Coping With Loss

By Emilie Bahr, AICP

The National Climate Assessment estimated in 2014 that sea levels along U.S. coastal communities could rise by up to four feet by 2100.

Bad news for the 50 percent of Americans living in those areas, of course, but an especially grim prediction for coastal Louisiana.

That's because much of the state's extensive coastal zone is simultaneously sinking. Some degree of subsidence is naturally occurring in deltaic locales, but in South Louisiana, the rate of subsidence is exacerbated, scientists say, by manmade activities like energy extraction and the leveeing of the Mississippi River, which largely disconnected the river from its now sediment-starved delta. As a result, coastal Louisiana faces some of the highest rates of relative sea-level rise in the world.

A graphic included as part of the state's 2017 Coastal Master Plan shows predicted land change along Louisiana's coast over the next 50 years if no dramatic action is taken. The map looks like a hemorrhagic patient, blood red spreading out across the bottom of the state, representing another 2,250 miles of land expected to be lost. (And that's not even the worst-case scenario.)

This isn't just some future disaster scenario set to play out decades from now, either. The changes are already happening. Since the 1930s, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that some 2,000 square miles of land in coastal Louisiana have been lost, meaning that a territory bigger than Delaware has vanished into the sea. Formerly thriving communities have disappeared entirely, casting doubt onto the accuracy of maps more than a few years old and rendering the boot-shaped outline that has long been associated with Louisiana virtually obsolete.

Even if the ambitious, expensive master plan — hailed as the best shot at salvaging a vast swath of the state — is fully realized, there is only so much it can do to stem the tide. And full implementation of the plan is far from a foregone conclusion, given economic and political realities. Louisianans are coming to terms with a hard truth: The landscape, their property, and places that sometimes many generations have called home are increasingly at risk.

Siblings Dakirah, Deyonte, and Dasayah Simmons in Isle de Jean Charles. The island has lost more than 90 percent of its land mass since 1955, and its residents are being relocated to drier ground. Photo by William Widmer/Redux.

An uncomfortable reality

Terrebonne Parish's Isle de Jean Charles, about a two-hour drive south from New Orleans, is disappearing so rapidly that its mostly indigenous residents recently became the subject of the first federally funded, large-scale relocation of a population due to climate change. Management of that undertaking, now under way, largely falls to the state's Office of Community Development.

That agency is also helping to administer, alongside other governmental, nonprofit, and private-sector partners, a project called LA SAFE, or Louisiana's Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments. Some have described the initiative as one of the most progressive efforts in the country to encourage people to rethink how and where they live in areas at high risk of climate change-related impacts.

LA SAFE was established in 2016 after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's National Disaster Resilience Competition awarded more than $92 million for two related projects. About half of that figure went toward the relocation of the Isle de Jean Charles community, with the remainder dedicated to LA SAFE. The stated goal of the program is to create "a statewide resilience policy framework focused on helping communities plan for — and implement — safer, stronger, and smarter development strategies."

"It's a way of thinking about the future and about our build out and growth relative to that future," says Mathew Sanders, AICP. A South Louisiana native, he was working in New York City six years ago when he decided to come back home to help with disaster recovery efforts following Hurricane Isaac. Sanders now serves as resilience, policy, and program director at the state's OCD and has helped craft and administer the Isle de Jean Charles relocation, as well as LA SAFE.

"If we have a realistic view of how we expect the land form to change over time, how we expect flood risk to change," he says, "then we have an ability to make good development decisions around what we think is within the realm of possible."

Members of CSRS's Isle de Jean Charles relocation project team review the existing drainage conditions of the new community site near Schriever, Louisiana, with the current property owner. The 515-acre site is located about 40 miles northwest of the Island. Photo courtesy CSRS Inc.

In some cases, it's a strategy that won't involve growth at all, but retreat, an uncomfortable admission in a state that, as recently as five years ago, made rosy pronouncements about land-building efforts in the coming decades that would offset the territory already lost to the Gulf.

LA SAFE targets six coastal parishes heavily affected by Hurricane Isaac in 2012: Lafourche, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, and Terrebonne. Sanders describes this initial focus area as a pilot, developing best practices that can potentially be used elsewhere.

"A huge share of National Flood Insurance Program payouts are oriented in these parishes," sanders said at the State of the Coast conference in New Orleans in June, a gathering of scientists, governmental officials, and other stakeholders engaged around Louisiana's existential crisis. LA SAFE was held up as a "planning model for the future."

The conference came on the heels of nine months of public engagement sessions with 71 community meetings and nearly 3,000 people. Residents in the target parishes talked about the challenges and opportunities related to living along some of the most vulnerable parts of the coast, while the project team shared the latest information about anticipated risks, oft en starting with a display of satellite imagery showing what the state looked like in 1960, then a progression of images depicting the change over time.

"It's not our job to talk about some of the drivers — about why things may or may not be happening," Sanders says, acknowledging that in Louisiana not everyone believes that humans are causing the changes to the climate, "but you can't argue with satellite imagery."

