HOUMA, La. — If Houston gets serious about preventing massive damage the next time it floods, it may need to learn a lesson from its neighbors in this oil and gas town, just 15 miles up the road from Louisiana’s historic bayou communities.

This town’s residents—roughnecks, shrimpers, shipbuilders and small-business owners—aren’t typically the joining type. And yet dozens have recently begun showing up for an unusual discussion group underwritten by the state and federal government, and dedicated to a question very difficult to grapple with: What happens when the next hurricane hits, sending bayous rising and inundating the most flood-prone homes, and people start moving here?


Permanently relocating people is the third rail of disaster planning, the aspect no one—especially politicians—wants to talk about. Local zoning and development decisions have encouraged millions of people to move into floodplains, and federal insurance policies and disaster aid have bailed them out time and again. But as these storms become increasingly costly, and climate change promises to make them more so, it becomes harder to avoid the bigger topic: There are places where people simply shouldn’t live anymore.

Relocation is politically toxic; handled centrally, it is disruptive and interventionist, the kind of move that foments revolutions. But as the state of Louisiana mounts a massive battle against the rising tide, planning and funding ambitious efforts to restore buffering wetlands and build levees and floodgates, it is also beginning to acknowledge to residents that even their best efforts will not be enough—and is asking them to think about what comes next.

With the help of $92.6 million in federal grant money, Louisiana’s Office of Community Development has launched a first-of-its-kind effort to help communities across the state prepare for the tumult to come. Rising waters and escalating flood insurance rates will drive thousands of families farther inland, the state predicts, leaving behind homes they’ve known for generations and places that have fundamentally shaped their identities. But those refugees aren’t the only ones who will experience change. Communities like Houma will experience their own jarring transition as they receive an influx of waterlogged neighbors. Houma sits high enough that it’s less likely to drown in a hurricane, and thanks to its industrial base, could more easily win additional levees and flood protection.

Top: The old Boudreaux Canal School, which has closed since the population of Chauvin has steadily dropped. Bottom: The cemetery at St Joseph Catholic Church, north of Chauvin along Bayou Petit Caillou. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

“This is the first time that I can remember that a group came in and said it’s not going to be all right,” said Jonathan Foret, sitting in the living room of the 88-year-old home he pours his weekends into restoring, which was once owned by the wealthy fur trader his grandfather trapped for in the southern marshes. Foret, whose family goes back generations in Terrebonne Parish, quickly signed on to be a local discussion leader for the state’s effort.

Relocation has already shaped Foret’s family in ways that many Gulf families can understand. His father was born in Cocodrie, Louisiana, an old Cajun fishing village on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Foret grew up 15 miles north in Chauvin, his mother’s hometown, where the water of Bayou Petit Caillou serves as the town’s true main street, and locals recognize each other’s comings and goings by their hulking, hand-built shrimp boats. But after Hurricane Juan flooded the family home in 1985, Foret’s parents decided it was time to move farther inland still, scoping out the dry ground one community north in Bourg.

When Foret, 40, was ready to buy property himself five years ago, he turned his eyes farther north yet, to Houma, 30 miles from the rich, still bayous his ancestors plied.

Migration is nothing new for Cajun families like Foret’s, many of whom were driven first from France, then from their adoptive home in Canada’s maritime provinces in the 1700s before settling here among the marshes and moss of coastal Louisiana. But over the next two generations it will happen at an alarming scale, as the twin challenges of sinking land and rising seas overtake ancestral homes at breakneck speed. In 50 years, the state estimates Terrebonne Parish, whose name means “good earth” in the French that some of its residents still speak, will lose 41 percent of its land mass.

The goal of the new planning effort, dubbed Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments, or LA Safe, is to head off the worst-case scenario in which people move out of flood-prone areas only once they’ve lost everything, and arrive en masse in communities that aren’t ready to absorb them. It’s a scenario with precedent: After Hurricane Katrina, entire neighborhoods from south and east of New Orleans relocated to the affluent bedroom communities of Covington and Mandeville, north of Lake Pontchartrain, straining schools, clogging roads and leading to resentment among some longtime residents. As far away as Houston, residents complained about “Katrina refugees” sapping local resources.

