by Gary Rivlin
“I went straight to one of them that I knew, he was one of my neighbors,” Rahim said, “and asked him, ‘Man, what’s going on? What you carrying all these guns for?’ He tells me, ‘We’re protecting the neighborhood.’ And this other guy walks over and says, ‘You don’t owe this nigger no explanation.’ ” Hearing a commotion, an older white woman opened her door, a moment that Rahim is convinced spared his life. The white men came looking for him a few hours later, Rahim said, but by that time he had picked up what he described as “reinforcements” and the men left. That week, Rahim said, he came across the bodies of several black men who had been shot, including one around the corner from his home.II A Danish filmmaker in Algiers working on a documentary he called Welcome to New Orleans interviewed a group of armed whites at a popular Algiers Point bar a week after Katrina. “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota—if it moved, you shot it!” one crowed.
Rahim still had family in Gretna—older relatives who might need his help had they been unable to evacuate ahead of the storm. But that meant getting past the checkpoints the police had set up at the Algiers-Gretna border. Every street was barricaded, Rahim said; because they didn’t have enough police cruisers, they used fire engines and garbage trucks. “They had police on dirt bikes and in their cars, riding up and down, making sure no blacks were going over into Gretna,” Rahim said. Ultimately he would gain entry using Rasmus Holm, the Danish filmmaker working on his documentary. “He opens his mouth, you know this dude isn’t from anywhere near here,” Rahim said. “But Rasmus says he’s hired me to work on his house and they let us through.”
While he was in California, Rahim had gotten to know Mary Ratcliff, the editor of a small, black newspaper called the San Francisco Bay View. Three days after Katrina, Ratcliff called Rahim. She didn’t figure she’d reach anyone living in the city’s 504 area code, but Rahim answered. The words gushed out as Ratcliff typed. “This is criminal,” he began. “Gangs of white vigilantes riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed.” He was angry that tens of thousands of people were still trapped in New Orleans. They had working water and sewer systems on his side of the river, Rahim said. The West Bank had remained dry. “Our parks and schools could easily hold forty thousand people, and they’re not using any of it. People are dying.” Rahim closed with an appeal for supplies, donations, and volunteers.
In 2005, there was no Twitter, and Facebook was still mainly a plaything of the college set. The term social media was only spoken inside the bubble of Silicon Valley. Mary Ratcliff included Rahim’s address and phone number in the article she posted on Bay View’s website and in an e-mail she blasted to a wide circle of contacts. Within the week, Rahim was a guest on Democracy Now!—a popular left-leaning news program carried by hundreds of cable stations around the country. “The volunteers started coming,” Rahim said, “and I kept finding them things to do.” People claimed any bit of floor space they could find to put down a sleeping bag in the three-bedroom home Rahim had inherited from his mother. Dozens camped outside—in his backyard, on the front lawn, and on his front and back porches. “I had seventy people scattered around the property,” he said, “and just about every one of them white.” Another forty stayed in the donated tents they set up next door. Ultimately, somewhere around twenty-five thousand volunteers arrived to help in the two years Rahim was running Common Ground—or thirty thousand if you include those who came after he was pushed out of the organization he had formed.
Several of the first volunteers to show up at Rahim’s door were community-health people with a van filled with medical supplies. Rahim set them up in the abandoned storefront mosque down the street. They spray-painted FIRST AID on the door, and ten days after Katrina, they were helping diabetics requiring insulin, victims needing a wound dressed, and the like. Eventually, the clinic found a more permanent home in a corner storefront painted blue and pink. “The little clinic that could,” the New York Times declared two years after Katrina—an oasis in a “shattered health care system.”III
Other volunteer efforts popped up in the months after Katrina. The Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund was founded by a group of black locals. They were fighting the demolitions in the Ninth Ward, as well as organizing protests to demand that public housing be reopened. ACORN was a presence in the Lower Ninth, and many people were coming to New Orleans as part of a church group or some other civic affiliation. Reportedly, more than ten thousand college kids came to help gut homes and businesses that spring break. Becky Zaheri, a lifelong New Orleanian and stay-at-home mom prior to the storm, created Katrina Krewe, which drew hundreds of volunteers twice a week to a trash-strewn neighborhood. Habitat for Humanity made a multimillion-dollar commitment to work on housing for displaced musicians. The big, established charities such as the Salvation Army and the Red Cross came under criticism in the weeks after Katrina. The Red Cross’s white, older volunteers, residents claimed, largely ignored the black community. Though the agency drew around 60 percent of the $3.6 billion people donated to the hurricane-relief effort in the first six months after the storm, it was accused of doing far less than half the work of tending to storm victims.
Yet no group matched Common Ground and the breadth of services it offered. People were concerned about the poisons the floodwaters left behind, so Common Ground started a toxins-testing service and gave away red worms and plants that help leach harmful chemicals from the soil. The group created a pest-control unit and launched a pirate radio station dubbed Radio Algiers (“reporting from the West Bank of occupied New Orleans”). They established a free legal clinic and a women’s shelter. The exploitation of immigrant workers became a concern so the collective recruited lawyers for those brave enough to file a complaint. In the Lower Ninth, a Rahim lieutenant declared, their goal was nothing short of at least one restored home on every block to thwart developers looking for undeveloped tracts of land.
