Why neighborhood organizations matter: part 1

Neighborhood Organizations can play an important role in City resiliency and recovery.

Neighborhood organizations' role in New Orleans after Katrina

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, neighborhood organizations in the City began to flourish as they started to play an important role in the City's recovery efforts. According to one report, Mapping New Orleans: Neighborhood Organizations and their Reinvigoration in the Face of Government Inaction, neighborhood organizations played a vital role in sharing important information and catalyzing involvement in the City's recovery process.

The City had attempted a top down planning process, called Bring New Orleans Back, led by a City appointed commission of experts and City elites. The Commission assumed that residents who had fled the City would not care to return, and proposed turning several neighborhoods into green zones and parks. A poorly communicated map and proposal for flood reduction efforts resulted in a community backlash.

But, according to the report by City Works, "Neighborhood organizations became a vital nexus in the exchange of useful information." In response to the Mayor's top-down proposal, the City Council proposed its own recovery plan, focusing more on bottom-up neighborhood based recovery.

According to this report, and others, the failure of the City to respond appropriately lead to rapid growth of neighborhood organizations throughout the City. Other reports have indicated that neighborhood organizations played an important role in increasing trust in government recovery operations by improving communication and participation in recovery planning.

Minneapolis Recovery Response: NRP

In the 1980s, the City of Minneapolis was facing its own crisis, one that was many years in the making. The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) was created in response to growing concern about neighborhood decline, falling population, and decaying housing stock.

The City's population fell dramatically from a peak of over 521,000 to 368,000 in a period of 40 years. At the same time, the Federal Government was abandoning it's urban renewal programs. As the population fell, the housing stock decayed and the City's infrastructure was in crisis.

The City's "Neighborhood Housing and Economic Development Task Force (May 1988) reported that “the City must take the initiative to preserve and revitalize its physical structures and stabilize its tax base.” According to the Minneapolis Community Development Agency's Director James Heltzer “if unabated, these trends mean Minneapolis will crash and burn as a decent livable city over the next 20 years.”

"The elected officials twenty years from now cannot prevent this… We must have our neighborhoods effectively function as the basic building blocks of this revitalization plan. It is their planning, their priorities, their needs that are the driving force—the engine—that will make revitalization a reality.”

Heltzer further reported: "The elected officials twenty years from now cannot prevent this… We must have our neighborhoods effectively function as the basic building blocks of this revitalization plan. It is their planning, their priorities, their needs that are the driving force—the engine—that will make revitalization a reality.”

The proposal was a twenty-year revitalization plan in which:

• Residents must be intensively involved;
• A consistent strategy is required to encourage private investment and ensure completion of tasks;
• Adequate funding is needed on an annual basis;
• Funding strategies and commitments must be flexible to meet specific neighborhood needs.
• Decision making must come from the bottom up.

Proposed Solution

The City of Minneapolis joined in the Rockefeller Foundations 100 Resilent Cities initiative in 2016. If the City truly wishes to be resilient, then the City should ensure that solid resident participation and neighborhood organizations play a central role in that planning.