racialization and rescaling: post-katrina rebuilding and the louisiana road home program

ARTICLES

Racialization and Rescaling:Post-Katrina Rebuilding and theLouisiana Road Home Program

KEVIN FOX GOTHAM

AbstractThis article examines the interlocking nature of racialization and rescaling inpost-Katrina New Orleans, focusing specifically on the implementation of the LouisianaRoad Home program, the largest housing recovery program in US history. Based oninterviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the Road Homeprogram as a racialized spatial strategy to revalorize disaster-devastated spaces andenhance the exchangeability of damaged property. I trace the logic of rescaling inpost-Katrina New Orleans and reveal the ways in which state policies to accelerate theturnover time of flood-damaged housing reflect and reinforce the racialization of space.New Orleans stands as a valuable laboratory for the study of government interventionunder conditions of widespread upscaling, downscaling and outscaling processes,pushing trends found elsewhere to their limits while revealing the negative consequencesof rescaling for local institutions and residents. The article illustrates the localizeddynamics of rescaling in times of crisis and offers a novel processual account of thedrivers and consequences of rescaling processes in a disaster-impacted territory.

IntroductionIn recent years we have witnessed the growth of a burgeoning literature on the causalimpacts, developmental trajectories and consequences of various rescaling processes.Alongside complex processes of globalization, state territorial restructuring and thedevelopment of new forms of networked governance, scholars contend that a ‘reshufflingof the hierarchy of spaces’ (Lipietz, 1994: 32) is occurring throughout the world. Thepopularity of such phrases as ‘deterritorialization’(Agnew, 1994; Brenner, 1999a; 1999b),‘glocalization’ (Swyngedouw, 1992), ‘grobalization’ (Ritzer, 2004) and ‘indigenization’(Appadurai, 1996) reflects scholarly interest in understanding how global-level processesaffect cities and how cities shape and mediate global influences. Central to many of theseanalyses is the concern with theorizing and examining ‘the new political economy ofscale’ (Keil and Mahon, 2009), which implies the intensification of social andgeographical interconnectedness and an accelerated circulation of people, capital,information and cultural symbols on a worldwide scale. Rescaling is neither a singularprocess nor a static condition. Rather, rescaling makes sense only in reference to othersocio-spatial processes, state projects and political strategies. In the work of Neil Brennerand colleagues, rescaling encompasses several processes, including the rescaling of state

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Volume 38.3 May 2014 773–90 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12141

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space, the rescaling of capital accumulation, the rescaling of urbanization processes andthe rescaling of contentious politics (Brenner, 2001; Brenner and Theodore, 2002;Brenner, 2004). The proliferation of research on rescaling has opened up fertile areas ofresearch and theorizing linked to several concerns, including the various political sites ofrescaling, the etiology of rescaling processes and the socio-spatial patterns andconsequences of rescaling for cities and political-economic life (Swyngedouw, 2000;Leitner et al., 2007; Smart and Lin, 2007; Cox, 2009).

In this article, I examine the post-Katrina recovery and rebuilding process in NewOrleans to highlight the impact of state rescaling activities on the racialization of space.1

The study of rescaling has long been one of the foundational concerns of urban politicaleconomy, globalization studies and critical geography (for overviews, see Boyer andHollingsworth, 1997; Brenner, 2004; Gough, 2004; Sassen, 2006). My argument is thatrace and racial inequalities are central dimensions of the organization and reproduction ofrescaling processes. Racial discrimination can occur at various steps in the complex chainof actions and events underlying the formulation and implementation of state policies andsocio-legal regulations to rescale institutions, social hierarchies, capital flows andnetworks of exchange. Decisions to contract out social services to private firms and actionsto upscale state functions to supranational organizations, for example, represent therescaling of social inequalities to the extent that some class-based, racial and ethnic groupsbenefit and others suffer. Moreover, a careful reading of recent scholarship on rescalingreveals that decisions to scale back social provision and outscale (privatize) public goodshave had dramatically unequal effects and consequences for different racial and ethnicgroups (Calhoun, 2006; Hacker, 2006). Goldberg (2009: 334–35) argues that neoliberalrescaling ‘ensures a space for extending socio-racial interventions’ such as ‘demographicexclusions, belittlements, forms of control’. Such forms of ‘racial neoliberalism’ serve to‘protect the private sphere from state incursion’and empower private actors and organizedinterests to freely discriminate without legal consequences.

The Louisiana Road Home program offers an ideal case study to examine rescaling asa highly racialized activity. Launched in June 2006, the Road Home program was designedby the state of Louisiana and funded by the US Congress through the CommunityDevelopment Block Grant (CDBG) program to provide compensation to Louisianahomeowners and renters whose homes had been damaged by Hurricanes Katrina or Rita.The goal of the Louisiana Road Home Small Rental Property program was to providefinancing to small rental property owners in the form of forgivable loans for the repair ofrental units. For the Homeowner Assistance program, eligible homeowners could receivea one-time compensation grant payment, up to a maximum of $150,000, to either repair orrebuild their home, purchase another home in Louisiana, or sell their home and relocateoutside of the state. The state of Louisiana, through the Louisiana Recovery Authority(LRA), accepted more than 229,000 applications for the homeowner program anddistributed more than $8.95 billion in aid to eligible landlords and homeowners for theirlosses to enable them either to move back to their homes or to sell the damaged property.In terms of the number of displaced residents assisted and federal money allocated, theRoad Home program is the largest single housing recovery program in US history.

