Some neighborhoods flood every time it rains hard. Others barely notice. Some communities have fresh food around the corner. Others drive miles for a vegetable. Most people treat those as separate problems. Preston "King" Robinson says they are the same problem wearing different clothes, and that the decisions behind them were made generations before Katrina ever showed up.
King is the founder of Garden Picasso, and he grew up in the Seventh Ward, where flooding was so routine nobody thought to question it. He beat cancer at seventeen, went into chemical engineering, and came back home with a different way of seeing his own city, one that starts three feet under the soil instead of at the curb. In this conversation he breaks down why the city sinks, what the pumps can actually handle, why concrete makes a neighborhood hotter and angrier, and how a vacant lot can be turned into something that holds water, grows food, and pays somebody.
Bruce and King get into Katrina and what people in those neighborhoods still say they heard that night, gentrification moving street by street, gumbo filé and what New Orleans does to an ingredient, and an employee model built around people most companies skip over entirely. It is a conversation about landscaping the way a house is about lumber.
#NewOrleans #NOLA #GardenPicasso #Flooding #StormwaterManagement #GreenInfrastructure #FoodDeserts #HeatIsland #EnvironmentalJustice #BlackBusiness #HurricaneKatrina #ClimateResilience #CommunityDevelopment #blackentrepreneurs #unsolicitedperspectives
Chapters:
00:00:00 How King Robinson is rebuilding New Orleans from the soil up 🌊🌱🏠
00:02:10 How forgotten spaces can rebuild and revive whole communities 🌱🏘💧
00:05:11 Growing up surrounded by culture and community in New Orleans 🎺⚜❤
00:07:34 Escaping Katrina and feeling like refugees inside our America 🌊🚗🏚
00:09:58 Realizing which New Orleans wards flood while others never do 🌊🏘💧
00:11:45 Beating cancer at seventeen and choosing to build something 💪🌱🔬
00:13:40 How landscaping evolved into meaningful green infrastructure 🌱🧪💧
00:15:41 Why stormwater capacity matters for every New Orleans home now 📏🌧🏠
00:17:12 How old pipes and unstable soil keep New Orleans slowly sinking 🕳🏙💦
00:21:12 How New Orleans was designed to fail long before Katrina hit 🏙🌊🚧
00:23:04 The levee theories, the gentrification, and saving the Quarter 🌊🏙💰
00:26:51 Heat islands explain why some communities suffer far more heat ☀🏙🌡
00:29:06 How food deserts, concrete, and flooding remain deeply connected 🥬🧱🌊
00:32:04 Garden Picasso uses science to keep New Orleans from sinking 🌱🔬🏙
00:34:14 Okra, gumbo filé, and the food culture that defines the city 🍲🌽🌶
00:37:11 The Goldman Sachs pivot from one and a half to eight inches 💧📈🌱
00:40:03 Balancing a client's vision with what the science truly demands 🌱🔬🤝
00:44:15 Coastal cities prove New Orleans does not have to be abandoned 🌊🏙🌍
00:45:22 The Pathway First model for hiring the overlooked and unhoused 🏠🌱🙌
00:47:36 One decision away and why we invest in our people far too late 💡🤝🌱
00:49:11 Why community transformation needs support before real success 🌍🙌🌱
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