Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Governing wouldn’t be easy in a city where power had shifted so dramatically from black to white. The same election that crowned Landrieu as the first white mayor in thirty-two years also created a 5–2 white supermajority on the City Council. The parish again had a white district attorney, and all but a half dozen of the city’s schools were being run by a majority-white board in Baton Rouge. A few months before the mayor’s race, DC had sent David Gilmore to take over the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Gilmore arrived with a reputation as a talented turnaround specialist, but he was also a white man running a housing authority whose tenants were nearly all black. He was also answerable to pretty much no one but himself: he was the sole commissioner serving on the one-person board of directors to which he reported.

  Landrieu had grown up at the dinner table of the man who had done as much as anyone else to integrate City Hall. Mitch Landrieu’s politics were more or less those of the legislature’s black caucus, and his relationships with African-American elected officials from New Orleans were strong. In many ways he acted as a savvy politician aware that he would preside over a divided city where resentments ran high. He bought billboards around town that read ONE TEAM. ONE FIGHT. ONE VOICE. ONE CITY. That was the theme of his inaugural address and would be the guiding principle, he declared, of his tenure. Two days after he took office, Landrieu sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking for the help of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in overhauling a police department sometimes viewed by black New Orleanians as an occupying force—and other times as an indifferent one. “Nothing short of a complete transformation is necessary,” the new mayor wrote.

  At first, Landrieu seemed similarly sensitive to the black community’s concerns in his choice of a new police chief. With his inauguration more than two months off, Landrieu named a multiracial task force of nearly two dozen to help him scour the country in search of top candidates. To chair the committee the mayor-elect named two well-regarded figures in the black community. Yet members complained that the mayor’s transition team declined to share with them the criteria they were using to sort through potential candidates or even the names of applicants. Danatus King, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, stepped down, saying he wanted to avoid being used as “window dressing.” Two more members of the task force resigned, and a fourth was removed the day after she made her frustrations public. The day after sending his letter to Eric Holder, Landrieu announced his choice: Ronal Serpas, a white man who had spent the previous six years running the Nashville police department after twenty-one years with NOPD.

  “A sham process produced a sham choice,” declared John Slade, who cohosted WBOK’s Showtime in the Afternoon with Paul Beaulieu. Slade was the younger of the two and also more sarcastic and funnier. Beaulieu was the cantankerous, gravelly voiced uncle who cracks up the kids at the Thanksgiving table with his irreverent commentary. At least we’ll have plenty to talk about in the coming years, Beaulieu and Slade agreed shortly after Serpas’s appointment.

  THREE MONTHS INTO HIS tenure, Landrieu ventured to the Household of Faith church in New Orleans East. The mayor was inaugurating what he called “budgeting for outcomes”—a gathering in each of the city’s five council districts to give citizens input on the budget. “We’re doing the first of these meetings in New Orleans East,” the mayor began on a muggy night in August 2010, “to honor the frustration and anxiety and uncertainty that exist in the East about whether you’re a real part of the city of New Orleans.”

  In time, the routine would become familiar to New Orleanians. If it was the summer, the mayor and dozens of City Hall employees would be visiting your part of the city. Attendance was mandatory for department heads and other top staff, including police and fire. Any person living in that district was allowed two minutes at the microphone. The mayor, sitting at a table, scribbled on a legal pad; after the last person had spoken, the mayor would address people’s questions and concerns, one by one. At one of these forums, Landrieu, an average-size man with close-cropped hair and a doughy face, was the thespian skilled at communicating empathy to a large audience. “It’s amazing to watch,” said Connie Uddo. His eyebrows would gather into a small peak above watery-blue eyes. He’d bite his lower lip, he’d shake his head slowly, as a citizen of his city shared his or her tale of woe. A frown would take over his face. He’d address every constituent by first name and asked department heads to stand and account for themselves. “Mitch is so good at letting people know he really heard them and really cares,” Uddo said.

  That first meeting at the Household of Faith church lasted three hours. Dozens spoke, all voicing similar grievances and pleas. They were angry about the slow pace of the recovery and scared about the future of the East. They were fed up with the overgrown, empty lots. Where were the inspectors to enforce the rules for maintaining a property? The East still had few stores. The closest emergency room was twenty minutes away. The residents felt like easy targets in a city awash in crime. “We need your help, Mr. Mayor!” one woman told him that night.

  Landrieu finally stood to speak at nearly 11:00 p.m. “A lot of you talk about blight, but I wanna talk about race for a second,” Landrieu began. He could order his people to crack down on the scofflaws who failed to take care of their properties. He would sign demolition orders if that’s what was required. “But if I start taking people’s houses who aren’t back from Houston and Atlanta—our brothers and sisters—then people on CNN are gonna run up on me and say, ‘Why are you trying to stop people from coming home? Why don’t you want the brothers and sisters to come, lil’ Mr. Mitch, looking the way you do?’ ”

  There was no mistaking the sentiment expressed inside the Household of Faith church that night: people wanted him to do something about the blight. But the mayor had a point to make: “We’ve erred on the side of people who haven’t returned. What I hear you saying is it’s time to err on the side of those who’ve moved back. Is that it?” The crowd roared yes. Again, Landrieu brought up race: “I promise you, as soon as I lay it down, somebody’s gonna come down here, and there’s gonna be a march, and somebody’s gonna try to turn it into something it’s not.”

