Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Some in Congress were convinced the federal government was wasting taxpayer money rebuilding New Orleans. Others were disinclined to entrust so much money to a state where officials were known for enriching themselves and their friends. “Louisiana and New Orleans are the most corrupt governments in our country, and they always have been,” Senator Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, told a home-state newspaper in December (that was eighteen months before the wider world would hear, after his arrest at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport, about the “wide stance” he takes in a bathroom stall). As a preemptive measure, Blanco said, the state hired a pair of accounting firms to help watch for corruption. “We hired auditors to audit other auditors,” Blanco said.

  The approaching close to the congressional session added to the urgency felt by advocates for the Gulf Coast. The short attention span of the media was one worry, the roots people were putting down wherever they’d ended up another. “Forgotten Already” was the headline over the editorial the Times-Picayune ran on its front page in mid-November. A few days later, Bobby Jindal shared his frustrations in an interview with the New York Times. “Every day that passes, it will be a little harder to get things done,” said Jindal, who had been elected to Congress from the New Orleans suburbs two years after losing to Blanco for governor. Even Haley Barbour, despite his place at the front of any line, voiced his displeasure. “We are at a point where our recovery and renewal efforts are stalled because of inaction in Washington, DC,” Barbour told one of several congressional panels looking into the federal government’s response to Katrina. Another Republican Party stalwart, Bob Livingston, told the Los Angeles Times, “Here we are in month four of a terrible, terrible tragedy, and other than hotel rooms and meals ready to eat and some reconstruction, we haven’t gotten squat.” The former Republican congressman turned high-priced lobbyist added, “I’m ready to start a revolution.”

  The Corps’ early estimates put the price of a Category 5 storm protection system at $32 billion—eight times its annual budget. The Bush administration responded with $4 million for a study to put forward alternatives. That study would be due back to Congress by the end of 2007—more than two years later. The Baker bill, while popular among local officials, had critics on both the left and the right. On the left, people questioned a bill that proposed to provide 60 percent of the worth of a home when they saw the levee failures as 100 percent the federal government’s fault. On the right, they wondered why the federal taxpayer should be expected to pick up any of the bill when the government already funded a flood-insurance program.

  Congress recessed for the year without even considering the Baker bill. They would need to start over again in January. “We are about to lose New Orleans,” the New York Times began an editorial that ran in the Sunday paper in mid-December. “Whether it’s a conscious plan to let the city rot . . . or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die. . . . If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.”

  15

  A SMALLER, TALLER CITY

  Joe Canizaro was exhausted. “I’ve been overwhelmed fully,” he confided on New Year’s Day 2006. He had Curtis, his house manager, and also Sue Ellen, but who was there to help him run his businesses while he was preoccupied figuring out how much of the city they should rebuild? His bank, called First Bank and Trust, demanded the most attention. It had outposts in Biloxi and Gulfport, two of the Gulf Coast’s harder-hit towns, and it had losses on investments in New Orleans properties. Like Alden McDonald, Canizaro felt the pressures of the nervous regulators examining his books. “It’s a lot right now,” he confessed.

  Fatigue put Canizaro in an expansive mood on this first day of the new year. He expressed disappointment in decisions that had already been made and also in decisions that had been put off. Every expert said the same thing: the city couldn’t afford to rebuild every last neighborhood. He cited the Rand study showing no more than 60 percent of the city’s population returning at the three-year mark: “It doesn’t take a genius to figure if you’re missing forty percent of your original population, then there’s going to be shrinkage in the amount of land that’s going to be needed.”

  Yet Canizaro said he was unwilling to pass a death sentence on any part of the city. The racial implications would be too great. “Unfortunately, a lot of poor African Americans had everything they own destroyed here,” he said. “So we have to be careful about dictating what’s going to happen, especially me as a white man.” They would discourage people from moving back into areas that might well flood again, he said, but they wouldn’t forbid anyone from rebuilding.

