by Gary Rivlin
Uddo was tempted to quit despite the work still to be done. Let Lakeview Civic wage war with the bureaucracy. Hood told her she was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She agreed but confessed, “I know if I’m taking care of other people, I don’t have to look at myself.” Maybe it was time to focus on herself. “I really wanted to say, ‘Let’s have a normal life again,’ ” Uddo said. But the experience of running the recovery center had made it hard to walk away. When your job is putting shattered lives back together, she asked herself, how do you go back to teaching tennis?
The next time Uddo saw Hood, she asked him to take a ride with her through Gentilly. Her son attended school there, and every day she saw the contrast between Lakeview and its neighbor just on the other side of City Park. Driving through the area, Hood said out loud what she had already told herself: Gentilly looks the way Lakeview did two years ago.
“Don’t you think if they had a hub of recovery, they’d be further along?” she asked him.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’d be a shame to just walk away. I’m thinking I’ve learned so much that I’m a disaster-recovery manager now.”
“Are you up for it?”
“I feel like I can do a lot of good in Gentilly.” Hood spoke with the diocese, which proved willing to keep funding St. Paul’s Homecoming Center even as it shifted its focus to Gentilly. The question was whether people there wanted the help—and if it might be too late.
IT WAS A HARD couple of years for the McDonalds, Rhesa especially. “It was a whole new world in Baton Rouge,” Rhesa said. “Finding our way around. Finding places we liked to go. And then my father got sick.” Revius Ortique, eighty-one years old when Katrina hit, had always been a commanding figure in her life. He was now suffering from a mysterious autoimmune disorder that no doctor could diagnose. “We got to know the Baton Rouge health system quite well,” Rhesa said. He wasn’t so sick that he needed to be hospitalized, but that meant it fell on Rhesa and her mother to care for him. A husband working in New Orleans all week added to the stress.
The first time Rhesa saw their old house in the Lake Forest Estates subdivision was in the spring of 2006. One visit was all she needed to make up her mind. “She told me she didn’t want go back. Ever,” McDonald said. The home sat untouched while husband and wife talked over their options. The green dot over the East had been replaced by a giant question mark. Many of their friends and neighbors had given up on the community, if not New Orleans. “We truly didn’t know what we were going to do,” Rhesa said. Complicating their decision was Rhesa’s commitment to caring for her parents. For everyone’s sake, they would need to find a home with two master bedrooms.
Rhesa thought about remaining in Baton Rouge. “My mom and I started to like it there,” she said. “We thought, ‘There’s some very nice areas there, we might as well stay.’ ” Her father was the one who insisted they move back to New Orleans. A friend came up with the solution when she suggested they consider the Park Island house where Rhesa’s parents had lived since 1989. Park Island offered them waterfront property on the Bayou St. John, yet in Gentilly and therefore closer to town than New Orleans East. Why not use their insurance settlement to turn Park Island into the home they were looking for? An architect drew up plans that added a second bedroom suite downstairs without any structural changes, and the decision was made: the McDonalds would move to Park Island, across the street from the Nagins.
McDonald arranged for the construction on the front end of the project. Rhesa handled most everything else. “I’m driving back and forth from Baton Rouge constantly,” Rhesa said. The renovations would take more than two years—too long for Revius Ortique. He suffered a stroke in June 2008 and died several days later, at age eighty-four. Five months later, in November of that year, more than three years after Katrina, the McDonalds moved back to New Orleans. The RV that had been Alden McDonald’s temporary home in New Orleans all those months he donated to a local religious order that worked with wayward youth.
A FAVORITE STORY RHESA tells about her husband dates back to a time before children and the big house in Lake Forest Estates. On vacation in the Bahamas, they had been looking forward to a romantic dinner but were disappointed to find a long line of people ahead of them. She next spots her husband, the bank president, a serving tray in hand, busing tables. A horrified Rhesa, the princess who grew up with her own private bathroom, almost shrieked, “What are you doing?” Matter-of-factly, McDonald told her, “They’re shorthanded. And I figured if we’re ever going to get a table, I need to help out.”
