Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  At a press conference a few days after his Mexican workers comment, Nagin said, “Now is the time for us to think out of the box”—and Sally Forman flinched. He had been thinking about the gambling industry, he told the assembled reporters, and all those billions they had to invest. Why not create a casino district in the center of the city? He hoped to enlist the governor’s support, he said, perhaps unaware that Blanco had campaigned on a moratorium on new casinos. “We’re a cash-strapped city,” Nagin said. “I know of no other way.”

  The casino proposal seemed to perturb the Uptown establishment as much because the mayor had failed to vet his proposal with them as because of the idea itself. As director of the city’s zoo and aquarium, Ron Forman was a key member of the city’s hospitality industry, yet he hadn’t heard a thing about a proposal to build as many as six casinos in the center of town until Nagin floated the idea at the press conference. “It came from nowhere—and then the next week it was gone,” Forman said. Another Nagin story that had Uptown talking was Nagin’s trip to the capitol and the tongue-lashing he took from the city’s black legislators. After the meeting, Nagin was spotted slumped against a wall, half sitting, half standing. “I did not sign up for this shit,” the mayor cried out. “I did not sign up for this shit!”

  Maybe it was just as well that the mayor was out of town when the Urban Land Institute’s all-star team of planners, architects, academics, ex-politicians, and others convened in New Orleans that November. Greg Meffert, who prior to taking a job at City Hall had founded a pair of encryption-technology start-ups, had rented a place with his wife in Jamaica. Why not join us? Meffert asked Nagin. To further entice the mayor, Meffert made sure free first-class airplane tickets for Nagin, his wife, and his three children were part of the deal. Feeling he needed another break, Nagin told Meffert yes. He would be back in town by week’s end, when the press would show up at the Sheraton to hear what the ULI had to say. When anyone asked, the mayor’s people said their boss was in Washington on city business.

  OF COURSE JOE CANIZARO was in town that week. He was glad that with his adopted city in crisis he was in the position to offer them this gift. “We need to hear how other people dealt with tragedies of this magnitude,” Canizaro said. “We need the best minds in this nation on this.”

  Canizaro was back in his office on Poydras. By mid-October, he and Sue Ellen were living again in Old Metairie. The bottom floor of their house had been gutted, but generators had been trucked in so they had power. They limited themselves to the second floor, where Curtis, their houseman, had set up a microwave and a refrigerator for them. But a bad odor lingered in the house and Canizaro started to feel wobbly and run-down. The longer they stayed, the more convinced Canizaro became that the mold was making him sick. They lasted maybe two weeks at the old place before Canizaro moved them into a house he found nearby for $850,000.II That would serve as their base of operation for the next couple of years as they oversaw reconstruction. No one, of course, was suggesting that parts of Old Metairie revert to greenspace.

  Jimmy Reiss wouldn’t have to find alternative housing for himself. He was back in Audubon Place less than two weeks after Katrina. Bring New Orleans Back cochair Mel Lagarde also slept in his own bed every night. Indeed, his home on St. Charles would serve as the commission’s unofficial offices. “We were meeting at Mel’s house almost every day,” said Margaret Beer, hired to serve as the commission’s communications person. It was mainly black members of the mayor’s panel who needed to make do in temporary digs. Alden McDonald was living in Baton Rouge when he wasn’t sleeping in his RV, and Entergy’s Dan Packer, whose house had taken on eight feet of water, was living and working out of the Hyatt. Oliver Thomas was living at the Sheraton with several other members of the City Council rendered homeless by Katrina.

  Barbara Major, the panel’s other cochair, had gotten seven feet of water in the ranch-style home she owned in New Orleans East. Using her home even as a temporary base while in town wasn’t an option. She also had her fourteen-year-old son and his schooling to consider. She was in Houston because she had a brother there. He had found her a house in a good school district that was big enough to accommodate her older son and his family, along with assorted in-laws and nieces and nephews needing a place to stay. “I tell folk I was a rich white woman for a year,” Major said. “It was a gated community so rich the guards at the front gate wore gloves.”

  At first, Major made the weekly five-hour drive to New Orleans for the Monday meetings. But this woman chosen to represent the average New Orleanian was as financially stressed and overwhelmed as her constituents. She was perched in a strange city and spending most of her time, or so it seemed, either on the phone with an insurance company or waiting in one line or another for assistance. She wore donated clothes picked up at a giveaway arranged for Katrina survivors and was thankful for the $500 check she received from the Red Cross. FEMA was picking up the rent, but she and her family still had food and other expenses when none of them had paying jobs. Major’s insurance company sent her a check for $2,500 for the loss of the use of her home. They sent another $25,000 to cover the contents of her house. “That’s what we lived on for a long time,” Major said. For a time, they were on food stamps.

