New Orleans: A Right to Return?
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
NEW ORLEANS has been challenging the limits of taste for over a century now. It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on Bourbon Street, unadulterated...
...Katrina has produced a peculiar form of homelessness...
...In other cases, rescue workers cut the holes to reach the flood victims inside...
...For many people—among them residents who might favor charter schools under other circumstances—the timing of this policy suggests a blatant attempt to repopulate the city with wealthy and white families...
...Then I wouldn't have to do this...
...Rahim is a former Black Panther...
...The insinuation is that the true culprit behind the disaster was the Army Corps of Engineers...
...Its called Holy Cross...
...Common Ground operates its own free public health clinics...
...Above all, he was angry at the Army Corps of Engineers...
...There is also the dysfunction of families living without resources, sardined in FEMA trailers...
...From the moment I stepped aboard the van I wondered how this tour could escape being awkward...
...In the meantime, the activists start where they can—with the right of people to live where they choose...
...On one hand, Nagin with his breezy, schoolboyish manner is credited by many New Orleanians as feeling the pain of minorities and the dispossessed...
...Aside from the offensiveness of this rapacious rush to evict, the suddenness of rental increases has left most New Orleanians confused and financially strapped...
...The labor on these projects will be 100 percent unionized...
...I mention the love of community that many former residents of the Ninth Ward have expressed in well-publicized testimonials...
...Rising above them, they can see the windows of the units they believe are a partial answer to the housing crunch...
...The oppressive emptiness of the devastated areas is relieved by spurts of activity DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 25 NEW ORLEANS around the trailer villages, shelters, and food lines that relief organizations still maintain...
...This is a mirage, a trick with mirrors...
...It has been suggested that many of these residents of "zones of poverty" will have better, more prosperous lives in other places...
...We're falling right into a right-wing trap...
...Nearer the water, the embankment rises...
...I wanted to immerse myself in a city where I was—like it or not—a visiting journalist...
...Stanley embellished the first few minutes with colorful stories...
...The surface damage is bad enough...
...If they hadn't been there to pick up where FEMA failed, thousands more, he believed, would have been left hungry, homeless, or both...
...There's also, in the Upper Ninth Ward, Habitat for Humanity's Musicians' Village...
...Feelings about home ownership run deep in the American psyche...
...Several have huge dark glasses—they have vision problems...
...You see it at all the meetings, protests, and seminars...
...Private hospitals funneled their trauma patients to Charity, reducing their own workloads and staff requirements...
...For Rent...
...His father—whom he mentioned often during the trip—had been a bartender in the French Quarter...
...Even before I learned this, everything I saw in New Orleans made me wonder how judiciously the federal assistance received thus far is being spent...
...The study criticizes the levee system that lined the entire Gulf Coast...
...The significant point, however, is that it was still, as in so much else, something of an oddity...
...some also gut houses for residents of the demolished zones or operate homeless shelters...
...Neighborhoods Pre-Katrina New Orleans was a city of neighborhoods— with wonderful names that rolled off the tongue like musical notes, resonant with the city's French and Spanish history: Audubon, Broadmoor, Carrolton, Fontainebleau, Marigny, Gentilly, St...
...This is a specious argument that evades the need for a comprehensive social plan...
...This is the environment that thousands of students and volunteers are invading...
...The woman says she has a housing voucher and a three hundred dollar deposit that her landlord returned...
...The architect quoted the biblical passage "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's," and vaguely referred to the possibility of federal dollars...
...They're built like castles—castles for the underprivileged...
...You are not homeless," Rahim says...
...In East Orleans, an area that was deluged by floodwaters, a Vietnamese community has successfully rebounded...
...Common Ground was founded in the weeks after the hurricane by activists Malik Rahim and Scott Crow...
...Shayd then paused and, underlining the passage with his finger, asked the audience to pay particular attention to the last, most important right: The right to return or volNEW ORLEANS untary resettlement, which included the provision that special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration...
...They're returning with little assistance other than their own determination...
...That's what the city is like right now...
...It's a distraction from fighting for the high ground...
...Thousands of volunteers—often college age—occupy the demolished areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, bringing their youthful and idealistic energy...
...If all three grown-up kids have to live in their mama's house, a man on the street asks me, aren't they homeless...
...Mary's Church in the Upper Ninth, the young volunteers live in huge dormitories with shoulderto-shoulder beds...
...In the lobby Common Ground activists enter and exit...
...The progresz 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 sive action groups include People's Hurricane Relief, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), Insight (Women of Color Against Violence), Common Ground, and the Loyola Law Clinic, groups assisting and organizing and strategizing about how best to utilize the organized poor (which can be harder than organizing them)—all beginning with and extending from an emphasis on the right to return and rebuild...
...it was the levees, they're insisting that the water can be trusted...
...I remember seeing some of the church groups before I saw FEMA...
...The Woodlands Housing Complex is located in Algiers...
...Now that we know, it's criminal negligence to put people back in these areas...
...There's little sense of a strict schedule...
...What reigns in New Orleans...
...Finally, he asks about money...
...You'd be lucky to get twenty thousand dollars a house...
...The shoddy levees breached under the weight of what was merely a category 3 hurricane when it hit...
...Sweeping buyouts invoke concerns about gentrification.' Imagine Treme without African Americans or any significant connection to its past—a place that resembles the community of story and song in name only...
...How safe is New Orleans...
...Half answer yes, they want to return...
...To some degree or another, so is most of New Orleans.' Many Houses, Few Homes Disrepair stretches over such large portions of New Orleans that you are reminded of a cautionary sci-fi movie, warning against humanity's nuclear hubris...
...In late June of hurricane season 2006, the halves of his personality came together long enough for him to appear on television and inform New Orleanians of his crime control policy...
...For all the public attention residents of the Lower Ninth have received, the dominant message remains, What a pity...
...At one of several Common Ground headquarters, St...
...FEMA plans to cut funding for a bus, which would leave everyone at the park who doesn't own a car effectively stranded two hours away from New Orleans...
...This is hardly the scene at the camp...
...I boarded the van with skepticism and antipathy, in order to study "up close" an example of crass commercialism (but yes, I did board the van...
...It collapses if you drive too far down Canal Street...
