Fred Cuny

I love hanging out with engineers. Recently, as the vicissitudes of New Orleans have played out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I've listened to a number of engineers casually lay out their suggestions as to how New Orleans should be rebuilt with the aim of avoiding a similar catastrophe in the future. "Take down the levees, see where the water flows, rebuild only to the waterline," says one. "Keep the existing levees, lay out a greenspace just inside those levees, build another set of levees on the inside of the greenspace," says another. All the ideas make good sense, but when you introduce human desires and needs into the mix, the equation changes dramatically.

Frederick C. Cuny, born on this day in 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut, was an engineer who made disasters his life's work. In 1969, Fred Cuny took a leave of absence from a Fort Worth engineering firm to assist in an airlift of food to Biafra, the beginning of a career of relief work in which he exorcised his impatience with bureaucratic red-tape and waste by founding Intertect Relief and Reconstruction Corp., a relief mission technical assistance and training company. Through Intertect, Cuny designed and built refugee camps in Bangladesh in 1971; created a housing reconstruction and materials recycling program following the 1976 Guatemala earthquake; and helped refugees return to their homes in Ethiopia in 1985. He even argued with Mother Teresa over the viability of concrete housing in the mud-puddles of Calcutta, and was right.

After almost 20 years of working in disaster relief, Cuny assembled his experiences in his book, Disasters & Development (1983), and trained relief workers in the "Cuny approach" to disaster relief -- using disasters and violent conflicts as catalysts for economic development in the Third World, by figuring out how to reestablish and strengthen resource distribution systems following a disaster rather than merely encouraging dependent or combative behavior by handing out food and drawing able-bodied populations to the edges of airstrips.

Reading Disasters & Development today, one experiences an eerie sense of familiarity, as Cuny describes the chronology of relief and government action following a hypothetical Third World hurricane -- the cross-jurisdictional bickering, looting, corruption and the gradual tailing off of emergency relief, leaving lasting deficits in housing, food distribution, potable water and other necessities. Most interestingly, Cuny observes that disasters always hit the poor disproportionately -- not only because the poor live in sub-standard dwellings in areas where land is cheap and therefore often more vulnerable to the elements, but also because prior to a disaster, all resources are spent on maintaining a minimum level of development, with few resources being free for improvement. When a disaster hits an impoverished community, the effect is often epochal, setting back the meager advancements of decades of step-by-step improvements in matters of sanitation and construction. Were he alive today, no doubt Cuny would have said as much about Katrina.

After helping Palestinians in Kuwait and Kurds on the Turkish border following the Gulf War, Cuny went to Sarajevo in 1993, where he secretly built a water filtration plant (concealing it from hostile authorities in an abandoned highway tunnel) to meet the emergency need for potable water outside the range of sniper fire while the Bosnian conflict raged around the city. By 1995, Cuny had begun to articulate the need for the world's major powers to develop a systematic approach to dealing with regional conflicts, and to cease using well-intentioned humanitarian aid as a replacement for decisive political or military action.

In his last crusade, he visited Chechniya and returned to the U.S. waging a war of words against the brutality of Russian attacks; he returned shortly thereafter with a plan for a cease-fire, combined with recommendations to set up a medical center to deal with the cholera outbreak, distribution of repair kits to restore damaged homes and the establishment of an emergency radio station to help separated families find each other. Soon after his return to Chechniya, however, Cuny disappeared. President Clinton raised the question of Cuny's disappearance with Russian president Yeltsin, but it was later discovered that the Russians had been spreading false propaganda about Cuny (that he was anti-Islamic) which resulted in his being detained and executed by Chechen intelligence officials in April 1995.

Michael Brown Testifies Before Congress

"I do solemnly swear that not a single Arabian horse was lost during Hurricane Katrina."

(Credit: George H.)

Land Rush

Among the many surprises in President Bush’s speech from Jackson Square in New Orleans last Thursday was his proposal for a federal urban homesteading program for the Gulf Coast region. As he put it: “Under this approach, we will identify property in the region owned by the federal government, and provide building sites to low-income citizens free of charge, through a lottery. In return, they would pledge to build on the lot, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity. Home ownership is one of the great strengths of any community, and it must be a central part of our vision for the revival of this region.”