Jonathan Foret, the Executive Director of the South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center, holds a pet nutria named Beignet that he uses in educational programming. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

Mathew Sanders, who is leading the project for Louisiana’s Community Development Office, said LA Safe is meant to be a first step in figuring out how to help communities live on a smaller footprint of land, without losing their wealth and their cultures in the process—if that’s even possible.

“We’re asking communities to think through, based on environmental changes, based on projected flood risk, what will this community legitimately look like at year 10, at year 25, at year 50?” he said.

The planning effort makes up half of the federal grant; the other half is focused on relocating the highly flood-prone Native American community of Isle de Jean Charles—the worst-case scenario that planners are hoping LA Safe can help avoid in the future.

In Terrebonne and other coastal parishes, Sanders’ team has been identifying corridors that are expected to remain high and dry over the next half century and are ripe for growth, as well as areas that could lose their tax bases as rising waters and increasing flood insurance rates drive most locals out. Then they’re using community meetings like the ones Foret helps lead to ask residents what types of projects, from cultural centers to housing developments, might help ease that transition. By the end of the year, some of those projects will be selected for seed funding from the $40 million pot of federal funds.

The idea is that LA Safe will not just offer Louisiana communities some progress in dealing with their looming challenges, but that it will also serve a model to other regions of the country facing similar futures, as climate change drives sea levels higher and exacerbates flooding in communities from Houston to Miami to Norfolk, Virginia. After Hurricane Katrina laid bare the state’s coastal vulnerabilities, Louisiana has become a leader in resiliency planning, even building a $60 million “water campus” that it hopes will serve as a resource for communities like Houston.



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But even just starting a conversation like this with residents is something that many governments are afraid to undertake. Losing people means losing a tax base and constituents—something no politician would want. And the policies quickly get tangled up in both climate-change politics and the interests of powerful lobbies like local developers. In North Carolina, a state science report predicted sea-level rise as high as 39 inches within a century—and the Legislature outlawed its use, after an outcry from real estate developers and residents. Planners in vulnerable communities around the country tend to rely on the lowest-risk scenarios for fear they’ll alienate locals and provoke a political backlash if they use even middle-of-the-road projections.

Top: A levee construction project in Lower Lafourche Parish. Bottom: Windell Curole, of the South Lafourche Levee District, stands at a levee construction project in Lower Lafourche Parish. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

The Louisiana planners had a leg up, since the environmental changes here have been so swift that many residents have seen land lost in their own lifetimes. Still, Sanders’ team knew the effort would work only if the solutions came out of the communities themselves. To that end, they’ve partnered with the nonprofit Foundation for Louisiana, a major funder and organizer of community development work across the state, for help identifying the pastors, school board members, respected neighbors and other crucial community leaders who could give the project legitimacy. They also provide transportation and child care to help people make it to the meetings, and offer food as an enticement.

Another challenge: figuring out how to help residents understand the forecasts well enough to consider making big, disruptive changes in their lives. The complex projections that drive planning for future sea-level rise and land loss can befuddle even scientists.

“How do we actually present this very challenging, sometimes divisive information? How is it discussed in a way that is accessible and digestible and takes into account literacy rates and linguistic barriers?” asked Liz Williams, Coastal Community Resilience Director for the Foundation for Louisiana. Before partnering with the state, Williams led a pilot project in Plaquemines Parish, along the tail end of the Mississippi River before it drops off into the Gulf, to develop the maps and other tools now being used in LA Safe. These materials are meant to be straightforward and user friendly, for instance, rather than using red to signify areas primed for land loss, as the coastal authority’s maps do, they use blue to show that those areas will soon be water.

By the end of June, the planners had held a pair of meetings in each of the communities across the six parishes targeted by LA Safe, including in Terrebonne Parish, and had begun plotting residents’ ideas on maps that also overlay current development and infrastructure as well as future flood risk.

In 50 years, some areas are expected to be under 12 feet of water during a so-called 100-year storm—the kind with a 1 percent chance of hitting any given year, used as the linchpin of disaster planning. Ideas for projects there are largely recreation-based. Recognizing that these regions aren’t likely to have many year-round residents left, the suggestions aim to keep some economic activity going by building boat ramps and nature centers that could draw weekend visitors. Farther north, in Houma and above, swaths of orange highlight the beginnings of growth corridors on the map, where residents are eager to see restaurants and small businesses that could bolster new, bigger populations.

