Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi even harder than it hit Louisiana. Biloxi, a small city that juts into the gulf, was completely flattened. The Times had a fascinating article on the politics of rebuilding Biloxi.
The city planners want to rebuild the city according the New Urbanism movement.
New Urbanism arose as a reaction to sprawl, the default American landscape of highways lined with strip malls and big-box stores and suburban subdivisions populated by a homogeneous and insulated middle class. The New Urbanists proposed higher-density, pedestrian-friendly communities: old-fashioned neighborhoods with schools and shops, parks and offices, single-family homes and low-income apartment buildings, all mixed together and connected by shady streets and wide sidewalks. Seaside, Fla., was the first real New Urbanist project, and it remains the most famous, in large part because the movie “The Truman Show” was filmed there. But the Congress for the New Urbanism, which was founded in 1993 by six like-minded architects, now has 2,500 members who have built scores of communities.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Yeah, that’s because you’re an effete blue stater. The locals hate it. A good number of the people won’t be able to afford the new housing. One interviewee said, “Affordable to who? It won’t be me, I can assure you of that.” The locals don’t want walkable neighborhoods.
…New Urbanism is like Whole Foods: it’s meant to be good for you, but it’s expensive, at least on the front end, and it comes with a set of cultural connotations that generally play best among the prosperous and the self-consciously progressive. At Tyrone’s Barber and Beauty Shop, Bernice Catchings had flipped through the plan, with its spiffy little houses and tasteful storefronts, and said: “A poor lady like me, what the hell am I going to do with that? Walk by it and admire it? We can’t buy it. The white man will always have us pushed to where we have to just . . . go by and admire it and then go home somewhere and eat them old beans and bread and be thankful.”
Actually, the locals don’t want to even follow FEMA’s elevation codes, which is insane given the dire weather predictions. They want to build cheap homes quickly without concerns for safety or aesthetics.
Reminds me of the problems of trying to enforce environmental regulations on the third world.
New Urbanism. Whole Foods. Environmentalism. How do we make progressivism more than an upper class movement?
(Here are two old posts on suburban planning.)
Apt. 11d 
Very good point! I have been reading about rebuilding NO, most recently in The Covenant With Black America. This is such a great opportunity to try something different… I hope a lot of creative, thoughtful people can become part of the process. Most importantly, the folks who live there, and who have been living there, and who call it home.
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The thing is, though, there’s nothing innately more expensive about walkable housing. It becomes more expensive because it’s desirable, and higher demand drives the prices up. And the people quoted aren’t saying they wouldn’t like the planned New Urbanist developments, just that they don’t believe they’ll be allowed to live in them at a price they can afford.
This isn’t an argument for building less walkable housing, it’s an argument for building more, and subsidizing them to the extent necessary.
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I agree with LizardBreath. I live in Chicago, an eminently walkable city, and there’s a good amount of affordable housing here. The keys are good public transit, laws that make it relatively easy to be a landlord, and jobs you can get to without a car.
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There is a quote, which I should have included in my post, from a community activist who said that their people did not want these walkable communities, because they wanted their cars. A good number of the people in these commmunities were Vietnamese and, for them, being American meant having a car and a nice plot of land. They HATED the designs for Biloxi.
As they have been designed, the new homes were not affordable for the people of Biloxi. Yes, I’m sure that it could be done cheaper, but between the new FEMA codes and the new designs, they won’t be.
BTW, I’m a huge fan of New Urbanism. I gues I didn’t make that clear in the post. But I do worry about the race/class issues.
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Could it be that progressive fail to grasp the aspirations of recent immigrants and the poor? They are not aspiring to be upper (or upper middle class) like us. It’s not the idea of shopping at Whole Foods that drives them. Rather, they’re seeking what the class just above them possesses: a car, a free standing house, a little land.
New Urbanism rejects a symbolic system of wealth that has reigned in America for decades. I think it’s good, because that system has been responsible for the suburbanization of the country. But why should we be surprised when people strive for more widely accepted trappings of success?
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That was a pretty silly article in some ways. Instead of $140,000 homes (which, for new ones, are completely reasonable; I live in Augusta GA, which is as working class-dominant as the Gulf Coast (and isn’t located along a shore) and even new townhomes go for $100,000 to $120,000, already. OLD homes go for $60,000 and that territory.
So, instead of new homes at a reasonable cost, you’ll see new giant casinos with a clientele that never leaves the places. And you’ll have big ugly condos, owned mostly by vacationers, I presume. I presume the author will be happy with that outcome!
I have plenty of issues, and agree with critics with their problems, with the assumptions of new urbanism or more specifically most of the existing new urbanist developments (although few stories such as this make you aware that Duany and others have been involved in mixed-income developments in places like Macon GA). But at least these people were and are trying.
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Laura:
Have you ever been to Biloxi and, more specifically, did you visit its beachfront neighborhoods before Katrina? The neighborhoods did not the typical suburban-style housing, or particularly large lots, for the most part. I just went to the Miss. Gulf Coast two weekends ago, and the housing that survived a few blocks from the water is of the fairly high-density variety.
And, for the record, all the Coastal areas besides Biloxi are said to be taking the CNU plans quite seriously. Biloxi always had more commercial development, despite a large stock of immediate post-bellum era housing, and classic Gulf Coast vernacular architecture.
Ray
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Thanks for the link. Sorry I didn’t see this earlier. My school workload in the spring kept me from keeping up with my RSS feeds.
You probably already know this, but New Urbanism strives for mixed-income housing as well. There was a whole section in Suburban Nation about the advantages of mixed-income communities, being able to run across your doctor and kid’s schoolteacher on the street and poor kids being able to have positive role models.
As others have said above, the prices are high not because it costs more to build that way, but because the demand is outstripping supply.
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I think I am in a unique position on this since I am both fairly well familiar with “new urbanism” (also referred to as “neo-urbanism”) via books I have read on the subject as well as personally witnessing Seaside, Florida go from a single tin-roof house in 1979 (Seaside was incorporated in 1980 I believe) to the well-visited community it is today (and it is quite expensive to live or even visit there). I am also very familiar with the Biloxi-Gulfport area with many relatives and friends who live there. I was there just a week ago visiting for the first time since Hurricane Katrina and even though some places are rebuilding most residences damaged and destroyed are still empty many with FEMA trailers still outside. Rebuilding is going to take decades, not merely years. Although the new urbanism might be feasible in a small area, it won’t work well for the majority of the area for far too many reasons to list here.
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