When spoken with the President’s Texas drawl, the word “homestead” cannot help but call forth in my mind the memory of that famous Oklahoma land rush scene from William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds (seen above), one of the greatest and most realistic Western action sequences of the silent cinema. (The one in Tom Cruise’s Far and Away was a pretty walk in the park by comparison.) Since 1889, when the original Oklahoma Cherokee land-strip rush occurred, the government has gotten a little more sophisticated about how it doles out its homesteading land, however, so you can all put your horses back in the barn.

Commentators have generally been stymied by the proposal. Cokie Roberts referred to urban homesteading as a new idea in her NPR commentary on the speech earlier this week, stating that the 19th century Homestead Act that made land available in the West was “one of the most effective and popular ideas in this country,” but that “we’ve never tried it in urban centers.”

Actually, we have. Or at least we’ve seen variations on this theme. Three years before the Homestead Act itself was repealed in 1976, Wilmington (Delaware), Philadelphia and Baltimore started their own “citysteading” programs, taking city properties acquired in tax foreclosures and offering them for sale to the public at low prices. The federal government began the process of rechanneling its interests in homesteading the following year with the passage of the Housing and Community Development Act, re-selling properties acquired in FHA mortgage defaults; by 1980, 90 urban areas, from Benton Harbor, Michigan to New York City participated in such programs.

Unfortunately, by 1989, it had come to light that many urban homestead properties that were intended for “low income working people” had been transferred illegally to ineligible people (i.e. speculators with capital). Under the HUD Equity Restoration Act of 1989, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was given the power revoke home sales and impose civil penalties on well-heeled carpetbaggers. In 1997, President Clinton announced a new urban homestead initiative, attempting to improve city homeownership by “cutting mortgage closing costs, helping police officers buy homes, using rental subsidies for home purchases and cracking down on housing discrimination.” The Urban Homestead Initiative remained a part of the HUD strategic plan as late as 2000.

So, in one form or another, it’s actually an old idea.

However, I have seen surprisingly little study with regard to the success of either the federal programs or the myriad of state and local urban homesteading programs that exist to this day. It seems to be accepted as a given that such programs will help to facilitate urban revitalization. What seems less clear is that such programs do anything to improve the plight of the urban poor.

One of the interesting recurring anecdotes of the Katrina aftermath are the stories of New Orleans residents, now finding themselves in Houston or Florida or LA, confirming that they have no intention of returning to New Orleans. They perhaps sense that there is more opportunity for them in a new environment -- and judging by what we have seen, we can hardly blame them for that.

One wonders if an urban homesteading program would actually draw any of the people President Bush would hope to draw back into New Orleans, or whether drawing low-income people back into New Orleans just for the sake of having them there is an altogether good idea – particularly if job creation lags behind resettlement.

Although I have nothing against a nationwide urban homesteading initiative, it would perhaps be a better bet, for the short term, to find ways to fund the cost of moving and temporarily resettling people (giving the Katrina homeless financial assistance to deal with rental and utility deposits, for example) in areas where work and opportunity can be found -- followed by a more robust initiative addressing home ownership for low-income individuals, wherever they may be located. While the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast is a worthy and important goal, let’s hope that federal housing and urban policy focuses on some of the systemic problems that existed before Katrina hit (though illustrated in its wake) and that continue to exist in its aftermath.

Urban Search and Rescue Heroes

Our friend Jocelyn Augustino, a photographer, has been following FEMA Urban Search and Rescue crews around New Orleans for the last week. We received this dispatch yesterday:

Just wanted to drop a note to say I'm fine....in spite of the fact that I'm living in hell....you couldn't even begin to imagine things down here. I have lost the charger for my cell phone so have not been able to return my personal phone calls. Hope to resolve that...someday;) other than that...very tired...living off of very little sleep...the rescue guys remain my heroes -tragic that the media has decided to slam the FEMA operation which in turn slams these men. People are still getting rescued...had a bunch today in areas that are flooded...you couldn't believe the lift of spirits for these men and women when they make a rescue.
Just a reminder that, even as we express our dismay and outrage over the inadequacy of leadership and the initial responses to the New Orleans disaster, the Urban Search and Rescue men and women in the field deserve our thanks and respect.

