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| Rebuilding healthy neighborhoods in New Orleans is a priority for Tom Farley, director of the Prevention Research Center and chair of community health sciences in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. |
Tom Farley worries about footprints. Not just the need to shrink the footprint--the city-limits area--of post-Katrina New Orleans but also the missing pitter-patter of children's footsteps on playgrounds and city sidewalks.
Farley is professor and chair of community health at Tulane's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. On Wednesday (Feb. 22) he presented a seminar, "Opportunities to Rebuild Healthy Neighborhoods in New Orleans," as part of the Prevention Research Center seminar series. Farley directs the center, which receives funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has as its mission the promotion of healthy neighborhoods and the combating of obesity in the city of New Orleans.
"It breaks my heart," said Farley, as he showed a slide of a newly installed FEMA trailer park on the site of a playground near the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church. A place where children once ran and jumped and played is filled to the curbs with trailers. While he feels strongly that trailer parks are needed for housing in New Orleans right now, he thinks they should be located on parking lots, not parks.
Getting enough exercise is a crucial factor in keeping weight at a healthy level. Farley advocates that safe places for children to play be included in plans for rebuilding New Orleans. Other goals for healthy neighborhoods are "walkability," bike paths, adequate lighting and visibility to deter crime, and healthy food availability.
Within the multiple, competing planning processes--from the Louisiana Recovery Authority at the state level, the Mayor of New Orleans' Bring New Orleans Back Commission, neighborhood groups, and other planning entities--"there's a whole lot of planning" going on, said Farley. But there's a disconnect in implementation of the plans, so far.
Farley has shuttled among the different planning entities, talking to "anyone who'll listen" about the healthy neighborhood concept.
At the local level, Farley said he thinks the single best change in city governance would be for the New Orleans City Council to lose its authority to override the City Planning Commission. That way, effective planning could be implemented without running into the "buzz saw" of New Orleans politics, where there's such a strong "undertow to rebuild as it was before."
Rebuilding New Orleans as it was before simply won't be possible, said Farley. The city's population was already in decline from its peak of 600,000 in 1960 to 460,000 just before Katrina hit.
Today, the population of New Orleans is estimated at 160,000. The most optimistic predictions put the population in the city at 250,000 to 300,000 in the next year or so. Fewer people with more blighted houses looms as a major problem for city planners.
Farley would like to see subsidies or other financial incentives available to grocery stores that sell fruits and vegetables so they'll open for business in the "walkable" neighborhoods with bike paths, playgrounds and good lighting that he envisions. The corner store that mainly sells alcohol and cigarettes could be squelched under a strong city-planning authority.
Some of the most heavily flooded areas of New Orleans--Lakeview and New Orleans East--are the least hospitable to walking, said Farley. He hopes city planners take that into consideration as they grapple with shrinking the footprint of the city.
One positive public health aspect in the post-Katrina world is the gathering of "social capital" as New Orleanians have jumped into community groups at an unprecedented rate, attending neighborhood planning meetings and stirring themselves to get their voices heard and concerns addressed.
"I've never seen so much civic activism as I have in the last six months," said Farley. And that's a healthy sign.
