by Gary Rivlin
VIOLENCE WAS STILL A constant in a city that had enough problems without people killing one another. An Iraq war veteran living in the French Quarter killed and mutilated his girlfriend and then threw himself off a nearby hotel roof. On Halloween, a gunman walked into a Quarter nightclub and shot five people. Drug-related murders were on the rise and domestic violence spiked, driving up the number of women living on the street. “People don’t realize this isn’t a normal community yet,” New Orleans police chief Warren Riley told USA Today. Was it any wonder that a University of New Orleans political scientist found that 32 percent of returnees were considering leaving?
Chief Riley and his top people were still working out of trailers. New Orleans still had no working crime lab. FEMA had filed the requisite damage-assessment reports for the city’s police headquarters and its damaged precinct houses, but that was only the start of a long, drawn-out process. When the money might be pried from the federal treasury so work could begin on essential government buildings was one of many unknowns inside City Hall. A beleaguered police department was also contending with scandal. Six days after Katrina, the police, responding to a call for help on the Danziger Bridge, a small stretch of high ground between Gentilly and New Orleans East, killed two people and shot four others, though civilian witnesses claimed all of the victims were unarmed. So, too, did other officers. One victim was a mentally disabled man shot in the back while trying to run. Seven officers were indicted on charges ranging from obstruction of justice to murder.II
The year 2006 ended grimly with the murder of a drummer from the popular Hot 8 Brass Band. (The shooter killed the wrong person.) The new year wasn’t a week old and already the city had recorded eight murders. In a city where the typical murder victim was a young black man living in a high-crime area, the body count included a young Uptown woman found shot dead in her bed and a prominent local filmmaker killed during a home invasion in the Marigny district. Her husband, a doctor, was also shot, while their two-year-old son survived. “Killings Bring the City to Its Bloodied Knees,” cried the Times-Picayune on its front page the next day. A crowd of around five thousand showed up at City Hall for an anticrime rally and hurled angry words at both the mayor and Chief Riley. The killings, however, continued. Pre-Katrina, the police would record around a thousand violent crimes each quarter. Fewer than half the city’s population had returned, but there would be more than thirteen hundred violent crimes reported in the first three months of 2007.
“Surge in Homeless Hits New Orleans,” read a Christian Science Monitor headline that March. Whereas the city had around six thousand homeless people before Katrina, now an estimated twelve thousand people were sleeping in cars, abandoned motels, or under highway overpasses. Most of the city’s emergency shelters were still closed, while meanwhile a new population was demanding the attention of people such as Martha Kegel, the Stanford Law grad who ran a local advocacy group for the homeless: “people in their late eighties,” Kegel said, “who never in their lives expected to be homeless.”
The housing policies adopted by some of New Orleans’s suburban neighbors didn’t help a city in dire need of more affordable units. St. Bernard Parish, the white-flight suburb just south and east of New Orleans, passed what its sponsor called a “blood-relative ordinance.” In a parish where whites owned 93 percent of the housing stock, the new law dictated that landlords could rent only to family members.III The parish would pass another law barring the redevelopment of any property with more than four units. The main target of this second ordinance seemed to be the Village Square, a sprawling, hundred-building complex occupied mainly by low-income African-American renters. Officials in Jefferson Parish blocked construction of a two-hundred-unit residential facility for the elderly, and at least one city there placed a moratorium on multifamily units.
Insurance companies were a constant topic of conversation in wounded New Orleans. Those who had splurged on a comprehensive homeowner’s policy learned that comprehensive didn’t include floods. Homeowner’s insurance generally covered wind damage, but even a hole in the roof through which rain had fallen might not be enough proof that a house had been damaged by more than floodwaters. People believed that the insurance companies offered a fraction of what they owed and then waited to see who had the will to fight for more.IV The Louisiana Department of Insurance was receiving twenty thousand calls a month. Nearly five thousand people had leveled a formal complaint in 2006. Sixty-six hundred insurance-related lawsuits had been filed in federal district court in New Orleans by the first half of 2007.
Alden McDonald had no argument over his personal insurance coverage. He had received the maximum $250,000 from his flood insurance carrier plus another $75,000 or so to cover his home’s contents, but he had no roof damage and didn’t expect any more money under his homeowner’s policy. But his brother Byron needed to sue his carrier before he received anything near what he felt was a fair settlement. Flood insurance had paid the full $250,000 on the two-story, $350,000, brick home Byron owned in Gentilly. But the Hanover Insurance Group offered him close to nothing under a $200,000 homeowner’s policy despite the hole in his roof after the wind tore off a ventilator. Hanover claimed Byron owed them money given the $1,500 check they mistakenly believed they sent to Byron and his wife to cover their temporary living expenses. A month before they were scheduled to go to trial, Hanover settled for an amount Byron cannot reveal given a binding nondisclosure agreement.
Insurance-industry spokespeople pointed out that carriers had collectively paid out a record $11 billion to homeowners in Louisiana after Katrina. But the $49 billion in profits insurance firms pocketed that year was also an all-time insurance-industry high. The state officials behind the Road Home program were among those convinced insurers were short-changing people. By their calculations, homeowners were paid on average $5,700 less than they were owed—no small matter for a program created to make up the difference between what a property was worth and the actual insurance payment a homeowner received. State officials figured that would add another $900 million to the cost of making people whole under Road Home.
