Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  * * *

  I. The hopes of people in the Lower Ninth and St. Bernard Parish would be revived when, in May 2015, another federal judge, ruling in a second MR. GO case, ordered the US government to compensate homeowners and businesses for at least some of their flood losses.

  II. The suit was settled at the end of 2014 when the authorities agreed to many of the policy changes that parents and their advocates were demanding.

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  BLIGHT

  Alden McDonald’s grim survey of New Orleans East began in a large boardroom down the hall from his office. Five years after Katrina, on the sixth floor of his bank’s headquarters, the flood seemed as if it had happened twelve months earlier. The east-facing windows looked out onto a stretch of emptiness that had once been a giant mall. Where once there had been stores, now there was just asphalt and weeds. Read Boulevard—the next exit up the highway—loomed in the middle distance. McDonald pointed out a tan building around the same height as his: the vacant “thodist” hospital (the first two letters in the sign METHODIST had fallen off). The hospice next door was boarded up, as was a black office tower once filled with doctors and other professionals.

  The windows on the north side of this glass box more or less at the East’s epicenter offered an equally bleak picture. A pair of large, empty parcels on the other side of the I-10, the former sites of a Walmart and a Sam’s, were now just giant wounds on the landscape. The three-story office building next to McDonald’s was shuttered, as was the shattered green-glass rectangle on the other side of that. McDonald pointed out several more office buildings: “Empty, empty, empty.” Before Katrina, more than a dozen office buildings were in that part of the city. “I’m still the only one open in the East,” he said, yet he still had plenty of vacancies. Five years after Katrina, his building sat half-empty.

  McDonald continued his tour of the battered East behind the wheel of a black Lexus sedan. Near his office were a trio of strip malls. “All of them one hundred percent occupied pre-Katrina,” he said—all three now vacant. Nearby an abandoned nursing home and a two-story, brick rehab center were covered in graffiti. The next exit off the interstate and the one after that offered more of the same: stretches of boarded-up strip malls and destroyed businesses. A Days Inn had reopened along the highway and also a Comfort Suites, but he pointed out two other motels that had slashed their prices and reopened as flophouses for transients. There were several car dealerships and gas stations, a few places to grab food, but not much else.

  “We have no jobs out here,” McDonald said. “We have no commercial business to speak of.”

  McDonald occasionally left a main artery to dip into a subdivision. Lake Forest Estates—McDonald’s old neighborhood—was faring better than most. So, too, was Spring Lake, which benefited from an active neighborhood group. Yet both were littered with ruined homes on every street. Less fortunate communities weren’t even one-third back. “It’s like the ULI had warned us—the jack-o’-lantern effect,” McDonald said. Prior to Katrina, New Orleans East was home to four Catholic churches. Five years later, only one had reopened.

  McDonald the banker had identified patterns in the repopulation of the East. The first people to move home were invariably those who only recently had taken out a mortgage. They owned so little equity in their homes that it was likely the bank would end up with all their insurance and Road Home money. “They had to rebuild or they’d be walking away from their down payment,” he said. He watched others use Katrina to pick up a house they could never have afforded before the storm. “You have a whole new class of people who are moving in,” McDonald said. “People who got big insurance checks, money from Road Home, seeing an opportunity to move up.” He might have done the same if he were in their position, but it all changed the feel of the community. “Neighbors aren’t connected like they were before,” McDonald said. “Where in the past someone might know ten people on their block, now they know four.”

  Eating in New Orleans East still meant fast food, a food truck, or a temporary perch in one of a few open take-out places, so McDonald headed west toward the center of town. As lunch approached, McDonald took a detour first through the Seventh Ward, where he had grown up, and then Gentilly, where Liberty was focusing a lot of its post-Katrina efforts. If anything, the Seventh Ward was starker than New Orleans East, with more shuttered businesses and wrecked homes still sporting the National Guard’s conspicuous Katrina tattoo. Forty percent of its residents were still missing, according to the 2010 census.

