Fallon Aidoo

Hurricane Katrina submerged thousands of single-story, slab-on-grade homes in low-lying New Orleans, disproportionately displacing African Americans they sheltered and sustained. Critical disaster studies cast charitable individuals and organizations as sponsors of Black survival, yet nongovernmental aid programs remain marginal to scholarship on environmental justice and Black geographies. This paper sheds light on the funding programs, public-private partnerships, and design-build projects by which philanthropies and charities aid Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) in retreat from flood hazards. This nested case study of HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization program and the Salvation Army’s EnviRenew program shows Black developers, planners, and architects of retreat from New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park Historic District gained public, private, and philanthropic sponsors at steep costs: the loss of land, life, and leadership in sustainable development. Drawing on administrative data, legal documents, and stakeholder interviews, the mixed-methods analysis finds new housing built above projected base flood elevations inside flood hazard zones not by choice or by chance, but in compliance with aid programs requiring Black participation in land buyout programs (Road Home) and Black facilitation of green home building and buying (Build Back Better). The Pontchartrain Park case of “management failure,” which included rescinded grants and land takings, not only illuminates the macroeconomics and microaggressions that restrict where and how Black resettlement takes place. Ultimately, this article reveals climate mitigation patrons relocate BIPOC households and heritage from endangered places in theory, yet, in practice, their relief formulas may house marginalized minorities in precarious places above measured risks.

Hurricane Katrina submerged thousands of single-story, slab-on-grade homes in low-lying New Orleans, disproportionately displacing African Americans they sheltered and sustained. Critical disaster studies cast charitable individuals and organizations as sponsors of Black survival, yet nongovernmental aid programs remain marginal to scholarship on environmental justice and Black geographies. This paper sheds light on the funding programs, public-private partnerships, and design-build projects by which philanthropies and charities aid Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) in retreat from flood hazards. This nested case study of HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization program and the Salvation Army’s EnviRenew program shows Black developers, planners, and architects of retreat from New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park Historic District gained public, private, and philanthropic sponsors at steep costs: the loss of land, life, and leadership in sustainable development. Drawing on administrative data, legal documents, and stakeholder interviews, the mixed-methods analysis finds new housing built above projected base flood elevations inside flood hazard zones not by choice or by chance, but in compliance with aid programs requiring Black participation in land buyout programs (Road Home) and Black facilitation of green home building and buying (Build Back Better). The Pontchartrain Park case of “management failure,” which included rescinded grants and land takings, not only illuminates the macroeconomics and microaggressions that restrict where and how Black resettlement takes place. Ultimately, this article reveals climate mitigation patrons relocate BIPOC households and heritage from endangered places in theory, yet, in practice, their relief formulas may house marginalized minorities in precarious places above measured risks.

African Americans’ experience of and participation in post-disaster recovery is the subject of many scholarly publications and popular media concerning New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the storm that flooded the city in August 2005. Most scholarship in the social sciences explores Black residents’ right to return to their neighborhoods and the right to rebuild their homes; some highlight the uneven resettlement pattern of returnees while others attend to unequal access to rebuilding resources. Far less studied, the ways by which black business owners returned, recovered and reinvested in their communities and corridors are explored in this paper as well as a growing body of literature on the in/equities of foundation and federal grantmaking post-disaster (Ehrenfeucht & Nelson 2013; Gotham 2013; Lowe & Bates 2013; Marshall et.al. 2016). Standardized and segmented small business data for New Orleans remain scarce even 15 years after the storm. The author partnered with small business incubators, preservation resource centers and cultural district commissioners to build archives of historical, qualitative, quantitative and spatial data on Black enterprises and entrepreneurs, and their participation in disaster recovery grant programs administered by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority since Katrina. Drawing primarily but not exclusively on this archive of private business records, demolition and development permits, grant contracts, project documentation and litigation, participant observation, snowball interviews and stakeholder surveys, I ultimately demonstrate prejudicial development policies and paternalist planning paradigms have made black real estate development and holding companies—the city’s least common type of black-owned business—vulnerable to predatory inclusion in philanthropic programs and investment portfolios. The paper concludes by outlining how post-disaster business and building revitalization programs, whether they are government, foundation and/or bank-supported, can re-prioritize the business of Black land holding and development in capital raising, program design, project selection and grantee evaluation.

