by Gary Rivlin
CONNIE UDDO KNEW IT would be hard starting over in a new neighborhood given her race, her outsider status, and also the size and complexity of Gentilly. It’s pre-Katrina population was roughly four times that of Lakeview and had a daunting twenty-two neighborhood associations. Money, too, separated Gentilly from Lakeview. Gentilly had small pockets of affluence, such as Park Island on the Bayou St. John, where Ray Nagin and Alden McDonald lived, but the average home there sold for around $150,000. “You don’t see contractors out here,” a retired mechanic named Albert Felton, seventy-six, told a reporter who found him working by himself on his Gentilly home a couple of years after Katina. “We can’t afford them.” Uddo opened St. Paul’s Homecoming Center at the start of 2009 in a Gentilly house that volunteers had refurbished.
Uddo was cautious her first few months in Gentilly. She met with the president of each neighborhood association. She complimented them all on the job each was doing and stressed that she was there to help, not tell them what to do. Each association head shared with Uddo more or less the same set of stories. People wanted to return but didn’t have the money to rebuild. A lot had started to rebuild but ran out of money long before they could finish, often because they had been ripped off. “I feel like ninety percent of the homes I work on in Gentilly involve some kind of contractor fraud,” Uddo said.
Road Home was another culprit. In her testimony before a Senate subcommittee in May 2007, Uddo spoke about the program as thwarted by bureaucratic incompetence. In Gentilly, she recognized the more basic flaw in Road Home. Sheetrock cost the same whether you lived west of City Park in Lakeview or east in Gentilly. So, too, did an electrician and a roofer. Yet Road Home decreed that the same three-bedroom, two-bath arts-and-crafts home was worth $100,000 less in Gentilly than in Lakeview. It still cost around $200,000 in post-Katrina New Orleans to rehab a two-thousand-square-foot house even if insurance and Road Home only added up to $140,000.I
Gentilly was three-quarters black, but several years after the storm, no one seemed to care that Uddo was a white woman from Lakeview. “By that point, if you were saying, ‘I can help,’ it didn’t make a difference what race you may be,” Uddo said. She gave each resident she met the same small speech. She talked about her success in Lakeview but stressed that she wasn’t a miracle worker. “All I can promise you is that I’ll do my best,” she would tell someone walking into her group’s offices. “I’ll look for funds to buy the materials you need to work on your house. I’ll look for volunteers to help you. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take, but I’m not leaving you.”
That last point impressed Cathey Randolph, who had worked as a case worker at Uddo’s Lakeview center. “So many people came around promising this and promising that, and then they’d just disappear,” said Randolph, who is black. “Connie stayed.”
Uddo’s role as a second responder evolved. Whereas in Lakeview her job had been more about the community, in Gentilly she focused on individuals. A lot of the job now was finding outfits willing to donate supplies and volunteers able to do specific work. When the kitchen and bath manufacturers were in town for a meeting at the Convention Center, that proved a perfect opportunity to help the Davis family, who for years after Katrina were still preparing their meals on a hot plate and a microwave in an upstairs bedroom. A volunteer group gave the Davises a new kitchen, along with two other families that had turned to Uddo’s group for help.
“I saw a lot of people getting to the ten-yard line and running out of money,” she said. “They’d be living in homes where the floors were buckling from flood damage. Or they had managed to redo the whole downstairs except they had no walls.” Uddo was confident she could always find people willing to hang Sheetrock or install a floor. She started pitching to funders a program she called Home Stretch, to provide the money for the supplies people would need. “The idea was with free labor, you could ‘stretch’ a five-thousand-dollar or ten-thousand-dollar supply bill into a completed project,” said Uddo, who raised $220,000 for the program from the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
Uddo had hired Cathey Randolph to concentrate on homeowners who were a lot more than a working bathroom or a paint job away from moving back home. That included people such as Sylvia and Anthony Blanchard, an older couple still living in a FEMA trailer when, three years after Katrina, they contacted Uddo’s group.