  McDonald’s mood brightened once he passed into Gentilly. He showed off the half-wrecked building he had bought under a government program created to encourage investment in blighted neighborhoods. He planned to turn it into a professional building. He had bought a wrecked mini-mall nearby under the same program. “At least there’s life back here,” he said.

  Those were modest investments compared to the $20 million loan fund the bank had created to help those who still didn’t have enough money to rebuild fully after insurance and Road Home. (Liberty set aside another $20 million for a similar loan fund for homeowners in the Lower Ninth.) Called the Gentilly Homeowner Initiative, the program began with a survey of the community’s needs. That’s how McDonald learned of a working couple with three children squeezed into the two rooms they had had the money to rehab. They needed around $80,000 to finish the rest of the house, but both worked service-industry jobs and didn’t make enough to justify a loan half that size. McDonald’s people would need to play a role closer to that of case manager than loan officer. “We partnered up with nonprofits able to give them free labor so they’d only have to buy supplies,” McDonald said. Sometimes that meant working with Connie Uddo’s organization. “We’re trying to find creative, nontraditional ways to help people.”

  Lunch was at Dooky Chase’s, a favorite of the black professional class (George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both eaten there). Over Leah Chase’s signature fried chicken and sweet-potato salad, McDonald talked about his life since the storm. He and Rhesa couldn’t be happier in their home along Bayou St. John. It was as if they had found a little bit of Uptown in a hidden part of Gentilly: a two-story, white clapboard house with a closed-in porch. But that brought into relief the disparity between his life and that of so many of his neighbors. For Rhesa’s sixtieth birthday that year, he had spilled a few thousand dollars on a blowout party at Bullet’s, a popular local club, and bought her a new Lexus SC 430 sports car. Yet a preoccupation during his driving tour of battered New Orleans were those of modest means trying to get by in a city where the price of everything from rent to property taxes to insurance had gone up.

  The bank was thriving even as the eastern half of New Orleans struggled. McDonald was the focus of a long, flattering profile in the pages of American Banker—his second in two years. This time the magazine’s focus was McDonald’s plan to transform Liberty into the country’s premier community-development bank. As McDonald explained, a wealth of government programs offered tax credits and similar incentives to any entrepreneur funding projects in a moribund community. That would be the focus of a failed bank Liberty had just bought in Detroit and also the one it had acquired in Kansas City a couple of years earlier. That would become a greater part of Liberty’s focus in New Orleans as well.

  Liberty was operating twenty-four branches in six states, but McDonald told American Banker he felt they weren’t running anywhere near their potential capacity. He was convinced that bad subprime loans meant too many banks were still struggling to survive—and he was intent on ensuring Liberty remained hunter rather than prey. That was one advantage of having lived through Katrina: “I know distressed loans better than anyone else.”

  PEOPLE NOTICED THE BRAD PITT homes. They were strange but beautiful, designed by Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and other internationally acclaimed architects—brightly colored works of art erected in the barren moonscape of the Lower Ninth Ward north of Claiborne. One house looked as if it had been artfully sawed
in half; a second seemed as if it were several homes fused into a single structure. Another resembled a steel shipping container, except with a front door and a wedge-shaped roof. Some stood atop stilts, and one the color of a berry-flavored drink was built on hidden pontoons so it could float if there was another flood. “They’re the ugliest houses I’ve ever seen,” declared Henry Irvin Jr., who cut so high a profile in the Lower Ninth post-Katrina that even Mitch Landrieu once referred to him as the area’s true mayor.

  The cost rather than appearances offended Alden McDonald. Pitt had predicted that each Make It Right home would cost between $100,000 and $174,000 to build, but apparently that estimate was calculated before his people priced the formaldehyde-free wood, termite-resistant lumber, fiber-cement siding, and custom-built cabinets they used. Each home was platinum LEED-certified and featured solar panels and a stylish metal roof. The average home ended up costing $270,000—or considerably more than that if factoring in the cost of a full-time executive director, counselors, a PR person, and other staff. Then it worked out to closer to $500,000 per house. McDonald appreciated that the utility bills for one of Pitt’s Make It Right homes were a fraction of what a resident would pay in a traditional home—a huge savings in the warm months. But the banker within couldn’t square the idea of spending a few hundred thousand dollars to build a home that would be worth half that amount on the open market. “He had the money to put a lot more people into homes,” McDonald said.