...the facial expressions say, Is it possible, could my depopulated, flood-damaged block become this lovely...
...There is no privacy...
...Stanley's positive words were reserved for the various religious and secular relief organizations and grassroots and political groups that have responded to the crisis...
...4. These questions are not wholly abstract and philosophical...
...Black people moved there because the good high ground had been taken," said Bring New Orleans Back Commission member Barbara Major...
...What about the idea of a federal program that can provide low-income homeowners with permanent homes elsewhere...
...The testimonials address, in a somewhat wide-eyed, simple-minded way, the issue of voyeurism...
...The court decision was the major victory thus far for grassroots activism in New Orleans...
...too few have been offered convincing incentives...
...After the levees breached, the water was so high that people broke through their roofs themselves, saving their lives by climbing on the rooftops...
...All these activities represent the slogan Solidarity, Not Charity in action...
...I don't think they allowed enough room for input from the audience...
...PreKatrina New Orleans had been characterized by a series of developers' schemes in which communities were made promises that were never fulfilled...
...He has a long association with the Green Party...
...It couldn't, and the awkwardness built...
...Even if you do have health insurance, medical access is dicey...
...We park and walk down Florida Avenue...
...THE CLOSER you are to the water, the safer you are...
...I'm here to say that before you start planning and urban design—light rails and all that stuff—first you need to think about how to bring people back...
...Hurricane season finds New Orleans under siege again—now by neoconservative solutions and a piranha-like attempt to privatize, raise costs, and gentrify...
...The policy was a preposterous injustice at a time when so many residents were refugees scattered across the country, without access to necessary information...
...His skepticism gnawed at him whenever we passed a FEMA trailer community—temporary housing for dispossessed Louisianans...
...The push behind the reconstruction seems to be a dream of a "crime free," gentrified New Orleans or, more simply, a thuggish animus against the poor...
...He shivered, smoked, shivered, and tried to regain his composure...
...someone asked, and the question produced a ripple of chuckles...
...The organization depends upon volunteers—transient residents—and to many their sheer youth calls into question how well they appreciate the significance of the work they have been called to do...
...This makes a psychological impression, increasing your sense of having been dumped down a hollow, entrapped...
...Will there be federal assistance directed at homeowners to rectify this egregiously misguided notion...
...That's why they wanted poor people here...
...The former residents serve food, share stories, talk about old times and their old lives...
...Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco issued a temporary ban on evictions, but when the ban expired in October 2005, landlords promptly began filing eviction notices—in excess of a thousand a day...
...Inside, however, they are all moldy, mucky, and unlivable...
...Or, worse, like actors playing preassigned roles...
...A city cannot function without a middle class...
...He spoke about his own community, Tremê, famous in the history of jazz...
...The former residents say the four together easily housed several thousand people...
...The occasional naysayer has written, I'm outta here...
...There are people here after all...
...Is it all sentimentality...
...The economic squeeze over living space began a month after Katrina...
...What was I supposed to do with money...
...If no place to sit is available, they drop to the floor, stretch out, and read a magazine...
...The housing crunch weighs over New Orleans like a dense fog...
...The project was torn down in the late nineties with assurances from developers that mixed-income housing would replace it...
...Very informative...
...Instead construction contracts have gone to corporations (Halliburton, the Bechtel Corporation) with close connections to the Bush administration...
...he asks...
...It is the site of fewer than a hundred affordable housing units...
...Simple observation tells you that 70 percent of the city, which includes communities of widely varying economic status, is damaged...
...it wasn't...
...The "new" New Orleans faces new problems and is, once again, ignoring them, with the same results...
...He was angry at the Federal Emergency Management Administration...
...2. The AFL-CIO plan is to invest seven hundred million dollars in affordable housing along the Gulf Coast, as well as in corporate developments such as hotels...
...It's easy to spot Common Ground activists...
...The Urban Land Institute suggested that the city should have a "smaller footprint," and the phrase stuck...
...Several of the devastated black communities were professional middle class...
...The very image of water, on the way to the Ninth, suggested danger...
...What are the rights of people whose communities have disappeared...
...Residents— many fifty and older—show signs of the weariness of their semi-transient existences...
...Violent crime in New Orleans is on the rise...
...Rahim talks about Woodlands as a cooperative, with several of the apartment units becoming businesses whose profits 30 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 will be funneled hack into services, such as day care, for the residents...
...Roughly half the schools scheduled to open in Orleans Parish in September (and, at the time of this writing, that number is still uncertain) will be charter schools managed by private sponsors...
...To reach the Lower Ninth Ward, the most photographed of the devastated areas, you must cross a small drawbridge over an industrial canal...
...I cannot begin to express the impact of this tour...
...Thank you...
...It is rare to find people with such strong feelings about home and place as you find in New Orleans...
...Homeowners from the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards sit in lawn chairs in a FEMA trailer village...
...Not a right to get blown away in the next hurricane...
...New Orleanians are, however slowly, returning— even with an understanding of the dangers they face...
...For weeks, while people were desperate, just for some food, or a place to stay, I don't remember seeing them...
...New Orleanians know them as locales of the city's public housing developments— huge, two- and three-story brick edifices that have produced several of America's best-known gangsta rappers...
...The Lower Ninth was a community with a high percentage of older residents whose pride lay in this idea—people for whom images of home ownership opposed images of derelict poverty just as the concept of African American family unity opposed the stereotype of the shiftless black profligate...
...Common Ground has its critics...
...Besides, an apartment complex—even in a so-called nice area—isn't what they've lost, or what they hope to have restored...
...What are they thinking...
...Why should anyone return to the catastrophe areas...
...If her story is true, he doubts there will be an apartment waiting for her...
...I accompanied some of them to the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Association meeting...
...Would he rather people come to New Orleans and see only the Quarter, I asked rhetorically, but he answered, "I kind of wish people still only wanted to see the Quarter...
...If the tour could provide, to any extent, an authentic experience, then we looked like foolish innocents...
...Or rather, my skeptical feelings paled in comparison to the pleading gazes place after place cast back at us...
...He seems to me an extremely self-conflicted figure, seesawing back and forth between emotive outbursts that 34 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 position him as a "man of the people" and policy decisions that return him to the safety of conservative arms...