Friends and peers who knew him well offered the same clichés about McDonald. He was a doer. If anyone could save Liberty, they said, it was Alden McDonald. By 2008, he was making a believer of people in the wider world. Fortune magazine included McDonald on its “Portraits of Power” list. Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the FDIC, named him to a task force she created to find alternatives to check cashers, payday lenders, and other fringe financial institutions feasting on the working poor. In the pages of the American Banker, he was the “high-energy CEO” who had pulled off a miracle. Liberty booked $3.6 million in profits in 2007—nearly twice what it earned in 2004, the last full year before Katrina. “I wasn’t sure Liberty was going to make it, but within a couple of years, we’re more profitable than ever,” said board chairman Norman Francis. “That was Alden’s crowning glory.”
Pre-Katrina, Liberty had eight branches in New Orleans. Three years later it would still have just five. Fewer people in the eastern half of New Orleans meant fewer customers, but McDonald found new business. He hired specialists who would allow him to take advantage of federal programs that gave big tax breaks on investments in low- and moderate-income communities. Liberty bought a mortgage company in Baton Rouge and another in Houston and purchased land in Jackson to build a third branch there. At the start of 2008, McDonald bought a three-branch, black-owned bank in Kansas City. It hadn’t been long ago that skeptical regulators seemed convinced Liberty would need to find a larger suitor to survive. Yet those same regulators came to him in 2008 as a potential buyer for the troubled Douglass Bank in Kansas City. There would be more feelers from regulators in 2008 as subprime loans took down the global economy, causing more bank failures.
The subprime crisis was largely a nonevent for Liberty. A large share of its business was home loans to people of modest means. Many had a below-average credit score. But unlike many banks then, McDonald had subprime customers but never made subprime loans. Liberty instead focused on financial education and worked with customers to improve their credit.
New Orleans, not Liberty, would suffer after the subprime meltdown caused a global freeze in the lending markets. FEMA and HUD money would still reach the city, but not private investment. All those plans to build or rebuild hotels, condos, and other commercial projects would be stymied in a market where safe projects struggled for money, let alone speculative projects in a partially rebuilt city with an uncertain future.
THE FINAL MONTHS OF 2006 had been good ones for Cassandra Wall and her sisters. Their mother was again living in the family home, where they celebrated Christmas as a family. “It really felt like it had before the storm,” Cassandra said. She had even found a program in Baton Rouge called InCourage, which provided free counseling to Katrina survivors. She took advantage of ten sessions as did her son, Brandon. She got more involved with the local church.
“I thank heaven I had some semblance of a support system in place,” Cassandra said. Because as bad as 2005 had been, she said, “2007 would be worse.”
Cancer took her mother’s life on Valentine’s Day. She was seventy-four years old. The diagnosis predated Katrina, but Cassandra and her sisters believe the storm accelerated her demise. She had had a horrible experience dealing with her homeowner’s insurance and ended up part of a class action lawsuit that hundreds of New Orleanians filed against a local company. “She was fighting this battle for her h
ealth and then the storm came along,” Cassandra said. “And now she’s fighting not only the cancer, but she’s fighting to get back home and she’s fighting this insurance company. And with all of us fighting battles of our own, we weren’t there to help her like we were before the storm.” Daisy Wall’s death meant they no longer had a family matriarch. “She really was the one holding us together,” Cassandra said.
Cassandra and her husband divorced that year. Plenty of their fissures predated Katrina, but Cassandra blamed the storm. She resented that she felt alone whenever she was contending with the insurance company or Road Home or even the cleanup of the house. “Mentally, I felt he subtracted himself from all that,” she said. She also felt the storm hit her husband harder than it did others. “Post-traumatic stress disorder” was her amateur diagnosis of her husband. To the extent he spoke about what he might be going through, he talked about the photos of his long-deceased parents lost in the storm. “I really think that pushed him over the edge,” Cassandra said.