1 On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina triggered the collapse of the Army Corps of Engineers’ leveesystem, flooding approximately 80% of the city of New Orleans and all of St Bernard Parish. Thedeluge caused 1,464 deaths and damages estimated at approximately US $150 billion. Approximately90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast region were designated federal disaster areas, an area almostas large as the United Kingdom. In New Orleans, Katrina flooded over 12,000 businessestablishments (41% of the metropolitan area’s total businesses) and 228,000 occupied housingunits (45% of the metropolitan total). Those who lived in flooded areas included more than 70,000elderly people and 124,126 children. The storm displaced more than a million people in the Gulf Coastregion and nearly everyone living in New Orleans and several surrounding suburbs (The BrookingsInstitution, 2005: 14–15).

774 Kevin Fox Gotham

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.3© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited

Practices and processes of rescaling and racializationRecent years have seen a huge growth in scholarship on the concept of scale and variousattempts to develop scale-sensitive theories of macrostructural change and empiricalanalyses of contemporary rescaling processes. Foundational works by David Harvey(1982) and Henri Lefebvre (1991; 2009) elaborated several heuristic devices andsensitizing concepts to understand the spatiality of social relations and conflicts, and thesocially constructed nature of urban space. Lefebvre (1991) fashioned the spatial triad ofperceived–conceived–lived to analyze the articulations at macro- and micro-level, humanagency and social structure in the production of urban space. In his famous book, TheCondition of Postmodernity, Harvey (1989) posited the concept of time-spacecompression to explain the socio-spatial processes that reduced the spatial and temporalbarriers to capital accumulation, a situation that accelerated the turnover time of capitaland therein produced widespread discontinuity, fragmentation and ephemerality in urbansociety. Other works by Massey (1995 [1984]) and Swyngedouw (1997; 2004) focusedon understanding how powerful groups and organized interests mobilized variouspolitical strategies to transform established spatial forms of organization, includingspatial divisions of labor and interspatial financial competition. Brenner (2004) hasdeployed the language of scale to identify the formation of ‘new state spaces’ linked tothe transformations of urban governance and the rescaling of state power andurbanization processes. Overall, scholars have focused theoretical and empiricalattention on various rescaling processes but disagree over issues relating toconceptualization, etiology, logics of explanation, impact and developmental trajectories(for an overview, see Brenner, 2009; Lobao et al., 2009).

Most analyses of rescaling center on the global level and examine rescaling as amacrostructural condition or process that is an expression of large-scalepolitical-economic trends. Many scholars have examined supranational institutions suchas the World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International MonetaryFund (IMF) as agents and networks of rescaling (Sassen, 2006; for an overview, seeLeitner et al., 2007). While this scholarship initially focused primarily on changesencountered by governments and institutions in Europe and North America, there is nowincreasing recognition that state rescaling and related processes are global phenomena(Leitner et al., 2007). Rescaling accounts typically use deductive forms of theorizing,generalized analysis, and focus on structural processes ‘from above’, examining theactions taken by national governments or supranational institutions to impose new formsof market-oriented or neoliberal forms of socio-legal regulation on subnationalgovernments (for an overview, see Brenner and Theodore, 2002). In terms of thisextra-local focus, rescaling is a theoretical category for explaining a general trend ofworldwide socio-spatial restructuring. While important, there has been little systematicresearch on the different institutional forms, policy trajectories and regulatory problemsof state rescaling (notable exceptions include Hackworth, 2003; Grant and Nijman, 2004;Mahon, 2005; Giersig, 2008 and Ren, 2011).

If we agree, following Brenner (2009: 132), that rescaling is ‘mediated throughnetworked, territorialized or place-based structures, processes, mechanisms, andrelationships’, then it seems essential to identify the key institutional sites, policies andsocio-legal regulations that have shaped and influenced patterns and processes ofrescaling. The advantage of such a perspective is that it can sensitize us to when, whereand why processes of state rescaling develop and how such processes affect variousrealms of urban life and community. In this article, I examine rescaling as a racializedprocess that is activated and reproduced through the concrete decisions and actions takenby state actors, elected leaders, economic elites and other powerful organized interests.A core assumption of this agent-centric approach is that rescaling outcomes do notdevelop out of an inevitable and unalterable structural necessity but rather in a contingentmanner; they result from the conscious actions taken by individual decision makers invarious institutions, organizations and communities acting under particular historical

Racialization and post-Katrina rebuilding in Louisiana 775


circumstances. This emphasis on contingency and agency compels us to examine theactions of local people, and powerful economic and political actors and interest groups,in an effort to grasp not only how larger structural forces make themselves felt in the citybut also the manner in which they generate responses in the actions of residents,neighborhood coalitions and grassroots organizations.

My approach views rescaling activities as contextually embedded within national,regional and local contexts defined by the legacies of past racially discriminatoryland-use and regulatory practices, socio-spatial inequalities and political struggles. Adual, racially segmented mortgage market, one that has been structured by the race ofhomeowners and borrowers and the racial composition of neighborhoods, has been adominant feature of US cities for decades. Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act,discriminatory real-estate and appraisal practices, racial steering and segregationisthousing policies remain prevalent within housing markets, making residentialsegregation the ‘structural linchpin’ (Pettigrew, 1979) of US race relations andmetropolitan development. As detailed in Rugh and Massey’s (2010) analysis offoreclosures in the top 100 US metropolitan areas, residential segregation operated as animportant contributing factor to the foreclosure crisis even after controlling foroverbuilding, excessive subprime lending, housing price inflation and lenders’ failure toevaluate borrowers’ creditworthiness. As many scholars have noted, the racialcomposition of neighborhoods shapes the geography of opportunity in which place andrace interconnect to determine the location of schools, flows of capital mobility andaccess to networks of upward mobility (for an overview, see Squires and Kubrin, 2006).In short, race has long been connected to the ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]) in the US, with racial discrimination being a major feature of housing marketsand uneven spatial development (Gotham, 2014 [2002]).

