Protect What We’ve Gained in Flood Loss Reduction

Flood damage on Staten Island from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Flood damage on Staten Island from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

One of the ongoing, perhaps permanent, struggles in public policy in a democracy like ours involves finding a balance between enabling private sector opportunities and protecting both the public interest and the public purse. Depending on their philosophies and perspectives, people will naturally draw those lines in different places on different issues. But sometimes it is perfectly clear when the public interest is about to suffer a hit. Currently, one of those possibilities involves the fate of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

On April 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 2901, a bill that seeks to make it easier for private companies to write private flood insurance policies that can take the place of those provided by the NFIP. The NFIP was created under the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 to provide insurance that was then largely unavailable on the private market, but it also set in motion the creation of a federal regulatory program that has established standards for floodplain management in more than 22,000 communities nationwide. Many of those communities, particularly smaller ones, have no other meaningful land-use regulations, unlike bigger cities and suburbs and communities in states that mandate planning, which typically have comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, and subdivision regulations. The reason is that federal flood insurance is made available only in communities that have adopted the minimum standards of the NFIP, which seek to achieve flood loss reduction, thus reducing the damages from flooding and the resultant payouts under flood policies.

It makes perfect sense. There is no good reason for the federal government to insure properties against flood losses without making some attempt to minimize those losses through sensible land-use measures. Private casualty insurers certainly make attempts within their means to reduce losses from other types of accidents and disasters. Why not the federal government?

There is nothing inherently wrong with expanding opportunities for private flood insurance coverage. But there are serious issues with HR 2901, and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), an organization with which I work closely as manager of the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), has mounted an alert among its members to urge U.S. Senators to take time to examine the bill closely before taking any action this fall. It has also addressed the issue earlier in testimony before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The Senate is in recess until September 6. ASFPM would ideally prefer that Congress defer action until next year, when the NFIP is due for reauthorization in any case, in order to consider the unintended consequences of the House bill in line with the larger objectives of the NFIP. APA is in support of the ASFPM effort in this regard.

The NFIP has evolved for nearly half a century with numerous revisions and reforms over time. Like any such program, it has needed to evolve in response to new lessons and changing circumstances. Some of the most significant lessons of the past came from the 1993 Midwest floods, which spawned reforms a year later. Among numerous changes that year was modification of policies to include Increased Cost of Compliance, which allows policies to pay for building improvements in response to higher local building standards, for example, by requiring elevation of buildings above the Base Flood Elevation, which is basically the height of the 100-year, or one percent chance annual flood, as mapped on the NFIP’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps. It is in the public interest to facilitate the capacity of communities to upgrade such codes over time as new lessons are learned, and to make it financially feasible for policy owners to comply with those new standards when rebuilding after a flood.

To be sure, these maps have never been perfect indicators of flood risk, though they are getting better with current digitization initiatives. Still, only about 1.2 million miles of shoreline and riverfront have been mapped, while more than 2/3 of the miles of the nation’s waterways are not. Most of the latter are small creeks and streams outside developed areas, which clearly have always been the priority. But it also means that development can occur in less developed areas without requirements to meet standards that only apply to mapped floodplains—unless a local jurisdiction is proactive enough to require developers to map such areas before new subdivisions or other development can be considered. Mostly, that is not the case.

So what is at issue with HR 2901? For one thing, NFIP policies include a policy fee that helps underwrite the cost of all this mapping, including updates and corrections over time. It is an ongoing process in part because floodplains are not static geographic entities. They expand or contract with the impact of our development practices, which affect the amount of impervious surface in urbanized areas, which affect how stormwater and other runoff is absorbed into the ground or directed downstream. Further, according the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), about 40 percent of flood-related losses occur outside mapped floodplains. Why? Because not all floodplains are adequately mapped or as yet mapped at all, and because flooding can occur outside and beyond the 100-year floodplain, and often does.  We have Certified Floodplain Managers these days because this is, in fact, a complex and technical subject.

The problem with not including policy fees in the private policies is that the burden of financing this public good of mapping floodplains and maintaining a mountain of data about flood hazards falls to those NFIP policyholders who are paying for it, or to the American taxpayer when Congress allocates money directly for the purpose. The fee also supports flood hazard reduction efforts under FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance program. That creates an inequity in favor of private flood insurance. But that is not all. Although federal financial regulators have had authority to establish policies concerning what provisions in a private policy would make them acceptable as an alternative to an NFIP policy, they have not acted. FEMA legal advisors, for whatever reason, decided in 2013 they did not have the authority to issue guidance. So the House bill assigned this responsibility to state insurance commissioners while prescribing that lenders and federal bank regulators “shall accept” the standards laid out by the states. It would be small surprise to anyone knowledgeable in this field to discover that state regulation in most cases is likely to be minimal and limited. The only required equivalency in the House bill will deal with the coverage amount, which may result in much smaller private premiums with high deductibles that may be superficially attractive—until homeowners with large deductibles find they lack the resources to rebuild and just walk away, quite possibly leaving communities and the federal government holding the bag for addressing the problems of neighborhoods with spotty redevelopment and blighted properties.

