 In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. During the period that followed, recovery efforts accelerated the implementation of long-established visions for the city, profoundly affecting its physical and demographic landscape. New Orleans is located within the vast wetlands of the Mississippi River's Deltaic Fan, and its people have always lived at the mercy of water. Government and industry-led actions have long intensified this risk. The construction of the industrial canal made New Orleans into a shipbuilding hub at the same time that it made the city newly vulnerable to storm surges from the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1940s, the Housing Authority of New Orleans created six segregated public housing complexes near the port in response to the influx of laborers. Most of these complexes were dangerously below sea level. Despite concerns, private real estate developers continued to train the so-called back swamps to create new neighborhoods. Following both world wars, modest legislative progress related to flood and erosion control was undone with the construction of the Mississippi River Golf Outlet Canal by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The canal was built as a shipping shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico. However, the MRGO remained inadequately protected from flash floods and would grow wider with each year due to erosion. At the same time, advances in the oil and gas industries introduced containerized shipping technology that shrunk the demand for manual labor, allowing for more recreational development along the waterfront. Then in September of 1965, Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans. 300,000 citizens were displaced and 27,000 houses destroyed. Betsy proved that the city was dramatically unprepared for severe storms. In response, federal legislators called for a system of levies to protect the city and neighboring areas from storm surges. The passing of the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968 spurred further development in flood-prone areas by setting short-sighted nationwide standards. Simultaneously, New Orleans' white population moved to suburbs like Jefferson Parish, taking a sizable amount of the tax base with them. The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition and the development of Eastern New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward were at least partially designed in response to this loss of revenue. Yet by 1986, the city faced a $30 million deficit, with public sector jobs being slashed, unions weakened and wages dropped by 20%. Real estate interests continued to redevelop areas adjacent to the affluent and white French Quarter, Riverfront, and Garden District, which at the time was home to St. Thomas Public Housing. In 1993, Joe Canizaro, a local developer and owner of a large tract of Riverfront land, commissioned a report on redevelopment opportunities in the area through the Urban Land Institute. The report suggested using a Hope 6 grant to fund redevelopment of the St. Thomas site. Hope 6, created by the Clinton administration in coordination with the Congress for the new urbanism that same year, provided federal funds for the demolition of public housing and the construction in its place of mixed income private housing, supplemented by housing vouchers. Around the same time, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros declared the Housing Authority of New Orleans in breach of its obligations and by 1996 it had entered a cooperative agreement with Mayor Morial for joint control of the authority. The restructuring of the Housing Authority allowed the city to demolish St. Thomas with the Hope 6 grant in 2001. A second Hope 6 grant allowed the city to demolish desire houses in the Ninth Ward. By 2005, mixed income housing was under construction at both sites. Developers gave the sites new names, erasing their origins. St. Thomas became River Gardens and Desire became the estates. It was in this context strengthened by climate change that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005. Almost 2,000 people died in the storm's aftermath. 1,500 in Louisiana alone. Thousands of residents, now homeless, fled to other cities. Noting this crisis, President George W. Bush declared a federal emergency in all 50 states to provide resources to those seeking refuge. Over $60 billion in federal aid was provided by mid-September alone. Yesterday I signed a disaster declaration for the state of Louisiana. And this morning I signed a disaster declaration for the state of Mississippi. These declarations will allow federal agencies to coordinate all disaster relief efforts with state and local officials. We will do everything in our power to help the people and the communities affected by this storm. Hurricane Katrina has now designated a category 5 hurricane. We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities. I urge all citizens to put their own safety and the safety of their families first by moving to safe ground. Please listen carefully to instructions provided by state and local officials. This aid was allocated to numerous private consulting firms, including floor enterprises which received a $1.3 billion contract to manage temporary housing mobile homes throughout Louisiana and neighboring states. These homes were later deemed unsafe due to high levels of formaldehyde. The last of the floodwaters weren't cleared until more than three weeks after the storm hit. As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used emergency funds to strengthen the city's storm surge defenses, local leaders sought to determine how the rest of the city would rebuild. Mayor Ray Nagan created the Bring New Orleans Back Commission for this purpose, arguing that most HUD recovery funds should be distributed to the city through these prominent citizens, among them developer Joe Canizaro. Ultimately, Governor Kathleen Blanco's Louisiana Authority received the HUD funds and distributed them via the Road Home Program and an initiative to help rebuild or sell property that was damaged by the hurricane. A January 2006 report jointly produced