  Yet McDonald had also sat on an airplane next to the manager of a fast-food restaurant who’d shown him pictures of the Brad Pitt home she had chosen as if she were sharing photos of a newborn grandbaby. He’d witnessed the magic of the Make It Right homes as had Thom Pepper, who had taken over as Common Ground’s executive director after the group’s founder, Malik Rahim, could no longer bear to come around. The BellSouth man had initially told Pepper that the company would never restore phone service north of Claiborne. No one from the city would ever commit to a date for new streetlights or even permanent street signs. Then the media arrived trailing Pitt and occasionally a former president. “Make It Right forced the city to start addressing infrastructure issues,” Pepper said.

  Mack McClendon thought the Make It Right homes were “weird.” He resented that so few locals worked on its construction crews. But McClendon was convinced that if not for Pitt, that corner of the Lower Ninth would have been snapped up by developers intent on building big—condos, a hotel, maybe even a casino. “I’m afraid to think about what would have happened if Make It Right didn’t build these houses when they did,” McClendon said.

  “As far as I’m concerned, the hero of the Ninth Ward is Brad Pitt,” Malik Rahim said. Added the former Blank Panther, “We tried and we couldn’t do nothing. We couldn’t save it. But Brad Pitt—an actor, this white dude—did.”

  YET PITT ONLY BUILT on a few streets closest to the levee. Another twenty or so blocks were between the Make It Right homes and the St. Bernard Parish line. Most of the homes in this part of the Lower Ninth had been bulldozed. Even five years after Katrina, entire blocks remained uninhabited. Henry Irvin Jr., the area’s unofficial mayor, never doubted he would rebuild. He had bought a home in the Lower Ninth in 1964, and he would be back in his one-story, redbrick home north of Claiborne in 2009. A caved-in home sat two lots over, and a Baptist church was down the street, but otherwise he was by himself. “You can buy junk food here and you can get alcohol,” said Jenga Mwendo, who moved back into her refurbished Lower Ninth home in 2008. “You can go to church, you can fill up with gas, you can get your car fixed. That’s pretty much it. You have to cross the bridge for everything else.” For a time, Common Ground was able to operate a health clinic, but funding dried up and it closed shortly after the fifth anniversary. With no health clinics, Mack McClendon asked, was it any surprise that maybe 5 percent of the community’s older homeowners were back?

  The Lower Ninth was home to five public schools prior to Katrina. In 2010, the neighborhood still had just the King charter school that Doris Hicks and her people had opened. The area still had no high school, so King’s board voted to truck in trailers to add the ninth through twelfth grades. “We couldn’t even get money from the district to pay for the modulars,” said Hilda Young, the school’s board president.

  The Lower Ninth lost more of its earliest leaders. Charmaine Marchand announced in 2011 that she would not run for reelection due to family obligations. Her father was suffering from advanced dementia; her mother, too, was sick. She also had financial pressures as a single mother earning less than $50,000 a year as a state legislator. She was a lawyer and needed to make more money. Another early pioneer, Patricia Jones, who had founded the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, or NENA, also disengaged from her community work to spend more time tending to family and work.

  Pam Dashiell stepped down as head of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association to cofound the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, an environmental group focused on the Lower Ninth. Dashiell’s group made reclamation of the Bayou Bienvenue—the once-thriving wetlands that was now stumps in a stagnant swamp—a priority and also addressed the toxins she believed had contaminated the area’s soil. “I don’t think anybody understands the effects of climate change and global warming better than the people of the Lower Ninth Ward,” Dashiell told the Gambit.

  Dashiell would prove the Lower Ninth’s saddest loss when she died at her desk in December 2009. She was sixty-one years old. “A guiding force in the rebuilding efforts,” Brad Pitt said of this woman he described as a “dear friend.” Her funeral was held at All Souls—the Walgreens church. Among those eulogizing Dashiell was Bill Waiters, a supervisor at a nearby Domino sugar plant. Waiters, who had taken over as the head of Holy Cross after Dashiell, had been two weeks from moving back into the Victorian home he owned near the Industrial Canal when a faulty heater in the bathroom caused the house to burn down. The fire happened on the same day he learned Dashiell had died.