See some of Jocelyn’s photos at http://www.fema.gov/storm/katrina/photo_katrina1.fema?id=5.

New Orleans Levees: Crushed By the Bipartisan Weight of Suburban Politics

As Ron Fournier of the Associated Press has reported, last year the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million from Congress for hurricane and flood programs for New Orleans, but had its request slashed to $42.5 million; meanwhile, the recent $286.4 billion federal highway bill did manage to provide for such pet projects as a $231 million bridge to a “small, uninhabited Alaskan island.”

The failure of federal authorities to fix the problems, resulting in the devastating breach of New Orleans’ levees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- after years’ of unheeded warnings by scientists, the Corps and New Orleans’ leading institutions -- is unfortunately part of a broader pattern of bipartisan neglect of cities at the state and federal level that has been taking shape for two decades.

In a 1992 essay in his book Dead Cities entitled “Who Killed L.A.? A Political Autopsy,” Mike Davis observed that as voter demographics have changed, so has the attention paid by state and federal officials to the economic and infrastructural needs of the nation's larger urban areas. In 1992, the year that President Clinton was elected, the nation officially became a “suburban majority” nation, meaning that there were more suburban voters in the country than urban or rural voters. Apparently, suburban white voters had already been a majority of white voters since 1980.

As Davis put it:

The politics of suburbia, notes Fred Siegel in a recent article in Dissent, are “not so much Republican as anti-urban . . . [and] even more anti-Black than anti-urban.” Racial polarization, of course, has been going on for generations across the white-picket-fence border between the suburb and the city. But the dramatic suburbanization of economic growth over the last decade, and the increasing prevalence of strictly rim-to-rim commutes between job and home, have given these “bourgeois utopias” . . . unprecedented political autonomy from the crisis of the core cities . . .

Core cities, for their part, have helplessly watched the reapportionment of their once-decisive political clout in national politics . . . as Carter, Mondale and Dukakis each demonstrated, it was possible to sweep the urban cores and be crushed in the suburbs by the defection of so-called “Reagan Democrats,” a stratum largely consisting of blue-collar and lower-middle-class white refugees of the cities . . .

The Clinton campaign [in 1992] was, of course, the culmination of a decade-long battle by suburban and Southern Democrats to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from labor unions, big city mayors and civil rights groups . . .

. . . [T]here is no obvious reason why a campaign carefully designed to de-emphasize the cities should deliver a president suddenly fixed on their needs. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles rebellion, neither Business Week nor the National Journal could locate a significant dividing line between the Clinton and Bush [Sr.] approaches to urban policy.
Along with the inexorable shift in political clout away from the cities to suburbs, cities have received less and less help from state and federal sources.

Just to take New York City as an example – in 1977, federal contributions constituted 19% of the city’s budget. In 1985, the federal contribution had fallen to 9%, and by fiscal 1997, it was apparently just under 5%. Combined with the dwindling tax base of most major urban areas due to the suburban flight of not only affluent individuals but healthy businesses, the result has been that many cities are finding it increasingly difficult to stay viable economically. Most often, the programs hardest hit by such budget cuts are subsidized housing, economic development assistance and job training, but infrastructure is a matter for increasing concern in most cities. As Tom Cox, deputy mayor of Pittsburgh, told me, just before Pittsburgh had to file for “distressed status” under Pennsylvania’s Municipalities Financial Recovery Act in 2003, “It isn’t as if we have fewer roads to maintain, or fewer feet of sewage line,” just because more people are leaving Pittsburgh for the suburbs and taking their votes and their tax dollars with them. (Myself included, admittedly.)

As the cable news cameras are making abundantly clear as they hover over New Orleans, inadequacies in our current method of funding infrastructure, housing and job creation in the nation’s cities are all issues that are inevitably swirled up by the tragedy of the breach of New Orleans’ levees.

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See also:

Mike Davis: Poor, Black, and Left Behind (September 24, 2004)