Doug Ahlers (left) and Henry Lee
Pat Semansky

"Broadmoor Q&A with Henry Lee and Doug Ahlers"

Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter

Spring 2008

“It's totally awesome what the Broadmoor community has done in partnership with Harvard's Kennedy School...This will be a model for what a place like Harvard can do, and what a community like Broadmoor can do."-Author Walter Isaacson, former Broadmoor resident and vice-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority

In the months following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, Belfer Center Senior Fellow and New Orleans resident Doug Ahlers began organizing a group of Kennedy School students to help with the recovery of the hard-hit Broadmoor neighborhood. Since then, the Kennedy School/Broadmoor collaboration has grown, and in 2006, the School launched the Broadmoor Project: New Orleans Recovery. Based at the Belfer Center, the project is directed by Doug Ahlers, with Henry Lee, director of the Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program, serving as faculty chair. We asked Lee and Ahlers to tell us more about this collaboration and the successful efforts to bring back the Broadmoor neighborhood.

Q. Doug, after Katrina hit, what gave you the idea to organize Kennedy School students to help the Broadmoor neighborhood draft a recovery plan?

Doug Ahlers: As the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Katrina raised serious policy questions about how effective disaster recovery management is conducted. Clearly, there was a leadership role in New Orleans for the Kennedy School. Most other universities, volunteer groups, and NGOs were approaching the problem of recovery by pursuing a single issues (housing, economic development, education, etc.), but since these problems are interdependent within a disaster zone, we believed that the only viable solution was to work with a community across all of their issues across time. We decided to work with a single neighborhood (about 3000 properties) in order to focus our attention and resources. It was also the best way for us to create an in-depth learning laboratory where we could apply best practices and develop recovery management models based on lessons learned. Broadmoor was selected by looking at the demographics of the flooded New Orleans neighborhoods and the overall city demographics. It was the best match to the citywide demographic averages and was most representative of the city as a whole.

Q. Henry, how do you see the collaboration between the Kennedy School and Broadmoor fitting in with the mission of the School and Center?

Henry Lee: In the last two years, seventy four students from the Kennedy School have spent at least a week working in New Orleans. In their post-visit debriefings with the Dean, they have stated almost to the person that their work with Broadmoor was the most satisfying experience in their time at the Kennedy School. Why has volunteering to bring back the Broadmoor neighborhood had such an indelible impact on these students? To some extent, a vast majority of our student body is committed to public service and to making a difference. Quite often that difference becomes hard to measure and one rarely sees the tangible impacts of ones work. Broadmoor provided a very different experience. Here was a city that had suffered one of the worse natural disasters in US history. Block upon block was destroyed. KSG students met the people they were trying to help, saw their destroyed homes, and became familiar with their pain and loss. The work of the students directly affected these people. The students played a major role in developing the planning document that drove the recovery, in designing the community development corporation, in helping the residents deal with bureaucratic hurdles, and in bringing back the school.

Twenty years from now, they can go back to this city and to this neighborhood and tell their children that they played a role in bring this neighborhood back. If the mission of the school is to educate and to inspire the next generation of public policy leaders, the Broadmoor project has made a unique contribution.

Q. Doug, the Broadmoor Project has worked with the Broadmoor Improvement Association to raise significant funding to help rebuild Broadmoor. How has Broadmoor used these?

Doug Ahlers: Broadmoor has raised funds to rebuild their neighborhood library, community center, school, playgrounds, and homes. Instead of waiting for government funds for these civic projects, the neighborhood raised moneys from the private sector. In many cases, this funding allowed these projects to move ahead while other city projects have languished, and in other cases, the Broadmoor funds have filled the gap between available FEMA funds and the actual costs of repair. In some cases, the private sector funding has allowed Broadmoor to make long needed capital improvements to the public facilities in their neighborhood. Broadmoor's fundraising success is due to a focus on building public-private partnerships. The residents educated themselves on grant-writing and learned to think in the same terms as do funders. Broadmoor's strategy is to build a relationship with partners, creating a situation where both Broadmoor's and the funder's needs are met. In short, Broadmoor makes it easy for partners and donors to work with them.

Q. Henry, the federal government has been strongly criticized for doing much too little too late in New Orleans. Are there lessons from the Kennedy School involvement with New Orleans that the federal government can apply in future disasters?