WARD “MACK” MCCLENDON FELT numb that first year after Katrina—asleep, he said, even with his eyes open, “hoping I’d wake up from a bad dream, except it only kept getting worse.” McClendon had planned on riding out the storm at his daughter’s home in Atlanta, but the traffic was so bad he stayed that Sunday night at a no-name motel in Opelika, Alabama. His daughter was about to give birth to her first child, but he heard about the levee breaches and returned to New Orleans rather than continue on to Atlanta, less than two hours away. “I’m telling you, I wasn’t in my right mind then,” McClendon said. Back in New Orleans, he paid way too much to hole up in a fleabag motel while waiting the two months it would take him even to see his house in the Lower Ninth Ward.
McClendon lived one block from Flood Street in a city where the Army Corps of Engineers had its main offices on Leake Avenue. “That should’ve told me something right there,” McClendon said. “But like my mama was always telling me, I wasn’t always so good at listening.” He was a squat, dark-skinned black man with Popeye forearms and a fireplug physique. His voice, proper and refined, suggested a thespian past, but his education stopped after high school when he took a job laying cable for the phone company. McClendon was twenty-nine years old when he fell from a ladder and fractured several discs in his back. Permanent disability would pay him two-thirds of his salary for life. He spent most of the next decade bouncing around the country, but returned to the Lower Ninth just before his fortieth birthday. “I realized I needed three things in life,” McClendon said. “Good food. Good people. Good music. And no place I looked at offered as good a combination as New Orleans.”
McClendon ran his own small salvage yard in the years leading up to Katrina. Mostly he spent his time restoring antique cars. He’d buy junkers for a few hundred dollars, if not the price of a tow, and then haunt the antique-car shows in search of parts. “You can ma
ke ten times the money you put into them,” McClendon said. “But you drive ’em and think about how much work you put into it and you don’t want to ever let them go.” He was up to fourteen cars at the time of Katrina. The floodwaters destroyed all of them. None of them were insured.
The house he owned on Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth proved a bigger blow. It wasn’t much to look at from the street: a narrow, two-story place with a plain exterior. But McClendon knew he was looking at his dream home the first time he stepped inside. The old house had wood floors, high ceilings, crown moldings, and a pair of tiled fireplaces. With four bedrooms upstairs, it was a lot more house than a single divorcé needed, but he had eight kids, and though all of them were grown, he liked that he could offer them a sanctuary if they ever needed it. He paid $72,000 for this handsome old home only a couple of blocks from the Mississippi. He redid the floors downstairs and restored all the wood molding and baseboards. He installed new cabinets in the kitchen and spent weeks working on the old, wooden banister leading up to the second floor. In July 2005—one month before Katrina—he rounded up several friends to help him move furniture. He had finished work on the first level and was moving everything downstairs to start work on the second.
“Had I reversed it,” McClendon said, “I would have saved just about everything.” Instead five feet of floodwater sat in his home in the weeks after Katrina and he lost everything but a duffel bag of clothes. He had survived, unlike hundreds of his neighbors. But sitting alone in his lousy hotel room, he said, “I really felt like there was a personal vendetta against me.”
McClendon put his name on the waiting list for a FEMA trailer. He jumped when after about six months the agency offered him a trailer in Slidell, more than thirty miles from his home. The first anniversary of Katrina came and passed before FEMA delivered a trailer to his property on Caffin. Home was now a three-hundred-square foot, white rectangle with water that never quite got hot enough, but he was back in the Lower Ninth, gutting his home. It felt like forward motion.
Still, sifting through the remains of his life, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for himself. “What’s it like to lose everything overnight?” he asked. “I can tell you.” In a culture in which our possessions can define us, he continued, he had nothing. Only later, sitting in his bare office in a strange-shaped, multicolored building he dubbed the Lower 9th Ward Village Community Center, lighting up yet another Kool as executive director of the refuge he had created, could McClendon declare, “Katrina is the best thing to ever happen to me.”
PEOPLE WORKING WITH COMMON GROUND, the volunteer group that Malik Rahim founded in the days after Katrina, posted hand-painted street signs around the community. That way at least they knew where they were when driving around the Lower Ninth. Confrontations over the city’s aggressive demolition plans were now being fought in the courts rather than on people’s front lawns. The Episcopals staked an important flag in the community around a year after Katrina when they sanctioned the Lower Ninth’s first house of worship. The Church of All Souls first met in a parishioner’s garage but soon moved into a building that had been used by a big discount drugstore chain. St. Walgreens, people called it, or the Walgreens church.
