News Roundup

There Go the Neighborhoods

The New Orleans Agenda
By Tom Farley, M.D.
January 9, 2007

Bike paths, parks and sidewalks aren’t frills, but it turns out they’re a bit too ‘visionary’ for us

Those of us who suffered through a year of painful planning meetings sensed that it was happening, but last week we got the final word. The money is gone.

The only elements of Unified New Orleans Plan that will be funded, we’re told, are “recovery” items. We can forget “visionary” items, including bike paths, playgrounds and beautification.

Troy Henry, a consultant to the planning effort, said leaders are trying to stick to the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s call for a plan that will simply help the community recover. He said they want to avoid criticism that we’re asking for too much. Sixteen months ago, the story was different. Then, I stood outside a barricaded Jackson Square, where President Bush promised the nation that “the work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”

The Associated Press reported then that “rebuilding across the devastated region is expected to cost $200 billion or more in the near term.”

Some of us, imagining $200 billion pouring into a ruined city, saw the greatest opportunity in American history to rebuild a wonderful place that maintained the charms of the old New Orleans and also fixed its many problems. How could so many billions have disappeared so quickly?

First, the $200 billion never materialized. The $62 billion that was approved dwindled fast.

After FEMA’s botched emergency relief effort and their multibillion-dollar recovery contracts, the state was left with $10.4 billion for community development. Then the LRA gave private homeowners, businesses, the hospital system, schools and a long list of others nearly all of those funds, leaving New Orleans neighborhoods only $116 million. That is just 4 percent of the $3.3 billion the Lambert group estimated we need.

It makes me wonder what exactly we are rebuilding here.

Do people really want to rebuild their houses only to live in a pock-marked wasteland of vacant lots and half-filled strip malls? Yes, we need hospitals and schools, but what about people who are trapped in their houses because the sidewalks are treacherous chunks of concrete, the streetlights are decapitated and neighborhood playgrounds have been replaced with puddles and debris?

Katrina didn’t just destroy buildings; it also destroyed neighborhoods. Bike paths, street lights, sidewalks, walkable commercial centers, playgrounds and other areas where children play and neighbors talk to each other are not frills. Safe common areas are what makes a bunch of houses a neighborhood.

Hundreds of people in dozens of neighborhoods eagerly came to planning meetings. Ideas poured in. You can dismiss beautification as “visionary,” but the fact is that quality of life is important to people here, and it is becoming increasingly important as an economic development tool nationally.

Walkable, active neighborhoods also happen to be healthy neighborhoods. Most of the leading killers of our time — heart disease, diabetes, cancer — can be prevented by physical activity, and some of the best ways to get the daily physical activity we need is to walk for errands or jog in a nearby park.

It seems that the billions the federal government is sending us for community development have all been spoken for — by individuals who want their houses back and institutions that want their buildings back. It’s hard to blame them for asking. But great neighborhoods are much more than buildings. In the long line of petitioners for the federal dollars, why should neighborhoods be dead last?

Tom Farley is a professor at Tulane University. His book, “Prescription for a Healthy Nation,” was recently published by Beacon Press. His e-mail address is tfarley@tulane.edu