by Gary Rivlin
McDonald felt especially frustrated with the town’s hotel and restaurant owners. His father, a waiter for fifty-two years, was very much on his mind whenever industry people asked him for a meeting. For many hotel chains, they told McDonald, their New Orleans property was the most profitable in their portfolio. Restaurants were able to charge more for food and drink without any drop-off in business. The future only looked bright for a tourism economy that they declared more profitable than ever.
“Then tell your people to give the workers a raise!” McDonald countered. “I’ll tell them, ‘You correct this or you’re going to end up with a population so poor they’re not going to be able to even afford the rent here.’ ” The homeowner who paid $600 a year in property tax before the storm was now looking at an annual bill of nearly $2,000. Flood insurance rates had increased threefold. Homeowner policies had gone up by around the same amount. People’s water bills are slated to more than double by 2020 to pay for much-needed repairs to an ailing water and sewer system. “What that means is the poor will stay poor and the middle class can never get ahead,” McDonald said. Liberty was thriving, but not those McDonald and others had wanted to help when they started the bank in 1972.
“GET OVER IT.” THAT’S what Jimmy Reiss wanted to tell people still bringing up Dallas eight years after Katrina.
Sitting in the ground-floor café of a Poydras high-rise, Reiss spoke of the twenty years he had spent “working my ass off and getting only shit. Racially, they were against something a white man tried to do even if it was for the good of everybody.” He read from a one-page stat sheet he had brought with him that showed New Orleans circa 2005 to be a high-crime city with too many unemployed black men, lousy schools, and a crumbling infrastructure. His only crime after Katrina, he said, was that he had proclaimed the obvious: New Orleans had too many poor people.
EIGHT YEARS AFTER KATRINA, Cassandra Wall gathered with her family at her sister Petie’s home in New Orleans East. Cassandra’s niece—Petie’s oldest—had just given birth. Petie had invited everyone over to celebrate.
Cassandra couldn’t have been happier for her niece and her husband. But as invariably happened when Cassandra was in New Orleans, she felt relieved her visit would be short. “I’ll go and be glad I went, but I feel out of place,” Cassandra said. “Being there, I feel the disconnect. I feel the loss.”
Thanksgivings and Christmas dinners were still held in New Orleans. The five of them made the effort to get together around Mardi Gras and for other celebrations, and also for the occasional dinner because it had been too long since they had seen one another. “I’d still describe ourselves as close,” Cassandra said. “We still love each other. It’s just different.” They agreed to avoid certain topics, and tensions would flare when invariably they ended up talking about them anyway.
“Cassandra changed a lot,” Petie said. “It’s not just geography. Her opinions about New Orleans changed and that’s been hurtful. Because this is home.”
Cassandra had thought it was inevitable that eventually she would end up back in New Orleans. The house in Baton Rouge, she always thought, was about giving Brandon stability while he went to school. Surely New Orleans would be ready by the time he finished high school. But occasionally she’d drive through the old neighborhood, and all she could see were the homes that were still unoccupied and the same FOR SALE signs from the last time she’d visited. Brandon graduated in 2011 and matriculated at Xavier. Her son was living back in New Orleans, yet, two years later, she was still in Baton Rouge.
“I live here but I don’t consider Baton Rouge my permanent home,” she said. “I feel disconnected from both places. It’s a bad feeling.”
Her sisters didn’t want to believe she had given up on New Orleans. “We’ve all done our share of traveling, overseas, all over the US,” cousin Robyn said. “We’ve all talked about it, how we’ve never found a place that compares to New Orleans.” Tangee, Petie, and Robyn were working hard to make New Orleans East what it once was—and felt the sting every time they heard Cassandra say, “The home I know doesn’t exist anymore.” Even Contesse—prickly, contrarian Contesse—chose New Orleans when she moved back into the old house they’d inherited in Central City.
