of initiative, organization, and local knowledge to connect individuals with the resources

they need to recover.

The cases of Fillmore and Piru also suggest that local implementation capacity can be an

important variable the success of recovery efforts. For example, Bolin and Stanford report that

while the Mano a Mano organization “had important local contacts and legitimacy in the

community, its staff lacked the grant-writing skills of more experienced NGOs also working in

the area” (Bolin and Stanford 1998: 32). As a result, much of its work was eventually taken over

by a local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity. The authors also note that an 81-unit affordable

housing development planned by the Carbillo Community Development Corporation as part of a

recovery strategy for Fillmore’s Hispanic community was stalled by city council members who

cited concerns about the development’s “‘social impact’” (Bolin and Stanford 1998: 32).

Carbillo’s size and grassroots nature may well have limited its potential to see the project

through, as it lacked the clout and wherewithal to secure even local political approval. Thus, the

20
recovery experiences of Fillmore and Piru reveal both the potential and some of the possible

limits of community-based efforts to spur and foster recovery from a disaster. In subsequent

chapters, I argue that resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have in many ways

overcome such limitations. The cases of Fillmore and Piru demand that I provide a compelling

explanation of how Broadmoor and Lakeview cleared these hurdles.

Bolin and Stanford highlight local knowledge and local implementation capacity as

important contributors to the success of collective recovery efforts, but what other variables play

a role? In their study of community-based earthquake recovery in Kobe, Japan, and Gujarat

State in India, Nakagawa and Shaw conclude that social capital and leadership capacity were

important determinants in communities’ abilities to mount successful internally-driven recovery

efforts (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004). They define social capital as “a function of trust, social

norms, participation, and network[s]” within communities (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 5). They

first examine the recovery experience of the Mano neighborhood in Kobe after that city’s

devastating 1995 earthquake. Mano had not been designated by Kobe’s government as a

“readjustment and redevelopment” zone, so like neighborhoods today in New Orleans, a great

deal of homegrown initiative would be required for its recovery to be successful (Nakagawa and

Shaw 2004: 13). Unlike surrounding neighborhoods, Mano had a history of neighborhood

leadership and had developed a high degree of social capital as the authors define it. The

community’s first well-established leader arose in the 1960s and led the community in a drive to

curb pollution from surrounding factories, and by the time of the earthquake, a larger second

generation of leadership had taken his place (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 14). The neighborhood

also boasted an array of loosely-linked formal and informal organizations. Each block had its

own neighborhood association; women’s, middle age, and elderly social clubs met regularly;

21
neighborhood baseball teams competed against one another; a PTA kept close links between the

school and the neighborhood. All of these associations were themselves loosely connected

through the neighborhood’s Machizukuri (Town Development) organization (Nakagawa and

Shaw 2004: 14).

Mano experienced a highly successful recovery, and the authors assert that “the success

in Mano owes much to its people’s efforts, the web of community groups and local leadership”

(Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 14). During the neighborhood’s recovery, Mano residents

constructed a neighborhood organization center, founded a “Manokko (private limited

company)” for community development, prepared housing proposals for the construction of low-

income housing for displaced residents, lobbied for elderly housing, and ran a daycare center

(Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 13). The authors argue that the neighborhood’s “loosely connected

alliance” of residents’ groups “made it possible to plan and implement community development

projects or to conduct various activities quite flexibly and quickly, immediately after the

earthquake.” The neighborhood’s well-established leaders, they argue, also played a

fundamental role in crafting its comprehensive response to the quake (Nakagawa and Shaw

2004: 14).

The authors, after analyzing the social networks at play during Mano’s recovery,

identified three broad categories of social capital from which he neighborhood benefited. The

first, “bonding social capital,” held small communities and groups within the neighborhood

strongly together with bonds of trust and frequent contact. The second, “bridging social capital”,

held these tight communities loosely together to form the neighborhood, and also constituted the

bonds between the neighborhood and affiliated NGOs and universities. The third, “linking social

capital”, consisted of the “formal collaboration” between the neighborhood and government

22
entities (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 15-16). All of these forms of social capital, the authors

asserted, had contributed to Mano’s singular success.

In Gujarat, as in Kobe, the authors found that social capital and leadership played a

substantial role in spurring recovery outcomes. They compared the experiences of four separate

jatis6 in the city of Bhuj, which was at the epicenter of Gujarat’s major 2001 earthquake. Of

these jatis, the Soni community had the lowest annual per capita income, yet it enjoyed the most

successful recovery rate (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 19). Via written surveys and interviews,

the authors concluded that the Soni jati scored the highest in each of the three social capital

categories that had been identified in the Kobe case (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 22). Members

of the Soni jati also reported the higher trust in their community’s leader than did members of

the three other jatis in the study (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 23).

“As the Mano and Soni community cases show,” the authors conclude, “even in the

challenging situation of rehabilitation, communities with social capital can perform well.”

Moreover, they assert, “strong leadership inside the community is also essential for any

collective action” (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 23). Therefore, in assessing a community’s

ability to mount its own organized effort to recover from a disaster, both social capital and

leadership capacity are fundamental considerations.

The success of recovery efforts also depends upon the ways in which they are carried out.

In their study of a 1997 flood that devastated the towns of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East

Grand Forks, Minnesota, for example, Kweit and Kweit found that recovery outcomes depended

on the process by which decisions about recovery are made. The study compares citizen

satisfaction with recovery outcomes across the two towns, and concludes that residents of East

Grand Forks were significantly more satisfied with their town’s recovery than were residents of
6
A Jati is essentially a caste, which in a local context functions as extended social organization and support network.

23
Grand Forks (Kweit and Kweit 2004). The study attempts to explain this variation via a

regression analysis of citizen perceptions of the ways in which post-disaster decisions were made

by town government officials, and of their perceptions of the content of those decisions. The

authors explain that:

In East Grand Forks, elected city officials played the major role in policy making, assisted by a citizen
participation process facilitated by two local nonprofit foundations. In Grand Forks, three department
heads were designated as tri-chairs of the recovery process. Following bureaucratic norms of expertise,
regularized rules and procedures, and efficiency, the tri-chairs sought policy solutions primarily following
neutral, technical criteria. (Kweit and Kweit 2004: 355-356)

Even after controlling for residents’ satisfaction with the content of decisions made in the two

towns, the study finds a strong correlation between citizens’ evaluation of the success of

recovery and their perceptions of the openness of the process by which recovery decisions were

made (Kweit and Kweit 2004: 368). Thus, inclusive decision making can be an important

determinant of recovery outcomes in a disaster’s wake, and it is a factor for which I must

account.

Literature that addresses urban neighborhood-driven development in non-disaster

contexts can also help to explain the success or failure of post-disaster neighborhood

redevelopment efforts. Peterman’s four “Criteria for Doing Successful Neighborhood

Development,” which he synthesizes in his collection of case studies of Chicago neighborhood

development efforts, provide such valuable insights (Peterman 2000).

The first criterion is critical because it speaks to the resource dependent nature of New

Orleans recovery efforts, acknowledging both monetary and human resources to be vital. It

reads as follows:

1. Adequate and ongoing monetary resources as well as human technical resources must be
available and accessible not only to carry out individual development projects but also to sustain
a comprehensive program of neighborhood development or redevelopment. (Peterman 2000: 155)

24
If I am to successfully account for divergent recovery outcomes between Broadmoor, Gentilly,

and Lakeview by arguing that Broadmoor and Lakeview residents mounted more effective

recovery efforts than did Gentilly’s residents, I must therefore examine the roles that human and

monetary resources played in each neighborhood’s effort. As I show, although all three

neighborhoods’ efforts had the involvement of college educated and technically adept residents,

only Broadmoor and Lakeview managed to secure substantial funding for their initiatives.

Peterman’s second criterion asserts that the most successful community development

initiatives are generated by and strongly supported by residents.

2. Community development must be demand driven, arising from grassroots community organizing.
It cannot be legislated into existence by public officials, no matter how well intentioned.
(Peterman 2000: 155-156)

This principle is of vital importance for a number of reasons. Of course, an initiative that

neighborhood residents do not like or fully support is undesirable in and of itself. Moreover,

community input into a project’s goals will help to hone and target that project’s effects within

the neighborhood, because residents know their neighborhood better than anyone else. More

fundamental, as Peterman points out, is the issue of “community empowerment” (Peterman

2000: 156). If residents are actively engaged in the work of a neighborhood development

project, that involvement builds their collective capacity to see more positive change through in

the future. This is the proverbial difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to

fish. My research attempts to account for the importance of community development projects

being community-driven, and argues that resident involvement in the planning and

implementation of recovery initiatives was more central in Broadmoor and Lakeview than it was

in Gentilly.

Peterman also makes the important observation that neighborhood capacity to drive

development, while critical and often underutilized, is in itself insufficient:

25
 3. Community leaders must build and maintain strong and direct ties with public officials; technical,
legal, and financial experts; and other community organizations and umbrella coalitions of
organizations. (Peterman 2000: 155)

Peterman argues that residents should retain core control of their neighborhood’s development,

but that in order to be successful, they must develop a diverse network into which they can tap

for resources, expertise, and support. Taking this observation into account, my research shows

that Broadmoor and Lakeview developed a diverse array of partnerships that augmented

residents’ abilities to implement recovery themselves, whereas Gentilly’s partnerships did not

build residents’ implementation capacity.

Peterman’s final criterion argues that the relationship between neighborhoods and city

government that is most conducive to the success of neighborhood development efforts is

characterized by a degree of tension:

4. The relationships between the community and those governmental agencies that have interests in
and responsibilities with respect to the community must be neither too friendly nor too
confrontational. An atmosphere of ‘creative tension’ appears most appropriate. (Peterman 2000:
155)

This, according to Petersen, is because continued resident involvement and investment in

neighborhood development processes depends on residents not fully trusting their city, and not

expecting constructive work to get done without their continued involvement. Petersen cites an

example of a resident-led effort to enact full resident management of a Chicago Housing

Authority (CHA) development. The residents succeeded in their quest, having been forced to

cohere as an effective group and deepen their commitment in the face of a disorganized and

uncooperative CHA bureaucracy (Peterman 2000: 121-122). Resident management was going

well, until a new chairman arrived at CHA who was so enthusiastic about the residents’ work

that he invited them to work more closely with the Authority:

As the resident leaders began to rely more on the friendly officials at the CHA…[o]ne by one, their links
to the external community were severed, and they came to be seen more as an arm of the CHA than an
independent corporation. Over time, the resident management effort stalled and ultimately failed.
(Peterman 2000: 156)

26
The creative tension Petersen describes is an important and not immediately obvious

consideration when evaluating the causes of the success or failure of neighborhood-driven

recovery efforts in New Orleans. As I argue in subsequent chapters, the success of efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview was predicated upon residents’ low expectations for and distrust of

city government, whereas part of the failure of Gentilly’s effort stemmed from its trust of and

over reliance on various governmental entities.

To summarize the variables that authors propose affect the emergence and effectiveness

of collectively-driven recovery efforts, I present the below chart:

Group Context Variable: Authors

Recovery efforts draw on local knowledge Bolin, Peterman
Residents control recovery planning and implementation Bolin, Kweit, Peterman
Efforts develop sound implementation capacity Bolin
Affected community has established leadership Nakagawa
Affected community has high internal social capital Nakagawa
Efforts utilize outside ties and resources Nakagawa, Peterman
Efforts maintain "creative tension" with government Peterman

***

My overarching goal in this thesis is to account for a difference in outcome between

neighborhoods: explaining why Broadmoor and Lakeview are recovering consistently while

Gentilly is not. Thus far, I have presented a number of studies that present potential explanations

for this difference in outcome. These, as we have seen, range from factors that enable or inhibit

recovery on an individual-by-individual basis, such as the demographics of the affected

population and level of destruction suffered, to variables that determine the success or failure of

the concerted recovery efforts mounted in the disaster’s wake, such as the pre-existing leadership

capacity on which they are based or their success at forming constructive outside partnerships.

My thesis must account for this range of variables in its explanation of the divergent recovery

outcomes in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview.

27
II. Methodology

In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that my chosen methodology – a comparative analysis of

the recovery experiences of Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview based on interviews, participant

observation, repopulation data, and demographic information – provides the best means by

which to isolate the causes of the difference between Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s consistent

recoveries on the one hand and Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery on the other. I also argue that

my choice to compare Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview is itself optimal, because while the

neighborhoods are fundamentally similar enough to warrant comparison, the differences between

them allow for a great number of variables that potentially explain their divergent recovery

outcomes to be tested.

Comparative Analysis of Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview

My thesis utilizes a qualitative comparative research methodology, which provides the best

research framework for explaining this difference between cases. As Ragin explains,

“comparative researchers examine patterns of similarities and differences across cases and try to

come to terms with their diversity” (Ragin 1994: 107). After developing in-depth and

multifaceted qualitative understandings of each of the cases in question, comparative researchers

use rigorous logical analysis to pinpoint potential causes of differences in outcome between the

cases. Scholars of revolutions, such as Theda Skocpol (Skocpol 1979) and Timothy Wickham-

Crowly (Wickham-Crowley 1992), have used comparative methodology to provide convincing

explanations of why certain revolutionary movements succeed and others fail. Their

methodology allows for accounts that are qualitatively rich and multifaceted but also rigorous,

logical and convincing, striking what Ragin calls the “balance between discourse on cases and

discourse on variables” that characterizes “good comparative social science” (Ragin 1991: 1).

28
 Comparative methodology is particularly suited to the study of neighborhood recovery

outcomes in New Orleans because it allows for this balance. A qualitative study that sought only

to capture the lived experience of resident return in New Orleans could shed a great deal of light

on the processes by which residents have organized around their neighborhoods in the storm’s

wake. However, this exposition alone would provide a relatively weak basis upon which to

explain divergent rates of neighborhood recovery. Conversely, a well conceived and executed

statistical study of the causes of neighborhood residential recovery could well isolate variables

that have statistically significant correlations with rates of resident return across neighborhoods.

However, if it found a particular resident organizing variable to be statistically significant, it

alone could do little to flesh out how and why residents successfully organized to produce this

outcome. Comparative methodology, by contrast, allows for sound qualitative analysis of each

neighborhood’s recovery experience and also for logical explanatory analysis to account for why

certain neighborhoods in New Orleans are experiencing more consistent residential recoveries

than others.

An explanation of my choice of Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview as units of

comparison sheds light about the logical systems of analysis that comparative methodology

employs. While the comparative method aims to explain differences between cases – for

example why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing consistent residential recoveries but

Gentilly is not – its cases must be similar enough to warrant the comparison between them

(Ragin 1994: 105-107). Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview are indeed sufficiently alike to

deserve comparison. All three are primarily residential neighborhoods comprised of single

family homes and duplexes (or “doubles” as they are known in New Orleans). All three were

badly flooded in the wake of Katrina, with their housing stocks so damaged that the vast majority

29
(>80%) of residents were displaced from their homes for at least six months as they undertook

repairs.7 In all three neighborhoods, the majority of residents owned their houses, meaning that

most residents had direct control over whether to rebuild houses and return. Discourse took

place after the storm among residents, planners, politicians, and the media about whether any of

these three neighborhoods should be rebuilt.8 Thus, Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview

residents all faced great uncertainty about their neighborhoods’ futures, and recovery in each of

the neighborhoods would require that this uncertainty be overcome on an individual-by-

individual basis as residents decided to return. Finally, each neighborhood saw the emergence of

an organized recovery effort by its residents. It is on the basis of these fundamental similarities,

summarized by the chart below, that I undertake this comparative study of the recoveries of

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview.

Variable Broadmoor Gentilly Lakeview

Primarily residential Yes Yes Yes
Over 50% of households resident-owned Yes Yes Yes
Housing: single family homes and duplexes Yes Yes Yes
Badly flooded Yes Yes Yes
Most residents experience 6+ month
displacement Yes Yes Yes
Discourse questions neighborhood return Yes Yes Yes
Resident-driven recovery efforts present Yes Yes Yes

Comparative studies use simple Boolean logic to hone in on potential explanations for the

difference between their cases.9 Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview are ideally suited to a

comparative analysis, as they differ in many ways that literature suggests should affect their rates

7
Figures on early rates of resident return for the three neighborhoods are not available, but by most accounts, the
total returned population in all three neighborhoods was still in the high single digits or very low teens in February
of 2006 (Virginia Saussy, June 18, 2007; Jack Stenson, July 9, 2007; Jennifer Campbell, July 18, 2007).
8
For example, although it was never acted upon, the Bring New Orleans Back commission plan designated
Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview as “Neighborhood Planning Areas”, recommending a four month moratorium
on building permits in the neighborhoods until a firm decision had been reached about whether or not to rebuild
them. BNOB, U. P. C.-. (2006). Urban Planning Committee: Action Plan for New Orleans Executive Summary.
9
John Stewart Mill coined the terms “method of agreement” and “method of difference” to describe the process.
For more on Mill’s method of similarity and Mill’s method of difference, see Little Little, D. (1991). Varieties of
social explanation : an introduction to the philosophy of social science. Boulder, Westview Press..

30
of recovery. For example, Lakeview is a predominantly middle- to upper-middle class

neighborhood, whereas Gentilly and Broadmoor residents are on average less well off.

Likewise, Broadmoor and Gentilly have substantial African American populations, while

Lakeview is primarily white. Broadmoor and Lakeview had established residents associations

prior to Katrina, whereas Gentilly did not.10 These and many other differences between the

neighborhoods are further explored in Chapter 2, but it is important to note for now that these

differences allow for logical inferences to be drawn about the causes of recovery outcomes in the

three neighborhoods. For example, although we have seen that both Haas et al and Elliott and

Pais stress the importance of individual access to financial resources in recovery, the fact that

both Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing consistent residential recoveries in spite of their

widely divergent average incomes suggests that average resident income provides an insufficient

explanation for consistent residential recovery. Similarly, neither neighborhood racial makeup

nor the percentage of residents living in poverty explains differences between the

neighborhoods’ residential recovery outcomes. Conversely, the fact that both Broadmoor and

Lakeview had residents’ associations before the storm, but Gentilly did not, could help to

account for Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s relative recovery success.

Variable Broadmoor Gentilly Lakeview

Dependent Variable:
Residential recovery Consistent Inconsistent Consistent
Independent Variables:
*
Average Income $36,400 $46,000 $64,000
% in Poverty* 32% 15% 6.60%
% African American* 68% 68% 1.30%
Residents’ association existed before the storm Yes No Yes

10
Some individual neighborhoods within Gentilly were served by residents’ associations prior to the storm, but no
organization served the area as a whole before the founding of the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association after the
storm.
*
GNOCDC (2008). Pre-Katrina Data.

31
 On its own, Boolean analysis of this type is most effective at dismissing potential causes

of the difference in question. It can also be used, as I just did in the case of the presence or

absence of residents’ associations, to suggest possible explanations for the difference. Of course,

once an explanation is suggested, qualitative follow-up is required in order to determine whether

it bears fruit. For example, any conclusion that the preexistence of residents’ associations in

Broadmoor and Lakeview contributed to their consistent recoveries would need to be based on

in-depth qualitative analysis of what these residents’ associations actually did before and after

the storm. Thus, Boolean logic can eliminate some explanations and suggest others, but it is

certainly a limited tool.

Nonetheless, the role of Boolean analysis in this thesis is not constrained to simply

eliminating possible explanations of Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s consistent housing recoveries.

It is also be used to hone in on an explanation of how and why resident-driven recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview have maintained high levels of resident engagement and implemented

a substantial number of successful recovery initiatives while Gentilly’s has not. Indeed, it is

notable that all three of the neighborhoods I have chosen to compare have concerted resident-

driven recovery efforts present, because on a basic level, Boolean logic would suggest that the

best way to test the effect of resident-driven efforts on recovery would be to compare

neighborhoods where efforts were underway and neighborhoods where no efforts were present.

However, given constraints of research time and writing scope, it was much more fruitful and

useful to compare two neighborhoods with successful resident-driven efforts and one

neighborhood with an unsuccessful effort. The most relevant information for disaster-stricken

communities is not only whether resident-driven efforts can have tangible effects upon recovery,

but also how and why these efforts succeed, and this information is most effectively gathered by

32
comparing successful efforts and failed efforts. The comparison of two successful efforts helps

to identify their core unifying components, and the comparison of these two efforts to Gentilly’s

unsuccessful effort helps to pinpoint potential pitfalls that future efforts would be well advised to

avoid.

