Jordan Flaherty of Left Turn has written some excellent articles about Katrina and its aftermath on New Orleans and other Louisiana residents. This is from his most recent article, dated November 4:
White New Orleans is steadily coming back, and Black New Orleans is moving out. A grassroots organizer with New Orleans Network tells me she has been speaking to people in every moving truck she sees. She reports that in every case, “they’re Black, they are renters, they’re moving out of New Orleans, and they say they would stay, if they had a choice.”
With few standing, livable homes, a shortage of temporary housing, and some landlords asking for six months of rent in advance for what is left, there’s little choice except to leave.
Inequality continues through the cleanup of New Orleans. Some areas have electricity, gas, and clean streets, and some areas are untouched. Medical
volunteer Catherine Jones reports that driving the streets of New Orleans at night, ” I felt like I was in the middle of a checkerboard. The Quarter lit up like Disneyworld; poor black neighborhoods a few blocks over so dark I couldn’t even see the street in front of me.”The Washington Post reports that although both the overwhelmingly White Lakeview neighborhood and Black Ninth Ward neighborhood were devastated by flooding, “It now appears that long-standing neighborhood differences in income and opportunity…are shaping the stalled repopulation of this mostly empty city.”
I finally did get hold of my aunt and her family. They have now returned to their home in New Orleans, which is structurally on high ground between Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue. This in no way means that they are well-off. The rich and the poor live cheek-by-jowl in New Orleans. Sometimes, good neighborhoods are joined to bad neighborhoods by a street or a corner.
Their former next door neighbors, an interracial couple, a black man and a white woman, decided to stay where they had been evacuated in Utah. They returned, took what they most needed and left my cousins several appliances, bikes, tools and other things that they could use.
My cousin, who I will call Junior, said that they had to come up with the money to get home; the Salvation Army refused to help them relocate back to New Orleans by providing transportation. This was particularly difficult since Junior is on unemployment insurance as his job was terminated because of the storm.
On top of that, when they returned home, the family found that they were also on their own regarding the repair of the roof of the house. This was their most pressing hurricane damage. Their landlord was still unavailable after several weeks despite their having left dozens of messages on his answering machine. So patching the roof became their responsibility. Who knows when they will be recompensed for this work?
The state has taken over the New Orleans school district; and because of this, my younger cousins may be able to attend parochial school–the equivalent for some families of sending troublesome teens to military school. The Catholic schools are going to be recompensed by the state for this, so they may be able to attend St. Augustine High School for boys or even St. Leo’s (the alma mater of Wynton Marsalis)–something formerly out of reach for poor black families.
While people are returning to New Orleans, my cousin said, the Ninth Ward and certain other areas are still a mess. Many are still homeless or underhoused and FEMA has not supplied promised trailers for residents, although they are quite a force taking over some buildings downtown for their operations. I asked my cousin whether it appeared FEMA was doing anything substantial. Not, he said, to his knowledge. He was utterly amazed when I told him that FEMA had had a man in the Dome Blackberrying to Brown about the deteriorating situation.
It was evident to him, though, that the powers-that-be want to turn the Ninth Ward into little more than a golf course. Roberta Brandes Gratz, in her article for Common Dreams, says much the same thing. However, its people want to rebuild a community, not just their homes:
Betty Lewis described it while checking out assorted family homes with the help of a cousin. Ms. Lewis’ mother, 12 aunts and uncles, and 19 of their children owned homes at one time on three contiguous blocks. She paused in front of one family bungalow, partially wrecked, and said, “You couldn’t get in trouble in this neighborhood without someone telling your mom. In front of whoever’s house you were at lunch time is where you went into eat.”
Durwin Hill, a carpenter and renovator, pulled loose the plywood he carefully covered his front door and windows with before evacuating. He peered inside and saw that the eight feet of water that immersed his simple brick house had ruined everything in sight, including the two attached rear apartments for his sons. “It was in worse shape when I bought it,” Mr. Hill said. “I fixed it once and I’ll do it again.”
Why? It’s home. He knows the policeman who just finished fixing up his home, catty-corner to Mr. Hill’s. He describes Mercedes’ Place, the corner neighborhood bar and restaurant with a simple white stucco façade and green scripted letters. He remembers the young white couple next door who moved here from Texas to teach in the neighborhood school but were laid off after recent budget cuts.
Beth Butler, the chief organizer for New Orleans-based ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the nation’s largest community organization of low and moderate income families, described how close-knit her Ninth Ward constituency is. Before the hurricanes one of ACORN’s bulk mailings was returned to her office and marked “undeliverable.” Ms. Butler asked the postal clerk to sit down with a Ninth Ward resident who knew everyone. Every last addressee was located. “Her mail goes to her mom around the corner,” the resident explained, “and that one is living with her sister.” She knew who had moved nearby or far. She located them all.
In an October 12 diary, Jordan Flaherty relates the problems evacuees still had to face and the racism and discrimination pervading the recovery effort:
Jenka Soderberg, an Indymedia reporter and volunteer at the Common Ground Collective reports from her experience at a New Orleans FEMA compound, “I went to the FEMA base camp for the city of New Orleans. It made me feel sick to my stomach. We walked around this absolutely surreal scene of hundreds of enormous air-conditioned tents, each one with the potential of housing 250 people — whole city blocks of trailers with hot showers, huge banks of laundry machines, portajohns lined up 50 at a time, a big recreation tent, air-conditioned, with a big-screen tv, all of it for contractors and FEMA workers, none of it for the people of New Orleans.”
Inside the FEMA camp, she was told by contractors, “the tents are pretty empty, not many people staying here.” However, “we don’t combine with the evacuees — we have our camp here, as workers, and they have their camps.”
They have their camps??
Soderberg comments, “[T]housands of New Orleans citizens could live there while they rebuilt and cleaned their homes in the city. But instead, due to the arrogance of a government bureaucracy that insists they are separate from the ‘evacuees’, and cannot possibly see themselves mixing with them and working side by side on the cleanup, these people are left homeless, like the poor man I talked to earlier in the day, living under a tarp with his mother buried under the mud of their house. Why can’t he live in their tents? It makes me so sad and mad to see so much desperate need, and then just blocks away to see this huge abundance of resources not being used. I have seen no FEMA center that is actually providing any aid for people — I have been to this main FEMA base camp and three others in New Orleans, and each of them have signs saying ‘No public services available at this site/Authorized personnel only'”
And with poor people out of the city, the developers and corporations are grabbing what they can – but there are no shoot-to-kill orders on these well-dressed looters. NPR and other media have portrayed developer Pres Kabacoff as a liberal visionary out to create a Paris on the Mississippi. The truth is that Kabacoff represents the worst of New Orleans’ local disaster profiteers. It is Kabacoff who, in 2001, famously demolished affordable housing in the St Thomas projects in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District and replaced it luxury condos and a Wal Mart. “New Orleans has never recovered from what Kabacoff did,” one housing activist told me. “It was a classic bait and switch. He told the city he was going to revitalize the area, and ended up changing the rules in the middle of the game and holding the city for ransom. He made a ton of money, the rich got more housing, and the poor got dispersed around the city.”
This year, Kabacoff has had his eyes on razing the Iberville housing projects, a site of low-income housing near the French Quarter. While Iberville residents were in their homes, they were able to fight Kabacoff’s plans, and held numerous protests. Now that they are gone, their homes (which were not flooded) are in serious danger from Kabacoff and other developers seeking to take advantage of this tragedy to “remake the city.”
Junior says that when it is feasible, he is going to move his aunt and family to the West Bank, even to Metairie to safer and higher ground. He says that he has had it with living in New Orleans proper.
