Gentrifying disaster

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/10/gentrifying-disaster

Hello Everyone:

I'd like to start off today with a bit of current events news.  Hollywood area council member Eric Garcetti has been elected the new Mayor of Los Angeles, ho hum.  If I sound blase about it, it's because every time Los Angeles gets a new mayor, he comes in with a flurry of high-minded goals and expectations.  Then reality sets in.  All I can say is that I hope he doesn't mess up the city any more than it is already.  All right on to today's rant and rave.

I realized today that I've been carrying on about gentrification and leaving out an important, yet timely discussion about gentrification in the wake of disaster.  Hurricane Sandy and the tornadoes in Oklahoma have really brought this subject into sharp focus.  Mike Davis, an urban studies professor in Los Angeles and great writer (check out City of Quartz), wrote about the subject about seven and half years ago in the wake of Hurricane Katerina in an article for Mother Jones titled "Gentrifying Disaster".  I have to caution you that Mr. Davis is an avowed Socialist so sometimes his politics does get in the way of what is otherwise very keen observations about urban life.  Be that as it may, his observations about the George Bush administration's response to displaced residents in New Orleans really hit the nail on the head.  I'd like to focus on one section of this article, "The New Urbanism Meets the Old South" because we've been talked about the subject before and in the wake of the recent natural disaster, it has relevance.

In the wake of Hurricane Katerine, it was revealed that there was a shocking lack of any planning on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the return of residents evacuated from the hard hit areas.  On top of this, there were no strategies for any restoration of essential public services, job creation, or the delivery of social welfare benefits to the city's low-income residents.  Into this already chaotic situation the Congress of New Urbanism parades into the city trumpeting promises of a new and improved urban environment.  The CNU was founded by Miami-based architects and urbanists Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in the mid-eighties.  Mr. Duany and Ms. Plater-Zyberk and their CNU cohorts offered a vision of building communities that were socially diverse and environmentally sustainable based on the systematization of the "City Beautiful" principles.  These principles were pedestrian scale, traditional street grids, an abundance of open space, and a mix of land uses, income groups, and building forms.  Sounds ideal doesn't

In theory, of course it sounds like a utopian urban dream but according to Mr. Davis, in practice diversity has never been achieved.  Mr. Davis points to the famous Seaside Development, caricatured in the 1998 film "The Truman Show," as an early warning that kitsch would win out over democracy in the New Urbanist world.  Indeed, the stage-set like building forms, intended to evoke a time past, reveal a sentimental-to-the-point-of-manic devotion to earlier period styles that one can find at Walt Disney World.  Despite the populist tone of the CNU manifesto, Mr. Duany did not hesitate to involve corporate imaginers, developers, and politicians.  For example, in the mid-nineties, then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros incorporated New Urbanist principles into many of its HOPE VI projects.

HOPE VI was originally conceived as a low-rise, high-density replacement for the anonymous housing projects that blighted the urban landscape.  However, HOPE VI, according to Mr. Davis, quickly became a replacement strategy for the poor themselves.  The strategically-sited projects, such as New Orleans St. Thomas homes, were taken down to make way for neo-traditionalists townhouses and retail businesses (in this case a giant Wal-Mart) in the New Urbanist vein.  The "mixed-use, mixed-income" estates were usually advertised as pockets of diversity utopia but, in the case of St. Thomas, they were more exclusionary than inclusionary.  Why do I not sound surprised?  Nationally, the HOPE VI projects resulted in a net loss of more than 50,000 units of badly needed low-income housing.  Thus proving my point from yesterday's blog about the need to do low-rise, high-density housing right.

Savvy developers have been quick to take up the New Urbanist cause as part of their over eager land grabs and wholesale neighborhood demolitions.  Similarly, conservatives such as Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Heritage Foundation (http://www.heritage.org), have recognized the connection between political traditionalism and architectural nostalgia.  This connection is older than dirt.  Look at Washington DC, for example.  The choice of Neo-Classical architecture for the White House and Capitol was a deliberate attempt to evoke the "virtues" and "ideals" of ancient Greece and Rome.  This connection is also in evidence in Daniel Burnham's plan for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and his "City Beautiful" plan for Chicago.  Really.  In 2005, Mr. Weyrich wrote that "new urbanism need to be part of conservatism."  This conservatism remakes cities that's purged of the "criminal underclasses."  I put criminal underclasses in quotes because it can be construed to imply those receiving social welfare benefits.

Andreas Duany's courting of politicians isn't limited to Democratic administrations.  Mr. Duany joined with Haley Barbour, the now former Governor of Mississippi, in 2005.  Then-Governor Barbour was trying to milk whatever political and economic advantage he could from Katerina.  For example, one of his stated priorities was bringing the casinos onshore, to create a Las Vegas-type setting, and to rapidly restore the shoreline property values and surpress any debate about moving the population to defensible higher ground.  You could argue that moving the casinos ashore and creating a Las Vegas south would greatly benefit the area in terms of jobs creation and property values but ask yourself, is that really what the residents needed in the wake of Hurricane Katerina?  Yes, they needed jobs, the restoration of services, and a place to live but was this the way to go?  This, no doubt is the same questions that the residents of the New Jersey shore affected by Hurricane Sandy are asking right now and not doubt the survivors of the Oklahoma tornadoes will be asking.

Governor Barbour invited the CNU to help Mississippi rebuild the Gulf Coast "the right way."  The first step in the process was a "mega-charrette," which took place October 11-18, 2005 and brought together 120 New Urbanists with local officials and business groups for brainstorming sessions on the physical reconstruction of their communities.  Andreas Duany led the charge with his romantic visions of "Tara" and Gone With The Wind, extolling the beauty of Mississippi's architectural heritage.  Thus, with such images dancing in everybody's head, the CNU teams spent the week trying show the locals how to replace the strip malls with grandiose Greek Revival casinos and townhouses that would've made David O. Sleaznik envious.  The entire exercise was guided by the parameters of a gambling-driven "heritage" economy with casinos interspersed in the community fabric and mini-Mansions on the beach.  Gone With The Wind gone wild.

In the end, it was not the content of the charrette or the idealism of the participants that was important but the legitimacy that the CNU gave to Governor Barbour and his agenda.  It also made a  Republican shill out of Andreas Duany who never misses an opportunity to push his cure-all for the urban woes.