“We could all see it happening,” Tangee said. “There wasn’t a big insurance payment there. He was really missing his old job. Katrina put a real strain on their relationship.” Eventually, Cassandra and her husband received a Road Home check for $105,000. The lawyers would need to figure out how they would split it up.
Postdivorce, Cassandra worried more about her son than herself. Brandon was just starting high school at the time of the divorce. “Brandon’s a real child of the storm,” Cassandra said. “He also lost his home. He lost his community. He was separated from all of his friends. And he lost his father in the sense that they’ve had little contact.”
MACK MCCLENDON TOOK PERVERSE pride in telling people he ended up in a formaldehyde trailer. It further underscores his having lived the full Katrina nightmare. He spent much of the second year after Katrina working all day in the muck and mold of his ruined house and then breathed formaldehyde all night. He never developed respiratory ailments, but many of his neighbors had a noticeable Katrina hack. Eventually, the federal government told him he needed to leave the trailer so they could cart it away. He would pick up the tab, not the government, for the bargain hotel in the central business district that was his home for the two months it took him to find a two-bedroom place in the Lower Ninth for $850 a month. Now that McClendon was no longer sleeping on his property, his home proved an easy target. He counted five times that people broke in. Thieves stole his copper. They took his tools. They even pulled out some of the new wiring that he had paid an electrician to install.
“It seemed the harder I worked at rebuilding, the further behind I got,” he said.
McClendon felt largely alone living on an empty street without neighbors. Before the storm, he had his eight kids, seven of whom lived in New Orleans. Now they were living in Atlanta, Houston, and Lafayette. Only one had moved home. McClendon loved being a grandfather, but the ones with children all told him the same story. “I said to one of my daughters, ‘When are you going to bring my babies home?’ ” McClendon said. “And she said, ‘If I bring them home, I don’t love them.’ ” Not knowing what his daughter meant, she explained, “When your grandkids were in New Orleans, they were hyperactive. They talked about giving them drugs. In Houston they’re on the principal’s honor roll.” He told her he’d visit as soon as he could.
McClendon waited for the Road Home money he hoped would allow him to continue working on his home. Occasionally he’d visit one of the preservation-society warehouses that opened after Katrina, on the lookout for old doors and other components he would need to rebuild. Otherwise he seemed to obsess over a place a few blocks from his house. The strange-looking building had a curved, corrugated-tin roof and resembled an airplane hangar. It had been built as a food-science laboratory when much of the area was covered with sugarcane. Over the years, it had housed a boat-propeller maker, a beauty school, and an auto repair shop. A church had taken over the building a few months before Katrina, but McClendon wasn’t sure anyone had even bothered to look inside to assess the damage.
“I used to go over there and stare at it,” McClendon said. In his fantasies, he owned the building and used it to work on and store his cars. The large holes Katrina had punched in its roof suggested that he might be able to afford a property that would have been well out of his price range before the area flooded. At City Hall, he looked up the name of the owner, who was happy to show him the property. “It looked like half the Lower Nine had floated inside,” McClendon said—and smiled to himself. “The worse it looked, the better the price I knew I’d be getting,” he said. He put down only a few thousand dollars for a ten-thousand-square-foot building he bought for $180,000.
McClendon can’t quite explain what happened next. He was not ten steps inside the building, he said, when a thought stopped him. The space would serve as a perfect home for a community center. “I went in there wondering where I was going to set up my little shop, but I’m thinking of kids playing basketball. I’m thinking cooking classes, choir practice. All the things our community needed,” McClendon said.
McClendon tried pushing the thought away. “I really just wanted to get back to tinkering on my antique cars.” That’s what he would have done only a few years earlier. “Before Katrina, I wasn’t really paying attention. Even if I could feel something wasn’t right, I would say to myself, ‘It’s not my business.’ ” Yet if not him, then who?
