Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Strong Civil Society As A Double-Edged Sword: Siting Trailers In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Daniel P. Aldrich, Kevin Crook

Daniel P Aldrich

To meet the dire need for housing created by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans and the staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) worked to create lists of potential sites for trailer parks. This procedure took place within an environment of Not In My Back Yard-ism, or NIMBYism, where a number of communities and individuals expressed their opposition to hosting such trailer sites both publicly and privately. We analyze the final list of city-approved sites to track which factors were correlated with larger (or smaller) numbers of trailers and trailer …