Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Four of the city’s seven general hospitals were still closed, including Charity. A survey taken several months before the anniversary found that 77 percent of the city’s primary-care physicians were still not back. Eighty-nine percent of its psychiatrists were still missing. “There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric patients,” Loyola law professor Bill Quigley wrote on CounterPunch at the one-year anniversary. The metro area had 450 psych beds before the storm. It now had 80.

  In June, the federal government had announced its intention to demolish the city’s four largest housing projects—the Big Four, as they were known. That represented nearly five thousand apartments and well over half the city’s public housing units. Under the HUD plan, private developers would build mixed-income complexes in place of all four. “In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes—and replace them with the kind of generic, mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats—the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of the city,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Residents and their supporters established a tent city outside the city’s largest housing projects and shouted down the federal housing officials who arrived to explain their plan. Protesters broke into one of the Big Four to help a man move back into his old apartment, and then, after he was booted by an armed SWAT team, several residents broke into another. Lawsuits were filed on behalf of residents and a small demonstration held outside Nagin’s home. Among those speaking out against the demolition plan was Tulane’s Lance Hill, who told the New York Times’ Susan Saulny, “The people who’ve been planning the recovery process never wanted poor people to return to the city in the first place.” But Hill and the protesters would find few allies among elected officials, black or white. They were noticeably silent on the issue. “The city has nothing to do with this,” Nagin said. Only around one thousand of the housing authority’s units had been reopened since Katrina.

  The Great Experiment, as some would eventually call the transformation of the city’s public schools, was another issue dividing the city. Where before Katrina the city was home to only a few charter schools, soon New Orleans would become the first school district in the country with a majority of its students enrolled in a charter school. Two dozen charters opened in anticipation of the new school year. No one knew what to expect in this overwhelmingly poor school district. Prior to the storm, three in every four public school students qualified for a subsidized lunch. By Katrina, only 4 percent of the kids attending the public schools were white.

  For some, anything would be an improvement over what they had pre-Katrina. The dropout rate at some high schools had been as high as 70 percent, and the city’s math and reading-proficiency scores were consistently among the worst in the state. A “dysfunctional catastrophe,” one unhappy white parent said of the pre-storm schools, under the “control of a corrupt district office.” He was inclined to celebrate more power in the hands of parents, where he thought it belonged, but others stressed that a duly elected school board—a majority-black body—had been stripped of its authority. Others displeased with the state’s custodianship pointed to bad experiences in other places, where the charters accepted only children willing to obey their rules or rejected those with learning disabilities and other students who might drag down test scores. The parents of those kids would need to fend for themselves.

  BROKEN STOPLIGHTS STILL DANGLED in parts of the central business district. Stores even in the center of town remained shuttered a year after Katrina. To reach the city’s economic-development office one entered through a side door, as the revolving doors out front were still boarded up.

  Shell was back, but Chevron announced it was moving its offices to higher ground in the suburbs. Traffic at the port was almost back to normal, but the city’s manufacturing base post-Katrina was almost nonexistent. One survey found that twelve months after the storm, two in every three businesses were still closed. Shops catering to tourists complained that they were doing maybe half their pre-storm business. One local economist predicted that 40 percent of the city’s businesses would end up a casualty of Katrina.

  The few big-box retailers knew they could do a brisk business even in sparsely populated parts of town—basically Home Depot and Lowe’s—but the big national and regional chains were slow to reopen. At first that surprised Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane who has written extensively about New Orleans and its history, but it came to make sense. The small mom-and-pops had everything invested in one store. “They have no choice but to do whatever they can to come back,” Campanella said.

  After September 11, the state and federal governments had set aside $500 million to help small businesses in New York. That figure would be $38 million for small businesses in Louisiana hit by either Katrina or Rita. Sitting in Memphis, Anthony Patton was technically still president of EBONetworks. Running a ten-person firm he touted as the South’s “premier African-American marketing company,” he had earned a spot on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Yet one year after Katrina, he had no clients and no employees. “All the African-American businesses are gone,” Patton said.

  The optimists thought about the billions in government money that would soon be washing through New Orleans. They imagined “an arts-infused mecca for youthful risk-takers, a boomtown where entrepreneurs can repair to cool French Quarter bars in ancient buildings after a hard day of deal making,” wrote the Times’ Adam Nossiter, who lived in New Orleans at the time. The pessimists worried that New Orleans was on its way to becoming the country’s next Detroit—a city of abandoned neighborhoods. Others fretted that the new New Orleans would become a hollowed-out, Disneyfied version of itself. The city’s aristocracy would still put on carnival each year, and the city’s main attractions would remain its food and music. But in this vision, about all that would be left of New Orleans would be the tourists and the people getting rich off them, along with the low-paid housekeepers, waiters, busboys, and bartenders to keep everything going.