  Canizaro had tried to elicit input from each of his fellow commissioners. Instead they seemed relieved that he, not they, would have to make the decision. “The commission really saw it as Joe’s job to come up with a plan for the neighborhoods,” Tulane’s Scott Cowen said. Yet Canizaro wasn’t going to reach a decision on his own. He and Ray Manning, the man chosen to serve as his cochair, had handpicked twenty-six people to serve on the commission’s Urban Planning committee, and another fifty-plus people were serving on various subcommittees (Historic Preservation, Zoning, Housing). Canizaro had also opened his checkbook to buy the services of a well-regarded planning firm based in Philadelphia.

  A realization came to Canizaro after the ULI left town. These outside experts were correct to categorize neighborhoods based on damage, but they had it upside down: people in the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods—the people who most needed help—should be the top priority. In the coming weeks, a plan took shape. Canizaro would recommend that the federal government give New Orleans money to hire teams of planners and other experts to help the residents of each flooded neighborhood decide whether to rebuild or relocate. “Let people see the pluses and minuses of moving back home,” Canizaro said. “With these planning teams, we’ll help people make an informed decision.” They debated whether to provide four months or a year to convince a critical mass of a neighborhood’s residents to move home. A buyout program along the lines of the Baker plan would be created to compensate communities who concluded they couldn’t make it work. “What’s important is we give people an opportunity to determine their own future,” Canizaro said.

  Canizaro felt anxious after laying out his plan in a phone conversation he had with Karl Rove between Christmas and New Year’s. “Karl left me realizing we needed to do a better job of packaging and selling the plan,” Canizaro said. Don’t say they were hiring these experts to help residents figure out which parts of the city needed to be reverted to swampland, Rove suggested. Instead, say they were there to help increase the odds of a community’s success for those residents who wanted to return. If nothing else, Canizaro’s talk with Rove helped him realize details still had to be worked out. That Saturday they were holding the final meeting of the Urban Planning committee so Canizaro would be ready to share his plan with others at Mel Lagarde’s house that Monday. On Wednesday, he would be presenting their recommendations to the public at a giant ballroom inside the Sheraton.

  THE URBAN PLANNING COMMITTEE met Saturday in Canizaro’s offices on the seventeenth floor of a brown marble tower on Poydras. The floors were a dark hardwood, the furniture antiques, the art on the wall expensive works dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Marble sculptures and priceless-looking urns were perched on pedestals along the hallways. Canizaro had asked some of his people to work that day to direct people to the big conference room in back, and to provide photocopying or other support.

  A nearly all-male, all-white group gathered around a large conference table for the 1:00 p.m. meeting. Of the twenty or so people seated around the table, two w
ere black and one was Indian-American. Curtis was there, dressed in a starched white shirt and black suit. He served people tea and coffee and other refreshments. Canizaro, short, with a square face, a strong jaw, and brown eyes, sat at the head of the table. He was dressed in a plaid sweater vest over a yellow dress shirt, chinos, and tasseled loafers.

  Canizaro opened by telling everyone about his conversation with Rove. “The goal here is to accentuate the positive.” He spoke in a clipped, authoritative manner that suggested a man accustomed to giving orders. The script they had worked out had Canizaro saying a few words of introduction at Wednesday’s meeting and then turning the program over to John Beckman of Wallace Roberts & Todd, the Philadelphia-based planning firm Canizaro had enlisted. Beckman, who was sitting near Canizaro at the front of the table, stood to talk. Beckman, thin, bespectacled, white, with unkempt hair, had decades of planning experience in New Orleans, including a hand in the city’s successful creation of its Warehouse District. Beckman began offering inspirational words about the task with which they had all been burdened, but Canizaro, irritated, cut him off: “Just get on with it.” Later, Canizaro reminded his fellow committee members that they all had a vote—except his vote counted a hundred times more than theirs. It was funny the way he said it, but the crack also left no doubt that they were just there to help the boss make up his mind.