The Common Ground workers were easy to identify in post-Katrina New Orleans: swarms of whites, sometimes dressed in masks and gloves if not moon suits, gutting a home in a mostly black neighborhood. An inordinate number of these volunteers had dreadlocked beards, face piercings, and/or tattoos. The core group helping Rahim run the collective were leftist activists, at least a few of whom described themselves as “revolutionaries.”
Rahim was initially worried how his flocks of white volunteers would be received inside the black community, but they were embraced wherever they showed up. “I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I didn’t see it myself,” Rahim said. He mentioned a young white man he called Jimmy Mac who lived with him for several months. Somehow, Jimmy had gotten his hands on a Penske truck, which he would drive to Mississippi every day. He’d fill it with food and medical supplies and drive back to New Orleans. “He’s doing all this at his own expense,” Rahim said. “No one’s paying his gas, we’re not paying the charges on the truck. We’d just give him a list of places around town that needed supplies, and he’d go into the African-American communities and pass out whatever he managed to pick up.” Those places included the Fischer housing projects on the West Bank, which had remained dry. “Fischer is one of the toughest places in town,” Rahim said. “But no one would think of touching Jimmy Mac. He’d go through and it was like he walked on water.”
Common Ground didn’t limit itself to the Ninth Ward. Ultimately, the collective had people working in nineteen parishes around Louisiana. They’d set up outposts, too, along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi and Alabama. Bruce Springsteen donated $100,000 to the cause and Dave Chappelle $150,000. Michael Moore gave $120,000 and paid Rahim’s cell phone bill.
“My own version is that New Orleans was on the verge of a race war back then,” Rahim said. “What stopped it was the fact that we had young white kids that came down and did what nobody else would do.” That was the miracle of Katrina for Rahim: that so many white outsiders saw New Orleans as if it were also their problem. “If I was them, I would’ve said, ‘Fuck them. They got their black mayor. They
got their black City Council. Let them work their own selves out of this mess.’ ”
* * *
I. Senator Mary Landrieu, who arrived with her brother Martin, was also there that night. “She gave me her cell phone number and told me, if I need anything, call her,” Uddo said. Landrieu would phone Uddo throughout the recovery “just to see how I was doing and check in.”
II. Investigative reporter A. C. Thompson was among those stopping by Rahim’s home to watch a tape he made after discovering the body around the corner. Thompson’s terrific article, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” appearing in the Nation magazine three years after Katrina, suggested there was evidence of eleven shootings in Algiers after Katrina. “In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.”
III. In 2007, the Common Ground Health Clinic broke with the rest of the collective and thrived as a free-standing institution.
19
DARKNESS REVEALED
The East had few street signs, but Liberty’s headquarters were still easy enough to find: a wounded, six-story glass box missing several windows in a part of town dominated by subdivisions and off-ramp detritus. The hard part was finding a way inside. The front doors were padlocked. One year after Katrina, the only way into the building was the heavy metal door that Russell Labbe had used when there was still ten feet of water.
Inside, even rooms devoid of furniture and carpet still reeked, even months after the storm. The building had three elevators, but they still didn’t work. Every day Alden McDonald, sixty-two years old, and his staff walked five flights of stairs to reach the bank’s executive suite.
It had not been easy since Labbe had phoned McDonald at the start of 2006 to tell him the lights were back on. McDonald loved the idea of his lit-up glass tower as a beacon drawing people back to the East, but that also meant doing without phone and Internet while waiting for BellSouth to finish replacing trunk lines and switching stations destroyed by flooding. “We basically need to rebuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure in the eastern half of the city,” BellSouth’s director of operations said. Not until the second half of March could McDonald reestablish phone service and the Internet connection that would finally allow him, more than seven months after it had arrived, to connect the bank’s new mainframe computer to the global banking system. Sometime that spring they lost power in the building for a couple of weeks. The salt water had corroded the bank’s underground wiring. “It was horrible,” the seventy-year-old Labbe said. “I’d start early in the morning and work till night, breaking concrete to get at wires. It made me old.” A generator on-site allowed them to at least keep the lights on and computers running.
Liberty had almost no neighbors at the one-year anniversary of Katrina. The power was still shut off intermittently and garbage pickup was erratic. Lunchtime was depressing: you’d brown-bag it, buy from a truck, settle for fast food, or drive fifteen minutes to Tremé for a table at Dooky Chase’s. The bank still had important mail sent to the Southern branch because delivery in Baton Rouge was more reliable. Before the storm the bank had thirty-five thousand customers, but was now down to fewer than twenty-five thousand and maybe as few as twenty thousand.I “I have to get an exact count on that,” McDonald told a visitor that summer, before his voice trailed off. Liberty didn’t require the 150 employees it had on the payroll prior to Katrina, but it needed more than the 90 it had in August 2006. That kept expenses low, bolstering profits, but it also made it harder to generate new business. McDonald wanted to open a fifth branch in New Orleans, but the bank was having trouble finding the tellers, branch assistants, and loan officers needed.
