Just short of a decade after Hurricane Katrina, tourism in New Orleans is back and booming. But beneath the Big Easy’s role as a respite for gamblers, heavy drinkers and jazz aficionados is the legacy of environmental disaster and inequality.
New tourist services, like tech darlings Airbnb and Uber, transcend the exploitative, transactional tourist experience into an organic reordering of urban environments around the needs of outsiders — with racial, economic and social ramifications.
Tourists aren’t confronted with the reality of a post-Katrina New Orleans. The neon and alcohol-induced haze of Bourbon Street and the beignets of the French Quarter fail to convey to visitors their place within the city’s evolving legacy, both before and after the storm.
Water lines left by Katrina still mar the exterior of some buildings, but they remain forever etched into the city’s social fabric as well. Fading red search and rescue “x-codes” dot facades as innocuous reminders of the 2005 storm that flooded approximately 80 percent of the city, and ultimately came to pervade its identity.
In the waning days of a recent visit, it became clear how naive I’d been about my surroundings. I had blithely retread the scenes of one of the country’s worst ecological disasters, tooling the city streets as an accidental disaster tourist, failing to fully appreciate the gravity of recent history.
Andrew Crisp
View from the New Orleans streetcar, along St. Charles Ave., home to Tulane University, the Garden District and Audubon Park.
It was a week spent debating “green building” in New Orleans at the annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, hosted by the U.S. Green Building Council. They’re also the group behind the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating systems — “LEED” plaques are identifiers of the sustainability or energy consumption characteristics of a building’s design, construction and maintenance. Conversations about sustainability drifted to discussions about the equity of green building practices, the effects of climate change on already disenfranchised populations and USGBC’s role in ensuring equal access to a green future.
Days earlier, I had cruised the Lower Ninth Ward by way of an unofficial tour, culminating in a social event where we drank in tragedy amidst the remnants of disaster while sipping sazeracs and snacking on hors d’oeuvres.
But these issues remained philosophical concepts debated in the abstract, while the city outside our convention continued to struggle with the reality.
It sank in at the tail end of my visit, while shuttling to the airport in nearby Kenner. Conferees, myself included, had casually nursed coffee and listened to panel discussions in the two buildings that had played host to some of the worst moments of the city’s history, as temporary homes to its eco-disaster refugees. Like many Americans, in the late days of August 2005, I watched news updates decrying looting, violence and suffering among those left stranded at the Mercedes-Benz (neé Louisiana) Superdome and the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center (named for the city’s influential first African American mayor).
Photo Courtesy Sally Heller
Artist Sally Heller’s sculpture “Scrap House,” made with found and recycled materials in memory of Katrina. The sculpture, installed just outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, one of the facilities that became a shelter for thousands after Katrina.
Thousands suffered abhorrent conditions at the Superdome and convention center after Katrina made landfall, seeking food and shelter in an otherwise deserted city, while floodwaters permeated their neighborhoods. Breathless television reports stated hundreds had perished, by murder or fatigue, at the hands of looters or gangs. Nearly a decade removed, we now know these initial reports of violent crimes were vastly overblown. Official estimates indicate six died while in wait at the Superdome, and another four at the convention center — out of a combined 30,000 to 40,000 sheltered at the two facilities. The details of this recent history are remarkably absent in facades and promenades now scrubbed clean.
Standing before the looming, mile-long convention center, or the massive 70,000-seat Superdome, it’s easy to forget the role they played in the suffering of so many, first at the hands of Mother Nature and later from the failure of our collective society to react appropriately to the devastation. They stand as symbolic reminders of Katrina and its aftermath, in a way that the hundreds of flooded or washed away residential homes, businesses and other facilities fail to capture.
In a stark plaza near the outsized convention center, the impact of Sally Heller’s powerful “Scrap House” sculpture is minimized in the shadow of the mammoth building. Little else in the area stands to remind visitors of Katrina’s gravity, bungled emergency management response or the countless individuals whose lives were lost or indelibly altered.
