Deborah Gans,an architect and professor at the Pratt Institute, spent four years working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and is now involved in community rebuilding projects in Sheepshead Bay, or Brooklyn. In an interview with WNYC's Jami Floyd,she said New York officials learned plenty from the mistakes that took place in Louisiana:The city created the Rapid Repairs program, in which contractors brought in new boilers and fixed electrical systems damaged by the storm, and so that residents could stay in their homes and not acquire to adandon their communities by relocating with friends or in shelters.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo instituted a buy-out program that in some respects resembled the much-maligned and ultimately abandoned "green-dot blueprint" that New Orleans officials proposed to designate where houses could not be rebuilt. But Cuomo asked property owners to voluntarily opt-in,rather than forcing people to sell their property.
But Gans said city officials took some of the "lessons" from Katrina too far. Because some homeowners wasted their recovery. "We were so concerned not to repeat the ways in which money was misspent by homeowners," Gans said. "We were so concerned with the graft that further victimized homeowners by contractors, or that we place in so many checks and we made the paperwork so difficult for people that it stalled the program for a very long time." To listen to the full interview,click the audio button.
Source: wnyc.org