All of this, at the very least, deserves some serious debate before the Senate accepts the House version, but proponents have been seeking to fast-track the Senate bill (S 1679) under a process known as Unanimous Consent. However, if enough Senators hear enough complaints, fast-track may become a less attractive option. And, as noted earlier, there are good reasons to delay this discussion and take it up as part of the NFIP reauthorization next year, so that both Senators and the public can begin to understand the full implications of what has been proposed.

In no way would this be a death knell for private flood insurance. One problem the bill deals with in two useful paragraphs is to allow the private policies to be considered “portable” for the purpose of maintaining an unbroken record of coverage for a property if the owner switches between public and private insurance. That has not been the case but is not hard to fix. ASFPM notes that there has been a doubling in the last couple of years of companies offering private insurance. In other words, the expansion of private flood insurance is already happening. There is no reason to create a whole class of private policies that are not truly equivalent to those of the NFIP and, in the process, undermine the public goods produced by the NFIP and quite likely, increase the number of property owners seeking disaster assistance after discovering they are inadequately covered.

Flood insurance policy has already entered a volatile period that began with the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, passed just a few months before Hurricane Sandy. While trying to place older, subsidized policies on a path to actuarially justifiable rates, it triggered a political backlash when rates began to soar after the impact of Hurricane Sandy. By 2014, Congress somewhat reversed course but has left unresolved a number of issues concerning how previously subsidized policyholders could afford their now escalating premiums as Congress sought to reconcile affordability with a desire to place the NFIP on a fiscally sound footing. It is a thorny issue at best, and we surely have not heard the end of it.  The simple fact is that large numbers of older, poorly protected properties in or near floodplains are likely to continue to generate flood losses into the future.

We already have a flood insurance program that is $23 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury because of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, which overrode assumptions that the NFIP would largely insure garden-variety disasters. Next year’s reauthorization could sensibly forgive this debt in order to begin to place the NFIP back on a fiscally sound footing, but not with the approaches in HR 2901. We need to strengthen, not weaken, a system that at least drives toward stronger floodplain management and flood mitigation. We need to get this train moving again in the right direction. Congress needs generally to be more productive than it has been in recent years, but it also needs to put more thought into this particular issue and act in less haste. The alternative is to continue to generate a long train of unintended consequences and later ask what happened and why.

Jim Schwab

Katrina at 10

Eminent Domain for Who

All photos by Stephen D. Villavaso

For the first time since launching this blog,  I have invited a guest author, Stephen D. Villavaso, a New Orleans native, urban planner, and land-use attorney, to comment on today’s tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. I was heavily involved not only in the Shreveport conference he mentions below in October 2005, but also in the subsequent Louisiana Recovery and Rebuilding Conference in New Orleans the following month, and supplied Steve with the “boxes of books” to which he refers, which consisted of copies of APA’s 1998 report, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, which he dutifully distributed to fellow professionals in the weeks that followed. I am happy to turn over this forum to Steve on this special occasion.

How Do We Set the Right Tone for an Anniversary, a Milestone….a Birthday??

by Stephen D. Villavaso, J.D., FAICP

Ten years seem like a long time to someone growing up, but not so long to mature elders watching and nurturing a new budding person. Some may even tire of the annual milestone review that seems to redundantly and almost imperceptibly move toward some unknown completion. Such may be the feelings people entertain as the ten-year milestone of the events centered on Hurricane Katrina arrives.

House for sale, tree for free.

House for sale, tree for free.

First, some myths need to be dissolved in favor of some clear starting points. Hurricane Katrina did “hit” on August 29, 2005. But more importantly, dozens – no, hundreds, possibly thousands –of events cascaded (and continue to cascade) from the moment of the so-called “hit.” Lives lost, homes destroyed, neighborhoods shattered, and cultures wrecked are but a few that should be marked in time and remembered. New beginnings, renewed faith, technology advancements, and new ideas and creativity should also be hallmarked and remembered. Remembered because “ten” is an important benchmark (a birthday?), some might say.

Katrina-fatigue was, and continues to be, discussed and experienced in many areas. In movies, songs, political speeches, product placement ads, and even in publishing, the Katrina-fatigue syndrome has caused many glazed eyes, bad reviews, and the occasional attack on the underlying motivations. Urban planners have not been immune to any of these phenomena surrounding Katrina. Within the first six hours of the “hit”, communications between planners at local, state, federal, and international levels exploded the airways.

LNW ground zeroTen years ago the “airways” were primitive as compared to the instant, high speed, always-connected cyberspace a mere decade later. To say that bandwidth was very restricted is a geeky way to say the phones just plain did not work very well. Flip phone texting was slow and unreliable, and most people did not even know how to do it. Land lines in the general vicinity of the hit (within 100 miles) were gone for the most part, and the few satellite phones in use almost never worked. The systems that did work were the existing professional and cultural networks that had been established prior to and nurtured since these events. Getting out of the impacted zone was a key step in linking communications out and then eventually back into the areas.