In the sections that follow I explain how racially discriminatory and segregationistsocio-legal regulations can operate as major spheres or ‘leading edges’ of state rescalingprocesses. Many studies of rescaling have been ‘situated analytically within a broader,unevenly developed global context of rescaling processes, practices, and struggles’(Brenner 2009: 131, original emphasis). Scholars have written less about the impact ofstate institutions on rescaling processes or examined amalgamations of meso-level ormicro-level factors in the constitution and regulation of rescaling processes. Brenner’s(2004) meso-level investigation of rescaling in Western Europe represents an attempt toexpress the core features and crisis tendencies associated with several major waves ofstate rescaling. Ren’s recent (2011) analysis of rescaling in Chinese cities finds thatmetropolitan governments, with power scaled down from the central government andscaled up from local communities, largely account for the increased speed of urbanredevelopment in recent years. Smart and Lin’s (2007) study of ‘rescaling from below’in China’s Pearl River Delta region suggests that the emergence of cross-scaleinteractions and flows has been dependent on pre-existing social networks thatinterconnect villages and townships. A central insight in these studies is that variousrescaling processes are articulated unevenly and in diverse institutional and politicalforms in different places around the world. Moreover, these studies suggest that what weneed are well-focused, theoretically driven, methodologically sophisticated researchdesigns that can allow us to understand the nuanced linkages among global and locallevels pertaining to trajectories of state rescaling.

In embracing the concepts of racialization and rescaling my goal is to address twomajor limitations in debates over the post-Katrina rebuilding process. First, I argue thatexisting accounts have overlooked the issue of geographical scale and, in particular, thescalar processes that have affected New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since the disaster.Scholars have offered new conceptions of disasters to understand the massivedestruction, and have assailed the inadequate and ineffective response by governmentsand the private sector (Brunsma et al., 2007; Tierney, 2007; Adams, 2013). Missing frommany accounts, however, is a critical analysis of how processes of post-Katrinarestructuring are deeply spatialized and mediated through particular state rescaling



strategies. I argue that recent discussions of the scale question provide a more preciseconceptual grammar for analyzing the restructuring of post-Katrina space. Whereasscholars have focused on the ‘neoliberalized’ state’s response to the disaster (for anoverview, see Johnson, 2011), research has not specified how neoliberal ideology,conditions and processes interconnect to determine particular social outcomes. Bycontrast, I argue that the new lexicon of geographical scale emerging in theories ofrescaling offers a powerful means to denaturalize, historicize and critically interrogatethe very spatial units and hierarchies in which post-Katrina social relations are beingconfigured. The advantage of a rescaling approach is that it provides an importantanalytical lens through which to decipher how various state policies and socio-legalregulations and strategies — for example, downscaling and outscaling — are operatingto reinsert relations of domination and subordination, to manage the destabilization ofrace relations and inequalities, and to reconstitute racialized patterns of segregation.

Secondly, while scholars have emphasized the centrality of racial discrimination inshaping the racial contours of post-Katrina New Orleans, they have overlooked thespatialization of racialization processes and their articulation with particular rescalingstrategies.2 Avariety of articles and books have explained the inequities of the post-Katrinarebuilding process with reference to longstanding racial prejudices and discrimination(Bobo, 2006; Dyson, 2006; Bullard and Wright, 2009; 2012). Scholars have been carefulnot to categorize racism as a static, exogenous or omnipotent variable. Nevertheless,researchers tend to assert the importance of race and racial discrimination without anappreciation of their historically contingent and changing meanings. In many scholarlyaccounts, there is a tendency to assume everyone knows what ‘racism’ means and toaddress it without distinguishing between racial prejudice (beliefs and attitudes),discrimination (overt actions that maintain racial inequalities) and ‘institutional’ racism(covert, subtle or past actions that reinforce racial inequalities in the present).Manifestations of racial discrimination and their linkages to segregative outcomes are byno means automatic, and much debate and controversy surrounds theorizations andanalyses of the relationship between racism and the spatialization of racial inequality (Omiand Winant, 1994; Sugrue, 2005; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Gotham, 2014 [2002]). As asocially constructed and politically contested term, race is a historically changing conceptthat expresses a complexity of social meanings that are given concrete expression by thespecific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded. The advantageof a racialization perspective is that it eschews immutable and unchanging notions of raceand sensitizes us to the need to examine the structural and strategic factors that contributeto the racialization of space at particular historical conjunctures.

Investigating and explaining how governments create socio-legal regulations andpolicy tools to revalorize disaster-devastated spaces is central to understanding therescaling of socio-economic activity. While there are different conceptualizations ofrescaling processes, I focus my analytical attention on both downscaling and outscalingprocesses and their linkages with the racialization of space. Downscaling is analogous tothe vertical decentralization or devolution of national-level policy implementation and

2 As developed by a number of scholars, the term racialization refers to the way in which people aresorted into racial categories, resources are distributed along racial lines, and state policy shapes andis shaped by the racial contours of society (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Lipsitz, 2007; Feagin, 2010).Racialization is a process of assigning socially constructed racial meanings, symbols and signifiersto non-racial relations, groups, practices or socio-physical spaces. The racialization of space involvesreal-estate activities, land-use practices, socio-legal regulations and redevelopment policies thatspatially segregate groups and assign values to property based on the race of the residents(Gotham, 2014 [2002]). Perceived racial differences then become the raison d’être for justifyingspatial segregation and discrimination. Racialization organizes racial groups and spaces in the cityhierarchically, creating both physical and imaginary boundaries that disadvantage racial minorities,limit agency and mobility based on race and contribute to the imposition of negative stereotypes onracialized others (for an overview, see Neely and Samura, 2011).



regulatory responsibilities to regional and local governments (Brenner, 2004: 62). Inaddition, researchers typically view outscaling as a strategy to establish and reproducehorizontal linkages with non-governmental organizations and private firms. Contractingout, outsourcing and related forms of privatization represent outscaling strategies (Sites,2000; Brenner and Theodore, 2002). My basic goal is to reveal how rescaling activitiesreflect and reinforce racialization processes. Specifically, I point to rescaling as a highlyracialized process that has significant racial dimensions. The continuing prevalence ofracial discrimination in housing markets combined with longstanding patterns ofresidential segregation operates to create the conditions in which rescaling activities haveracial impacts and outcomes.