Preservationists and philanthropists are just starting to take stock of their symbiotic relationship—partly due to planners recognition of its importance.  This paper, drawn from a multi-city, mixed-methods study of preservation philanthropy, illuminates the newest philanthropic instrument of preservation—loans and loan guarantees—and their programmatic focus: commercial buildings showing signs of chronic disinvestment or acute damage. The authors’ participatory observation in and qualitative research of Grow Baltimore and Façade Renew informs the paper’s focus on how foundations leverage community development block grants and community development policymakers leverage philanthropy to revitalize and reface storefronts. Before delving into the spatial, aesthetic and cultural politics of façade improvements in Baltimore and New Orleans, the paper outlines philanthropy’s role in Main Streets revitalization. The latter highlights the “new normal” for commercial revitalization patrons and participants: an insufficient eco-system of economic development incentives that relies on periodic but substantial disaster related funding.  Quantitative analyses of their collective impact on the small businesses and social enterprises that take place there are just emerging from both the National Main Streets Center and academics concerned about their role in disaster recovery (Rumbach and Appler 2019). This paper disaggregates foundations’ financing from disaster recovery funding to offer specific suggestions for how philanthropic support of commercial property owners in historically “chocolate cities” (Hunter and Robinson 2018) can extend beyond façade rehabilitation to building retrofits that position legacy businesses for both reinvestment and resilience.

Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. In academic and popular discourse, spaces tend to serve as passive containers, symbols, or geographical coordinates for political theories, ideologies, and histories. By contrast, the essays in this collection illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority. Each chapter features original research on the spatial production of conflict and consensus, which ranges from exclusion and incarceration to reclamation and reconciliation. By focusing on the architects and spaces of political empowerment, the anthology fills a critical gap in studies of space and politics in anthropology, architectural history, conflict studies, geography, public policy, science/technology studies, and urban planning. These essays also demonstrate the global, historical, and contemporary relevance of thinking spatially for political action. Altogether, this multidisciplinary collection puts forward various spatial epistemologies that conceptualize, concretize, and contest forms of spatial politics.

PANEL DISCUSSION: Evacuation. Eviction. Emigration.
Who leaves their home--when, why and how?

Featuring:
John Arena (CUNY)
Monica Farris (UNO-CHART)
Farrah Cambrice (Prarie View A&M)
Andreanecia Morris (HousingNOLA/GNOHA)
Zaire Dinzey-Flores (Rutgers)
Fallon Samuels Aidoo (UNO), moderator

This Working Group assesses how acute crises impact places and populations chronically at-risk. Often minority-owned, small businesses operating in places populated largely by racial minorities disproportionately serve and employ Black, Latinx, Asian, MENA and Native Americans. Our policy-oriented, place-based research of these assets evaluates long-term community resilience and vulnerability not just short-term business recovery and distress. This Working Group aims to inform the meaning and measure of majority-minority communities closed and ‘open for business’ due to this and future coronaviruses. The group plans to acquire, analyze and report on available data regarding small businesses sustaining or ceasing operations in places defined, by US census and ACS, as majority-minority communities. Members will rectify the communities’ underrepresentation in locational data and local documentation of businesses and buildings through community-engaged research of where, how and with what resources business resilience and community vulnerability unfold. With members’ research partners in COVID-19 hotspots, the group’s designing research protocols to deploy in public, private and participatory forums—from online interviews and windshield surveys to social media ‘street views.’ Via mixed-methods research of hazardous and helpful business climates, we lay the groundwork for cooperative research endeavors with front-line communities that account for displacement and distress of their business owners, operators, landlords and patrons without discounting their time-tested resilience strategies and inventive recovery solutions.