Urban Studies Commons^™

Beacons Of Hope: How Neighborhood Organizing Led Disaster Recovery, Denise Thornton

New England Journal of Public Policy

The goal of this article is to broaden the scope of your knowledge about New Orleans neighborhoods by describing our revitalization strategies and our common goals, which may be of value to civil society, business, and government leaders in other cities facing social and economic decay. Many have studied us, many have tried to blend into the colorful fabric of our society, but most fall short in truly understanding our rich and diverse culture and our remarkable social structure. This lack of understanding was detrimental to our recovery and is explained in the coming paragraphs.

Legal Origins And Evolution Of Local Ethics Reform In New Orleans, David A. Marcello

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Office of Inspector General came first, and like many another reform in city government, it was born as a campaign commitment. When I met with state senator Marc H. Morial in September 1993 to discuss the issues component of his campaign for mayor, ideas poured out of him for an hour and a half, and I took copious notes. “We need an Inspector General,” he said, “and we need Charter Revision”—the two ideas linked from this first campaign convening. When he was elected mayor six months later and inaugurated in May 1994, charter reform became an early and important …

Social Traps And Social Trust In A Devastated Urban Community, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

The last national survey of adult literacy prior to Hurricane Katrina found 40 percent of New Orleans adults reading at or below the sixth-grade level and another 30 percent at or below the eighth-grade level. During the three years before the hurricane, New Orleanians watched as public meetings of its elected school board became models of incivility, where the politically connected struggled for control of contracts and patronage and self-appointed activists ridiculed school officials, board members, and fellow citizens who were attempting to raise the performance of the city’s public schools out of the ranks of the nation’s worst. During …

The New Orleans Criminal Legal System: A Flowing River, William C. Snowden

New England Journal of Public Policy

Ask anyone from New Orleans and they will tell you the city has not been the same since the storm. Although the city has persevered through many storms and hurricanes in its three-hundred-year history, this particular storm—Hurricane Katrina—is notorious for the transformation it brought to New Orleans in the years that followed.

The makeup, culture, and rhythm of New Orleans have changed, but so too have the various systems that give the city its tempo—particularly the criminal legal system. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that revealed deficiencies, abnormalities, and injustices in the New Orleans criminal legal system. Some responses to …

Preventing Bankruptcy And Transforming City Finances After Hurricane Katrina, Andy Kopplin

New England Journal of Public Policy

In 2010, when the Landrieu administration took office in New Orleans, we inherited a financial situation that the mayor compared to the massive oil spill occurring at that very time in the Gulf, the worst in US history. The city was nearly bankrupt. Much of what we faced was the result of factors—Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the subsequent failure of the federal levees, the great recession—that were far from the prior administration of Mayor Ray Nagin’s control. Much was the result of a culture of ineffectiveness and inefficiency that predated his administration. But much was the result of gross mismanagement …

Special Issue Editor’S Introduction: Practical Wisdom And Institutional Transformation In An Urban Disaster, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

As I complete the editor’s introduction to these articles on institutional disruption and transformation in New Orleans triggered by Hurricane Katrina, Corona splashes her colors over maps of the earth. The hurricane pales in comparison with the pandemic, but one contrast between the two occurs to this participant/observer in both.

Prior to Katrina most institutions necessary to proper city functioning—including city administration, police department, and courts—were broken or stretched to the breaking point. As you will see in these articles, following the storm, business and civil society leaders, cooperating with government officials when possible, challenging them as necessary, led dramatic …

The Strange Case Of The Seven Assessors, Janet Howard, Shaun Rafferty

New England Journal of Public Policy

New Orleans was, before Katrina, the only parish (county) in Louisiana to have multiple assessors. There were seven. Each of them had his or her own district, and collectively they formed the Board of Assessors. The strange structure was the vestige of times past, with no rhyme or reason in modern times.

Community Demand For Change And Accountability: A History Of Court Watch Nola, New Orleans’ Community Courtwatching Program, Simone Levine

New England Journal of Public Policy

The criminal justice system, like any other system, is run by insiders: prosecutors, judges, deputy sheriffs, police, clerks, private defense, and public defenders. But system outsiders—victims, witnesses, criminal defendants, and the community in general—have the power to demand respect from that same system and to demand that the system work for them. System insiders have no monopoly on the knowledge and the power to shape the criminal justice system.

The Nutria That Roared: How Building Coalitions Can Empower The Small To Drive Great Change, Michael Hecht

New England Journal of Public Policy

Hurricane Katrina saved the New Orleans economy. To be clear, Hurricane Katrina was not “good”—it was a devastating event, the most destructive storm in American history, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars in damage. But when the books are written, and the story is told, the conclusion will be inescapable: Hurricane Katrina marked a profoundly positive inflection point in the New Orleans economy.

Katrina And The Philanthropic Landscape In New Orleans, Ludovico Feoli

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article explores the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the philanthropic landscape in New Orleans, drawing on the perspective of participants in the field—staff and board members of community, local, and national foundations and key nonprofits—who were surveyed or interviewed for this purpose. It does not offer a definitive statement about the disaster as it pertains to philanthropy; nor does it consider the crucial leadership role of the many individuals involved in the recovery process, even though that role often intercepted with the philanthropic sector. Instead, it seeks to identify general trends that emerge from a qualitative assessment of the …

The New New Orleans, Gregory Rusovich

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region was formed in 1985 by the iconic chairman and CEO of Freeport McMoRan, Jim Bob Moffett. The core mission of the Business Council during its thirty-four years has been to improve the region’s business climate, enhancing the quality of life for the community, working to effect principled reform, and simply striving to make New Orleans a safer and better place to live, work, and raise a family. It consists of CEOs and owners of primarily the largest businesses and employers in the city and has ranged in total membership from …

Reinventing The New Orleans Public Education System, David Osborne

New England Journal of Public Policy

If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third years? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?