The Blanchards had already started work on the modest, two-bedroom house they owned in Gentilly when Road Home informed them they had failed to submit proper proof of ownership and would be receiving no money from the state. The Blanchards hadn’t used a traditional lender but had instead bought their home from the seller through a bond-for-deed arrangement. Their records had been destroyed by the flood, but Sylvia Blanchard, who had put in twenty years as a court clerk before her retirement shortly before Katrina, copied records at City Hall that showed that they were paying taxes on the property. She made copies of other records documenting their ownership and submitted an affidavit from the previous owner. When Road Home responded with a second rejection letter, the couple drove to Baton Rouge to talk with someone in the governor’s office. No one there would help them.
“I fought for my country!” Anthony Blanchard yelled after they were turned away. He was a Vietnam vet with three Purple Hearts who had retired from the post office shortly before Katrina. “I was shot at. And what does my country do for me? They kick me in the head.” Security escorted the couple out. On the day the couple received a letter from Road Home telling them that their appeal had been denied, Anthony suffered a massive stroke.
The couple had burned through their savings. Each received a pension, but they needed that money to cover their monthly expenses. Then Uddo and her organization showed up. It took two years, but in June 2010, Sylvia and Anthony could finally move into their home. Six months later, Anthony Blanchard was dead at seventy years old. “It wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that killed him,” his wife said. “It was the recovery.”
* * *
I. A federal judge announced in August 2010, two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Katrina, that he was likely to rule in favor of a claim by housing advocates that Road Home discriminated against African Americans. He also ordered the state to stop using pre-storm market values to calculate any future Road Home grants. But Louisiana had by then sent out checks to nearly 128,000 homeowners, and less than $200 million in disaster aid remained. Housing advocates settled the case when the federal government agreed to set aside an extra $500 million to help low-income homeowners. “We felt it was better to get money now to help people rather than dragging this out with years more of fighting,” said James Perry, the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, one of the groups bringing the Road Home suit.
26
THE SORE WINNER
It was an extraordinary gesture by a man new to politics. Troy Henry’s concession speech after taking second in the 2010 mayoral race would have sufficed. “Mitch is going to be a fantastic mayor,” Henry told his supporters, gathered at the Chateau Bourbon in the French Quarter. “I’m going to support him in any way he needs.” Then, Henry walked to Mitch Landrieu’s victory party to congratulate the mayor-elect in person. Landrieu called Henry to the stage and the two embraced. Landrieu next lifted Henry’s arm and asked the crowd to give his worthy challenger a round of applause.
This moment of black-white unity was captured by the television cameras. Henry thought Landrieu meant it when he whispered in Henry’s ear during their embrace that he looked forward to working with Henry over the coming months. “I guess you can say I’m very naive,” Henry said. “He’s been very vindictive.”
Never mind the city contracts with Henry’s consulting firm that were terminated after Landrieu took office. More disheartening was when the mayor obstructed a pair of projects Henry was working on with his childhood friend, the actor Wendell Pierce.I After Katrina, Pierce and Henry created the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp. to help res
tore their neighborhood, which Pierce dubbed the “black Mayberry.” Together they also started Sterling Farms to bring quality grocery stores to parts of the city where they were scarce.
Their efforts in Pontchartrain Park ran into trouble when Henry and Pierce partnered with an out-of-town developer who failed to deliver on his promises. They had raised millions of dollars, though, and eventually moved ahead with a plan to build geothermal, solar-paneled homes in Pontchartrain Park—despite a lack of support from City Hall. “The last thing Mitch wanted to do,” one former Landrieu appointee said, “is work with Troy on Pontchartrain Park. Mitch hates Troy’s guts.”
Both Henry and Pierce believe the mayor also stood in the way of a Sterling Farms store slated for the Lower Ninth Ward. “Once the city learned me and Wendell were the developers, our financial backers withdrew their support,” Henry said. That was in 2011, six years after the storm.