Data and methodThe evidence I present here draws on 8 years of New Orleans-based research involvingprimary and secondary data collection, including participant observation and qualitativeinterviews. The secondary data come from archival collections, government documents,planning reports and newspaper articles. The primary data include two dozen interviewswith a variety of long-term residents, including civil-rights activists (N = 3),neighborhood coalition leaders (N = 8), city planners (N = 2), teachers (N = 4), attorneys(N = 4) and leaders of non-profit organizations (N = 3) as gathered by means of asnowball sample method. To protect the confidentiality of my interviewees I havechanged their names. I also examined public officials’ announcements and debates aboutpost-Katrina rebuilding, and analyzed the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper,using various search engines for news coverage about the Road Home program, and localgovernment recovery and rebuilding efforts.

For this article, I used interviews to understand the organization and impact ofgovernment emergency-management policies, the pace and trajectory of post-Katrinaneighborhood recovery, and the challenges and opportunities that different groups andorganizations have faced in the years since the disaster. I tape-recorded, transcribed andsystematically analyzed the in-depth interviews for their content. I also codedand analyzed field notes and interviews using open and focused coding. In myinterviews, I asked questions about the impact of various government policies andprograms on local neighborhoods, the bases of local community struggles and conflictsover the recovery process, and the role of federal and local governments in leading and/orimpeding the recovery and rebuilding effort. This interviewing format also allowed meto probe for clarification when needed, and helped create an opportunity for uncoveringrich data. Broadly, the interview data provided an added resource for triangulating datasources — government documents, newspaper articles and other data sources — toenhance validity and reliability.

Although general theoretical accounts on rescaling by Swyngedouw (2000), Brenner(2004) and Sassen (2006) are extremely important because of the broad and generalizedperspective they bring to explaining rescaling processes and effects, the kind of richdetail and investigative specificity of case studies and qualitative interviewing can offera researcher empirical and theoretical gains in identifying and understanding thedeterminants and causal mechanisms of rescaling processes. Rescaling ‘never entails thecreation of a “blank slate”’, according to Brenner (2009: 134), ‘but occurs through aconflictual “layering” process in which emergent rescaling strategies collide with andonly partially rework inherited landscapes of state scalar organization’. Scholars haverecognized that contextual factors specific to the city under study complicate cross-citygeneralizations about rescaling processes. Local contextualities render variations in theimpact and effects of rescaling strategies and processes to have a relevant degree of placespecificity. Place-based study is important for illuminating unique and distinctivefeatures of rescaling, including concrete and contextually specific forms of recalling. Inshort, place matters in the study of rescaling because an analysis of why and how



rescaling strategies develop and manifest will need to take into account where (andwhen) they develop and reveal their effects.

Race, rescaling and post-disaster redevelopmentMy central argument is that the Louisiana Road Home rental program and thehomeowner program have operated as major catalysts in the post-Katrina period todownscale the responsibility for post-disaster redevelopment to lower levels ofgovernment and outscale program administration and implementation to privatecontractors. Table 1 presents a schematic overview of the two programs and lists theirfunding source, scales of operation, rescaling strategies and program goals andoutcomes. Disaster-recovery policies and rebuilding programs do not target particularscales as fixed, pre-given ‘things’ that exist in an a priori fashion. Rather, they activelyproduce and modify socio-spatial relations and ‘partition geography’ (Smith 1993: 1010)to restore and expand the capacities for profit making and economic growth that havebeen destabilized by the traumatic event.

We can understand post-Katrina rescaling processes and activities in the context of theracialization of space associated with the concentration of minority poverty and racialresidential segregation. In the decades after 1970, the emergence of concentrated povertyand extreme segregation created a city with dramatic and troubling racial and classdisparities (Spain, 1979; Hirsch, 1983; Wright, 1989; Hirsch, 1992). While the entire citysuffered from a low median household income and other social problems, theAfrican-American population suffered even more, as segregation led to concentratedpoverty and other social problems such as underfunded schools, high unemployment andneighborhood disinvestment (Mahoney, 1990; Lauria et al., 1995; Lauria and Baxter,1999). As a result, by the time Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, New Orleans hadbecome a place sharply divided by race and class — a city where many poor blackresidents were geographically isolated from the rest of the population. If we agree thatrescaling activities reflect the legacies of past investments and the built environment andtherefore have close continuities with inherited institutional geographies, then it isimportant to recognize that New Orleans’s patterns of racial segregation andconcentrated poverty constitute an important contributing factor linking rescaling andracialization processes in the development of post-Katrina redevelopment policies.

Downscaling, outscaling and the Louisiana Road Home program

The widespread destruction caused by the collapse of the federal government’s leveesystem in New Orleans in August 2005 created unprecedented policy challenges forgovernments. In the interest of promoting urban revitalization and affording the state ofLouisiana and the city of New Orleans broad ‘discretion’ and as much ‘flexibility’ aspossible in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Congress chose the CommunityDevelopment Block Grant (CDBG) program as the vehicle to provide the largest share ofdisaster relief and recovery funds. The CDBG program’s primary objective is notspecifically to provide disaster relief to states, but rather to develop viable urbancommunities by providing decent housing and expanding economic opportunities forlow- and moderate-income persons. Over the last two decades, however, Congress hasrelied upon the CDBG as a convenient source of flexible funding to help state and localgovernments revitalize their disaster-devastated communities.

