فیلم جدول جلسه پایداری، قسمت اول: جان هنبرگر

Title:Resilience Roundtable, Episode 1: John Henneberger

در سری جدید پادکست APA، میزگرد Resilience، میزبان Rich Roths، AICP، با برنامه ریزان و متخصصان متحدی صحبت می کند که تاب آوری را ماموریت خود می کنند، حتی در مواجهه با مخاطرات طبیعی ویرانگر. ریچ یک برنامه ریز ارشد خطر برای خدمات برنامه ریزی برتون در کلمبوس، اوهایو است. او پیش از این برای آژانس مدیریت اضطراری فدرال (FEMA) کار می کرد، جایی که او مسئول هماهنگی تمام فعالیت های برنامه ریزی کاهش برای شش ایالت در منطقه V بود. ریچ همچنین یکی از اعضای بخش برنامه ریزی کاهش خطر و بازیابی بلایا APA است. در قسمت اول، جان هنبرگر، متخصص مسائل مسکن کم درآمد، یکی از همکاران مک آرتور در سال ۲۰۱۴، و مدیر مشترک تگزاس هاوسرز، یک سازمان غیرانتفاعی که از سیاست ها و شیوه های عادلانه بازیابی بلایای طبیعی دفاع می کند، حضور دارد. جان، مسکن مقرون به صرفه و پیشینه توسعه اجتماعی خود را توصیف می کند و اینکه چگونه طوفان های کاترینا و ریتا در سال ۲۰۰۵ در ساحل خلیج فارس فرود آمدند، او به سرعت از تأثیر اغراق آمیز بر محله های رنگین کم درآمد آگاه شد. او تلفات خاص طوفان هاروی بر هیوستون و مناطق اطراف و اینکه این بلایای طبیعی می تواند دوره ای به نظر برسد را توصیف می کند، زیرا بسیاری از محله هایی که سازمان او در آنها کار می کند ویژگی های مشابهی با آنچه در بخش نهم پایین پس از کاترینا دیده اند، مانند انبار مسکن قدیمی دارند. و زیرساخت های عمومی ناکافی یا وجود ندارد. جان در مورد روش‌های نوآورانه‌ای صحبت می‌کند که نیازهای بازیابی بلایای طبیعی در شهرستان‌های مختلف تگزاس برآورده می‌شود، و سیستم RAPIDO را برجسته می‌کند، یک مدل مسکن موقت تا دائم که به مالکان ملک کنترل بیشتری بر روند بازسازی می‌دهد. بارها و بارها در طول بحث، جان استدلال می‌کند که برنامه‌ریزی خوب و عدالت به‌طور جدایی‌ناپذیری با هم مرتبط هستند و دادن حس عاملیت به بازماندگان فاجعه یکی از مهم‌ترین کارهایی است که برنامه‌ریزان می‌توانند برای افراد آسیب‌دیده انجام دهند. درباره تاب‌آوری و دسترسی به منابع بازیابی بلایا بیشتر بیاموزید: https://www.planning.org/resilience/

به قسمت های دیگر پادکست APA گوش دهید: https://www.planning.org/podcasts/

عکس پایین سمت راست توسط کاربر flickr John Wiess (jweiss3): https://flic.kr/p/kMZu3x (برچسب ها برای ترجمه t)طوفان هاروی

قسمتی از متن فیلم: [RICH]: Welcome to the American Planning Association podcast. This episode kicks off our series that looks at how different communities prepared for and responded to natural hazards, such as floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and more How have planners in these communities promoted resilience in their hazard

Mitigation and disaster recovery planning? We’ll find out on this episode of Resilience Roundtable, brought to you in conjunction with the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. I’m your host, Rich Roths. I’m a part-time senior hazard planner for Burton Planning Service of Columbus, Ohio, and previously a principal planner

With URS / AECOM Corp. Before that I was a senior planner for FEMA Region 5 where I was in charge of coordinating all mitigation planning activities for the six states in the region. I’m also a proud member of the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. Our

Guest today is John Henneberger. John is one of Texas’s leading experts on low-income housing issues, a nationally renowned advocate for fair and affordable housing, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. In his 40 years in housing and community development, he has helped grassroots community groups advance

Their own model solutions to housing issues in their communities and forge common ground policies from diverse housing interests. John is co-director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable and just disaster recovery policy and practices. John, welcome to the podcast. [JOHN]: Oh thank you very much.