Once these ideas are refined—the planners intend to take them back through several more rounds of review with residentsthey’ll be something that the state knows how to work with.

Sanders’ office routinely does Main Street revitalization programs, mixed-use development deals, job training and small-business incubators. “If we understand the types of economic development, and more importantly the sectors and the corridors that we need to localize that development within, then at that point we’re really talking about more traditional community development techniques,” he said.

Local residents throw cast nets into the water along Bayou Sale Road in Lower Terrebonne Parish. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

One of the goals in this sort of proactive planning is to keep housing prices in the high-and-dry areas from skyrocketing beyond the reach of people migrating from flood-prone regions, who may have lost significant amounts of wealth in the process.

That’s a major concern for Donald Bogen, a pastor and community activist who lives in the northern Terrebonne community of Thibodaux, where new gated communities advertise “higher elevations” on bright banners facing the highway. He said he’s worked with several elderly residents from the lower parts of the parish who are no longer able to rebuild after each storm and are eager to move north. But, he said, they have given up on the idea after looking at housing prices and realizing they can’t afford it.

“The developers, they’re not stupid. They see what’s going to happen. But they’re going to price the older people out,” Bogen said.

Moreover, he argued, people who have to abandon flood-prone homes are apt to arrive with credit issues, and may not even be able to afford a rental, let alone a new house. Up until now, he said, the community has been able to absorb these handful of newcomers, with friends and relatives welcoming them into their homes. “But if you’re looking at 20 people over the next four years, that’s going to be a real strain,” he said.

Left: The Chauvin floodwall and lock system in Terrebonne Parish. Jerome “Zee” Zeringue stands on a walkway on the Bubba Dove floodgate in Terrebonne Parish. Zeringue is a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for District 52 in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in south Louisiana. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

Can any planning effort really avoid this fundamental economic problem? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” Sanders acknowledged. “What we have is essentially $96.2 million in research and development capital.”



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Success, however, could come with its own set of controversies. If the state finds ways of making relocation cheaper and smoother, at some point it will become harder to make the case for pouring tens of billions of dollars into levees and floodgates meant to help keep withering coastal communities livable.

While Louisiana is making progress on its $50 billion coastal master plan, aimed at stemming the tide of wetlands loss and protecting over the next 50 years, the fight is getting only tougher. What had been the worst-case scenario for land loss when the Legislature passed its 2012 version of the master plan became the best-case scenario in the latest version, approved by the Legislature in June, thanks to updated sea-level rise estimates. Meanwhile the cash-strapped state has only a fraction of the dollars needed to fund it.

Left: Dirk Guidry sits in his pizza restaurant in the bayou town of Chauvin. Right: A map of the Morganza to the Gulf levee system hangs on the wall at Dirk Guidry's pizza restaurant. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine

In Chauvin, Dirk Guidry, 61, has seen the consequences firsthand. After traveling the world with the Air Force, Guidry returned home, opening up a pizza restaurant just down the road from the two-bedroom house his grandmother was raised in with 10 siblings. But the landmarks of his childhood are slowly disappearing, baseball fields and cow pastures replaced by open water edging in closer and closer to the road.

As a member of the parish council, he has fought hard for a massive flood protection system, including by persuading residents in this staunchly conservative region to approve taxes to help fund it, and he can’t quite shake the hope that the federal government might yet come to the rescue.

But the parish can’t hold off forever, he knows. It recently closed two elementary schools in the lower part of the community, consolidating the students into a larger school farther north. And Guidry is spearheading an effort to do the same thing with the parish’s libraries, closing those that are prone to flooding and building a larger, parish-wide one farther north. “Everything’s moving further up,” he said with a shake of the head.

Guidry himself has no plans to go anywhere. He’s already bought a burial plot in the family cemetery and says he’ll “go down with the rest of them” when it’s under water one day. But he doesn’t want the same for his daughters, one 20, the other 37 with three children of her own.

“Would I ever encourage one of my kids to build down here?” he asked. “No. I love it down here, but you have to be smart about it.”