ABSTRACT
In order to discourage rebuilding in neighborhoods that would likely prove unviable in the long run, in January 2006 the ULI and the BNOB recommended
imposing a moratorium on issuing rebuilding permits until communities could prove their viability. In other words, the underlying assumption at work within the redevelopment planning process was that, given the collective action problem, it was best to let government orchestrate a top-down redevelopment effort than to allow a private response to unfold in a bottom-up and piecemeal fashion. And yet, within the first six months of the storm some neighborhoods were beginning to show signs that they were rebounding: school children returning, church attendance rising, construction repairs underway, and businesses with open doors. These early signs of resilience were not only in the neighborhoods that tourists frequented before the storm, but in suburban outposts as well; not only in those areas that received little flood damage, but also in communities that were entirely submerged under eight feet of standing water; not only in expensive neighborhoods, but in working class neighborhoods as well. Clearly, these early pockets of success were not fruits born of the redevelopment planning process.2 By the end of 2006 the City of New Orleans had pursued five discrete planning processes, the first two of which were scrapped. The New Orleans city council eventually approved the United New Orleans Plan (UNOP), which was subsequently approved by the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) in June 2007, despite the fact that it had been criticized for not advancing a clear set of priorities or guidelines for the recovery process (Bureau of Government Research 2007). As will be discussed in later chapters, the uncertainty generated by the redevelopment planning process, particularly in New Orleans, has itself been the source of considerable uncertainty, frustration, and delay. In fact, some of the most dramatic cases of community resilience, such as the Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans East, and the socioeconomically diverse Broadmoor neighborhood, were under threat of elimination had early redevelopment plans been successful. Thus, an explanation for the early signs of community rebound rests somewhere other than with government efforts to engineer a way around the collective action problem. This chapter presents an important piece of that explanation by focusing on the role private citizens (often in the hardest hit communities) played by strategically deploying socially embedded resources in the months following the storm. Sixty-three of the 300 subjects who had returned to the affected area were interviewed between February and July of 2006 when the uncertainties associated with the collective action problem were most daunting.3 It is these interviews that provide the basis for the present chapter. The strategies of mutual assistance, cooperation through commercial networks, and the development (or redevelopment) of key community resources are examined below. By deploying such strategies, private citizens gave and received direct material support that mitigated the disproportionately high costs of an early return. Further, such activities conveyed important signals that a community was on the rebound, helping to reduce the worry that a decision to return and reinvest would be an isolated one. By investigating the ways in which early returnees deployed social capital resources, we gain insight into how discovery in the largely non-priced context
of social capital serves as a critical source of resilience at the individual level. Further, such an investigation demonstrates how creative deployment of social capital resources generated non-price signals that helped to foster a process of social learning and overcome the daunting collective action problem identified by Schelling.