Interview and Participant Observation-Based Research

A combination of interviews, primary source reading, and participant observation

comprised the bulk of the research performed for this thesis, and these techniques proved to be

ideally suited to the task at hand. Efforts within the three neighborhoods are still ongoing, and

with the exception of one report on Broadmoor’s planning process (Hummel 2007), these efforts

have not been extensively documented. Thus, the best way for me to learn about these efforts

was to immerse myself in them.

Before I arrived in New Orleans, I contacted the president of each neighborhood’s

residents’ association and gained each individual’s approval to conduct the research. These

individuals were among the first people I interviewed in each neighborhood, and their contacts

(along with the legitimacy they lent me) allowed me to effectively “snowball” out into the

neighborhoods. I also placed an advertisement explaining my research in The Trumpet, a local

recovery-centered newspaper, which generated a substantial number of resident interviews. This

ensured that not all of my subjects were closely tied to the social networks of the recovery

organizations. Many of the residents I interviewed had not moved back into their homes and

were internally displaced within greater New Orleans. Through residents I met and through the

advertisement I placed in the Trumpet, I also secured interviews with residents who no longer

lived in New Orleans, whether by necessity or by choice. I performed fifty-six interviews in

33
total: eighteen with Broadmoor residents, seventeen with Lakeview residents, and twenty two

with Gentilly residents.

I also sought, whenever possible, to take active part in the daily work of recovery. I

distributed fliers door-to-door, signed up children for a charter school, attended fundraising

sessions with Fortune 500 executives, moved doors and drywall, helped residents with their

Road Home applications, and sat in on as many neighborhood meetings as I could. This

participant observation gave me firsthand insight into the daily realities and challenges of

recovery, and gave me key insights that mere interviews would not have provided. Sitting in on

neighborhood meetings, for example, gave me a window on group dynamics and organizational

effectiveness that I could not have gained through one-on-one interviews.

Additionally, I consulted a variety of primary written sources from the three

neighborhoods. The most fruitful of these were recovery plans created residents of each of the

neighborhoods, as well as the Gentilly After Katrina listserv, a Yahoo email list started by

Gentilly residents after the storm. The plans provided valuable insights into each community’s

ultimate redevelopment goals, and also into the strategies by which each planned to attain these

goals. Membership on the Gentilly After Katrina listserv gave me access to all of the list’s

archived emails, which provided valuable information about Gentilly’s gradual mobilization

after the storm.

***

In sum, literature on disaster recovery suggests a variety of variables that could explain the

different rates of recovery between Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview. My comparative

methodology and on-the-ground research allow me to test a number of these variables, and also

to explore the root causes of the neighborhoods’ divergent recoveries in-depth.

34
 Chapter 2: Neighborhood Comparison
In the last chapter, I highlighted a number of variables that affect recovery according to

disaster and community development literature. In this chapter, I examine the roles that a

number of these variables are playing in the recoveries of Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, in

an attempt to isolate a variable that explains their divergent recovery outcomes. Through this

analysis, I argue that structural factors, such as the degree of damage each neighborhood

suffered, residents’ average pre-storm incomes, and neighborhood racial makeup, provide an

insufficient explanation of why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing steady residential

recoveries but Gentilly is not. I use my analysis to argue that this difference could instead be

explained by the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview at

maintaining high levels of resident involvement and implementing an array of recovery

initiatives, versus the failure of Gentilly’s effort to do the same things. I substantiate this

argument in the subsequent chapter.

First, though, in order to provide a basis for my analysis and arguments, I introduce each

neighborhood, and show that Broadmoor and Lakeview have experienced spatially and

temporally consistent recoveries in Katrina’s wake, while Gentilly’s has been inconsistent.

I. Introducing Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview

The three neighborhoods I examine in this thesis are primarily residential, comprised

mainly of single family homes and duplexes, or “doubles” as they’re widely known within the

city. Gentilly and Lakeview also have areas of commercial development that are struggling to

return in the storm’s wake, but these comprise a small fraction of the neighborhoods’ built

environments. As a result, the most fundamental aspect of “recovery” in each of these

35
neighborhoods is the return of residents and the repair of homes. The recovery process in

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview occurs one household at a time, and this fundamental

similarity11 allows for a direct comparison of their respective recovery efforts.

Broadmoor

Broadmoor is located in a shallow topographical “bowl” in the center of the city,

surrounded by the affluent “Uptown” neighborhoods of Audubon and Maryville / Fountainbleau

to its west and southwest, a smattering of poorer neighborhoods adjoining “Central City” to its

east and southeast, and an area of light industry to its north. It is itself a product of the

confluence of these neighborhoods, and as a result is quite diverse. It had 7,232 residents at the

time of the 2000 census, and its racial demographics very closely matched those of the city as a

whole (GNOCDC). The neighborhood is trisected by three roads, Napoleon Avenue,

Fountainbleau Drive, and Broad Street, which divide Broadmoor into three geographically and

demographically distinct segments. In the wake of Katrina, these areas have been designated

“Subsection A”, “Subsection B”, and “Subsection C” by the Broadmoor Improvement

Association. Subsection C adjoins the more affluent “Uptown” neighborhoods that surround

Tulane University, and it is the most affluent and most predominantly white of the subsections.

Subsection B, by contrast, is primarily African American, and many of its residents are quite

poor. Subsection “A” lies between the two on the demographics scale. The below map shows

Broadmoor and its three subsections:

11
Along with the other similarities outlined in the previous chapter’s methodology section.

36
 Before the storm, Broadmoor was served by a small but active residents’ association

known as the Broadmoor Improvement Association, or BIA. In the decade before the storm,

BIA leadership successfully advocated for new streetlights for the neighborhood, lobbied the

Corps of Engineers to undertake a multi-million dollar drainage project to help reduce flooding

in the neighborhood during rainstorms, and prevented the opening of a convenience store that

residents found undesirable (Bert Milton, June 13, 2007). Despite this activity, most residents

were not involved with the BIA prior to the storm.

Gentilly

Gentilly is a large and diverse area of New Orleans bordering Lake Pontchartrain. To

call it a “neighborhood” is slightly misleading, as it consists of twenty-one individual

neighborhoods with relatively distinct borders and demographics. The below map shows the

boarders of each of Gentilly’s neighborhoods:

37
Gentilly’s pre-Katrina population, as of the 2000 census, was 43,863 residents (GNOCDC

2008).12 Gentilly was racially and socioeconomically diverse prior to the storm. Though most

of its individual neighborhoods reflected this diversity prior to Katrina, some, such as the Lake

Oaks neighborhood, were substantially wealthier than average. Others, such as the historically

black Pontchartrain Park neighborhood, were substantially more racially homogenous.

Generally, Gentilly was known as the home of the working middle class backbone of the city.

One resident explained that “We have a lot of university professors and high school teachers

living in Gentilly. We had a very healthy amount of first responders. Nurses. Professionals like

that” (Simon Wright, June 23, 2007).

Although the bulk of Gentilly consists of residential neighborhoods, it is also a home to

large commercial areas, most notably a development at the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard

and Elysian Fields Avenue, along with strip shopping and a small mall at the eastern edge of

Gentilly along the Chef Menteur Highway. Gentilly is also home to four universities: The

12
The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center website splits Gentilly into eight smaller subsections, and does
not present aggregate data for Gentilly as a whole. As a result, I have manually aggregated the Gentilly-wide data I
present in this thesis.

38
University of New Orleans, Southern University of New Orleans, Dillard University, and a

Baptist theological seminary.

Several neighborhoods within Gentilly had residents’ associations prior to the storm. The

largest and most active of these was the “Pontilly” organization, which served the Pontchartrain

Park and Gentilly Woods neighborhoods (Adrian James, July 26, 2007). Gentilly as a whole,

however, did not have an overarching residents’ association.

Lakeview

Lakeview is an almost entirely residential neighborhood that lies in between the Orleans

Avenue Canal and the 17th Street Canal. As one resident told me, “Lakeview was the last bastion

of white middle class in the City of New Orleans” (Harry Stevenson, June 29, 2007). Though

large, with a population of 17,507 at the time of the 2000 census (GNOCDC 2008),13 the

neighborhood was quite tight knit. Many residents with whom I spoke credited neighborhood

institutions, such as the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association, St. Dominic’s Catholic

Church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and the grocery store, Lakeview Fine Foods, with

cementing a sense of common neighborhood identity prior to the storm. On Lakeview’s sense of

community, one woman remarked: “It’s almost to the point where, you know the Andy Griffith

show, with Mayberry USA? You walk down the street, everybody waved, everybody was

friendly, it was nice. You might not know everybody by name, but you know their face” (Sarah

Farmer, July 2, 2007). The below map shows Lakeview’s borders:

13
The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center splits the area that residents know as “Lakeview” into three
separate areas: West End, Lakeview, and Navarre. These are the three areas served by the Lakeview Civic
Improvement Association. Consequently, I have manually aggregated data from these three neighborhoods to arrive
at composite figures for “Lakeview,” as residents and the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association define it.

39
 Lakeview bred a degree of loyalty amongst its residents that outsiders often found

surprising. Real Estate agents working in the neighborhood joked with potential buyers that if

“you buy in Lakeview, you die in Lakeview” (Jennifer Campbell, July 18, 2007). Children who

had grown up in the neighborhood moved back in droves. Several residents reported instances of

three generations of a family living in close proximity to one another in Lakeview, and one man

bragged “I’ve got four generations within a two block area of my house” (Phillip, July 13, 2007).

Lakeview was served by a large, well organized, and very active residents’ association

prior to Katrina known as the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association, or LCIA. The LCIA

served in many ways as a small town government, striving to maintain suburban living standards

within Lakeview’s borders. In an agreement with the state of Louisiana, it arranged for extra

taxes to be levied on Lakeview residents to support a supplementary police force for the

neighborhood. Dissatisfied with city services, it also investigated the possibility of creating

“quasi-governmental agencies to take care of streets, drainage, [and] water” for the neighborhood

(Jennifer, July 18, 2008). During the 1980s, it even led an unsuccessful attempt to secede from

Orleans Parish and incorporate itself as its own city.

40
Katrina’s Effects

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview were all badly affected by the substantial flooding

that followed Hurricane Katrina. The map below shows the depth of water that affected each

neighborhood. Much of Broadmoor was submerged in eight or more feet of water, and

substantial portions of Lakeview and Gentilly were under ten feet of water or more. The

stagnant and often toxic water remained in the city for weeks, rendering most houses in the

neighborhoods uninhabitable.

Some houses, especially those that were close to levee breaches in Lakeview and Gentilly and

had been exposed to the tremendous forces of fast-flowing water, were structurally unsound and

had to be demolished. Most others remained structurally intact, but needed to be “gutted” –

cleared of destroyed contents, muddy carpet, moldy drywall, compromised electrical systems,

ruined appliances etc. – and then have their studs treated with chlorine or other chemical

cocktails to rid them of mold. Moreover, as FEMA administered federal flood insurance raised

its base flood elevations, many homeowners realized that they would need to elevate their homes

in order to afford flood insurance in the future. In all, this meant that most homeowners in all

41
three neighborhoods had a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars of repairs that they would

need to complete on their houses before being able to return to them.

To make matters worse, residents would be returning to neighborhoods which had

disastrously flooded – an expensive proposition if they planned to raise their houses above

Katrina’s high water mark, and a risky proposition if they didn’t. Perhaps more menacing than

the threat of floodwaters was the threat of abandonment. Homeowners who moved back to still

empty blocks faced the very real threat that their neighbors would never return.

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, with their thousands of homes rendered

uninhabitable by the storm and their populations almost14 entirely displaced, faced a massive

collective action problem as they entered the fall of 2005. Although some residents were

steadfastly determined to return to their homes as quickly as possible, many lacked the material

means to do so, or wanted a degree of assuredness that their neighborhoods would indeed

recover. The inability or unwillingness of residents to return to their homes was (and remains)

the primary hurdle to full recovery in each neighborhood.

II. Divergent Recovery Outcomes

Since Katrina, the rates of repopulation and house rebuilding in Broadmoor and

Lakeview have been both spatially and temporally consistent. Residents have been steadily

coming back to and rebuilding throughout both neighborhoods. In Gentilly, by contrast,

rebuilding in many areas has been slow or stagnant. In this section, I elaborate on these

differences and explain how they were measured. By establishing that Gentilly’s recovery has

been less consistent than recovery in Broadmoor and Lakeview, I lay the groundwork in this

14
“Almost” is a necessary qualifier because at least one couple in Broadmoor remained in the neighborhood through
both the storm and the flooding. The second story of their raised basement house did not flood. They hid from
National Guard patrol boats, and spent their time canoeing around the neighborhood to rescue their neighbors’ pets.

42
section for my subsequent discussion of why this is the case. In the subsequent section, I argue

that the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview and their relative

failure in Gentilly best explains the neighborhoods’ divergent recoveries.

Data about housing recovery and repopulation in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakevew

comes from house-by-house surveys performed in all three neighborhoods by separate groups of

residents and volunteers. Three surveys each were performed in Broadmoor and Lakeview, and

one comprehensive survey was performed in Gentilly. The survey efforts have been unique to

each neighborhood, and have employed categories of measurement and methodologies that make

them incompatible with one another for direct comparison.15 Each survey, however, gives a

sense of its neighborhood’s recovery progress over time, which actually allows for more

important and revealing comparisons between the neighborhoods’ recoveries than would a

simple point-in-time, head-to-head comparison.

Overall, the surveys show that substantial rebuilding and repopulation progress is being

made in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview. However, their results indicate that only

Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing steady progress everywhere within their borders,

whereas many areas within Gentilly are experiencing slow or stagnant recoveries.

Broadmoor’s three surveys reveal that steady and surprisingly swift rebuilding progress is

being made in the neighborhood. In July of 2006, only 34% of properties in the Broadmoor had

15
Three surveys of Broadmoor have been conducted by volunteers from Bard College. The surveys separately
measured housing repair (whether houses were untouched, gutted, under active repair, or demolished) and
repopulation on a household level (whether or not dwellings had residents living in them, or whether residents were
living in trailers on their properties). Similarly, three complete surveys have been performed in Lakeview, and these
surveys have also tracked both repopulation and home reconstruction. Lakeview’s surveys were conducted entirely
by residents. There has only been one comprehensive survey of Gentilly, which was performed in March of 2007 by
a team lead by an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Unlike the surveys
conducted in Broadmoor and Lakeview, it grouped houses that had merely been gutted and houses under active
repair into a single category. Some observers objected to this methodology, because many houses were gutted by
volunteer groups even though their owners had no intention to return. As a result of the survey’s methodology, it is
difficult to ascertain the number of houses under active repair in Gentilly.

43
repairs either underway or complete. By January of 2007, that number had jumped to 51%, and,

and by August of 2007 it stood at 68%, (Ahlers 2007).

July January August

[Pre-Katrina] '06 '07 '07
# buildings with repairs underway or complete 2305 783 1164 1560
% buildings with repairs underway or complete 100% 34% 51% 68%

The neighborhood’s quick recovery clip has left many residents surprised. Broadmoor resident

Kathleen Patterson remembers expecting that Broadmoor’s recovery would be slow, and reports

that she has been surprised by the neighborhood’s progress. ““I thought [it would take] a long,

long time. Years. Nothing like this. Nothing this fast,” she said (July 23, 2007).

In addition to being consistent over time, rebuilding in Broadmoor is occurring in all

parts of the neighborhood. Steady progress is being made on almost every block, with the

neighborhood’s more affluent Subsection C experiencing the fastest recovery. This spatial

consistency, as I will show, puts Broadmoor’s recovery in stark contrast with that of Gentilly.

The below set of maps chart housing repair progress in Broadmoor on a block-by-block basis,

and illustrates this consistency.

44
 Similarly, Broadmoor’s population has been steadily climbing towards pre-Katrina

levels. As the below chart shows, many residents are moving back into their houses, more are

living in trailers on their properties as they complete rebuilding, and more are living elsewhere in

New Orleans but returning regularly to their properties to maintain them and continue repair

work.

Broadmoor Repopulation:16

[Pre-Katrina] July '06 January '07 August '07

17
% buildings inhabited < 100% 15% 25% 40%
% lots with occupied trailers n/a 13% 12% 8%
% lots w/ residents in area n/a 7% 6% 16%
TOTAL < 100% 35% 43% 64%

By August of 2007, 64% of Broadmoor’s households had at least one resident regularly in the

neighborhood, and most of these people were back living in the Broadmoor full time.

Broadmoor’s repopulation to date has thus been steady and successful.

A smaller percentage of Lakeview residents have renovated their homes and returned to

the neighborhood than in Broadmoor, but rebuilding and repopulation in Lakeview is taking

place at steady rates throughout the neighborhood. As I discuss in this chapter’s next section,

Lakeview sustained the most consistently severe damage of the three neighborhoods, and its

steady and relatively high rates of recovery are thus impressive. Rebuilding and repopulation

data for the neighborhood as a whole is presented below:18

[Pre-Katrina] September ‘06 April ‘07 July ‘07

# buildings occupied 6997 374 1190 1565
% buildings occupied 100% 5.3% 17.0% 22.4%

# buildings under repair n/a 1371 1675 1702

% buildings under repair n/a 19.6% 23.9% 24.3%

16
GNOCDC (2008). Pre-Katrina Data.
17
There was some blight in Broadmoor prior to Katrina, hence fewer than 100% of buildings were occupied before
the storm
18
GNOCDC (2008). Pre-Katrina Data.

45
 # occupied trailers n/a 695 408 372
% occupied tailers n/a 9.9% 5.8% 5.3%

As I will further discuss, Lakeview’s initially low rate of home occupancy – only 5.3% more

than a year after the storm in September of 2006 – reflects the consistently severe damage the

neighborhood suffered. However, as the chart shows, Lakeview has made steady rebuilding and

repopulation progress since that time. Less than a year after the initial survey, nearly half of

Lakeview’s homes were either occupied or under active renovation.

Lakeview’s recovery has also been steady in all parts of the neighborhood, including its

most devastated northern reaches.19 In the survey area closest to Lakeview’s levee breach,20

which received the deepest flooding in the neighborhood, 44% of properties were either

reoccupied or under repair in July of 2007 – not far off the mark of approximately 47% achieved

within the neighborhood as a whole.21 The steadiness of Lakeview’s recovery, both

geographically and over time, is remarkable when compared to that of Gentilly.

While some neighborhoods within Gentilly are making impressive recovery progress,

others have seen their recoveries largely stalled. As of March of 2007, the percentage of

renovated or occupied houses within several entire neighborhoods of Gentilly hovered around

10%, and many other neighborhoods had rates that were only marginally higher. Unlike in

Broadmoor and Lakeview, where even the most severely damaged areas are mounting steady

recoveries, rebuilding and repopulation in many of the worst flooded areas of Gentilly is slow or

stagnant.
19
As I will further discuss in the subsequent section, the northern part of Lakeview flooded most deeply, with some
areas receiving up to 14’ of floodwater. It also had newer and less-flood resistant housing. Moreover, Lakeview’s
levee breach occurred in the north of the neighborhood. This exposed a number of homes to forceful floodwaters,
leaving many structurally unsound.
20
For the purposes of data collection, Lakeview was broken into eight survey areas. The survey area to which I
refer is defined by four roads: Robert E. Lee Boulevard in the north, West End Boulevard in the east, Veterans
Boulevard in the south, and Bellaire Drive in the west.
21
July Survey

46
 Gentilly’s relatively high overall rate of rebuilding and repopulation belies the

inconsistency of its recovery. The neighborhood’s only comprehensive survey, performed in

March of 2007, found that fully 31% of Gentilly’s properties were either renovated or occupied,

and these results were rightly heralded at the time as a surprising sign of progress (Warner 2007).

However, as I further discuss in the next section, much of Gentilly’s rebuilding and repopulation

is taking place on land that received between zero and four feet of floodwater. Unlike

Broadmoor and Lakeview, portions of Gentilly did not flood at all, including land along the

shore of Lake Pontchartrain and land along what is known as Gentilly Ridge. Some of Gentilly’s

densest neighborhoods straddle this ridge, which rises three feet above sea level and gradually

slopes downward over several tenths of a mile in either direction (Campanella 2006: 55).