“Well, I happen to love traditions and customs, they’re important to me,” Robyn had said at one of their gatherings. She figured if Cassandra felt she had the right to vent her opinions about the place where they lived, they had the right to offer a counterview. Petie nodded her head in agreement. This time Cassandra remained silent despite the implied criticism that she didn’t care about the things that made New Orleans unique. Cassandra was tired of their disappointment, and they tired of what Petie described as “her constant negativity about the place I happen to live.”
“All this divisiveness,” Petie said, “started when the two of them”—Cassandra and Contesse—“didn’t want to come home.”
“You go through a traumatic event like this,” Tangee said, “and it’s never going to be the same.”
From the perspective of her sisters, maybe Cassandra’s greatest transgression was that she came to this realization before the others. “A tragedy happened and destroyed what we had,” Cassandra said. “You just have to move forward and build something new because—and there’s no way around it—it’s gone and never coming back.”
MARTIN LANDRIEU—SON OF a politician, brother of the incumbent mayor—was too much of a diplomat to declare the new Lakeview a vast upgrade over the old one. “I can’t use the word better given the circumstances,” he said. But eight years after Katrina, he marveled over Lakeview’s makeover. For years, he was part of a group working to draw a younger demographic to a neighborhood that, pre-storm, was dominated by older, smaller homes. “We didn’t have the closet space young families wanted, we didn’t have the amenities.” Katrina corrected that. Modest-size ranch homes were torn down and replaced by sturdy two- and three-story places. Homes that survived the bulldozer had undergone six-figure rehabs that meant all-new kitchens, bathrooms, and open floor plans in vogue.
“The kind of change that would have taken us thirty or forty years,” Landrieu said, “took seven or eight.”
The Times-Picayune ran a feature in 2011 about this community that “stands out for the economic rebirth it is experiencing even as a national recession has stymied growth.” Six years after Katrina, it seemed a retail outlet would have a hard time even finding an empty storefront. “Commercial space is getting to its saturation point,” a dry cleaner told the paper. Where Alden McDonald and others were constantly in touch with big-name retailers in the hopes of drawing them to the eastern half of the city, Robert Lupo, Lakeview’s top commercial landlord, was swatting them away. “I can’t tell you how many calls I get from the national chains,” Lupo said. But he had to tell them he had no vacancies. “All of my businesses are happy,” he said. “People here have all this disposable income.” Lakeview had fewer homes and more double lots after Katrina, but by 2013 it had more people because of all the families that had moved there.
“The big fights in Lakeview right now are people building multimillion-dollar mansions,” Freddy Yoder said. “Housing prices are going up astronomically.”
The range of restaurants struck Cassandra Wall when one day she drove down Harrison Avenue, Lakeview’s main commercial strip. She saw more upscale eateries in a few blocks than in all of New Orleans East. Driving the side streets made her more depressed. “Compare Lakeview to the East,” Cassandra said. “It makes no sense.” Two middle-class, professional-class communities, yet one was thriving, and the other was a place she couldn’t live. “You tell me the difference between the two communities,” she requested, then supplied the answer. “Race. Of course.”
Jeb Bruneau, the president of Lakeview Civic at the time of Katrina, spoke of the grit among his neighbors when asked why Lakeview and not New Orleans East. “We didn’t wait for government but decided to do for ourselves,” Bruneau said. Connie Uddo, despi
te the racial bias she recognized in the Road Home program, agreed: “People want to say people here had more money. But rich or poor, black or white, if you were wiped out, you were wiped out. The difference is we got organized faster. We realized early on that government wasn’t going to be there, so we didn’t wait.”
Martin Landrieu wasn’t sure what the explanation was, but Jeff Hebert, the man his brother the mayor had put in charge of blight, said he’s puzzled over the question of Lakeview versus New Orleans East for years. Lakeview was on the right side of nationwide trends (the revival of communities closer to the core city, the community feel of its commercial strip), Hebert pointed out, while New Orleans East was on the wrong side (suburban sprawl, strip malls, office parks off the interstate). The compact size of Lakeview compared to New Orleans East was another advantage.