  Houston was home to more evacuees than anywhere else. That first spring after Katrina, the city polled those who had availed themselves of a free housing program set up to get people out of the Astrodome and other shelters. Nine months after Katrina, only one in seven of them had a job. Most were either people over fifty-five or single mothers. “Over ninety percent of the people here are either suicidal or hopeless,” a dispossessed thirty-four-year-old named Alphonso Thomas said of his fellow evacuees.

  “Time has long since passed for the able-bodied people from Louisiana to either find a job, return to somewhere in Louisiana, or become Houstonians,” a Houston congressman named John Culberson, a Republican, said of the “deadbeat” New Orleanians who had invaded his city. Those stranded in Houston were blamed for an increase in crime (a claim later refuted by studies). Where once displaced New Orleanians were slapping a THANKS HOUSTON bumper sticker on a car, many now felt as though they had worn out their welcome.

  NAGIN FIRST IMAGINED FIREWORKS. He suggested a “comedy night” as well for the evening of August 29. Ultimately, the city chose a more solemn set of events to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Katrina. At a prayer breakfast that morning, Nagin rang a large silver bell at 9:38 a.m., which is believed to be the time of the catastrophic Seventeenth Street breach. Later that morning, Nagin joined the president, who was in town and speaking at a new charter school. Bush declared August 29, 2006, a National Day of Remembrance and reiterated the pledge he had made at his Jackson Square speech to do whatever it took to rebuild New Orleans. His motorcade then crossed the bridge in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the president visited the home of R&B legend Fats Domino, who had been airlifted from there several days after Katrina.

  No one knew exactly how many people had died in Katrina. They never would after the State of Louisiana, in 2006, defunded the project it had set up to identify unidentified bodies and calculate how many bodies might have washed out
to sea. Some bodies were still buried in plain sight, such as the body that had been discovered in the rubble just before the anniversary. One year after Katrina, the best the authorities could do was to declare that at least eighteen hundred people across the Gulf Coast had died in the storm. More than eleven hundred of them were from New Orleans.

  KATRINA OFFERED PLENTY OF ammunition to Democrats seeking to discredit a sitting president with Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. “We know the storm was a tragedy, but a bigger tragedy is how the federal government responded,” Harry Reid, then the Senate minority leader, declared in August, a little more than two months before the 2006 midterm elections. That summer it seemed half the Bush cabinet was on the Gulf Coast to announce new initiatives. “I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response,” Bush declared around the first anniversary. Yet it was too late for a president saddled by both Katrina and Iraq. Democrats gained thirty-one seats in the House that November—enough to make Nancy Pelosi that body’s first female Speaker. Harry Reid would take over as majority leader after the Democrats picked up six seats in the Senate.

  The city of Gretna returned to the news that summer. The state attorney general, Charles Foti Jr., completed his investigation into the blockade. Foti was a local, a white man who had recently been elected AG after thirty years as the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff. Rather than take a stance, Foti had his people deliver a report on the case to a long list of law enforcement officials, including the FBI, the local US attorney, and US attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Others were free to venture into the racial politics of Gretna should they choose.

  In August, Orleans Parish’s district attorney, Eddie Jordan, who was black, announced he had formed a grand jury to investigate the incident at Gretna. Another five civil suits were filed against the city, including a class action suit prepared on behalf of the RTA workers. “We saved our city,” said Gretna police chief Arthur Lawson. “We put officers on the streets. We didn’t allow joyriders or people to come into the city who didn’t reside in the city. We set up perimeters. Our plan worked.” Now the judicial branch would decide whether, in protecting Gretna’s streets, rights had been trampled.

  THAT SUMMER, LAKEVIEW CIVIC held a rebuilding workshop in the gym at St. Dom’s. Connie Uddo stood to talk about Beacon of Hope. Afterward, a priest named Will Hood introduced himself and asked her to take a walk with him.

  He was new to Lakeview, Hood confessed, a navy chaplain recently returned from duty in Iraq. He had been hired as the rector of St. Paul, an Episcopal church in Lakeview, with the understanding that he would probably shut down the church and its school. The parishioners he met, however, didn’t seem ready to give up. Each more or less greeted him the same way: Thank God you’re here, what can we do to help? He convinced the bishop to let him try to save St. Paul, he told Uddo, and had even secured funding from the diocese to help him rebuild the neighborhood.

  Hood and Uddo were a few blocks from the church when the priest pointed to an empty building. He’d already spoken to the landlord, he said. The place would be ready and available within four weeks. He wanted to use the space to create a recovery command center. “But I can’t do it and rebuild a church and school,” he said. Did Uddo want the job?

  Uddo first asked whether it made a difference that she was Catholic. Her second question was why her. Hood told her he had driven through her neighborhood and been impressed. “I can tell you’re combat-ready,” he told her. One month later, on the August 29 anniversary date, Uddo opened the doors to St. Paul’s Homecoming Center. Uddo figured she’d be there a year, maybe two, and then go back to teaching tennis.