These exploded airways actually resulted in a sort of boundary of communication accessibility that existed around the most impacted areas. The mobilization of planning resources began in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the already scheduled October 2005 state conference of the Louisiana Chapter of the American Planning Association. This North Louisiana location was just far enough away from the impacted zone to allow for the dialogue and planning solutions to emerge.  Ironically, the conference was almost cancelled due to incredible logistic issues (i.e., air service limitations and infrastructure failures). These hurdles were overcome with two other significant forces that also served to overcome the psychological roadblocks: the dogged local perseverance to recover and the sincere national commitment to assist. Thus, within 72 hours of the impact of Katrina, national and state APA leaders made the decision to stay the course and convene the state conference on schedule, albeit with a new, urgent focus. So now another point of remembrance is this unique gathering of the best and brightest planning minds that converged in Shreveport to begin the dialogue of replanning neighborhoods, restarting communities, recharging regions, and reconnecting these levels with the rest of the state and even the nation. These events that emerged from the early days after the hit have rocketed the field of what was called “disaster recovery” into the robust science of resilience planning and implementation mandates that serves city planners and decision makers a mere decade later.

Subsequent hurricanes (i.e., Rita, Gustave, Ike, Sandy, and others); inland riverine flooding in Kansas, Colorado, and other basins; almost regular earthquakes (followed by tsunamis) along the western U.S. fault zones; and the now cyclical drought/fire/landslide scenarios have continuously added chapters, techniques, and new policy initiatives and solutions to the planners’ resilient recovery toolbox.

A ten-year milestone is an important mark in an event’s history if it can teach or continue to teach.  Teaching a community to be better prepared (to plan), of course, is fundamental, but for urban planners, the “teachable moment” never ends. The dozens of stories that should be documented on this anniversary will be told. These planning stories should be viewed through many lenses.  One key focal point is the role of the American Planning Association (APA). APA landed in Shreveport ten years ago with the best minds on the planet, boxes of books, some meager funding sources, and an undaunted spirit to “build belter communities.” That moment continues, the remembrance is important, and the story needs to be told and retold.

Stephen D. Villavaso is a New Orleans native whose family has lived in New Orleans for 300 years. For the past forty years Steve has worked as an urban planner/professor/attorney, spending the last ten (post-Katrina) years rebuilding his home, city and state, in that order. See his full bio.

The Past and Future of Disaster Research and Practice

Interdisciplinary disaster studies are still relatively new, compared to long-standing fields like geology or even psychology. I spent last week (July 19-23) in Broomfield, Colorado, first at the Natural Hazards Workshop, sponsored by the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, and then at the one-day add-on conference of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association (NHMA). The International Research Committee on Disasters Researchers Meeting took place at the same time as the NHMA gathering. The main event marked the 40th year of the Natural Hazards Workshop, launched in 1976, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), by the Natural Hazards Center’s renowned founder, Gilbert F. White, who virtually pioneered studies of flooding in the 1930s as a geographer who served in the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, later taught at the University of Chicago, and finally found his home in Boulder, where he died in 2006 at age 94. You can read a full biography of White, a true scientific pioneer, in Robert E. Hinshaw’s Living with Nature’s Extremes, published shortly after White’s death.

To mark this milestone, current NHC director Kathleen Tierney invited several of us to join a panel for the opening plenary on July 20 to discuss both retrospective and prospective views of disaster research and practice within four disciplines. I spoke about urban planning; Howard Kunreuther spoke by video on economics; Tricia Wachtendorf of the University of Delaware on sociology; and Ken Mitchell of Rutgers University on geography. In the end, of course, we all use and benefit from each other’s insights, so it was intriguing to hear the comparisons in how our fields have approached problems of hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. The forum was moderated by long-time NSF program director Dennis Wenger, who previously served at Texas A&M University, where he was Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center.

Wenger himself had a story to tell before introducing his panel, one involving more than 800 projects funded by NSF for more than $200 million over the years his program, Infrastructure Systems Management and Extreme Events, has been in place to fund research on hazards. It has not always had that name; as Wenger humorously noted, however, its four name changes over some four decades is “not bad for NSF.” The ballroom of 500 disaster practitioners and researchers from multiple disciplines contained more than a few people whose research has benefited from those NSF grants, which have moved the field forward in numerous and remarkable ways.

The American Planning Association taped the opening plenary and has made it available on its multimedia Recovery News blog at http://blogs.planning.org/postdisaster/2015/07/28/what-next-the-past-and-future-of-disaster-practice-and-research/. The blog post includes the PowerPoint accompanying my presentation.

 

Jim Schwab

Did We Learn from Sandy?

Two years ago, in June 2013, I participated in a day-long meeting in New York hosted by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, helping explore the coastal policy implications of Hurricane Sandy. These two organizations were hardly the only ones pursuing such questions, but they were certainly among the most prominent. RPA has been a long-time presence in the New York Metro area, and the Lincoln Institute is a highly reputed research organization located at Harvard University. Both clearly had a stake in the region’s recovery from the Superstorm, and together they had access to some of the best planning minds familiar with disaster issues.

Last year, in part as a result of that and other research sessions and forums, the Lincoln Institute produced Lessons from Sandy: Federal Policies to Build Climate-Resilient Coastal Regions. Though many of their prescriptions will look familiar to those who have followed the trajectory of post-Sandy redevelopment, this report is both worth reading and very readable. It concentrates on issues of disaster relief, insurance and flood risk management, and urban infrastructure. Its recommendations are clear and strong, starting with a series of specific ideas for addressing future climate impacts during the recovery and rebuilding process, talking about how to make programs such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Public Assistance Program, which funds the rebuilding of public infrastructure, more flexible in this regard, improving the coordination of planning before and after disasters, and development of new financing and insurance mechanisms to support investments in mitigation and resilience. It also discusses realigning federal programs to reduce risk and restore the health of coastal resources, and better data sharing to aid decision making.