  “We got your back!” a woman yelled out. The audience broke into applause.

  YET PLENTY IN THE black community were dubious that Landrieu had their back. Prior to Katrina, Waste Management, a publicly traded multinational, handled most of the garbage pickup in New Orleans. But Katrina caused the city to fall so far behind in its payments to Waste Management that the company declined even to submit a bid when its contract came up for renewal. Under Nagin, the multimillion-dollar garbage pickup contracts ended up with a pair of local, black-owned firms. The Tribune’s Beverly McKenna considered it one of Nagin’s most significant accomplishments. So, too, did WBOK’s Paul Beaulieu. The economic revival of the black community, both argued, required a healthy black business sector—and if both firms proved loyal WBOK and Tribune advertisers, that only underscored their point about black businesses being an essential part of the ecosystem. “They gave jobs to people who otherwise would have a hard time finding them,” Beaulieu said. “Ex-cons trying to clean themselves up, people who might not have graduated from school, jumping on and off trucks, making good money, providing for a family.”

  Stacy Head, the white city councilwoman, was the first to cast suspicions on the no-bid deal the Nagin administration had cut with the two firms. Satisfaction with garbage pickup had increased since the switch, but the city was also paying more, Head showed, than their counterparts in neighboring Jefferson Parish. Those defending the two companies pointed out that hauling garbage in a crumbling city with narrow streets costs more than in the suburbs, but that nuance disappeared in the media coverage. Landrieu, who had inherited a budget shortfall of nearly $100 million, sided with Head. Renegotiate your rates, Landrieu insisted, or he would explore the legality of voiding the contracts.

  Who could argue with the $5 million a year the mayor save
d the city after the two firms renegotiated? But these two homegrown firms were two success stories in a community feeling shortchanged even as billions in recovery dollars were flowing through the city. Said John Slade, Beaulieu’s WBOK cohost, “This mayor’s attitude is, ‘We’re going to take everything from black hands. We’ll let them have crumbs.’ ”

  CHARITY HOSPITAL WOULD NEVER reopen as a health care facility. In 2010, a federal arbitrator decided in the state’s favor in its dispute with FEMA over the damage to Charity. FEMA officials thought they were being generous when they set aside $125 million to reimburse Louisiana for a facility they believed had suffered only minimal structural damage, but the arbitrator ordered the agency to pay nearly four times that amount. That $475 million check from the feds would allow the state to start construction on its hospital at the ambitious new biomedical center the city had decided to build at the edge of downtown—a project Landrieu supported. For nearly three hundred years, New Orleans had been home to a public hospital whose primary mission was caring for those without health insurance. The uninsured would be treated at a new state hospital that would, once built, be less reliant on public dollars and serve both private and indigent patients.

  In 2010, a federal judge would rule against those feeling their rights had been trampled when the authorities prevented pedestrians from escaping New Orleans over the bridge into Gretna. The authorities in Gretna may have proven bad neighbors when they locked their doors in the midst of a crisis, said US district court judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon, but restricting pedestrian traffic into their city “is not an unreasonable restraint of liberty.” Five class action lawsuits had been filed against the Gretna police and other law enforcement agencies. All of them were tossed out of court before a trial. A grand jury had also declined to indict any of those behind the decision.

  Those living in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish also received bad news. An appeals court overturned Judge Duval’s decision that the government needed to compensate homeowners and businesses there because of the Corps’ neglect of MR. GO. A three-judge panel agreed with Duval that MR. GO “greatly aggravated the storm’s effects on the city,” but ruled the law “completely insulates the government from liability.”I

  ACCORDING TO THE 2010 census, 343,829 people lived in New Orleans—29 percent less than before the storm. Some 24,000 fewer whites resided in the city and 119,000 fewer blacks. Whereas before Katrina the city was more than two-thirds African-American, it was now less than 60 percent black. The census also showed a modest bump in the number of Latinos living in New Orleans.

  Fewer children were living in New Orleans five years after Katrina—44 percent fewer, according to the census. Overall, Lakeview was missing one-third of its people and New Orleans East more than 40 percent. The official population of the Lower Ninth Ward was down more than 80 percent. One in every four residential properties across New Orleans was categorized as blighted or vacant—fifty-four thousand addresses across the city. The city was certain to lose seats in the state legislature after new legislative districts were drawn in 2011.

  Education persisted as an issue dividing the city. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s public school students were now attending a charter school—a higher proportion than anywhere else in the country. Those seeing charters as the solution to the abysmal pre-Katrina performance of the Orleans Parish schools could point to rising test scores, just as skeptics stressed that most schools were still posting failing grades. The editorial boards at the New York Times and Washington Post were impressed with the progress being made, as were the liberal thinkers at the Brookings Institution, which hailed the early successes and dubbed New Orleans “one of the boldest public school experiments under way in the country.” Yet more than a few parents longed for the traditional neighborhood-based system, whatever its flaws, when the alternative was now lotteries held to fill spots at popular schools and children attending schools on the opposite side of town.

