Creating a Community of Practice

In this Resilient Communities podcast, we hear from Heather Schwartz, a policy researcher based in RAND's New Orleans office who studies the effects of integrating low- and middle-income families on the school experiences of children from low-income families. Her most recent work asks whether 11 cities' inclusionary zoning policies actually achieve the policy goal for social inclusion. This work is relevant to communities that are interested in retaining lower-income families who might otherwise be priced out of their high-cost housing markets.

In this Resilient Communities podcast, Jennifer Steele, a policy researcher whose work with her RAND colleague Georges Vernez and with Tulane University's Cowen Institute, has examined New Orleans's charter and district-run schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Policymakers responded to the storm's destruction by transforming the New Orleans Public Schools into a decentralized system composed mostly of charter schools. These efforts are relevant to other cities seeking to use charter-based school choice to create a more resilient public education sector.

In this Resilient Communities podcast, Jordan R. Fischbach discusses recent research that has helped the city of New Orleans address the challenge of reducing flood risk and is relevant to many other coastal communities that are concerned with water resources, infrastructure planning, rising sea levels, and flooding. Fischbach describes how nonstructural measures — such as incentives for home elevation, incentives for relocation to lower-risk areas, and restrictions designed to curtail future growth in the floodplain — can make coastal communities less vulnerable to storm surge flooding.

In this Resilient Communities podcast, Admiral Thad Allen discusses the critical questions confronting the field of community resilience as well as a new toolkit developed by RAND researchers to support community disaster planning.