...but he is a doer and a mover...
...The protest signs protrude from the ground like a valley of spears...
...All four developments have been shut down since Katrina...
...For the lone nonhomeowner, they also discuss renters' rights...
...Locals can see their demarcations, but for outsiders it is difficult...
...But noting the complexity of the pattern gives a truer picture of the human dimensions of this tale...
...Bernard— where the exiles of St...
...And most of these questions remain relevant whether or not you believe the Gulf Coast should remain inhabited...
...To generations of homeowners in the Lower Ninth, "smaller footprint" was a thinly veiled plot to exploit the tragedy of Katrina and free up space for corporate development, condominiums, and casinos...
...Common Ground's latest initiative is the Woodlands Housing Complex...
...There is yet another dynamic influencing the social tenor, making this city so known for its decadence possibly the most socially conscious city in America...
...The reconstruction of the Gulf Coast was an excellent opportunity for a massive jobs and job training program, putting residents to work...
...Claude...
...What about low income homeowners' right to profit—just like homeowners in other areas—from the increased real estate values of the "new" New Orleans...
...There is no way we can ever protect these neighborhoods...
...The urban planner had nothing more to say...
...It requires diligent maintenance...
...The architect's speech was followed by a presentation by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund...
...Its admissions strengthen the impetus for a national discussion about DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 33 NEW ORLEANS Katrina that focuses on people's rights...
...There are two responses...
...So say his critics...
...They didn't have a decent grocery store...
...Or, more aptly, he was traumatized...
...How on earth are you gonna rebuild that...
...nature creates its own permanent levees...
...his supporters say there's little he can do...
...He was skeptical that the levees were being restored in good faith...
...Solidarity, Not Charity aspires to engage the country in questions such as, What about the right of homeowners and residents to be involved in decisions about their communities...
...Huge swatches of New Orleans are now sparsely populated...
...The urban planner remained hawkishly stoical about the destruction thus far...
...Of course, several concerned funding issues...
...The point, beyond that, was that Shayd was living on hope...
...Simultaneously, lawyers for various groups took the DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 29 NEW ORLEANS city to court and prevailed...
...but I think that character is better judged by the numbers who have returned to the city...
...The mirage sustains itself as long as you stay near the Mississippi River, as though the light reflected off its waters blinds you...
...ACORN attempts to restore the population of the Lower Ninth to viable levels...
...If the rule of thumb is that the poorer you were, the more likely you were to live in jeopardy, it holds up here...
...The crazy quilt of Crescent City neighborhoods is visible in meetings sponsored by Lambert Advisory, hired by the Orleans Parish City Council to help neighborhoods develop reconstruction strategies...
...To reach this place so associated with Katrina's violence, you first NEW ORLEANS climb higher on the bridge, then you drop...
...While I was initially concerned about being a tourist in these devastated areas, I now have a firsthand perspective on what happened...
...if Charity isn't reopened (and every day that passes increases the possibility that it won't be), it is doubtful that a system of privatized health care NEW ORLEANS and Medicare assistance can match this statistic...
...But this truism was already untrue in pre-Katrina New Orleans, which looked more and more like most racially segregated and class-stratified American cities...
...They returned believing they had an apartment, but the landlord now says the apartment won't be ready for another three weeks...
...Russell continues to insist that the Lower Ninth is unlivable...
...The very concept of a "disaster tour" is carnivalesque and slightly criminal...
...Because the schoolteachers' union has been broken, most Parish schoolteachers won't be rehired...
...But there were houses—rows of houses, houses so close together that you could imagine them rubbing elbows or shaking hands...
...The second and third stories remain habitable...
...That's why they fared so badly...
...As you travel to mid-city neighborhoods such as Broadmoor and beyond, the situation worsens to a degree that, if you initially began in the tourist districts, you wouldn't have thought possible...
...The above paragraphs read like a litany of complaints...
...Though this is a camp, not a lawyer's office, their concerns contradict the impression of the generic, empty-handed, disposable poor, people as migratory as flocks of birds...
...This is why the post-Katrina closure of Charity hospital—save for a few temporary adjuncts—has had disastrous effects...
...In early June 2006, if you drove by St...
...the group decides to attempt to fund their own shuttle service for residents of the various FEMA trailer camps...
...An architect projected a map of the Lower Ninth restored, a vision of the future of the community...
...Private hospitals struggle to take care of the Charity Hospital overflow, worsened by an influx of Latino laborers who generally lack insurance...
...It's something of a mystery even in New Orleans what Nagin is actually doing...
...Common Ground activists stood in front of the houses to prevent the bulldozings...
...Bernard are commonplace narratives...
...There is also criticism from the conservative side...
...They want the gumbo...
...Malik's manner is avuncular and informal...
...Now permanent guidelines 26 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 regarding home elevation have been released, but homeowners find them hard to understand...
...From reading certain popular fashion magazines, full of the glitz that still characterizes the French Quarter, you could get the impression that New Orleans is resurrected—with the exception of a few rough patches, mostly in poor neighborhoods that the "new" New Orleans can live without...
...This failure of human ingenuity has left New Orleans weighted with distrust...
...The Lower Ninth used to be a plantation...
...Jerry Ward, a professor at Dillard University, commented to me, "I attended a neighborhood meeting to see what they had planned for DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 27 NEW ORLEANS the area where I live...
...the redeveloped St...
...Cooper off Earhart Boulevard, and Lafitte near Faubourg Treme...
...On a sultry June day, I have an opportunity to witness this pride in home ownership firsthand...
...The very day of the meeting, the AFL-CIO had announced its intentions to purchase two hundred blighted homes in the Treme neighborhood...
...What are the rights of victims of natural disasters?—assuming Katrina was a natural disaster...
...It's true, as Russell Henderson says, that in the Lower Ninth there were no banks, not even a major supermarket...
...I'm there with members of Curtis Muhammad's People's Organizing Committee...
...He remembered the weeks after the hurricane when food and supplies were scarce...
...Today, a Wal-Mart occupies the former site...
...Peet in Central City, B.W...
...There is general confusion over the rights of homeowners...
...Nonetheless, Khalil feared for the fate of his community in the district planning process...
...This is not my favorite tour...
