When Michelle Whetten arrived in New Orleans in March of 2006, the region was still reeling from the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Although it had been six months since the hurricane, only about one-third of area’s residents had been able to return home.
“The scene was a combination of emptiness and chaotic destruction with houses still turned upside down, infrastructure destroyed, and piles of debris everywhere,” says Whetten, Enterprise’s vice president and market leader for the Gulf Coast.
Today, Whetten describes the city and region’s recovery as ongoing — slow and uneven, but also full of inspiring progress, and at a place that was difficult to imagine back in the very early days.
Back then nobody had a roadmap for recovery from this kind of disaster. Everybody was figuring it out as we went along...It's a story that continues, even 20 years later.
michelle whetten
Whetten, a Seattle native who was the former deputy director in Enterprise’s New York office, has made New Orleans her home and spent the past two decades focused on helping her adopted city and region build back. She has also been a fierce advocate for both faster disaster relief and recovery support, and more sustained, long-term investment in communities struck by extreme weather events.
As the 20th anniversary of the 2005 hurricane approaches, we caught up with Whetten to get her take on how rebuilding from the unprecedented storm and the flooding that followed has transformed Gulf Coast communities, landscapes, and lives.
What were your first impressions when you arrived in New Orleans and assessed what Enterprise could do here?
It was still a chaotic environment when I first arrived, and the needs seemed overwhelming. Enterprise’s immediate priority — through our federal policy office — was to join with other housing advocates to support local leaders. We needed to communicate the scale of the needs to members of Congress, so that federal recovery resources could be made available. It was clear that low- and moderate-income households, many of whom were renters, had experienced some of the largest losses.
I was fortunate to have the guidance of one of my mentors, [former Enterprise CEO] Doris Koo, who was at the time Enterprise’s western regional director and who was leading our response efforts. We quickly learned local leaders would need support designing housing recovery programs, and nonprofits and other developers would need support and access to private capital to put these federal resources to use once the programs launched.
Thinking back right after Katrina, did you believe New Orleans would be able to build back and the housing landscape would be as it is today?
Recovery was extremely slow at the start. In the first couple of years a big part of my job was giving funders and congressional staff tours of the city and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and for a long time we would see neighborhood after neighborhood, mile after mile of nothing but devastation. It was difficult to fathom all the debris being removed, let alone homes, businesses, and infrastructure being rebuilt. You could see maybe one house being rebuilt here or there, but it was hard to comprehend that the city or the whole Mississippi Gulf Coast could come back to life.
Local leaders were managing a situation much larger than anything they had ever dealt with. Many local officials and nonprofit leaders were working long days and returning home to deal with their own flooded houses and living in temporary housing if their homes were not livable.
We still have large neighborhoods or sections of neighborhoods that have only a small percentage of their pre-Katrina population and very little commercial development in those neighborhoods. New Orleans is now about 80% of the population it was prior to Katrina. Much of the population loss is due to Black households who were unable to return or chose not to.
Still, there has been some incredible progress in the rebuilding of neighborhoods and in the community development system that seemed impossible 20 years ago. That progress is the result of both large-scale development, and the cumulative impact of individual houses rebuilt one at a time over the years.
Despite the uncertainty in the first several years after the storm, we’ve seen investment in the region that has exceeded expectations. Affordable housing has been rebuilt to a high standard of energy efficiency and climate resilience and has gained more political and public support than it had before. We have public agencies that are better coordinated. Local colleges and universities have started professional programs in real estate and affordable housing finance. We are seeing innovative housing models emerge Including several recent winners of the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge – with innovative models of construction and financing.
Enterprise was one of the early investors in new affordable housing in the region, back when there were so many unknowns, and it took a leap of faith.
You were deeply involved in rebuilding housing at Lafitte in the Tremé neighborhood. Can you describe the process?
Lafitte was one of several 1940’s public housing complexes in New Orleans that did not suffer extensive damage but experienced significant flooding and had experienced decades of deferred maintenance. After Katrina, residents either evacuated or were forced to leave, and they were kept away for several months. At the time, our housing authority was under federal receivership. HUD and the housing authority decided that instead of repairing the buildings, they would be demolished, and new mixed-income housing would replace it.
Because of Doris Koo’s experience with high-quality HOPE VI developments in Seattle, and the emerging work of our partner Providence Community Housing in the Treme neighborhood surrounding Lafitte, HUD asked Providence and Enterprise to consider taking on the redevelopment. It has been quite a long journey since then — for us, but especially for the residents who were displaced.
