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A few gleams of light are appearing in the paths of families made homeless and communities devastated by the monster hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast.
First is a transitional housing plan just announced by the Bush administration. Starting immediately, temporary (three month) vouchers will be issued to displaced families, letting them move out of temporary shelters and into the rental housing market. The move seems incredibly more sensible than warehousing people in trailer parks -- possible future “ghettoes of despair,” in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s words.
The prelude was a rare act of current-day bipartisanship when the Senate on Sept. 15 voted unanimously to support an amendment by Sen. Paul Sarbanes (Dem.-Md.) to create a $3.5 billion program of rental assistance -- enough to provide one year of assistance to 350,000 families.
Both under the administration and Sarbanes plans, the temporary vouchers, including payment for rent and security deposits, can be used anywhere in the country that hurricane families have landed since the storms.
Even so, the housing challenge, by any definition, is staggering. The Enterprise Foundation calculated (pre-Rita) that 455,000 New Orleans and Gulf Coast homes had to be rebuilt entirely, with another 475,000 in need of significant repair. The National Low Income Housing Coalition determined 71 percent of the lost units were low-income.
The initial Bush administration reaction to the vouchers was cool, perhaps because the president’s 2006 budget actually proposed chipping away at the government’s Section 8 voucher program for the poor. But logic, for once, seems to have trumped politics.
Vouchers don’t specify where recipients should pick housing. But they do provide a possible “move to opportunity,” into mixed-income neighborhoods with better schools and better job opportunities. That’s a major step up from the brand of high-poverty, high-crime, high-risk neighborhoods that doom so many youths and families to failure, according to a group of noted sociologists and economists organized by MIT’s Xavier de Souza Briggs.
Gleam of hope #2: The nation’s top “intermediaries” in financing of low-income housing -- the Enterprise Foundation and Local Initiatives Support Corp. and their friends in the foundation and investment world -- are not just setting up a Community Recovery Fund to help cope with the massive shelter challenge. They’re working, reports Enterprise president Bart Harvey, to include two voices often unheard -- low-income residents and the community-based organizations that represent them, plus leaders of faith communities both liberal and conservative -- in the critical debates on just how communities should be rebuilt.
Which leads to gleam #3: Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Republican National Chairman and high-powered lobbyist, has appointed a commission headed by former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, a man known to have big sympathies for the disadvantaged, to head his commission on redevelopment of the state’s hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.
Barksdale, in turn, has turned to famed architect Andres Duany to organize, through the Congress for New Urbanism, a huge set of “charrettes” (broad community forums) to plan rebuilding. They’ll be held October 11-18 -- a big one encompassing the entire coastal region, nine to 11 smaller ones focused on individual communities such as Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula.
The principals of dozens of prestigious New Urbanist architectural and planning firms from across the country have offered to come, either without fee or at a fraction of their normal fees, to hear from state and local officials, city and neighborhood groups, and then help the Mississippians define alternatives that will help them envision a future they want.
A good chunk of the discussion will focus on building standards for more hurricane-resistant homes and buildings -- like the new codes Florida wrote after Andrew, says Duany. Another major potential: developing the coastal rail line for possible passenger service, cutting back on auto dependence.
The local focus, Duany explains, will be on creating areas “that are more diverse, less auto dependent, more environmentally friendly.” There’ll be ideas “to wind back the heritage to 1950 and earlier, to distinctive coastal architecture, about shade and breezes and durability and neighborliness. This will not be about strip shopping centers and subdivisions.”
At the moment, with much of the once-picturesque coast strewn with huge piles of lumber and twisted metal, such visioning may seem tough. Entire neighborhoods were flattened a quarter mile back from the beach. But decisions made now may control the future across a swath of critical issues. Among them: whether to allow or bar high-rises that can block coastal views, where and how the massive casinos introduced in recent years will be allowed to rebuild, and how to achieve less sprawl and more compact, walkable, mixed-income neighborhoods.
In the past, big dollars by big interests called the tune, often eclipsing any public debate, certainly any voice for the dispossessed, on such issues. If Barbour, Barksdale, Duany and the New Urbanist crew can change that, they’ll truly make history.
Comments may be addressed to npeirce@citistates.com
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