[RICH]: John, can you tell us about your background, what got you into the field of hazard mitigation and disaster recovery planning? [JOHN]: My real background is in affordable housing and community development. I’ve worked for 40 some odd years on issues of housing for low-income people

And the — trying to improve the physical conditions of low-income neighborhoods. I got into that work as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin and worked with — as a volunteer in community organizations in low-income African-American neighborhoods, which were facing combined problems of

Freeways being built through them and neglect of public infrastructure and in another case an urban renewal area that the promise to rebuild had never occurred. My involvement in disaster recovery kind of came about post-Katrina and with the follow-on of Hurricane Rita after that, which hit the southeast Texas

Gulf Coast. And I was made quickly aware of the fact that the impact of these natural disasters has a tendency to be felt most strongly in low-income neighborhoods of color — the type of neighborhoods I had been working on to try to secure more decent affordable housing and adequate public

Infrastructure and neighborhood protection and the like. And so that’s — I guess you’d say I sort of got into disaster recovery because the disasters seemed to be affecting the neighborhoods that I cared about a whole lot starting in around 2008 and we’ve had a whole series of disasters hit Texas in the

Subsequent years and it’s like we’re never not recovering from a disaster these days in Texas. And climate change really has really made these disasters even more frequent and more severely felt and no more severely felt than again in these low-income neighborhoods of color, which have a tendency to be in

The physically most vulnerable locations where disasters seem to strike [RICH]: I totally agree. Can you describe what your current position is? [JOHN]: Well I’m the co-director of a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1988. It’s called Texas Housers. And we work on the same things I started working on back about

۴۰ years ago — it’s the issues of ensuring that there’s housing justice for low-income people, that everyone should have access to decent affordable homes in a quality neighborhood of their choice. So we work on the issues of housing affordability, we work on looking at government efforts to develop housing

And the systems that government has in place to make housing assistance of available. We’re sort of a policy practice combination organization. Generally we associate ourselves with organized groups of low-income people sometimes at a citywide level and other times at a neighborhood level who are

Trying to take on the problems of of housing and we’ve expanded over the years to focus a lot on issues of public infrastructure. And I guess you’d say social infrastructure within neighborhoods as well. [RICH]: Am I correct in assuming that you would also get involved more on a state and national level

On environmental justice issues for grants? [JOHN]: Yeah we we do work on a number of environmental justice issues — you know both at the local community level, we’ve been doing some work around a Superfund project in the — on the Texas-Mexico border. In Hidalgo County we’ve worked on some related projects of

Chemical spills on industrial sites in low-income neighborhood in Houston, worked on problems of the blight caused by refineries that abut low-income neighborhoods in Corpus Christi and Beaumont Port Arthur and and other areas. We don’t do so much work on a national level, we pretty much concentrate on issues where there are local partners.

Our sort of philosophy of change if you will is that the real solutions to problems that affect the communities that we work in have to be advocated for and won by citizens who are civically engaged at the community level to take

On these issues and we see ourselves is basically sort of a staff resource to citizens who perceive a problem and want to take it on. And most of our work is at a fairly micro level, although these large-scale disasters like Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Dolly, and now Hurricane Harvey, those affect

Multiple counties. And so we have been fairly active at those — those are programs that are administered through the governor’s office and so we’ve been pretty active in looking at the policies that are implemented on the state and the regional level around disaster recovery. [RICH]: Can you — I realize that you

Don’t deal with a specific community, but can you give us kind of a snapshot pre- Harvey of some of the communities that you are dealing with and have dealt with and then also go into the impact of Harvey on the communities?