The redevelopment of Lafitte has involved all parts of Enterprise. Working with Providence Community Housing, Enterprise Community Development led predevelopment efforts at Lafitte. They engaged with the architect and oversaw planning and community engagement through a charrette process.
Enterprise Community Loan Fund provided financing for the first two phases, and all of Lafitte is certified to Green Communities. Matt Morrin came to us as a fellow after Katrina and has been Enterprise’s lead on the development ever since. A third partner, L+M Development joined the team as the development got underway which was right as the financial crisis was hitting in 2008. And now, Ryan Brock on our local team coordinates programs and supports for residents at Lafitte.
Because of his role as Secretary of HUD starting in 2009, Shaun Donovan was actively engaged in supporting Katrina recovery efforts and particularly instrumental in overcoming obstacles that were impeding progress in the redevelopment of New Orleans public housing — so it is especially rewarding to have him return 15 years later as Enterprise's CEO and president and be so familiar with this work and even know some of these residents by name.
How have your priorities shifted over time since you started working in the Gulf Coast region?
Our initial priorities were to support state and local government, strengthen local development capacity, and attract private-sector investment to help rebuild quality housing in the areas most affected by the storm — and we had the urgency of time-limited disaster recovery resources.
Since Katrina, our region has experienced a dramatic increase in hurricanes and other climate events, as have other areas across the country. Over and over, we have seen that that low-income households and renters face the greatest challenges in preparing for and recovering from severe weather. And we’ve realized we can do the most if we focus on strategies that not only reduce the physical damage to homes and limit the time people are without power, but also that increase the amount of resources people have before, during, and after a disaster. I’m inspired by the work of organizations like Springboard to Opportunities and Reconcile New Orleans that focus in this area.
Right now, we’re focused on attracting new sources of capital and encouraging sustained philanthropic investment in the region, while addressing the growing crisis over the cost and availability of insurance. The biggest thing we can do to speed up disaster recovery is to permanently authorize the CDBG-DR program by passing the Reforming Disaster Recovery Act so that Hud doesn’t have to rewrite the CDBG-DR regulations each time there is a disaster.
The Katrina anniversary is a time to look back but also plan for the future. What are you most looking forward to in your work?
There’s a lot! We have been working with Enterprise’s rural team on a collaborative project with the state of Mississippi for tools and training to increase access to the state’s affordable housing programs and resources for newer developers and developers in rural communities.
We are also working with a group of 12 community-based nonprofits in New Orleans to help them increase the impact of their work as well as their financial sustainability — based on a successful model developed by Enterprise’s team in Detroit. The leaders of these organizations are developing an advocacy agenda, including reducing displacement and effective use of the newly passed New Orleans Housing Trust Fund.
I’m excited about using Enterprise’s capital products to support deeper climate resilience and energy-efficiency efforts and working with capital partners to address issues like repairs to owner-occupied homes and smaller-scale rental properties.
How has New Orleans and the Gulf Coast served as a model for other locations? Given recent natural disasters, what can other parts of the country learn from the region's effort to build back?
Back then nobody had a roadmap for recovery from this kind of disaster. Everybody was figuring it out as we went along. Mistakes have been made, and we have learned a lot over the years about how to do things better.
To start, we’ve learned the importance of accurate information to help people make decisions about their future. There is so much confusion and often conflicting information after a disaster. People need easy to understand accurate information about resources that are available and the process for accessing them, and they need guidance from people they trust. So providing support to nonprofits who can provide this kind of information is essential and often overlooked after a disaster.
We have several well-tested housing recovery programs including an innovative multifamily program that combines Low Income Housing Tax Credits with CDBG-DR to support new resilient and energy efficient housing – Enterprise’s Green Communities and the Insurance Institute for Business Health & Safety’s Fortified Gold standard that is a great model for other locations that experience climate disasters.
Another big learning relates to the important role of philanthropy after a disaster, not just in the short-term response, but in the long-term recovery effort. Our local community foundation, the Greater New Orleans Foundation, created a fund to support nonprofits that were redeveloping neighborhoods and raised money from large national foundations that might not have otherwise provided that kind of sustained support. We still need to support the work of nonprofits because their recovery efforts are ongoing. It's a story that continues, even 20 years later.
Michelle Whetten at the "Magic Archway," created by Laurel True, True Mosaics Studio, and Faubourg Lafitte community members. The archway is lined with bricks like those of the Lafitte Public Housing Development and mosaics from residents of Faubourg Lafitte.