Yet none of those, Hebert said, offered anywhere close to an adequate explanation for what he saw going on in the two neighborhoods. “I look at the data out in the East. The high homeownership. The income numbers. The high levels of disposable income. And the answer I keep coming back to is race.”
CONNIE UDDO WAS STILL working in Gentilly eight years after the storm. She thought about shutting down her organization, but she reminded herself of how much happier she was after Katrina than she was before. “I kind of like this Connie Uddo a lot more than the other one,” she said.
Uddo was now running two nonprofits: the Homecoming Center in Gentilly and also a group called Hike for KaTREEna. The latter had been founded when a lifelong New Orleanian named Monique Pilié quit her job at Federal Express six months after Katrina and pledged to plant a tree for every mile of the Appalachian Trail that she walked. Uddo, who had started working with Pilié around a year after Katrina, agreed to take over after Pilié moved from the area. Under Uddo, the group planted its twenty-five thousandth tree in Jackson Square in mid-2014.
Money was a constant worry. The Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana shut down its office of disaster recovery around the fifth anniversary of Katrina, so from 2011 on, Uddo has been on her own. Her survival has come largely courtesy of a wealthy benefactor whose parents had attended St. Paul, the church in Lakeview where the Homecoming Center started. Contributions came as well from Drew Brees’s foundation, and she got a $40,000 check when she was featured in a New Orleans–based episode of ABC’s Secret Millionaire. But even these “gifts from my angels,” as Uddo described them, wouldn’t prove enough.
“You talk to potential funders and it’s like, ‘We’ve moved on,’ ” Uddo said. “But come to Gentilly, go to the Lower Ninth Ward or New Orleans East, and you’ll see we haven’t recovered.”
AT LEAST MACK MCCLENDON had the Lower 9th Ward Village. That provided some solace when, a few weeks before the eighth anniversary of Katrina, McClendon received a legal notice telling him he had lost his home through foreclosure. “I could be mad at myself for letting it happen, but I’m not,” he said. He knew if not for the Village, he would have moved back into his home on Caffin Avenue. “But once you know what you’re born to do, you get up every day and do it.” He had met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus who had stopped by the Village on a fact-finding tour of New Orleans. He had given a place to stay to groups representing more than a hundred colleges and ultimately housed somewhere around twenty thousand people. How could he have any regrets?
“My mom always used to say, ‘You’ve got to find your purpose in life.’ And I always thought, What’s she talking about? Now I know. As much as I loved that house, it was still just a thing.” To keep things in perspective, he thought of his daughter’s death around seven years after Katrina. A bad fall when she was in her third trimester sent her to the hospital. The baby lived, but the doctors couldn’t stop his daughter’s cranial bleeding. “She was my baby girl, just twenty-one years old,” he said.
Around the time of his daughter’s death, McClendon put his monthly town hall meetings on indefinite hold. “I stopped because it’s one thing to agree on what the problems are, but what’s the point when nothing changed?” To get to a Village meeting, residents would drive the same rutted, fractured roads pocked by crater-size hollows that made the word pothole seem inadequate. They’d pass the skeletal remains of the businesses still shut down years after Katrina and the jungles of weeds growing where homes used to be.
McClendon had mixed feelings about Mitch Landrieu. The mayor at least showed that he cared about the community in ways that his predecessor had never bothered. “The Lower Ninth Ward,” the mayor had vowed at a groundbreaking for the high school the community was finally getting, “is going to become the symbol for how America can find her greatness again.” Yet McClendon was also cynical about the money the city spent on the BREATHE LIFE. BREATHE LOWER NINE. banners that lined a dozen blocks of St. Claude and Claiborne, the two main commercial strips in the Lower Ninth. “You’ll see Landrieu when you’ve got the cameras around,” McClendon said. Landrieu was there when FEMA broke ground on a new community center on Claiborne (approved the year before he took office), and he was there holding a ceremonial shovel when they broke ground on a new FEMA-funded fire station one block away.