Individual rebuilding and repopulation data is not available for all of these neighborhoods, but

what data does exist unsurprisingly shows very high rates of recovery. For example, portions of

the large Gentilly Terrace neighborhood are perched on Gentilly Ridge, and consequently 53%

of homes in Gentilly Terrace were renovated or occupied in March of 2007 (Jett 2007: 2).

Similarly, homes along Gentilly’s elevated lakefront escaped serious flooding. Fully 87% of

houses in the Lake Oaks and Lake Terrace neighborhoods were renovated or occupied at the

time of the survey (Jett 2007: 2). Such pockets of rebuilding on dry or lightly-flooded land have

buoyed Gentilly’s aggregate recovery numbers.

Unfortunately, the situation in Gentilly neighborhoods that received substantial

floodwaters is much more dire. In the year and a half between Hurricane Katrina and the

administration of the survey, recovery in many of these neighborhoods was slow. The large

Pontilly area, which contains 2,332 addresses and is nearly identical in size to Broadmoor, had

only 16% of its structures renovated or occupied at the time of the survey (Jett 2007: 2). While

47
this rate of recovery was similar to Lakeview’s at this time, Pontilly was less damaged than

Lakeview,22 and its rate of recovery is surprisingly slow in light of this fact. Recovery in other

flooded Gentilly neighborhoods was even more moribund. In Seabrook Place, a large

neighborhood of approximately 1100 properties, only 13% of homes were renovated or occupied

(Dartmouth 2007).23 In Mirabeau Gardens, a neighborhood of more than 440 homes, only 11%

of properties were either renovated or occupied (Dartmouth 2007).24

Moreover, although follow-up survey data is not available for most Gentilly

neighborhoods, residents generally agree that recovery in Gentilly’s badly flooded areas will

continue to be slow. In recounting her decision to move back to a still largely-deserted

neighborhood, a Mirabeau Gardens resident named Nora anticipated that she would remain a

“pioneer” in her neighborhood for “at least five years if not five to ten.” Recovery in Mirabeau

Gardens is “a very slow issue”, she said (July 17, 2007). A resident of Vista Park, a badly-

flooded neighborhood of nearly 400 homes just to the north of Mirabeau Gardens, echoed these

sentiments. Active home renovation in Vista Park is slow, she said, with not much more than a

dozen families in the neighborhood currently working on their properties (Monica, February 19,

2008) Another Gentilly resident, speculating about the future of the flooded Seabrook Place

neighborhood, said “that’s going to be a dead spot for a while” (Mike, July 24, 2007). Thus, it

seems that recovery in Gentilly’s flooded neighborhoods will continue to be slow or stagnant.
22
26% of Lakeview’s homes had been demolished at this point Lakeview (2007). "Lakeview Survey Data - April
Survey.", versus only 9% of Pontilly’s homes Jett, Q. (2007). New Orleans Rebuilds, Tuck School of Business at
Darmouth.. Moreover, the southern portions of Pontilly abutted the Gentilly Ridge, and sustained lower floodwaters
as a result.
23
The report released after the completion of the March 2007 survey did not include individual data for every
neighborhood. However, the data was presented visually through an online mapping tool, which shows rebuilding
status on a house-by-house basis with colored dots. Once I determined the neighborhood’s borders – in this case
Fillmore Avenue, People’s Avenue, Leon C. Simon Boulevard, and St. Roch Avenue – my methodology was simply
to count colored dots and divide appropriately.
24
I utilize neighborhood borders as defined by Duany, Plater, Zyberk & Company, an urban planning firm that
produced a plan for Gentilly. The borders are Fillmore Avenue, the London Avenue Canal, Virgil Boulevard, and
Paris Avenue (Duany, A. (2007). District Six Charrette Report, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.. These borders
are more expansive than those used by the Mirabeau Gardens Residents’ Association (Nora Edison, July 17, 2007).

48
III. Explaining Divergent Recovery Outcomes

Why is it that Broadmoor and Lakeview are recovering steadily, but Gentilly is not? In

this section, I analyze a number of variables that could explain this difference, and argue that

variables that affect recovery on an individual basis - such as the degree of damage residents

suffered or resident demographics – provide insufficient explanation for the difference between

Gentilly’s spotty recovery and the steady and consistent recoveries mounted by Broadmoor and

Lakeview. Instead, I use comparative logic to argue that this difference is best explained by the

success of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview. I then fully substantiate

this argument in the next chapter, which qualitatively assesses the effects that resident-driven

recovery efforts in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview are having on each neighborhood’s rate

of rebuilding and repopulation.

In the previous chapter, I utilized disaster recovery literature and neighborhood

development literature to identify a number of variables that could explain the divergent

recovery outcomes between Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview. The below chart measures and

compares a number of these variables for Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Gentilly, and also identifies

several other variables specific to these neighborhoods’ particular recovery circumstances:

Variable Broadmoor Gentilly Lakeview

Dependent Variable: Residential Recovery Consistent Inconsistent Consistent

Independent Variables:
Moderate to None to
Flood Damage Severe Severe Severe
% Homeowners Who Have Reached Road Home
+
Closing 80% 81% 73%
*
Average Income $36,400 $47,000 $64,000
% in Poverty* 31.8% 15.0% 6.6%
% African American* 68.2% 68.5% 1.3%
% Rental Households* 45.2% 24.4% 30.0%

+
WIMBY. (2008). ""What's In My Back Yard?" Reports." from http://wimbydb.road2la.org/WIMBY/Reports.do.
*
GNOCDC (2008). Pre-Katrina Data.

49
 % Elderly* 13% 16.2% 18.6%
% College Grad* 23.60% 25.9% 44.8%
Proximity to Dry Land Yes No Yes
High Pre-Storm Demand for Real Estate (as
reported by residents) No No Yes
Resident Association Size Small None Large
Resident Association Activity Active N/A Very Active
Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts Maintain High
Levels of Involvement Yes No Yes
Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts Implement
Array of Recovery Projects Yes No Yes

Rationale for these dependent variables

I explore the meanings and implications of each of the above variables in due course, but

must first explain my rationale for including each one. Haas et al, as I have discussed, argue that

the pace of recovery is determined primarily by “the extent of damage, the available recovery

resources, [and] the prevailing predisaster [development and population] trends” (Haas, Kates et

al. 1977: xxvii). Consequently, I have included variables to measure each of these factors. To

measure available recovery resources, I have included as variables both residents’ average pre-

storm incomes and the percentage of homeowners in each neighborhood who have reached

closing with the Road Home program (which compensates homeowners for damages not covered

by flood insurance). As a measure of pre-disaster development and population trends, I have

included the presence or absence of high pre-storm real estate demand as a variable. I also

designate the flood damage each neighborhood suffered as a variable, although I have not

utilized a single specific measure of this factor.

I also consider a number of demographic variables. In my last chapter I examined the

study by Elliott and Pais, which finds that race, class, and renter status are having profound

effects upon individuals’ abilities to recover in Katrina’s wake. My inclusion of pre-storm

resident income and rates of poverty as a variables account for the role of class in each

neighborhood’s recovery, and I have included each neighborhood’s percentage of African

50
American residents as a variable to account for the role that race might be playing. Prompted by

their findings, I have also included the percentage of rental households in each neighborhood as a

measure of renter status. Elliott and Pais’s emphasis on demographic variables also spur me to

include two other demographic measures that could affect recovery on an individual-by-

individual basis: the percentage of residents with college degrees and the percentage of elderly

residents.

As I discussed in the last chapter, Rossi found that “institutional strength”, “political

culture,” and “economic resources” accounted for variations in rates of recovery after an

earthquake. My inclusion of resident income and Road Home closings as variables account for

the role being played by economic resources, and “political culture” would seem not to apply as

all three neighborhoods fall under the same city, state, and federal governments. However, I

have included the pre-storm size and activity levels of neighborhood residents’ associations as

measures of each neighborhood’s institutional strength.

I also discussed a number of studies in the last chapter which suggested that community-

driven responses to disaster could directly affect recovery outcomes. These studies suggest a

number of variables that contribute to the emergence and success of these movements. Why and

how each movement succeeded is a topic I address in the final chapter. For now, I only establish

whether or not each neighborhood’s effort is succeeding. The authors I considered agree that

successful community-driven efforts implement recovery projects with tangible benefits to

residents (such as the housing units built by Mano a Mano after the Northridge earthquake or the

construction of the neighborhood organization center after the Kobe earthquake). I therefore

include each effort’s success at implementing such projects as a variable. As a measure of each

51
effort’s strength, I also designate as a variable each effort’s success at maintaining high levels of

resident involvement in the work of recovery.

Finally, based on the particular circumstances of the New Orleans recovery, in which the

“normalcy” of unaffected dry land exists side-by-side with areas devastated by flooding, I

include each neighborhood’s proximity to dry land as a potentially significant variable.

Testing the variables

Which of these variables could explain why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing

consistent recoveries while Gentilly’s recovery is inconsistent? In this section, I use the logic of

comparative analysis, along with qualitative analytic consideration of each variable’s effects, to

test these variables. Based on this analysis, I argue that that the variables which best explain

Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s consistent recoveries and Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery are

resident involvement in recovery efforts and recovery efforts’ success at implementing recovery

initiatives. I also argue that the prior existence of active neighborhood associations is significant,

but as a determinant of recovery effort success rather than as a factor that itself directly affects

residential rebuilding or repopulation.

Damage

Simply put, the degree of damage each neighborhood suffered does not adequately

explain why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing steady recoveries but Gentilly is not,

because most houses in all three neighborhoods incurred substantial damage, and because

damage was most severe in Lakeview, which is recovering steadily. Damage in Katrina’s wake

was a function of the depth and force of floodwaters in each neighborhood and of the housing

types within each neighborhood. Older New Orleans houses tended to be framed with cypress, a

wood that was inherently resistant to water damage and hence more flood resistant. They also

52
tend to be raised several feet off the ground to avoid mild flooding from rainstorms. Alternately,

they were built with raised basements. The primary living quarters of raised basement houses

were located on the second floor, leaving them clear of even catastrophic flooding. The ground

floors of these houses served a variety of purposes, from extra bedrooms to garages to rental

units. By the 1950s and 60s, building techniques in New Orleans increasingly fell in line with

national norms. Houses were often built at grade on concrete slabs, and made out of building

materials including non-flood resistant wood, fiberglass insulation, and drywall which were

inherently vulnerable to water damage (and subsequent colonization by mold). Not surprisingly,

“modern” houses in flooded neighborhoods suffered the most catastrophic damage as a result of

the levee failures.

The combination of floodwater depths and housing type left each neighborhood with

substantial damage, but Lakeview’s was the most consistently severe. This is important, because

Lakeview is experiencing a steady recovery in spite of its heavy damage, and Gentilly’s recovery

is inconsistent in spite of the fact that it incurred less damage. Thus, flood damage alone does

not adequately explain the different recovery outcomes between neighborhoods. To further

explain damage sustained across neighborhoods: most Lakeview houses utilized slab-on-grade

construction, and the neighborhood sustained between six and fourteen feet of water. Thus, all

of its houses suffered severe damage. In Broadmoor, 63.8% of houses were raised several feet

on piers, 21.2% of houses were built with raised basements, and 9.2% of houses were built with

slab-on-grade construction (Ahlers 2007). Houses on slabs and piers in the neighborhood were

not high enough to escape flood waters, and sustained severe damage. Raised-basement homes

sustained moderate damage, with their ground floors destroyed but their living quarters

untouched. Damage was the most variable in Gentilly, as portions of the neighborhood lay

53
above sea level and housing types ranged from raised basements to slab-on-grade bungalows

(Duany 2007). Gentilly’s architectural variation left its flooded neighborhoods on average more

damaged than Broadmoor’s, but less damaged than Lakeview’s. For example, as of the latest

count in each neighborhood, fully 27.6% of Lakeview’s houses had been completely demolished,

versus only 8% in Gentilly and 2.3% in Broadmoor (Ahlers 2007; Dartmouth 2007; Lakeview

2007). While these numbers do not solely reflect damage suffered – Lakeview residents are

more likely to have the means to rebuild their houses from scratch (Megan, June 28, 2007) –

most of Lakeview’s demolitions have been necessitated by cracked concrete slabs beneath

houses which create structural instability and necessitate demolition, (Nancy, June 20, 2007;

Sarah, July 2, 2007). The fact that Lakeview sustained the most severe damage lends credence

to my argument that the degree of damage suffered in each neighborhood does not adequately

explain the differences in their rates of recovery, because Lakeview is mounting a steady

recovery in spite of it.

Moreover, focusing on different degrees of damage in flooded areas of Broadmoor,

Lakeview and Gentilly glosses over the fact that even “flood resistant” houses, or houses that

sustained only several feet of water because they lay on higher land, still suffered severe damage.

Even the experience of returning to a flooded raised basement home – the most flood-resistant

housing type – was very costly and difficult. A resident named Bert described prying open the

garage door that led to his furnished raised basement, only to behold a sea of mucky and moldy

debris: furniture, family records, tools, and other objects incongruously stacked atop one another.

His car had floated on top of is desk and then crushed it as the floodwaters had receded.

What I saw was such devastation, they said I was going to collapse the people who were with me. Cuz I
started to shake, and I said “I’m sick”, and I threw up. And I said – I pulled the garage door down and I
started to cry. And I drove back over to my daughter’s, and I said “there’s no way. There’s no way I can
do that.” (Bert, June 13, 2007)

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Bert was only able to move back into his house after having it completely rewired, entirely

gutting his first floor, and treating his studs for mold. The process of renovating his first floor

took the better part of a year. He remained without heat and gas for months, and describes

staying up at night with “two lanterns, three pistols, and a rifle.” His experience of return was

thus quite difficult, and his home incurred tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage. Thus,

recovery is no easy feat even for residents whose houses sustained only moderate damage. For

this reason as well, the difference between Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s consistent recoveries on

the one hand and Lakeview’s on the other is not easily explained by the degree of damage each

neighborhood suffered, as residents in all neighborhoods faced significant hurdles to their return.

Demographics and Resources

Likewise, neighborhood demographics and recovery resources do not sufficiently explain

why only Gentilly is experiencing an inconsistent recovery, because Gentilly does not face an

absolute disadvantage in any of the demographic and resource categories under consideration.

To begin with, Gentilly’s residents have the highest rate of closing with the federally

funded Road Home program, which compensates residents up to $150,000 for damages not

covered by flood insurance. 81% of Gentilly applicants have reached closing, compared to 80%

for Broadmoor’s applicants and 72.7% for Lakeview (WIMBY 2008). This is not the entire

story, as 50.4% of households in Gentilly have applied for Road Home Funding compared with

39.3% in Lakeview and only 27.4% in Broadmoor (WIMBY 2008). This means that 9.6% of

Gentilly properties have not settled with The Road Home, versus 10.7% in Lakeview and 5.4%

in Broadmoor. Overall, the differences between these percentages are relatively small; Lakeview

has a higher percentage of outstanding claims with The Road Home, and Broadmoor’s overall

55
lower rate of application means that it is certainly not awash with recovery funds. The difference

in recovery outcomes between the neighborhoods thus likely lies elsewhere.

Resident income also provides an insufficient explanation for this difference, as

Broadmoor has mounted a successful recovery despite the fact its residents’ average income at

the time of the 2000 Census was $10,000 per year lower than that of Gentilly’s residents.

Broadmoor’s average household income was $36,399, Gentilly’s was $46,004, and Lakeview’s

was $64,048 (GNOCDC 2008). Also, according to the 2000 Census, 6.6% of Lakeview

households were in poverty, as opposed to 15% in Gentilly and 31.8% in Broadmoor (GNOCDC

2008). Thus, neither rates of poverty nor average income explain the three neighborhoods’

divergent recoveries, as Broadmoor’s recovery has been consistent in spite of having by far the

lowest average income and high poverty level of the three neighborhoods.25

The explanatory power of two other factors that Elliott and Pais found to hinder recovery

on an individual basis – race and renter status – is also insufficient to explain the difference

between the consistent recoveries in Broadmoor and Lakeview and the inconsistent recovery in

Gentilly. As I discussed, Elliot and Pais found that both African American residents and

residents who had rented their homes faced added hurdles in their recoveries. However,

Broadmoor had a much higher portion of renters than Gentilly, and an identical portion of

African Americans. 68.2% of Broadmoor’s residents were African American, vs. 68.5% in

Gentilly, yet Broadmoor’s recovery is more consistent than Gentilly’s (GNOCDC 2008).

Similarly, 45.2% of Broadmoor’s households were rental properties at the time of the 2000

25
It would also be appropriate to consider insurance payouts made in each neighborhood. Unfortunately, I could not
secure comprehensive information on rates of flood insurance coverage and flood insurance payouts on a
neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. It would seem likely that residents with higher incomes were more likely to
be well insured, and data from my interviews supports this hypothesis. This would render Lakeview the best insured
neighborhood and Broadmoor the least well insured neighborhood. Again, Gentilly would not be at a disadvantage
relative to Broadmoor, and its disadvantage relative to Lakeview would be lessened by payouts from the Road
Home program.

56
census, versus only 24.4% in Gentilly (GNOCDC 2008). Clearly, the explanation for difference

in the consistency of each neighborhood’s recovery lies elsewhere.

I have also chosen to consider two demographic variables that Elliott and Pais do not

mention – the portion of elderly residents in each neighborhood and the portion of college

graduates in each neighborhood. A recurring theme in my interviews was the difficulty elderly

residents had returning to their homes,26 and it seems likely that highly-educated individuals

might find themselves better able to navigate the confusing array of obstacles (from insurance

claim difficulties to obscure building permit rules) standing in the way of their recoveries.

However, neither of these variables satisfactorily explains the recovery differences between

Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview, because Broadmoor had the lowest portion of college

graduates, and Lakeview had the largest portion of elderly residents. At the time of the 2000

census, 18.6% of Lakeview’s residents were elderly, versus only 16.2% in Gentilly and 13.0% in

Broadmoor. Similarly, only 23.6% of Broadmoor residents had graduated from college, slightly

less than Gentilly’s 25.9%, and much less than Lakeview’s 44.8%. Because Gentilly does not

face an absolute disadvantage in either of these categories, neither adequately explains the

inconsistency of its recovery relative to those of Broadmoor and Lakeview.

In sum, demographic and resource differences between Broadmoor, Gentilly, and

Lakeview do not explain their divergent recovery outcomes.

Development and Real Estate Factors

As I discuss in the last chapter, Haas et al propose that disaster recovery is dependent

upon pre-disaster trends of either growth or decline in the affected area. Do pre-disaster real

estate trends within neighborhoods help to explain the relative consistencies of their recoveries?

26
Elderly residents who were flooded out of their homes face a myriad of extra challenges as they try to return. In
addition to being on average less able to cope with the physical demands of moving, elderly residents often face the
financial constraints of low fixed incomes and the inability to take out new long-term mortgages.

57
Similarly, do other variables within the context of real estate and development, such as each

neighborhood’s proximity to large areas of unaffected land, affect the neighborhoods’ residential

recovery rates sufficiently enough to explain the differences between their recoveries? I argue

that pre-disaster real estate trends do not explain the differences between the neighborhoods’

recoveries, as Broadmoor real estate was not in high demand before the storm. I also argue that

while Broadmoor and Lakeview enjoy proximity to large areas of unaffected dry land that

Gentilly does not, Gentilly’s residents do not report that this as either a significant psychological

or logistical hurdle, and its power to explain the inconsistency of Gentilly’s recovery is thus

minimal.

Pre-storm demand for neighborhood real estate does not explain the difference between

Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery and the consistent recoveries of Broadmoor and Lakeview,

because demand for real estate was neither particularly low nor particularly high in either

Broadmoor or Gentilly. While a Broadmoor landlord reports that prices were gradually rising

throughout the city before the storm, he said that this gradual trend was not affecting Broadmoor

more than any other city neighborhood. Prices in Broadmoor remained low, he reports: “We

were an affordable neighborhood, we weren’t Uptown.” (Hal Roark, March 18, 2007). Similarly,

a Gentilly resident called his neighborhood “very affordable,” calling it “the poor relation of

Lakeview and Lake Vista” – two neighborhoods with much higher real estate prices (Jack, July

9, 2007) In Lakeview, on the other hand, real estate was selling at a fast rate prior to the storm,

and undeveloped land was being developed at a brisk clip. One resident, discussing empty lots

in the neighborhood, reported that “before the storm, there wasn’t a lot to be had, that’s why it

was so expensive to live here” (Megan, June 28, 2007). However, while Lakeview’s hot pre-

storm real estate market may have been a factor in its recovery, pre-storm real estate trends do

58
not explain the difference in recovery rates between Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview.

