SOUTH MISSISSIPPI, August 27, 2008 – Cynicism on the western end of the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast has steadily escalated. In a recent story in the New York Times, the reporter, in an otherwise straightforward piece on a New Orleans city housing scandal drops this phrase into his narrative: “The classic New Orleans blend of possible corruption and certain mismanagement has dominated headlines for days...”

On bad days you’ll hear grumblings of “certain mismanagement” in Mississippi, as well. Yet you’ll also get full-throated optimism, particularly from business and political leaders who point to evidence that life is getting back to some semblance of normal – or at least to a “new normal.”

Leland Speed, former head of the Mississippi Development authority and a prime mover of the 2005 effort that created the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal, occupies the middle ground, where optimism and realism co-exist:

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest patience is rewarded, if at a much slower pace than many would prefer.

Read the city-by-city report of progress in the SunHerald’s August 24 editions, and you sense the progress. Same with the Gulf Coast Business Council’s anniversary report. And our special update on community planning along the Coast by New Towns reporter/editor Jason Miller.

Yet there’s no avoiding the question asked outright by cable news analysts safe in studios hundreds of miles from the storm zone and implied by the grumblings on the Coast: Why is it taking so long?

To better understand the context of an answer to that question, take a look at the three slide shows to the left. In the first, the SunHerald’s photographers capture the dramatic, permanent change in the Coast’s landscape in photos of the same places, the same structures, before and after the storm. In the second slide show, architect Steve Mouzon chronicles the depressingly un-recovered neighborhoods in his images of nightfall along the Coast in early 2007.

Look also here [6.4mb .pdf] at the groundbreaking final report of the Governor’s Commission at the end of 2005. Katrina changed forever not only the physical landscape of the Coast but also the more complex interrelationships of citizens and governments, individuals and communities. In both the literal and figurative sense, the storm surge knocked out the foundations of most peoples’ lives. Many victims were already living at the margins.

Consider: In Mississippi’s Hancock and Harrison Counties, almost three quarters of the housing units were occupied by households living below the U.S. median income level. Over 90 percent of the homes in Harrison County (Biloxi and Gulfport) did not have flood insurance. The majority (62 percent) of housing units across the three coastal counties was built before 1980 and below the standards of modern building codes. (ref: page 68 in the Governor’s Commission report)

Now consider the challenge of replacing 65,000 destroyed homes in a post-Katrina era in which building codes, FEMA regulations, escalating insurance prices, and rising construction costs complicate the lives of even those earning above-average wages. Then, add to that dilemma a national economy staggered by crises in the housing and financial markets, tightening lending and freezing new development.

If something approaching a quick “return to normal” was expected, the expectation was naďve. Even the leader of the most idealistic of the teams that came to Mississippi to help in planning encourages a more realistic perspective.

“Anyone who suggested that change would be easier in the Gulf because Katrina ‘wiped the slate clean,’ got it backwards,” says former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Reform is hard everywhere and even harder in the Gulf right now, but the social and economic payoff of staying committed to real renewal couldn’t be more worth it.”

You can see a powerful hint of that future in the images from SunHerald photographers in the third of the three slide shows to the left. These are photos taken over the last two years for a new SunHerald magazine called beachblvd. Here are images of a South Mississippi built back “better than ever,” just as Governor Haley Barbour challenged planners and community leaders to think about in the days after Katrina. It’s a set of intentionally rosy pictures. But they’re of real people and real places nonetheless. If they don’t quite balance the starker realities of South Mississippi’s recent history, they at least hint at the future payoff Norquist suggests.

August 25, 2008 -- The headline in a June, 2006 article in the design magazine, Architectural Record, proposed this question: “Can New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Face the Hard Questions?”

It’s been the question of the day, almost every day, since August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in Mississippi and flooded New Orleans and adjacent parishes in Louisiana. Three years beyond the disaster, the most costly in U.S. history, that core question is obscured by the more emotional, more often-asked one: Why is it taking so long to build back?

With the help of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and in partnership with the SunHerald newspaper and the Congress for the New Urbanism we hope to provide, if not answers, at least a broader context for addressing these questions as they apply to post-Katrina recovery along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

This site, first launched in October of 2005, five weeks after Hurricane Katrina, has been the archive for products and follow-up projects of the Mississippi Renewal Forum, the weeklong design charrette funded by the Knight Foundation and James L. Barksdale. You can read all about that process and what emerged from it by clicking here to enter the archival section of the site.

In this third-year anniversary week update, we want to use this space to present the latest reports on progress and challenges and to broaden the “hard choices” discussion. We think lessons learned and struggles still underway in South Mississippi can inform the conversation just heating up in America at large. In an important sense, Mississippi and Louisiana got to the future first. The hurricane blew them into the new era of increasing demands and diminishing resources.

Two things are obvious to most folks who live and work on the Gulf Coast now. The extent of the storm’s destruction during Katrina was vastly under-appreciated by those who live outside the region. And the potential for an accelerated recovery was vastly exaggerated.

The bottom line, says Brian Sanderson, head of the Gulf Coast Business Council, is “that there’s no silver bullet. There’s no one thing that will solve the interconnected problems of housing, insurance, and all of the rest of the issues we’re dealing with -- plus the effects of the downturn in the national economy.”

The Gulf Coast Business Council, in August of 2008, published a report on successes and shortfalls since the storm: “Mississippi Gulf Coast 3.0.” There’s plenty of good news: Population in the three coastal counties has come back to within 96 percent of pre-Katrina levels; unemployment has dropped below seven percent after a 20-percent rate right after the storm; casino revenues, which provide sales taxes and reflect employment in the region, are expected to exceed pre-2005 levels for the second consecutive year.

Yet there are worrying aspects of the recovery effort: Steep rises in depression and suicide since the storm; wide swaths of the coastal landscape abandoned, at least for the time being, by property owners and businesses; Highway 90 is still under re-construction; insurance and construction costs are pushing homes beyond the reach of many workers and potentially dampening employers’ expansion plans.

There have been inspired plans and painfully slow implementation. Much is due to an atmosphere of uncertainty about where it’s safe to build and how much it will cost for storm-hardened construction and insurance. Much of it is connected to slow-moving state and government processes.

“Would-be developers or contractors, which nowadays could be anyone from a veteran professional to a single parent just trying to rebuild a home on their own, are finding the rolls of red-tape too much,” says Donovan Scruggs, former city planner for Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and now a planning consult with a local architecture firm. “This, combined with the NIMBYism (the Not-in-my-Backyard syndrome), are going to make recovery a very long and stressful process.”

Asked about lessons learned since the hurricane, Adele Lyons, Knight Foundation program director in Biloxi and Gulfport, says, “What I’m glad I didn’t know then was how long this recovery was going to take. We heard it was going to be a 10-year process, but we are impatient.

“We’ve been flying this airplane while we’re building it, and that’s not the best way to do business. But the reality is, this is a multiyear process. The first year was all about clean-up and getting organized. The second year, projects began bubbling below the surface. In the third year, we’re beginning to see things come out of the ground.”

What that means in terms of long-range renewal for the Mississippi Coast, we’ll explore in this week’s reports and analyses.