Sometimes it takes Fred Johnson, accompanied by New Orleans’ own Hot 8 Brass Band, to encapsulate exactly what one thinks about the snail slow pace of recovery post-Katrina, especially during this phony `lull’ before the Dems take office in January:

And it’s still straight bullshit.

Now that we’ve made some much-needed changes in Congress, what’s a more comprehensive plan for healing and renewal in New Orleans?

And where and how are the evacuees and the residents now, during this second winter after Katrina?

People are trickling back home, but it’s a daunting process.  Some wonder whether it’s worth it.

Those who are home are still fighting to stay home.  

Protests in front of Nagin’s house and mounting outcries from desperate citizens have forced Bush to reopen some public housing units ‘temporarily’ that were originally slated for demolition.

It also follows meetings between HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., incoming chairwoman of a key House subcommittee with jurisdiction over housing issues. In those meetings, Jackson said he would consider reopening more storm-damaged units to low-income people forced from their homes 16 months ago. Many have lived in Texas and elsewhere since the storm, unable to return.

I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it’s a new day in Congress, but the pressure has to be kept up.

I know about my own family members.

My 75-year-old stepdad and his wife have an appointment in New Orleans later this week with representatives from
The Road Home Program, which is to assist New Orleans homeowners in rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.  My dad is living in Dallas with his daughter, her husband and her two kids, while his wife `holds the fort,’ as it were, back in what is left of the Crescent City.  They want to fix up the house where he grew up in Central City (and where as a young man, he lived upstairs with his drum kit in the converted attic), and later, rent it out for income.

When I heard my dad talk about the program, of course, I was excited for him.  It sounded too good to be true.  So I did some research online between book chapters.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson today (May 30, 2006) announced he is approving a $4.6 billion plan proposed by the State of Louisiana to create The Road Home Program. Louisiana intends to use funding provided through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program to offer up to $150,000 to certain eligible homeowners whose primary residences were destroyed or severely damaged following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Jackson made today’s announcement during a news conference with Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

So far so good, right?  

Only on paper.

The firm ICF Emergency Management Services was contracted to administer the program in June.  By the time the holiday season began to hit its stride, however,
the pace of grant awards on top of the jaw-dropping meagerness of the payouts began to make headlines in the Times-Picayune.:

While more than 90,000 homeowners have applied for a Road Home grant in the past four months, as of last Thursday just 94 families had received money.  ICF has until July (2007) to complete the awards process.

Tempers reached full boil on Dec. 15, when the state House of Representatives voted 97-1 to approve a resolution demanding that Gov. Kathleen Blanco cancel ICF’s three-year, $756 million contract. Lawmakers repeatedly questioned the company’s competence, while the bill’s sponsor, Rep. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, called ICF’s performance “morally reprehensible.”

 

(Morrell, as some of you may recall, also appeared with his wife, a New Orleans city councilwoman, in Spike Lee’s documentary,
When the Levees Broke; more about the film later.)

ICF seems to be just another confidence game set up to disappoint and bamboozle New Orleans residents.  (And what could they have expected from the likes of Alphonso Jackson in the first place, who’s just–like a low level Nazi–following orders?)  No, it’s not just a black thing here in New Orleans.  The middle class, the elderly, the homeowners, the public housing dwellers –most residents who applied for grants were in revolt.

Saul and Mildred Rubin were seeking hope for the future from the state’s Road Home program, a grant that would compensate them for the loss of their Lakeview home, which flooded when the federally built levees collapsed during Hurricane Katrina.
But the Road Home program didn’t deliver hope to the Rubins.  Instead, the elderly couple — both in their 90s — got a kick in the face: a paltry $550 award offer for a home that represented most of their savings.

ICF, while getting “72 percent of its consulting work in recent years from federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Housing and Urban Development” had never taken on anything as full of twists and turns as a state’s recovery from the effects of not one, but two hurricanes, and within a specific, if not rapid, length of time.  It tended to hire subcontractors to accomplish its goals (some fairly good in certain areas, and some, unfortunately, not so good).

Blanco hasn’t moved yet to implement the Morrell bill, preferring to pressure the firm into hiring more people and demanding that it comes up to speed.  But her self-preserving standoffishness and histrionics has gotten her into trouble once more with her constituents, because ICF’s contract is already nearly half over.

To give you a clue about how unpopular Kathleen Babineaux Blanco truly is,
Newsday columnist Les Payne reported that at an auction for hurricane relief, lunch with the beleaguered governor went for a drop in the bucket:

Dinner with her was the last item on the docket, and bidding reportedly opened at $1,000. It was sweated down to $500, with hopes of recovery. Finally, Malcolm Maddox, bent perhaps on rescue if not on a bargain, bid $1. The regional chairman for Capital One was declared the winner for one smacker. The embarrassment has loosed a gale of apologies from Monroe business leaders. Dinner with the Louisiana governor goes for the price of a praline. Chamber of Commerce president Sue Edmunds offered, “It’s something we deeply regret.” I, myself, did not.

Indubitably,

[…] the contract has been very good for ICF.  After the company went public, it distributed $2.7 million in one-time bonuses to 30 of its top managers. Byrne said he was not one of the recipients, but he declined to reveal his salary or say what any other executives in charge of the Road Home contract are making.

“It is private information and we won’t disclose that,” ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the employees.”

Yeah, right.

“They wouldn’t dare offer me something like that,” my dad growled over the phone, when I told him how little the elderly couple was offered. “They wouldn’t dare, dragging me back there to take that little bit of money.”

I fell silent.  I didn’t want to upset the old man, beyond asking him to check to see whether he still had an appointment.  But you couldn’t put it past bureaucracy to pull a dirty trick like that.   They sure as hell would dare.  They’re that cruel these days.