...That is ethically and morally wrong...
...Charity Hospital offered free public health care to Louisianans for generations...
...They all offer brief explanations...
...We had these very glib people coming from a very high-powered planning firm...
...Solidarity, Not Charity means reframing the dialogue about Katrina and the seven hundred thousand former residents of scattered Gulf Coast communities...
...The saying expresses a sense of strength and stability in living close to nature...
...In Gentilly, the first area we passed through that was genuinely ravaged, the houses resembled rows of dominos toppled over...
...But understand, we're concentrating the city's resources in the areas that are in the immediate recovery zone...
...then the woman confesses— still in a robotic voice directed to the floor— that her fourteen-year-old daughter is pregnant...
...The health care service that exists at present is severely understaffed...
...He won reelection, then disappeared from view...
...There will be no heat, electricity, or water inside...
...He teases us that we're distracting him from other business, but if he gets a chance he'll sit down with us and play Old Maid, the children's card game...
...Post-Katrina television images make it too easy to conflate blackness and poverty in New Orleans...
...The issue," it's clear, is a very large black woman, her head lowered in an attitude of shame and despair...
...I wanted help more than I wanted money...
...The previous owner, a private landlord, left many units in shoddy condition...
...The federal government neglected to up24 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 grade the levees and led the public to believe the existing system was reliable...
...It was a community that existed for the sake of its homes...
...it is the people, period...
...These questions—which must of course precede the answers—extend from seeing the post-Katrina tumult in terms of rights, not charity...
...Members of the German delegation shook their heads and whispered anti-American comments under their breath...
...Then he made a comment that I would hear repeated in various forms DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 23 NEW ORLEANS throughout my stay in New Orleans...
...The traffic on the streets lessens as you approach the breached canal levees until the emptiness is significant, and neighborhood after neighborhood consists overwhelmingly of unoccupied houses...
...They lived in areas—among them some of the poorest areas, such as the Lower Ninth Ward—that were not considered flood risks according to federal insurance maps...
...The low ground is the basin of the bowl, more susceptible to flooding, havoc, and death...
...The city's neighborhoods were charismatic settings with their own miniature, eccentric histories...
...It's often about immediate assistance—offering food, protesting evictions, gutting houses—and the philosophical dimensions of the action exist somewhere over the horizon...
...There is something secretive about many New Orleans neighborhoods...
...He visited New Orleans in the summer of 2006...
...Generally no older than twenty-five, they color the landscape with a blur of vivid T-shirts, braids, dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings...
...Except in an aerial photograph that would render the individual homes as dots, it would not be possible to convey the wreckage in a single shot...
...Mary's headquarters at any time of day or night, you can probably find a meal...
...It was "too much...
...Most of what you had in the Ninth Ward was flimsy, disposable housing...
...See if she's clean," Rahim says, presumably referring to drug use...
...Break down a door, unscrew a window...
...Whereas many relief workers wear uniforms, they dress as they please...
...We started with a tour of the Quarter and the levees that ran adjacent to the Mississippi River...
...Healthy attendance at the meetings suggests a significant rise in the level of civic responsibility...
...Though nearer the water (which surrounds the bowl), the high ground sits above sea level...
...I know the houses look like they're about to fall down, but they've been around for two hundred years, and they aren't going anywhere...
...All volunteers in New Orleans eventually find their way to the politicized Lower Ninth (which sits across an industrial canal from the Upper Ninth...
...You're making decisions about neighborhoods that aren't your own...
...The Army Corps of Engineers' recent internal investigation has confirmed that its own negligence played a considerable role in the disaster...
...it may strike outsiders as capturing the peculiar charisma of New Orleans—a city of macabre dualities...
...Solidarity expresses a sense of rights...
...The woman speaks in a robotic monotone...
...This background is essential to understanding the resistance psychology and, despite its poverty, the pride of the Ninth Wards...
...To stay at Woodlands, he explains, she will eventually be expected to work in the community...
...But they're here to talk about their rights...
...They wear sagging clothes and pajamas...
...For example, FEMA by law can only provide temporary housing and shelter...
...This can mean such rights as freedom of speech and assembly, but in the Lower Ninth the bedrock of this concept was in homeowners' rights...
...You could tell that the 'haves' had already adopted an attitude toward the 'havenots.' For the have-nots, this kind of environment wasn't within their purview...
...Prior to projecting the image, he jockeyed questions...
...If we found it easier to imagine him discoursing on a subject less grave, so did he...
...Isn't it ironic that we're fighting to come back to this...
...Scandalously, a $6.3 million FEMA grant is being used to repair the Superdome (the famous football stadium and infamous Katrina shelter) while health care languishes...
...One also wishes it would expose the myth that a city characterized by general uncertainty over the future of housing, health, education, and livability can be stabilized...
...It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on Bourbon Street, unadulterated raunchiness...
...Rahim asks the supervisor to make a double unit available at no extra cost...
...Bernard plan to live until the Department of Housing and Urban Development listens to them—is neighborly...
...The small encampment is a protest movement...
...But this information is necessary to understand the day-to-day stress of life in New Orleans...
...This tour has a noticeable advantage over the others—you're escorted in a relatively intimate and compact van rather than a bus...
...But many are offended by the spate of disaster tours currently available from local tour companies...
...I thought the people who had been brought in to do the planning were exceptionally skilled...
...The breaches that resulted in the catastrophe of August 29, 2005, were in the levees that lined the canals, "artificial" bodies of water created over the last two centuries for purposes of drainage and, ironically, safety...
...They talk about the absence of a plan, how HUD has told them to wait, but given them no solutions in the meantime...
...In the Lower Ninth Ward, returning residents live in generator-powered trailers...
...We couldn't put her in one of the shelters...
...The Lower Ninth, in fact, has a middle-class area that sits on the high ground...
...The public school system of New Orleans has been eviscerated in favor of radical privatization...
...Henderson points to an ACORN No Demolitions sign, then gestures in exasperation at the wreckage the sign watches over...
...Doubtless there are developers in the wings with images of transforming New Orleans into a playground for the rich...
...Driving on, we felt as though the ground curved beneath us...
...Before, we didn't know what could happen...
...The enthusiasm was not merely an expression of self-interest...