To distribute CDBG funds for the replacement or repair of housing, the state ofLouisiana created the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) to administer the RoadHome Small Rental Property program and the Road Home Homeowner Assistanceprogram. The LRA designed the Road Home Small Rental Property program for ownersof small rental properties in the most damaged parishes. The program made forgivable



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loans available to property owners to independently finance needed repairs and rent outtheir units to income-eligible tenants. The Road Home homeowner program had twogoals. First, program architects designed the program to allocate rebuilding assistance tohomeowners to repair their homes with the intent to speed up the repopulation ofneighborhoods. Secondly, the program attempted to acquire the homes of people whochose not to repair them on their own. Here the desire was to discourage abandonmentand reintroduce homes into the circulation process so that they would not becomeblighted and dilapidated. Between December 2005 and November 2007, Congressappropriated $16.7 billion for the CDBG program, of which $13.4 billion went to thestate of Louisiana to fund the two housing programs. From 2006 through 2011, the RoadHome homeowner program received over 229,000 applications and distributed $8.95billion in funds to eligible homeowners (see Table 2).

In June 2006, the LRA signed a three-year $750 million contract with Virginia-basedICF International to manage the Road Home program, thereby outscaling programimplementation and privatizing the largest housing recovery program in US history(Maggi, 2006). The privatization of the Road Home program generated huge profits forICF International while creating new opportunities for the corporation and its dozens ofsubcontractors to administer government programs. ICF International viewed thecontract as a source of new business investment, a foundation for future growth. With theRoad Home contract in Louisiana, ICF ‘could take the capacities built here and leveragethem in response to additional disasters’, according to John Wasson, ICF’s chiefoperations officer (Goldfarb, 2007). Three months after winning the Road Homecontract, ICF announced that it would sell its stock publicly for the first time in its 37years of existence. ICF’s annual revenue increased fourfold between 2005 and 2007, andgross profit nearly tripled. In August 2007, the corporation reported that itssecond-quarter revenue had quadrupled to $190 million, and the company’s stock hadshot up 70% since September 2006 (Hammer, 2008). Large corporate subcontractorsreceived the lion’s share of Road Home resources, with three dozen subcontractorsreceiving 62% of the $592.7 million the state of Louisiana paid ICR as of 10 March 2008.According to a USA Today report, the Road Home contract ‘sweetened [ICF’s] initialpublic stock offering, and helped it buy out four other companies. It now reaches intogovernment contracting sectors that include national defense and the environment’(Gonzales, 2008).

Early on, advocates for affordable housing assailed the Department of Housing andUrban Development (HUD) and LRA officials for a dearth of funding to cover thehousing needs of renters and a lack of transparency in notifying the public on how thatstate was spending CDBG funds. Shortly after the deluge, elected leaders lobbied for andreceived permission from HUD to lower the requirement that 70% of CDBG moneybenefit low- and moderate-income people to 50%.3 On 20 June 2006, civil-rights and

3 Federal waivers are recorded in the Federal Register, published by the National Archives andRecords Administration (NARA). For recent CDBG waivers after Hurricane Katrina, see NARA, 13February 2006 and 6 March 2007.

Table 2 Louisiana Road Home homeowner program statistics (as at 29 May 2012)

Total applications received 229,430

Total eligible applications 148,438

Total applications eligible for benefits calculation 130,140

Total applications with funding disbursed 129,845

Total funding disbursed $8.95 billion

Source: Louisiana Road Home program, available at https://www.road2la.org/ (accessed 1 June 2012)



low-income-housing activists filed an Administrative Complaint with HUD, chargingthat the state of Louisiana was engaged in ‘the planned misuse of federal funds’ due tothe ‘refusal to provide adequate resources for renters’. ‘At no point in the Louisianaplan’, according to the complaint, ‘is there a detailed breakdown of precisely how theCDBG funds are going to be spent to meet the legal 50% requirement’. According tocritics, the LRA did not specify exactly, with goals and benchmarks, how the state wouldcreate homeownership opportunities for low- and moderate-income renters, one of thelegislative goals of the CDBG program and one of the stated goals of all HUD activities.A similar critique was raised by the Public Affairs Council, which noted that the ‘state isunprepared, quite frankly. We don’t have in place the arsenal of oversight mechanisms[to ensure] the state will be a trustworthy steward of these funds’.4

The LRA developed the Road Home program to privilege homeowners andmarginalize the housing needs of renters, a policy orientation that disadvantagedlow-income and poor residents. The breached levees flooded approximately 200,000homes in metropolitan New Orleans and had a severe impact on renters; 40% of thehomes lost were rental units, and ‘over half of those lost rental units were affordable tothose making less than 80% of the area median income’ (Clark and Rose, 2007: 9). Basedon an analysis of CDBG funding, the non-profit organization PolicyLink found that theLRA allocated only 15% of CDBG funds for rebuilding rental units, and the agency didnot direct any funds towards renters (ibid.). After much protest by affordable-housingadvocates, the LRA established the Small Rental Property program in December 2007 toprovide incentives to property owners to repair their storm-damaged rental property. Yetthe rules for the program hampered efforts to revive the rental housing stock.Participating landlords could not seek reimbursement from the LRA until they hadfinished repairs on all eligible units and provided affordable rent to tenants. Most smalllandlords, however, could not afford to pay for repairs up front, which is why they soughtthe forgivable loans in the first place. Finally, a year later, in December 2008, after muchprotest and litigation, the LRA allocated funding to allow upfront financing for currentprogram participants. By March 2009, as reported in the Times-Picayune (2009)newspaper, rental property owners had repaired only 1,188 units under the program, wellbelow the 18,000 the state had expected.