 

Jim Schwab

Resources for Planners to Address Hazards

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

One benefit of increased attention to hazards and climate change within the planning profession is a growing array of valuable literature that can benefit practicing planners and widen the scope of thinking on the subject among academics. This review of books published within the past year or so is intended to highlight some of this new literature and offer some comparisons on the focus and practical value the authors provide.

Because urban planning is ultimately about people and the built environment, it may make sense to start this survey with two books that examine the context within which risk happens. Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center there, sets out in The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2014) to reorient our thinking away from the idea that individual natural phenomena—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.—“cause” the death and destruction that we often associate with them. In fact, she says, the death and destruction, particularly in the modern world, is an artifact of the social decisions that produce and, equally important, distribute risk differentially among populations, often producing widely varying impacts. In the opening chapter, she states, “the organizing idea for this book is that disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and that the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself.”

By itself, the idea that disaster losses result from the collision of natural forces with the built environment should not surprise any planners with a modicum of intelligence. And the built environment is inevitably the result of both individual and community decisions. The devil of Tierney’s thesis lies in the details: paying attention not only to all the social, institutional, and political decisions that either enhance or mitigate risk but to how those decisions get made and for what reasons. It is clear that those impacts are anything but randomly distributed and that most are avoidable, yet the litany of losses marches on. Tierney notes that a great deal of professional attention in recent decades has focused on how people perceive risk, a legitimate area of inquiry, but not nearly as much has focused on the origins of risk and how it was socially constructed. There are reasons, after all, why a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti kills an estimated 300,000 (but who really knows?) yet only dozens at most in California, and why the 1,800 who died during Hurricane Katrina included overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of the economically disadvantaged.

Most planners work in local or regional government, and they serve power structures that must make the decisions, even when they choose to do nothing, that affect these outcomes. In that sense, some of Tierney’s theories and conclusions may challenge our comfort zones because they imply (or state directly) a need to challenge power with regard to these issues. For precisely that reason, I recommend reading it. Most social progress results from stepping outside traditional comfort zones. For planners, it is also within our ethical and legal responsibilities to help protect public health, safety, and welfare.

Those who wish to examine more closely how differential risk affects more vulnerable subsections of community populations can follow up with a case in point provided by Michael R. Greenberg, professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he had a front-row seat to observe Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As a baby boomer with aging parents, he says, the event inspired him to examine the issues such events pose for seniors. Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters: From Hazards and Vulnerability to Prevention and Resilience (Routledge, 2014) closely dissects the vulnerabilities of the rising generation of seniors among baby boomers. It exposes the resulting collision of demographics with natural hazards and often inadequate public policy in considering the reduced resilience that may result. At the same time, he notes that many seniors in good mental and physical health can become assets in using their to help build the very resilience many communities will need in coming decades, if only their communities learn to focus these social resources to address and help solve such problems. My only regret after reading this thoughtful book is that the publisher chose to make it so expensive ($145 hardcover), but perhaps a library or electronic copy can make it more accessible.

Six authors, mostly at Texas A&M University (TAMU) have addressed the question of resilience head-on in Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters (Island Press, 2014). Jamie Hicks Masterson, program director of Texas Target Communities (TAMU); Walter Gillis Peacock, professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and director of the Hazards Reduction & Recovery Center (TAMU); Shannon S. Van Zandt, associate professor in the department and director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development (TAMU); Himanshu Grover, assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo; Lori Feild Schwarz, comprehensive planning manager for the City of Plano, Texas (and formerly in Galveston); and John T. Cooper, Jr., associate professor of practice in the same department at TAMU, have combined somehow to produce an almost seamless document that lays out a very practical approach to understanding and developing resilience within communities. The book is littered with tables, checklists, and exercises to walk planners and city officials through the necessary analysis to grasp the impacts of everyday planning decisions in connection with natural hazards. The book tends to rely heavily on the Texas and Gulf Coast experiences of the authors, but as they note with a wry sense of humor, “We like to say that if you can plan in Texas, you can plan anywhere.” For the practicing planner, this may well be the most useful of the five books reviewed here.

Two other books represent the rising level of interest among planners in addressing the impacts of climate change, a subject implicit, and sometimes explicitly expressed, in the three books noted above. One of these, Local Climate Action Planning (Island Press, 2012), by Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale, is actually three years old but still a very useful and well-informed primer for those planners and city officials undertaking to address climate change. The primary focus is actually not hazards but climate action plans, which focus on mitigating climate change by using public policy and planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For climate change skeptics, it is worth noting that many of the resulting strategies have local environmental and economic benefits that add to the allure of effective climate action plans. While much of the book addresses techniques like inventorying local greenhouse gas emissions and developing reduction strategies, nonetheless, the authors devote one chapter to climate adaptation and outline means of assessing community sectors for vulnerability to climate change impacts.

