Louisiana looks toward compact development

St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, which had 67,000 residents before Hurricane Katrina damaged most of the homes in its jurisdiction, may pull back from the most flood-prone areas, such as those along the 40-Arpent Canal, where a surge of water caused the most severe destruction. It may also adopt the SmartCode. Both actions were recommended in a charrette that was sponsored by the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) and led by Andres Duany over nine days in March. The Council for the parish, which encompasses hundreds of square miles of low-lying land southeast of New Orleans, approved 17 resolutions endorsing, in principle, the charrette’s recommendations. Duany’s team suggested concentrating development into more compact centers, and offered guidance on the critical question of what to save and what to raze. Some houses should be restored as is, others should be elevated and renovated, while still others should be demolished, according to the concluding report. The charrette, said to have involved thousands of residents, was part of a months-long planning process for which Calthorpe Associates of Berkeley, California, is chief organizer. Specific actions are to be decided by officials after consulting the inhabitants of each neighborhood. Joel DiFatta, vice chairman of the Parish Council, praised the charrette’s idea of creating a retail town square with condominiums overlooking the Mississippi River in a community called Old Arabi. Housing on piers When greater New Orleans rebuilds, it is likely to do so with fewer slab-on-grade houses and with more houses that are elevated on piers — a form of construction that was common until after World War II. Many existing slab-on-grade houses are likely to be demolished because it would cost too much to raise them to conform with FEMA requirements. Houses that are already supported on piers can be raised at a more moderate cost. Whether the result will allow good urbanism depends in part on how high they have to go. The charrettes across southern Louisiana appeared to come off well. In Lake Charles, the City Council approved proposals the day the charrette ended. In Abbeville, proposals won adoption the day after the charrette, and in Vermilion Parish they were adopted one week later, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. Joe DiStefano, Calthorpe’s project manager for the regional planning effort, said a trend-based forecast is now being developed to help state, parish, and local officials make their decisions. The forecast will reveal what Louisiana will be like in 2030 if it follows a conventional route and what it will be like if different decisions are made on land use, transportation, and other matters. With the help of advisers such as The Brookings Institution, Fannie Mae, and the advocacy organization PolicyLink, the LRA team will identify the “policy levers to be pulled” in order to produce various results. Stakeholder workshops throughout the region will begin in early June. New Orleans, which initially kept its recovery effort independent of the state, “has decided they would like to be part of the LRA effort,” DiStefano said. All of this makes an exceedingly complicated enterprise, especially at a time when, DiStefano says, “people are sort of planned-out and meetinged-out.” He observes: “It’s the most challenging process I’ve ever worked on.”