Reinforcing segregation: the racialized dynamics of the Road Home program

The Road Home program’s grant-calculation formula and appraisal practices fueled apost-Katrina resettlement pattern that expressed and reproduced longstanding processesof uneven development and socio-spatial inequality. During 2006 and 2007,neighborhood leaders in predominantly African-American neighborhoods organizednumerous protests, charging that residents were being paid lower Road Home grantamounts than white homeowners in predominantly white neighborhoods (for anoverview, see Bullard and Wright, 2009). Under the rules of the Road Home program,ICF International calculated rebuilding grants on the basis of the lower of two figures: thepre-storm market value of the home, or the cost of the storm damage to the house.5 Bydefinition, therefore, homeowners would receive sufficient assistance to rebuild their

4 Administrative complaint, filed by the Loyola University New Orleans School of Law against theDepartment of Housing and Urban Development, 20 June 2006. Re: Challenging the misuse ofFederal Community Development Block Grants by the state of Louisiana in ‘Road Home’expenditures of Federal funds because there is no guarantee of a ‘fair share’ for low and moderateincome renters and homeowners, available at http://justiceforneworleans.org/jfnodocs/CDBG.pdf(accessed 1 June 2010).

5 The Road Home homeowner program policies version 6.0, at 26 (2008) is available at http://road2la.org/Docs/policies/Homeowner_Program_Policies_070908.pdf (accessed 7 June 2012); TheRoad Home program (n.d.), Pre-storm value, is available at https://www.road2la.org/Docs/faq/Prestorm%20Value%20FAQ_060908.pdf (accessed 9 June 2012).



homes if the cost of damage was lower than the pre-storm value — or they would receiveinsufficient funds to rebuild if the pre-storm value was less than the actual cost ofdamage. In terms of this formula, owners of identical homes with similar storm damageand repair estimates would receive very different grant awards, depending on where theylived (see Bates and Green, 2009).

African-American applicants for Road Home grants received smaller compensationawards and therefore a fraction of the funds needed to rebuild their homes because theywere residents in historically segregated neighborhoods with depressed property values.According to Census 2000 data, African-American homeowners in New Orleans weremore likely than white homeowners in New Orleans to own homes with lower values. In2000, nearly 80% of homes owned by African Americans in New Orleans were valued atless than $100,000, while only about 33% of homes owned by white homeowners in NewOrleans were valued at less than $100,000. Moreover, approximately 93% of homesowned by African Americans in New Orleans were valued at less than $150,000,compared to 55% of homes owned by white homeowners.6 To buttress their claims,civil-rights activists drew on 2008 data showing that homeowners in the Lower NinthWard, a predominantly black neighborhood, faced shortfalls of over $75,000 between theavailable rebuilding resources and the cost of rebuilding each home. At the same time,homeowners in Lakeview, a predominantly white neighborhood, faced shortfalls of only$44,000 per home (Rose et al., 2008: 47).

The discriminatory design and operation of the Road Home program fuelled racialtension and motivated civil-rights groups to file a federal class-action lawsuit inNovember 2008, charging the LRA and HUD with unlawful racial bias anddiscrimination.7 The crux of the complaint was that HUD and the LRA designed theRoad Home program to discriminate against African Americans, since homes inpredominantly African-American neighborhoods had lower values than those in whitecommunities, even when comparing and controlling for condition, style and quality ofhomes. According to the lawsuit, the Road Home program buttressed enduring spatialpatterns of segregation through racially discriminatory practices that restricted choicesand limited the range of individual and collective decisions of displaced residents. SinceRoad Home grants for African Americans were more likely to be determined accordingto the depressed pre-storm value of their homes, rather than the cost of damage from thestorm, the program reinforced an institutionalized system of racial inequality in housing.Rather than using federal policies and programs to undo pre-Katrina segregative patterns,the Road Home program extended and deepened racial and class divides. As one lawyerinvolved with the lawsuit told me:

The suit came about generally because of the work I was doing right after Katrina. I wasworking as a housing counselor and providing help to homeowners generally with mortgage-related problems. We were seeing a lot of people with Road Home applications who wantedhelp filling out the forms, or who were receiving award letters and didn’t understand anythingabout the program. They really needed help to get through the program. I met with hundredsof people and early on I started seeing this pattern where homeowners in predominantlyAfrican-American neighborhoods in New Orleans East, Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Wardwere getting these ridiculous, low Road Home grant amounts, even though their homes were

6 From pages 8–9 of the United States District Court for the District Of Columbia: Greater New OrleansFair Housing Action Center, et al., Plaintiffs, v. United States Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment, et al., Defendants. Case no. 1:08-Cv-1938-Hhk. Plaintiffs’ memorandum and points ofauthorities in support of their motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction.Document 50-1, filed 06/02/10. Available at http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-DC-0004-0010.pdf (accessed 11 June 2012).

7 United States District Court for the District of Columbia: Greater New Orleans Fair HousingAction Center, et al., Plaintiffs v. United States Department of Housing and Urban Development,et al., Defendants. Case no. 1:08-cv-01938, date 11/12/2008. Available at http://www.nationalfairhousing.org/RoadHomeFinal/tabid/3313/Default.aspx (accessed 10 June 2010).



totally destroyed, and in most cases they had very little insurance. The Road Home people werebasing the grants on pre-storm value, [and] then subtracting whatever residents received fromtheir insurance settlements. But in areas where African Americans lived, the values of theirhomes, or the values the Road Home claimed the houses had, were so low that after you tookout whatever insurance money people got, the program offered people very little. There was noway the money they would get would be enough to fix their houses (interview with WS,October 2010).