  Every trip to New Orleans took another bite out of the insurance check. She footed the bill every time she filled up with gas and the wear and tear on her truck. There’d also be the cost of a hotel room if she wasn’t up to making the ten-hour round-trip in a single day. “No one gave me a free room when I came to New Orleans for the commission meetings,” Major said. “No one was buying my meals. Folks don’t believe me, but I never got no money from anybody over that.” She was the mayor’s single nod to the activist set, but she also declared that she didn’t have the time or money to spend a week in New Orleans listening to the ULI’s planners and architects. Instead she would show up on the last day of the ULI’s visit to hear what they had to say. At that point, Major said, “I was seeing my job as stopping bad things from happening.”

  THE URBAN LAND INSTITUTE took over the Sheraton the week before Thanksgiving. The fifty or so panelists the ULI had flown to New Orleans were encouraged to take a half-day tour of the city to see the damage for themselves. ULI organizers set up interviews with three hundred people described as “business owners, decision makers, community activists, and citizens.” Yet the organization’s final report had the city flooding on Tuesday, August 30, rather than early Monday morning—as if the deluge had not happened until they saw the pictures on CNN.

  The panel ULI assembled to help New Orleans were polite guests. They said all the right things about the city and its culture to the 250 people who showed up at the Sheraton on a Friday in mid-November 2005 to hear the group’s initial assessment. (A more formal seventy-one-page report was submitted one month later.) The city was a “national treasure” in the words of one panelist; New Orleans was an “international treasure” to another. There were paeans to the city’s people, its spirit, its resilience, and its neighborhoods.

  Yet the ULI’s message was harsh. New Orleans was doomed, panelist after panelist said, if it didn’t overcome a political environment that several described as “dysfunctional.” The panel chairman, Smedes York, himself a former mayor, chided city leaders for their lack of urgency. “Put aside your bickering,” said another elected official. Several also brought up the city’s notorious reputation for politicians on the take. The city should create an independent oversight board to control the city’s finances for five years, the panel suggested, so outsiders were less hesitant about giving New Orleans billions in bailout money. Coastal restoration needed to be a priority. They also told the city to adopt a living-wage ordinance if people were serious about lifting up its poorest citizens.

  Yet few in the audience that day seemed interested in what the ULI might have to say beyond the future of the lowest-lying neighborhoods. “There are areas of the city we’re recommending not be rebuilt just now,” Sme
des York said early in the presentation. The room shifted. York and his colleagues named three categories of neighborhoods, ranging from the most damaged to the least. They recommended that, in the short run, the city only invest in neighborhoods in the least-damaged category. That way the city could revive its crippled economy and start rebuilding its tax base. The head of the ULI went one step further when she suggested that the city forbid individuals from rebuilding in the most damaged areas. The ULI imagined fingers of restored marshland in each low-lying neighborhood for better storm-water management. Greenspace in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods should be mapped out before people were allowed to rebuild. Those owning property in areas to be reverted to a natural wetland needed to be compensated, they stressed, and also offered first dibs on homes of those choosing not to return.

  The ULI didn’t go so far as to draw up the maps themselves. It suggested that the city stage planning meetings in the affected areas. Provide residents with the same topography maps the ULI had been given, the panelists predicted, and they, too, would see the wisdom of giving the city thousands of acres in additional parkland, along with bike trails and natural wetlands inside the city’s limits. The panelists didn’t single out any neighborhoods that would need to shrink, but they didn’t have to. An elevation map of New Orleans was flashed on a screen partway through the presentation. Areas that were at least two feet below sea level according to the US Geological Survey were depicted in red. Veins of red appeared in the Lower Ninth Ward and other parts of the city, but the communities of Lakeview, Gentilly, and New Orleans East looked like bloody masses.

  Joe Canizaro smiled after the ULI’s presentation. There would be no more dodging of the tough issues after today, he said. “This should get us talking frankly about some of the stuff we need to deal with, particularly extremely low-lying areas and areas where we have a low-income black population,” Canizaro said. But he worried in private. His hope in those first weeks after Katrina was that a shared fate would unite a city split between black and white. But his expert panel had convinced him that was a fantasy. “The ULI told us that the number one determinant for how a city recovers is its history,” Canizaro said. “If in fact a city was divided and not really working together, and not doing well economically, then it would take a whole lot longer to recover than if everyone was pulling together in the same direction.” Katrina didn’t mean a do-over for a city that had too many problems prior to the storm. Instead, the ULI said, history was destiny: the hurricane and the flood that followed would only amplify New Orleans’s problems.

  “POTENTIAL FOR MASS BUYOUTS” read the front-page headine in the next day’s Times-Picayune. The City Council’s “two Cynthias”—Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who between them represented New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth—slammed the ULI’s “proposal to eliminate our neighborhoods from New Orleans.” Exiting the ballroom after the ULI’s presentation, Willard-Lewis told reporters that she and her neighbors were “not going to allow themselves to be shoved into the back of the bus.” A few weeks later, the council approved a resolution requiring the city to invest in every part of New Orleans and not stagger its commitments based on damage assessments.

