by Gary Rivlin
He was not alone in that view. “New Orleans is such a better place than it was pre-Katrina,” Bill Hines, the lawyer once so close to Nagin, declared several years into Landrieu’s tenure. Over dinner at a favorite Uptown white-tablecloth restaurant, he, too, spoke of the strides made by the city’s underperforming schools and the demolition of the projects. His law firm had doubled in size since the storm, and his happy ending—new furniture in a refurbished home—seemed an apt metaphor for New Orleans. A decaying city that had been crumbling for decades was enjoying a massive makeover courtesy of FEMA and HUD. Tourists were spending at record levels, and the city’s convention business was strong. “New Orleans is a very hot property,” Hines said. As proof he mentioned a recent news story putting Louisiana ahead of New York and second only to California in film productions. “I’m seeing before my eyes the rebirth of New Orleans.”
Hines would get no argument from Michael Hecht, white, the CEO of Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic-development nonprofit. On the twenty-third floor of Canal Place, in an office overlooking the Mississippi, Hecht expressed concern for a “fragile black middle class” (Hines shared the same worry). But eight years after Katrina, Hecht, a post-Katrina transplant, declared the city to be in the midst of an economic renaissance. Where pre-storm New Orleans was a town growing increasingly reliant on tourism, he said, the city had invested in a giant biomedical center that promised a shift toward better-paying jobs. The tech scene that he and others had helped midwife had prompted the Atlantic to declare New Orleans a “start-up city.” Forbes listed New Orleans second in its 2011 “Best Cities for Jobs” feature, and the next year Travel + Leisure ranked New Orleans first in its annual list of “America’s top cities.” The latest census figures showed that the city was attracting another four-thousand-plus people each year, most of them presumably the smart, young artsy types the editors of Forbes had in mind when they declared New Orleans “Number One Brain Magnet in the US.” New Orleans, Hecht declared, “is one of the great comeback stories of all time.”
Even Ted Quant, an ally of Lance Hill’s who cofounded the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University, saw great improvements in the city that had been his home since 1970. Quant, who is black, occasionally visited Pres Kabacoff’s Healing Center. “There’s live music, a grocery store with great produce, a theater,” Quant said. “What’s there not to like about a place like that?” Personally, he had no complaints. He had money in the bank and found plenty of places to go when he and his wife wanted to enjoy a night out on the town. He counted himself among those dubious that the charter-school experiment would save the next generation of students, but his kids were already grown. His primary worry was for all those people working minimum-wage jobs who could no longer afford the rent. “The city does look good,” Quant said. “But for whom?”
VIOLENT CRIME OCCURRED AT twice the national rate eight years after Katrina, even though New Orleans was a smaller, whiter city. New Orleans was also a less affordable city, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center reported shortly before the eighth anniversary of Katrina. Despite the economic renaissance, more than half the city’s renters were still spending at least a third of their pretax income on housing, and the employment among working-aged black men had ticked up a mere two points, from 46 percent to 48 percent. The average education level among both blacks and whites had increased post-Katrina, yet the city’s poverty rate was 29 percent in 1999 and still 29 percent when in 2013 the Data Center released its “New Orleans Index at Eight.” The Bloomberg wire service found that inequality was greater in New Orleans than any other US city except Atlanta. The disparity between rich and poor in New Orleans put the city on par with Zambia.
The remaking of public housing in New Orleans was near complete eight years after Katrina. It represented another audacious experiment watched by researchers around the country. Only one-third of the units overseen by the Housing Authority of New Orleans would house low-income residents. Another third had been set aside for moderate-income locals, which, after lobbying by Kabacoff and others, was increased from 60 percent of the area median income to 120 percent, or $71,000 for a family of four. The last third were reserved for market-rate rentals. Financing proved difficult after the collapse of the global credit markets in 2008, but Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffett, and hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson were among those funding this privatized “public” housing. The federal government chipped in an additional $18 million in FEMA dollars to pay the construction costs. Millions more in precious community development funds were also used.
New Orleans, which had fourteen thousand public housing units in the 1990s, now had fewer than three thousand low-income apartments. The federal overseer the Obama administration sent to run the Housing Authority of New Orleans was issuing more rental vouchers than in the past, but participation by landlords in the Section 8 program had dropped steeply post-Katrina. At the eight-year mark, the city had thirteen thousand people on its voucher waiting list and another three thousand families waiting for traditional public housing.
The RTA was still running only half the number of bus lines as before Katrina. Those who couldn’t afford a car in a city in which one in every three people earned under $20,000 a year faced much longer waits for the buses that did run. Before Katrina, a bus on the Galvez line, which connects the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards to the rest of the city, ran every seven minutes during peak ridership hours, said Mitchell L. Guidry Jr., the RTA’s director of planning. Eight years after Katrina, a bus ran every forty minutes. The city’s streetcar lines also suffered from tight funding. Where once twenty cars ran on St. Charles during the commute hours, now there were eight. The typical wait was now fifteen minutes rather than five.