...A chain smoker, Stanley began to take frequent cigarette breaks...
...Bernard in Gentilly, C.J...
...The big issue today is transportation...
...The last official commentary on the rights of homeowners remains the lengthy, but vaguely worded report of Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which discouraged rebuilding in the devastated areas and threatened homeowners with eminent domain...
...I was told by personnel at two humanitarian relief organizations that as charities they preferred to avoid contention and shunned association with Common Ground, whose activities were "too political...
...A supervisor at Woodlands asks Rahim to come to her office and "resolve an issue...
...The performance center would restore their neighborhood and raise their real estate values...
...In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete and inconsistent patchwork of protection, flawed in design and construction, and not built to handle a hurricane anywhere near the size of Katrina," writes John Schwartz in the June 2 New York Times...
...His vision of Woodlands conjures images of Fidel Castro talking about the new world after the revolution...
...The Lower Ninth is a distraction...
...Boundaries blur together, twist, and confuse— fittingly for the city that's the birthplace of jazz and gumbo...
...Conservative pundits will of course blame the crime rise on the character of New Orleanians...
...some combine all this with political agitation...
...Certainly the tent village outside St...
...We descend the drawbridge into the Lower Ninth...
...The situation appears resolved...
...Areas that were completely submerged...
...No doubt Stanley gave tours of several kinds every week...
...What's certain is that he has not spelled out a plan of action to replace the failed Bring New Orleans Back Commission...
...To New Orleanians, "the water" means natural bodies such as the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain...
...What has to happen before the UN steps in...
...You're making decisions about people who aren't here and are powerless...
...but in this case, the local residents aren't laughing...
...First, opinions about the safety of the restored levees vary (furthermore, new floodgates have been added to the levees) and, second, the grassroots activists do have a big picture...
...In the early months after the hurricane, the Commission and the Urban Land Institute, a development firm, raised the possibility of invoking powers of eminent domain to convert the Ninth Ward, East Orleans, and possibly other areas into a greenbelt—parks and swamps surrounding and providing environmental safety for the high ground...
...It is easy to parody Stanley...
...The size of the complex is impressive: sixteen four- and six-story buildings surrounding a courtyard...
...The POC meeting continues with a discussion of various committees and various strategies for using the media...
...It's a "new civil rights movement" if the new civil rights frontier is economic justice...
...DISSENT I Fall 2006 n 3 I NEW ORLEANS There's a drawbridge—if you lift the bridge you can blockade the whole area...
...It is difficult to admit, but the five-hour tour in the crowded van—the effect of intimacy and tragedy—somehow deflected my skepticism...
...The audience response was sympathetic and enthusiastic...
...A larger, more serious conversation on rights and reparations isn't happening because the country's attention has been insufficiently engaged...
...by that time there were already reports of landlords "clearing house" by evicting their absent tenants...
...The nervous laughter acknowledged the unlikelihood of UN intervention...
...The Lower Ninth is a resistance site, and Common Ground is at the forefront of the resistance...
...People's Hurricane Relief Fund protests FEMA funding cuts (FEMA seems to announce new cuts or a change in guidelines on a weekly basis...
...Moderately wealthy and predominantly white Lake View was horrifically devastated and sits in low-lying ground near the breached 17th St...
...Tell Malik your story," the supervisor says...
...The air seems thicker...
...The activist energy burgeoning in New Orleans has been hesitantly spoken of as a "new civil rights movement...
...They suggest specific policies and programs...
...This was a large part of New Orleans' misfit charm in an America with a whitewashed historical consciousness...
...THE HEALTH CARE infrastructure of New Orleans is tenuous...
...Imagine ten times more flat tires, but ten times fewer places to fix your car...
...Henderson raises an issue that confuses people throughout the country...
...To all questions regarding the socioeconomic impact of public housing versus mixed income housing, they have a simple answer: public housing is better than no housing...
...The City Council divided New Orleans into thirteen planning districts and assigned each district architects and urban planners to assist with the task of producing viable community visions...
...I will not forget...
...Harry Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis are helping to sponsor the construction of a massive music and performance center...
...It is the influx of relief organizations...
...If you drop by the St...
...The former residents resent the gate that bars them from returning home...
...In the middle of the tour, he confessed, "I gotta tell you...
...The performance center will be accompanied by a revived neighborhood, constructed under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity, two hundred or more small houses with low mortgage payments for dispossessed New Orleanians...
...It's hurricane season...
...he hangs in a state of stasis—and so, unfortunately, does New Orleans...
...The ostensible intention is to remake the troubled Orleans Parish school system by attracting the "best and brightest" students and teachers...
...A young activist named Khalil Shayd addressed the group...
...They want the music...
...Public housing developments aren't included in the neighborhood planning process, but former residents believe they should be...
...Activism at this level is always a work in progress...
...The old New Orleans dealt with poverty, disenfranchisement, and economic desperation by ignoring them...
...They're all full...
...People hidden away—just as so much of the condition of New Orleans is hidden in the shadows...
...Bernard in Gentilly, you would see a dozen tents pitched outside the housing complex...
...The plural "houses," moreover, is radically insufficient...
...Like father, like son...
...The canals are monuments to human engineering and ambition...
...But for the past nine months, a gate has surrounded St...
...3. Its generally known by now that the areas that were razed by Katrina floodwaters were predominantly black and usually low income...
...When the levee walls breached, the conflicted emotions poured out...
...All you needed to live the good life in New Orleans was a lawn chair and a cooler," recalls a former resident for whom New Orleans was a relatively inexpensive city that encouraged culture, provided neighborliness, and was tolerant of individualism and extravagance...
...the less apparent infrastructural damage languishes, patchily repaired, meaning that the true condition of most of New Orleans is a plight...
...Homeowners, or How Should the Left Move...
...What do you think is going to happen to those trailers if another hurricane hits...
...In this group of approximately twenty, only one person identifies himself as a renter...
...if you go there you will find standing homes...
...The activists begin the meeting by asking how many in attendance want to return to their old communities and how many would like to move elsewhere...
...Some groups focus exclusively on food programs (still sorely needed...
...Malik Rahim escorted me and several other journalists on a tour of the facilities...
...I didn't even see FEMA...