Henry Lee: Broadmoor project deals with bringing back a neighborhood. When I talk with people in Broadmoor and in many of the other neighborhoods, the federal government is very distant. The city and state governments affect their lives. There is a strong belief that government failed them; that it was too focused on process and forgot about people, more concerned that government monies would be misused than used well, and focused on what could go wrong as opposed to what could go right. The one bright light has been the role of neighborhood associations.

Admittedly some have performed better than others. But to the institutions that have made the most significant contributions have been these associations and the men and women who have risen to leadership positions within them. A very compelling policy question is what should their role be going forward? Should they be given formal governance authority and if so how would they be funded and how would one assure that they would accurately reflect the needs of the citizens in their neighborhoods? These questions will not lend themselves to easy answers, but if higher levels of government are unable to respond to the needs of the people inevitably there will be pressure to look to other institutions. In all likelihood this pressure will not be simply bottom up, but city governments may find that they will be able to deliver certain services more effectively through these associations. San Francisco, for example, has looked at the Broadmoor example and is now exploring the possibility of trying to replicate it with its neighborhoods.

Q. Have other neighborhoods been able to benefit from Broadmoor's experiences?

Doug Ahlers: From the beginning, the goal of the Broadmoor Project at the Kennedy School was to use the Broadmoor experience to increase our knowledge of the dynamics of disaster recovery in general, and to use the lessons learned from our work in Broadmoor to inform public policy debate in regard to preparing and managing future disasters. The Kennedy School has been sharing our knowledge with other New Orleans neighborhood and community leaders so that they can replicate the Broadmoor model. The Kennedy School has conducted a series of neighborhood leadership training forums in New Orleans, we have published a guide to community-based recovery planning and implementation, and we bring New Orleans neighborhood leaders to Cambridge for Executive Education Program training. Broadmoor was one of the hardest hit neighborhoods, and has one of the highest concentrations of poverty, with 24% of households in Broadmoor having a total household income of less than $10,000 a year before Katrina. And yet, Broadmoor has one of the highest recovery rates in the city. Broadmoor has been recognized as a national recovery best practice model. Many other neighborhoods in New Orleans have been emulating Broadmoor, and it has been part of our modus operandi to share all information, documents, processes, procedures, data, and software with other neighborhoods. We are also working with the City of San Francisco to share the Kennedy School's knowledge of recovery management so that they can plan in advance of a disaster as to how to efficiently manage recovery after a disaster. The Kennedy School has also developed several cases that allow us to use lessons from New Orleans in classroom teaching.

Q. Where does Broadmoor's and New Orleans' recovery stand now - and what's next?

Doug Ahlers: Estimates of New Orleans repopulation are that 70% of the population is back in the city (not necessarily back in their homes). These estimates are very rough, which points out the need for better methods and procedures for tracking and measuring recovery and repopulation after disasters. The 70% figure is a total for the city and includes "dry" (unflooded) neighborhoods which never had to recover in addition to "shallow wet," "deep wet," and "white water" neighborhoods that had differing levels of devastation. In the flooded sections of the city, property recovery rates can range from as low as 12-15% to as high as 70% (Broadmoor). On average, best estimates are that most neighborhoods are in the 50-60% recovered/recovering range. Noticeably absent in the recovery have been the rebuilding of public buildings and infrastructure. Less than 33% of schools, fire stations, police stations, libraries, parks, community/senior centers, hospitals, streets/sidewalks, etc., have been repaired. Homeowner rebuilding and private real estate investing is far outstripping government rebuilding projects. It is likely that the population of New Orleans will stabilize at a level that is 15-25% smaller than its pre-Katrina population but with the same size footprint. Certain neighborhoods will recover faster and will attract residents from other neighborhoods that are recovering at a slower pace (internal migration). But even the neighborhoods with a high percentage of abandoned homes will eventually have these properties absorbed, largely through demolition and new development, or by selling lots to neighbors to increase property size and lower density. City bureaucracy, inefficiencies, and lack of money will continue to delay the rebuilding of infrastructure and public buildings. Issues of security (crime)could have a dampening effect on reconstruction if not brought under control.

For Academic Citation:
Communications Office. "Broadmoor Q&A with Henry Lee and Doug Ahlers." Belfer Center Newsletter (Spring 2008).