(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)
New York City received much attention after the attacks of September 11. There was an outpouring of support from around the country and the world as the nation’s biggest city struggled to regain its footing after the destruction of the Twin Towers. The problem now is that the day is often cited in a dishonest, politically exploitative manner by the Republican Party and Joe Lieberman. Nevertheless, the fact remains that people remember what happened here, for better or for worse.
The same cannot be said of New Orleans. A city that possesses a rich history and a glamorous nightlife was devastated by Hurricane Katrina nearly one year ago. Officially, more than 1,800 people died due to the incompetence of local, state, and federal officials. The few days that passed between the storm and the effort to help stop the flooding revealed a stunning disconnect between what was happening on the ground and the politicians who were supposed to ensure the safety of the residents of New Orleans and the surrounding areas.
Now, almost a year later, out of the public spotlight and out of most Americans’ minds, New Orleans is a city that is struggling for survival.
One has to wonder exactly what kind of help the people of New Orleans are getting these days…especially when you read that 90-year old women are having to be the ones to care for their homes:
They said she was too frail. That the mold growing on the warped walls of her flooded house would make her ill. That she shouldn’t bother since her mottled, mud-filled home would likely be bulldozed anyway. But Willie Lee Barnes, who recently turned 94, didn’t listen.
Standing outside her flooded house in the Louisiana sun, she clasped her rosary in her frail hands and prayed. “Lord,” she said, “I’m not asking that you climb the mountain for me. I’m only asking that you give me the strength to do it myself.”
Strapping on a dust mask, she grabbed a shovel and with all her force, began pounding the deformed walls of her living room until they came off, falling to the floor like the rinds of a desiccated orange. She filled buckets with the broken drywall, which her son ferried outside. Bucket by bucket and week after passing week, she kept at it, resting occasionally on a stool, the only piece of furniture in her house to survive the flooding. Flanked by a worn statue of the Virgin Mary, hers is now one of the few houses that’s been gutted in the city’s most destroyed neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward.
It’s a crime that there’s not enough federal or state support to help move along the cleanup of New Orleans faster. But it certainly doesn’t help when the infrastructure of the city is largely broken, leaving a city that is a shadow of its former self.
Those who choose to return do so in spite of the city’s broken infrastructure, which a year later remains in tatters: Nearly 60 percent of homes and business are still not receiving electricity or heating gas. Only three out of nine New Orleans hospitals have reopened. Only 56 of 128 public schools will enroll students this fall.
The city itself still has no master plan.
Those attempting to rebuild their homes have yet to be told how high they will have to raise them. And it’s still unclear if the city’s patched levees will hold back future floods.
One of the first things I learned in business school is the necessity for organization. Given that Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, has a background in business, one would think that having a master plan for the reconstruction of the city would be a top priority. Apparently, it doesn’t appear to be so. In a recent New York Times article, we see that Nagin shirks his leadership responsibilities as mayor:
Ever since a botched attempt to develop a comprehensive plan for New Orleans fell apart last winter, city and state officials have been straining to avoid the sticky racial and social questions that are central to any effort to rebuild and recover after Hurricane Katrina.
Their solution, hammered out in July, was to turn the planning process over to a local charity, the Greater New Orleans Foundation. On Aug. 1 the foundation opened a series of public meetings in which groups representing more than 70 neighborhoods would begin selecting the planners to help determine everything from where to place houses to the width of sidewalks.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin has referred to the process as “democracy in action.” And, superficially, it sounds like one of the most stirring grass-roots planning movements imaginable, one that would help preserve the rich heterogeneity that gives the city its vibrant urban character.
Yet this freewheeling approach has shifted attention from the critical and more daunting challenge of reimagining the city’s infrastructure, from levees to freeways to its ecological footprint. It is the failure of that infrastructure, after all, that exposed the inequities that have been eating away at New Orleans for decades.
“Democracy in action” sounds nice – and I’m all for local groups having input. The problem is that the multitude of groups that have input will be inclined to take a hard line on getting what they want without regard for the greater good of the city. The matter of race will always be an issue whenever a plan for rebuilding New Orleans is reconsidered – but to sweep it under the rug, instead of confronting it head-on, suggests an unwillingness to solve the problem. Consider the issue of public housing. Most of these residences were occupied by low-income, minority families. However, there is considerable controversy when it comes to the issue of rebuilding these areas after they have been demolished.
