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.)