Finally, Adapting to Climate Change: Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning (Springer, 2014), assembled from a variety of contributions by editors Bruce C. Glavovic, of New Zealand’s Massey University, and Gavin P. Smith, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings together the subjects of climate and natural hazards in a way that points to future successes in addressing the increased vulnerabilities associated with climate change. Unlike the other books, it is less a single narrative than an anthology using examples of climate change adaptation from around the world. It is unquestionably the most cosmopolitan and far-reaching of the five books in its aspirations for global relevance, using case studies from South Africa, Peru, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, among other locations, in addition to the United States. The two editors first met while working in different capacities along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and have collaborated periodically ever since. Both have been anxious to explore and explain the critical roles of planning and governance in managing exposure to natural disasters, especially as “practitioners from diverse backgrounds  . . . are faced with the grand challenge of adapting to climate change. Planners who like to mine the experience of other cities and regions in case studies will find plenty to contemplate as they review the mixed international track record of community resilience in facing floods, coastal storms, and other weather-related phenomena influenced by a changing global climate with its wide-ranging variations in specific local settings. It may take a while to digest this substantial book, but it is probably well worth the effort.

 

Jim Schwab

Bounce Forward? But, of Course!

In recent years, there has been growing interest in and activity around the concept of resilience. For many people long involved in trying to make the world’s communities safer from disasters, the interest has been heartwarming. The underlying idea is that a community should be better positioned to “bounce back” from a disaster, recovering more efficiently and quickly. A major natural disaster—tornado, hurricane, earthquake—need not be a death sentence or leave a community flat on its back for years. There are numerous ways in which we can do better. We can prepare better, mitigate better, plan better—but to what end?

Some resilience advocates are almost scared by the current interest. After all, look at what happened to the concept of sustainability, subjected by now to years of corporate whitewash and a relentless watering down of the essential message, as originally framed, that we have a moral obligation to future generations to leave them with the same opportunities to enjoy prosperity by reducing our ecological footprint, taking better care of the earth’s resources. Sustainability by its very nature ought to be challenging, yet too many things are too easily labeled sustainable, and the word loses its moral authority in the process.

Could the message of resilience be watered down in the same way?

For a long time, federal and state policies with regard to disaster assistance focused on supporting no more than the replacement of what existed before disaster struck. We’ll help you build back, but we won’t help you build a Cadillac. As federal policy, particularly within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), increasingly emphasized hazard mitigation in order to minimize losses in future disasters, however, the idea behind such thinking became increasingly suspect. If you could make a community more resistant to future disasters, if you could reduce that community’s future reliance on outside assistance in managing recovery, why would you not want to make that investment? In the 1993 Midwest floods, in particular, the use of federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program money to buy out flood-prone properties and create public open space in floodplains at least meant removing some development from harm’s way. That opened the door to even more forward thinking. Some relocated communities, like Valmeyer, Illinois, went much farther and adopted green building codes. The “green rebuild” of Greensburg, Kansas, after its 2007 tornado built on this idea.

DSCF1844Indeed, is there really anything wrong with leaving a community better off than it was before? By the time the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force issued its report in 2013, this bridge appears to have been crossed. The task force answer was clearly that we want very much to rebuild communities that would be more resilient in the face of future disasters. Ideally, that would not mean that such communities would merely regain their pre-disaster status quo more quickly, although that seems to have been the goal for more than a few communities after Sandy. The bigger vision just never materialized. At the same time, however, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been seeking ways, most recently through the National Disaster Resilience Competition, to encourage states and communities to think about improvements that, in particular, instill greater resilience among their most vulnerable populations.

The question won’t go away, and fortunately, there are plenty of people, particularly within the growing community of climate change adaptation professionals, who remain engaged. This is a very good thing because, in the face of phenomena like climate change and sea level rise, hazard mitigation faces the prospect of running hard merely to stay in place, a la Alice in Wonderland. Elevate homes, retreat from the seashore, and you find in another generation that you have gained little or nothing because average temperatures are rising and the sea is following you to higher ground. This is precisely why the latest guidance from FEMA on hazard mitigation assistance insists that states and communities must begin to account for climate change in the hazard mitigation plans that qualify them for federal grants. There is little sense in spending federal money to mitigate the same problem repeatedly when you can do it once with more foresight.

At the risk of oversimplifying the underlying questions, which can and do fill volumes of scholarly and professional analysis these days, I lay this out as the background for introducing a remarkable new document unleashed into this debate by The Kresge Foundation. Bounce Forward, a strategy paper from Island Press and the foundation, which funded the project, raises the question of what constitutes “urban resilience in the era of climate change.” At the outset, it confronts the fear I cited at the beginning of this blog post—that of losing the essential poignancy of the message of resilience. It states:

But the transformative potential of resilience is far from assured. There are several potential pitfalls. Notably, if resilience is conceived simply as “bouncing back” from disaster, it could prove harmful, by reinforcing systems that compound the risks our cities face. More insidiously, the concept of resilience could be co-opted by opponents of meaningful reform. And if efforts to build resilience do not also mitigate climate change, they will be of limited use.

