by Gary Rivlin
A few months after Katrina, the federal government announced low-interest loans for businesses willing to build in the Gulf Coast region. These Gulf Opportunity Zone Bonds could possibly be used to help fund at least a few of Blakely’s proposed projects. But most everything the city had in mind would need to be funded with HUD “flex money” distributed by the state. “HUD basically tells the state, ‘Here’s the money, here are our rules, and by the way, we’ll audit everything to make sure you do it right,’ ” said Jeff Thomas in Blakely’s office. The state set aside $1.1 billion in flex money for the parishes suffering damage from Katrina or Rita. New Orleans’s share would be just over $400 million—not nearly enough to cover even this more modest assortment of city improvements.
Funding even a single project would prove an endurance test. That much became clear to Blakely and his staff after they submitted to Baton Rouge their list of projects they wanted funded. A month later, a consultant working for the state sent them a flow chart laying out the steps required to secure HUD money. It measured eight feet across. “It took us six months just to get two feet,” Thomas said. Battles within City Hall also needed to be waged. “We were just this little group of thinkers in the corner coming up with nifty ideas,” Thomas said. “Everything we did had to be blessed by these other departments.”
The biomedical center proved the most controversial item on Blakely’s list. Maybe building a hospital complex on the edge of downtown would establish New Orleans as a center of biomedical research, maybe it wouldn’t, but if Blakely’s plan was successful, it would mean the city would no longer have a public hospital. This “anchor for the city’s economic recovery,” as Blakely sold it to Nagin, was slated to cost more than $1 billion to build. For Blakely’s idea to work, the city would need the money the state would be receiving to rebuild or replace Charity Hospital. They would need, too, money the federal government planned to spend refurbishing the city’s VA hospital, which was badly damaged in the storm. Federal officials were on board with a proposal that had them building a hospital on the same site as the state’s so long as the city found a suitable property. State officials also signed off on the deal. Callers to WBOK had been urging the mayor to demand that the state refurbish Charity. Instead the city was plotting a new facility that guaranteed that the old hospital would never reopen.
The disenchantment of the activist set deepened as the plan took shape. Blakely ceded control of parts of the project to the state because the state had stronger eminent domain authority than the city. The site the city chose to build the twin hospitals was a neighborhood just east of downtown that had suffered only mild flooding and was coming back a lot faster than most. Many homeowners there had restored their homes or were doing so when the city unveiled its plans. The city needed sixty-seven acres to build the two hospitals, which meant tearing down or moving 250 homes, 150 of which had been deemed “historically significant” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Several blocks heading east-west were permanently closed off to traffic, as were several blocks going north-south. When the Department of Veterans Affairs threatened to pull out of the deal and build outside the city, Blakely promised them $75 million in HUD disaster money to offset their construction costs—one-fifth of the city’s precious flex dollars. The price spiraled from $1.2 billion to nearly $2 billion, by which time the naysayers had renamed the project the Tajmahospital.
WHERE WAS NAGIN? THE Tribune’s Janet Stanton even ran a joke column asking that question. Was the mayor suffering post-traumatic stress disorder? “Was he bored with the job?” Stanton asked. “Ready to throw in the towel? Mortally wounded during battle by those he considered friends?” Talking to people around Nagin, she tried to suss out what might be going on, but “even the mayor’s most ardent supporters dropped their eyes and shrugged.”
Nagin’s greatest attribute was that he looked the part of mayor. Even in the early months after Katrina, Nagin seemed to glide through the city, flashing a smile for the cameras, reassuring people. Yet now Blakely was the front man everyone saw on television and quoted in the news. One of the few glimpses of Nagin midway through his second term was that of a mayor angry at the media. He threatened to “coldcock” the news director of the local CBS affiliate over the station’s demand that the mayor produce a copy of his work schedule. By the start of 2008—with more than two years left in his term—he was granting few interviews to local media.