There was good news to report at the one-year anniversary of Katrina. As expected, 2005 proved the most abysmal year in the bank’s history. But McDonald was shocked that their losses weren’t bigger. Pre-Katrina, the bank had been on pace to make around $3 million, but a few weeks after the storm, McDonald was anticipating year-end losses of $10 million or more. Yet Liberty ended up losing a more modest $3.4 million in 2005. The real surprise was 2006. Liberty reported $2 million in earnings in the first half of a year that would prove its most profitable ever.
“Liberty seems to have done a remarkable job in a trying situation, certainly better than I ever thought possible,” said William Cunningham, CEO of Creative Investment Research, which monitors the financial health of minority-owned financial institutions. “But my concern is with the health of the bank two years, three years out, especially with so many questions around the rebuilding.” McDonald harbored the same worries. He only had to consider his own subdivision. Of 150 families, he knew maybe 10 taking steps to rebuild. He counted himself and Rhesa among the undecided. His best guess was that maybe half the East was returning.
Liberty still had no branches in the East, but McDonald opened what the bank dubbed a “recovery center.” There, a homeowner could arrange financing to finish rebuilding—and also grab one of the Liberty I’M COMING BACK! lawn signs sprouting around the East. McDonald dialed down the risk by declaring that Liberty would no longer write no-down-payment mortgages, but that also meant the bank would be writing fewer loans. He started talking more about the possibility of doing business in Texas and other places where large concentrations of New Orleans evacuees had relocated. “I’ve got to go to where my customers are,” he said.
THE CITY COUNCIL ENDORSED the UNOP process that Rockefeller and the other foundations were funding. So, too, did the mayor. That July, a citywide meeting was held for anyone wanting to learn more about UNOP. As if people weren’t confused enough, Paul Lambert—the planner who had been hired by the City Council—took out a full-page ad in the Times-Picayune imploring people not to waste their time talking to anyone from UNOP.
Lambert’s team continued to hold planning sessions around the city. They were in New Orleans East in mid-August, where they wowed a few hundred people showing up at the St. Maria Goretti Church. They showed sketches of the neighborhood populated by people enjoying the new jogging and biking paths that could be built and spoke of the “world-class health care” they could enjoy. They imagined sound barriers along the interstate, and parks where there had been low-rent apartment buildings because, as one facilitator said, “it’s up to the community to decide where we put the greenspace.” What he and his cohorts failed to tell the standing-room-only crowd, though, is that they were fulfilling a contract that had not been voided just because the City Council had decided to throw in with a different set of planners.
Kathleen Blanco had given everyone hope that February when she announced Road Home—the multibillion pot of money to help flooded homeowners whose insurance companies had left them short. A few weeks later, the Times-Picayune published the Web address for applying for Road Home along with a telephone number. From that point on, virtually every article written about the lethargic pace of the New Orleans recovery mentioned Road Home and included an obligatory paragraph about the billions in federal housing aid that would be flowing into New Orleans. But first HUD needed to endorse the state’s plan, and not until June 2006 would the president authorize the money. When in August, six months after first announcing the program, Blanco was on Poydras to announce the opening of the city’s first Road Home office, she blamed delays on “government speed.” The reporters descending on New Orleans around the time of the one-year anniversary were still stressing the potential of Road Home—optimistically imagining the billions in housing dollars that would hit the city that fall.
At least a program was in place to help homeowners. Renters, though they constituted a majority in New Orleans, would be on their own. Rents had spiked 39 percent in the twelve months after Katrina—another hurdle for those of modest means anxious to get home. Most public housing units remained off-limits, and the city’s landlords didn’t seem nearly as susceptible to the pioneer spirit galvanizing homeowners around the city. In communities thick with rental units such as Central City and the Seventh Ward, enti
re blocks sat untouched, rotting in the heat twelve months after Katrina, making them that much harder to restore. “You drive around and you pretty much see nothing going on. It’s depressing,” said Henry Jones, who was living in a trailer in the East while he and his wife fixed up their home. An estimated sixty-eight thousand rental units were destroyed or heavily damaged by Katrina.
The state was offering no-interest loans to anyone willing to fix up or build rentals in New Orleans—except those taking the money were permitted to charge market-rate rents. That would do little to help low- and moderate-income residents who wanted to move back to New Orleans.II Those tenants looking for a below-market-rate unit signed up for federally subsidized Section 8 housing and hoped that one day their phone would ring. Early on, Alden McDonald had suggested using federal vouchers to foster homeownership and bring families home. Let a person qualifying for a Section 8 voucher (basically, anyone earning under $10 an hour) pair up with a sibling or a parent or a grown-up child to purchase a two-family home. Then ease the rules so that the Section 8 recipient could use his or her monthly voucher to help cover the mortgage. But like everything else born under the rubric of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, it was ignored.