by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and the Urban Land Institute called on the city to, quote, repair and reopen all public housing units in appropriate areas, to build higher density development that incorporates the look and feel of New Orleans and to redevelop in a way that allows for neighborhoods to be recreated in harmony with the natural environment. The report also called for the downsizing of the city, suggesting that only neighborhoods in which more than half of residents returned should be rebuilt. Residents vocally opposed such language and it was ultimately excised. Meanwhile, Governor Blanco hired private consulting firm ICF International with a three-year, $750 million contract to manage the Road Home Program, thus privatizing the largest home recovery program in U.S. history. ICF's performance was not without controversy. Continuing previous trends, the housing authority decided to close all public housing complexes affected by Katrina, even those where little flood damage had occurred. Did residents have legal leases at the time Katrina hit? Two, were resident rents paid up when Katrina hit? Three, is there any stipulation, at least, that says a resident can be evicted when they are forced out of their homes for a natural disaster? In answer to those three questions, everything else is a mood issue. As someone has said tonight, they're not necessarily against improving the condition of the development. Not necessarily against redeveloping some portions of it, but let that process continue after people at home in their houses. In the summer of 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to modify the city's hurricane protection system. The plan called for stronger and higher levies, closure of the city's waterways with floodgates and added protections at inland pump stations. That same summer, HUD Secretary Alfonso Jackson, through federal receiver William Thorson, announced plans to demolish and redevelop the so-called Big Four public housing developments in New Orleans. Residents and activists, many as part of the New Orleans Housing Eviction Action Team, sharply opposed these demolition efforts. Nonetheless, the city tore down these and other city-owned complexes in early 2008. That same year, civil rights group Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center settled a lawsuit with HUD and the Road Home Program for discrimination in their awarding of recovery grants. This stated that predominantly African-American neighborhoods were assigned lower property values than those in white communities, even when their quality, style, and inflicted damage were similar. In 2006, a competition was launched for redevelopment of six miles of the downtown waterfront. The winning team was a partnership between two international firms and a New Orleans Architecture Office. In 2008, the winning team and the New Orleans Building Corporation outlined a $294 million plan to create a public waterfront with civic, commercial, and residential uses along with new architectural icons for the city. The plan compared New Orleans to other esteemed cities with modern landmarks on their waterfronts. Their plan, titled Reinventing the Crescent, laid out large areas of public park, along with wind turbines, a river turbine, and educational and cultural institutions. With the privatization of public housing still underway, the city received another HUD grant in 2008 to continue redevelopment of CJ Pete houses, which despite the minimal storm damage was demolished by the end of that year. It was soon replaced with a mixture of market rate, low-income housing tax credit, and public housing, with fewer than half of its original units. In 2009, Army Corps contractors completed construction of the MRGO closure structure, blocking a channel that had become known as the Storm Surge Superhighway for flooding much of the Ninth Ward in 2005. In 2010, with $30 million in HUD grants intended for community development projects but modified for disaster relief aid, the city broke ground on another portion of the waterfront termed Crescent Park. The park would eventually feature repurposed wharves, a covered event space, and a bridge by David Adjaye. The Seabrook Floodgate Complex and Lakeborne Storm Surge Barrier began operations in 2012 and 2013, protecting the Inner Harbor navigational canal. The combined cost of construction was $1.3 billion. In October 2017, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced additional projects on the riverfront in conjunction with development plans at the former World Trade Center, the Spanish Plaza, and the Canal Street Ferry Terminal, continuing to catalyze redevelopment along the river with high-profile design. In December 2017, as public attractions continued to develop closer to the river, the three permanent canal closures and pump stations at the mouths of the New Orleans outfall canals neared completion. This continued with the targeted seemingly endless advances in the city's flood control. The contract for the job totaled $615 million. By this time, the redevelopment schemes for New Orleans public housing sites were complete. Before Katrina, the Housing Authority operated 7,379 units. As of 2018, that number was 2,175. Many of these same areas have seen an increase in white populations as the African-American populations have decreased, mirroring city-wide demographic trends. In 2017, the Trump Administration's Department of Homeland Security recommended that FEMA disallow over $2 billion in post-Katrina recovery funding. The recommendation states that FEMA should have never awarded the sewer and water board of New Orleans the recovery funds because evidence shows that the infrastructure was in poor condition even before the hurricanes. FEMA did not agree. Recovery and redevelopment efforts in New Orleans make visible the persistently uneven landscapes of risk, as well as the centrality of infrastructure to their construction. These efforts also prompt careful observers to consider whether or not Katrina was the true emergency, or if the emergency has actually been made and remade on the backs of certain citizens before and after the hurricane ever made landfall.