Because pre-storm home values were significantly lower in African-Americanneighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, even white homeowners living in African-American neighborhoods would receive far smaller Road Home grants than if they hadlived in homes in mainly white neighborhoods. This racial disparity was true even whena home in a predominantly black neighborhood was essentially identical to a home in apredominantly white neighborhood and had identical storm damage. The end result wasthat speed of community rebuilding followed racial lines; predominantly African-American communities such as the Lower Ninth Ward, for example, recorded a 23%repopulation rate according to the 2010 US Census, whereas the predominantly whitecommunity of Lakeview had a 65% repopulation rate, even though both neighborhoodshad roughly the same amount of storm and flood damage.8

In short, the downscaled and outscaled implementation of the Road Home programreinforced and perpetuated a racially segregative post-Katrina resettlement pattern. TheRoad Home formula design disproportionately burdened African-American homeownersand hindered them from returning to their homes. The racial effect of the formulawas intertwined with spatial discrimination, as all residents in African-Americanneighborhoods were disadvantaged even if they were white, Asian and Hispanic, or hadanother ethnic or class background. Neither HUD nor the state of Louisiana offered alegitimate reason for taking pre-storm home values into account when calculatingawards. Moreover, no government body moved to address the discriminatory impact andracially unequal effects of the Road Home program until forced to do so by litigationinitiated by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, the National FairHousing Alliance and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.9 Thus it wouldbe misleading to explain the ‘failures’, ‘limitations’ and segregative effects of the RoadHome program with reference to the ineptitude or incompetence of individuals. Rather,the architects and implementers of the Road Home program formulated a housingrecovery program that cemented deep-rooted racial prejudices and class biases into theprogram design. The effect of this racialization process was to obscure the entrenched,systemic structures of inequality that the levee breaches revealed.

Privatization and the deficit of democratic accountability

The contracting out of the Road Home program to the private sector opened up new andlucrative opportunities for ICF International and its subcontractors to advance theirprofiteering interests, with little public oversight and democratic accountability. Twopeople I interviewed remembered:

8 Figures for the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview come from the US Census Bureau, Census 2000 andthe American Community Survey 2006–2010 (5-year estimates); data collected from SocialExplorer. Available at http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx (accessed 24 March2012).

9 National Fair Housing Alliance, 11 July 2011, Press Release: Civil rights organizations settle HurricaneKatrina housing discrimination case against HUD and Louisiana. Available at http://www.nationalfairhousing.org/Portals/33/Road%20Home%20Settlement_Plaintiffs%20Joint%20Press%20Release%202011%2007%2006.pdf (accessed 6 June 2012).



ICF gained huge amounts of money because of its administration of the Road Home program.It parlayed this experience into being able to compete successfully for anti-terrorism, from thefederal government, homeland security and even Head Start program grants, which is reallyshocking. ICF’s stock increased enormously with Road Home. The rate at which they werepaid for their work on this program was high and the percentage of money that went tocontractor administrative cost was unusually high for this housing recovery program. This isreally amazing, given the notoriously poor, error-prone administration of the program on thepart of ICF. You can go to the record and see every time there was a legislative body meetingabout the Road Home program, there was never an admission of problems or failures. Well, youcan’t correct mistakes if you won’t admit them (interview with MHC, 2 October 2010).

I definitely do believe there were systemic failures in the Road Home program. It is a failureat the institutional level, in the way the program was constructed. I also believe there were poordecisions made throughout the life of the program — on how to provide oversight, on how theappeals system was crafted and implemented; there was a lot of subjectivity going on(interview with HUR, 15 November 2010).

In these interviews, residents reflect on the failures of the Road Home program using thetropes of exploitation, mistreatment and government and corporate manipulation.Themes of abuse and insult radiate through interviews as residents struggle to understandand explain why the Road Home program was designed and implemented so poorly.Anger, disappointment and sadness characterize reactions to the program. These negativeemotions reflect coping strategies residents use to manage their distressing andheartbreaking experiences as well as to interrogate the program’s culpability in impedingcommunity recovery. Moreover, the vehement criticism of the Road Home programreflects collective awareness and realization that the program’s treatment of individualsas ‘cases’ served to atomize individuals and elide a notion of residents as ‘members’ ofan aggrieved ‘community’.

The privatized implementation of the Road Home program generated intenselegitimation problems through its highly organized distribution of public funds to largelyunaccountable private contractors. Indicators of these legitimation problems includedincorrectly calculated grant awards, bogus calculations to appraise pre-storm homevalues, slow progress in awarding grants to needy homeowners, confusing rules,mismanagement of a program to help mom-and-pop landlords repair damaged rentals,lack of performance benchmarks, and demeaning anti-fraud rules that requiredapplicants to be fingerprinted before they received funds.

These and other problems were documented by grassroots organizations such as theCitizens’ Road Home Action Team (CHAT), an unincorporated, all-volunteer associationformed in September 2006 to obtain and disseminate information about the Road Homeprogram and to advocate on behalf of grant applicants’ rights. Within several months ofCHAT’s creation, leaders announced that they had a network of 850 members allorganized ‘to give a voice to those who are being ill-treated by the Road Home programbecause of being ignored, lied to, or unfairly denied grants’.10 One of the organization’scentral complaints was that ICF International was using arbitrary, subjective and biasedappraisals and damage assessments to limit payments to needy residents. As one leaderof CHAT noted in a complaint to the Inspector General of the HUD:

The long delays in assessing damage to most applicants’ homes often resulted in applicantsborrowing money to repair damage before the Housing Evaluator came to assess the extent ofstorm damage. Frequently, these evaluators would not accept objective evidence of the original

10 Citizens’ Road Home Action Team (CHAT) homepage, available at http://www.chatushome.com:2500/chatus/published/HomePage (accessed 9 June 2012).