[JOHN]: Sure, let me give you a couple of examples at the local level. In the Houston area — Houston was one of the epicenters of the impact of Hurricane Harvey. It was essentially a flood event there. We’ve been working for I guess about seven, eight years with a group of African-American and Hispanic

Grassroots low-income leaders in Houston through the Texas Organizing Project. It’s a citywide organizing group of people who are fighting for economic justice and housing justice and neighborhood justice. And a number of these neighborhoods as I was saying earlier are in low-lying areas. A lot of

Them are affected because upstream areas flooded heavily and the bayous that carry the water from those neighborhoods through the low-income neighborhoods of color overflowed and caused widespread flooding. It isn’t the first time some of these neighborhoods had flooded; many of them had flooded under tropical storm

Allison and Hurricane Ike, but a number of them flooded more severely than they had ever before. By and large these neighborhoods lack any sort of engineered stormwater protection. They have open ditch drainage they do not have storm sewers the conveyances the bayous are the major conveyances for

Water for the entire county and they flow from generally from the western part of the county where the incomes are higher and the housing densities are lower through these low income neighborhoods of color which are older neighborhoods more inner-city neighborhoods and then into the into the

Bay the bayous overflowed and people’s houses flooded to an extreme degree and there were environmental consequences to this one Superfund site in particular which we’ve been working on in the fifth Ward in Houston was flooded and it was a creosote old Creole site with a railroad and those contaminants flowed into the

Surrounding neighborhoods and yeah it was you know the Harvey was was a major disaster in in these neighborhoods which are completely and equipped by virtue of the fact that they’ve essentially been publicly redlined from even basic infrastructure so the results were were catastrophic did the homeowners have flood insurance by

Chance very very few homeowners had flood insurance we’re talking about areas where generally the poverty rate is somewhere between 40 and 80 percent in the census tracts a lot of people didn’t even have homeowners insurance these are older neighborhoods many of the

Properties have have been passed down over generations there’s been a number of households have had deferred maintenance issues on their homes because of their low incomes insurance is isn’t the top priority when you’re living at the poverty level and trying to pay the taxes and the upkeep on the

House and deal with transportation costs which are huge and you stand because of the lack of a very robust public infrastructure a public transportation infrastructure that sounds very similar to the issues in the lower 9th Ward and New Orleans after Katrina I know I was in New Orleans post-katrina for the

American Planning Association we saw those same issues I think that the we always always remarked after every disaster that many of the neighborhoods that we work in have almost identical characteristics that we’ve seen in the lower ninth after Katrina the the aging housing stock the public infrastructure

That just is either non-existent or hugely inadequate often the failure of public infrastructure we had a subsequent disaster to Harvey down in the lower rear Valley in Texas right on the border with Mexico where informal settlements outside of the major metropolitan areas are occupied by immigrants and farmworkers and very low-income people

Again the the water conveyances the main drains if you will that carry the water out of the urban areas run adjacent to many of these informal settlements and we had levee failures in that instance that heavy rain event down there about three months ago and we had levee breaches that caused widespread

Structure flooding it’s eerily similar to you know the failure on the mr. go canal and and the other things which devastated the low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans these these patterns of public neglect combined with these climate change events I’ve really just repeatedly devastate low-income people’s

Communities yes they do unfortunately and we see it again and again are you aware of whether Euston or Harris County or any of the other counties and communities you were dealing with had either approved response plans or annexes to plans or approved mitigation plans well in some cases you know I’m

Not certain what the formality of the mitigation plans are the Harris County Flood Control District has been doing some some buyouts and done some impoundment areas and the like to try to improve drainage prior to Hurricane Harvey it was it was obviously insufficient to be able to address the

Problems very obviously they need a lot more work post hurricane Harvey yeah and I’d say the one of the things that sort of you know concerns me is there’s a there’s an equity question there’s obviously an equity issue about

Why we’re at the stage we were at the time of the last disaster you know why is it that the bayous overflowed why is it that there was no engineered storm water collection system to get the water out of the neighborhoods and the like I

Think the the current equity question is Texas has received approximately 10 billion dollars of CDBG disaster recovery funds from the federal government and you know the current concern is what is going to be the the use of those funds are those funds going to actually address the communities