  The group argued over words and images as Beckman walked them through a PowerPoint presentation. They were recommending that the city give every community four months to hammer out a plan. Canizaro wanted to describe the process as “efficient,” but someone suggested “equitable” as more “warm and fuzzy” and less “cold and calculating.” Those around the table generally agreed that the slide deck minimized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the city had to remake its park system. New Orleans had two spectacular signature parks in Audubon and City, but otherwise precious little greenspace. Words were added: “Now is the time many people want to sell property and so it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”

  Partway through Beckman’s dry run, an image flashed on the screen: an artist’s rendition of the Lower Ninth Ward, showing the kind of mixed-use developments (retail, housing, community space) they hoped would pop up over the flooded parts of New Orleans. As people around the table imagined it, parts of the Lower Ninth (and every other flooded community) would revert to marshland. Meanwhile, the glimpse of the community shown looked like a kind of New Urbanism pipe dream: two- and three-story, handsome brick buildings, a new light-rail stop, and storefronts along a tree-lined boulevard dense with happy shoppers. “Change it to ‘the historic’ Lower Ninth,” someone suggested. Early on, Canizaro had decided that they would use the Lower Ninth “to show that you can take one of the worst communities and show how it has a brilliant future.” In the end, though, the group convinced him it would be wiser not to single out any neighborhood.

  Beckman reached the end of his presentation, and Canizaro invited comments from people around the table. Pres Kabacoff was there, the developer whom Barbara Major mistrusted because he never mentioned how his altruistic projects would also make him money. Kabacoff had been all over the media talking about his idea for a “smaller, taller” city. Firms such as his would convert old factories into condominiums or hives for interesting businesses. Where they found empty lots or buildings that needed to be torn down, they would in-fill the commercial strips and other blighted spots with mixed-use developments and mixed-income developments that would let them take advantage of government programs. Kabacoff had dubbed his plan Operation Rebirth, but invariably he would bring up Paris when stating his goal of a New Orleans that offered visitors fifty to a hundred walkable blocks. “This working for you, Pres?” Canizaro asked several times during the afternoon. “You see anything here that gets in the way of your Paris thing?” Kabacoff, his gray hair in a small ponytail, would nod, indicating that all was good.

  Another Canizaro favorite around the table was Reed Kroloff, the dean of Tulane’s architecture school. Kroloff, who was white, had only been in New Orleans a year (and he would be gone eighteen months later when he moved to Michigan for a different posting). He spoke more frequently than anyone else except Canizaro and Beckman.

  One question was how blunt they should be in expressing their belief that some communities, or at least large parts of some communities, shouldn’t come back. “It depends on how much dancing around you want to do,” Kroloff advised. Canizaro said he thought they needed to say that not every community would be coming back. Kroloff met him with a smile and said, “We all saw ULI give a logical, reasonable, well-thought-out presentation of a very logical, well-thought-out plan. And we then all watched them run into a buzz saw.” Canizaro, they agreed, should say that there would be people “disappointed” at the outcome of the four-month planning process.

  During the four months communities were supposed to be coming up with a plan, should they impose a temporary moratorium on any development there? The committee agreed that communities, rather than imposing a ban, should “discourage” homeowners from rebuilding in the hardest-hit areas. They imagined two kinds of communities in the flooded zone: those able to draw a critical mass of people and those that couldn’t. But what was critical mass? Fifty percent of the people in a neighborhood giving a verbal commitment to rebuild? Seventy percent? “I’m one who likes to be definitive,” Canizaro said. “But that really sets you up as a target.” They would leave the phrase ambiguous. Another debate broke out over how much money they would request to fund the land bank the city would need to create in order to purchase properties in neighborhoods that decided to right-size themselves for the new New Orleans. “Twenty billion dollars?” someone asked. Canizaro declared that too big a number, but they never settled on a more palatable figure.