I sense an echo here. For some years, at the American Planning Association and some allied organizations, we have talked of “building back better” as the real goal of disaster recovery. (See Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation.)* But resilience is about much more than effective recovery from disasters. It is also about positioning a community’s human and institutional resources to respond to all manner of setbacks, whether stemming from chronic decline and social pressures, or from the impact of nature on the built environment, to deal more creatively with those problems so as to evolve a society that can help its least advantaged sectors in responding to those threats and to become more prosperous and confident. A commitment to social justice must be inherent in the formula. A society that imposes unfair environmental burdens upon, and denies opportunities to, its most economically challenged elements cannot be resilient in any meaningful way. Such a society is merely perpetuating its vulnerabilities. A community is only as strong as its weakest link. In an “era of rapid change,” the Kresge report says, in effect, that weakest link is getting weaker, inequalities are growing and will be magnified by the impacts of climate change, and the concept of resilience means nothing or worse if it does not address these issues.

The aim of Bounce Forward is to create a framework for doing so. Stronger social cohesion and more inclusive community decision making are among the ingredients essential to this transformation. What’s more, as such reports go, this one is a very good read.

Jim Schwab

*I wish to note that, at the invitation of The Kresge Foundation, I have participated over the past year as a member of its Project Advisory Committee for a study of community resilience being prepared by Stratus Consultants, which is still being completed. I also represented APA at a Kresge Foundation symposium on resilience at the Garrison Institute, held last June in Garrison, NY. Because of our common agendas, APA has had an active interest in supporting the Kresge initiatives on this subject.

Solar Power and Resilient Communities

One of the most critical lifelines for survival for many citizens in a community stricken by disaster is the electrical grid. Without power, food spoils in refrigerators. Without power, one cannot recharge a cell phone, which may be a critical means of seeking help. Without power, one may freeze in the dark.

Last Thursday, February 26, I participated as a panelist in a webinar hosted by the American Planning Association as part of its involvement in the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Solar Outreach Partnership. With two other speakers, Robert Sanders and Stephan Schmidt, I helped explore solutions to such helplessness through what is becoming known as solar resilience. The idea is simple: through a combination of solar photovoltaic systems and battery storage for the electric power produced, critical facilities—and even homes in vulnerable neighborhoods—can rely instead on solar power that does not need to rely on a functioning grid to power the buildings to which it was connected. Instead, it can provide reliable backup electricity in a crisis for shelters, hospitals, and public safety facilities like police and fire stations. Communities no longer need to be at the mercy of an electrical power grid that can fail in an emergency, as happened in Hurricane Katrina and, more recently, Hurricane Sandy.

My colleagues certainly have done their homework. Stephan Schmidt, now a planner in San Luis Obispo County, California, researched the topic in depth while a graduate student at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. He is the author of a very thorough guide for local governments, Solar Energy & Resilience Planning, that discusses the technologies, practical benefits, and financing for such projects. The publication details numerous examples of the successful applications of solar technologies with battery storage in facilities like the Public Safety Building in Salt Lake City, completed in 2013 and now the largest net-zero facility in the nation. Net zero, a concept also being applied to many schools in innovative jurisdictions, means that the building’s solar photovoltaic system generates “nearly as much energy as it uses in operations.” That is to say, it draws little or no power from the grid.

The big question facing developers of such facilities has been financing. Solar power historically has involved high up-front costs, even as it has brought down the actual generation costs because of the fact its fuel source is sunlight rather than fossil fuels (coal, oil, or natural gas). That is the expertise of Rob Sanders and the Clean Energy Group, a national nonprofit advocacy organization working on clean energy and climate change issues. The group has created a number of resources to highlight means of financing solar electric power development. One useful guide it has produced is Resilient Power: Financing for Clean, Resilient Power Solutions. It details financing and ownership solutions to bypass systemic roadblocks that might otherwise impede progress on solar resilience. For instance, with $200 million of federal Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following Hurricane Sandy, the state of New Jersey in 2014 created the nation’s first Energy Resilience Bank to underwrite the development of resilient power at critical facilities throughout the state and minimize the potential for major power outages. It is clear that some vital lessons are being learned.

Jim Schwab

The Challenge of Creating Resilient Communities

A scene from the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy.

A scene from the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy.

Resilience has typically been defined as an ability to bounce back from, and to withstand, shocks and crises. These can include natural disasters but also terrorist strikes, sudden economic downturns, or major industrial accidents. The term was borrowed from the field of ecology, but it has taken root in community planning and has important implications for how and where we build and for the kinds of human capital we develop. It is inherently a complex topic.

That complexity raises the question of how entities outside communities can encourage or foster greater resilience within them. Is it all up to local planners and elected officials, or is there a role for state and federal governance and perhaps private philanthropy? If so, what is that role?

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), followed up on its Rebuild by Design initiative that followed Hurricane Sandy by unveiling the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC). The new effort makes nearly $1 billion in grants available to eligible jurisdictions. Details about the HUD Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) and the overall competition are available elsewhere on the APA website, on the HUD website, and on several other sites allied to or supportive of the competition (also listed on the APA page linked above), most notably including the Rockefeller Foundation. The idea was to encourage communities to develop proposals that would address community resilience needs in a holistic fashion. At the same time, because the money was tied to the Sandy supplemental appropriations for HUD’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program, the proposals needed to tie those needs back to a presidential disaster declaration between 2011 and 2013, and meet other CDBG requirements relating to vulnerable and disadvantaged sectors of the community. Those requirements establish a threshold of eligibility for states and communities that can be challenging to meet while setting their sights even higher. In all, the NOFA listed 67 eligible jurisdictions. These included 48 states (only South Carolina and Nevada had no declarations during the relevant period), and 19 other counties and municipalities, plus Puerto Rico. Louisiana and Illinois had adjacent local jurisdictions eligible in both the Chicago and New Orleans metropolitan areas.