Notably high real estate demand did not exist in either Broadmoor or Gentilly, and yet

Broadmoor’s recovery has been consistent while Gentilly’s has not.

The role played by each neighborhood’s proximity to dry land is also worthy of

consideration. Indeed, it is the first variable I have thus far considered whose presence in

Broadmoor and Lakeview and absence in Gentilly could explain the neighborhoods’ divergent

recovery outcomes. However, I argue that from available evidence, it does not seem that this has

been a unique or severe enough a factor to singularly explain disparities between Gentilly’s

recovery and those of Broadmoor and Lakeview. Broadmoor is located close to neighborhoods

along the banks of the Mississippi River that did not flood, and Lakeview is located across the

17th Street Canal from Jefferson Parish, which also avoided flooding. Conversely, although

Gentilly has several strips of unflooded land within its borders, larger unaffected swaths of land

are more than a mile away from the neighborhood’s borders. In general, this means that Gentilly

residents have to travel farther than before to run errands, and also that the psychological comfort

of “normalcy” is physically farther away. Lakeview resident Adam speculated that his

neighborhood’s proximity to dry land has aided its recovery on both fronts:

I always knew that Lakeview had an advantage because we’re just a hop, skip, and a jump to completely
unaffected Jefferson Parish. You know? And so we were able to sort of sustain ourselves off of their
commercial base while the residents here sort of could get themselves together. (Adam, August 4, 2007)

However, if Gentilly’s distance from unaffected land were a substantial detriment to its recovery

– significant enough to explain it’s inconsistent recovery relative to Broadmoor and Lakeview –

it is likely that residents would have mentioned it as a hurdle to their returns. In none of my

twenty-two interviews with current and former Gentilly residents, however, did residents

mention Gentilly’s distance from dry land as a significant factor in their personal recoveries.

One complained that she had to drive farther to buy groceries than she did before the storm, but

59
this was a secondary concern (Suzanne, July 19, 2007). For this reason, I argue, Gentilly’s

distance from unflooded land does not seem to have been a sufficiently significant hindrance to

explain it’s inconsistent rate of recovery relative to those of Broadmoor and Lakeview.

Resident Organization and Resident Efforts

Finally, I arrive at the set of variables concerning each neighborhood’s level of resident

organization and activity prior to the storm and the success of resident-driven efforts after the

storm. Prior to Katrina, Broadmoor had a small, active residents’ association, Lakeview had a

large, active residents’ association, and Gentilly had no overarching residents’ association. After

the storm, residents of all three neighborhoods organized themselves and undertook attempts to

spur recovery within their neighborhoods’ borders. However, only the efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview have managed to sustain high levels of active resident involvement, and only these

two efforts have successfully enacted substantial projects and initiatives to bolster their

neighborhoods’ recoveries. A summary of the accomplishments of resident-driven efforts in

each neighborhood is presented in the chart below:

Outcome Broadmoor Gentilly Lakeview

Residents Reopened Neighborhood Schools Yes No Yes
Case Workers Hired Yes No Yes
Volunteer Center Opened Yes No Yes
Widespread Resident Involvement is Ongoing Yes No Yes
Funds Secured for Library Renovation Yes No No
Neighborhood Marketing Campaign Undertaken Yes No No
Recovery / Information Centers Opened No No Yes

I argue that the success of resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview at

sustaining high levels of resident engagement and implementing recovery initiatives, when

compared to the failure of Gentilly’s effort on these fronts, provides a compelling explanation for

why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing more consistent recoveries than Gentilly.

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Furthermore, I argue that the presence of residents’ associations in Broadmoor and Lakeview

prior to the storm helped successful recovery efforts to emerge in these neighborhoods.

In this chapter, I have introduced Broadmoor, Gentilly and Lakeview, demonstrated that

Gentilly’s recovery has been less consistent than those of Broadmoor and Lakeview, and

identified a number of variables that could explain this difference. I have also argued that many

of these variables – factors which primarily affect recovery on an individual-by-individual basis

– do not adequately explain the difference in the neighborhoods’ recoveries. It is my task in the

forthcoming chapter to substantiate my argument that this difference can instead be explained by

the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview, and their failure in

Gentilly. Then, in my final chapter, I explain how and why these efforts have succeeded.

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 Chapter 3: Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts
In this chapter, I substantiate my argument that the difference between Broadmoor’s and

Lakeview’s consistent recoveries on the one hand and Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery on the

other is attributable to Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s more successful resident-driven recovery

efforts. I first recount the processes by which residents in Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Gentilly

organized and responded to the storm, showing that the efforts in both Broadmoor and Lakeview

have maintained high levels of resident involvement and successfully implemented a number of

recovery projects, while the effort in Gentilly has not. Then, I argue that the success of resident-

driven recovery initiatives in Broadmoor and Lakeview helps to explain these neighborhoods’

surprisingly high and consistent rates of resident return. I show that these efforts have helped to

increase motivation to return amongst undecided residents by demonstrating to them that many

of their neighbors are also planning to return, by giving them meaningful and constructive work

in which to take part and take pride, and by reassuring them that effective recovery work is being

undertaken in their neighborhoods even if they themselves are unable to take part in it. I also

show that the outcomes of these efforts – from reopened schools to hired case workers to newly-

founded neighborhood volunteer centers – have directly lowered material and logistical hurdles

that had prevented residents from returning to their houses. Importantly, the process of

organizing as a neighborhood and working constructively to achieve concrete goals seems to be

at least as important for spurring resident return as any of the direct results of these efforts.

Throughout this discussion, I highlight the absence of similar findings in Gentilly. Gentilly

residents’ recoveries have not been significantly spurred or aided by the GCIA’s efforts. Thus, I

argue, the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview at prompting

62
and enabling resident return, versus GCIA’s relative failure on this front, convincingly explains

why residential recovery in Broadmoor and Lakeview has been more consistent than in Gentilly.

I. Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts in Broadmoor, Lakeview, and

Gentilly

This section consists of narratives of resident-driven recovery efforts undertaken by residents of

Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Gentilly in Katrina’s wake. I show that efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview have sustained high rates of active resident involvement and successfully carried out a

number of recovery-oriented projects, but that Gentilly’s effort has not. These narratives provide

the basis for this chapter’s subsequent discussion of how efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview

meaningfully contributed to the neighborhoods’ residential recoveries, but Gentilly’s effort did

not. They also provide the basis for the next chapter’s analysis of why and how the efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview succeeded while Gentilly’s effort faltered. Because these analyses are

to follow, the below narratives do not seek to explain or analyze the efforts they discuss, only to

report events and outcomes in each effort’s progression after the storm.

Broadmoor’s Effort

In the first months after the Katrina hit in August of 2005, the Broadmoor Improvement

Association was in no position to mount a large scale response to the disaster. Like the rest of

Broadmoor’s residents, its leadership was scattered around the country. LaToya Cantrell, who

had become President of the BIA the previous December, had been displaced to Houston. “Up

to January,” LaToya remembers, “it was just finding people. I mean, you’re displaced, you don’t

know where anybody is” (LaToya Cantrell, June 29, 2007). She remembers being glued to her

email account looking for friends and neighbors and learning as much as she could about the

situation on the ground.

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 On September 29th, 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appointed an independent

“blue ribbon panel” known as the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) commission, and tasked it

with producing a plan for the city’s recovery by the end of the year. Like many other New

Orleans residents, LaToya watched with interest as the commission’s work unfolded.

By January of 2006, when the commission’s plan was due, only a small fraction of

Broadmoor residents had returned to the neighborhood. One Broadmoor resident, who was

living elsewhere in New Orleans with a friend whose house had not flooded, recalls the anxiety

that she and her neighbors felt during those early months after the storm. “At that time,” she

remembers, “we didn’t know. We didn’t know what was going to happen. About anything”

(Catherine, July 23, 2007). Rumors had been circulating in the city that some flood affected

areas would not be allowed to return. Still, though, few Broadmoor residents were prepared for

the news that appeared on the front page of the Times Picayune on the morning of January 11th.

“4 Months to Decide: Nagin panel says hardest hit areas must prove viability” read the headline

announcing the completion of the Bring New Orleans Back Land Use committee’s final report

(Donze and Russell 2006). 27 In a now infamous map, it singled out six areas in the city,

including Broadmoor, as possible “Areas for Future Parkland” (BNOB 2006). The map as it

appeared in the Times Picayune appears below:

27
“4 Months to decide” http://www.nola.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-4/1136962572109650.xml, Cited
February 22nd

64
 While planners on the commission later insisted that this was not their intention,

Broadmoor residents took this as a direct threat that their neighborhood would be bulldozed.

Residents of Broadmoor and other potentially non-viable neighborhoods, the Times Picayune

article warned, could “face the prospect of having to sell out to a new and powerful

redevelopment authority” (Donze and Russell 2006). The report recommended a four month

moratorium on building permits in these neighborhoods, during which time it would be

determined whether a sufficient number of residents were committed to returning to warrant

allowing them to rebuild (BNOB 2006). Although the report’s recommendations were

ultimately never acted upon, its release had instant effects within flooded New Orleans

neighborhoods.

The “green dot”, as it quickly became known, immediately spurred Broadmoor residents

and neighborhood leaders into action. Independent of the BIA, a resident named Virginia

organized a rally at the center of the neighborhood four days after the green dot was announced,

with the goal of proving that residents were already committed to returning to the neighborhood.

A marketing executive, Virginia made a shrewd decision to appropriate the green dot’s color for

the neighborhood’s purposes, and had a 15’ banner made that proclaimed “Broadmoor Lives” in

large green lettering. More than three hundred residents attended the rally – many having driven

in from outside of New Orleans (Virginia Saussy, June 18, 2007). As a Broadmoor resident

named Francis remembers, “we were surprised that there were that many people there.

Because…before the storm, neighborhood involvement was about twenty five people” (Francis,

June 12, 2007).

Board members of the BIA attended the rally and used the opportunity to announce a

general neighborhood meeting to respond to the green dot. Several days later, five hundred

65
residents crowded into the tent that had been rented for the meeting, huddling against small

electric heaters to stave off the drafts of January cold as they listened to what neighborhood

leaders had to say. BIA President LaToya Cantrell and a resident named Hal Roark had

corresponded prior to the meeting, and they presented their vision of the neighborhood’s path

forward.

Rather than protesting the BNOB commission’s recommendations, Broadmoor residents

would agree to the commission’s terms but “beat it at its own game,” working together to make

Broadmoor a viable neighborhood (Hal Roark, July 6, 2007). The Broadmoor Improvement

Association would form two recovery committees, one focused on repopulation of the

neighborhood and one focused on revitalization of its physical and built environment. These

committees would set to work overcoming some of the initial hurdles to recovery in the

neighborhood. Meanwhile, the neighborhood would begin a self-guided planning process, so

that by the time the four-month deadline for proof of “viability” had passed, the neighborhood

could present the city with a comprehensive written plan for its recovery. Residents at the

meeting overwhelmingly approved the recommendations, committee members and co-chairs

were signed up, and by the time the crowd dispersed, one week after the release of the “green

dot”, Broadmoor’s resident-driven recovery effort was underway.

Over the next month and a half, the BIA facilitated a process for residents to agree upon

priorities for Broadmoor’s recovery, which would then be written into the neighborhood’s plan.

Broadmoor was split into three subsections in which fifteen smaller meetings were held, and the

residents reconvened twice as an entire neighborhood to approve the vision they had collectively

crafted. Those who were involved in the process saw it as a chance to renew and improve upon

their neighborhood. “Katrina came, and all I saw was the opportunity” remembers BIA

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President LaToya Cantrell (June 29, 2007). Broadmoor, residents resolved, was going to come

back “better than before.”28 Residents agreed that the neighborhood needed to prioritize the

opening of its grade school and its library, bolster its crime watch to counter a wave of theft and

violence sweeping the city, pursue a neighborhood marketing campaign to encourage resident

return, institute a block captain program to increase outreach and keep track of newly returning

residents, and spearhead initiatives to make the neighborhood’s streets more accommodating of

cyclists and pedestrians (Broadmoor 2006).

Subsequently, under the leadership of the BIA, Broadmoor residents began the work of

creating a written plan for how the neighborhood would attain its collective vision. Resident-

staffed subcommittees were formed to address housing, economic issues, education, flood

mitigation, transportation, urban planning, emergency preparedness, and legal affairs

(Broadmoor 2006: Goals-23). Residents held over 160 meetings and spent thousands of hours

producing a several hundred page long plan outlining the neighborhood’s vision and the strategy

by which it would achieve it. The plan was overwhelmingly approved by residents in July of

2006.

In the year and a half since the plan’s release, residents have worked successfully to

execute much of its content. The plan called for the Broadmoor’s grade school to be reopened as

a charter school (Broadmoor 2006: Education-9). A Broadmoor School Committee was formed

in late September of 2007, and eleven months later, Broadmoor’s newly-formed Andrew H.

Wilson charter school opened its doors to 450 students. In order to spur the rebuilding of houses,

the plan called for a neighborhood Community Development Corporation to be founded

(Broadmoor 2006: Future: H-12). By January, the Broadmoor Development Corporation (BDC)

had been established, which hired a housing case manager and began to spearhead a
28
This phrase became an oft repeated neighborhood slogan.

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comprehensive effort to help Broadmoor’s poorest residents rebuild their homes and return

permanently to the neighborhood. The plan envisioned turning Virginia’s “Broadmoor Lives”

sign to be into a neighborhood marketing campaign (Broadmoor 2006: Future: R-8), and an

updated green and yellow “Broadmoor Lives” logo soon appeared on light post banners, bumper

stickers, and yard signs throughout the neighborhood. The plan also prioritized the reopening of

Broadmoor’s flooded historic library (Broadmoor 2006: Existing-57), and within a year of the

plan’s release, a resident-staffed committee had secured a $2 million grant from the Carnegie

Corporation to renovate and furnish the building. To support resident efforts, the plan called on

Broadmoor to form and maintain a diverse array of partnerships with religious institutions,

nonprofit foundations, major corporations, and universities, each of which would provide unique

support to the neighborhood’s recovery (Broadmoor 2006: Goals-7). These partnerships have

blossomed, from a church that provides the BIA and BDC with office space and up to 125

volunteers per week, to the Shell Oil and CH2MHill corporations which provide substantial

financial backing to neighborhood initiatives, to the Carnegie Corporation and the Clinton

Global Initiative which also provide development funds, to Harvard University, MIT, and Bard

College which provide the neighborhood with undergraduate and graduate student interns.

Through these successes, resident engagement in Broadmoor’s recovery efforts has been

sustained at high levels. Hundreds of residents contributed to the initial planning effort and

continue to attend neighborhood meetings in large numbers.29 Moreover, dozens of residents

worked actively on the neighborhood’s planning subcommittees, and when the plan was

complete, most joined new committees to begin to implement the array of projects and initiatives

the plan had proposed.

29
For example, a neighborhood meeting I attended in June of 2007 drew over 200 residents.

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 In sum, Broadmoor’s resident-driven recovery efforts to date have constructively

mobilized hundreds of neighborhood residents to work collectively towards a shared vision of

their neighborhood’s future. It has successfully implemented a number of projects and initiatives

to make this vision a reality, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Lakeview’s Effort

Water hadn’t finished flowing through the breach of the 17th Street Canal when board

members of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association, scattered about the country in family

members’ houses and motel rooms, found one another and held the first of many conference calls

to plan their response to the disaster (Phillip, July 13, 2007). During the weeks that their homes

were under water and National Guard humvees blocked all entry points to their neighborhood,

they began to lay the groundwork for a coordinated recovery effort. Soon after the neighborhood

was reopened, approximately 3,000 Lakeview residents crowded onto a parking lot at St.

Dominic’s Catholic Church to attend a meeting that the LCIA convened (Jennifer, July 18,

2007).

January brought with it the release of the Bring New Orleans Back commission’s

recommendations, and though its Land Use Committee had not branded Lakeview with a green

dot, Lakeview was one of a number of areas designated by its report as a “neighborhood

planning area”. The committee recommended a four month moratorium on building permits in

these areas, during which time residents and planners could decide on the neighborhood’s fate.

This was never enforced, but it seemed to be a distinct possibility at the time of the plan’s release

(Nelson, June 20, 2007). As the Broadmoor Improvement Association had done in Broadmoor,

LCIA leadership vowed to prove the neighborhood’s viability through a resident-driven planning

and implementation process. Reasoning that “there’s strength in numbers,” they invited the six

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other neighborhoods in Lakeview’s city planning district – District 5 – to form the District 5

Neighborhood Recovery Steering Committee (Nelson, June 20, 2007). Lakeview was far larger

than the rest of these neighborhoods combined, so the steering committee consisted of five LCIA

members and one representative from each of the other neighborhoods. As a result of

Lakeview’s size and its significant representation on the District 5 Steering Committee, most of

the District 5 organization’s work would directly serve and concern Lakeview itself (Philip, July

13, 2007).

The District 5 group charged itself with undertaking the first critical steps toward

recovery for the area it served, such as clearing streets and restoring damaged neighborhood

utilities and infrastructure. After a meeting in March attended by over 400 residents, District 5

spawned approximately fifty subcommittees, which served both to implement initial cleanup

work in the neighborhood and to also to make longer-term plans for recovery (Nelson, June 20,

2007). On the immediate recovery front, many committees maintained direct lines of

communication with utility companies and the city to keep these entities on task and to target

repairs within the neighborhood. One committee was tasked with coordinating with the city to

restore streetlights, another with working with Entergy Electric to reestablish electric service in

all parts of the neighborhood, another with coordinating with the New Orleans gas utility, and so

on (Phillip, July 13, 2007) Committee members quickly established connections with utilities

and service providers throughout the city, and worked hard to cement working relationships with

them to quickly restore basic services to Lakeview and clean up the neighborhood.

Simultaneously, other committees within District 5 began collaborating on a comprehensive plan

for the area’s recovery. Residents also established a neighborhood planning team, which

consisted of subcommittees dealing with everything from urban design to zoning. The Bring

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New Orleans Back plan had long since been discarded, and by the time a new city council-

sponsored planning effort for flooded neighborhoods known as the Lambert planning process

had begun, Lakeview’s planning was well underway. Much of its plan was simply incorporated

into the larger citywide planning framework (Nelson, June 20, 2007)

As the District 5 group carried out its work, Lakeview residents also mobilized to reopen

two private schools that served a number of the neighborhood’s children. St. Paul’s Episcopal

School and St. Dominic School were both pre-K through seventh-grade schools located across

the street from one another in Lakeview’s small commercial center. Collectively, they served

nearly 900 students prior to the storm, most of whom hailed from Lakeview. The schools were

run by Lakeview churches whose congregations took great pride in their operation, so the effort

to reopen these schools engaged residents well beyond the parents. While a public elementary

school down the street sat untouched by the city, Lakeview residents had reopened St. Dominic’s

school by May of 2006, and St. Paul’s Episcopal School opened the following August (Reckdahi

2007).

