Reforming New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, but in the subsequent ten years, the city has demonstrated both remarkable resilience and frustrating stagnation. In Reforming New Orleans, Peter F. Burns and Matthew O. Thomas chart the city’s recovery and assess how successfully officials at the local, state, and federal levels transformed the Big Easy in the wake of disaster. Focusing on reforms in four key sectors of urban governance—economic development, education, housing, and law enforcement—both before and after Katrina, they find lessons for cities hit by sudden shocks, such as natural disasters or large-scale financial crises.One of their key insights is that post-disaster recovery tends to limit local control. State and federal officials, national foundations, and local actors excluded by pre-Katrina politics used their resources and authority to displace entrenched local interests and implement a public agenda focused on institutional and governmental change. Burns and Thomas also make clear reform in New Orleans was already underway before Katrina hit, but that it had focused largely on upper- and middle-class residents, a trend that accelerated after the storm. The market-centered nature of the reforms have ensured that they largely benefited city and regional elites while not significantly aiding the city’s working-class and impoverished populations. Thus reform has come at a cost and that cost, in the long term, could undermine the political gains of the post-Katrina era.

Through the conceptual lenses of 'political arrangements' and ‘policy agenda fidelity’ the authors set out to explore the ways extralocal actors and reform-oriented players have used their resources and authority to change pre-Katrina governance configurations and... capture eloquently the identity of the pre-Katrina status quo and the longstanding patterns of corruption, patronage and mismanagement that characterised the city institutions and officials prior to the storm. It will be a critical resource for academics, researchers and practitioners in the field of disasters, urban politics and urban sociology., Not surprisingly, Burns and Thomas find that pre-Katrina New Orleans was governed by multiple political arrangements with weak fidelity to policy agendas (5).... It's important to remember... that in a political arrangement that results in a greater chasm between rich and poor, barriers to affordable housing, persistent inequities in education, and a racially disparate criminal justice system, we all lose.

Peter F. Burns is Professor of Political Science at Soka University of America and was previously Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author most recently of Electoral Politics Is Not Enough: Racial and Ethnic Minorities and Urban Politics. Matthew O. Thomas is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Chico.