Because only HUD can legally explain the NOFA but is unable to directly help jurisdictions develop their applications, the Rockefeller Foundation, already supporting other resilience initiatives, chose to support the competition by providing such technical assistance. It did this with extensive help from HR&A Advisors, a consulting firm, by organizing five regional “resilience academies,” in Atlanta, Seattle, Kansas City, Boston, and Chicago. These provided an excellent vehicle for using the talents of at least some of the APA members who volunteered their time for our Planners Resilience Network, whose names we shared with both HUD and Rockefeller. The Rockefeller consultants enlisted dozens of design professionals as subject matter experts (SMEs) and facilitators to staff the workshops. I participated as an SME in the Chicago academy, which was held January 29-30 at the James Hotel. Both groups were assigned during the events to specific applicant teams as they worked through their ideas, but also participated in critiques of presentations by other applicants. HUD personnel were on hand to answer questions about the NOFA, and Enterprise Community Partners representatives held counseling sessions with each applicant team.

The overall idea was to help the teams refine their ideas and broaden their thinking about resilience, overcome siloes and boundaries, and collaborate with neighbors. Judging from my own experience, I would say that in most cases the applicant teams moved quite far from their initial concepts in just two days. There is a tendency in local and state government to tailor proposals narrowly to fit the needs of highly stovepiped funding sources at the federal level, which can be notoriously limiting with regard to the range of acceptable options. Even HUD in its FAQs has broadened its interpretation of its own NOFA in recent weeks.

One challenge in particular that I noted in Chicago was that many of the issues states and other jurisdictions face do not stop at their boundaries. In the Midwest, for instance, major river systems—the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio, in particular—form those boundaries, but the floodplain management issues clearly involve both sides, whether it be Wisconsin/Minnesota or Ohio/Kentucky, to name just two examples. There can be little doubt that similar issues prevail across the country. What the academy organizers—and HUD—hoped to convey was that collaboration across such boundaries not only would be rewarded but is absolutely vital to long-term regional success in creating disaster resilience.

The formula worked in part because it minimized set presentations in order to maximize team discussions and feedback. There were basic presentations about the concept of resilience, defining risks, and how to apply innovative thinking to resilience problems. More importantly, however, the academies focused their efforts on a well-considered progression of exercises throughout the two days. These exercises led participants through the identification of resilience opportunities in their target communities, to understanding the risks they face, then to expanding their approach, before the first critique, which forced each team to decide on the “elevator speech” that would communicate the key elements of their proposal in about five minutes, subject to feedback from the SMEs and facilitators. Mastering the art of identifying a handful of key bullet points about a complex proposal to increase community or regional resilience for a particular area in reference to particular hazards and disaster events is not as easy as it may sound, and it probably does not even sound easy.  It is fair to say that some master this challenge better than others, but what is important is that all went home with the experience of having to defend and rethink their ideas and how they could be tied together into a coherent strategy that met also met the threshold requirements for the HUD grants. That is no small request to make of these teams, but many were game to at least try to rise to the occasion. That is progress.

The second, slightly shorter day allowed these teams to refine their approach through a leverage and consultation exercise, followed by a post-lunch second critique, closing out with an opportunity to finalize their approach before going home. The morning also offered five topic area breakout sessions where applicants could choose to learn more about particular hazard types or about leverage and creative financing.

Although the more conceptual Phase I proposals are due March 16, allowing HUD to winnow the list for the Phase II proposals that will nail down specific projects, it is virtually a certainty that nearly every team will be meeting with its counterparts at home to take their ideas farther and respond to the challenges posed during the academies. No one ever said planning is easy. Planning with the goal of achieving community resilience is even tougher. Representatives for the Rockefeller Foundation repeatedly emphasized that, even for communities that do not make the cut, the process of participating in these academies may still enrich their approaches to such issues for the future. No one should have gone home empty-handed.

Jim Schwab

Random Thoughts on the People’s Climate March

Reportedly, about 400,000 people attended the People’s Climate March in New York City last weekend. I was not one of them, but that is not because I don’t support their objectives. I had planned to be in Iowa City, and will discuss that visit in an upcoming blog to follow this one, and I learned long ago that I cannot be everywhere that I think it might even be important to be. As I jokingly tell those who wish I could attend some event that I have declined, “I have utterly failed to clone myself.”

I am, however, glad that others were there, including those scientists, particularly climate scientists, who felt a need to speak out on this issue. I won’t even try to duplicate all the news already reported through numerous outlets like Huffington Post and the New York Times. There are plenty of places on the Internet and in print to find such reportage. Instead, briefly, I want to offer a different observation.

