Letters From Our Readers

New Orleans Regional Residential Recovery Plan

Dear Urban Conservancy:

Since Hurricane Katrina passed through, I have been living in Petal, MS and I have had time to think about the needs of the people who own the 150,000 or more severely flooded houses.

Since I believe that I have skills in planning, I thought about the owners of the houses that flooded and what they need. I designed a process that I called the New Orleans Regional Residential Recovery plan. On November 11-12, 2005, I attended the rebuilding New Orleans meeting sponsored by the American Institute of Architects at the Marriott on Canal Street. Following that meeting, I converted the ideas on the residential rebuilding process into 22 draft slides that I consider as “idea starters”, not THE PLAN, for a mass rebuilding effort that will require private and government resources.

I have tried to get these ideas into discussion by any means possible. One person at the Urban Land Institute has the slides. On January 11, 2006, I gave a hard copy of the slides to John Beckman who presented the Urban Plan at the meeting of the Rebuilding New Orleans Commission. I have sent hard copies to the Louisiana Senators and local representatives including Rep, Richard Baker.

So far I have had very little feedback. The type of rebuilding program that I envision is something that I have heard many people ask for. My hope is that the Richard Baker bill or other legislation with universal support will be enacted to give property owners help with the decisions they need to make about the future of their property.

The main steps in the process are as follows:

1. Contact owners and define a recovery plan for each house
2. Build a database with the plan and progress of each house
3. Develop construction cost information and ways to reduce cost that support property owner rebuild/tear down decisions
4. Develop and implement a land use and an infrastructure plan
5. Plan and develop a work schedule from the “Flood Map??
6. Apply insurance or other funding to fund the work teams
7. Recruit and train a large corps of workers to do each task
8. Where needed, use heavy equipment for mass tear downs
9. Access and stabilize ALL damaged housing in the next 36 months
10. Coordinate the housing recovery with the infrastructure rebuilding

Please provide any feedback to me on how together we can get some progress on rebuilding residential property.

Sincerely,

Ben Claassen

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