Which had essentially no infrastructure or are they going to go for areas that for buyouts and reimbursements to homeowners in higher income areas that flooded obviously the situation which existed at the time of the disaster was built on years of conscious public disinvestment of public funds in it from

Infrastructure in the low-income neighborhoods of color in the poor neighborhoods in Houston and you know there really isn’t any evidence to suggest that that the local governments the county government the state government have we are really going to prioritize the use of these new disaster

Recovery funds to address the retro actively the absence of infrastructure in these areas actually there’s quite a bit of evidence to the contrary in houston the city council just adopted a requirement requiring that homes that are rehabilitated above a certain value and new homes constructed are elevated

To two feet above the 500-year base flood elevation out of the 500-year floodplain and well that’s that’s in theory a positive thing we are concerned that that what’s going on is really sort of a burden-shifting exercise if you will that what what is happening is that the

Low-income neighborhoods the people are going to lack the financial resources to do that elevation these are areas where no new housing no new businesses that were being built prior to the disaster because of the high poverty rates and the lack of public infrastructure to begin with and you know to the extent

That the city looks to individuals to elevate as a solution as opposed to addressing the restoration of basic or the first time provision of basic public flood control infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods to us represents this thing I call sort of a burden-shifting approach to disaster

Recovery where you where government tries to say to individual homeowners you’re responsible for making sure that you don’t flood again and I think the result is going to be that basically a lot of people will not be able to afford

To elevate and we’ll see repetitive flooding in these areas as a result John could you explain how your organization is working then to change the status quo in Houston and Harris County to get more funds into those low-income housing areas well we did a lessons learned document that’s on our website at Texas

Hauser’s dot o-r-g which is basically a summary of four rights that we think government ought to extend to all the people who are affected by the recovery process seven principles for recovery and then we have 60 programmatic initiatives based on our experience with previous disasters about programmatic

Approaches to dealing with the problem so we’ve taken it at that kind of high level about saying here are the principles the rights the lessons learn and and then we also work with individual neighborhood associations that were affected and the leaders in those neighborhoods and we serve as

Their research staff and their policy researchers and their data researchers we have a Weber research team a GIS team that has spent a lot of time trying to obtain FEMA individual damage assessment report data out of FEMA FEMA has been

Not as transparent and free to share that information as we would like but we have analyzed the data that we’ve been able to get to determine who was affected by the disasters so that we are able to try to monitor that the funds

That the state is dividing up are allocated appropriately and fairly on a geographic basis I kusa it was 52 counties were affected and so the geographic allocation of the funds is important and then we’re also interested in the question of income wise who was affected by these disasters within these

Geographies and then beyond that what is the ethnic and racial profile of the individuals what percentage of the population are disabled so what we do is we try to monitor where the funds are going and look for questions of equity

Around the allocation of the funds are the are the funds flowing into the areas that actually had a loss and more than that are the funds flowing into the areas that have unmet need because if the funds just flowed based on lost and

That wouldn’t be the an equitable way to distribute the funds because there are a number of individuals who have insurance proceeds in the like that are going to make them whole we have to look at the unmet needs and to see whether the funds

Flow equitably there so we look at the policy issues from a planning side we look at we try to monitor where the damage was and where the funds are flowing and then at the micro-level we work with neighborhood and community leaders to basically understand how individuals and

Neighborhoods are being affected by the process and then to help them to have the information tools and the data tools to be able to advocate for an equitable recovery for themselves out of all of these can you come up with one item that

You’re particularly proud of from your post Harvey work I know there’s a lot of them sound very good things that we would really like to see happen but anything you’re particularly you’re proud of well I’m an advocate so I am

Mostly focused on things that are still going wrong we’re trying to fix and I have to say that the state’s response to the Harvey disaster does not indicate that it is learned very much from previous disasters I think there’s a lot

Of dysfunction in the state and local governments in terms of the design of programs the allocation of funds and the like and the alarm bells are going off here in our office when we look at the data and we look at how them how the

Programs are operating and and when we talk to people at the neighborhood level and we look at the type of temporary repairs being done to homes you know I don’t want to paint a I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture to say

