NOLA wins $141M in HUD Resilience Competition

NEW ORLEANS, LA. -- The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the city of New Orleans $141 million in the National Disaster Resilience Competition.

The plan, the Resilient New Orleans Strategy, is composed of 41 actions that focus on the environment, city services, and social and economic equity. The goal is to protect people when there is a disaster while also improving their lives¹.

“It isn’t just that a category-five storm made a near direct hit on the city. It’s that you had all these underlying stresses with economy, equality, and transportation and health that exacerbated this and posed a really serious challenge and existential threat to the city,” said Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities, which helped the city create the plan¹.

One of the major points of the resilience plan, of course, is the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan², which will focus on changing how stormwater, surface water, and groundwater is managed in Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes. This part of the city’s resilience plan received an Environmental Planning Award from the American Planning Association last year in recognition of the city completely refocusing how it manages water.

Read the original news in the The Times-Picayune.

Sources

^{1 http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/08/new_orleans_resilience_plan.html}

^{2 http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/04/greater_new_orleans_urban_wate.html}