Politico.com

The Dark Side of Katrina Recovery

2015-09-01

This week in New Orleans, plenty of people are trying to describe the post-Katrina state of the city. News cameras are crowding streets and sidewalks all over town, filming the saxophonist playing in front of Café du Monde and children playing in a plastic pool in the Lower 9th Ward. But while outsiders who didn’t live through the tragedy throw around words like “resilient” and “transformation,” people who live here are wary of celebrating the pretense that New Orleans is now repaired and complete. Because it’s clear that 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the city has had few unqualified victories.Maybe it’s best described as recovery with an asterisk. To date, New Orleanians of color and people with lower incomes have watched their hometown bounce back architecturally and even culturally, as Mardi Gras Indians, jazz musicians and Sunday second-line parades, hosted by social aid and pleasure clubs, seem to have returned with vigor.**But it’s not uncommon to find Indians who sew their suits in Houston and then come home just in time to debut them on Mardi Gras Day. To see social aid and pleasure clubs that are half the size they were before the storm. To find a grown man busing tables at a restaurant where the cheapest menu item runs more than he will bring home that night in wages. Those who know housing say that it’s clear that the city’s brand-new mixed-housing complexes are tidy; some are even beautiful. Those who know the economy say that’s stronger than it’s ever been.* *But there are only 700 apartments with public housing-level rents available for the 3,077 households who lived in the four complexes razed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after Katrina. And despite the booming economy, the city’s child-poverty rate has now crept back up to pre-Katrina levels, 39 percent, and the city ranks second in the nation in income inequality.Former President Bill Clinton addressed the recovery’s inequities head-on in a Saturday night speech capping off a week of remembrance here in New Orleans. “What your very best efforts did should make you bursting with pride,” Clinton told the crowd at a local arena. “But it should not stop you from trying to erase the last manifestations of the color line, of the economic differences, of the educational differences, of the healthcare differences.”The crowd cheered to hear Clinton issue a direct counter to the “it’s-all-good” message that’s been delivered by the parade of officials visiting New Orleans and issuing press releases about its sensational recovery from disaster. Though Mayor Mitch Landrieu and President Barack Obama, who visited on Thursday, have been careful to mention that much work remains unfinished, many others have stood at podiums and raved about the rebuilt city in such an unqualified way that it was hard for many locals to stomach. Then came Clinton, issuing what seemed like a clarion call for equality in the wake of the Katrina disaster: to date, an unfulfilled goal.A closer look at the uneven recovery teaches us much, not only about New Orleans, but also about future disasters in other places. ***When asked the foremost lesson that Katrina taught us, Gen. Russel Honoré was succinct. “I think it boils down to this,” he said. “On any given day, Mother Nature can break anything built by man.” Of course, Honoré, a Louisiana native who commanded the U.S. military’s response to the storm in New Orleans, was referring to the federal levees that gave way in 2005, flooding 80 percent of the city. “We had done good until the levees broke,” he said.But Honoré presented a secondary lesson that he learned two days after Katrina hit the city, when he entered New Orleans but did not like the way that his troops held their guns. He’s famous for having told his soldiers, “Put those damn weapons down. This is a rescue mission, dammit.”That day, Honoré said, Katrina taught him that his soldiers, like many others involved with the disaster, were “predisposed to be afraid of poor people.” That meant that the crowds they faced seemed fearsome, because most of those left behind were poor, disabled or elderly, he said.That’s usually who is left behind, said sociologist Lori Peek, the co-director of the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University, who has long emphasized that, contrary to some perceptions, disasters do not level the playing field.Instead, decades of research have shown that “the already disadvantaged suffer disproportionately in disaster,” Peek said. That was affirmed by what happened after Katrina, as she recounts in Children of Katrina, the book she co-wrote with Alice Fothergill.So when Peek sees rising poverty and inequality across the nation, she sees increased vulnerability to disaster. “Katrina taught us that many deaths are still possible in U.S. disasters when we don’t tend to the poorest and most marginalized,” she said.The initial bursts of news reports about the 10th anniversary of Katrina were gushing. Those reports, which began late this summer, praised New Orleans as a miracle city, a phoenix that had risen from the ashes. Yet more attention has been paid in recent weeks to the city’s divergent recoveries. A survey released Monday by Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University found that while 80 percent of white New Orleanians thought that the state has mostly recovered, that perception was shared by only 59 percent of black New Orleanians.This is because black residents, for the most part, have experienced a very different recovery from their white neighbors. A National Urban League report released Wednesday found that between 2005 and 2013, median income rose by 7 percent for the city’s black residents, to $25,102; but it rose by much more for whites—by 23 percent to $60,553. In many ways, the flood just exposed the rifts that were already present. As Landrieu said in his address to the National Press Club earlier this month, “The storm didn’t create all our problems. Our issues are generations in the making and are shared by every other part of America.”Indeed, many cities are racially segregated. But it’s worse in New Orleans, because of its geography. Because of historic