Fight for Survival Revives New Orleans Neighborhood

By Nicole Wallace

Not long after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding that devastated New Orleans, a city

planning commission recommended that the neighborhood of Broadmoor not be rebuilt but instead turned into parks and other open space to serve as a drainage area.

That proposal galvanized the Broadmoor Improvement Association, founded in 1930, to fight for the working-class neighborhood’s revival.

The group’s high-profile Broadmoor Lives campaign showed the city that Broadmoor wasn’t going to go down without a fight, and today the neighborhood has one of the highest percentages of returned residents in areas that flooded.

Residents decided after a six-month planning process that repairing their local public library and reopening the neighborhood’s elementary school were the most important priorities for bringing back Broadmoor.

“The way you recover from a situation like this is to improve the neighborhood and make it better, so that people will want to return,” says Hal Roark, executive director of the Broadmoor Development Corporation, the recovery arm of the neighborhood association.

The organization has made significant progress toward meeting those goals.

It has raised more than $3-million — including a $2-million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York — toward the renovation and restocking of the library, which will also include state-of-the-art computer equipment.

At the same time, the neighborhood group has started a charter school that opened in September. Classes are currently held at a temporary location two miles outside Broadmoor.

But the organization applied to the Louisiana Department of Education’s Quick Start program, and its neighborhood school, Andrew H. Wilson Elementary, was selected as one of five schools slated for immediate renovation. The building is scheduled to reopen for the 2009-10 school year.

Harvard Help

Broadmoor has reached out to many organizations for help, both in New Orleans and outside the city.

The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has provided policy expertise and leadership training, set up an internship program for graduate students to work on projects with the group, and acted as a sounding board for neighborhood leaders.

Douglas Ahlers, a senior fellow at the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who studies disaster prevention and recovery as a national-security issue, says he was skeptical when he started working with the Broadmoor Improvement Association, even though he knew that research shows that the vast majority of recovery work takes place at the individual and neighborhood levels.

“At first I thought, ‘Well, they won’t be as organized. They won’t be as expert on issues as they should be. They have no training for this,’” he says. “So I actually had fairly low expectations going into it.”

Now, Mr. Ahlers says, he realizes that he could not have been more wrong. He says he has been impressed by the “knowledge and motivation and dedication” residents bring to bear on the problems their neighborhood faces.

Time and again, he says, he has seen that residents decide on the same solutions to those problems that outside experts would have recommended.

“But the difference is that instead of having the solution prescribed for them, they come to the solution out of their own wrestling with the issue and, as a result, are also incredibly motivated and committed to the implementation,” says Mr. Ahlers.

As an example, he points to the neighborhood association’s deliberations about how to help homeowners who haven’t been able to repair their homes.

So far, nearly three-quarters of Broadmoor’s homeowners have at least started, and in many cases finished, renovating their houses. (Broadmoor was one of the last neighborhoods to flood, so very few homes had to be demolished.)

The quarter who have not are the ones who will need the most help, people who are very poor, elderly, or disabled.

When the neighborhood group first started thinking about how they could help, one of the first ideas residents considered was starting a construction company, something that Mr. Ahlers says would have been difficult and expensive to get off the ground. In time, he says, residents came to that conclusion as well and decided on another plan.

The Broadmoor Development Corporation started a three-way partnership that helps residents get the money and materials they need to rebuild.

The Church of the Annunciation, also in Broadmoor, has created a dormitory that can feed and house up to 100 volunteers, and the New Orleans chapter of Rebuilding Together oversees those volunteers as they work on residents’ houses.

“The whole overriding philosophy of Broadmoor is that the way we’re going to get out of this stuff is partnerships,” says Mr. Roark.

Different Stages

Of the 270 neighborhood groups in New Orleans, some, like Broadmoor, have become incredibly savvy in their ability to carry out programs and raise money, says Mr. Ahlers. A few, he says, are dysfunctional, and others fall somewhere in between.

In the months after the levees broke, all of New Orleans was waiting for someone to come and rescue the city, says Mr. Ahlers.

“The hardest thing for some of the neighborhoods, the ones that fall at the other end of the spectrum, is that they’ve never really made that psychological switch to say, ‘Yes, we have to do it,’ as opposed to, ‘Someone else will come in and do it for us,’” he says. He notes that a white board in the Broadmoor group’s office reads, “Be your own cavalry.”

As proud as Mr. Roark is of the work that Broadmoor and other local organizations are doing, he’s angry that so much of the task of rebuilding has fallen to the neighborhoods. The excuses that government agencies give, about how complicated recovery is, don’t wash with him.

“Frankly I’ve got no tolerance for that,” says Mr. Roark, “because if neighborhood associations, who don’t know how to do any of this stuff, can figure it out, then why can’t the alleged experts that we’re actually paying to do this — at the city, state, and federal level — get it done?”

And too often, says Mr. Roark, government shortcomings are all that people in other parts of the country hear about the recovery effort. The coverage can be so disparaging, he says. “People talk about us like we’re not in the room,” he says, “like we don’t watch CNN or read The New York Times.”

Mr. Roark says that he wishes the news media would also shine a light on the efforts that ordinary residents are making to rebuild their city.

“If most Americans knew how hard people are working, not to get a handout but to get some resources so we can pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, I think they’d be incredibly proud.”