  Cassandra Wall and her sisters viewed the ULI’s recommendations as perversely cruel. Uptown and the Quarter and the central business district had survived Katrina largely intact, yet that’s where the city should focus its efforts and resources? Terrel Broussard, an attorney with a downtown firm who owned in the East, had volunteered to monitor the mayor’s panel for their organization, Eastern New Orleans United and Whole. At the next Monday meeting, Broussard spoke with scorn about the so-called experts. “Seven days,” he said. “Seven days to pass a verdict on a lifetime of work. We deserve better.”

  The reaction was the same in flooded neighborhoods across the city, black or white. “The ULI is what really got us religion,” said Al Petrie, a member of the board of Lakeview Civic. Petrie and others had been talking regularly by phone, but after the ULI passed its verdict, Freddy Yoder decided they needed to reach out to every connection they had. He invited all the former presidents of Lakeview Civic to a meeting at his offices in Harahan, right outside New Orleans. That included Martin Landrieu, son of Moon Landrieu and brother to both a US senator and Louisiana’s lieutenant governor. “They wanted a war, we’d be ready for one,” Yoder said.

  “IT WOULD KILL THE black psyche if New Orleans East isn’t rebuilt,” Cassandra’s sister Petie Wall said at a Baton Rouge Applebee’s after one Monday-night meeting. “Think of what it would mean if the city successfully chased off so many African Americans who had money, its doctors and successful businesspeople and lawyers and such. People would no longer feel they had a chance.” A sociology professor at Brown University released a study showing that the ULI was talking about land that housed 80 percent of the city’s black population. Lakeview could trace its roots back to the 1910s. People in every affected community, black or white, rich or poor, spoke about the property rights they were supposed to enjoy as American citizens.

  Yet what if the experts were right? What if the right thing to do for the Wall sisters and the people of Lakeview was to insist they live someplace safer and more practical? The Urban Land Institute had warned against what its experts labeled the “jack-o’-lantern” effect—partially occupied blocks that looked like the broken teeth of a carved pumpkin, littered with boarded-up homes and empty lots—and also spoke of the importance of geographically right-sizing the city so people weren’t so spread out. As their experts saw it, a lot of people weren’t moving back, and fewer people meant less tax revenue and therefore less money to spend on everything from police and fire to street repairs.

  Geographers didn’t seem to have any trouble reaching a consensus. Craig Colton, who taught geography at LSU, heard from colleagues around the country in the weeks after Katrina. To them the only question was whether 20 percent of the city’s landmass should revert to wetlands or 40 percent.

  “I don’t know exactly where I would draw the line, but I assume that’s what the city is trying to figure out right now,” Colton said shortly after the ULI left town. Roughly half the city sat below sea level, Colton said, but that’s not to say he would decree half the city out of bounds. A community sitting a few feet below sea level might be deemed an “intermediate zone,” where people would be permitted to rebuild—so long as homes were jacked up high enough. “The city needs to choose some level below sea level and declare it economically unfeasible to build in areas that are at that elevation or lower,” he said.

  Bruce Sharky is a professor of landscape architecture at LSU. He, too, thought it would be irresponsible to rebuild all of New Orleans. A couple of months after Katrina, he ran into an acquaintance who told him he was already working on his home in Lakeview. Sharky knew he was supposed to praise the man’s pioneer spirit, yet he viewed his colleague as selfish. “The government is going to spend, what, one hundred billion dollars or more to rebuild New Orleans—and for what?” Sharky asked. “If we don’t do things differently, it can happen again next year.”

  Michael Liffmann was also affiliated with LSU. He was an economist working for a university-based program that promoted smarter stewardship of the state’s coastal wetlands. He had lived in New Orleans East in the early 1970s. “There are parts of New Orleans that are not fit for human habitation,” Liffmann declared. “They never were and never will be.” The best use of the commission’s time, he argued, would be to devise formulas for compensating homeowners unlucky enough to own a stretch of the city that would be returned to its natural state.

  Some thought such ideas were a fool’s errand in a town where most long-range planning meant deciding what to do that weekend. “There are only two things people around here plan for in an entire year, and that is what costume they’re going to wear on Mardi Gras and which Friday they’re taking off work to go to Jazz Fest,” Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose wrote that fall. “The
rest just happens.”

  Yet Liffmann was confident that those in charge would force people to move “in the name of safety.” As he saw it, the problem was one of timing. The city needed to settle some fundamental questions even as it was only partially through what might be called the Five Stages of New Orleans. Rather than grieving an individual, the city was collectively going through more or less the same phases Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had identified for a person who loses a loved one. Liffmann put New Orleans somewhere between denial and anger at around the time the ULI was in town, and somewhere between bargaining and depression in the final weeks of 2005.

  * * *

  I. Truman Capote described the Pontalba buildings as the “oldest, in some ways most somberly elegant, apartment houses in America.” They would be declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974.

  II. After selling the place several years later, he joked, “I lost a couple of hundred thousand dollars on it, but I kept a wife.”

  13

  ISLE OF DENIAL

  Cassandra Wall and her sisters were still camped out at the Microtel in Baton Rouge. Various nieces and nephews migrated there, along with cousins and assorted significant others. Cassandra said, “We basically had our own floor” within a few weeks. Among them, they had four dogs and two cats.