"We started with the general theory that most people, when presented with good, honest information, generally form reasonable opinions about how to react to that information," Sanders says. Public servants have a responsibility "to be honest with the population that you work with ... and that certainly has been a guiding principle for our project team."

The overarching message: The situation is only going to get worse, so coastal communities have to plan for a dramatically altered environment. "We're going to lose more land than we can rebuild," Sanders said. "We're going to incur a higher risk of flooding over time."

The message seems to be sinking in, despite the uncomfortable reality of Louisianans' increasing vulnerability. Migration trends, Sanders notes, already show that many with the economic means to do so are moving away from the most vulnerable places along the coast. Population densities could look quite different in the future as better protected inland areas absorb retreating populations.

Facing the Future on the Louisiana Coast

Even if the Coastal Master Plan is implemented, Louisiana faces an increasing flood risk. As the legend shows, the dark blue areas will be affected most severely. Maps courtesy LA SAFE.

The series of maps below show past and present conditions and the potential land preserved or gained (in green) by 2067 if the Coastal Master Plan is implemented.

Changing the status quo

Louisiana is going to have to get strategic about how and where it develops, prioritizing highground areas, Sanders says. He pointed to the tactics employed by Jean-Baptist Le Moyne de Bienville 300 years ago, when New Orleans was settled along the high ground adjacent to the Mississippi River, well before man-made levees and pumps allowed expansion into flood-prone territory at or below sea level.

Throughout dozens of community meetings, participants in LA SAFE have helped identify pilot projects to fund, along with other goals and strategies for adapting for the future.

As often happens in community meetings, proposals beyond the scope or intent of LA SAFE sometimes bubbled up, like the desire in a particularly flood-prone area for a new Target store with a Starbucks in it, says Liz Williams Russell, coastal community resilience director with project partner Foundation for Louisiana. But such requests speak to broader needs — in this case, the fact that the closest grocery store is an hour's drive away, and connectivity and mobility are essential considerations in some of these vulnerable areas.

Another challenge of the project: working in a cultural landscape that lacks a long tradition of planning or policy-based land management. So said Camille Manning-Broome, president and CEO of the Baton Rouge-based Center for Planning Excellence, another LA SAFE partner. As of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, just 15 of the state's 64 parishes had comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances in place. Today, she said, most parishes still don't have zoning or even sub division regulations.

She noted that the LA SAFE process has involved difficult conversations and has been met with some skepticism and skittishness, particularly in some of the most at-risk communities. Families in these places have frequently lived there all their lives, and sometimes for generations. "These communities define who they are," Manning-Broome said.

Still, Sanders has observed that people are becoming more receptive to the idea that the status quo won't be possible in the coming decades. "You don't have to go down to the coast and describe to anyone what it's like to flood," he says. They already know.

One of the next big steps of the LA SAFE initiative will be the release of its parishwide adaptation plans and a regional adaptation strategy shaped with input from the affected communities. Those documents are expected to debut by summer's end, Sanders said in May. Even before their release, speculation about the prospective plans and what they will entail have proven controversial, evidence of the sensitive nature of the topics at hand.

Likely fueling the controversy was a list of possible policy proposals found on the LA SAFE website that included ideas like phasing out the homestead exemption on properties in high-risk areas outside food protection systems, requiring bonds be attached to new commercial developments in those zones to pay for demolition, and a buyout program for residents at high risk of flooding.

Despite the emphasis by LA SAFE on "managed retreat," encouraging people to move away from the most vulnerable geographies on the coast, no statewide policy requiring relocations is on the table, Sanders says. Policy decisions related to incentivizing or discouraging development will be made locally.

This means communities will face some tough choices ahead, given the inherent conflict between moving people out of high-risk areas and preserving local tax bases.

The list of 10 pilot projects (see two in this article, the rest at lasafe.la.gov) to be funded under the initiative was released in April, comprising a spate of initiatives that got high marks from residents involved in planning meetings and hinting, perhaps, at the public's appetite for and approach to adaptation. They included a business incubator and resilient housing prototype; a complete streets project set to reshape an auto-centric, suburban corridor; and new trails.

Buyouts were also among the projects, but only for the handful of residences in Terrebonne Parish located outside of the levee system.

"Relocations never work out if they're imposed from the outside. It only works if members of the community are truly involved as active participants."
— Robert Olshansky, FAICP, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A pioneering approach

Between the Isle de Jean Charles relocation and the LA SAFE process and its emphasis on collaborative planning for adaptation, Louisiana is far ahead of many other places in preparing for and responding to the very different-looking future ahead, says Robert Olshansky, FAICP, a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Olshansky, who specializes in planning for natural hazards and cowrote the APA Planners Press book Clear as Mud about the post-Katrina planning process in New Orleans, calls Louisiana's approach to these related projects pioneering. He's impressed by the community-driven nature of the LA SAFE process and its honesty and willingness to have uncomfortable conversations in direct tension with conventional growth-centric planning models.

The process, he says, is giving people information and asking them how best to respond to that information, including with the possibility of relocation in certain scenarios.

But Olshansky stresses the difficulty of convincing people to move out of harm's way. "It's human nature to want to wish the disaster away," he says. "You want to get back to your life as it was before."