Nearly 80 percent of the city’s public school students were attending a charter school eight years after Katrina. Articles reported on the New Orleans schools miracle, and counter-articles exposed such claims as a myth. In 2013, Oprah Winfrey’s production company debuted Blackboard Wars, a series about a failing New Orleans school and the high-profile charter champion determined to prove his method can work in any environement. Less than a year later, abysmal test scores and falling enrollments caused the school to shut its doors.
“This is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest,” Arne Duncan, US education secretary, offered around the fifth anniversary of Katrina. “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.” Parent advocate Karran Harper Royal was among those offended by the remark and also baffled by it. Royal was a black woman who had for twenty years been fighting for better schools in New Orleans. More recently, she had started answering the complaint line for a group she was a part of called the Education Equity Roundtable. Some days she was receiving two or three calls from unhappy parents looking for the group’s help.
“If I had to choose, I’d vote to go back to the old system,” Royal said. “People needed stability after Katrina, but instead we got a system where schools are constantly opening and closing and you can never be sure where your child is going next year. There was a lot of dysfunction in the old days, but at least your children attended community schools. At least you knew the people and knew they cared.”
NEW ORLEANS COULD BOAST of its beautiful new flood-protection system, but the gift came with a price tag. The Corps was transferring responsibility for the levees in stages, and state and local officials were scrambling to find money to staff the pumping stations and pay for basic maintenance. That included the cost of occasionally raising the earthen levees to account for rising water levels and a sinking landscape. The levee boards had the authority to raise funds through property taxes, but any increase first had to be approved by a majority of voters in districts that covered several parishes.
The state’s receding coastline was another worry. The federal government had spent multiple billions on a storm system with a built-in obsolescence if the wetlands continued to disappear
. Between 1932 and 2010, according to the Data Center, the New Orleans region lost 948 square miles of coastal wetlands—nearly one-third of the marshland that served as a natural defense against storm surge. After Katrina, a new Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority was formed. Eventually, the legislature approved a $50 billion, fifty-year coastal restoration master plan. State and federal dollars would be used to fund the hundred-plus projects the state’s master plan identified to help Louisiana recover and protect its coastal lands. But even including fines related to the BP oil spill, the state had raised less than $3 billion by early 2015.
One of the regional flood-protection districts saw an obvious way to fund some of the work: make the people who helped cause the problem pay to help fix it. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East, or Slfpa-E, voted unanimously to file suit against nearly a hundred oil and gas companies. Their industry carved up the southeastern Louisiana marshes, the suit argued, accelerating the loss of the wetlands and making New Orleans more prone to flooding. So why shouldn’t the gas and oil interests pay to help correct the problem? “This protective buffer took six thousand years to form,” wrote John M. Barry, the author and historian who served as the board’s vice chair. “Yet . . . it has been brought to the brink of destruction in a lifetime.”
28
“GET OVER IT”
Alden McDonald saw virtue in a city thrumming with young energy—Brooklyn on the bayou. He and Rhesa even signed up for 504 (named after the New Orleans area code), a new program in which volunteers hosted dinners for newcomers wanting to feel more rooted in their adopted city. The McDonalds would feed a dozen or so people at a time in the hopes of teaching them something about New Orleans and maybe even inspiring them to get more involved in their community. “We could use all the help we could get,” McDonald said.
McDonald was as big a cheerleader for the makeover of public housing in New Orleans as Pres Kabacoff or Bill Hines. The tours he offered interested out-of-towners now included Columbia Parc, the new development near his home, built in place of the old St. Bernard complex. “It’s one of the bright spots to come out of this thing,” McDonald said. The first shock was physical: twenty or so blocks of dreary brick tenements had been replaced by rows of brightly painted town houses, complete with wrought-iron balconies, along with the occasional low-rise Creole cottage mixed in. Columbia Parc could accept only around one-third of St. Bernard’s former residents, but McDonald focused on families fortunate enough to secure a replacement unit. Each apartment was outfitted with a washer-dryer. Granite countertops were standard, as were stainless-steel appliances and faux-hardwood floors. An early-learning center, a computer room, a swimming pool, a health club, and a movie theater were on-site. “This was a case of an agency taking the opportunity to build things the right way,” McDonald said.
Yet McDonald was not nearly as beamish about New Orleans’s future as his peers in the white community. He also brought visitors to Pontchartrain Park, only a couple of minutes from Columbia Parc. There, in this subdivision central to the rise of the black middle class in New Orleans, refurbished ranch homes abutted houses that seemed untouched since the storm. Eight years after Katrina, McDonald said, maybe 60 percent of the homes in Pontchartrain Park were habitable. Other parts of Gentilly—areas only a few blocks from his own home—were filled with moldy houses crumbling from neglect. “See all those vacant lots?” He pointed to an empty-looking street. “They were occupied pre-Katrina.” Driving around the nearby Seventh Ward proved equally disheartening. “There’s still so much to be done.” McDonald worried about a lack of urgency given all those who had declared victory over Katrina.