  People were getting testy. Participants vied to be heard. More than three hours into the meeting, someone mentioned the renters: nearly seventy thousand rentals had been ruined by Katrina, but their plan did not provide any help for tenants. At that, one person threw up his arms; another ostentatiously rolled her eyes. A suggestion that the committee go on record as demanding that the Baker bill provide people with 100 percent compensation for damaged properties rather than 60 percent evoked a similar reaction.

  Near 5:00 p.m., Reed Kroloff asked about building permits in the hardest-hit areas. It was one thing to discourage rather than forbid people from rebuilding during planning, but it seemed crazy to have the city sanction projects with permits. But Canizaro, who had several times mentioned the late hour, was out of time: “My wife’s going to kill me if I don’t get home.” He told Curtis to get the car and be ready for him downstairs. He and Sue Ellen had dinner plans.

  KROLOFF’S PERMIT QUESTION GNAWED at Canizaro all that night and through church the next morning. It was the first thing the sixty-four-year-old Canizaro mentioned after greeting an out-of-town reporter he had invited to lunch. Canizaro drove his late-model, silver Lexus to Andrea’s, a favorite restaurant in Metairie. His wife sat with him in the front seat, the church pastor and the reporter in the back. “We issue permits, we’re telling them it’s okay to rebuild when we’re still not sure,” Canizaro said. The restaurant was only a few minutes away but he was already laying out the dilemma. He confessed he hadn’t considered the question until Kroloff raised it—yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Lunch meant more unanswered questions. The federal government had yet to issue the flood-elevation maps that might require people to raise their homes. Would insurance carriers even issue policies in the flooded areas? What about the homeowners halfway through rebuilding when they learn their block is being reverted to open space? “It’s amazing to me, the issues I hadn’t thought of until now,” he said.

  THE FRONT-PAGE HEADLINE OF the Times-Picayune ensured a big crowd at the Sheraton that Wednesday: “FOUR MONTHS TO DECIDE.” Several subheadlines followed. In red ink, the paper declared, “Nagin Panel Says Hardest-Hit Areas Must Prove Viability
,” and below that, in bold lettering, “Full Buyouts Proposed for Those Forced to Move.” But people mostly remembered the large, four-color map of the city on the front page. An obscure graphic in the PowerPoint deck John Beckman had prepared (“I must have had two weeks of twenty-hour days,” he said) used dotted black circles to show that communities lacking in parks would benefit from additional greenspace. The circles were “large to indicate that we have not identified properties,” Beckman wrote. “Those will be determined with citizen involvement.” But that fine print didn’t make the newspaper. Instead, enormous green dots sat over New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward,I above a caption that read, “Approximate areas expected to become parks.” More than one thousand people had jammed a giant Sheraton ballroom by the time the fire marshals declared that they would not let any more people inside. Members of the City Council held a press conference elsewhere in the hotel to denounce the proposal before it had even been introduced.

  “This is a process,” Nagin said in his introductory remarks. “This is a journey.” The mayor, who, Canizaro said, had “signed off” on his plan at Mel Lagarde’s house on Monday, spoke as if this moment were a mere stop along the way. Lagarde also said a few words, but the day belonged to Canizaro, who looked resplendent in a dark suit and red tie. “It’s impossible to plan a city in three months, but we’ve tried,” Canizaro said. He introduced Beckman, who asked people to imagine a New Orleans with a lot more greenspace and also light-rail lines crisscrossing it. The plan would remake commercial corridors and stressed the need for a stronger storm-protection system and called for coastal restoration. “New Orleans will be a sustainable, environmentally safe, socially equitable community with a vibrant economy,” Beckman said. He reminded people that George Bush was scheduled to visit the city the next day. The president had asked New Orleans for a workable, realistic plan that he could fund. This plan, Beckman implied, was the city’s shot at forcing Bush to make good on his promises.