Before Katrina, McClendon figured that maybe ten nonprofits were operating in the Lower Ninth Ward, “and I guarantee you they didn’t have a million-dollar budget between them.” After Katrina, he counted fifty-three. “At least three or four of these post-Katrina nonprofits went through a million dollars.” He had raised all of a couple of hundred thousand dollars over the years, yet managed to house and feed tens of thousands of volunteers.
“Something went wrong when so many millions were spent and a lot of my community still looks like it did three months after Katrina.” It seemed to McClendon that enough money had been spent “to build this community four times over.”
McClendon never took foundation money, unlike so many others in the Lower Ninth. “I’m the type who would have driven a funder crazy,” McClendon said. “If I had the money in hand and saw someone in need, I wouldn’t care what that money was designated for, I’d help that person.” Instead McClendon made a different kind of mistake when in 2012—seven years after Katrina and nearly five years after he first opened his doors—he agreed to turn the back portion of his center into a skateboard park with money from a local rapper named Lil Wayne, the philanthropic arm of the soda maker Mountain Dew, and Make It Right. McClendon was savvy enough to get his funders to cover the cost of his liability insurance, but the contract he signed meant he was responsible when a building inspector told him the building’s electrical system needed a major overhaul to bring it up to code. Seven and a half years after Katrina, the doors to the center were locked.
McClendon used Facebook and YouTube to appeal for donations. “I’m amazed and humbled by the number of people who wanted this place open as bad as me,” he said when several months later he was able to reopen. Yet several months after that, he was begging for money again on an East Coast fund-raising trip that had him visiting seven states in six days. He spoke at a church in Atlanta and a synagogue in the Bronx, and visited several colleges, but raised barely $10,000. His next step was a Kickstarter campaign that would fall more than $40,000 short of the $75,000 he had been seeking. “I’ve spent my life savings to get to this point,” he said. “I just don’t have any more to give.”
The occasional splashy effort to help the Lower Ninth was still made. In 2013, the year the Super Bowl returned to New Orleans, a group of large homebuilders and the NFL Players Association announced Touchdown for Homes with the idea of building dozens of homes at a barren edge of the Lower Ninth. They paid for three and stopped when they were able to sell only one to a qualified buyer. The streets were in terrible shape, the listing agent told a Times-Picayune reporter one year after the Super Bowl. The adjoining lots were choked with weeds, and there were no stores and no public transportation. “It shouldn’t be like that eight years after the storm,” she said.
Brad Pitt and Make It Right were sti
ll building homes in their small sliver of the Lower Ninth Ward. Fund-raising was an issue for many Katrina-inspired organizations, but not Make It Right. The group raised $5 million at the 2012 New Orleans fund-raiser Ellen DeGeneres hosted. A year later, Chris Rock was the MC and Bruno Mars was the featured entertainment. The organization raised another $4 million. The problem was scale. The Lower Ninth had eight thousand homes before Katrina. Eight years later, Make It Right had built ninety homes, and a group called Lowernine.org had done maybe seventy. Common Ground had done ten.
Nearly a decade after Katrina, it was still possible to drive several blocks in the Lower Ninth without seeing a single occupied home. Data from the US Postal Service showed that of the mailing addresses in the Lower Ninth before Katrina, only 32 percent were now occupied. At that rate of reoccupation, it wouldn’t be until around 2040 that the area recovered its population.
Epilogue
Ray Nagin was thicker around the middle. Gray flecked his mustache. A spell of gout had given him a pronounced limp. In January 2014, nearly four years after he had left office, Nagin was again in New Orleans, to stand trial in a federal courtroom. New Orleans, now a few years shy of its three hundredth birthday, had long been known as a city on the take. Yet Ray Nagin the reformer—the outsider who vowed to clean up City Hall—was the first mayor in its history to be indicted on crimes committed while in office.
There might even have been a time when New Orleans would have relished the idea of Nagin on the witness stand, explaining his lackadaisical manner or his inability to act more decisively when so many were looking to City Hall for leadership. But the charges against him, while serious, wouldn’t force him to explain his failings as mayor. Instead, this man about whom people had said at least he was honest was defending himself against claims that he used his position as mayor to enrich himself.