New Orleans East was faring better than Pontchartrain Park or the Seventh Ward. Estimates put the population at between 80 and 85 percent of its pre-Katrina numbers. A supermarket had finally opened six years after Katrina. A second opened a year or two later. Stores and eateries were leasing space in the strip malls, at least those located along the main roads. A beautiful new library had opened a few blocks from Liberty’s office. Schools were under construction around the East. Cassandra Wall’s sister Tangee, who had remained politically active, saw the revitalization of Joe W. Brown Memorial Park as critical. Rather than use FEMA dollars to simply restore this 163-acre park, the Landrieu administration sought partners in Nike, Allstate, and the Brees Dream Foundation to make it better. The park was now home to a regulation-size football field, a state-of-the-art track, tennis courts, an indoor pool, and a rec facility that hosted after-school programs aimed at teens. The city was also creating miles of walking and jogging trails in the area. Seven and a half years after Katrina, at the start of 2013, construction began on a new hospital at the site of the old Methodist facility.
Yet eight years after Katrina, New Orleans East hardly seemed a synecdoche for the “higher and better” New Orleans that George Bush was imagining in his Jackson Square speech two weeks after the storm. Locals were happy to see construction start on a new hospital. But where once the East had two hospitals, a single 80-bed facility was replacing a 181-bed institution. The new hospital would have no maternity ward. People were happy to have a couple of supermarkets, but the East had six prior to Katrina. An occupied storefront seemed better than an empty one, but now so many were filled by pawnbrokers, check cashers, and dollar-discount stores. “From the highway, we take on the look of a poor community when nothing could be further from the truth,” said Sylvia Scineaux-Richard, president of the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission (ENONAC).
Fewer low-rent complexes were along the I-10 than before the storm. Some had been converted to luxury apartments, and even those still filled with Section 8 tenants were upgraded to comply with new zoning rules championed by ENONAC (minimum square footage, a washer-dryer in each unit, a three-story height limit). Yet abandoned apartment buildings were still visible from the highway, as were the restaurants and big-box retailers that still hadn’t reopened. Walmart was returning to the East, but not the giant mall next to Liberty Bank or the movie theater in which McDonald had invested. Commercial strips a few blocks off the highway were still in shambles. Commercial properties in the worst shape—those whose owners failed to do basic maintenance such as mow the lawn or board up broken windows—were singled out by Tangee Wall and her allies during one of their “blight rallies.” Their targets included a hospice, a nursing home, and a pair of churches. “You’ll hear people say, ‘I thought this place would have been better a loooooonggg time ago,’ ” Wall said. “They’re giving up, leaving their home to the mortgage company and starting over somewhere else.”
Some subdivisions in the East had few empty homes. But others still had fewer than 80 percent of their pre-Katrina population eight years after the storm. Cheap Chinese restaurants and seafood shacks and the big fast-food chains were well represented, but nice restaurants and decent stores were lacking. The Eastover golf course was still closed. McDonald estimated that one-third of his friends had not returned to New Orleans. “I still have family members stuck in Houston. Some cousins,” McDonald said. “They’re terribly homesick. But people had to make choices.” They found a better job, according to McDonald, or they were reluctant to move home when their kids were doing well in school. “A very different population lives here now.”
Liberty Bank continued to expand, moving into the Chicago market at the start of 2013 when it bought a failing black-owned bank there. Soon, McDonald was wrestling a new, enviable worry: slowing down the pace of growth so that the bank, which now operated branches in seven states, didn’t cross the $1 billion threshold. If it did, it would have to submit to more rigorous regulatory exams. “I’m too old for that,” McDonald said. After more than forty years at the helm of Liberty, McDonald had been on the job longer than any other sitting black bank president. Approaching seventy years old, he took to calling himself “the grandfather of black banking.”
McDonald looked at the Uptown elite differently after Katrina. He h
ad let his membership in the Business Council lapse, he said, “because I did not approve of their behavior after Katrina.” Many peers whom he considered friends before the storm he now held at a distance. He would rejoin the Business Council seven years after Katrina—only once he was convinced that the organization was interested in promoting diversity.
“Ninety percent of what they were pushing for in Dallas they got,” he said—and the remaining 10 percent seemed still in play. In 2011, a downtown business group hung banners along the streets reading WELCOME TO YOUR BLANK CANVAS—presumably referring to places at least some people considered home. Communities such as Bywater and Tremé were now out of reach to many with deep roots there, forcing people to find cheaper housing outside the city. The tradition of second-line parades—the brass-band-led celebrations that take place in the city’s black neighborhoods—continued, but not without controversy. Events that before Katrina attracted a mostly black crowd of maybe a couple of hundred were drawing a mostly white audience of fifteen hundred. The worry among some black New Orleanians was that transplants were so eager to embrace the local culture that they threatened to suffocate it. Ill feelings were compounded when the newcomers drawn to Tremé by its rich history then called the cops to enforce a long-ignored city ordinance that prohibits the playing of live music on the streets after 8:00 p.m.