Few …

Across Racial Lines: Three Accounts Of Transforming Urban Institutions After A Natural Disaster, James Carter, Nolan Rollins, Gregory Rusovich

New England Journal of Public Policy

At 1:30 p.m. on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina grazed the mostly evacuated city of New Orleans, reserving its most devastating force for coastal Mississippi, just to the east. During the next two days, the federal levees protecting the city failed in multiple places. Sixteen hundred people died in the metropolitan area. Residences and businesses in 80 percent of the city went underwater. Public officials warned residents and business owners that they might not be able to return for two to three months. The scope of devastation in certain parts of the city made ever returning questionable for many residents. …

Rising From Katrina’S Ashes But Still In Crisis: Public Defense In New Orleans, Derwyn Bunton

New England Journal of Public Policy

New Orleans’ nickname “Big Easy” was based on the “anything goes” perception of the city. Feeding this perception was a sense of lawlessness, that New Orleans was a place where the rules changed depending on who you were and who you knew. So when Hurricane Katrina hit the city in August 2005 and tossed everything around—flooding mansions and missions, damaging the Superdome and supermarkets—the storm challenged old perceptions and presented unique challenges. Katrina made at least one thing clear: New Orleans could no longer wait for change, pretend nothing happened, or look back. The city’s survival depended on its ability …

How Data Became Part Of New Orleans’ Dna During The Katrina Recovery, Lamar Gardere, Allison Plyer, Denice Ross

New England Journal of Public Policy

Data intermediaries have a symbiotic relationship with government as the source of most of their information. The open-data movement in government and development of software-as-a-service technologies shaped the data landscape after Katrina. Through relationships and talent transfers with The Data Center, the City of New Orleans went from having its chief technology officer in federal prison and its data systems in shambles to being a nationally recognized leader in open and accountable government. To be effective during disasters, an intermediary should be (1) in place and widely respected before the event, (2) ready to respond immediately after the event and …

The Impacts Of The Bicycle Network On Bicycling Activity: A Longitudinal Multi-City Approach, Wei Shi

Dissertations and Theses

Bicycling is a promising approach to improve health, environment, and economic development of urban places. Theoretically, a bicycle network's component goes beyond lanes and paths, and would generate greater impacts than the sum of its parts. However, most previous research focused on how individual types of bicycle-related infrastructure could promote bicycling. Few empirical studies investigated how bicycle networks impact bicycling activity. This project attempts to address this question. Specifically, how to properly measure bicycle networks, and what impacts bicycle networks have on bicycling activity, e.g. bike ridership and bike mode choice, across different cities and longitudinally.

To address the first …

Webinar: When Growth Outpaces Infrastructure: A Community-Engaged Assessment Of Transportation Gaps, Jandel Crutchfield, Kate Hyun

TREC Webinar Series

This study used a community-engaged interdisciplinary approach to assess the gaps between economic growth and transportation infrastructure development, and the impact of potential gaps on access to opportunities for environmental justice populations within North Central Texas, where population growth has increased over 100% since 2000.

The interdisciplinary team, comprised of social work and civil engineering researchers, in partnership with the regional homeless coalition, measured residents’ perspectives of:

• the economic growth in the area over the past decade,
• the extent to which transportation infrastructure has matched the economic growth, and
• the implications for access to affordable quality housing, employment, quality public …

Visualizing Statewide Trips: Tools To Leverage Gps Data In Transportation Planning, Nikola Markovic

TREC Project Briefs

The University of Utah has a new data visualization service to offer to state DOTs and other agencies. Using Small Starts funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), researcher Nikola Markovic and his team have developed a suite of visual analysis tools to demonstrate how GPS trajectory data can help accurately model and analyze mobility trends. These data are typically purchased from vendors, which means that transportation agencies must first understand the benefits before they decide to invest in data acquisition.

Visual Exploration Of Utah Trajectory Data And Their Applications In Transportation, Seth Miller, Zachary Vander Laan, Yinhu Wang, Nikola Markovic

TREC Final Reports

Transportation agencies have an opportunity to leverage massive GPS trajectory data to support their analyses and enhance their decision making. However, these data are typically purchased from vendors, which means that transportation agencies must understand their benefits before they decide to invest in data acquisition. To help transportation agencies better understand the tremendous value of trajectory data, the PI of the project acquired Utah GPS trajectory data from one of the leading GPS data providers and conducted visual analyses demonstrating applications of trajectory data in various areas of transportation. The analyses focused on (a) evaluating the data itself by exploring …

The Southwest Corridor Light Rail Project, Fiona Cundy, Patrick Sweeney

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Southwest Corridor Light Rail Project is an expansion of the MAX light rail system into Southwest Portland, Tigard and Tualatin. Not only will the project add 11 miles of light rail track and 13 stations to the system, it also includes new bicycle facilities, sidewalks, safer crossings, improvements to local bus service, and significant upgrades to stormwater treatment infrastructure. As a cooperative effort between regional partners, the project is seen as a catalyst to help realize broader shared goals of fostering equitable communities, ensuring healthy environments, and providing robust mobility options for all modes. Currently in the planning and …