  * * *

  I. By comparison, at Dryades, another black-owned bank in New Orleans, two-thirds of its roughly three thousand pre-Katrina customers had shut their accounts by August 2006.

  II. Eighteen months after Katrina, Road Home announced a program to replenish the area’s rental stock by helping small landlords—those owning five units or fewer—repair flooded units. But property owners first needed to make repairs that could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and rent out a unit before they could be reimbursed. The goal was the restoration of eighteen thousand units, not the four thousand the state actually financed.

  III. The team would change its name to the Pelicans a few years after moving back to New Orleans.

  20

  ROAD HOME

  Professional football returned to New Orleans in the fall of 2006. The city had been excited about a team that ended the 2004 season with four consecutive wins, but after the storm hit, fans suffered through a dismal year. The Saints lost thirteen of their sixteen games playing “home” games in Baton Rouge, San Antonio, and even New Jersey, where the end zones of the Meadowlands were spray-painted the Saints colors and the hometown Giants wore their road uniforms.

  The league did what it could to give the state, which owns the Superdome, the time needed to ready the stadium. The Saints played their preseason home games in Shreveport and Jackson, Mississippi, and their first two regular-season games were on the road. Under a new head coach, Sean Payton, and led by a new quarterback, Drew Brees, the Saints won the first two games of the season, raising expectations for the first professional football game to be played in New Orleans in twenty-two months.

  The Superdome, a vast upside-down dish that seats seventy thousand, was sold-out. U2 and Green Day played a mini-three-song setI before the game began, and former president George H. W. Bush was there for the coin toss. Four plays into the game, a Saints reserve named Steve Gleason blocked a punt and a backup cornerback named Curtis Deloatch recovered the ball in the end zone for a touchdown. “It was like an explosion,” Deloatch said. “It was like I just gave New Orleans a brand-new city.” The Saints beat their division rival the Atlanta Falcons, 23–3, in a stadium Coach Sean Payton declared the loudest he had ever heard. That year the team notched only its second play-off win in franchise history and would miss out on its first Super Bowl appearance after losing to Chicago in the NFC championship game.

  MARTIN LANDRIEU AND HIS team had submitted their plan for Lakeview to the city. So, too, did Charmaine Marchand in the Lower Ninth and others around the city. New Orleans, however, was still a long way from submitting a written plan to the Louisiana Recovery Authority to free up the billions in recovery dollars that New Orleans was due. The city still hadn’t heard from those who hadn’t managed to make it home yet—and Carey Shea, the Rockefeller Foundation’s point person in New Orleans, was determined that they have their say before a plan was submitted.

  Shea, from New York, moved to New Orleans over the July 4 weekend 2006. Talking to people involved in the planning that summer, she concluded that Nagin had made a key tactical mistake when he gave the job of rebuilding to the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Ordinary New Orleanians needed to feel as though they had been included in the decision making. Instead they were asked to wait patiently while a group of CEOs and other elites determined their future. Shea also came to believe the city had brought in the Urban Land Institute prematurely. At that point the city needed group therapy, not a bunch of outsiders telling them they needed to give up on their homes.

  “What the plan was missing was community buy-in,” Shea said. “So I went to the other foundations that had been watching a little bit from a distance and shared my concern that voices weren’t being heard from what everyone was calling then ‘the diaspora.’ ” A foundation created by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton—the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund—chipped in $1 million. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the State of Louisiana, and other organizations contributed millions more.

  They would need all that money and more for what Shea had in mind. A woman she knew had attended a September 11–related event at the Javits Center in New York that had been organized by a group called AmericaSpeaks. Shea’s friend had been impressed by the diversity of the crowd that had arrived at the Javits Center that day and wowed by the tech
nical capabilities of a group that issued every participant an electronic pad for instant voting. “They’re like a production company in the business of putting on these ginormous meetings,” Shea said of AmericaSpeaks. “It’s very therapeutic. The person running the thing cries. There’s praying, there’s music.” But maybe most important, “they’re really good at creating consensus around broad issues.” Shea hired AmericaSpeaks for what they were calling a Community Congress—the big event held in New Orleans in October 2006 to give ordinary citizens a chance to talk about the city’s future.

  Shea was impressed as she watched AmericaSpeaks prepare in the months before the Community Congress. Their people put together a list of FEMA trailer camps in southern Louisiana and sent people to visit each one. They arranged for vans and buses to shuttle those needing transportation. They also contacted people in Houston, Atlanta, and other cities to spread the word.

  But the Community Congress would prove a disappointment. They had expected 1,000 people but only 350 showed and half of them were staff. Three-quarters of those in attendance were white, and nearly half had an annual household income above $75,000—hardly the dispossessed population organizers were hoping to hear from. Just their luck, NPR reporter Martin Kaste was in town for a piece on the city with no plan and captured the disappointment. “We’re like lemmings going off a cliff,” one participant told Kaste for a report that aired on NPR a week later.