Twenty years later, investor-driven rebuilding—which makes it almost impossible for marginalized residents to return—has become standard in the aftermath of climate disasters.
Just a handful of months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, submerging nearly 80 percent of the city under water and killing more than 1,400 residents, the Times-Picayune published a map of New Orleans on its front page. It wasn’t a map of the floods or devastation. Instead, what became colloquially known as the “Green Dot Map” displayed a plan for the city’s future. The map was derived from then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s rebuilding commission, per the Times-Picayune story, and represented the commission’s “boldest recommendation”: a color-coded key showed grey splotches where rebuilding would be permitted; green dots indicated where neighborhoods would become flood-mitigating parkland; and vast swaths of yellowed land, once home to thousands of residents, would be saddled with a building moratorium until they could “prove viability” for rebuilding. For those yellowed-out neighborhoods, the Times-Picayune reads, “it puts the onus on residents to show that enough people will return to make the neighborhood sustainable.”
Though it never came to be, the Green Dot Map’s specter haunts post-disaster recovery and adaptation planning in New Orleans. Many of the city’s residents who once inhabited the yellow neighborhoods, including the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and much of New Orleans East—lower-income communities of color—never returned. Subsequent recovery endeavors have yielded what’s considered “gentrification by flood,” in which there’s been a demographic shift, broadly characterized as a whiter, wealthier New Orleans. The city was ranked fifth of 20 cities in a 2020 study of the county’s most gentrified cities by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
In the 20 years since the disaster, we’ve seen popular podcasts, documentaries (including one by Spike Lee released for this year’s anniversary), and dramas based on true events—not to mention a deluge of anniversary coverage. In some ways, we’ve been fortunate that the storm hasn’t receded from our collective memories, especially as increasing climate change catastrophes give rise to growing anxieties over displacement and gentrification across the country. In post-disaster areas like Los Angeles’s Altadena neighborhood, or Lahaina in Maui, concerns over investor-driven rebuilding stoke fear and frustration among marginalized and indigenous residents; and, crucially, as the federal government touts shrinking its role in recovery, adaptation, and mitigation processes, we are left asking: for whom will our future be built?
Temporary population decline is predictable in areas where disasters occur, but at the scale of Katrina’s destruction the downturn was precipitous. The 2000 census showed New Orleans’s population nearing 455,000; by 2006, it plummeted to 230,000, according to Axios. Over the past 20 years, the city has slowly repopulated, though the overwhelming result of the earlier devastation is felt among the city’s Black population, which declined 29 percent, per City Journal, by 2020. Perhaps such loss isn’t surprising: A 2024 Urban Institute report, “Housing Resilience in Greater New Orleans,” notes that those lower-income Black and Brown residents faced greater exposure to flood risks than white, non-Hispanic residents; segregation clustered many of these residents into low-lying areas where they bore the brunt of the damage and death.
But others also attribute this long-term population loss to more than just the dangers of historic marginalization. Adelle Thomas, senior director of adaptation at the National Resource Defense Council, saw the insufficient disaster response on the part of local, state, and federal governments as having contributed significantly to the ability for Black populations to return to their homes. Wealthier, predominantly white residents who had access to preexisting financial resources did fare better overall, but she says, “those that were able to return were able to better access the FEMA support that was given; others that didn’t have the money to be able to come and rebuild were left to find elsewhere to live.”
Thomas was living in south Florida during Katrina, and she had family in New Orleans who evacuated to Virginia and never returned. Axed out of access to FEMA recovery dollars and without sufficient insurance, many, including her own kin, were unable to rebuild their homes. “We saw renters, public housing residents, communities of color, people that were unhoused, were unable to access those resources, and so they had no recourse to be able to come back,” she continues.
After Katrina, it seems that the bureaucrats tasked with rebuilding the city were not focused on bringing back those forced to leave or making reparations to those overlooked in disaster assistance. Instead, much of the ethos pumped out in the media—and in processes that informed such documents like the Green Dot Map—was that recovery was a chance at reinvention. In their book How to Kill a City, author P.E. Moskowitz details some of the most infamous of examples, including then Governor Kathleen Blanco who proclaimed, “It took the storm of a lifetime to make an opportunity of a lifetime,” and a 2005 New York Times column by David Brooks, in which he wrote, “If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as run-down as before.”
Rebuilding, Moskowitz asserts, “provided an opportunity to enact gentrification-friendly policies on a condensed timeline.” It wasn’t that the city decided to plop in new urban amenities that attracted a specific type of population, but that leaders engineered opportunities to ensure that those who were displaced by the storm had fewer means to return. Not only were public housing units demolished after Katrina, but the loss of “naturally-occurring” affordable housing (private market rentals and generationally-owned homes affordable to lower-income residents) was felt across the city. Decisions surrounding what homes would be rebuilt—and for whom—played a role in that statecraft.
In May 2011, the nonprofit Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) issued “The House that Uncle Sam Built,” a report on New Orleans’s subsidized housing. By 2012, the report states, “New Orleans will have approximately 35,700 units of subsidized rental housing—an increase of approximately 15,800 units over the pre-Katrina level.” In today’s environment, this might be considered something to celebrate, but the BGR was issuing a warning: the increase in affordable units would place a “disproportionate burden on the city” and the report vaguely recommended right-sizing for more diverse incomes (and future tax bases).