racial segregation patterns in the city, whites settled along the river and on ridges while even higher-income and middle-class black households ended up settling in lower-lying areas of the city more prone to flooding. Those houses had lower real-estate values than comparable houses in majority-white neighborhoods.In the wake of Katrina, contractors basically charged the same amount to rebuild a three-bedroom house, whether it was in the Lower 9th Ward or on high ground Uptown. But rebuilding grants didn’t take that into consideration. The architects of the state-run Road Home program, which gave rebuilding grants to Louisiana homeowners, devised a grant formula based not upon rebuilding costs but on pre-storm home values. Since majority-black neighborhoods had lower property values, white homeowners received a markedly higher grants than black homeowner with comparable houses. The end result was that more white homeowners were able to rebuild, while more black homeowners couldn’t afford to do so. (Elderly homeowners also suffered from what became an epidemic of contractor fraud: hucksters who took rebuilding money and then ran without doing the work.) Of those surveyed for Monday’s Manship poll, 70 percent of whites said that they were able to return to New Orleans within a year, compared with 42 percent of blacks. On Monday, to address these concerns, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Road Home allocated additional money and caseworkers for people who have not yet completed rebuilding.But there’s more to be done, said Clinton in his Saturday night speech. Since many have privately said that some New Orleans conditions will never improve because of the city’s unique history, structure and culture, Clinton addressed that myth directly. “You will not lose the history of jazz or Dixieland. You will not lose the flavor of your gumbo,” he said. “You can still dance your way down the street at the end of a burial. You will not lose who you are, if all of a sudden, without regard to our race, we have the same chances at education, jobs, incomes, healthcare and a future.”In fact, the city’s best chance of a strong recovery is in establishing new identities beyond its famous culture. For Robin Barnes, the executive vice president for Greater New Orleans, Inc., a regional economic alliance, Katrina taught us that even the most hidebound economy can diversify. Before the storm, Barnes said, the city relied mostly on the Mississippi River, the oil industry and jazz, food and other cultural draws.Now, Barnes noted, the city leads the nation in digital-sector growth. It has hope for a biosciences industry, in addition to an emerging environmental industry, which will be heavily financed by Restore Act money—fines paid by BP for Clean Water Act violations during the 2010 oil spill. A challenge that remains is how to connect the new economic opportunities to New Orleans’ lower-income black communities. And, while that’s a local matter, one of the ways to bring these economic reforms to bear may be national attention. Ronald Eyerman, a Yale University sociologist and author of the recent book Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma believes that the racial inequities laid bare by Katrina spurred new groups of young African Americans to mobilize. He cites research done by a recent Yale doctoral student showing how Katrina laid the groundwork for what has become the Black Lives Matter movement.***So when does true recovery arrive? Can everyone reach it?Lori Peek said that, for the several hundred Katrina children she observed, “Disasters last a long time. There is no single endpoint of recovery. It is a process.” ey societal factors most impacted children’s trajectories. Peek found that recovery doesn’t hinge on a child’s intelligence or his temperament, instead, it hinges on whether his family is poor, whether his social network is thin, and how soon he lands in stable housing, which allows him to stay in one school and build social networks.Ultimately, Katrina taught anthropologist Kate Browne that a return to familiar routines, family dinners and church services is essential for people affected by trauma. Browne, author of Standing in the Need, examined the role of culture as she followed hundreds of members of the sprawling Johnson-Fernandez family in hard-hit St. Bernard Parish, which lies just southeast of New Orleans. The large black family that she followed for nine years tried to replicate its culture while family members were displaced in Texas, by gathering together to cook with bayou ingredients, share stories and plot home repairs. Yet even the tight-knit Johnson-Fernandez faltered when faced with Katrina’s inequitable recovery. In December 2007, just as Christmas was approaching, one of the family’s matriarchs, Katie, told Browne she felt devastated about a puny Road Home settlement, $22,000, less than half of what she should have received. So Katie hadn’t decorated anything that year, though she loved holiday dazzle. “Just don’t have the courage,” she told Browne. “I’m too blue. I don’t see no light on the horizon.” A few days later, she suffered a massive stroke that led to her death.University of New Orleans professors Pam Jenkins and Vern Baxter often pondered the timeline of recovery while they rebuilt their flooded homes. They pondered it while they worked with their former UNO colleague, University of North Carolina professor Steve Kroll-Smith, to follow families rebuilding in two majority-black New Orleans neighborhoods, Pontchartrain Park and Hollygrove. In many ways, they found the recovery so arbitrary that they titled their resulting book Left to Chance. The trio, which responded in a joint email message, said that Katrina taught them that the word “recovery” is misused when it’s applied to individuals. “Streets, houses, public buildings and so on can be rebuilt, restored, refurbished, and so on. But people? Well, they beg a different vocabulary.”Ultimately, they found that many of the people they followed, through no fault of their own, were mired in “the context of inequality” that seemed hardwired into Katrina’s recovery. “In this disaster, poor people who had little voice before the disaster had even less voice afterward,” they wrote.