“The mayor, I learned, is a sore winner,” Henry said. Jacques Morial, who had known Landrieu since they were boys, used that same phrase to describe his old friend. “Mitch could be a great mayor,” Morial said. “People expected the charming, consensus-building type they knew in Baton Rouge. But he’s not governing as mayor that way. He doesn’t look for consensus.” Instead, Morial said, you’re a loyal member of the mayor’s team or you’re part of the problem—in a city Landrieu stressed needed to speak with a single voice. “Frankly,” Morial said, “I see this version of Mitch as a bully.”
CEDRIC GRANT WAS LANDRIEU’S choice for making sure more cranes were in the sky. Grant, a genial black man who had filled top posts under both former mayor Marc Morial and Kathleen Blanco, inherited Ed Blakely’s six-hundred-item wish list and turned it into the one hundred Katrina-related construction projects that Landrieu promised would be completed by the end of his term. Grant stood out as one of Landrieu’s more impressive hires—the man able to apply defibrillator paddles to a recovery that was flatlining. A little more than halfway through the mayor’s term, Grant was so confident that he would deliver on the first hundred ideas by election day that he added another two hundred to the list, including around seventy-five road-repair projects.
Jeff Hebert, the young black man Landrieu put in charge of blight, also proved a smart pick. Charged with returning ten thousand blighted properties to the tax rolls by the end of Landrieu’s term in 2014, Hebert implemented what he called BlightStat, based on the CitiStat crime-tracking system first championed by Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley. “We did calculations on everything from how many inspections we needed in a month to reach our goals to the number of judgments we needed,” Hebert said. He gave iPad-like tablets to the city’s inspectors and created an easy-to-use Web page where residents could file complaints and monitor progress on individual properties. Blight vigilantes such as Rita Legrand in Lakeview appreciated a system that sent out an automatic notice after an inspector visited a site and alerts that let you know when a hearing was scheduled.
Landrieu was the beneficiary of some good timing. He had an ally in the White House in Barack Obama and benefited from the return (prior to his taking office) of the city’s investment-grade bond rating, which allowed New Orleans to borrow at a more favorable interest rate. Cedric Grant also appreciated the work his predecessors had done moving projects to the other side of the state’s eight-foot flow chart. Projects that would become signature Landrieu initiatives—the city money set aside to help draw grocery stores to so-called food deserts, a Soft Second Program to help those $20,000 or $40,000 short of the money they needed to rebuild—were ideas born in Ed Blakely’s shop.
After the ineffectual Nagin, however, Landrieu’s aggressiveness was impressive. That was most obvious in his administration’s pursuit of FEMA dollars long after federal officials figured they had closed the books on New Orleans. Inside FEMA, they might have thought they had completed their block-by-block assessment of the damage to the city’s streets, sidewalks, and buried pipes. To Landrieu and his people, that represented only phase one of an ongoing process. Convinced that the city’s infrastructure was more damaged than FEMA was acknowledging, Grant and his people insisted they open the streets. The city documented every underground leak it found and submitted detailed reports noting the impact of post-storm debris removal on streets, down to the weight of the trucks and the routes each took. Eight years after Katrina, Grant said, someone on his staff was meeting with FEMA at least once a week. Every two weeks, Grant himself sat down with someone from FEMA, and the mayor met monthly with the agency’s regional director. Under Landrieu, Grant claimed, the city wrested an additional $600 million in repair money from FEMA. Sewerage and Water picked up an extra $400 million–plus.
