American Planning Association

In the new APA Podcast series, Resilience Roundtable, host Rich Roths, AICP, talks with planners and allied professionals who make resilience their mission, even in the face of devastating natural hazards. Rich is a senior hazard planner for Burton Planning Service of Columbus, Ohio. Previously he worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he was in charge of coordinating all mitigation planning activities for the six states in Region V. Rich is also a member of APA's Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division.

The first episode features John Henneberger, an expert on low-income housing issues, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow, and the codirector of Texas Housers, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable disaster recovery policy and practices. John describes his affordable housing and community development background and how, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita descended on the Gulf Coast in 2005, he became quickly aware of the exaggerated impact on low-income neighborhoods of color. He describes Hurricane Harvey’s specific toll on Houston and the surrounding area and how cyclical these disasters can seem, as many of the neighborhoods his organization works in have identical characteristics to what they saw in the Lower Ninth Ward after Katrina, such as an aging housing stock and inadequate or nonexistent public infrastructure. John talks about the innovative ways disaster recovery needs are being met in various Texas counties, spotlighting the system RAPIDO, a temporary-to-permanent housing model that gives owners of the property more control over the rebuilding process. Again and again throughout the discussion, John argues that good planning practice and equity are inextricably linked, and giving disaster survivors a sense of agency is one of the most important things planners can do for affected individuals.

New Orleans’s City Park claims some impressive titles: At 1,300 acres, it’s the largest regional park in Louisiana, and it ranks as the most visited park in the state at nearly 15 million visits per year. But that wasn’t the case 13 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005, and devastated the city — including that well-loved civic space.

For this special episode of People Behind the Plans, recorded in New Orleans at the National Planning Conference earlier this year, Courtney hears from Bob Becker, FAICP, CEO of City Park and an adjunct professor at the University of New Orleans. During the first half of the episode, Courtney and Bob look back on the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the park — every building damaged, 2,000 trees destroyed, and 90 percent of its funding gone overnight. Just five months before the storm hit, the organization finished devising a new master plan for the space, and Bob stresses how important that document was for charting a course forward during the recovery effort. (In fact, their work was recognized with a 2010 National Planning Excellence Award for a Hard-Won Victory.) During the second half of the episode, Bob talks about his career trajectory, including how he ended up doing planning work in Kuala Kencana, a company town in Papua, Indonesia, and how he finished a PhD program at a later-than-typical point in his career.