A Survey of Issues Facing Federal Coordination for the Housing and the Redevelopment of the Gulf Coast, U.S.

Jesse Keenan

W09-6: The goal of this paper is to identify a wide variety of systematic "barriers" that in the aggregate impact a displaced person’s chances of ever returning to a place called home. This paper seeks to identify not only short- and long-term barriers, but also to find federal solutions to the underlying problems thwarting the redevelopment of the Gulf Coast. Regulatory, judicial and legislative barriers exist by and between every local, state and federal regulatory regime. The degree to which conflicts arise is an inverse measure of administrative efficiency. An inefficient administrative system usually just adds costs to the development model, but when speaking in terms of disaster redevelopment, there is a disproportionately greater cost to the model because the federal government is looked on as the ultimate source of leadership and capital. With the parameters of these impacts in mind, this paper intends to find a normative framework from which regulatory agencies, legislative bodies, courts and communities can be better prepared to recover from disasters in the future...