Governing's September cover story: Mississippi’s Urbanist Odyssey

Q&A with Christopher Swope: Mississippi’s a ‘Different Disaster’

At the end of July, Associate Editor Christopher Swope went down to the Gulf Coast to report September's cover story "Mississippi’s Urbanist Odyssey." Afterwards, he sat down with Managing Editor Anne Jordan to share his impressions of how things are coming along in Louisiana and Mississippi a year after Hurricane Katrina hit. The photos accompanying this interview were taken by Chris, and to hear more about New Orleans and Mississippi, visit Governing's 13th Floor to read his posts from the road.

What places did you visit to report this story?

I flew into New Orleans first, mostly because as someone who has been there many times and loved the city, I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Journalistically it was also helpful. While I was not comparing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi per se, going to New Orleans enabled me to understand how Katrina was actually two different disasters that affected those places very differently. What happened in New Orleans was a flooding event; the levees failed and large parts of the city soaked in water for a month.

I spent most of my time in Mississippi, particularly in Biloxi and Long Beach, but also in D'Iberville, Gulfport, Ocean Springs and Waveland. The damage in these places was much more what you'd associate with a hurricane: wind and ocean surge. In New Orleans, many houses are still standing but rotted, so from a redevelopment perspective, the city faces a very large demolition project. Deciding which houses are or are not recoverable will be a long and painful process. Along U.S. Highway 90 in Mississippi, everything is just gone. The sight is the same for miles and miles. You see just the foundations of houses. Dump trucks are still hauling debris away. Mother Nature did a lot of demolition work on her own. So while Mississippi faces some tough questions and choices in terms of rebuilding, they're different than what New Orleans faces.

What was the situation you anticipated finding, and how did that compare to reality?

I expected New Orleans to be a mess and it was. But with Mississippi, I think a lot of people--myself included--had a sense that the state had done a better job recovering from the storm. The media talked about how Governor Haley Barbour had lots of friends in Washington and pulled lots of money down for his state. So I mistakenly thought things would be further along in terms of the rebuilding effort than it was. I realized when I got there that was a naïve view. Like most people, I didn't appreciate the overwhelming scale of the disaster until I saw it.

When I asked why there wasn't much rebuilding going on, people cited several factors: The big one was insurance and the question of whether damage to people's homes was caused by wind or flood waters. The storm flooded huge areas not thought to be in flood zones, so people weren't required to have flood insurance. When they've submitted claims, they're not getting anything near the sort of payout they were hoping for.

Then there's the fact that the biggest chunk of federal money Barbour got for Mississippi--up to $150,000 for those homeowners without insurance--is only now starting to be distributed. Anybody who has to completely rebuild their house is still waiting to find out how much money they'll have to rebuild with.

While all this is going on, a lot of people have put their properties up for sale. There's a lot of interest from casino and condo developers, so people are thinking that they can cash in, and they're asking for prices that aren't realistic. The real estate market is in this weird position where there's abundant supply, but prices are still going up and the developers are playing wait and see.

There's also regulatory uncertainty about how to rebuild in particularly low-lying areas. FEMA is using data from Katrina to re-draw maps that tell who needs to buy flood insurance. In some neighborhoods, this will mean rebuilding structures as high as 17 feet off the ground. A few cities, such as Biloxi, have been playing a game of chicken with FEMA by adopting building standards that do not raise the required elevations as high as FEMA suggests. At some point next year, FEMA's maps will become final. In the meantime, many residents are still wondering what to do.

What was your initial idea about the focus for the story and did it change?

I went down there with three things in mind: casinos and the likelihood that Biloxi will basically emerge as a southern Las Vegas; how to build in a way that acknowledges the future risk of hurricanes and how communities come to grips with the unhappy choices that go along with that; and the fact that there has been a lot of discussion about planning in general and New Urbanism in particular. They had a massive planning charette last October that had gotten a lot of attention. My hunch was that it's more show than anything else, but I was surprised to find that most of the towns had taken it very seriously. They had held more charettes locally and were on the verge of adopting New Urbanist master plans and zoning codes. I chased those three tails and then focused on the New Urbanist material because it seemed the most relevant to a national audience of state and local officials.

Were there logistical challenges that you had to overcome?

Just finding a place to stay is not easy. The housing market is so out of whack that even motels by the interstate can charge more than $100 a night. When I checked in to the Gulfport Best Western, the parking lot was filled with contractors' pickup trucks with Texas and Florida plates. It was also hard to find a place to eat anywhere near the Gulf, other than at the casinos in Biloxi. But this was a minimal hardship compared to what most of these people are going through.

It was more difficult than usual "parachuting" into town to interview city officials. In Long Beach and Waveland, the city government is working out of trailers. For the most part, people are just using their cell phones. I got the sense that while the immediate crisis had clearly subsided, it still seemed like things were in a busy state of quasi-chaos. I went to Waveland hoping to catch the mayor, but there was a continual parade of people from the Army Corps of Engineers and Mississippi's emergency management agency going in and out. It seemed nowhere close to normal.

How did the storm affect public officials--both professionally and personally?

Most of the city officials I spoke with had either lost their homes or had significant damage. Biloxi Councilman George Lawrence showed me the pile of bricks left from his house. He had lost everything and was living in a trailer on the slab where his house used to sit. He sort of boasted that his trailer had a little pop-out section, making it a little bit bigger than the usual FEMA trailer. So many people are living in FEMA trailers that there's a certain dark humor around the cramped life inside them. One city employee in Waveland called her trailer a "can-dominium."

Some city officials seem worn out by all they've been through. My last interview was with Bobby Hensley, the head of Biloxi's housing authority. He told me that he and his wife had just bought an oceanfront condo last March, only to see it destroyed in August. He, too, was living in a FEMA trailer, and like almost everyone down there, he was feeling pretty glum about how little his insurance company had paid out. He described the horrific days after the storm, looking for bodies in the rubble of a housing project, and finding corpses that had washed in from a nearby cemetery.

Professionally, Hensley's trying to do his part to help rebuild--housing is the biggest problem down there-- but his employees had to function for one month without phones, two months without computers, and couldn't move back into their offices until January. His biggest complaint was that money to rebuild the units they lost was stuck somewhere between Washington and Jackson. His properties had taken $57 million in damage, but as of July he'd received only $8 million worth of federal funds.

What was the most surprising or interesting thing you learned working on this story?

The power of the ocean. The Gulf of Mexico sometimes looks flat as a lake, and it's absolutely unbelievable that suddenly a storm could come along and raise the ocean level by 30 feet so that everything you see is the ocean floor, and just sucking it out to sea. You still can't swim in the water because there's debris floating around. Many of these people experienced Hurricane Camille in 1969, and they say that everything about Katrina was much worse.

Is there something you'd like readers to know that didn't make it into your article?

They're really just starting to rebuild. The efforts of church, school and other volunteer groups have been incredibly helpful to a lot of people. But what they really need now is skilled labor--people who know how to do plumbing, electric and drywall. They also need construction materials. For those who want to help, people told me they could use gift certificates for Home Depot or Lowe's or cards for home furnishings. So many people lost everything that they owned. They don't just need to rebuild their homes, they also have to buy spatulas and blenders and all the implements of day-to-day life. There was a huge outpouring of compassion after the storm, and a lot of attention around the one-year anniversary might remind the rest of the country that life on the Gulf is nowhere close to normal.