As parents worked to reopen Lakeview schools and the District 5 group laid the initial

groundwork for recovery in Lakeview, it became clear that more than just a restoration of

infrastructure would be necessary to foster recovery on a resident-by-resident basis. As the

chairman of District 5’s infrastructure group explained:

after we had done as much as we could do as subcommittees for District 5, the people were still trying to
recover on their own. District 5 had helped them with permits and helped them get power and do those
types of different things. But it hadn’t helped them from the standpoint of finding contractors, figuring
out what is the next step on the recovery process on the grassroots level. (Philip, July 13, 2007)

A woman named Denise Thornton in the Lakewood neighborhood, which adjoined Lakeview,

had begun an effort that seemed to address this problem. She had opened up her home to her

neighbors as a resource and information center which she called “The Beacon of Hope.” With

71
the help of Lakeview residents and a number of neighborhood leaders from the Lakeview Civic

Improvement Association, six Beacons of Hope were established in homes throughout

Lakeview, and a substantial resource center funded by the Episcopal Diocese formed a seventh

Beacon in the neighborhood (Denise Thornton, July 19, 2007). The Beacons of Hope quickly

became hubs of activity that drove recovery progress in Lakeview forward. Beacon

administrators and their volunteers worked feverishly to ensure that every property within their

boundaries was gutted and secured (Nancy, June 20, 2007). They used directory searches to

reach out to residents who had not returned, phone calls which often left residents feeling

encouraged that they could indeed return to their homes (Kelly, July 6, 2007). They also worked

to lower barriers to return, from helping residents with mold remediation to maintaining lists of

preferred contractors to connecting needy residents with New Orleans nonprofits that could

address their specific needs. Using grants from the United Way and the Blue Moon Fund, they

purchased tools and lawn equipment for residents to use as they returned to their homes.

Beacons also served as the hubs of extended social networks that formed in the storm’s

wake and drew neighborhoods more tightly together. A Beacon administrator named Rita holds

weekly meetings at her house that often overflow into several adjoining rooms. One resident

told me that residents in Rita’s Beacon are “gung ho. If they’re driving down the street and see

‘they’re demolishing a house!’, they call Rita right away. That’s how into their Beacon they are”

(Justine, July 9, 2007). In this way, the social network that has developed around the Beacon has

not only drawn neighbors closer together, but also created an effective way for residents to keep

close tabs on recovery progress in their neighborhood.

Lakeview’s responses to the disaster have been diverse, with efforts spearheaded by the

District 5 group, the LCIA, and the Beacons of Hope. However, a clear gauge of the success of

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these efforts is the harmonious existence they have achieved. When asked to identify a single

organization that had done the most to spur recovery in Lakeview, one resident replied “you

know it’s so much that it’s hard to really pinpoint one thing, because it’s an entire community”

(Megan, June 28, 2007). The effective teamwork between Lakeview’s three organizations is due

in part to leadership crossover between them. The most compelling example is perhaps Jennifer,

who explained: “the beauty of this, is that we are all so integrated…For example, I’m President

of Lakeview Civic, I run a Beacon, and I was on the D 5 executive committee.” She continued:

We’re so integrated that we’re literally drawing up right now almost a formal contract on which group is
going to take care of what aspects. Who’s going to handle infrastructure, who’s going to handle
marketing, who’s going to do fundraising. (Jennifer, July 18, 2007)

To date, the combined work of these three organizations has laid the fundamental

infrastructure groundwork for Lakeview’s return, while also moving the neighborhood’s

residential recovery along by helping one resident and one family at a time. Through

neighborhood meetings, District 5 subcommittees, and Beacon of Hope volunteer networks, the

Lakeview recovery effort has actively engaged hundreds of residents in the work of rebuilding

the neighborhood. The methods and intricacies of Lakeview’s post storm organizing beg further

exploration, but it is beyond a doubt that the execution of Lakeview’s recovery efforts to date has

been astoundingly successful.

Gentilly’s Effort

The organized response to Katrina among Gentilly’s residents began with a Yahoo email

group called “Gentilly after Katrina”. “GAK”, as it is often known, has seen over 12,000

postings since its founding on September 18th, 2005 (GAK 2008). Because Gentilly had no

overarching residents’ association before the storm, GAK was the first way that many displaced

residents were able to communicate with one another and begin to learn information about the

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state of their still-cordoned off neighborhood. To many, the creation of this venue for

information and fellowship came as a huge relief. One of the first posts to the list opened as

follows:

A big thanks to whomever started this group! I've been checking the Orleans forum at nola.com for days
searching for any crumb regarding Gentilly. Some info there, but also a lot of junk. Will be great sharing
with, and getting to know, others who love the neighborhood.

GAK provided the venue through which more active resident organizing was able to

begin. In early October, a resident posted a message entitled “Getting Organized”, in which she

proposed that Gentilly residents create “a committee for obtaining information about the re-

building process in their area.” She proposed that that interested residents hold a face-to-face

meeting with Gentilly’s City Councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge Morrell. Approximately fifteen of

the GAK list’s most active contributors attended the meeting (Cynthia Hedge Morrell, August 1,

2008).

The meeting began the formal sequence that lead to the establishment of Gentilly’s first

overarching residents’ association. With Morrell’s blessing, six of the people present at the

meeting decided to form a formal association for Gentilly residents. The Gentilly Civic

Improvement Association, as it would be called, would serve “as an umbrella organization for all

Gentilly residents, business persons, and existing organizations to come together to share ideas

and work toward common interests” (GAK 2008).

On December 7th of 2005, the first GCIA meeting was held, with over a hundred Gentilly

residents in attendance. Simon, a resident who had served as the organization’s acting President

during its formation, was elected President of GCIA for a first official term. Additionally, ten

other board members were elected, Membership and Bylaws and Public Relations committees

were established, and a monthly meeting schedule was agreed upon. The GCIA was off and

running.

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 One of the GCIA’s earliest tasks was to found or to reconstitute residents’ associations in

many of Gentilly’s twenty-three neighborhoods. This work would be slow, but as Gentilly

residents began to attend GCIA meetings, they were encouraged to form associations in their

respective neighborhoods (Simon, June 23, 2007). As the GCIA grew, it also won the loyalty

and cooperation of existing residents’ associations. The president of the Gentilly Heights East

Neighborhood Association, for example, remembers that a resident in her neighborhood

encouraged her to attend a GCIA meeting after she had returned to her flooded house. She was

skeptical of the organization at first, but after meeting the GCIA’s President, she reports that “his

enthusiasm kind of won me over.” Members of a larger pre-established residents’ association

from the Pontilly area began to respond to the storm on their own, but also attended GCIA

meetings and took part in its work (Adrian, July 26, 2007). In this way, the GCIA grew in

involvement and legitimacy in the months following the storm.

Although the Bring New Orleans Back commission report designated most of Gentilly as

a “neighborhood planning area” and placed one of the infamous green dots over three of its

neighborhoods, the GCIA did not immediately respond with a recovery planning effort as

occurred in Broadmoor and Lakeview.30 However, as other city neighborhoods began to

undertake planning processes, the GCIA sought to follow suit. In March of 2006, Gentilly’s city

councilwoman invited renowned urban planner Andres Duany to Gentilly to run a planning

charrette for the neighborhood. Duany had already run charrettes elsewhere on the Gulf Coast,

and he agreed to render his services to Gentilly for free (Cynthia Hedge Morrell, August 1,

2007). He assembled a team of dozens of urban planners who donated their time to the effort,

and contributed nine employees from his own well known planning firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk &

30
In the next chapter, I argue that this difference in reaction stemmed primarily from the GCIA leadership’s lack of
prior experience fighting on the neighborhood’s behalf within the city political environment.

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Company. The charrette was held in April of 2006 in a school building, during which time the

assembled planners generated ideas for the neighborhood’s future and residents gave them input

on their ideas (Jack, July 9, 2007). The resultant plan included suggestions for neighborhood

resource centers to aid individual return, generated ideas for the renovation of different types of

housing in the neighborhood, and spelled out the particular needs and challenges facing each of

Gentilly’s 21 individual neighborhoods. It also called for the creation of more pedestrian

friendly commercial space, a renewed “town center” at a busy intersection, and improved public

transportation (Duany 2007). After the completion of Duany’s Charrette, four Gentilly residents

formed a GCIA planning subcommittee and produced two reports – one on Infrastructure and

Environmental Quality and the other on Land Use and Zoning (Frasier, August 4, 2007).

Through both the Duany charrette and the planning subcommittee’s reports, the GCIA acted as

the driving force behind efforts to envision Gentilly’s future.

Since the end of planning efforts in Gentilly, the GCIA has remained an effective

advocacy group for the neighborhood. In a competition with seventeen other neighborhoods, it

successfully lobbied the city to commit to building a new school in Gentilly. Construction on the

Lake Area Technology High School is slated to begin in 2009 (Monica, February 19, 2008). The

GCIA also helped to lure the private Holy Cross boy’s school into the neighborhood from its

historic but badly flooded site in the Lower 9th Ward (Simon, June 23, 2007).

However, while the GCIA has effectively advocated on Gentilly’s behalf, it has not

developed the capacity to implement recovery initiatives on its own. None of the major elements

outlined in its plans have come to fruition; moreover, neighborhood leaders seem at a loss as to

how to even begin to work towards implementing the plans. One resident who had been closely

involved with the GCIA’s work reflected: “Our effectiveness, I would say, has been pretty minor

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overall.” She also expressed pessimism about the future of resident-driven efforts in Gentilly,

saying “I almost feel like things have slowed down to almost a halt at this point” (Nicole, August

7, 2007).

Indeed, after the GCIA’s early growth in the months after the storm, active resident

engagement with its efforts began to wane. The organization’s core leadership had never grown

beyond around a dozen residents, and many of these began to leave the organization because of

internal conflicts and other commitments. Members of GCIA’s urban planning group, feeling

marginalized within GCIA, split off to form their own organization called the District Six

Community Council. This prompted more infighting; one of GCIA’s founders wrote the

following in a blog post in response to the formation of the District Six group:

I’m only concerned with Gentilly, and I’ll be damned if folks seek a profit for our citizen’s losses. I didn’t
spend money and time to create an avenue for cretins to rape the citizens of Gentilly. I think such actions
are of the most base kind, and I will work to stop them in their damn tracks.

While this infighting occurred, the GCIA’s founding board handed their powers over to a

new board composed of the presidents of Gentilly’s individual neighborhood associations. Many

of these presidents headed fledgling organizations that they had founded in the storm’s wake as a

result of the GCIA’s organizing efforts. However, a number of these individuals report that they

felt little stake in the GCIA as an organization (Adrian, July 26, 2007; Mike, July 24, 2007;

Nora, July 17, 2007). The president of one neighborhood association reports that she didn’t

know she was on the new board until weeks after the transition of power had been made.

Another man on the board complained that after the transition, several months passed before the

new board could agree on a time to hold their first meeting. He also reports that attendance at

the GCIA’s general meetings has dropped drastically.

Thus, since the storm, the GCIA has not developed capacity to implement recovery

initiatives on its own, and active resident engagement in its efforts has declined. I examine the

77
causes of these failures in the next chapter, but for now, I turn to the effects that resident-driven

recovery efforts in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview have had on the return of individual

residents to these neighborhoods.

II. Explaining Resident Return

Thus far, I have shown that resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview

maintained high levels of active resident involvement and implemented a variety of recovery

projects, whereas Gentilly’s effort did not. In this section, I argue that this difference explains

why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing consistent residential recoveries while

Gentilly’s recovery is inconsistent. First I identify three major sets of hurdles that prevent

residents in all three neighborhoods from returning to their homes, which I designate as

motivational, material, and logistical. Then, I show that the substantial and sustained resident

mobilizations in Broadmoor and Lakeview directly lowered motivational hurdles to return for

many residents in both neighborhoods, and that the outcomes of each neighborhood’s effort

helped to significantly lower motivational, material, and logistical hurdles to resident return. I

stress that a number of Broadmoor and Lakeview residents cite the efforts in their neighborhoods

as having directly contributed to their successful returns to their neighborhoods. In Gentilly, by

contrast, I show that the GCIA’s efforts helped to lower logistical hurdles and motivational

hurdles for some residents, but not nearly to the same extent as these hurdles were lowered in

Broadmoor and Lakeview. I also show that the GCIA’s efforts have not lowered material

hurdles to resident return, and stress that the Gentilly residents with whom I spoke did not cite

the GCIA’s efforts as having contributed to their return to the neighborhood. This difference in

outcomes, I argue, convincingly explains why Broadmoor and Lakeview are experiencing

consistent recoveries while Gentilly is not.

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Hurdles to Recovery

In order to understand how successful resident-driven recovery efforts can contribute to

resident return, it is first important to understand the array of challenges and hurdles that prevent

residents from rebuilding and returning to their homes. Although these challenges are closely

intertwined, they can be roughly split into three groups. The first are a set of motivational

hurdles that can cause residents not to want to return, irrespective of the resources they have at

their disposal. The second are material constraints – usually financial limitations – which

prevent residents from rebuilding their houses. The final set are logistical constraints, which

range from confusion over changing building permit regulations to the closure of schools that

residents’ children attended prior to the storm.

Residents cite a variety motivational hurdles which prevent them from reinvesting in their

homes and returning to their neighborhoods. This hesitancy is usually well grounded, regardless

of the form it takes. Mary, a nurse from Broadmoor, reports that her family had to overcome

significant emotional hurdles in order to return to their house. They had ridden out the storm

with her in the hospital where she worked, only to be stranded by the floodwaters for days as

temperatures rose to 95 degrees and patients died around them. Her eleven year old daughter

had been traumatized by her experience, and refused to return to their home for over a year

(Mary, June 6, 2007). Other residents decide they are inclined not to return after weighing

benefits and potential costs of moving back into their flooded neighborhoods. “My heart told me

to rebuild, my brain told me not to,” remembers Daniel, who decided not to renovate the rental

properties he owned in Lakeview after considering the cost of building high enough to avoid

future flooding (Daniel, August 1, 2007). Similarly, a Broadmoor resident remembers that she

hesitated to return because of fear of potential flooding. “We’re living behind broken Federal

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levees. That’s stupid,” she remarked (Catherine, July 23, 2007). Many are also hesitant to return

for fear that their neighbors are not coming back. A woman from a tight-knit Lakeview block

remembers calling her neighbors in the storm’s wake and asking them about their plans to return:

“I kept getting the same answer: “we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know” (Megan, June

28, 2007). Concern that neighbors wouldn’t move back has not only a social but also a financial

basis; a renovated house on an otherwise abandoned block becomes a “white elephant” – it is

nearly impossible to sell at a reasonable price. In all, residents of flooded neighborhoods have a

compelling variety of reasons not to return to their homes, and sustained recovery in these areas

requires that these motivational hurdles be overcome.

Similarly, regardless of their desires to return, residents often face material limitations to

their abilities to rebuild. Many residents had insufficient flood insurance when Katrina hit,

having anticipated light flooding from rainstorms but not heavy flooding from levee breaches.

As a Gentilly resident named Doug explained, “I had very little flood insurance. No one

expected 11 feet of water. If I had had, you know, 3 feet, that twenty grand would have done a

lot of it,” (Doug, June 25, 2007). Like many underinsured residents, Doug was still waiting for

money from the Road Home program, which was mired in bureaucracy and short on funds. A

number of other residents reported receiving much lower payouts than they were due, and

entering a maddeningly slow and bureaucratic process of appeals (Jack, July 9, 2007; Sarah, July

2, 2007). Lack of funds became especially difficult as the short supply of contractors and high

demand for them shot construction prices skyward.

In addition to financial constraints, residents hoping to return also face a daunting array

of logistical hurdles. Many public schools did not reopen after the storm, and families whose

children had attended these schools were left unsure whether or where their children would go to

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school if they returned. One resident argued that “areas that are serviced wholly by public

schools….[are] not coming back” because of these closures, “…and it’s the school system’s

fault” (Nelson, June 20). Another significant set of material and logistical hurdles lies in the

long process of repairs that most flooded houses require. The steps of gutting, mold remediation,

rewiring, re-plumbing, installing air conditioning, installing drywall, and finishing must be

performed in turn. Several of these steps require individual permits and they often entailed work

from specialized contractors. In addition to driving prices up, the city’s short supply of

contractors also made the process of hiring them a logistical nightmare. Harry reported “I just

started getting contractors, which was insane. Try getting an electrician when 100,000 people

are looking for electricians” (Harry, June 29, 2007). Other residents had difficulty with

permitting. Sarah remembers that “everything was perfect until permitting came. Once we got

involved with the city, then we ran into more problems” (Sarah, July 2, 2007). Residents in

flooded neighborhoods also face the logistical challenges posed by still-empty houses. As

Lakeview homeowner Phillip comments:

I’ve got a house three doors down from me, for example, that was bought by the LRA.31 They … have
moved now and bought a house in another part of New Orleans, their life is moving on. That house is
there. That grass is continuing to grow, and the rodents are continuing to live in that house, and there’s
nobody there to take responsibility for it. (Phillip, August 1, 2007)

This plethora of logistical challenges can in many cases prove so overwhelming that even those

residents who are desperate to quickly return to their homes find that they lack means to easily

do so.

Overcoming Recovery Hurdles

The recovery initiatives in Broadmoor and Lakeview, I argue, have done a great deal to

help residents overcome these motivational, material, and logistical hurdles to return. Many

31
The Louisiana Recovery Authority, which administers the Road Home Program

81
residents cite the contributions of these efforts as having been instrumental in spurring and

assisting their returns to the neighborhoods. This is in contrast to Gentilly, where the GCIA’s

efforts have only marginally lowered motivational and logistical hurdles to resident return, and

where residents do not report that the GCIA’s efforts have substantially affected their decisions

or abilities to return.

The broad-based, sustained, and constructive efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have

reassured residents that their neighbors were committed to returning, given residents meaningful

work to do that has increased their perceived stake in their neighborhoods’ recoveries, and

spread the word to residents still displaced outside of the New Orleans metro area that recovery

was underway in their neighborhoods. In these ways, the process of resident mobilization,

planning, and implementation helped to overcome the hesitancy that many residents felt about

returning to their flooded neighborhoods.

Many residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview, for example, were impressed and surprised

by the high attendance and level of commitment they witnessed at neighborhood meetings. In

some cases, this alone swayed their decisions to return. Sarah remembers that:

We thought about not coming back at all. And my husband was very adamant about not coming back.
He was like, ‘there’s no way, we’re not going to deal with this again. We’re not going to have to worry
about flooding or losing everything.’ And he was at a Lakeview meeting that they had over at St.
Dominick. It was very positive meeting, I was surprised at how many people had turned out and were
there. And I was like, ‘we’re coming back. We’re gonna do this; I don’t know how, but we’re gonna do
this. (Sarah, July 2, 2007)

The meeting had not only reassured Sarah that her neighbors were planning to return, but also

given her a tantalizing taste of what it could be like to be part of a larger effort to rebuild the

neighborhood. Broadmoor residents echo this sentiment. Catherine reports that she had been

planning to sell her house even before the storm, and that the flooding had seemed to her to be

ample reason to move out of Broadmoor. “But when I went to the meeting and I saw neighbors

and I saw organization and I saw caring, and I saw smart people working, um, then I thought,

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‘OK, well I’d like to live here now.’….This seems like a special place to live” (Catherine, July

23, 2007). Thus, successful and productive resident organizing in both Broadmoor and

Lakeview provided a key initial incentive for residents to return.

Similarly, many residents found that sustained involvement in their neighborhoods’

efforts was therapeutic, and this helped to affirm their decisions to remain in Broadmoor and

Lakeview. Kelly, for example, lived with her family in a third-floor Lakeview apartment that

was one of the few dwellings in the neighborhood not to flood. Living on her still largely

deserted block, however, was hard, and she reports that she may well have left had it not been for

her involvement in starting a Beacon of Hope in her neighborhood. She says that

the only way to survive here, and to battle this depression, is to start helping people. Once you start
helping people, you get focused off of your own problems, you get so darn busy and at the end of the day
you’re ten feet off the ground. (Kelly, July 6, 2007)

Likewise, Broadmoor resident Hal Roark remembers that his heavy involvement in

neighborhood meetings gave him an otherwise lacking sense of purpose, reinforcing his decision

to remain in the neighborhood. “At that point, it was the only thing in my life I had any measure

of control over” he remembers (Hal, July 6, 2007). Thus, the thriving recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview gave many residents reason to stay who might well have otherwise

left.

Moreover, even residents who were not actively involved in recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview nonetheless found these efforts to be reassuring, and credit their

ongoing strength and presence in the neighborhood with reinforcing their decisions to return.