  Barbara Major was among those charging that the charters were cherry-picking the system’s better students to keep their scores up and leaving slower learners and their parents to fend for themselves. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state and Orleans Parish schools for shortchanging the education of forty-five hundred special-needs students.II Teach For America, which was supplying the local schools with fresh college graduates, almost all of them white, was another flash point. Depending on whom you asked, the Teach For America kids were recent college grads whose youthful exuberance enlivened the classroom or clueless interlopers set loose inside the schools after a five-week summer-training program.

  The demand for affordable housing in New Orleans continued to outstrip supply. Around the United States, an alarmingly high 40 percent of all renters spent more than 35 percent of their income on housing. In New Orleans five years after Katrina, that number topped 60 percent. More than three thousand names were on the waiting list for public housing in New Orleans, and another twenty-nine thousand people were still hoping for a federal housing voucher that would cap the amount they paid for housing at roughly 30 percent of their income. Further limiting people’s options was a public transportation system that had 60 percent fewer riders than it did pre-Katrina and therefore couldn’t afford to offer the same service as before the storm. Meanwhile, thousands lived in their ruined homes because they couldn’t afford to live anyplace else.

  New Orleans had a decent mental health care system prior to Katrina. But Charity Hospital was closed and Governor Bobby Jindal in 2009 cut off funding for the adolescent mental health facility the state operated in New Orleans. The city had endured a terrible trauma yet lost dozens of psychiatric beds along with hundreds of mental health professionals. Five years after Katrina, the suicide rate in New Orleans was still at least twice as high as it was before the storm.

  Not all the news was bad as the city approached the fifth anniversary of Katrina. Civic engagement was higher than ever in the Big Easy, a locale historically short on activism even in the face of a dysfunctional government and monumental social problems. “I must’ve gone to three hundred meetings in the first two years after Katrina,” said Lakeview’s Miss Rita—Rita Legrand. Before Katrina, she never attended any. A notoriously weak public defender’s office was transformed post-storm into a well-functioning one. Charity Hospital wouldn’t be reopening, but a spate of community-based clinics had opened around the city, providing the poor better access to preventive care and other health services. Arts organizations were generally strong in an environment where foundation money was available to groups working to preserve the city’s culture.

  Legions of young college grads resettled in New Orleans after Katrina. Some were idealists who had shown up to help rebuild the city after Katrina and never left (the YURPs, they were called: young urban rebuilding professionals); others were hipsters and artists and self-described “gutter punks” who saw in New Orleans a cheap way to live in a city with a vibrant music scene, great food, and a unique culture. Locals complained about the high rent, but outsiders saw a bargain when it was stacked up against prices in Brooklyn or the San Francisco Bay Area. Others saw financial opportunity in a town enjoying a kind of mega-stimulus program, fueled by billions in recovery dollars, while most of the rest of the United States was slogging through a recession. “For the first time in decades,” the Times-Picayune reported, “New Orleans is attracting waves of young professionals.” Entrepreneurs were creating new businesses at a pace greatly outstripping pre-Katrina numbers. Even wages were up in New Orleans, as was median family income. Just as Jimmy Reiss and his allies had hoped when dead bodies were still in the streets, while the city’s poorest residents were still having a hard time returning, the city would be more prosperous.

  THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF Katrina fell on a Sunday. A light, steady rain fell all day. There was the customary tolling of bells and prayer services, and also a large demonstration occurred in the Lower Ninth Ward, where more than a thousand people showed up to pr
otest the lack of progress in their neighborhood. Maxine Waters, a high-profile congresswoman from Los Angeles, black, took aim at “low-down, dirty insurance companies,” Road Home, and also the charter-schools experiment. “We want our public schools back,” Waters said to loud applause.

  Barack Obama came to town for the fifth anniversary. He had been heckled the first time he had visited New Orleans as president (“We’re working as hard as we can,” a defensive Obama had said). This time he arrived intent on proving his commitment to the city. A few days before Air Force One touched down in New Orleans, the administration had announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant—a lump sum that parish officials could spend as they chose, without needing FEMA to sign off each time they decided to rebuild a school. On a stage at Xavier University, a historically black college that had been rebuilt since the storm, Obama reiterated a pledge he had made as a candidate to restore the coastal wetlands and declared that the area’s new flood-protection system—what he called “the largest civil works project in American history”—would be ready by the next hurricane season. “My administration is going to stand with you, and fight alongside you, until the job is done, until New Orleans is all the way back,” the president said.

  Mitch Landrieu spoke that night at the refurbished Mahalia Jackson Theater in Tremé. He reminded people of the ways New Orleanians had come together after Katrina: “Young black boys pushing an old white man in a rusted wheelchair to find water,” he said. “An old white woman holding the hand of a crying black girl who had lost her mother.” That, he said, should be their template. “To become the city of our dreams, we must follow a righteous path guided by the lessons learned from Katrina. Love thy neighbor, our diversity is our strength, never give up.” His next lines he would repeat throughout his mayoralty: “We are not rebuilding the city we were. We are creating the city we want to become.”