But Nagin didn’t entirely disappear. In February, the mayor and Chief Riley were together for a photo op showing off $1 million in guns and other equipment the city had secured to fight against soaring crime. Joking around, Nagin picked up one of the assault rifles and aimed it at his chief. The next day, the mayor’s press office sent out an angry release arguing that Nagin had merely been lowering the gun when a Times-Picayune photographer snapped the shot appearing in that morning’s newspaper. That May, Nagin mentioned a homeless encampment near City Hall during a welcome speech he delivered at the Convention Center. The real solution to homelessness in the city, he joked, would be “some bus tickets . . . one way.” Another time he suggested that a murder rate that was tops in the nation wasn’t all bad because it “helps keep the New Orleans brand out there.”
Ed Blakely said he felt as though he were working inside a “cocoon”—and a tense, unpleasant one at that. “Black people have a hard time taking instruction from white people,” Blakely said. “It’s really bad. I’ve never encountered anything like this.”
RAY NAGIN’S POLICE GUARD sat outside a private dining room at Antoine’s in the French Quarter. Two years into the mayor’s second term, he had asked his old ally, Bill Hines, to meet him for dinner. Occasionally, a waiter would need to enter the room, but otherwise, it was just Hines and the mayor in a room that would more comfortably seat twenty. “It was almost like we were getting together as old friends to clear the air about this thing that happened between us,” Hines said. “He got off his chest how the white business community deserted him and how that made him feel.”
The two spoke for something like two hours. “I could say he was almost Richard Nixon–like, in a bunker, sharing all these resentments,” Hines said. The two shook hands at the end of what Hines described as a “very strange dinner” and would never speak again.
NAGIN AT LEAST HAD his family. Seletha and Tianna, his daughter, were still in Dallas, as best anyone could tell, but his sons were in New Orleans. Eight months before Katrina, Jeremy and Jarin had founded Stone Age, a home-improvement company focused on granite and marble kitchen-countertop installations. Nagin had put up the seed money and figured he’d be a passive investor. But that was before Katrina turned a modestly interesting idea into a potentially lucrative one. Half the city needed new countertops—and Stone Age’s strategy was to establish itself as the go-to countertop installer for one of the big-box retailers in town.
“Like any father,” Nagin said, “I wanted to help my sons.” And also help himself. His parents, Nagin’s son Jeremy said, “have invested a significant amount of our family net worth and taken on major debt to put this company in position for growth.”
Stacy Head, the newly elected member of the council, gave Nagin a chance to make himself invaluable to Home Depot. At the end of 2006, the company announced its intentions to build a new store in Central City in Head’s district. Home Depot would bring two hundred jobs to a desolate part of town, but it needed the city’s permission to block off several streets. Eager to please her new constituents, Head proposed a “community benefits agreement”: the store could have its zoning changes in exchange for a $12.50-an-hour minimum wage and a promise to hire from the neighborhood, among other concessions.
Ray Nagin phoned Home Depot CEO Frank Blake. “I got a voice mail from Mayor Nagin saying that he understands we have a problem with a neighborhood group and asking whether we need his assistance,” a baffled Blake wrote to Kent Knutson, the company’s chief lobbyist. “Do you know what this is about?”
; “Most likely, it’s about Nagin’s son’s desire to be a vendor,” Knutson wrote back, “and install kitchens/countertops for us using a company that he and his dad own together.” Knutson labeled Nagin and also the community group Head was working with “shake-down artists.” The difference, though, Knutson added, was that “Nagin wanted work for Stone Age” while “the community groups wanted higher wages and money for projects.”
Nagin sent e-mails to other Home Depot executives, promising to help them any way he could. When the City Council held a hearing on Head’s plan, the mayor sent his economic-development director to testify. We’re elated Home Depot wants to move into Central City, she said, and oppose the idea of a binding community-benefits agreement. Under the terms the city reached with the company, there was no binding agreement, just a promise by Home Depot to consider qualified low-income applicants from the area. A month later, Home Depot chose Stone Age as the exclusive granite installer for several Home Depot locations.