Broadmoor resident Tony, for example, admits that “I can’t really brag to say that I’m an

extremely active member of the [BIA] organization.” Nonetheless, he credits Broadmoor’s

recovery, and also to a degree his own return, with the Broadmoor Improvement Association’s

work in the wake of the storm. He found it reassuring that Broadmoor “had a group and we had

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a name and we had…leaders who were on the case.” He continues: “I give the organization a lot

of credit. Because we could have all been running around as individuals trying to make

something happen and like I said before, we wouldn’t have made anything happen” (Tony, July

25, 2007). Indeed, even residents who couldn’t take part in neighborhood recovery initiatives at

all, because they were still displaced outside of the New Orleans metro area or because their jobs

and personal circumstances did not allow them the time, were still able to stay abreast of their

neighbors’ efforts and accomplishments. Sarah from Lakeview read meeting notes on the

internet:

So we were lucky, in that we did have people from the different Beacons and the neighborhood go to the
meetings, take notes, and then post the notes on the internet so that you could keep up with what was
going on. (Sarah, July 2, 2007)

Others such as Mary, a displaced Broadmoor resident, kept abreast of residents’ efforts through

conversations with her neighbors, who had returned to the neighborhood. This news of

neighborhood efforts helped to inform her decision to return: she reports that “Knowing that

[Broadmoor] was organized was a big plus” (Mary, June 6, 2007) Thus, residents who were not

actively involved in their neighborhoods’ recovery efforts still knew about these efforts and

found them reassuring.

Indeed, especially in the case of Broadmoor, resident recovery efforts raised the

neighborhood’s media profile, which both helped to reach out to not-yet-returned residents and

also increased a sense of pride amongst residents who were back. One Broadmoor resident

proudly reported that Broadmoor hardly received any media coverage before Katrina, but that in

the storm’s wake, the Times Picayune devoted a tab on its website just to reporting about the

neighborhood’s recovery efforts (Virginia Saussy, June 18, 2007). Catherine says that she

frequently hears about Broadmoor from her coworkers and friends: “[they’ll say] we heard about

Broadmoor on TV last night.’ And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah. Yeah. That’s my neighborhood’”

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(Catherine, July 23, 2007). Lakeview’s recovery efforts also received media attention, including

an hour-long TV special called “Rebuilding Lakeview” that ran on the local New Orleans ABC

affiliate. In this way, the presence of recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview helped to

raise each neighborhood’s profile, reassuring displaced residents that their neighborhoods were

on the mend and reinforcing returned residents’ senses of pride in their accomplishments.

In all of these ways, the presence of sustained and broad-based recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview has contributed to resident return in these neighborhoods by lowering

motivational hurdles to resident return.

Gentilly’s less broad-based, cohesive, and sustained effort, by contrast, has done

substantially less to motivate residents to return. Among the twenty two Gentilly residents I

interviewed, none reported that their decisions to move back to Gentilly were in part motivated

by the GCIA’s efforts. Certainly, the GCIA’s role in motivating resident return should not be

entirely discounted because of this finding. GCIA’s founding President, for example, says that

one of the GCIA’s primary successes was that: “we were the first people in Gentilly to say its

OK to come home. We’re here! We’re seeing what’s going on. A lot of people started coming

back because of that” (Simon, June 23, 2007). However, based on the content of my interviews,

the GCIA’s role in motivating residents to return to the neighborhood seems to have been

substantially less than those played by resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview.

It is also important to note that the outcomes of efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview

worked to spur residential recovery in these neighborhoods, by helping residents to overcome

motivational, material, and logistical hurdles to their recoveries. In Broadmoor, for example, the

opening of staffed Broadmoor Development Corporation and Broadmoor Improvement

Association offices gave residents a tangible sense that their individual recoveries would now be

85
firmly supported. Mary remembers that its established presence made her feel comfortable

moving back to the neighborhood:

Knowing that there was a central place to use as a resource to get information to help find people who can
actually do the work I need done on my house. And who probably can give me information about how to
get insurance proceeds to pay for the raising and leveling of my house. Knowing that there was a
resource available that was in my neighborhood, part of my neighborhood, was important in helping me
feel comfortable doing this. (Mary, June 6, 2007)

Similarly, the opening of Beacons of Hope across Lakeview has helped to spur many residents to

return to the neighborhood, and many others to attend to houses that they had been neglecting.

Beacon administrators systematically call residents who haven’t returned, encouraging them not

to sit and wait on abandoned property. They do not attempt to cajole residents into returning –

especially elderly residents and families with young children – but rather facilitate homeowners’

arrivals at timely and informed decisions about what to do with their properties. Their goal is to

ensure that houses in Lakeview do not remain perpetually vacant and untouched. Kelly, a

Beacon administrator, explains that administrators ask displaced residents:

Where are you? Where’s your heart? …. How are you feeling? Would you like to come back? If we
showed you how you could come back and gave you resources and gave you a helping hand do you think
you would like to? If they said yes, or if they were on the fence, we would say ‘why don’t you let us do
your yard and why don’t you meet us there if you can and then we’ll walk around your property and
identify the issues that maybe [are] making you think you can’t come back. And so many times after
doing that we’ve actually saw people turn their heads where at the end of that day they were coming
back. (Kelly, July 6, 2007)

When residents do not decide to return, Beacon administrators ensure that they secure and

maintain their properties until they are sold, thereby cutting down on the problem of derelict

houses in the neighborhood, and lowering a substantial logistical hurdle to other residents’

return. Thus, the opening of the Broadmoor offices and the openings of Beacons of Hope have

spurred resident return in the two neighborhoods.

Apart from directly convincing residents to return, services of the Broadmoor

Improvement Association and the Beacons of Hope also support residents by helping them

overcome smaller logistical hurdles on their paths to recovery. Both organizations, for example,

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maintain lists of recommended contractors, an important service in a post-storm environment in

which many desperate residents have been cheated out of money or paid for slipshod work by

unscrupulous and unqualified carpenters and electricians (Harry, June 29, 2007; Charles, July 3,

2007). Residents also report that the Beacons’ simple services ease their experiences coming

back into the flooded neighborhood. As Sarah explains:

Last week, I went to the St. Paul’s beacon and I said ‘I need weed killer. I have to go kill weeds on this
property that’s so overgrown…that you can’t put a lawnmower on there.’ And then, here’s not only the
weed killer, but here’s also the pump that you’re going to need to spray the weed killer. Simple things
like that. They have a free laundromat... a lot of people don’t own washing machines yet….the internet
service is a great convenience to have over there. Just to have someplace to go on certain days when you
say, ‘I can’t deal with it any more.’ (Sarah, July 2, 2007)

By helping residents overcome small hurdles in this way, both the Broadmoor Improvement

Association and the Beacons of Hope help to speed the process by which residents move back

into their homes, and in this way as well, contribute to their neighborhoods’ consistent rates of

recovery.

As I have shown, one of the most substantial hurdles to resident return is lack of money.

On this front, the outcomes of resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have

helped as well. For example, many residents had difficulty applying to the Road Home program,

because of a number of confusing steps and involved financial questions on the application.

Both the Broadmoor Improvement Association and the Beacons of Hope helped residents submit

their applications before the final deadline in July of 2007. Some residents also remain in a state

of limbo over insurance payouts and their applications to the Road Home program, and both the

Broadmoor Improvement Association and the Beacons of Hope have arranged for free

consultation and legal services for residents who have claims against their insurance companies

or the Road Home. Dozens of residents took advantage of these services in Broadmoor during

my summer research there, and Lakeview residents similarly reported making use of the

Beacon’s services. Similarly, the case workers each neighborhood organization has hired are

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able to help residents resolve financial claims (Nancy, June 20, 2007; Hal Roark, February 29,

2007). Thus, both the Broadmoor Improvement Association and the Beacons of Hope are

helping residents directly tackle financial hurdles to their return.

The reopening of schools in Broadmoor and Lakeview has also lowered an important

logistical hurdle for neighborhood families with school-aged children. In Broadmoor,

registration events for the Andrew H. Wilson Charter School held in the summer of 2007 drew in

hundreds of would-be students and their families.32 Although students could register for the

school from all over the city, many of the school’s students hailed from the Broadmoor, and

some came from families that had been displaced and were not yet been able to return to the

neighborhood. Thus, even before the school had opened its doors, it was luring residents back to

the neighborhood. Similarly, Lakeview residents credit the reopening of the private schools that

serve the bulk of the neighborhood’s children, including the St. Dominic’s School and St. Paul’s

School in Lakeview proper, with prompting many families to come back. “I promise you, if Mt.

Carmel, Jesuit, Brother Martin, St. Dominic, Christian Brothers were not open, people would not

be coming back to this area. They just wouldn’t, it wouldn’t happen” asserted a Lakeview

resident (Nelson , June 20, 2007). Thus, the schools that Broadmoor and Lakeview residents

have worked to reopen are directly contributing to these neighborhoods’ recoveries.

It is likely that Broadmoor’s sustained recovery also owes credit to the extensive

Broadmoor Lives advertising campaign, which could well be increasing residents’ motivation to

return to the neighborhood. The lawn signs, lamp post banners, and bumper stickers give the

neighborhood a palpable and unifying sense of place; it is nearly impossible to cross into the

neighborhood without seeing them. Their bright green and yellow colors reinforce the signs’

message of vibrancy and life, and mark Broadmoor as a place on the mend. Broadmoor
32
I attended or staffed a number of these events this summer

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Development Corporation Executive Director Hal Roark calls the Broadmoor Lives campaign

“effective branding”, but some residents push the point further. For example, Catherine says of

the signs:

I love them. They make me feel so good. I’ve got one on my desk, one on my car, I mean, I don’t know
how to put it, but I was like, I was totally abandoned, and had no identity. I lost my job, I lost my house,
I lost my city, lost stuff, my daughter had to go away, and then just every thing Broadmoor gives me an
identity. (Catherine, July 23, 2007)

The Broadmoor Lives campaign has created a unified sense of place in Broadmoor, asserted that

this place is vibrant and alive, and contributed to the formation of a sense of neighborhood

identity. They may well be playing a substantial role in the neighborhood’s sustained recovery.

Thus, the outcomes generated by resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview have worked in a variety of ways to lower motivational, logistical, and material

hurdles to resident return. Many residents credit these outcomes with having substantially

spurred or aided their return to the neighborhoods. This stands in contrast to the situation in

Gentilly.

In Gentilly, as I have shown, the GCIA has not been able to implement recovery projects

on its own. Thus, not surprisingly, Gentilly residents do not credit resident-driven projects with

having contributed to their return to the neighborhood. When asked what role the GCIA has

played in their personal recoveries, most residents cite the reliable information they learn at its

meetings as its biggest contribution. Nora, for example, said “the thing that’s been most helpful

has been the information, bringing together speakers to address the group on many different

topics, whether it’s crime, economic development, [or] education” (Nora, July 17, 2007). Lack

of information can be a significant logistical hurdle to resident return, so the GCIA’s role in

propagating useful information to residents should not be underemphasized. No residents,

however, cite this information as having been central to their return. Moreover, given the lack of

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concrete outcomes to date that Gentilly’s resident-driven recovery effort has produced, it is

beyond a doubt that its effort has been less successful than the efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview at attracting and assisting residents back to the neighborhood.

***

In sum, there is clear and convincing evidence that resident-driven recovery efforts in

Broadmoor and Lakeview have directly contributed to resident return in these two

neighborhoods, while little such evidence exists in Gentilly. The efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview have lowered motivational hurdles to resident return through their success at

maintaining high levels of active resident involvement. Moreover, the outcomes these efforts

produce have substantially lowered motivational, material, and logistical hurdles to resident

return. Conversely, Gentilly’s less broad-based and cohesive effort, combined with the lack of

tangible outcomes it has produced in the neighborhood to date, has not substantially spurred

resident return. Thus, the success of the efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview at maintaining high

levels of resident involvement and producing an array of important recovery outcomes, versus

the failure of Gentilly’s effort in these regards, convincingly explains the difference between the

consistent residential recoveries taking place in Broadmoor and Lakeview and the inconsistent

residential recovery taking place in Gentilly.

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 Chapter 4: How and Why Resident-Driven Recovery Efforts
Succeed
My final task is to explain how and why resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor

and Lakeview have successfully maintained high levels of resident engagement and implemented

substantial recovery initiatives, while Gentilly’s effort has not. To explain why this difference

occurred, I turn to the prior existence of neighborhood leadership capacity in Broadmoor and

Lakeview and its absence in Gentilly. Although all three neighborhoods faced a clear threat to

their existences in Katrina’s wake, only residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview organized their

responses to the disaster based on the realization that responsibility for their neighborhoods’

futures lay largely in their own hands. This realization was critical to their efforts’ successes,

and it stemmed from the experience and expectations that leaders in these neighborhoods had

built up over years of fighting to improve conditions in their neighborhoods. This realization of

responsibility spurred leaders in Broadmoor and Lakeview to mobilize residents into taking

active charge over the work of planning for and implementing their neighborhoods’ recoveries –

mobilizations that were aided by the pre-established legitimacy of both the BIA and the LCIA.

In Gentilly, by contrast, residents’ lack of experience fighting collectively on their

neighborhood’s behalf, combined with the neighborhood’s lack of a pre-established leadership

structure, led residents to respond to the disaster in a manner that was not focused on taking

immediate charge over recovery outcomes in the neighborhood.

How then, did this difference between the neighborhoods’ mobilizations lead recovery

efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview to maintain high levels of engagement and successfully

implement recovery projects, while Gentilly’s effort failed to do so? I argue that the direct

responsibility residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview took for their neighborhoods’ recoveries led

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them to maintain tight control over the content of their neighborhoods’ recovery plans, helped

them to realize the importance of implementing their plans, allowed them to depend on

partnerships with outside entities to support their efforts, and finally allowed them to develop

substantial adaptive capacity to alter their efforts appropriately with the ebbs and flows of the

dynamic New Orleans recovery environment. I show that these characteristics were critical to

their success at both maintaining high rates of resident involvement and implementing recovery

projects. In Gentilly, by contrast, I show that because residents did not assume full responsibility

for their neighborhood’s recovery, their effort failed to develop these characteristics, and faltered

as a result. Throughout this discussion, I also show that my own findings largely confirm the

importance of variables that existing disaster recovery literature identifies as aiding the

emergence and success of collective responses to disaster.

Variables that Explain Movement Emergence and Success

In Chapter 1, I culled a number of variables from disaster literature that could account for

the emergence and success of resident-driven recovery efforts. I present these variables again in

the chart below:

“Group Context” Variable Authors

Recovery efforts draw on local knowledge Bolin, Peterman
Residents control recovery planning and implementation Bolin, Kweit, Peterman
Efforts develop sound implementation capacity Bolin
Affected community has established leadership Nakagawa
Affected community has high internal social capital Nakagawa
Efforts utilize outside ties and resources Nakagawa, Peterman
Efforts maintain "creative tension" with government Peterman

As I explore the causes of the success of resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview at

maintaining high levels of resident engagement and implementing recovery projects, versus the

failure of Gentilly’s effort in these regards, it becomes apparent that the Broadmoor and

Lakeview efforts share a number of commonalties which distinguish them from Gentilly’s effort,

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and each difference helps to explain their success. 33 The explanatory power of the “group

context” variables summarized in the chart above seems to be largely confirmed. Specifically,

the existence of community leadership capacity, whose importance Nakagawa identifies, proves

critical to explaining why Broadmoor and Lakeview residents mobilized to take responsibility

for their own recoveries, while Gentilly’s residents did not. The other variables help to explain

how resident-driven recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview, once infused with this sense

of responsibility, acted effectively upon it. Interestingly, though, the fact that Broadmoor had

substantially lower pre-storm social capital than Lakeview suggests that prior leadership and

organization is more important than social capital for the emergence of successful resident-

recovery efforts. Broadmoor developed high internal social capital34 through its efforts, which

contributed to its success.

I. Leadership and Resident Mobilization

In the wake of Katrina, Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview faced fundamental threats to

their existences. Severe destruction caused by flooding, combined with city planning processes

that sought to write off the neighborhoods, made it seem quite likely in the months after the

storm that none of them would recover. However, residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview

responded very differently to these threats than residents in Gentilly. In this section, I show that

Broadmoor and Lakeview residents assumed full responsibility for their neighborhood’s

recoveries while Gentilly residents did not, and argue that this difference in response stems from

the prior existence of neighborhood leadership in Broadmoor and Lakeview. First, I show that

33
Thus, this chapter will not mirror the approach I took in Chapter 2, in which I was able to undertake a rigorous
Boolean analysis to isolate a single variable – the success of resident driven efforts – to explain the difference
between Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery and Broadmoor’s and Lakeview’s consistent recoveries.
34
As Nakagawa and Shah define it: “trust, social norms, participation, and network[s]” within communities
Nakagawa, Y. and R. Shaw (2004). "Social Capital: A Missing Link to Disaster Recovery." International Journal of
Mass Emergencies and Disasters 22(1): 5-34.

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existing leadership in Broadmoor and Lakeview steered residents into a constructive orientation

towards recovery, while Gentilly’s leadership did not. Then, I argue that this difference in

approach stems from the prior experience of leaders in Broadmoor and Lakeview relative to that

of Gentilly’s leaders, and also from the pre-established legitimacy that both the BIA and LCIA

enjoyed.

The neighborhoods’ responses to the Bring New Orleans Back commission plan illustrate

the ways in which each neighborhood’s leadership was able to steer residents and frame their

approaches to the disaster. I have already detailed the process by which Broadmoor residents

first held a rally to protest the green dot, but then quickly agreed at a subsequent neighborhood

meeting to “beat the city at its own game” by making Broadmoor a viable neighborhood.

Broadmoor Improvement Association leaders played a critical role in this progression. As one

observer of the process remarked, “they took what could have become an ultimately futile protest

movement and channeled it constructively for Broadmoor’s wellbeing” (Ahlers, March 15,

2007). When BIA President LaToya Cantrell learned of the rally, she supported it, but made

sure to have board members on hand at the rally passing out fliers to announce the upcoming

neighborhood meeting. Then, she reports, “we just set the tone in the very beginning by being

extremely organized (how we ran the first meeting) and results-driven in our approach” (LaToya

Cantrell, February 26, 2008). In so doing, BIA leadership used the rally as a springboard to get

residents working constructively together, laying the foundation for the impressive work that

would follow.

Similarly, neighborhood leadership in Lakeview responded to the threat posed by the

Bring New Orleans Back commission by mobilizing residents to take their neighborhood’s fate

into their own hands. In early October, LCIA leadership caught wind of the commission’s

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potential plans to call for certain neighborhoods not to return. The 3,000 person rally that they

held later that month, reports the then LCIA president, was explicitly designed to prove that

residents remained committed to the neighborhood. The message was that “we’re messed up,

but you don’t kill us that easily. This neighborhood – there’s too many people who care too

much about this neighborhood. It’s gonna be back.” Because of neighborhood leaders’ pre-

emptive action and residents’ overwhelming response, she reports, “it was at that point that we

stopped being a green blob on the New Orleans Commission map,” (Jennifer, July 18, 2007). As

I have discussed, although Lakeview avoided being branded with a green dot, it and every other

flooded neighborhood in the city were given a four-month window in which to “prove their

viability” when the BNOB report was released in January of 2006 (Donze and Russell 2006). As

occurred in Broadmoor, Lakeview’s leadership responded by mobilizing residents to

constructively rise to the challenge, organizing the coordinated District 5 effort to clean up from

the storm and plan for longer-term recovery. “We initially met in January of ’06,” reports the

chairman of the District 5 effort, “and the first thing on our agenda was ‘can we prove the

viability of this neighborhood, so that when government resources become available, we will be

in line for recovery” (Nelson, June 20, 2007). The constructive and proactive approach fostered

by neighborhood leadership in Lakeview stands in stark contrast to the response of Gentilly’s

leadership.

While Broadmoor and Lakeview leadership began mobilizing residents to rise to the

city’s challenge in the wake of the BNOB report’s publication, Gentilly’s leadership did not. In

an email sent to the Gentilly After Katrina listserv the day after the report’s release, the newly-

elected president of the GCIA insisted that responsibility for Gentilly’s recovery should lie first

and foremost outside of the neighborhood. “In my view we have not received the services in

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many areas that the CITY must provide in order for us to engage in demonstrating the ‘vitality’

or ‘Viability’ of a neighborhood within the recommended deadline,” he wrote (GAK 2008).