...It goes against common sense...
...The suddenness and extremity of this attack is straining the city's middle class to the breaking point...
...Then he projected, against a white screen, the dreams of the dispossessed...
...the words of politicians can't...
...If even half the population has returned, the rate has exceeded the estimates on which the Bring New Orleans Back Commission based its "smaller footprint" proposal...
...He was like a levee himself...
...Ray Nagin and Beyond If one man symbolizes the conflict between soul and commerce in New Orleans, it is Mayor Ray Nagin...
...The environment is suffused with the communal ethos of an experiment in alternative living...
...But the minute a little electricity got turned back on, I got phone calls from them asking me if I needed money...
...The publicized rebuilding of New Orleans has focused too exclusively on presentation...
...She's got a pregnant child, Malik," the supervisor warns, after the woman has pulled two hundred dollars from her blouse and left the room...
...That's our culture...
...I support the methods and the goals of grassroots groups in New Orleans...
...The campsite numbers swell as the sun descends, peaking at three dozen...
...it was a land grab...
...Imagine New Orleans as a great cultural artifact, priceless and irreplaceable, crumbling to sand and muck, while a few thousand lovers of culture across the world watch in helpless horror...
...There is a kind of selfishness that's beginning to kick in that says this process is all about me and upper-class people like me...
...it says nothing about rights...
...In the early months after the hurricane, the city planned to bulldoze about a thousand houses in the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards...
...However, he argues with the goals of the grassroots left...
...The shock isn't so much the nonstop traffic of people coming to pick up food and materials...
...New Orleans pre-Katrina was also a city of entrenched poverty and crime statistics so high that many residents remain scarred by memories of murders committed in their own backyards...
...for a period he withstood the pressure...
...What about the idea of easing poverty by rebuilding stronger communities...
...I suspect the latter is particularly true for members of the most anarchistically spirited of the groups, Common Ground...
...And that was part of the problem...
...Now fifty-seven, he is a large man with graying, shoulder-length dreadlocks, sometimes described as a folk hero...
...They're also fighting a slew of less visible enemies—privatization, gentrification, and land appropriation—with limited options, as the city seems on its way to becoming, in journalist Jordan Flaherty's words, "a landscape for social experimentation by rightwing privatizers...
...When I talked to Jim Pate, director of Habitat for Humanity, he told me stories of how homeowners nearby who had been waffling over the decision to return now felt reinvigorated...
...As usual, most homeowners believe that the insurance dollars are insufficient...
...Not if the landlord has returned her deposit...
...How much better off is a fifty- or sixty-year-old who used to have a house, but now lives a semi-transient existence?' It is a principle of Solidarity, Not Charity that all rights should be respected...
...How high should I elevate my home...
...the home could be razed days later...
...Common Ground has lowered the rents by two hundred to four hundred dollars, depending on the size of the unit, with the agreement that current and future residents will work on groundskeeping and renovations...
...Although affordable housing is welcomed and needed, many in the activist community remain wary of massive development schemes...
...Some find a sense of purpose...
...Pre-Katrina, Charity Hospital serviced 66 percent of New Orleans' uninsured...
...I can look at you and see a cook," he teases her...
...Every house that is rebuilt in the Lower Ninth is a commentary on the absence of a larger conversation...
...Something is amiss when you pull into a Burger King drivein and no one comes to take your order ; the building is a husk...
...In response to a string of murders, Nagin called several hundred National Guard troops back into the city...
...in short, it would ease lingering doubts that their community could come back...
...Only the first floors received water damage...
...Other groups have specific admission policies...
...Every third house is scrawled with graffiti...
...I've been a tour guide twenty years and until this happened I don't think I once had anybody ask me to take them to the Ninth Ward," Stanley told us, as we reassured him that he was doing important work...
...Smaller footprint" wasn't environmental social policy...
...1. Roughly a third of homeowners in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina lacked flood insurance altogether...
...In the end, we had become like the voices of those Web site testimonials...
...This reasoning leaves social policy to the vagaries of chance...
...No Demolitions, they say...
...as opposed to What are their rights and how can we respect their rights...
...Henderson believes the No Demolitions movement faces an insurmountable roadblock—geology...
...Though the Lower Ninth is one of many flood-damaged neighborhoods, nowhere else is littered with so many signs...
...But he was mad, had been mad, still was...
...The project is ambiguous at heart, however, for no money has been allocated to enact the neighborhood visions...
...Federal funds (Community Block Development Grants) have been allocated for homeowner assistance...
...It isn't the visible homelessness of the streets of urban America...
...But it's no accident that all the activists share Solidarity, Not Charity as a guiding principle...
...Urban planning is a dry subject, but in meeting after meeting residents lean attentively toward the speakers...
...It was early June, the beginning of hurricane season...
...Henderson is a third-generation New Orleanian...
...He was, of course, speaking of the diaspora of New Orleanians scattered across the country, underlining the point that, although all neighborhoods are allowed to rebuild, the poorer neighborhoods are at a disadvantage given the absence of so many residents and the absence of fiscal resources...
...Pretty names, but not just names...
...The other passengers on the tour consisted of an urban planner from Washington, several "regular folks" from different states who had no motive other than curiosity, and a group of Germans...
...Malik asks for two hundred— single apartment units at Woodlands rent at four hundred a month—and tells the woman to keep the rest for herself...
...Treme was badly flooded, but hardly leveled...
...he ran on the Green Party ticket in the last mayoral primaries...
...It's too dangerous," he says as we drive together through the disaster sites...
...It also cannot function without a class of people willing to work at service jobs...
...But this animus risks destabilizing New Orleans for a long time to come...
...Canal...
...Flood insurance was optional...
...His manner is all charm, protective, even coddling, whatever his suspicions may be, and despite the woman's refusal to meet his eyes...
...Only in New Orleans could a tragedy responsible for over one thousand deaths in Louisiana become a vaudeville show...
...But the levees failed...
...Thomas is a high-end community named River Gardens...
...The woman only wants a place to stay for three weeks, whereas at Woodlands they usually rent apartments by the month...
...The following names and locations will mean nothing to most of America: St...
...The left-wing activists of New Orleans have a slogan: Solidarity, Not Charity...