Nagin negotiated Stone Age’s rates on behalf of his sons. He met with Home Depot officials at the Stone Age storefront and signed e-mails he sent to executives there “C. Ray Nagin, mayor.” Cane Womack, the Home Depot manager in charge of service contracts for the Gulf Coast region, didn’t know what to say when Nagin asked him to direct ten to twenty jobs a week to his sons. In Womack’s view, Stone Age was a young company not ready for that workload. But he complied, the Home Depot manager said, because if “you tell the mayor no, it could cause some problems for you.”
A year into their arrangement, Nagin complained to Womack that Stone Age wasn’t getting enough jobs to justify the money they had spent on the special equipment Home Depot required them to purchase for certification. Despite some complaints about Stone Age’s work, Womack tried to placate the mayor. “Given the political nature of this relationship,” Womack wrote in an e-mail to a fellow manager, “I think it’s better to move forward.”IV When in March of 2008, the Times-Picayune’s Gordon Russell broke the story of Stone Age’s relationship with Home Depot, he quoted several competitors in the granite business who felt they had been unfairly passed over in favor of a small, untested firm.
At Cox, Nagin had made around $400,000 a year. As mayor, his salary was $131,000. David White started sending Nagin money in the middle of the the mayor’s first term. At first it was $3,000 a month but soon $7,500 “to make ends meet with his family,” White said. But the checks stopped shortly before Nagin’s reelection. Nagin was working harder than ever before in his life, yet he wasn’t making nearly enough to cover the costs of two households. Even on those rare occasions when Seletha and Tianna were in town, it’s not as if he could even enjoy a quiet meal out with his family. “People would literally sit down at the table with us and ask me questions about city business or about a problem they were having,” Nagin said. “I would have to take notes.”
The citizens of New Orleans paid for Nagin’s 2006 Valentine’s Day dinner with his family at the Grill Room inside the Windsor Court: $225. They bought the mayor dinner the night he turned fifty ($250) and picked up the $175 tab when the Nagins celebrated their twenty-fourth anniversary at Stella in the French Quarter. A Mother’s Day celebration at Morton’s in 2008 cost the taxpayers nearly $500. So what if some of the meals—$252 at Crescent City Steaks, $229 at Ye Olde College Inn, $290 at the Sun Ray Grill—fell on a Saturday or Sunday night? “Just another day as mayor of the City of New Orleans,” Nagin explained.
BILL CLINTON WORE COWBOY boots, brown slacks, and a tucked-in, red polo shirt. Brad Pitt wore a gray newsboy cap, jeans, and a white dress shirt with the tails out. In March 2008, the Clinton Global Initiative hosted six hundred college kids at Tulane for a three-day discussion. On their last day in the city, students visited the Lower Ninth Ward to turn their words into action. Holding shovels, rakes, and other tools, they aimed to clean up that corner of the community where Make It Right wanted to put up a house. The two high-watt celebrities showed up for a groundbreaking ceremony, where Pitt proclaimed, “We hope to see a huge change here in the next six months.”
JOHN MCCAIN HAD VOTED against a 2005 bill that would have granted a year’s worth of unemployment benefits to anyone losing a job because of Katrina. He also joined a group of Republican senators opposed to a $28 billion hurricane-relief measure that the Bush administration supported. Yet in April 2008, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee needed to distance himself from the Bush administration. His campaign launched a “forgotten places” tour in April 2008 that included stops in Youngstown, Ohio, and Appalachia and ended in the Lower Ninth Ward. “I want to assure the people of the Ninth Ward, the people of New Orleans, the people of this country: never again, never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way this was handled,” McCain said. Asked whether he thought the Lower Ninth should be rebuilt, the candidate paused for several seconds and then confessed that he had no answer: “We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.”