Rather than attempting to mobilize residents to rise to the commission’s challenge, he told

residents “know that we are working hard as an association and with local officials to push for

revisions that are fair and just” (GAK 2008). Already, the stage was being set in Gentilly for

inaction.

The differences between the three neighborhood’s responses to the Bring New Orleans

Back commission plan stem firstly from the long prior experience among Broadmoor and

Lakeview leadership of fighting on behalf of their neighborhoods, versus the lack of such

experience among Gentilly’s newly-minted leaders. This experience taught Broadmoor and

Lakeview leadership that they could expect very little from the city’s notoriously disorganized

and ineffective government. “We estimate that Lakeview itself is in the forties and District Five

itself is way up in something like the sixtieth percentile in tax base in the city of New Orleans.

But we can’t get a street fixed” said Jennifer, recounting why Lakeview had tried to secede from

Orleans Parish in the 1980s (Jennifer, July 18, 2007). Similarly, BIA President LaToya Cantrell

reflected: “My experience with city government in general is where I learned that you have to

demand action and results in order to get them” (LaToya Cantrell, February 26, 2008).35

Because of this experience, leadership in both neighborhoods believed the Bring New Orleans

Back commission report’s suggestion that significant help from the city would not be

immediately forthcoming. An LCIA board member, for example, remembers that in the wake of

the release of the BNOB report, it was “obvious to me that if we were going to recover, it was

35
This is one articulation of the “creative tension” Peterman mentions. This tension exists in healthy quantities
between well-established New Orleans residents’ associations and the city administration. Peterman, W. (2000).
Neighborhood planning and community-based development : the potential and limits of grassroots action. Thousand
Oaks, Sage Publications..

96
going to be the people in the field, on the ground. It was going to be from the people in their

communities rebuilding and taking action on their own” (Phillip, July 13, 2007). Indeed, the past

two and a half years have proven him right. Just as Lakeview residents created their own police

force when they grew dissatisfied with existing police coverage before the storm, residents of

both neighborhoods would be on their own in the storm’s wake to make recovery happen.

Gentilly’s leadership, as evidenced by the GCIA president’s email, did not make this connection.

Secondly, the existence of leadership structures in Broadmoor and Lakeview prior to the

storm also gave leaders in these neighborhoods the legitimacy and confidence to mobilize

residents to take responsibility for their neighborhoods’ recoveries. For example, LaToya reports

that the “BIA's history and long existence pre-Katrina definitely had an impact on our efforts.

The leadership didn't have to work as hard to get folks to buy-in simply because BIA had a track

record of getting things done” (LaToya Cantrell, February 26, 2008). The fact that 3,000 people

arrived at the first LCIA meeting in the storm’s wake proves convincingly that the same was true

in Lakeview. The GCIA, by contrast, had to win residents over one at a time in the storm’s

wake.

In sum, the prior existence of neighborhood leadership in Broadmoor and Lakeview gave

residents the foresight to realize that responsibility for their recoveries lay in their own hands,

and allowed neighborhood leaders to quickly mobilize residents to act decisively upon this

responsibility. This is the most fundamental reason for the success that efforts in Broadmoor and

Lakeview, as it situated the locus of initiative for recovery firmly within each neighborhood.

Residents had to make recovery happen, however they could.

Making this leap, I argue, contributed to the characteristics of the Broadmoor and

Lakeview recovery efforts that have made them so successful to date. Because residents of

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Broadmoor and Lakeview realized that they themselves were responsible for their

neighborhoods’ recoveries, they remained in tight control of their own planning efforts and

realized the importance of being able to implement the plans that they created. They also sought

partnerships to make up for resources and expertise that they themselves lacked. Having

assumed full control over their efforts, they also developed the capacity to adapt to constantly-

changing recovery environment. These characteristics, I argue, helped their efforts to thrive

where Gentilly’s faltered.

II. Residents Generate and Implement Recovery Plans

Residents Generate Plan Content

As I discussed in Chapter 1, Bolin, Kweit, and Peterman all stress the importance of

recovery and development efforts being controlled by residents themselves, (Bolin and Stanford

1998: 34) (Kweit and Kweit 2004) (Peterman 2000: 155-156). 36 Bolin stresses that residents’

“local knowledge” allows them to overcome recovery obstacles within their communities that

outside entities cannot; Kweit and Peterman add that resident-controlled planning and

implementation better conforms to their own preferences. Both observations are salient to the

recovery planning processes undertaken in Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Gentilly. As I discussed

in Chapter 3, residents in Broadmoor and Lakeview facilitated their own planning processes, and

generated the content of their plans themselves. In Gentilly, by contrast, the neighborhood’s city

councilwoman invited renowned urban planner Andres Duany into the neighborhood to conduct

a planning charrette.

36
I have taken some of the content of this section and the following section from papers that I wrote for PAL-218, a
Harvard Kennedy School class taught by Professor Archon Fung. I have obtained Professor Fung’s permission to
use this content in my thesis.

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 True to Bolin’s, Kweit’s and Peterman’s assertions, the wholly resident-driven planning

efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview created plans that were mindful of the immediate challenges

each neighborhood faced. Because residents knew that they would be implementing these plans

themselves, the plans were also pragmatic and realistic. Moreover, the process of resident-

driven planning was at least as valuable to Broadmoor and Lakeview as the finished plans the

efforts produced, because this planning built residents’ capacities to collectively implement their

plans’ content. In Gentilly, on the other hand, Duany’s planning process did not develop

residents’ implementation capacities, and produced a plan that did not directly address the most

pressing problems facing the neighborhood. The plan also gave little thought to implementation.

As a result of these differences, substantial portions of the Broadmoor and Lakeview plans have

been implemented, while Duany’s plan gathers dust.

One woman who attended the Duany charrette in Gentilly reports that residents were

“swimming in ideas” (Harriet, August 4, 2007). However, these ideas were coming from the

professional planners rather than from the residents themselves. Jack, a resident who made a

full-time commitment to the charrette during the week that it took place, describes the process by

which ideas were generated:

They had little teams of architects, they had teams working transportation, various dimensions of an
urban scape, and they were coming up with ideas, and they would put them up on boards, and you could
put little post-its on it or grab one of them and say ‘that’s a dumb idea’ or ‘wow, that’s really interesting,”
and there was a good interaction. (Jack, July 9, 2007)

While Jack was not unhappy with this arrangement, and while residents did have the

ability to veto or modify unsound ideas, many in Gentilly have increasingly come to realize that

the content this planning process generated does not comport with their own fundamental

priorities for recovery. Harriet, for example, said

It seems like with these professional planners there’s all of this emphasis on visual stuff. To me,
cosmetic improvements. You know, you can throw out a really attractive plan of a town center or what a
renovated neighborhood is going to look like.

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She feels as though Duany’s planning process missed the things that are most hindering

Gentilly’s recovery.

More and more over the past few years I’ve been thinking ‘just put all the money in infrastructure
improvements. Especially flood protection, but also streets, sewerage and water, power grid, all of those
things. And if there’s any left, fix the schools. And I think that would be the basis of bringing the city
back. Of course, that’s not glamorous stuff. You can’t make pretty drawings of levees and sewer
systems. You know, that’s not what the planners do. (Harriet, August 4, 2007)

By contrast, because residents were generating the content of their neighborhoods’ plans

in Lakeview and Broadmoor, the plans addressed the diverse (if unglamorous) issues that

residents found most pressing. In Broadmoor, for example, a crime wave in the neighborhood

prompted residents to devote significant time to planning a crime prevention program –

something that would fall outside of the scope of traditional urban plans (LaToya Cantrell, June

29, 2007). In Lakeview, the resident-generated plan included a prioritization of street repairs and

an itemized budget for their completion (Phillip, July 13, 2007). In this way, as one observer of

New Orleans planning efforts observed, “Duany created a typical urban plan – a plan for

redeveloping an area – a plan for example that Boston might use for redeveloping the waterfront

over a period of 10-20 years. But what Gentilly needed was a Recovery Plan and not an Urban

Plan” (Ahlers, November 26, 2007).

Resident Implementation

Moreover, resident-driven planning in Broadmoor and Lakeview developed residents’

capacities in both neighborhoods to implement their plans. The processes drew in substantial

involvement from hundreds of residents, most of whom had not been involved in neighborhood

affairs before the storm. Adam said that he was “probably the least civic minded person” before

taking part in Lakeview’s planning effort, but found the work compelling and decided to stay

involved. As the planning and infrastructure recovery process in Lakeview came to a close, he

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shifted his involvement to spearhead successful fundraising efforts for the Beacons of Hope. Of

his involvement in the neighborhood, he muses that “it’s actually been one of the best things that

ever happened to me” (Adam, August 4, 2007). Similarly, when Broadmoor’s planning process

ended and its implementation phase began, many residents stayed on to serve on one or several

of the neighborhood’s implementation committees (Karen, July 20, 2007; Catherine, July 23,

2007). Thus from a manpower perspective, the planning process in both Broadmoor and

Lakeview helped to build the neighborhoods’ abilities to implement their plans.

The planning process also taught residents how to efficiently and effectively work

together to achieve concrete goals. For example, the same residents who served on Broadmoor’s

recovery planning committees proceeded to spend thousands of hours writing winning grant

proposals for the neighborhood’s library and school, thousands more applying successfully for

an elementary school charter and hiring the school’s administration, and thousands more

working for the newly founded Broadmoor Development Corporation. Resident-driven planning

processes in Broadmoor and Lakeview thus built up significant working capacity amongst

residents.

In Gentilly, by contrast, the merely consultative role that residents played in Duany’s

planning process reinforced the notion that residents were not themselves responsible for their

neighborhood’s recovery. One man who took part in the process remembers that the planners

often told residents “‘OK, we are going to rebuild better. So what do you want?’” He

remembers: “that kept getting pushed at people. ‘What do you want, do you want a dog park, do

you want this, do you want that?’….They actually thought they were going to get that” (Tony,

July 2, 2007). The planners’ approach reinforced a mentality among Gentilly’s residents of

“asking” for recovery. Simon, for example, recalls that “we were very much in the mindset of

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‘let’s ask for everything and we will work towards getting as much of that as we can’” (Simon,

June 23, 2007). Even in the seemingly empowered part of his sentence – “work towards getting”

(my emphasis) – his mentality seems to be that of receiving recovery help rather than of doing

recovery work. The Duany planning process, then, did little to foster a sense of responsibility for

enacting recovery outcomes among residents.

Another reason that residents of Broadmoor and Lakeview have successfully

implemented an array of recovery initiatives is that their planning processes actively anticipated

subsequent resident implementation. The pastor of Broadmoor’s Annunciation Church perhaps

best summed up this planning ethos. “An urban plan is not butterflies and high schools and

rainbows,” he says. “You have to show wood, bricks, nails. Nth degree detail. Not what you

want, but how you are going to do it.” (Jerry Kramer, June 26, 2007). Relentless focus on

implementation has been vital for both neighborhoods’ successes.

The final Broadmoor plan clearly reflects the residents’ orientation towards

implementation. Each section of the plan opens by stating its desired recovery outcomes, and

then proceeds to thoroughly develop strategies to achieve those goals. The plan’s “Housing”

section, for example, identifies numerous outside funding sources and potential partner

organizations to support rebuilding for low-income residents’ houses, lays the groundwork for a

proposed Community Development Corporation, makes a proposal for a faith-based volunteer

program for house gutting and reconstruction, and suggests an effort to extend Broadmoor’s

Historic District status to receive additional protection and funding under the National Historic

Preservation Act (Broadmoor 2006: H 1-20). In the year and a half since the plan’s release,

residents have followed many of these steps, and the neighborhood now boasts the Broadmoor

Development Corporation, a 125 bed volunteer center at Annunciation Mission, and an emerging

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partnership with Rebuilding Together, a national housing nonprofit. Thus, Broadmoor’s focus

upon implementation during its planning process left it well poised to achieve the goals it set out

for itself.

Although Lakeview’s recovery successes have not grown as directly from its planning

process as have Broadmoor’s, Lakeview has also benefited from a heavy emphasis on

implementation in its planning process. When the District 5 subcommittees identified problems

that could be immediately addressed, they set to work rectifying them rather than simply

planning to address them at a future date. The approach, as a committee chair explained, was to

“plan for it and do it at the same time” (Nelson, June 20, 2007). For example, as plans were

finalized to re-zone Harrison Avenue to encourage the development of a larger “downtown”

district, a District 5 subcommittee began applying to various “Main Street” grants that would

provide substantial funds to spur commercial development (Adam, August 4, 2007).

Many residents who had been active within the LCIA prior to the storm were already

used to having to work hard to implement neighborhood initiatives, and the planning process’s

emphasis on simultaneous implementation ingrained this ethos further. Thus, although the

District 5 report did plan for implementation as thoroughly as Broadmoor’s, this has not proved

to be a significant hindrance to recovery in Lakeview. For example, the District 5 plan called for

the repair and reopening of Lakeview’s fire station, assuming implicitly that the New Orleans

Fire Department would undertake this job. When it became clear that NOFD lacked the

resources to make the necessary repairs, LCIA members began spearheading a fundraising effort

to pay for the renovation themselves (Jane, July 25, 2007). Thus, as is the case in Broadmoor,

Lakeview’s successful attainment of recovery outcomes is due in part to a close connection

between plan formation and plan implantation. – and who is responsible for both.

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 In Gentilly, by contrast, planning efforts were characterized by minimal focus on resident

implementation. For example, Duany and his team proposed the creation of a Gentilly “town

center” at a busy intersection, but gave little thought as to how it would actually come into being.

After the charrette process, residents discovered that creating the town center would not only

cost tens of millions of dollars, but would also require them to divert a US Highway – Gentilly

Boulevard – which would require congressional approval (Simon, June 23, 2007). Needless to

say, this aspect of Duany’s plan has not come to fruition.

III. Partnerships and Outside Resources

While resident-driven planning efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview laid the groundwork

for residents to work towards recovery outcomes in their neighborhoods, these residents have by

no means “gone it alone.” On their own, residents have neither the financial means nor the

expertise to fully drive their own recoveries. This section examines partnerships formed by

residents of Broadmoor, Lakeview and Gentilly, and argues that constructive partnerships that

advise, resource, and fund resident efforts are vital to the successful implementation of

neighborhood recovery initiatives. These observations confirm the significance of the assertions

made by Nakagawa and Peterman that successful redevelopment efforts depend on the utilization

of outside ties and resources (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004: 15-16), (Peterman 2000: 155).

However, Gentilly’s experience shows us that these partnerships must not take the onus of

ultimate responsibility for neighborhood recovery off of residents themselves.

Lakeview’s partnerships have provided both sound advice and much needed resources to

the neighborhood. When the District 5 Steering Committee set out to spearhead a planning

process for the Lake Area neighborhoods, residents on the committee realized that they did not

know how to create an urban plan. As a result, remembers Nelson, “we teamed up very

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quickly…with the University of New Orleans College of Urban and Public Affairs.” After

consulting with the department, residents arranged for “professors and [undergraduate] students

and grad students to come in with us and help put together a plan” (Nelson, June 20, 2007). As

subcommittees were established, they were teamed up with University of New Orleans faculty

members. Ten faculty members, several of whom consulted with multiple committees, were

ultimately involved in the effort. The professors helped residents to determine which factors

their plan should address and what format it would need to take. As Phillip remembers, “they

provided to us resources for the initial planning aspects of creating a written plan that you would

use to redevelop [a neighborhood]” (Phillip, July 13, 2007). Having helped to task the

subcommittees, they stayed in the background of District 5’s planning process, acting as advisers

when questions arose but not exerting control over the resident-generated content of plans. In

this way, residents benefited from outside expertise without sacrificing control over their

planning process.

Lakeview has also formed partnerships with nonprofits, corporations, and privately

wealthy individuals who live outside the neighborhood. These partnerships have funded and

resourced a great deal of the neighborhood’s recovery initiatives. Some of these partnerships

have formed through residents’ personal connections. For example, several months after

opening the first Beacon of Hope out of her house, Denise Thornton received a $50,000 donation

for her organization from her husband’s employer, the owner of the New Orleans Hornets

basketball team (Denise Thornton, July 19, 2007). Similarly, a resident in charge of restoring the

neighborhood’s green spaces was an oil industry employee, and he secured donations from Shell,

Chevron, and other companies to fund landscaping projects throughout the neighborhood. As

Lakeview became more organized in the storm’s wake, more lucrative and formalized

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partnerships were also secured. The United Way and the Blue Moon Fund agreed to partner with

the Beacons of Hope, providing it with hundreds of thousands of dollars to expand its operation

and hire full time staff members (Denise Thornton, July 19, 2007). As it became clear that

Lakeview’s fire station would not quickly reopen, residents took it upon themselves to undertake

its renovation. They solicited funds for from various corporations, secured building materials in

a donation from Lowe’s Home improvement, and convinced a local developer to donate the time

of one of his work crews (July 25, 2007). By cultivating these donor networks, Lakeview‘s

leadership has managed to sustain recovery initiatives that would otherwise be well outside of

residents’ collective reach.

Broadmoor has similarly benefited from constructive partnerships that have both

informed and resourced its efforts. Leaders of the Broadmoor Improvement Association have

developed a close consultative relationship with a Harvard Kennedy School fellow named Doug

Ahlers, who first approached neighborhood leadership on the Kennedy School’s behalf. Like the

consultative partnerships the District 5 committees formed with University of New Orleans

professors, the Broadmoor-Kennedy School partnership has provided residents with needed

advice and expertise. However, residents have not fallen into the role of depending on Harvard

affiliates in the neighborhood to do work for them. Ahlers remembers that the “was grilled for

hours” by the skeptical BIA board members before they accepted his offer of partnership (Doug

Ahlers, December 17, 2007). Harvard’s role, all agreed, would be purely consultative; the

content of the Broadmoor plan and leadership of the planning process would still come from

Broadmoor residents themselves.

The relationship between Harvard and Broadmoor has proved to be quite fruitful.

Students from the Kennedy School, the Business School, the Education School, the Graduate

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School of Design, and the College have worked in the neighborhood during spring break and

summer vacation in both 2006 and 2007. These students have worked alongside residents to

support their efforts, but unlike Duany and his team, they have not sought to influence resident

preferences or shape the content of Broadmoor’s plan. In March of 2006, for example,

Broadmoor’s recovery committees had identified the diverse array of issues their plan needed to

tackle, but were still struggling to envision the form that the plan would take. To address this

problem, a team of Harvard students spent a week finding examples of model plans from other

communities and cities. As the co-chair of the revitalization committee explained:

[T]hey created a template, an urban planning document, based on dozens of urban planning documents
from all over the internet. So when we said we wanted flood mitigation, they pulled out the Missouri
Achewah Town flood mitigation [plan] so that we could get a model of what to copy….It ended up being
this document that…just goes in order of the things we said we wanted, to give us a model (Hal Roark,
July 6, 2007).

Broadmoor’s partnership with Harvard yielded it not only supportive footwork performed

by students, but also frank and constructive advice. When the components of a first draft of

Broadmoor’s plan were assembled, Doug Ahlers recommended that the plan be substantially

reworked. “It was going somewhere good, but Doug said again, you know, you have to work

backwards on this. This is where you want to go, how are you going to get there? You know, a

plan is not where you want to be, it’s how you’re going to get there.” In this way, Doug acted as

a coach and a consultant without attempting to sway residents’ visions of recovery. Like a good

teacher pushing a student to develop a promising essay, Doug pushed Broadmoor residents to

fortify their vision and turn it into a plan that would be both practically workable and respected

by officials in the city. This example suggests that outside experts can act as coaches and

strategic consultants to neighborhood efforts, so long as ultimate responsibility remains with

residents themselves.