Others were working to save the Lower Ninth. Common Ground was still active in the area and there was also the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, which everyone called NENA. NENA was formed around a year after Katrina by Patricia Jones, an accountant who had bought a home in the Lower Ninth with her husband two years before Katrina. Jones had drawn the notice of a long list of funders, including Capital One, the Ford Foundation, and the United Way, and NENA was helping a long list of Lower Ninth residents work out a rebuilding plan. But a dozen-plus organizations were aiming to do the same thing, and people resented the perception that her funding made Jones a first among equals. “Patricia has to get over herself,” a friend of McClendon’s complained. “She has air-conditioning. That’s why we meet there.” Other fissures included old divisions between Holy Cross and the rest of the Lower Ninth. Some in Holy Cross, near where McClendon lived, seemed intent on setting themselves off from everyone else at a time McClendon thought everyone needed to work together.
Any number of other irritants were also prodding at McClendon, urging him to get more involved. The disaster-tour buses, for instance. He was relieved that a couple of years after the storm, people still came to gawk. “The worst thing to happen to the Lower Ninth,” McClendon said, “would be if everyone just forgot about us.” But then he learned the tour operators were charging $35 to $65 a head. “None of that money was coming back to the community.” The City Council passed an ordinance banning tour buses from crossing the Industrial Canal, but that meant McClendon and others complained instead about a government that passes a new rule and then fails to enforce it.
McClendon attended a community meeting. He wasn’t sure what his goal was that first time he rose to speak. He began by declaring the Lower Ninth was doomed if there wasn’t a place for residents—children, the elderly, everyone around the room—to come together. He mentioned the building he had just bought and the possibility of converting it into a neighborhood center. “The idea was to ask if people even thought it was a good idea and hope they say no,” McClendon said. “And of course everyone says yes.”
McClendon had arrived with an escape plan. If this place is to be a community center, he told people, the community needs to help me fix it up. He gave people the address and said he’d be there working on the building all weekend if anyone wanted to help him. “I figured people were too busy with their own stuff to show up for anything. But wouldn’t you know, the whole community shows up.”
PATRICIA JONES AT NENA had been going nonstop. An organization that started to help people seekin
g their fair share of Road Home money had morphed into a center for people struggling to rebuild without enough money. Every person who walked in the door was a potential full-time project. An architect advised people on structural issues, and others helped residents navigate the permit process. NENA even got into home building. Yet as the city approached the third anniversary of Katrina, Jones and her family were among those living in a home that needed work. Much of the first level was still without flooring. A cinder block served as the front stoop. An exhausted Jones needed to slow down, and take care of her own. In time, she would step away completely from NENA.
Malik Rahim, too, needed to pull away. People thought Rahim stopped coming around the Lower Ninth because he was running for Congress in 2008 as the Green Party candidate. The truth, however, was that the Lower Ninth Ward felt to him like defeat. “I think of all the work we did, and I look at it and it makes me feel ill,” Rahim said. He blames Ray Nagin more than anyone else for letting down the Lower Ninth. “You can’t say it was because of racism, because we had a black mayor,” Rahim said. “Every time I go back there, I always remember that. And it always takes me days to get over it.” In 2009, the sixty-two-year-old Rahim became bedridden for weeks at a time with high blood pressure and respiratory problems. He blamed all those months working in moldy rooms but also the Lower Ninth Ward.
Initially, Mack McClendon imagined that he was re-creating the rec center of his youth. But speaking to his neighbors and others, he realized that a more pressing need was a kind of free hostel for volunteers wanting to rebuild the Ninth Ward. McClendon found dozens of surplus cots. He secured several restaurant stoves and a pair of industrial-size refrigerators, along with microwaves, toaster ovens, and army blankets. Rice in coarse, bulky burlap bags; eight-pound cans of tomatoes; oversize jars of Jif; blocks of cheese—McClendon took whatever was offered. He stored lawn mowers, weed whackers, rakes, and sledgehammers in a shed in the back. The Lower 9th Ward Village Community Center, McClendon called his creation: a hub that could house seventy people at a time and as many as one hundred during spring break and summer.