CC image from davecito

Two pieces on the challenges in re-building following a disaster. The first, from Lydia DePillis at the New Republic, on the challenges Brad Pitt has encountered in his rebuilding efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans:

But for a while now, Make It Right [ed- Brad Pitt’s charity foundation] has been having trouble enticing people to buy their made-to-order homes. The neighborhood has turned into a retirement-community version of its former self; the ward’s other former residents are dead or settled elsewhere. Construction on the cutting-edge designs has run into more than its share of complications, like mold plaguing walls built with untested material, and averaged upwards of $400,000 per house. Although costs have come down to around half that number, Make It Right is struggling to finance the rest of the 150 homes it promised, using revenue from other projects in Newark and Kansas City to supplement its dwindling pot of Hollywood cash. Now, in a wrenching deviation from its original mission, the non-profit has decided to open up to buyers who didn’t live in the neighborhood before Katrina.

But there’s a Catch-22: The neighborhood doesn’t have enough residents to attract many stores and services, and prospective buyers end up elsewhere because the neighborhood doesn’t have enough stores and services. So about 90 households, primarily elderly people like Guy, are living in futuristic homes that most Americans would covet, and yet there’s not a supermarket—or even a fast food restaurant—for miles.

The core challenge is meshing the reality of what conditions are required to successfully re-build a neighborhood following a disaster with the desires of the community, who (understandably) would like things to be simply a better version of what was there before:

If the Lower Ninth has any chance at becoming a livable community, new people are going to have to move in. But the young people who flooded the city after the waters receded are still finding plenty of room in the hipper neighborhoods, like the Marigny and the Bywater, that retained more of their historic housing stock. And the city seems determined to maintain the Lower Ninth’s structural disadvantage in this regard: Although a 2009 analysis of residential market potential showed that only about 20 percent of the existing demand was for single-family detached homes, that’s how the neighborhood has seen itself, and how it wants to remain. Even when a developer proposed the kind of dense, multifamily project that would attract the kind of amenities everybody says they want, residents howled in protest.¹

“It’s always been a single-family neighborhood, and that was the community’s desires were after Katrina, and I think it will go back as a single-family neighborhood,” says Jeff Hebert, director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

The second piece is from Bob Ellickson on street grids (hat tip to David Schleicher), including a substantial discussion of the permanence they have over time – particularly noting how street grids rarely change much following substantial disasters (examples include post-war Hiroshima; post-fire Chicago; and post-Katrina New Orleans) that open the door for re-imagining and re-building the city.

The abstract:

People congregate in cities to improve their prospects for social and economic interactions. As Jane Jacobs recognized, the layout of streets in a city’s central business district can significantly affect individuals’ ability to obtain the agglomeration benefits that they seek. The costs and benefits of alternative street designs are capitalized into the value of abutting lots. A planner of a street layout, as a rule of thumb, should seek to maximize the market value of the private lots within the layout. By this criterion, the street grid characteristic of the downtowns of most U.S. cities is largely successful. Although a grid layout has aesthetic shortcomings, it helps those who frequent a downtown to orient themselves and move about. A grid also is conducive to the creation of rectangular lots, which are ideal for siting structures and minimizing disputes between abutting landowners. Major changes in street layouts, such as those accomplished by Baron Haussmann in Paris and Robert Moses in New York City, are unusual and typically occur in bursts. Surprisingly, the aftermath of a disaster that has destroyed much of a city is not a propitious occasion for the revamping of street locations.

In the second half of the paper, Ellickson discusses the path dependence of a street layout once it is established, finding that 88% of street centerlines from the 19th century in select cities remain the same today. Even in places like Chicago that saw near complete destruction of the city retained 99% of street centerlines from the 1850s. Ellickson suggests that legal reasons and property rights contribute to this path dependence, but the political costs of change and the sense of place from residents are also important considerations.

The link between Ellickson and DePillis emerges in Ellickson’s discussion of these reasons for the path dependence of street grids, stemming from a desire to maintain the status quo:

A second downbeat theory would attribute some of the stickiness of street locations to psychological dispositions that may be ephemeral. Most city residents, for example, have a “sense of place.” Most of them also have a bias that favors maintenance of the status quo. They appraise the prospect of a loss from a given reference point to be more momentous than the prospect of an equivalent gain. When contemplating a proposed rejiggering of local streets, city officials, landowners and residents thus are all likely to exaggerate the costs of losing a street right-of-way, and to undervalue the benefits of gaining a new one.

Another urbanist reason for everyone to read Thinking Fast and Slow!

Ellickson’s other discussion of street grids is well worth reading, but the implications of the path dependence of street grids (and the difficulty of changing the intensity of land uses) raise some interesting issues for places like Tysons Corner and the proposed street grid.  Adding more streets to a superblock layout is certainly a different challenge than removing/re-aligning streets in an existing network, but the central point about the path dependence of streets raises serious issues for the promise of retrofitting suburbia.