...And what about next hurricane season...
...But from this point on, his breezy élan faltered...
...Henderson tells me he would like to show me warehouses and vacant space near the French Quarter and elsewhere that could be transformed into housing complexes in decent, safe environments...
...Not a right to go back to where they were set up to die...
...What you see in this city littered with FEMA trailers and wreckage is the ironic juxtaposition of thousands of abandoned houses, but few homes...
...The Lambert Group meetings take place alongside a slew of programs on home rebuilding, city reconstruction, and race, class, and equity issues that anybody can attend in any given week...
...The organization has purchased a sixteen-building complex with a total of 350 apartment units...
...at some point you'll notice the streetlights have stopped working...
...These rights include the right to basic shelter and housing and the right to compensation...
...When they say It wasn't the hurricane that killed us...
...These stories of Woodlands and St...
...It's a postapocalyptic reality...
...others find a sense of liberation...
...The problem in a nutshell is that too few doctors and nurses have returned...
...We'll try to provide you with support as best we can...
...It's a geographical pattern that's been established by prejudice, capitalism, and Darwinian instinct...
...All this attention to the Lower Ninth, the Lower Ninth...
...I'm coming back...
...he held them primarily responsible for a disaster that was to his mind unarguably man-made...
...It is not uncommon for apartments in the French Quarter to rent at rates three times higher than before Katrina...
...The driver was Stanley, a short, mustached, talkative New Orleans native...
...He shakes his head and sighs...
...Former St...
...To race-conscious critics with long histories in the grueling work of civil rights coalition-building, Common Ground activists exude a sometimes insufferable air of white privilege: relatively affluent or at least middle-class young people with the freedom to take a holiday in faux third world New Orleans...
...My impression is that at Common Ground anyone can come off the street and bunk down wherever there is space...
...What about the idea that federal money should be handed out in proportion to the devastation an area received, not in proportion to the value of the homes...
...Bernard...
...Isabelle's Web site features a section entitled "testimonials," where you can read impressions from previous riders...
...Rampant greed is shortsighted, however, if it fails to note that an understaffed city without a health care infrastructure isn't a city that can attract the right kinds of investments to sustain an economic boom...
...The van circled the Central Business District, picking up ten of us...
...It was once known as a city with a "checkerboard" pattern of race and class that saw rich, poor, white, black, and Creole living in close proximity...
...I'm gonna tell you something real funny about this city...
...Tours by Isabelle" promises to bring you "up close" to the disaster...
...When you look at the big picture, I believe that this is all a plot to drive poor people out of New Orleans," says Curtis Muhammad...
...The makeshift facility was filled with patients who had waited longer...
...Neoconservatism, commerce, or just confusion...
...The law now states that the city must make vigorous efforts to contact homeowners: it must mail notifications and publish notices in the paper and on a Web site developed specifically for this purpose...
...Those who wish to return invariably begin by saying, "I own my home and . . ." A strange duality...
...The most typical is, Leave my house alone...
...Stanley chirped, "My father used to tell me, kid, if there's a hurricane, get to the Quarter...
...No better example of a situation of "too many nails, too few garages" can be offered than a visit I paid to a Charity adjunct facility with health care activist Brad Ott, who requires post-stroke treatment...
...You could easily imagine Stanley, with his effervescence and heavy Cajun accent, regaling patrons...
...Thomas Housing Project...
...This will not only make a difference in my life, but also my students...
...We waited eight hours and left without his seeing a physician...
...He hopes to see the city restored...
...The right wing knows these are the most dangerous places to live...
...Stanley used the often-made analogy between New Orleans and a bowl: the high ground is the rim of the bowl...
...The neighborhood meetings are nonetheless a vehicle for residents to vent frustrations, rethink positions, and attempt to come to terms with their confusion about the future...
...It's unsettling to drive through East Orleans and see so few people and then to visit the food donation centers...
...When people say The closer you are to the water, the safer you are, they are acknowledging that engineering, however impressive, comes with a price...
...And the only way to save that is to bring the people back...
...However, Nagin himself compromised the authority of the report by saying that anyone in any area can rebuild...
...Among the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, some may find better lives...
...He did not refer specifically to the Ninth Ward, but the issues he raised apply there...
...Bernard residents—some now homeless—are demanding the reopening of the facility...
...I raised a question about the Ninth Ward, and the reaction was so negative, Darryl, that I blurted out, 'Are we all just going to sit here and watch the Ninth Ward become a large cemetery...
...The extremity of a situation that requires the National Guard should expose the myth that New Orleans is stabilized...
...Charles area—occupy zones of relative safety...
...What I'm saying is this: they have a right to return to New Orleans, not a right to return to the Lower Ninth Ward...
...Alongside flyers for the ubiquitous jazz and voodoo tours, there are foldouts blazoned with such headings as "Katrina: America's Worst Disaster...
...Can you cook...
...Activity lessens, like a body that tires, slows, and stumbles...
...And FEMA still has people living in trailers...
...New Orleans is filled with people who were deported to Houston or other cities, have now returned, but have no place to stay...
...You can witness eyes light up as architects unveil plans...
...Then you'll start to have flat tires...
...I call it left-wing nihilism...
...The scenic neighborhoods—the Quarter, the Central Business District, the St...
...However, as of this writing—in the middle of hurricane season 2006 the grant procedure is still being argued by the Louisiana legislature, and not a penny has been mailed to a single homeowner...
...Rahim is black...
...You're looking at a pile of rubble," says Common Ground activist Brandon Darby, "but to someone else that was a home...
...These prevalent feelings of safety in relation to nature, but danger and distrust in relation to human artifice, delineate a situation that some describe as a struggle to preserve the historic soul of the Crescent City...
...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 35...
...One reason that the Ninth Ward has assumed a large symbolic significance in the activist movement is that, in the months after Katrina, it stung former residents to hear their communities referred to again and again as "zones of poverty," considering that for genera32 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 tions the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward have been characterized by high some say amazingly high—rates of home ownership...
...It isn't a scene you associate with the propertied classes...
...Stanley called our attention to the holes in the roofs...
...There still wasn't any place to buy food...
...Nagin later tabled the idea, and on March 19, 2006, gave a speech that has been summed up as, "Rebuild, but at your own risk...