According to a 2015 Bloomberg deep-dive into the report, the BGR study caused a “slamming the brakes” on many affordable housing construction projects, even though much of the city’s housing needs weren’t being met after the storm. Despite more recovery dollars going to homeowners than renters (who made up more than half of the city’s pre-Katrina population), any longer-term endeavor to rebuild housing for the city’s most vulnerable people would be compromised by a four-year moratorium on all new subsidized housing. Today, according to Governing, the city still has 20,000 fewer housing units than it did before Katrina hit; as of 2023, home values had skyrocketed nearly 61 percent since 2012. The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority states that the city’s affordability index dropped by 29 percent between 2021 and 2024, and requires an additional 44,000 new affordable units to meet housing demand.
Again, we’re confronted with the problem of viability. To assert that subsidized housing creates a burden also suggests that such housing would make the city less viable in its quest for resurrection. In some ways, the opaque metrics used to justify what’s worth pouring in dollars to repair or rebuild is a temporal problem: the ability for a community to recover from a natural disaster—to rebuild its population and tax base—is fueled by both historic inequities and immediate disparities in emergency responses. But Zachary Lamb, an assistant professor of regional and city planning at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that failures to stabilize and support marginalized populations in the early stages of disaster recovery can also impact preventative projects: attempts to prevent or mitigate disaster in order to ensure the future viability of our cities during the era of climate change are not always equitably distributed, and run the risk of displacing vulnerable populations, as well.
Some basic adaptive strategies, like stormwater management, drainage, or levee and pump systems, use a cost-benefit analysis to decide who receives investments that might keep their communities safe from climate disasters. Here, areas seen as “unviable” don’t receive that type of infrastructure. Lamb calls this “acts of omission.” “When you think about omission, there would be instances where you have a structure in place that says we’re going to invest in protecting one area over another, often because property values justify that investment,” Lamb explains. This calculation is based on the value of potential losses—properties with lesser economic value are less likely to receive investments in wildfire protection, stormwater drainage, and other hazard mitigation infrastructures.
In these scenarios, higher-income communities receive the type of future-facing projects required to withstand our more volatile future. Lamb points to one area of Monterey County, California, where the Pajaro River divided two areas: On one side of the river is the community of Pajaro, which he says is largely lower income; on the other side of the river is Watsonville, which is higher income. “When the Army Corps of Engineers was evaluating whether they could upgrade the levees along the Pajaro river, they upgraded the levees on one side, but not on the other. And you can guess which side got the upgrade,” he says. In 2023, the levees failed and flooded 300 homes.
Lamb, however, is concerned about how these types of resilience projects become directly linked to gentrification itself. The Green Dot Map, where residential areas would be bulldozed for water-mitigating parkland, would constitute an “act of commission” wherein a whole community is displaced, sacrificed for the viability of other areas. More common, however, are incidents of “green gentrification” wherein resiliency or adaptive projects do get greenlit in those lower-income areas, but cause property values to rise and displacement to occur.
“It’s not a coincidence that the communities that are displaced by these by these resilience projects are overwhelmingly lower income and disempowered, in part, because, in many cases, these are communities that have taken up residence in places where land values are lower because they are riskier places to live,” he explains. An Urban Institute Housing Matters 2022 study recommends that endeavors to protect neighborhoods from environmental catastrophe must come alongside material support to keep existing residents in their homes—not unlike disaster relief itself, where getting vulnerable people access to stabilizing resources can prevent them from abandoning their city during a crisis.
In recent years, the federal government has been more attuned to the ways that short and long-term disaster recovery and prevention exacerbates existing disparities. In 2024, FEMA overhauled how they deliver disaster response to survivors. According to Grist, changes included removing bureaucratic roadblocks to accessing aid, and providing rapid $750 cash payment to victims without requiring states to request the money first. They would also provide funding to cover two weeks of temporary housing. To address inequities in adaptive infrastructure, in 2020 FEMA introduced Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants that fund climate hazard mitigation projects; under former president Biden’s “Justice40” program, $1 billion of BRIC grants were awarded to historically underserved and marginalized communities.
“There is still a long way to go, because these underlying issues of systemic racism and poverty don’t go away with just one agency’s small program, but there were some steps that were being made,” says Thomas. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen that whole [BRIC] program has now been removed, so the steps that were being made have been erased.”
In April of this year, President Trump canceled BRIC while teasing a full dissolution of FEMA itself, passing the recovery and resilience bucks back to the states. Thomas calls this move “catastrophic.” “States have relied on FEMA for help with disaster management, and many do not have the capacity to deal with disasters on their own. It’s not just how you deal with the disaster after it happens, but also how you improve resilience beforehand, which FEMA has also played a role in,” says Thomas. Lamb fears that eliminating a federal obligation to those resilience efforts could open up opportunities for privatization—financial institutions, hedge funds, and others could participate in resilience endeavors in a way that compounds risk to maximize profit. “If the Army Corps of Engineers is operating according to that [cost benefit analysis] logic in most cases, what happens when we let private equity and hedge funds make decisions about where climate adaptation infrastructure should be?” he asks.
In that grim future, we might see many more Green Dot Maps, where resiliency efforts are designed to maximize “viability” at the expense of existing residents. But as we saw in Katrina, as well as in the fires and floods of recent years, our old tools just aren’t cutting it, either. If FEMA is indeed eliminated and states are forced to bear the brunt of response and recovery, Lamb encourages everyone to get involved in neighborhood planning efforts to ensure that any type of disaster—climate, financial, real estate, or otherwise—wouldn’t exacerbate gentrification, displace communities, or create new real estate opportunities for the wealthy. For this type of change, Thomas argues, we need an entire cultural shift in what we need protection from—not just climate change, but poverty, housing insecurity, health vulnerabilities, and more. “Looking at adaptation as a positive change to something better,” she says, “can allow us to see how there are so many changes in all aspects of society that we need to adjust.”
Top photo of the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina by Smiley N. Pool/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images.
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