"Relocations," he adds, "never work out if they're imposed from the outside. The only way it really works is if members of the community are truly involved as active participants."

Louisiana's experiment, he says, will likely serve as a lesson for other communities confronting uncomfortable realities as they respond to rising seas and other climate-related environmental change.

Emilie Bahr is a writer and urban planner living in New Orleans. She is the author of the book Urban Revolutions: A Woman's Guide to Two-Wheeled Transportation.

Resources

APA is a partner in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Digital Coast project, which brings place-based resources to coastal communities. coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast

LA SAFE: A Community-Driven Process

Keeping coastal Louisiana communities safe means its residents must understand the problems they face — and collaborate on the solutions.

That's why the LA SAFE project team conducted an extensive and transparent engagement process that gathered the perspectives and ideas of more than 2,800 residents, parish officials, and other stakeholders to develop a shared vision for the impacted communities.

Through five rounds of iterative meetings, starting in the spring of 2017, residents' participation and knowledge helped to establish the policies, programs, and projects aimed at making each parish more resilient to increasing flood risk.

The process culminated with the evaluation and selection of 10 pilot projects in each of the six LA SAFE parishes — Plaquemines, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, and Jefferson. Proposals were assessed using five criteria: public preference, ability to leverage funds, benefits that help low-income residents, qualitative and quantitative public benefits, and points earned in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Community Rating System, which can help lower flood insurance rates.

The selected projects will be funded through a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Last spring, 10 pilot projects were selected for implementation. (See the project website, https://lasafe.la.gov, for more information. This story was adapted from LA SAFE source materials.) Images courtesy LA SAFE.

1 Identify Challenges and Opportunities

At meetings in each of the six parishes, the project team presented environmental data on land loss, flood risk, population movements, and economic change in the region. Participants identified population changes and flooding as the biggest challenges.

2 Locate Areas of Opportunity and Propose Strategies

In Round 2, the project team convened 21 meetings in 19 towns, which allowed participants to discuss local issues in more depth and with site specificity. They pinpointed challenges and proposed solutions, considering adaptation strategies that could apply in the short (0–10 years), medium (10–25), and long (25–50) terms.

3 Evaluate Parish Vision and Strategies Across Risk Zones

Three-part meetings in each parish started with polling on strategies for stormwater management, housing development, transportation expansion, and investment. Participants then worked with community visions for three different risk levels, expressing their preferences. Finally, the groups evaluated a range of place-specific strategy options.

4 Vet Draft Strategies With Parish Officials and Stakeholders

Parish planners, engineers, parks professionals, and elected officials weighed in on the implementation feasibility, project siting, long-term maintenance planning, and the potential for leveraging matching funds for proposed projects. They also looked at compatibility with preexisting plans and efforts, identifying ways to integrate shared goals. Meetings for the general public sought feedback on vision plans for each parish.

5 Select Final Projects in Each Parish

 

In the final round, participants dug into the six proposed projects for each parish, reviewing concept drawings and example images and information on cost, locations, and potential partners. As with other meetings, presentations were also given in Vietnamese and Khmer. Voting was held online for three weeks and then the LA SAFE selection committee chose 10 pilot projects to pursue.

Statistics

5: The number of planning categories to lead the discussion: Stormwater management; education, economy, and jobs; transportation; housing and development; and culture and recreation

71: community meetings

2,835: participants

"The fishermen know this landscape in and out ... They're experts. Local people have all this knowledge for eco-tourism. If someone could invest in that, they could use what they already know."
— Plaquemines Resident

"In the future, we want to see our assets preserved and protected. [We want] smart growth and planned development, not just development. We want quality, not just stuff."
— St. Tammany Resident

Lafourche Parish Chooses Innovation

Among the projects the parish selected are a model for housing and a business incubator. Renderings courtesy LA SAFE.

Emerging Industry Incubator

Economic resilience is a cornerstone of LA SAFE, and the incubator is aimed at helping to launch new businesses. Developing and diversifying the economy was a need identified by residents as essential to strengthening the region. Also important was expanding economic opportunities for young people in order to keep them in Lafourche Parish.

Entrepreneurs will have a mentor to guide them and access to a coworking space with shared office equipment and a communal kitchen. The program targets ventures in the areas of alternative energy, coastal restoration, hospitality, and eco-tourism.

The incubator was modeled after Propeller (above), a business incubator in New Orleans. It was strongly supported among LA SAFE stakeholders, ranking second of six projects proposed for Lafourche Parish.

Resilient Housing Prototype

As people move from high-risk to low-risk areas, creating quality mixed use development is key to maintaining housing affordability, revitalizing neighborhoods, and preserving green space.

The resilient housing prototype project demonstrates an ideal development pattern for an area in north Lafourche Parish, where the future flood risk is projected to remain relatively low.

The concept centers on higher density on a reduced footprint, with designs for resilience to flooding and wind damage.

It also incorporates clean energy practices, conservation, and on-site stormwater management.

Half the units will be market rate and the rest will be affordable to residents earning 20 percent, 30 percent, and 50 percent of area median income.