Recently, the federal government announced plans to demolish about two-thirds of the entire public housing inventory in New Orleans, about 5,000 units. The projects slated for razing are the St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, and B.W. Cooper and Lafitte developments. The plan is to turn these areas into mixed income developments. However, this plan is very controversial and has been attacked by a group called Justice for New Orleans, led by Loyola Professor Bill Quigley. The group has filed a class action lawsuit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, claiming that all of the units should not be torn down, but actually re-opened.
‘Mixed-income developments’ will probably serve to drive many of those who were displaced by New Orleans away from returning to the city. These are people who have been living in FEMA trailers and other cities. If they had the money to live in better housing than they had in New Orleans, it’s likely that they already would have. What people see, in effect, is an effort to replace New Orleans’ dominant African-American population with more white residents. The conclusion may or may not be correct, but it’s likely – and it’s not something that the black community would probably accept. It’s probably in the best interest for the housing units to be razed, but the type of rebuilding that will occur should be carefully addressed in order to account for the underlying social tensions. Yet Nagin and the city neglect to devise an overarching plan for getting the city back on its feet, leaving the federal government to make the decisions. Given the people who currently occupy the White House, that’s probably not the best idea. The Times article points out the possible outcome of a decentralized effort:
More to the point, the teams do not represent a cross-section of current architectural and planning debates. They create the illusion of choice where there is none, denying residents an opportunity to engage the full range of ideas that could spark a new vision for the future of New Orleans.
Worst of all, by planning ad hoc, the city is forfeiting a chance to consider how infrastructure could be used to bind communities — rich and poor, black and white — into a collective whole. It allows residents to retreat back into their old ways and ignore uncomfortable social truths.
Although this hurricane season is predicted to be less active than last year, there’s still the issue of planning for the next storm that could hit. Unlike terrorist incidents, which is unpredictable and will not definitively occur despite what the Republican Party may state, there is a much higher likelihood of another hurricane striking New Orleans. In issues of emergency procedures, one would prefer to have local authorities determine what is best – after all, they know the area the best. However, there are continuing conflicts between local officials and the heavy-handed federal government:
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has made it very clear that the river Center will house evacuees in future storms.
Chertoff threatened to take over the convention center during the next emergency if necessary to ensure it’s use as a shelter, said Mayor-President Kip Holden.
“We’re not going to ask you,” Holden said he was told when he protested. “You’re going to do what we tell you.”
[…]
The River Center housed up to 6,000 Katrina evacuees for several weeks last year.
There was little privacy in the big room. The limited restroom facilities quickly became overloaded. The influx of people and vehicles caused gridlock downtown and shut down nearby government activities.
I’m not sure why Michael Chertoff feels he has the know-how to determine what’s in the best interests of the people in Louisiana should another storm hit. The local officials didn’t do that great a job last year, given what happened at the Superdome during and after Katrina, but nevertheless, they still have a better feel for what’s going on. Chertoff, a New Jersey native who said no plan existed for the scenario that New Orleans faced after the hurricane, is hardly positioned to force others to institute a plan that did not exist before and is being formulated by Washington bureaucrats.
Another problem facing New Orleans is the growing issue of crime. The city, which already had high crime rates before Katrina, appears to be getting worse.
Just look at the numbers and that is all you need to know. According to Professor Peter Scharf who is an expert criminologist from the University of New Orleans, the city is “at approximately 49 or 50 homicides per month”.
Scharf points to a litany of factors which is causing the up spike of crime including a criminal justice that has come to a crawl and which Dr. Scharf says is successfully prosecuting slightly over one percent of its cases. He also states that a number of émigrés of the storm have returned and are engaged in an ever-spiraling drug trade.
The UNO Professor also points to a destabilized economy, slow processing of bond money, a fiscal crises which in his words is increasing the crime risks.
It’s hard to really estimate just exactly how many crimes are being committed, but there have been some multiple homicides this year. In addition, it’s clear that the legal system for prosecuting any wrongdoing is almost broken beyond repair:
One of those judges, Arthur L. Hunter, has threatened to begin releasing hundreds of defendants who have not had any access to lawyers back onto the streets as of Aug. 29, the date Katrina made landfall last year.