damage (insurance documents; paid bills for repair coupled with photographs of the damage)that had been repaired, and so flagrantly underestimated the damage.11

These legitimation problems and related accountability deficits were neither isolated noraberrant effects of otherwise altruistic and benevolent bureaucratic actions. Rather, thelegitimation problems were basic policy features that reflected state efforts to limit accessto rebuilding funds and thereby empower private actors (for example, ICF International)in control of public resources and the implementation of state policy. One person noted:

The government had responsibility for oversight and there were extensive failures with theRoad Home program. So whether we attribute that to ICF or state or federal government, or acombination thereof, I guess I think there’s kind of blame to go around. ICF was allowed to runfree in making the wrong decisions and then getting paid again to correct those decisions at theindividual level. The corporation was not implementing the rules that the state gave it butmaking up the rules with the state not looking. At the individual level there was wide latitudefor how decision making happened. There was a lack of uniformity, a lack of supervision anda lack of adequate training (interview with RFG, 19 October 2010).

Overall, the privatization of the Road Home program operated as a major rescalingstrategy to replicate pre-Katrina racialized spatial patterns and thereby reinforce socio-spatial relations of inclusion and subordination. Central to this rescaling was thereconstitution of citizenship in which displaced residents’ demands and claims to ‘rights’— for example, right to community recovery, right to return and right to rebuild, amongothers — were individualized and delegitimized rather than collectivized and recognized,a process of rescaling similar to the one Swyngedouw (1996) recognized in his analysisof the rescaling of state power in the form of authoritarian and punitive attacks againstBelgian coal mine workers’ claims to ‘rights’. In addition, the privatized and devolvedimplementation of the Road Home program entailed a contraction of democratic controlover the process of post-disaster rebuilding. Rather than operating through formalchannels of representation and public accountability, the LRA and ICF Internationalwere able to evade oversight and thereby design and implement a racially unequalhousing recovery program that benefited and empowered private contractors andreinforced class and racial segregation.

ConclusionIn this article, I have examined the Road Home program as a racialized state rescalingstrategy to enhance the exchangeability of real estate and revalorize disaster-devastatedhomes and neighborhoods. In tracing the logic of rescaling in post-Katrina New Orleans,I have focused on how state policies to accelerate the turnover time of disaster-damagedspace have had disruptive and destabilizing effects on prospects for community recovery.The decision to use the CDBG to deliver disaster aid and implement housing-recoverypolicy reflected federal efforts to transfer administrative responsibility for post-disasterrebuilding from the federal government to the Gulf Coast states and their counties. InLouisiana, neither appropriations language nor HUD program rules required that theLRA use a minimum percentage of their CDBG funds for low-income rental housing, asituation that allowed Road Home policymakers to divert housing-assistance funding

11 From page 23 of complaint filed by the Citizens’ Road Home Action Team, Re: Louisiana Road Homeprogram for homeowner assistance, addressed to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG),Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 2 February 2009. Available at http://chatushome.com/chatusfiles/HUD_OIG_Complaint_ForPublicRelease_final__2_2_09.pdf (accessed7 June 2012).



away from efforts to revive the supply of affordable housing for renters and low-incomefamilies. The vertical decentralization or downscaling of state activities towardssubnational administrative levels was also closely intertwined with a horizontaldecentralization or ‘outscaling’ process through which responsibility for the provision ofhousing aid and resources was delegated to private capital (ICF International).

Racialization and rescaling have had an elective affinity with one another. Therescaling of post-Katrina rental and homeowner programs buttressed longstanding socialand spatial patterns dividing whites from African Americans. The downscaling andoutscaling of Road Home program implementation was underpinned by a racial logic, aspolicymakers designed a ‘recovery’ program that racialized space using a non-racialdamage assessment and housing valuation formula; that is, ostensibly racially neutralhousing valuation practices had profoundly racial consequences. Black homeowners andneighborhoods not only bore the brunt of the flood and storm damage but suffereddisproportionately from the segregative effects of the Road Home program. In addition,the racialization of the Road Home program via the use of pre-storm market value ofhomes to calculate rebuilding grants reflected a market-centered logic that systematicallydenied the centrality of race and segregation as signifiers of housing value. Rescaling andracialization logics interlocked to render irrelevant the African-American experiencewith entrenched discrimination and segregation.

For New Orleans, the rescaling of institutional structures and forms of regulatoryintervention has been fraught with a number of contradictions that have exacerbatedsocial problems and slowed community recovery. One contradiction is that rescalinggenerates intense struggles between opposing political coalitions and alliances regardingissues such as social marginalization and exclusion, institutional capacities andintergovernmental linkages. Another contradiction is that downscaling and outscaling ofprogram implementation leads to a socially exclusive form of rebuilding that can shieldpowerful actors and organized interests from democratic scrutiny and public oversight. Afurther contradiction is that downscaling and outscaling permit non-public bodies,especially public-private partnerships, to shape an entrepreneurial practice and ideologythat can lead to political exclusion or a limitation of citizenship.

In this sense, the events in New Orleans stand as a starker version of trends that arehappening elsewhere and should serve as a canary in a coal mine for all US cities. Thesetrends include the use of public policy to physically and socially exclude the black urbanpoor from the redevelopment visions of the contemporary US city (Rhodes 2010); theerasing of systematic racism and class-based exclusion from a general understanding ofcities (Wacquant, 2002; Wilson, 2007; Wacquant, 2008); and the widespread deploymentof rescaling strategies to disinvest in poor neighborhoods in favor of reinvestment ingentrifying areas (Slater, 2008). Post-Katrina New Orleans is not an anomaly but anexemplary case that reveals in an intensified and telescoped fashion the overallfragmentation and balkanization of city space by class and race.

Kevin Fox Gotham ([email protected]), Department of Sociology, Tulane University,220 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA.

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