Of course, red state Mississippi was given a lot more moolah and assistance than blue state Louisiana.

While Louisiana is expected to get $74.5 million for a single project, Mississippi is expected to receive $280.8 million for two projects, according to an advisory distributed Thursday to members of Congress. FEMA officials declined to comment, promising to explain the program and awards at the news conference today (December 22).

Well done, Trent Lott.

In another development, Louisiana wildlife, thrown off kilter by Katrina, have been converging on the city, including `gators, `possums, rats, raccoons, nutria, armadillos, foxes, and even coyotes and poisonous insects.  In other words, animals you’d only find in the deep bayous and forests have been setting up residence in metropolitan and suburban New Orleans’ empty and crumbling buildings, air conditioning units, and swimming pools–and near garbage and debris that hasn’t yet been cleared or picked up.

“In 20 years of trapping animals here, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Greg duTreil, who is licensed by the state Wildlife and Fisheries Department to remove nuisance wildlife in the metropolitan area. “I’m getting calls night and day.”
[…]
In suburban Kenner, 82-year-old Cherry Robinson found snakes in her back yard, while in another part of town a man found deadly brown widow spiders – an equally venomous cousin of the black widow – in his yard.

Crime?  Well, as David Byrne once sang, same as it ever was AND worse in certain respects, even with fewer people.  Amazing, isn’t it?  The bountifully less charitable were praising the Almighty that He finally cleansed the city of the so-called lawless and chronically poor out of the housing projects.  But as one of the witnesses in Spike’s film pointed out, why did they think that crime would dwindle once the project class was gone from the city?

And what and who is left?  Untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) victims, with the mentally-unhinged and sporadically-homeless, and the overcrowded seem to be acting out just as much as the gangbangers, muggers, and drug dealers.  Anne Rochell Konigsmark, in a December 8 USA Today article reported that,

It’s been a violent autumn around the Spotted Cat, a pleasantly divey jazz club in the Marigny neighborhood.  […P]olice reported the discovery of a dismembered and cooked body believed to be that of Adriane “Addie” Hall, a former club employee. A suicide note penned by her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Zachary Bowen, before he jumped from a hotel roof, led police to the remains — in the refrigerator, the oven and on the stove in Hall’s apartment above a voodoo shop.
[…]
Not only is crime in new locations, [N.O. Police Superintendent] Riley says, there are new perpetrators. “Some of these shootings, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t have been shootings,” he says. He cites the Nov. 5 shooting deaths of a 47-year-old man and a 53-year-old woman, found in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer. The suspect, who was the woman’s husband, had recently sought psychiatric help, Riley says. His doctor was unable to find a bed for him, he says. With the city’s large public hospital shut down since the storm, beds for mentally ill patients have been scarce. “People’s lives have been turned upside down,” Riley says. “They are stressed, frustrated and anxious, he says. And, “they have nowhere to turn.”

While you can’t discount that the dark spirits may indeed have been at work below in the voodoo shop, many times it’s the darkness within individuals that finds no peace.

And speaking of the overcrowded, even FEMA trailer residents are being tossed out of their temporary homes without warning.  Wynaen Walker, living in a trailer in Baker, Louisiana, lost all of her belongings, including a $1,200 ring, when she was locked out.  Another family was unaccountably assigned to her trailer.  Evacuees maintain that these incidents occur more often than not, because there aren’t enough trailers or apartments.  A judge ruled last month that FEMA’s inconsistencies about providing permanent housing amounted to a denial of due process.  “Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court […] ordered FEMA to clarify the eligibility requirements and “immediately restore” many families to the program.”  Once again, as usual FEMA sidestepped and footdragged, and appealed the order.

New Orleans is two steps forward one day, and sometimes three steps back the next week.  This destructive cha-cha-cha is informed by the draining of our country’s blood and treasure–treasure that could rebuild the city and its infrastructure–especially the levees–is still being spilled out in the sandbox.  Mother Audrey Mason (older black women are sometimes addressed as mother for their spiritual or community work among blacks), exiled in New York, says as much in an eloquent challenge to former first lady Barbara Bush in the third DVD containing extended interviews with Al Sharpton, Sean Penn, Douglas Brinkley, and Gralen Banks and Fred Johnson of the Black Men of Labor social aid and pleasure organization.

I sent copies of the film to my mother and stepdad on Amazon; I plan to enrich Spike and HBO further by gifting it to my uncle and aunts in California and close friends in the near future.  

I don’t doubt that Spike is going to get another Oscar nomination, this time for this documentary.  As many times as I have seen it, first on HBO and now having my own copy, that it is not as ‘disorganized’ as critics are wont to say about it.  It definitely has an order, if not a focus on each aspect of the disaster that Spike wanted to address:  The approach and onset of Katrina; the levees begin to give way and New Orleanians try to find higher ground, the citizenry are flung into an American diaspora, and finally how will they ever return and rebuild.

This is a powerful testament.

My uncle was telling me a couple of months back how with Katrina, we have all come full circle.  My 78-year-old uncle’s recollections, therefore, are not about the famous 1927 Mississippi Flood (“They’re trying to wash us away/They’re trying to wash us away”), but of a disaster his grandfather passed onto him that occurred in the nineteen-tens in which hundreds drowned, or ran for higher ground, and houses floated away.  Well, a hundred years ago, we did not have the benefit of the New Deal.  Now that our country needs to renew that benefit, if not that promise of better times, we may not have the money, if not the will or the leadership, to make those levees as strong and armored as those in The Netherlands.  

Two steps forward, one step back.

It’s going to take some time, but I hope that it won’t be too late.