A back channel query and my response:
"I understand how many people can't rebuild yet if ever, etc., etc. But
what I cannot understand is how, with all the FEMA money, Corps of
Engineers, etc., the streets I see in photos can still be so full of
downed trees and junk, and that clearing teams are not cleaning up the
properties of people who want it. I would think that clearing, at
least, would be a Fed/State responsibility, gladly undertaken."
You may be seeing the persistence of information in that by the time we
see a photo the conditions have already changed, and the same photos
keep being used over and over. One thing that becomes immediatly obvious
when visiting in the Gulf region is that the news media cannot possibly
convey the enormity of the situation. The view that we are getting
through the media is terribly distorted to be too small and too
simple... not unlike say Chernobyl & the Russian media by comparison.
I think first to St. Felix Street in Brooklyn & the subway collapse in
1909 and eventual repairs to the 27 townhouse facades in 2000-2001. On
that project the Mayor's office and the local Brooklyn politicians were
freaking out something terrible, w/ the Mayor's #2 man meeting w/
residents at the site every Friday morning and Tully getting an
ultimatum to be done or forget about their $600M in yearly city
contracts. But then they got to help clean up the WTC and were
eventually given a plum on the Hudson River Park. Whenever government
interfaces w/ private property I get the impression it quickly turns
into a bottomless pit.
The government can give money, which requires paperwork that takes time
to process, but to directly interface with private property is a
problem. Think of all of the current controversy over eminent domain...
.and I read an article yesterday in a rival paper about the NY Times in
collaboration w/ a developer and the eminent domain excercised to obtain
a portion of the property that the new building is being built on --
which sort of situation may have something to do with why these
public-private interface complications are not widely reported. There is
a law suit occuring in which property owners felt they got swindled and
are asking for $200M more and if they win then the taxpayers, not the NY
Times, get to pay the vig.
As to paperwork... John Callan (our fellow BP'r) is the token (his own
word) preservation architect on a FEMA team in New Orleans and his
report is that all he is doing is processing paperwork... not even
visiting the heritage sites that the paperwork deals with. What happens
when you remove the hands-on architect from the buildings? The sheer
volume of processing is overwhelming and will likely go on for several
more years if not at least a decade. Or, I think in terms of the
complications of identification and resolution of property ownership for
double & triple claims that Daniel Boone went through in Ohio &
Missouri. People went their entire lives and died before it was ever
resolved. In our capital culture when property is not clearly identified
as to ownership it is like a free fire zone. Land rush.
The streets, the public streets, are for the most part clear. You can go
into 9th Ward, Holy Cross now and nobody stops you. I understand that
they did stop people for a while. I also understand that though people
are not supposed to be living there that they are camping out. They
don't yet have infrastructure utilities in full effect, water, phone &
electric. It does take time to rebuild that sort of stuff. My thinking
is that a city that took centuries to build to begin with cannot
possibly be rebuilt in a few years despite however enormous the desire.
(As a side note, Pyrate is, we hope, being enabled as a
consultant/contractor on Lafayette 1st Cemetery in NOLA -- hope for good
stories on that front!.)
In the case of the houses & properties themselves on one hand the owners
may be dead -- there are codes in large X's spray painted on the front
of house after house indicating the initial assesment of the structure
and if there were, or were not, dead people found inside. And then there
is the situation that those who are alive nobody officially yet knows
where they are at... and there seems to be issues w/ personal privacy
that prevent public agencies from tracking them down. A much bigger
scope of the similar problem of trying to track down if people were, or
were not, in the WTC and what to do with sorting out the cars abandoned
by default in the suburban parking lots. Or figuring out what to do with
all of the abandoned hi-heel shoes left on the sidewalks of lower Manhattan.
What is needed is NGO... which is - only one example of many - where an
alliance between the National Trust, World Monuments Fund and the
Preservation Trades Network working with the Preservation Resource
Center of New Orleans comes in. The alliance is driven by money that
American Express put on the table (telling the National Trust & WMF -
who is only after 9/11 developing projects in the Continental US) and
then that followed up by more money from the Florence Gould Foundation
(whose mission is to encourange French-American relations). The
difficulty then is that there are a plethora of NGO interests running in
to do their part... all of them seemingly uncoordinated and bouncing off
of each other and the government, local, state & Federal mucking about.
Where we are at right now w/ 9th Ward, Holy Cross is next week meeting
(not me but others w/in PTN) w/ the local Neighborhood Association and
the alliance of organizations potentially bringing in student volunteers
through the Univ. of Florida Preservation program (w/ Tulane possibly,
and w/ the Savannah School of Architecture & Design etc.) to do a
neighborhood cultural assessment that could serve as a backbone for the
Resettlement Plan that the local communities have to come up with if
they anticipate getting any public funds and/or direct physical
assistance in rebuilding their neighborhoods.
There is so much to be done and by proportion such a small amount of
sustainable resource that I believe the strategy of the city has been to
insist that communities present plans to show that they can bring their
people back. Nobody wants to expend resources on neighborhoods that the
population is not wanting to return to. Or as Ralph says, "We fix things
that we believe will last because we believe people to be around to
enjoy the fruits of our labors, and because it's our responsibility to
make the world a better place for those who are with us, and those who
come after us" A big question in NOLA right now is will there be people
to be around to enjoy the fruits of their own labor?
It is an incredible situation of having to tell the story of people and
the buildings and cultural environment that they inhabit.
][<
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