Gentilly Friday - Pontchartrain Park

An aerial view of Pontchartrain Park from the early 1950s. The area in the top left corner is Camp Leroy Johnson, an army supply depot. That land was turned over to the University of New Orleans in the 1960s, and is now the university's East Campus. On the right, jutting out into Lake Pontchartrain is Lakefront Airport (NEW). The top left corner of the undeveloped area is now the campus of Southern University in New Orleans. The drainage canal separating the park from the rest of Gentilly on the left is the Peoples Avenue canal. Next to the canal are the tracks for the Southern Railroad. They head from in town, curve right then travel east across the Industrial Canal and out to the train bridge across the lake that runs parallell to US90 and I-10. The canal and the train tracks make for a significant geographical boundary between the established part of Gentilly on the left and the new Pontchartrain Park subdivision on the right.

In the late 1940s/early 1950s, Pontchartrain Park was a new subdivision developed for upwardly mobile black families. Jim Crow laws were still in force at this time, making a new subdivision a gold mine for the developer, since a lot of black men took advantage of their GI Bill benefits, went to college, and now had good jobs. These men became the doctors, lawyers, and other professionals of the black community in the 1960s and 1970s. Shopping centers in Gentilly Woods and Gentilly Terrace (along Gentilly Blvd., just off this photo to the south) began an even faster growth. The archdiocese of New Orleans built St. Augustine High School to educate many of the young black men from these families, and St. Mary's Academy moved out to Chef Menteur Highway from the French Quarter in 1965. Southern University in New Orleans (SUNO) opened in 1959.

Fast forward to 2005. The Federal Flood hit the Pontchartrain Park area as hard as the rest of Gentilly. The combination of Army Corps of Engineers-designed structural failures in the floodwalls of the London Avenue Canal to the west as well as wind pushing water over the tops of the levees and floodwalls of the Industrial Canal in the east were a double-whammy for this neighborhood. Homes in the area got anywhere from 3' - 8' of water. Then, to add insult to injury, a tornado spawned from thunderstorms associated with Hurricane Rita touched down in this neighborhood.

Victims of the Federal Flood who had less than 4' of water come into their homes, generally speaking have had an easier time of rebuilding, since it's possible to cut out drywall interior at 4' and replace it with new sheets of the same height. This is assuming you have the funds to fix your house, and that's where the problem comes in for many residents of Gentilly. Those doctors and lawyers who moved out to Gentilly in the 1950s are now old folks. Their mortgages have been paid off for years, and with those mortgages often went flood insurance coverage as well. When a bank holds paper on a house in most neighborhoods down here, the owners are required to buy flood insurance. The premiums are factored into your monthly note and paid by the lender. Since a lot of folks are on fixed incomes by the time they burn their mortgages, they drop flood insurance. After all, the Corps of Engineers built all these levees and floodwalls, right?

That's where "Road Home" is supposed to help, but the program has been problematic. The state was making it up as they went along, so a lot of early applicants got lost in the shuffle. By the time the process was refined and (supposedly) working, other homeowners found that the state was cutting back on what they were wiling to pay them, fearful in some cases that there wouldn't be enough funds to go around. In other cases, some accuse the program of deliberately being an obstacle to keep blacks from coming back to the city. (I don't subscribe to the notion that they're directly discriminating--I think they're just bloody stupid.)

Then there's the geniuses at City Hall. The city wants to demolish homes that are supposedly "threats" to the neighborhood. Judging by the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit (PDF) filed against the city to halt demolitions, if you're not living in your home or in a FEMA trailer on the front lawn, your house is in danger of being summarily knocked down, no matter what the condition is. Read the lawsuit, it's scary.

But if you think that developers are having a field day tearing down housing projects, just wait until the Shaw group and other contractors get ahold of entire subdivisions. People still in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston, and Atlanta can't keep an eye on their homes 24/7 while they wait for Road Home money and insurance settlements. Those who voluntarily choose not to return are selling their houses back to the state. Imagine if your dad's house is one of two or three on a block that didn't get sold back to the state? Do you really think those couple of houses are going to slow down these people?

This is how we're treating our middle class in New Orleans. These are people who, in many cases, busted their asses to get out of the projects to make life better for their families. These are men who went to war and women who supported them. Entire neighborhoods still lie empty, hanging in limbo.

The public housing debate has made for dramatic theater in the last couple of weeks while the city, state, and Republican private sector are combining to eradicate what's left of the black middle class in New Orleans. Without a middle class, there will be no tax base. There will be no pool of skilled labor and professionals for corporations to employ. There will be no black health care professionals (and there already are bloody few white ones at the moment).

This is the story you should be blogging about. Those of you who are watching developments unfold in other parts of the country and world see the news coverage and read local accounts of the public housing debate are getting very emotional about what is essentially a small portion of the displaced population of the city. What about the homeowners? It's not fair to say that these people have more of a right to return than those who have less than them, but they damn sure deserve advocates as loud as the out-of-town activists who have been chaining themselves to fences. They're going to move on to the next kabuki stage while people in Gentilly struggle to rebuild.