Ideas for Mississippi’s coast ignite enthusiasm, face FEMA resistance

PHILIP LANGDON

J. Ronald Kabriel for the Long Beach Team

Over the course of a nonstop week of work in mid-October, 120 new urbanists — professionals from 22 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Britain, and Belgium — walked and rode through the rubble-strewn communities of the coast and then produced the most far-reaching set of recommendations South Mississippi has even seen.

Amid tens of thousands of collapsed houses and destroyed businesses, the leaders of the Gulf Coast were exhorted to think big — to plan something much more ambitious than simply returning their communities to the way they looked prior to Hurricane Katrina. Before the wind and water leveled substantial sections of the coastal communities on Aug. 29, old urban centers were eroding.

“You’re sort of at a choice point,” Harriet Tregoning, executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, told an audience of about 500 during a concluding session in Biloxi. The coast’s residents and development could, in the absence of good planning, migrate inland and northward, where the pattern already is toward a “less town-centered, more sprawling” character, Tregoning said. Alternatively, the region could plan to rebuild in a compact manner — strengthening its downtowns, integrating casinos into walkable districts, installing streetcars or light-rail transit, and concentrating activity in mixed-use centers.

The goal must be a higher-quality, better-connected region — one with boulevards where unattractive highways ran, with streetcars where there used to be hardly any public transportation, and with a new emphasis on compact development, the participants said.
When the large out-of-state contingent arrived on Oct. 11, it was by no means clear that the region would be in a position to embrace a broad new urbanist agenda. Many people were still traumatized by their losses, and not everyone was willing or able to participate. The mayor of Gautier gave hardly any time to a charrette team in his city. The mayor of Pass Christian never showed up; after Katrina, he had reportedly taken his ill wife to Baton Rouge and not returned.

No one could blame local officials for being stunned. In Biloxi, Katrina destroyed or damaged beyond repair an estimated 5,000 of the city’s 12,364 residential structures. Another 2,500 dwellings in that three-century-old city of 50,000 were left in questionable condition. Despite that, a large number of officials and design professionals from 11 cities participated in the charrette, which took place in a partly damaged casino hotel on the Biloxi beachfront, behind a military checkpoint. No one pitched in more zestfully than Brent Warr, mayor of Gulfport, who worked day and night with a design team headed by James Moore of HDR, sketching ideas for his city of 71,000 inhabitants, the most populous on Mississippi’s 120-mile coastline.

Making better choices

“The purpose is to illuminate the choices,” Gov. Haley Barbour said at the concluding session in the Isle of Capri hotel. “I believe a great job has been done at that.” Barbour had authorized the charrette, known as the Mississippi Renewal Forum, but he repeatedly made it clear that local governments would be free to adopt or reject its recommendations. The months ahead will reveal whether the enthusiasm that many of the region’s leaders expressed at the conclusion of the Forum will result in implementation of the charrette’s recommendations.

Andres Duany organized the Forum in less than a month on behalf of the Congress for the New Urbanism. A $1 million grant from the Knight Foundation and a $1 million gift from entrepreneur-philanthropist Jim Barksdale to the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal paid for the charrette and for some of the Commission’s other activities. Barksdale, a former Netscape executive, presided soberly throughout, and said afterward that the Forum reminded him of when he had to order security to bar Netscape’s doors one day a month to make sure his supercharged workers took time off. Results of the charrette are posted at www.MississippiRenewal.com.

USING THE VERNACULAR

The teams mostly employed forms and styles of buildings that the Gulf Coast had favored in the early twentieth century and earlier — ranging from cottages, shotgun houses, and bungalows to grander institutional structures. “The market in the Gulf area seems to be traditional,” Duany observed. In some instances, the teams looked worldwide for design ideas. Impressive 19th-century casinos on the Mediterranean were seen, for example, as something that Gulfport and Biloxi might aspire to — ingredients in upgrading the Mississippi coast’s tourist appeal and bolstering local pride.

With so much debris scattered about — by one estimate, the region was buried in 30 million cubic yards of wreckage — Duany suggested that each community aim to create “one perfect place.” Gulfport’s team recommended that Jones Park be rebuilt as its one perfect place, where local people could find respite from destruction that will take years to overcome.

