More Thoughts Regarding “Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster” – Read it With Us!

This is a continuation of last week’s blog on Managing for Long-Term Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster, Charles J. Alesch, Lucy A. Arendt, and James N. Holly (Public Entity Research Institute, 2009). This is, as I said, a book I heartily recommend.

            The methodology used in the book was qualitative interviewing. They picked several communities that had endured disasters and in varying stages of recovery and simply asked people who were there when the disaster hit, “What happened?”

            In listening to people tell their story, the authors gradually arrived at some conclusions put forth in the book. One particularly insightful one was that even as infrastructure was being restored and steps taken toward recovery, the disaster’s effects continued on for several years.

            Though undoubtedly communities need some outside support in recovering from major disasters, they note they could find no correlation between the amount of support and how effective the community was at recovering. Some got a lot of support and still appeared to be failing and some not so much and were succeeding.

            The last chapters of the book are written from a public practitioner’s perspective. The authors note the incredible strain that disasters put on public workers. Not infrequently, city managers resign after working long days for months on end. This is one more reminder that communities that do not plan to take care of their employees and their families are neglecting a crucial resource.

            Recovering from disasters can offer a community an opportunity to undo past mistakes. Many communities tried to do just that in focusing on revitalizing their decaying downtowns as a recovery strategy. Not surprisingly, they didn’t succeed. Even after facades were spiffed up, streets landscaped, and inviting parks built, most in the community continued to prefer the mall on the edge of town.

            I am reminded of the many failed efforts that cities undertook to ‘mall-ize’ their downtowns in the 1960s and 70s. Despite spending massive amounts of money and building them, the people did not come.

            We at CARRI are always reminding ourselves that the trajectory of a community before a disaster will be exacerbated post-disaster. The point here is a simple one. The decayed, vacant, unappealing downtowns didn’t happen overnight. Their development was an incremental process that occurred building-by-building, street-by-street, and tenant-by-tenant over several years. Attempting to change direction with all of that momentum in the wrong direction is not, as Alesch et. al. observe, good policy.

            Restoring, rehabilitating a vacant downtown should be done through careful planning with community involvement and likely will take a long time. While recovery planning can undo some mistakes, it cannot expect to reweave the fabric of the community in a completely new pattern.