Tourists aren’t confronted with the aftermath of Katrina. Commerce in the Central Business District has resumed, and the casual observer of cursory downtown amenities learns little about the past, whether by accident or as an intentional rejection of a troubling past. Locals however, according to my airport shuttle driver, speak in a sad kind of shorthand — referring to events as “Pre-K” or “Post-K.”
In the Ninth Ward, foundations remain wedged in otherwise empty lots now lush with new growth. Those cleared completely have been reclaimed by nature, a tangle of weeds and trees nursed to maturity by the wet climate. We arrived in the Ninth Ward on a Thursday by bicycle, navigating streets choked with new growth, sidewalks barely visible beneath overgrown grass and brush.
In hand-wringing over my role as a consumer of place (and I’ll admit that as a graduate planning student, I’m not the average NOLA tourist), I’m compelled to highlight a latent New Orleans controversy centered on Airbnb.
The San Francisco-based startup provides a “platform,” in tech bro babble, for visitors to rent a room in their destination, but has recently drawn criticism in numerous communities for a wide range of charges. Critics allege its libertarian business model leads to negative impacts on city neighborhoods, that it undercuts traditional hotel offerings and undermines the character of America’s special places.
It’s true that Airbnb allows residents to rent rooms to visitors for short term stays, often at prices significantly lower than similar accommodations at a hotel.
My NOLA home-away-from-home was lodged firmly in the up-and-coming “artist neighborhood” of Bywayter. The sliver of room I rented was in a larger shared house, the lion’s share of which was dedicated to visitors. Three guest rooms, including mine, a kitchen and two bathrooms dominated the floorplan, save a few scant square feet at the front of the home where, presumably, the full-time residents reside — I never met them. The only other people I interacted with were a 20-something white woman wearing a pair of white earbuds, furiously mopping the floors, and an older couple staying at the room down the hall.
The white couple, in their 50s, were empty nesters from the Midwest in town to look for a retirement home somewhere in the Bywater — using Airbnb as a home base.
Urban critics decry the service’s potential wide scale effects on cities. Proponents argue Airbnb provides individuals the ability to generate income on the side, helping them retain a space in their homes. Numerous issues unfold from the seemingly simple tussle over Airbnb — issues of municipal code, tax laws and the tourism industry on one end of the spectrum, AND gentrification, neighborhood identity and equity on the other.
Andrew Crisp
A former fire station turned apartments in the Bywater, on Dauphine.
A New Orleans city law subjecting traditional accommodations to taxes and licensing fees isn’t enforced in Airbnb rentals, critics say.
There was little indication that my own stay at a humble NOLA shotgun was part of this bigger controversy. As a guest in the city, it was my burden only to pedal a loaner bicycle carefree through the city streets. But conversations regarding Airbnb have flared tensions within the tourism and accommodation industries in New Orleans. Some of the locals I spoke with described the devil’s bargain between generating income by sharing one’s home, with the fear that the practice will erode neighborhood identity.
Add to this conversation further wrinkles: issues of gentrification and segregation.
A study conducted by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center found evidence of discrimination against African Americans attempting to rent housing in “high opportunity” neighborhoods. The study sent pairs of testers, one white and one African American, to 50 housing providers in the City of New Orleans. Test sites were targeted in neighborhoods with fewer than 30 percent of families living in poverty, with low violent crime levels and high levels of educational attainment. According to the report, each neighborhood tested was at least 70 percent white — New Orleans as a whole is approximately 34 percent white.
Fully qualified African Americans were denied rental options in 22 of the 50 cases.
Read the full report from the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center: “Where Opportunity Knocks the Doors Are Locked.”
Tulane University School of Architecture professor Richard Campanella has described the well-defined geography of gentrification and segregation within New Orleans as a “white teapot.” Viewed on a map, the “teapot” highlights almost entirely white areas of the city distinct from surrounding all-black neighborhoods, the kettle of which extends beyond Central City and a “spout” formed by the French Quarter, terminating before the Industrial Canal. My own Airbnb was located squarely in the “spout” of the aforementioned teapot — lending credence to my anecdotal observation of the demographic divide between the Bywater and neighborhoods to the North, across St. Claude Ave.