There’s there’s some great shining light in the middle of this I actually think that this recovery is going every bit as inefficiently and as in equitably as the previous disaster recoveries have have gone we have spent on the positive side

And it is very small positive on we have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to develop an alternative to the the process that our the state of Texas and most of the local governments use here to do rebuilding owner-occupied homes post-disaster we’ve lived pretty closely

With these programs over the last 10 or 12 years as the state you know essentially brings in private contractors spends 150 thousand dollars a unit to put a replacement house on the ground which is sort of a cookie cutter non architectural II designed no local context to the design structure to

Replace the homes of a lucky subset of disaster survivors I say lucky subset because the funds that are available are inadequate to rebuild all of the houses so in essence it’s a it’s a small proportion of the number of people who

Were eligible low-income and need a house who actually get it because of the various cost inefficiencies and the like there’s also this delay built into rebuilding it was it was over eight years after Ike before the last homes were completed the last owner occupied homes were completed in terms of

Rebuilding in Texas which is just way way way too long we’ve spent a lot of time with some friends of ours who are architects and some friends of ours who were Community Development Corporation’s trying to design an alternative rapid rebuilds program that we call rapido our API do there’s information about that

Program on a website rapido housing dot o R G and essentially what it is it’s a modular panelized unit where the the wall units are fabricated off-site and then brought on the side they’re stood up and a core house is built which is

Larger than a traditional FEMA temporary housing trailer unit that cost somewhere between twenty-five and twenty eight thousand dollars to deploy the the FEMA trailers are running about seventy-five thousand and our idea was to capture the value there the money that was being spent by FEMA

On the temporary housing unit and use it to build this core and then the rest of the house a completed house is built around the core while as the family lives in it so in essence instead of parking a FEMA trailer in the front yard

Navin people live in it while they’re waiting around for the hundred and fifty thousand dollar of CDBG money to eventually come around or not and then the house gets built and then the FEMA trailer gets hauled off and sold off surplus we’re putting people into a permanent core of the house that they

Will occupy permanently and then building the rest of it around it and capturing the FEMA money so as to be able to build rebuild more homes and we did we did 20 of those units as a demonstration in the Rio Grande Valley

After Hurricane dolly and we currently have one that we’ve privately fund raised and the family moved in in September to the temporary core so we are you know we are sort of testing this model we’re trying to perfect it we think there’s no one silver bullet and disaster rebuilding but there are it

Takes too long to rebuild under existing systems it costs too much and we never seem to learn the lessons from one disaster to the next so we’re trying to to cure those three problems sounds also like you’re sidestepping one issue after

Major disasters of with you mentioned the FEMA trailers with the issue of people complaining because the FEMA trailers never leave so by beginning to build a house that can be expanded on you’ve sidestepped that issue completely right and you give the individuals who live in the house some agency you know

There’s an architect assigned to each house and the family works you know the core is the core it’s an interior part of the house that’s a bathroom a temporary wall kitchen living area in a bedroom and so but you as you build

The rest of the house around the house you can customize the house and use the historical context in the architectural context of the neighborhood and actually of the house not appear to be a cookie cutter quote disaster house but you know

You can actually rebuild to whatever the vernacular is of the neighborhood in which the house is built and the individual homeowner has some agency in making choices about design and floor plan and other things like that and I’ve come to see having worked with a lot of disaster survivors that one of

The most devastating parts of the disaster there’s there’s the economic and the social aspect of the thing but it’s the it’s the loss of agency the loss of power the loss of control over your life that is also a compounding

Part of the disaster and if you can be engaged in the rebuilding and have some role in the home design in and even perhaps in standing up the wall units of the Corps and being part of the build as it as as your home gets rebuilt

Certainly part of the design and the like that is part of the healing process that really needs to take place for disaster survivors and I would assume that each of the houses then to can meet the individual needs of the various

Homeowners so you’re not going to get that cookie cutter effect right exactly the the family that was just the core was just built in Houston this is a woman with a severely disabled son who is wheelchair bound and requires a specially equipped ad a shower and bathroom and special design for the

Bedroom to permit egress in case of fire and the like and a specialized hospital bed and so you literally have to understand that every family’s need is to some degree different this family’s need was to a significant degree very specialized and you know that again is part of