Landrieu was candid about the hard choices he and the city faced. A pair of expensive federal court orders required the city to improve the parish jail and its police department. A state court in 2013 ordered the Landrieu administration to pay $17.5 million to cover its 2012 obligation to the firefighters’ pension fund. He had tried but failed to convince Baton Rouge to let him raise the taxes on hotel stays and cigarettes sold within the city limits. Even with all that additional FEMA money, the city faced the same problems as other municipalities around the country. Those overseeing the city’s libraries were crying out for more money as were those responsible for the city’s parks. That was the challenge of running a US city in the twenty-first century, Landrieu explained to people, especially an older one with a near-infinite list of needs. “Money I spend on street repairs or because a federal judge orders me to,” he said, “means money I can’t spend on police or fire or safety and permits or recreation.”
Yet the other Landrieu was petulant and thin-skinned, obsessive about the smallest details. Gordon Russell, who was city editor of the Times-Picayune through the first couple of years of the Landrieu administration, was always hearing from one of Landrieu’s people about his unhappiness with something in the paper that day. “It’d always be about the smallest stuff,” Russell said. A single paragraph buried deep in a news story, a throwaway item in a reporter’s notebook column. “I’d be almost embarrassed for him,” Russell said. “I’m thinking, ‘Let it go, man. You’re king of the world around here. Why do you care?’ ”
The experiences of people such as Troy Henry started spreading through political circles. Landrieu denied any retribution was behind his dealings with Henry, but others told a similar story. A children’s advocate claimed that after complaining about the city’s parks department, the city blackballed her nonprofit. A local legislator opposed a Landrieu plan to slash the number of judges in Orleans Parish, and the mayor and his people tried to have the man removed as chairman of a local development district. A local lawyer outspoken in her opposition to a new Tulane football stadium saw an end to her contract handling zoning cases for the city.
Tyler Bridges, a reporter for The Lens, an online investigative site focused on New Orleans, collected these and other stories in an article running under the headline “ ‘Enemy for Life’: Mayor Mitch Landrieu Accused of Steamrolling Those Who Disagree with Him.” Confronted with the stories Bridges had collected from the thirty-plus people he had interviewed, Landrieu said, “The record of accomplishment speaks much more loudly than the noise of those people who have been told no.” A more memorable defense, though, came in an e-mail sent around by a political consultant and Landrieu supporter named Cheron Brylski: “There are assholes and then there are PRODUCTIVE assholes. And in politics, the productive ones are often what you need when you have some place to go and no easy road to get there.”
A MILESTONE WAS REACHED in early 2012 when the last of the FEMA trailers were removed from New Orleans. The homes of some people around town were still not finished, but city officials said it was time to rid the neighborhoods of these “eyesores.” Code enforcement inspectors handed out tickets, threats were made, hearings held, and appeals lost. “Another page has turned in New Orleans’s post-Katrina history,” Mitch Landrieu said when FEMA finally decl
ared his a trailer-free city.
Pages were not only turned but eliminated when that spring Times-Picayune publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. announced the newspaper would move to a three-day-a-week publishing schedule (Sunday, Wednesday, Friday).II Seven years after Katrina, New Orleans would rank as the largest US city without a daily newspaper. “I’m glad,” WBOK talk jock John Slade said on the air. “That means the landed Confederate gentry’s megaphone has shrunk.”
The positive news included a $14.5 billion flood-protection system as impressive as it was expensive. The new pumping station the Army Corps of Engineers had built just south of the city was the planet’s largest; a two-mile steel wall was built on the city’s eastern edge to protect New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, and St. Bernard Parish from storm surges. The Corps had built or rebuilt several hundred miles of levees and floodwalls since 2005, along with seventy-three pumping stations and a series of massive gates to seal off waterways ahead of a storm. MR. GO was sealed closed. The naysayers said the Corps had designed its system to withstand a hundred-year storm—that is, a storm that has a 1 percent chance of happening in a given year—not a five-hundred-year storm as some had advocated. Still, what the Corps had built for New Orleans, declared Mark Schleifstein, the Times-Picayune’s longtime hurricane and environmental reporter, was a “far cry from the flawed structures that failed during Hurricane Katrina.” He also declared it “the best flood control system of any coastal community in the United States.”