  THE CHURCH GROUPS AND college students and shaggy-haired idealists kept finding the Lower 9th Ward Village, and Mack McClendon kept feeding them and providing them with a place to sleep. The volunteers attacked the overgrown lots that threatened to swallow parts of the Lower Ninth whole and took part in “buildathons” organized to help a homeowner who didn’t have the money to hire a crew. McClendon sent teams to neighbors who had turned to him for help and housed volunteers who came to work on the Bayou Bienvenue for Pam Dashiell’s group. By the five-year mark, McClendon had hosted more than ten thousand volunteers.

  McClendon knew he should have been working on his own home, but who had the time—or the money, for that matter? He had thought donations and T-shirt sales would prove enough to cover the costs of running the center, but he was always dipping into his savings—to pay an overdue electric bill, to pick up the grocery tab when the center was running low on donated supplies. He could no longer afford the apartment he was renting, so his friends and volunteers helped him create a mini-loft inside the center. The light fixtures were bare bulbs dangling from exposed wires in a pair of rooms that totaled maybe 250 square feet. The furnishings were castoffs, as was the stained carpeting. His bedroom was a small dresser and a futon on the floor. “I went from a four-bedroom house with a living room, dining room, and den,” McClendon said, “to living in a little closet that had me sleeping on the floor.”

  Originally, McClendon thought he was creating a community center for a neighborhood in desperate need of one. He had the outside painted an array of bright colors: green, red, purple, blue. Above the door, someone had painted WHERE IS YOUR NEIGHBOR? along with a giant, multicolored map of the United States. Each dot—in Maine, Montana, Arizona, Washington, Wisconsin—represented another displaced resident of the Lower Ninth. Most impressive was a handsome mosaic next to the front door that spelled out LOWER NINTH WARD VILLAGE, along with a we-are-the-world logo that had a pair of black arms embracing people of all races.
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  Inside were a warren of offices and a giant, high-ceilinged room where the volunteers slept. The “media room” was filled with donated computers, and a “homework lab” was outfitted with tables and chairs. A shed in back was filled with footballs, soccer balls, and bikes. A third room served as a lending library, stocked with donated books and tools. A couple of used desks were in the room McClendon claimed as his office, but most of the space was taken up by beat-up tables, mismatched chairs, and worn-out couches. Here McClendon hosted organizing meetings to talk about everything from the Village to the neighborhood’s future.

  Slowly, the Village made the transition from makeshift hostel to gathering place. McClendon set up basketball hoops behind the building and built a stage for a weekly Open Mic Night. Four years after the flood, McClendon started hosting what he called town hall meetings on the fourth Saturday of every month. That proved essential to a community that felt ignored and in need of public meeting space. The gatherings started promptly at 11:00 a.m. and rarely lasted more than an hour. Speakers could talk for no more than five minutes and needed to stick to the agenda.

  “We wanted to minimize venting,” McClendon said. “The idea was that we had business to take care of and didn’t have time to waste.”

  While McClendon’s firm hand as a moderator impressed his fellow activists (“Mack ran the best meetings,” said Common Ground’s Thom Pepper), his cooking skills were what guaranteed a crowd. “When we wanted to really turn people out, I’d do one of my seafood boils,” McClendon said, though in his mouth it sounded like a seafood burl. A stalwart few dozen were regulars at these monthly meetings that typically focused on a single topic: the lack of streetlights, say, or the government’s failure to take care of abandoned properties under its jurisdiction. “But if I told people I was burling seafood, I could pretty much guarantee standing room only,” McClendon said. The real business seemed to happen in the hours before the crowds arrived when McClendon, standing in front of a humongous, restaurant-size silver pot, a spoon in hand, would talk strategy and plot with others to save their community. On those days McClendon—who prior to Katrina barely made time to vote—seemed to be at the center of whatever was happening in the Lower Ninth.