Helping people recover is to recognize the special needs of of the families and also to blend a da and with the various post-disaster requirements of say elevating a structure right yeah the the wrapping of the structures obviously hugely important in the case of AD eight units but in all the units it’s our

Belief that every unit should have a no-step entrance and that every unit should be two feet or thirty inches actually above the estimated highest flood elevation that the the lot could be subject to so we’ve got some pretty good-sized ramps on some of these houses but having recognizing that homes are

For life and they’re often for many different families and so we believe in universal visitability as an absolute requirement if government money touches the structure one question that I have a PA is getting into more of providing assistance we’ve have our community planning assistance teams that

Have gone out several communities and now EPA is seeking volunteers post-disaster to assist communities did you have any outside planning assistance and what kind of planning assistance could you use in a future disaster so I think APA has a very important role to play in post disaster housing and I

Would I would argue that assistance ought to be provided in the same way that we seek to provide assistance to neighborhoods civically engaged homeowners associations residents Asians tenant unions and the like ought to be the client for engaging in remediation and analysis of community

Needs after disasters I think there’s a there’s a natural tendency to sort of assume that government is going to hire a fleet of planners and they’re going to go out and do assessments and hopefully they do but ultimately the people who

Are most concerned about the recovery and most concern about the equity about equity in the recovery those are people who actually live in the neighborhood and they are usually the ones who are most excluded from the from the planning process most in need of information they’re the Moga in our opinion they’re

The most important voice that needs to be present in determining you know strategies are we going to do like Houston’s doing a mandatory homeowner financed elevation program or are we going to do mitigation public infrastructure mitigation activities where people don’t have the money to do

It well you know the left to its own the government will do whatever is best for the government but you know I think that planning needs to happen at the neighborhood level and I think that the the residents need to be empowered to

Make those choices I also think that you know I’m I’m sort of a big believer in the notion that neighborhood type planning is like some of the real basic building blocks of democracy I talked earlier about how I think the individual

Homeowner needs agency in the rebuilding of their home but we also need to be focused on building not just physical infrastructure in neighborhoods but social infrastructure within neighborhoods that is to say institutions of people working together to define what’s going to make their

Community and their neighborhood liveable what’s going to make it a good place for them a place they can succeed and unless people have unless people have the the tools to engage in that type of planning process they’re sort of relegated to kind of pro forma efforts

On the part of public participation processes that are for regional disaster recovery and a whole lot of other things there is so much that has gone wrong there’s so much legacy of Jim Crow disinvestment and racism that has produced the extreme vulnerability of low-income neighborhoods that suffer

From disasters with the unprecedented amount of money that comes available for the rebuilding process there is an opportunity to undo a good portion of that disinvestment and exclusion and it’s not just physical disinvestment it’s civic disinvestment its social disinvestment it’s where City Hall tells

People this is what is good for you in this neighborhood and this is what we’re going to do disaster recovery you know it’s a terrible situation that you get into to do it but there is this opportunity to instill to support to prop up this social infrastructure of civic engagement and and

Self-determination and you know it’s what gets me up every day and it’s what gets my staff really excited about the work that they get to do when we get to support a neighborhood you know that’s been devastated but when when people

Feel like I’m going to have a say in this we’re going to be down at City Hall we’re going to be speaking out about how we want this recovery to work for us that’s what it’s all about well I for one would love to see you take this

Discussion and planning magazine has a opinion section and it sounds like this discussion needs to be made not only for those of us that are in the hazard mitigation and design to recovery area but basically for planners at large you know planners have the skills that

Commute the community needs in order to do these things getting the government to support the planners work to do this is the real trick you know I guess some of my cynicism flows from the fact that politicians often get hold of this

Disaster recovery money and in essence want to prove that they can administer this efficiently and effectively and it seldom works out that way but they often scorn the role of planners they often scorn the activity of planning as something that is sort of superfluous and takes up too much time and too much

Effort and slows the disaster recovery process down nothing could be further from the truth because in essence when there isn’t planning when we fail to taking advantage of the opportunity to give people the agency to do the restorative type of work for their neighborhoods

