Resilient Housing in a Changing Environment

Conversations about coastal community resilience often focus on our cities, yet rural coastal communities face many of the same environmental challenges with far more limited resources. In 2019, St. John the Baptist Parish’s Louisiana Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA-SAFE) Adaptation Strategy identified the need to direct growth to low-risk areas in order to create safe, inclusive, and vibrant communities within the Parish. Still recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Ida in 2021, St. John’s Planning & Zoning Department sought to advance this need by developing a Resilient Housing Plan with a multidisciplinary team of stakeholders across the Gulf Coast.

St. John is one of three local governments piloting the use of a Community Resilience Housing Guide to prepare their Resilient Housing Plan. The guide was developed by Smart Home America and Mississippi State University Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, with support from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources through a U.S. EPA Gulf of Mexico Program Cooperative Agreement. This case study will showcase the Community Resilience Housing Guide, a resource that will be available to communities after the pilot phase, and illustrate how resource-limited jurisdictions can adapt to changing conditions by tapping regional partnerships to achieve long-term planning goals.

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