Environment & Climate Change

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Belfer Center's Broadmoor Project was developed by then Belfer Center Senior Fellow Doug Ahlers to work with the Broadmoor neighborhood to rebuild the devastated community. Highly successful, Broadmoor is now a model of recovery, almost 90 percent rebuilt, with a new charter school, library, and community center. (See Broadmoor Project.)

With Ahlers vision and leadership, the Broadmoor Project has also helped other disaster-struck communities. Here, Ahlers describes how the Broadmoor model is currently assisting in the recovery of three Chilean communities nearly destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2010. The genesis of the Recupera Chile initiative is described below.

We Shall Not Be Moved, released in August 2012, is an account of how five New Orleans neighborhoods rebuilt in the years following Hurricane Katrina. Focusing on recovery efforts in the hard-hit neighborhoods of Broadmoor, Hollygrove, Lakeview, the Lower Ninth Ward, and Village de l'Est, author Tom Wooten, a research fellow with the Belfer Center's Broadmoor Project, tells the story of this rebirth through the eyes, voices, and experiences of residents who refused to give up in the wake of one of the country’s worst disasters.

Five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, one stand-out recovery success story is the neighborhood of Broadmoor and its unique collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School through the Belfer Center's "Broadmoor Project." While the determined community continues its renewal today, Broadmoor has become a model of disaster recovery efforts for other neighborhoods, cities, and even countries.