Then we end up building back the same patterns of segregation and inequality and environmental vulnerability that existed before the disaster and the notion that we would take ten billion dollars and rebuild Jim Crow and rebuild the same level of vulnerability which in in fact in Texas we’re doing today is a

Is a true travesty we’re getting to the end or we’re beginning to close out and the one question I’m not sure that there really is an answer but I’ll ask it anyways it sounds like you’ve got experience with a lot of hurricanes and

The question was going to be what do you know now that you wish you had known before the hurricane but it sounds like you’ve had this reinforced many times I think it’s I again I think it’s three things I think disaster recovery process takes too long there are financial in efficiencies in

The process and we don’t give survivors and communities the agency to rebuild in a better way to me those are the three lessons that I’ve learned over the years do you see any opportunities in the near future as the communities continue to

Recover yeah I mean I to me that there are examples of where each of these problems has been overcome or people are trying to work to overcome them the problem is is that at the state administrative level at HUD and at FEMA

The emphasis is on sort of managing the recovery process as opposed to making the recovery process have the best possible outcome it can have for people and so there are shining lights out there of ways that things could and should work but unfortunately control over these programs has a tendency to be

Consolidated in FEMA headquarters HUD headquarters and the governor’s office and they’re just managers they don’t have a vision they don’t have a plan they don’t have they don’t have a mission to fundamentally make things substantially better than they were all anybody’s trying to do is to manage a

Bunch of money and to manage a process to prevent waste fraud and abuse and the the bar is too low it sounds like you would be encouraging more– of a block grant to the local communities well I think I think a block grant can be a

Block grants can be good or block diagrams can be misused I I do think that I believe that there needs to be you know in Texas the governor’s got a mantra about local control but what local control means is that

Mayor or the county judge is going to make the decisions on how the disaster recovery program works within the context of a bunch of rules that are handed down by the federal agencies and the governor’s office and imposed on

Them you know I would go lower than all of that I really think that disaster planning and disaster mitigation is ought to be ought to be community and neighborhood level as opposed to city county and state level and it’s it’s

Hard for government to do that because it’s not used to engaging a community level constituency and and to involve them again I think that’s a role where APA and planners who thought about the notion of engaging community can can perhaps develop some systems or another way to do this I haven’t thought this

Out completely as to exactly how it would work except in the you know in the few communities that we are able to work with we’re beginning to see a number of webinars coming out on community engagement so perhaps this will help

Yeah yeah and it’s more than engagement it’s you know because I think that you know community participation and community engagement are sort of checkboxes for government Block Grant planning processes you know the government will develop a plan we’ll post it for 14 days we’ll take a public

Input maybe we’ll hold a public hearing and then we’ll go do what we plan to do and that’s not what I’m talking about and with that we’re at the end can you tell us where we can find more about your organization online and any resources you’d like our listeners to know about

Well our website and we have a pretty active blog where we’ve got all of our recommendations are for rights of disaster survivors seven principles of disaster recovery and 60 detailed disaster initiatives all of that can be found as well as updates on disaster recovery issues over the years

The website Texas Hauser’s that’s te XA s Hou scrs dot o-r-g and in addition to that I’m relatively active on on Twitter on these issues and my handle is John H underscore TX Hauser’s and with that I believe we are done I know I’m going to

Look at your website and look at that and hopefully a lot of the information is applicable outside of Texas also well thanks so much and hopefully all the planners out there will will rise up and help help engage the community to

Actually have some agency in disaster recovery I can’t think of anything more important in the community development field right now I totally agree thank you John for being on the podcast we really appreciate it it is great talking to you thanks for tuning in to another episode of the American Planning Association

Podcast for resources on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery visit planning dot org slash resilience to your past episodes of the APA podcast visit planning dot org slash podcast you can also subscribe to the podcast on itunes and stitcher have an idea for a podcast series send it to podcast at planning dot org

You

ID: ClOiCAqpvzE
Time: 1540580814
Date: 2018-10-26 22:36:54
Duration: 00:46:33

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