New Orleans saw a lot of both McCain and Obama in 2008. Both supported paying for a flood-protection system that could withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Both spoke of the need to restore the coastal wetlands. Yet New Orleans always seemed more Obama’s home turf, the perfect venue for contrasting his approach with that of conservatives. In a speech he gave at Tulane, candidate Obama mentioned the twenty-five-thousand-plus families still living in trailers or a FEMA-subsidized apartment and also all the schools and hospitals and fire stations that remained shuttered.
“We have to understand that Katrina may have battered the levees, but it also exposed silent storms that have ravaged parts of this city and our country for far too long,” Obama said. “The storms of poverty, joblessness, inequality, and injustice: those are the storms that swirled before Katrina hit.” He told the audience about an evacuee he had met when he visited Houston after the storm. “We had nothing before the hurricane,” she told the future president. “Now we’ve got less than nothing.”
HEAVY RAINS IN THE spring of 2008 caused severe flooding along the upper Mississippi River Valley. For Rush Limbaugh, the images out of places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the water ran ten feet high in the streets, called to mind New Orleans a few years earlier. The contrast between the two events, he told his listeners, was stark.
“I see people working together,” Limbaugh said of the Midwest floods. “I see people trying to save their property. I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people . . . whining and moaning—where’s FEMA? Where’s Bush? I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.”
* * *
I. Congress and the Bush administration eased affirmative action rules immediately after Katrina, ostensibly to speed up the recovery. As a result, only around 1.5 percent of the earliest recovery contracts went to a minority-owned business, the Government Accountability Office found, or less than a third of the 5 percent normally required.
II. The incumbent, Renée Gill Pratt, was later sentenced to four years in federal prison for siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for charitable and educational programs.
III. “He used the plan to get the money—and then crapped all of our work and decided to create his own,” said Troy Henry, a local black businessman who was central to the writing of the UNOP report. “He tells people, ‘Congratulations if you live in one of these seventeen recovery zones but if not, good luck because you’re on your own.’ ”
IV. Citing poor service, Home Depot severed its ties to Stone Age in 2008. The company went out of business the following year.
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FATIGUE
In the summer of 2008, Father Hood called Connie Uddo into the rectory office. The city was approaching the third a
nniversary of Katrina, and he needed to tell her he was leaving. “My work here is done,” he said. He had been assigned to a naval base in Africa. He asked Uddo what she wanted to do.
By mid-2008, 80 percent of those qualifying for a Road Home payment had received a check. The average payout of just under $60,000 per household was less than what many had expected, but enough so that Lakeview was noisy with the whine of table saws and pounding hammers. Every Wednesday night that summer, Uddo’s organization sponsored a community barbecue at an empty Knights of Columbus hall that volunteers were refurbishing. The church sprang for live music, her husband cooked, and for $5 people ate unlimited food and drink (first responders and kids were free). The Starbucks on Harrison opened in June 2007. Parlay’s bar was back in business, as was the local deli and the Gulf Coast bank. “It was starting to feel like a community again,” Uddo said.
Plenty was still left to worry about. More people talked about moving back than hired a contractor. Some were what Lakeview Civic’s Al Petrie labeled “turncoats”—people choosing to sell rather than rebuild. As much as people wanted to forget about the Urban Land Institute, the phrase it popularized, the jack-o’-lantern effect, had taken root. Road Home allowed people the option of selling their property to the state, which fed anxieties about outsiders building in Lakeview. Martin Landrieu and others came up with a program called the Lot Next Door, a citywide initiative that gave neighbors first dibs on any parcel adjacent to their own. “We were scared to death with what the city was going to do with these properties,” Petrie said. Zoning in Lakeview barred the building of multifamily units, but Petrie’s fear, and that of others, was that NORA, the agency responsible for abandoned properties in the city, would sell bundled lots to outside developers. “The last thing we wanted was tract housing that would undermine everything we were working so hard to achieve,” Petrie said.