There are two groups of people who really need to speak at such events, beyond the citizen activists who turned out in such numbers, not only in New York but in dozens of other nations throughout the world. One group consists of the public officials and policy makers, and they were certainly represented by the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. It is their job to translate credible science into public policy. For mayors, that job has often turned into a challenge to plan both for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change at the local level. For New York City, the adaptation means crafting strategies to protect the city from the impact of natural hazards, such as Hurricane Sandy, and the increasing impacts of storm surge combined with sea level rise. In other places, it may mean planning for prolonged drought, increased wildfire intensity, or flooding from high-precipitation events. Mitigation means finding ways to reduce the degree to which a community adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that feed these changes, and can include strategies for reduced consumption of fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide emissions. All this is important, but it is sad that much of this must take place in the face of inaction from Congress, where climate change skeptics abound in the face of an abundance of scientific evidence.

That brings me to the role of the scientists. Historically, many if not most scientists have been reluctant to be drawn into public policy debates, which often remove them from their comfort zone within the research community. They understand better than anyone how complex these issues can be, and often wince at oversimplifications of the underlying science. While environmental activists are perfectly capable of uttering their own oversimplifications at times, the megaphone for distortions has rested squarely with the skeptics, particularly those associated with industries that have benefited from undermining public acceptance of the science. These distortions are intentional and play upon the fact that it is human nature to seek simpler solutions than to spend the time and effort to try to understand complex problems. The campaign of distortion was highlighted several years ago in Merchants of Doubt, an excellent book on the public relations of issues like the health impacts of smoking, for which the science was settled some time ago, and climate change, a more recent entrant into the public lexicon. Their exposure of the techniques behind this campaign is troubling, to say the least. The authors are scientists who felt a compelling need to combat such distortions.

The bottom line is that very few climate scientists, or others qualified to discuss the subject, have any doubt remaining that human industrial and transportation activities, among other factors connected with modern civilization, are inducing changes in global climate patterns, for the most part producing an overall warming trend. Yet there is scientific debate about this issue because it remains and always will be complex. As Laurence Smith noted in The World in 2050, climate change involves global warming in most places most of the time, but also involves disruption of climate patterns elsewhere that result in particularly noticeable climate changes in certain places, most notably the polar extremes. The results overall are uneven. The skeptics cherry-pick selected outcomes and statistics without wrestling with the more inconvenient and nuanced overall changes that constitute the reality of climate change. Even so, there are clear trends to which honest policy makers must pay heed.

What was encouraging about the People’s Climate March was that, among those 400,000 voices, were some belonging to the very people who understand this science the best. They must continue to speak out and share what they know, lest the merchants of doubt win the day with misleading assertions based on cherry-picked data. We can no longer afford to be misled.

 

Jim Schwab

Crossing One Thousand

When I first started this blog, one of the nagging questions in my mind was, “Is anybody reading this?” It is a natural enough question for almost anyone. For someone who has published books and reports and hundreds of articles in various periodicals, all with readerships in the thousands to tens of thousands, it is also a question of how best to invest one’s time. The nice thing about a blog, however, is that you can choose your own subject matter. At first, I was inclined to focus more on book reviews, but the pressures of time quickly pushed that notion into the background. I do it, but I do not always have time to do it, and I realized I had a good deal more to offer, given my lengthy background in urban planning.

I made a simple decision. I now jokingly describe the subject matter of this blog as “anything I damned well please.” In truth, it’s more than that. I focus on subjects where I can bring some depth of commentary. I do not wish to rant or ramble, as I feel too many people do in an age where access to the Internet is nearly universal. One ought to be able to offer a useful perspective. But the freedom to decide what that is, outside the constraints of more prescribed frameworks, is a pleasant feature of a personal blog.

I launched this blog in earnest in April 2013, despite having posted one inaugural message a year earlier. A great deal of the frequency and content since then has been a function of my own free time. Sometimes, with the demands of professional life, that has barely existed. Travel has often taken its toll and produced a sudden hiatus here and there where I simply was not heard from. I try to avoid that, but professional responsibilities can and should take priority. I hope that my readers understand; this is, after all, purely a sideline venture. Not only do I not earn a living from blogging; so far I have made no attempt to make any money at all. People presumably have noticed there is no advertising. I don’t promise that forever, but it simply is not important right now.

So what is the point of this missive? To celebrate the simple fact that the audience has clearly grown. I no longer ask whether anyone is reading this blog. It is clear there is an audience. In the last few days of July, the number of registered users for this blog passed 1,000. That is nearly quadruple the number just three months ago. Some sort of momentum kicked in that is sustaining rapid growth in readership, adding anywhere from five to 15 new users every day. I have no way of knowing precisely what is attracting various people, and some of you are scattered around the world, in Europe and Australia particularly. I shall continue to trust that the attraction is simply providing thoughtful, thought-provoking information and commentary on a variety of topics, but most notably how we plan our communities and the ways in which we protect them from natural and man-made hazards. In addition, the occasional review of good books, movies, and restaurants may add some spice to the mix. I want to make and keep this a place for people who believe in good writing on subjects that actually matter.

And thanks for being among the first 1,000 regular readers, and to those other readers, thank you for visiting as well. I know you’re out there. I’ve been tracking this growth with considerable gratitude and appreciation.

 

Jim Schwab