Brad Pitt started showing up in the Lower Ninth after Katrina. The star had first fallen in love with New Orleans while there in 1994 to work on Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles. “Everything was sexy and sultry,” he said. “I’d ride my bike all over the place, amazed by the architecture. I’d return to New Orleans every chance I could.” He was in Calgary shooting a new Jesse James movie when Katrina hit, but a few weeks later he was in New York, attending the first Clinton Global Initiative. That proved all the inspiration this self-described “architecture junkie” needed. Pitt reached out to William McDonough, a leading voice in the sustainability movement, and teamed up with the group Global Green USA, which had already started doing work in the Lower Ninth. “There is a real opportunity here to lead the nation in a direction it needs to be going, and that is building efficiently,” Pitt said at a press conference eleven months after Katrina. He put up $200,000 to fund an international design competition in search of architects that would help build environmentally friendly, storm-safe homes in the Lower Ninth.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School sat derelict on Claiborne Avenue, a half dozen blocks from the levee breach. The school had been deluged with so much water that dead fish were found on the second floor. King lost ten students in the flooding and twenty of its parents. A family of four lived a few blocks from the school, two honors students and parents active in the PTA. All four perished that day.
King Elementary was relatively new in the Lower Ninth—barely a decade old at the time of Katrina—yet it was beloved by parents. Even as 96 percent of its students qualified for a subsidized or free lunch, its kids scored well on standardized tests. A big reason for their success was Doris Hicks, a commanding black woman who had grown up in the neighborhood. Hicks had been the principal of King since the day it opened its doors.
Hicks was in Dallas after the storm. Her staff was scattered everywhere. They had been fired en masse after Katrina, but less than two months after the flood, a group of them started to meet. Hicks flew to New Orleans from Dallas once a month. A third-grade teacher named James Mack drove from Cincinnati. As a group, they were generally hostile to charter schools; before the storm, Hicks herself had declared them “the demise of public education.” But their priority was reopening their school, and the new state-created Recovery School District made plain they looked more favorably on those claiming the charter banner. So the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology was born. Hicks signed up 95 percent of her old staff and put Hilda Young in charge of the board of directors they formed. With more than thirty years with the Orleans Parish school district, Young had worked both as a principal and in the district’s central office. Her job was to secure them the state certification they would need before they could open their doors. “The only school approved for a charter at the time without the help of an outside management group or nonprofit organization,” wrote Education Week’s Lesli Maxwell. King received its certification in March 2006.
They had a building: their old elementary school on Claiborne. The question was what shape it was in. Not trusting the new Recovery School District to tell them, Hicks called someone she knew at the Washington Group, an engineering firm in Denver that did work in New Orleans and had established a relationship with King Elementary. “They send in a team of people, and a week and a half later, I have this detailed report,” Hicks said. The building needed a lot of work, but the firm declared it structurally sound and worth saving. It didn’t matter. The people who ran the Recovery School District deemed the building a hazard and ordered it razed. “Their attitude was ‘The mayor is going to greenspace the neighborhood anyway,’ ” Hilda Young said. “That’s when we realized they didn’t want us to open.” If they were going to save their school, they were going to have to do it themselves.
Two policemen were standing in front of the school on a March morning seven months after Katrina. That’s how Hicks knew someone had tipped the district office off about their plans. A padlock was also on the school door. But Hicks, who stood more than six feet tall, wasn’t backing down. She had her engineer’s report and the support of Marlin Gusman, the parish’s sheriff. Besides, she had lined up around 250 volunteers, most of them from Common Ground, and they had a job to do. “We just cut those big padlocks off all the doors,” Hicks said. “And everybody got to work.” The police would kick them out several times during the four days it took to gut the school, but the cleanup crews would simply wait an hour or two before sneaking back so they could continue their work.
The parents of nearly a thousand kids signed up to attend King in the fall of 2006. The old building on Claiborne wouldn’t be ready for the new school year, but the district promised them a middle school in the Upper Ninth that had been
shuttered even before the storm. The building would be ready by mid-August, district officials promised, which is when Hicks wanted to start classes. Closer to the date, the district told Hicks they would need to wait until September 7. Even then Hicks found a school with moldy walls and peeling paint. “The rodents were probably saying, ‘You moving into our school?’ ” Hicks said. “They were running around like they owned the place.”
King held its first day of classes on the school’s front steps. “We broke kids into sections: kindergarten, first graders,” Hicks said. “Teachers had lessons, gave homework. Hot breakfast every day, hot lunch. I wanted the world to see. We’re ready to educate our children of color. But we seemed to be the only ones who cared about really doing that.” A few days later, the district found them an alternative building—an elementary school Uptown that had suffered only modest roof damage, but in a majority-white neighborhood.
“We were very grateful,” Hicks said. “We put letters in the mailboxes of all our neighbors, introducing ourselves and saying thank you for your hospitality. Everyone was very, very nice.” The best news from her perspective was that the district now had ample reason to find King a more permanent home in what one school official delicately called a “more demographically suitable neighborhood.” Education officials operating out of Baton Rouge put King on the priority list it shared with the Corps. Hicks and her people wouldn’t spend even a full year Uptown before the district delivered them the keys to the old place on Claiborne, now painted yellow with purple trim. It looked even better than it did before the storm.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER she started working with Will Hood, Connie Uddo asked him to compare Lakeview to Iraq. She wanted to hear about people worse off than they were. Hood laughed and said there was no comparison. “You look so much worse,” he said.