Richard Campanella lays out more of his research into New Orleans gentrification in his article published at New Geography.
Spatial and racial considerations come into play. Does the fashionable Airbnb service offer residents in Treme the same opportunity to rent accommodations as residents in the French Quarter or Bywater? Would tourists carry preconceived notions with them into predominantly black neighborhoods containing Airbnb homes? How might Airbnb accommodation providers perceive an African American tourist seeking to rent a room? As experienced in New Orleans and the exceedingly hip image of the sharing economy — including concepts in green building and sustainability discussed at Greenbuild — mirror the unfair housing, inequality and race and class divisions of the society at large. But it need not be that way.
A Harvard Business School working paper examines issues of “digital discrimination” against African Americans in online marketplaces not unlike Airbnb.
Airbnb and its ability to transplant tourists into the very neighborhoods once devastated by Katrina may be a powerful opportunity — not just a problem.
Andrew Crisp
New Orleans, from above Lake Pontchartrain. At left, the causeway connecting the city to Mandeville, Covington, and beyond.
Some foodies bemoan the fact that modern eaters are increasingly removed from the processes by which a sirloin steak or a chopped salad arrive at their dinner table. There’s a similar analogy in tourism and hospitality — there are countless New Orleans residents behind the scenes helping a Hampton Inn (or other hotel) run smoothly: the people who do the laundry, cook food, clean the rooms, in addition to administrative and support staff.
Across the street from the Morial Convention Center, near Heller’s “Scrap House,” stands a drab Hampton Inn & Suites that, while it pays room taxes for its visitors, contributes little to the city’s identity. Its architecture is uninspired and could pass for anything built in Des Moines or Detroit. Convention-goers who sleep at this particular Hampton can lunch at Subway and drink Starbucks coffee — the net benefit of both businesses accruing to company shareholders, not New Orleans residents.
Airbnb makes no bones about who provides those services to the individual — the sharing economy is nothing if not clear about who comprises your wait staff — in many cases they are personable hosts with whom you’ll converse and become familiar. There’s a social pressure to tip your Uber driver in a way that there isn’t in the disconnected void between your night stay and hotel room cleaning staff.
These issues are subject to debate and further research. New Orleans was a tourist destination long before Katrina, and will likely remain a place for visitors in the immediate future. Airbnb and other services like it are part of the landscape now, for better or worse.
Antigravity Magazine laid out a stark take on what Airbnb means for the city in March of this year. Authors Dorian Commode and Jules Bentley take a deep dive into the service’s effects on the Crescent City, its role as an income source for residents and highlight the predominantly white demographic offering the lion’s share of New Orleans Airbnb accommodation offerers.
More than anything, I was humbled by those who make their lives in the city.
Speaking with residents provides the closest proxy by which visitors can better understand the city: The young black man, fresh to New Orleans from St. Louis, who ran a family-owned corner store on the fringes of Campanella’s “teapot.” The group of elderly women at Parkway who shared their picnic table after a day spent volunteering at the botanical gardens. The lifelong resident, now a photographer, who talked about growing up in the city. Another, after she receives her license, plans to work as a tour guide. My interactions with all of them, however, were precluded by my role as a tourist, and it would be impossible for me to presume to understand their lives.
In these social interactions, can disaster tourism transcend the “experience” of touring defunct structures and derelict neighborhoods to become a more impactful experience, for both the visitor and the resident through the conduit of the sharing economy? Or will these upstart economic structures simply adapt by commodifying “authentic” and “local” experiences anew?
In my experience, day-tripping tourists cultivate experiences in search of the authentic, while leveraging the “sharing economy” to seek out culture that reinforces their stereotypes, and sidestepping areas that might prove emotionally or socially problematic to their token attempts to empathize with local plight. Acknowledging this inherent ignorance — and living light on the land when making your way as a traveler — may be the first step toward mitigating the negative effects of tourism.
Andrew Crisp
French Quarter tourism.
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