MEDIA ADVISORY
August 30, 2006
Contact:
Brian Gumm, Communications and Media Relations Director
202-543-1147
bgumm@afhh.org
WASHINGTON—Several staff members from the Alliance for Healthy
Homes—Executive Director Robert O. Zdenek, Community Projects Director
Ralph Scott, Housing Policy Director Jane Malone, and Communications and
Media Relations Director Brian Gumm—are authors of a chapter about
strategies for safe and healthy rebuilding of housing in devastated working
class communities in the new book There Is No Such Thing as a Natural
Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina. The book, edited by
Chester Hartman of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and Gregory
D. Squires of George Washington University, is published by Routledge
and is now available.
The Alliance staff’s chapter, “Reclaiming New Orleans’
Working-Class Communities,” argues that smart, safe, and healthy
recovery and rebuilding is possible and necessary in the communities affected
by the storm. The chapter discusses the conditions necessary for successful
rebuilding, makes the case for citizen participation in all neighborhood
and citywide planning, and looks at the rebuilding process as an opportunity
for reducing race and class disparities.
The book chapter is one part of the Alliance’s larger healthy homes
hurricane rebuilding work. The Alliance has delivered “train the
trainer” workshops to more than 50 local partner organizations in
the New Orleans area on safe and effective methods for ridding flooded
but structurally sound homes of mold and debris. The Alliance also is
partnering with building experts to promote affordable flood-resistant
rebuilding strategies. The Alliance has published a hurricane recovery
guidebook, available at www.afhh.org/res/res_publications.htm#hurricanerecovery.
To schedule an interview with any of the chapter’s authors, please
contact Brian Gumm at 202-543-1147 or bgumm@afhh.org.
For more information about the book, contact Routledge at 1-800-634-7064.
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