...But even without this warning, what you see thereafter will affect you: houses lifted from their foundations as though they had been punished by terrifying winds rather than tumultuous waters...
...All these activist groups are gutting houses that people will never live in," says Russell Henderson, a professor and lawyer who was involved in the tenants' rights fight to stymie postKatrina evictions...
...if you want to find a roof to sleep under, it's easy...
...Until June, FEMA flood maps outlining these guidelines were "provisional...
...If we were shocked, hadn't we expected to be shocked...
...I don't like doing this...
...I'm not a part of the romance of the Lower Ninth...
...One might think that nothing could offend the residents of New Orleans...
...Prejudiced against the tour, I took it to study the anxiety of life in New Orleans nine months after Katrina and to figure out how—given that anxiety—such a tour was possible...
...Open one of these, and the ad copy invites you to reexperience the tragedy, to share the pain...
...The closer you are to the water, the safer you are...
...The POC activists hold weekly meetings in the trailer parks...
...Not their sense of community and their need for community relations or proprietary attachments—their actual communities...
...Katrina floodwaters didn't touch this area of New Orleans, but in every sense this innovative project responds to the post-Katrina housing shortage...
...As you move away from the Mississippi River, away from the edges of the city and toward the center, you sink...
...some are large enough for ships to pass through...
...The law at that time was that the city merely needed to place a red sticker on the door...
...Russell Henderson charges grassroots activists with lacking a sense of the big picture...
...It's commonplace to hear stories of residents having to drive an hour out of the city to receive care...
...You'll find brochures for them in the lobbies of upscale motels in the French Quarter and the Central Business District...
...The complex was already in use at the time of purchase...
...The word homeowner conjures visions of middle-class stability...
...It's insufficient to put poor people back into poor and dangerous communities...
...it would be easy to parody us—bleeding heart liberals, disaster chasers, or middlebrow intellectuals...
...Charity was an unusually large and proactive center that was also the primary trauma unit of New Orleans...
...His words pair in my mind images of New Orleans and the Buddhist sculptures in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, exploded, in 2001, by the Taliban...
...There is also a flow of applicants—all black—coming to ask about apartments...
...They didn't have a bank...
...They're aimed to ease the moral qualms of potential patrons...
...After Hurricane Katrina, Nagin heralded River Gardens as a model for redevelopment projects in postKatrina New Orleans...
...I don't think there is a progressive organization in America that doesn't have a presence in New Orleans," says Curtis Muhammad of the People's Organizing Committee...
...Or, as Russell Henderson suggested, subsidized housing in central locations decided upon with community participation...
...They've lost a neighborhood...
...She and her fourteen-year-old daughter were living in Houston...
...The imNEW ORLEANS plications of this slogan clarify the goals of the grassroots movement...
...Relative to the rest of the Lower Ninth, Holy Cross sits farthest from the industrial canal and closest to the Mississippi River...
...Shayd then presented a lecture on the rights of internally displaced persons, as put forth in a UN resolution...
...Whatever its merits in justice, I doubt that a movement to pack subsidized residents into high-priced real estate areas has a chance of success...
...The problem is worsened by the expectation that flood insurance post-Katrina will be exorbitantly expensive.' At present it's difficult to figure out the guidelines that have to be followed to qualify for flood insurance...
...It's less a city than a crisis zone, characterized by quiet hysteria...
...many won't...
...Charter schools will have the freedom to hire their own teachers, set their own policy, and (it is feared) determine their own admission requirements...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and culture critic living in Charleston, South Carolina...
...The weather is torrid, their physical and mental exhaustion is evident...
...They talk about their rights—which in my experience has been a foreign concept to public housing tenants...
...The map of catastrophe isn't that simple, however...
...The reason I asked about cooking was that I wanted us to have a chance to look NEW ORLEANS at her...
...To quote Nagin, "If you [rebuild] in those areas, God bless you...
...The wink in his eye suggests that we are writers, thinkers, wordsmiths...
...Yes, the Lower Ninth (median income, $27,499 a year) was a "zone of poverty," and poverty puts you in vulnerable territory...
...The levees, in theory, were supposed to hold...
...At the meeting of the Fourth Planning District, sighs and gasps rose from the audience as an architect talked about new overpasses and rail systems...
...The holes in this game of social policy as fortunetelling are obvious even from casual observation at the FEMA camp...
...Stanley had the ideal tour guide personality...
...Activists on the ground are providing food, medicine, filling in the gaps in a broken city...
...The New Orleans poet Kalamu Ya Salaam said to me, "If you drive around, you'll see lots of wreckage...
...In general, brick structures have weathered Katrina better than wooden structures insofar as the former remain standing...
...Many low-income New Orleanians have lasting memories of the redevelopment of the 1,500-unit St...
...In the Lower Ninth alone, 60 percent of the residents of this African American community were propertied...
...On the other, he is a former Republican, a Bush supporter, and a businessman who has been called a pawn of real estate magnates...
...By then, water lines had begun to appear on houses, marking the level of destruction...
...Among the flooded areas in East Orleans, you have probably never heard of Eastover--it's a wealthy black gated community...
...As you drive through desolation that appears endless, suddenly, there's a functioning Asian neighborhood—solid and sturdy NEW ORLEANS houses, cars, people, community...
...Rahim shrugs...
...Leftist Nihilism...
...However, in the broadest sense, you've found an abode...
...Poverty and racism created these neighborhoods...
...What I want you to do first of all is get yourself together...
...Common Ground volunteers are predominantly white...
...He cannot, at the present time, reconcile the separate aspects of his personality...
...If you keep driving, you'll notice lots of nails...
...Because that's New Orleans...
...If I put money and resources into rebuilding, but too few of my neighbors return, what happens then...
...This is noticeable before you reach East Orleans or the Ninth Ward and see the worst...
...This is not necessarily hyperbole...
...The dream of a crime-free New Orleans is already over...
...Henderson's critique demands a counter-critique...
...He claimed he had seen urban blight as terrible in Detroit...
...some stay weeks, others have stayed months...
...Or medicine...
...Rents in New Orleans have doubled, sometimes tripled...
Vol. 53 • September 2006 • No. 4