“If we are still part of the United States and if the Constitution still means something,” Judge Hunter wrote in an emergency order last month, “then why is the criminal justice system 11 months after Hurricane Katrina still in shambles?”
[…]
So far this year — even with a much-reduced population — there have been 83 murders, some of them high-profile multiple homicides. Since the storm, however, there has been only one murder trial, and that was for a pre-Katrina killing.
What does this all mean? Recently, the Brookings Institution released a report evaluating the state of New Orleans almost one year after Hurricane Katrina hit. While they do say that a ‘rebirth’ is occurring in the city, the summary of its findings paints a deeply sobering picture of the work that remains to be done.
Housing rehabilitation, and demolition, are well underway while the housing market tightens, raising rent and home prices. Across the most hard-hit parishes in the New Orleans area, the pace of demolitions has accelerated in the last six months while the
number of permits issued for rehab has nearly doubled in the city. Yet, housing is less affordable as rent prices in the region have increased by 39 percent over the year and home sale prices have spiked in suburban parishes.Across the city, public services and infrastructure remain thin and slow to rebound. Approximately half of all bus and streetcar routes are back up and running, while only 17 percent of buses are in use, a level of service that has not changed since January. Gas and electricity service is reaching only 41 and 60 percent of the pre-Katrina customer base, respectively.
The labor force in the New Orleans region is 30 percent smaller today than one year ago and has grown slowly over the last six months; meanwhile, the unemployment rate remains higher than pre-Katrina. The New Orleans metro area lost 190,000 workers
over the past year, with the health and education services industries suffering the largest percentage declines. In the past six months, the region has seen 3.4 percent more jobs but much of that may reflect the rise in new job seekers. The unemployment rate is now 7.2 percent, higher than last August.Since last August, over $100 billion in federal aid has been dedicated to serving families and communities impacted by hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. In the meantime, the number of displaced and unemployed workers remains high. To date, the federal government has approved approximately $107 billion in federal aid to the Gulf Coast states most impacted by the storms. Of these funds, nearly half has been dedicated to emergency and longer-term housing. In the meantime, an estimated 278,000 workers are still displaced by the storm, 23 percent of whom remain unemployed.
$107 billion has been spent in the Gulf Coast region. That’s almost one-third of what has been spent in Iraq. What has it gotten us? I’ll leave it to a first-hand recollection of a recent visit to New Orleans to describe a scene of immeasurable sadness.
New Orleans has the emptiness of a war zone. It goes on for miles. Like most cities around the country, prior to Katrina, New Orleans’s had an abundance of small businesses. The number of businesses lost is enormous, which is indicative of the number of jobs lost. I saw where strip mall after strip mall remain empty with blown out windows and doors.
What was most striking was the deadening silence of inactivity. Missing was the familiar summertime sounds of children at play. Of the 30 schools in New Orleans, only 8 will reopen this fall.
It is almost a year later, they are still uncovering bodies as they untangle some of the properties. I was told that some of the debris has been removed, several thousand abandoned cars towed, and the roof of the Superdome has been replaced. It was great to see volunteers that continue to come down to help. I saw a village of six houses being built by Habitat for Humanity. According to HUD, New Orleans will need about 120,000 homes to be built. Churches are still volunteering, but, there is so much to do.
Some New Orleaneans I talked with want to wait until the 2006 hurricane season is over. They will never trust the levees again. Most thought some rebuilding should have at least started by now. Billions have been committed, but very little has been done. Simple things are now difficult. Projects are being held up by the city’s inability to process permits due to the lack of people to perform the tasks.
Government at all levels failed a year ago, but it seems to have been easily forgotten by those in power. If we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, we are certain to make them again. So when you read the stories about the conflict in the Middle East, the civil war in Iraq, the tensions with Iran, or other problems with a global effect, it’s good to note what the U.S. can do better. After all, we are still the biggest player in foreign policy.
Don’t forget New Orleans, though. If we can’t take care of our citizens here, how can we be expected to remedy the wrongs of the rest of the world?