A key goal was to give better urban form to the region’s economic underpinnings. Casinos had become a major source of jobs and taxes since they started arriving in the early 1990s. Planning teams asked that casinos and their hotels be integrated into walkable districts. One sketch envisioned a “casino square” in Biloxi, with tall, traditional-style buildings gathering around a civic space. Jaime Correa of Miami, leader of the team for D’Iberville, suggested designing casinos in a campus-like way, with the casinos, hotels, and cabanas forming plazas.

Streetcars could transport visitors to and from some of the casino complexes, encouraging tourists to explore the area, stay longer, and spread their spending among more establishments, teams said.

Here are some of the recommendations:

• Instead of trucking a huge volume of debris to landfills, Doug Farr of Farr Associates in Chicago suggested sorting the rubble and reusing much of it. Concrete slabs could be placed beneath the water to create fish habitat. Stable fill could raise low areas. Farr said Mississippi should seize the potential for eco-industries.

• Instead of rebuilding a US 90 highway bridge where it crossed the Bay of Biloxi, the bridge should be moved and a ferry should be established, helping to nurture an appealing ferry district in Ocean Springs, said a team headed by Victor Dover of Coral Gables, Florida.

• A fishing village serving the needs of Biloxi’s Vietnamese-American shrimp fishermen should be established on the bay, a team headed by Stefanos Polyzoides of Pasadena, California, recommended. With seafood restaurants and medium-density housing, it would appeal to local people and tourists.

• On the waterfront in Gautier, a team headed by Neal Payton of Torti Gallas & Partners said development could be modeled after traditional fishing villages — inspired by fish camps that used to be there. Individual houses could be freestanding or attached by a continuous boardwalk, with retail possibly at boardwalk level. “The appeal of this ‘vernacular’ style of housing will attract buyers who want something other than the typical high-rise condo,” the team said.

• In Long Beach, a team headed by Dhiru Thadani of Ayers Saint Gross in Washington, DC, recommended pulling Highway 90 back from the shore into a long, gentle arc, which Thadani said “would make people feel more comfortable” about walking or lingering in its vicinity. Condos, with retail nearby, would overlook the curving beachfront park.

• In Gulfport, a team suggested that a grand hotel and a dense urban grid of streets be created to intensify and improve the port area, now covered by too much blacktop parking.

• Throughout the region, teams applied the concept of the five-minute walk to neighborhood planning. Participants mapped communities according to Transect zone and proposed form-based codes to make more appealing physical settings. The day after the charrette ended, news came that the City of Flowood, 150 miles north of the coast, had become the first Mississippi community to adopt a form-based code.

• Criteria should be established to assess damaged buildings and favor their preservation, using demolition as a last resort, participants said. “Halt all arbitrary demolition,” the Biloxi team advised.

FIGHTING WITH FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) poses a major obstacle. The agency has started issuing floodplain maps that raise the level of the 100-year flood by three to eight feet in many places. The maps, in conjunction with measurements of the storm surge that in some places was more than 30 feet high, will require many new buildings to be elevated substantially.

The D’Iberville team proposed “French Quarter” buildings with arcaded 14-foot-high ground floors and two stories of housing above. But Polyzoides said it would be a travesty to require many dwellings to be raised 10, 15, or even more feet higher than in the past — it would make the houses ugly and more expensive. If first floors of new houses stand 10 or 15 feet higher than older houses close by, this “is going to destroy your neighborhoods,” he charged.

Low-lying areas of Biloxi really have just two options, Polyzoides said: “You scrape the town and move to the hills or you make your buildings able to take a swim every 30 years.” Few buildings can survive a raging wall of water, but many can survive inundation in slow-moving water, participants said. Studies have shown that well-constructed houses stood up to flooding (though not necessarily to the intense storm surge), whereas inadequately constructed houses did not. “You lost your town because it was not properly engineered,” Polyzoides asserted.

It appears that a long struggle with FEMA is beginning. It will no doubt exercise all the political muscle that Mississippi possesses in Washington. Tregoning warned, however, that it would be very damaging for Gulf Coast residents to undergo “a couple of years of not knowing where and how you’re going to rebuild.”

Duany presented the Forum’s ideas to developers the day after the charrette. Then followed the first of several weeks of town meetings throughout the region. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin belittled what he described as the “taste-police, frozen-in-time imagery” of many new urbanist sketches but otherwise he was impressed, likening the new urbanist visions presented in Biloxi to the “make no little plans” approach that Daniel Burnham brought to Chicago a century ago. “This may come as a shock to modernists,” wrote Kamin, “but traditionalism can be progressive.”