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 As I have discussed, Broadmoor has also cultivated a substantial network of partnerships

with congregations, nonprofits, and the private sector to help fund and resource its recovery

initiatives. The Carnegie Endowment and CH2M Hill have funded its library construction, Shell

Oil has paid intern salaries, Annunciation Church has provided office space and built a volunteer

center, and new partnerships are emerging with Rebuilding Together and the Salvation Army to

renovate neighborhood houses. The creation of these partnerships has been a consciously

articulated component of the neighborhood’s approach. The Broadmoor plan calls for a “Six

Point Redevelopment Strategy”, referring to the cooperation between six distinct groups:

residents, developers, government, the private sector, faith-based groups, and universities:

Instead of trying to control all activity within its borders or develop new businesses in which it has no
proven competency, the citizens of Broadmoor, through the Broadmoor Improvement Association and
Broadmoor Community Development Corporation (BDC), will partner with universities, faith
communities, private funders, NGOs, foundations, government, and private developers to create the
synergistic environment that empowers these diverse groups to cooperatively exercise their core
competencies within Broadmoor to the attainment of Broadmoor’s citizens’ predefined goals. 37
(Broadmoor 2006: Goals-7)

Broadmoor’s successful implementation of this strategy has been a vital component of its overall

success, as its residents themselves had neither the resources nor the “core competencies” to

undertake the neighborhood’s ambitious recovery initiatives on their own.

The GCIA, to its detriment, has neither benefited from nor sustained an array of

partnerships. In large measure, this is because the lack of a cohesive effort in Gentilly means

that rather than supporting pre-existent resident initiatives, potential partners find themselves

creating help for the neighborhood “from scratch”. These arrangements usually fail to have their

desired impact on the neighborhood’s recovery. I have already shown, for example, that the

short partnership between Andres Duany and the GCIA did little for the neighborhood. Another

37
The influence of “Kennedy School speak” is relatively clear within this quotation. Kennedy School students
worked with residents as the final report was assembled, and in this case may well have influenced the writing
process. The “Six Point Redevelopment Strategy”, however, was generated by a resident planning committee, not
suggested by a Kennedy School intern (Kramer).

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less-than-ideal partnership existed between GCIA and Dr. Quintus Jett, the Dartmouth Business

School professor who has performed one complete and several partial housing repopulation

surveys in Gentilly. Three members of the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association’s leadership

complained that even after the neighborhood contributed volunteers to his effort, he would not

give them detailed breakdowns of the data they had collected. “Let me know if he gives you

anything”, one told me, because “we have not been able to get anything out of him that was

useful, or user friendly, in spite of all of the time that our volunteers put into his project”

(Monica, February 19, 2008).

Overall, this examination of the role of outside partnerships in Broadmoor, Gentilly, and

Lakeview suggests that partnerships are vital to the successful implementation of ambitious

neighborhood recovery initiatives. Partners have valuable insights and resources to provide

residents, and community-driven recovery efforts cannot succeed without them. However,

productive partnerships are predicated upon the existence of well-established resident-driven

efforts, as partners can effectively support ongoing resident efforts, but have much less success

creating “help” from scratch.

IV. Adaptive Capacity

The New Orleans recovery environment is volatile and dynamic, and successful resident-

driven recovery efforts must be able to adapt to a constantly evolving array of threats and

opportunities. The pastor of Broadmoor’s Annunciation Church has developed a well-known

catchphrase in the storm’s wake: “be fluid, not flexible, because flexible is too rigid” (Jerry

Kramer, June 26, 2007). Adaptive capacity has been critical to the ultimate success of recovery

efforts in Lakeview and Broadmoor. In Gentilly, by contrast, the GCIA has shown little

flexibility, continuing to attempt recovery efforts that show no signs of success.

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 Broadmoor residents have designed their plan to be a flexible “living document”. This is

important both because it gives Broadmoor the unusual capacity to release updated versions of

its plan, and also because it has prevented residents from feeling constrained by the plan’s

content as they work to implement it. Residents sometimes call their plan “the Broadmoor

Bible”, but it is increasingly referenced as “the Broadmoor Plan Version 1.0.” A year and a half

after the plan was released, many of the goals contained within it have been met, many others

have fallen by the wayside, and many new goals have emerged. As opportunities and priorities

change, talk in the neighborhood has turned to releasing an updated version of the plan to reflect

these new realities. This is an important step, as the plan lends the neighborhood a great deal of

legitimacy in the eyes of potential partners and funders, and it will lose credibility as it falls out

of date. Residents feel empowered to undertake this update; they know what it takes to produce

a plan, and their continued involvement in the plan’s implementation has kept them up to speed

on new developments. However, as the resident who now directs the newly-founded Broadmoor

Development Corporation points out, Broadmoor’s empowerment in this regard is unusual.

No one else will come up with other versions of their plan. All the other plans: the UNOP plan, the ULI
plan, the Lambert Plan, the BNOP plan, are all done in planning software that no one has. Even if you
gave me the digital rights to it, and gave me a copy of it, I don’t have the software to open it. (Hal Roark,
July 6, 2007).

Broadmoor’s plan, by contrast, was written in Microsoft Word and then converted to a PDF; it

can be easily updated by any Broadmoor resident with basic technical skills access to a

computer.38 Thus, Broadmoor enjoys the relatively unique capacity to release new versions of its

plan as its recovery progresses, leaving it well poised to tackle more challenges in years to come.

38
It should be pointed out that although Broadmoor’s plan is simple to modify, it is quite graphically appealing and
does not look unprofessional. When the plan was in its late stages, residents hired artists to sketch some of the
“Future Visions” that residents put forth. These sketches, along with well selected photographs and a good layout,
give the plan the feel of being professionally produced.

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 In a more immediate sense, Broadmoor has benefited from viewing its plan as a valuable

guide but one that is not fixed in stone, as this has allowed residents to adapt to unforeseen

circumstances as they implement it. For example, Broadmoor’s plan anticipated that the

neighborhood would be able to partner with the New Orleans affiliate of Habitat for Humanity in

order to rebuild flooded homes. It became clear after the storm, however, that Habitat would not

be able to partner with Broadmoor, and for over a year, no clear alternative partner emerged.

Then, however, the stars aligned. Broadmoor Development Corporation Executive Director Hal

Roark learned of the availability of funds from the Red Cross and Salvation Army that could be

used to rebuild housing of low-income residents, funds that could well be gone if they are not

claimed in several months. He also learned that Rebuilding Together, a national housing

nonprofit dedicated to renovating housing for low income individuals and the elderly, was

interested in working in Broadmoor. The available funds could be used to fund Rebuilding

Together renovation projects in the neighborhood, but in order to secure them, better case

profiles would have to be built of eligible residents, and absent homeowners who had been as-yet

unable to rebuild would have to be tracked down. With this realization, Hal remembers, the

Broadmoor Development Corporation “turned on the width of a dime” and hired several

additional caseworkers with unused grant money. These case workers will identify residents

who could benefit from the Rebuilding Together program, and work connect the dots with the

Red Cross and Salvation Army to secure funds for the renovation of each individual house (Hal

Roark, February 29, 2008). It is hoped that dozens of homes will be renovated as a result. Of

course, such an arrangement was never envisioned by Broadmoor’s plan. However, because the

plan is seen by residents as a flexible, living document, they are guided but not constrained by

the ideas contained within it.

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 Lakeview has been similarly adaptive and nimble in the storm’s wake, which has allowed

it to tailor its recovery initiatives to both meet residents unmet needs and satisfy the desires of

donors. Its most impressive feat of flexibility has been its quick adoption and expansion of the

Beacons of Hope during the summer of 2006. Over the course of a few months, Lakeview’s

primary recovery activity shifted away from the planning and infrastructure recovery work of the

District 5 group and towards individual homeowner assistance provided by the Beacons of Hope.

The story of this transition demonstrates that Lakeview’s leadership had an astute sense of

emerging opportunities to receive funding for neighborhood recovery initiatives.

By the summer of 2006, members of the District 5 group were becoming increasingly

frustrated at their inability to win grants. Because the neighborhood was largely white and

middle to upper-middle class, the chair of the District 5 finance committee says that “it wasn’t

politically correct to really fund us” (Adam, February 19, 2008). Lakeview needed to begin

rendering hands-on assistance to individual homeowners, and it also needed to overcome its

white middle-class image in the eyes of donors.

As Lakeview leadership was coming to this realization, they were approached by Denise

Thornton, who had founded the first Beacon of Hope out of her house in the small adjacent

Lakewood neighborhood. They quickly realized that her organization was had both great

potential to help Lakeview homeowners, and also great potential to receive substantial funding.

Adam remembers being impressed with her work, but also immediately aware that the Beacons

of Hope could be a way to “sell” Lakeview to otherwise reluctant donors:

Denise came to one of our meetings and told us about some idea she had been pursuing in her
neighborhood, and, you know, she even had a…tag line for it: the Beacon of Hope. And I, I immediately,
as soon as I heard her go over it, I immediately knew that that was going to be my sales pitch. (Adam,
August 4, 2007)

112
Adam had been waiting to request funding from the New Orleans branch of the United Way until

he had a model to sell them on, and now he did.

Literally that afternoon I walked out of that meeting and marched into [the director of the United Way’s]
office…and gave him the spiel, without really having anything prepared. And asked him if he’d help.
And he said ‘yes.’ (Adam, August 4, 2007)

Adam was soon spearheading a substantial fundraising campaign for the Beacons, and meeting

with remarkable success:

when we went to [potential funders] as District 5 or when we went to them as Lakeview, wouldn’t fund
us. Just, not at all….But when I went to them with the Beacon of Hope story – same thing, it was just
packaged differently – they gave us a couple hundred thousand bucks. (Adam, August 4, 2007)

With the funding secured, a number of residents who had been very involved in the District 5

organization shifted their involvement to the work of supporting and growing the Beacons. They

began planning for the Beacon’s expansion throughout Lakeview, and soon, seven Beacons had

opened in the neighborhood.

Lakeview’s leadership had realized the limitations inherent to their work for the District 5

group, and demonstrated great adaptive capacity and creativity in embracing the Beacons as an

alternative model. As I have shown, the Beacons have had profoundly positive effects upon

homeowner return within Lakeview, and the adaptive decision-making of Lakeview’s leadership

helped this change to come about.

The Gentilly Civic Improvement Association, by contrast, has largely remained wed to

repertoires it adopted soon after the storm. These, unfortunately, have been insufficient to spur

recovery within its borders. For example, one GCIA member worked for two years after the

storm to attract private developers to Gentilly’s abandoned shopping centers. Developers,

however, refuse to invest in an area that has yet to re-establish a reliable clientele. They insist

that repopulation must occur before they invest millions of dollars in commercial ventures within

113
the neighborhood. As a result of this limitation, this man’s efforts never bore fruit, and he

recently cut back on his involvement with the association (Monica, February 19, 2007).

Similarly, the GCIA retains a heavy emphasis on information sharing in its meetings.

Although receiving accurate and up-to-date information was vital in the chaotic months

immediately following the storm, its importance has now declined. As a result, so too has

attendance at GCIA meetings, which used to draw hundreds of residents and now draw only

dozens (Mike, July 24, 2007).

Thus, resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview have managed to overcome

obstacles and take advantage of new opportunities by developing the capacity to adapt and

innovate. This adaptive capacity has been vital to their success. Conversely, the GCIA has

failed to innovate in the face of obstacles and change course as circumstances within the city

evolve. Its lack of adaptive capacity has helped to prevent it its efforts from coming to fruition,

and threatens to render the organization increasingly irrelevant in Gentilly.

***

Thus, I have traced the process by which recovery efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview

fostered active engagement amongst neighborhood residents and enacted an array of beneficial

recovery programs, while Gentilly’s recovery effort faltered. At the root of this difference in

outcomes is the fact that neighborhood leadership in Broadmoor and Lakeview, realizing through

past experience that recovery help would not be forthcoming and utilizing their standings within

their respective neighborhoods, mobilized residents to assume full responsibility for their

neighborhoods’ recoveries. Having embraced this responsibility, residents organized themselves

in a variety of ways that augmented their collective capacities to see recovery through. By

writing and implementing their own plans, seeking partnerships to make up for their limitations,

114
and striving constantly to adapt in order to better achieve their ultimate goals, residents in

Broadmoor and Lakeview have marshaled consistent recoveries within their borders.

115
 Conclusion
Post-Katrina New Orleans teems with fascinating and difficult questions. Why have tens

of thousands of American citizens received so little assistance in the wake of one of the worst

disasters in the country’s history? Should vulnerable areas of the city be rebuilt? What does the

aftermath of Katrina reveal about the state of racial segregation and poverty in American cities?

Given the prevalence and importance of such questions, my focus on rigorously

explaining a difference in recovery outcomes between three neighborhoods may seem overly

narrow or a bit quixotic. My motivation, however, is to isolate and explore some of the causes of

successful of neighborhood recovery, in hopes that this information could prove useful to still-

recovering Gulf Coast communities, or to victims of future disasters. Indeed, several important

lessons can be garnered from the findings I present.

Firstly, my finding that the difference between Gentilly’s inconsistent recovery on the

one hand and the consistent recoveries in Broadmoor and Lakeview on the other is convincingly

explained by the success of resident-driven recovery efforts in the latter two neighborhoods

confirms that disaster recovery is not merely a function of overarching structural variables. This

contradicts Rossi’s findings (Rossi 1993: 35), offering hope to disaster-stricken communities,

especially those like Broadmoor that do not have “structural variables” on their side.

My exploration of how resident-driven efforts tangibly affect recovery has both

theoretical and practical significance. Within the disaster recovery literature I reviewed that

focused on the effects of collective efforts on recovery, only Bolin showed how these efforts can

tangibly aid recovery on an individual-by-individual basis (Bolin and Stanford 1998). Moreover,

Bolin did not show that these individual results could in fact aggregate out to affect overall rates

of recovery within a community. My findings, on the other hand, provide both a micro and a

116
macro picture of collectively-driven recovery, and explicitly spell out how the two realms

interact. On an individual level, return to a flooded neighborhood can be stymied not only by

material limitations, but also by lack of confidence and by logistical challenges. Given these

hurdles, I argue for the dual importance of process and outcomes in resident-driven recovery

efforts. The presence of a broad-based recovery effort in a community can motivate still-

displaced residents to return, even before such an effort has produced tangible outcomes of its

own. Especially in communities where residents have the means to return to their homes, the

effects of recovery efforts on resident motivation to return may account for the bulk of these

efforts’ contribution to a neighborhood’s recovery. However, recovery efforts in both

Broadmoor and Lakeview also prove that residents, through collective action, can implement

projects which tangibly lower material and logistical hurdles to resident return. The most

dramatic example of this might well be in Broadmoor, where the Broadmoor Development

Corporation, through its partnerships with the Salvation Army and Rebuilding Together, will

soon begin renovating the homes of residents who lack the financial means to rebuild.

Indeed, New Orleans neighborhoods face a two-step challenge on their roads to recovery,

and resident-driven recovery efforts can help to overcome both of these challenges. The first is a

collective action problem, which exists among residents who have the means to return but are

hesitant to do so. The second is a material problem, which manifests itself among those residents

who do not have the means to rebuild. Residents hoping to spur full recovery in their

neighborhoods must work together to overcome both hurdles, but the collective action problem

must be overcome first. BIA President LaToya Cantrell seemed to refer to this two-step process

when she remarked “we’ve rebuilt Broadmoor the community, now all we’ve got to do is rebuild

some houses” (LaToya Cantrell, March 17, 2007).

117
 My finding that the success of resident-driven efforts in Broadmoor and Lakeview stems

from their organization prior to the storm also has theoretical and practical significance.

Nakagawa’s assertion that social capital plays a substantial role in determining the success of a

community’s recovery may well be valid, but my study suggest that it was of secondary

importance in Lakeview and especially in Broadmoor when compared to the role played by each

neighborhood’s established leadership structure in the storm’s wake. Although my measures of

Broadmoor’s pre-storm social capital are admittedly impressionistic, it was certainly not high.

Few of the individuals currently most involved in Broadmoor’s recovery efforts knew one

another before the storm, residents did not feel a strong pre-storm sense of neighborhood

identity, and residents generally report not knowing neighbors beyond those in their immediate

vicinity. Still though, with the urgency of the green dot and the skillful steering of BIA

leadership, residents quickly began to work cohesively together to save their neighborhood.

Although social capital played a greater role in facilitating Lakeview’s mobilization, it was still

pre-existing, organized neighborhood leadership that that framed and guided the neighborhood’s

response to Katrina.

The practical significance of this finding is that organized communities are more resilient

in the wake of disaster. Indeed, this is one of the primary lessons that other disaster-prone cities

have taken away from their examinations of the New Orleans recovery process. The mayor of

San Francisco, for example, has taken personal interest in Broadmoor’s story, and his staff

regularly corresponds with Broadmoor leadership. The San Francisco city government is now

attempting to spur the city’s residents to found neighborhood associations, in anticipation of a

potentially severe earthquake that could hit the city in the next several decades.

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 Finally, the remarkably similar processes by which Broadmoor and Lakeview residents

undertook successful recovery efforts provides a “how-to” guide for other disaster-stricken

communities hoping to follow in their footsteps. Effective resident-driven development in these

two cases began with widespread mobilizations brought on by an immediate sense of urgency

among residents. Neighborhood leaders channeled this urgency, and prompted residents to take

responsibility for their communities’ recoveries into their own hands. Then, residents in both

neighborhoods undertook their own planning processes in which they not only envisioned the

restoration they hoped to bring about, but also planned concretely for how they would enact this

vision. Indeed, residents of both neighborhoods used their planning processes to build their

collective capacities to undertake substantial recovery projects. They also formed diverse arrays

of partnerships, which made up for deficiencies in their collective expertise and resources.

Finally, as residents built their implementation capacities, they also developed the ability to

creatively adapt to shifting threats, limitations, and opportunities. Through this process, efforts

in both Broadmoor and Lakeview fostered and maintained high levels of resident engagement

and implemented an array of projects aimed at assisting resident return. These successes

significantly boosted recovery in both Broadmoor and Lakeview. The recoveries driven by

Broadmoor and Lakeview residents have been remarkable accomplishments, and they beg to be

replicated.

119
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Interviews and Communications39

Adam, Lakeview resident. 4 August 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Adrian, Gentilly resident. 26 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Bert, Broadmoor resident. 13 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Catherine, Broadmoor resident. 23 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Charles, Broadmoor resident. 3 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Denise Thornton, Lakewood resident, founder of the Beacon of Hope Resource Centers. 19 July
2007.
Doug Ahlers, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. 3 March 2007. Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Doug Ahlers, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. 26 November 2007. Email
correspondence.
Doug Ahlers, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. 17 December 2007. Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Digital Recording
Fraiser, Gentilly resident. Interview by author, 3 August 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording.
Francis, Broadmoor resident. Interview by author, 12 June 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Digital recording.

39
I have utilized first name pseudonyms for my interview subjects unless given explicit permission to use their real
names.

121
Hal Roark, Broadmoor resident, Executive Director of the Broadmoor Development
Corporation. 6 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Hal Roark, Broadmoor resident, Executive Director of the Broadmoor Development
Corporation. 29 February 2008, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hank, Broadmoor resident. 19 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Harriet, Gentilly resident. 4 August 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Harry, Lakeview resident. 29 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Heather, Broadmoor resident. 30 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Jack, Gentilly resident. Interview by author, 9 July 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording.
Jane, Lakeview resident. 25 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Jennifer, Lakeview resident. Interview by author, July 18 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording.
Jerry Kramer, Broadmoor resident. Interview by author, 26 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Digital recording.
Justine, Lakeview resident. 9 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Karen, Broadmoor resident. 20 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Kelly, Lakeview resident. 6 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
LaToya Cantrell, President of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. 17 March 2007,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
LaToya Cantrell, President of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. 29 June 2007. Digital
recording.
LaToya Cantrell, President of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. 19 February 2008.
Email correspondence
Mary, Lakeview resident. 6 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Daniel, Lakeview resident. 1 August 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Megan, Lakeview resident. June 28 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Mike, Broadmoor resident. July 24 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Monica, Gentilly resident. February 14, 2008, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Nancy, Lakeview resident. 20 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Nelson, Lakeview resident. 20 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Nicole, Gentilly resident, 7 August 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Nora, Gentilly resident. 21 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Phillip, Lakeview resident. Interview by author, 13 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording.
Sarah, Lakeview resident. Interview by author, 2 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording
Simon, Gentilly resident. 23 June 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Sheila, Gentilly resident. 16 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Suzanne, Gentilly resident. 19 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Tony, Gentilly resident. 2 July 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital recording.
Virginia Saussy, Broadmoor resident. Interview by author, 18 June 2007, New Orleans,
Louisiana. Digital recording.
Will, Broadmoor resident. Interview by author, 14 June 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digital
recording.

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