Hurricane Katrina: December 2007 Archives

Because I just can't ever see me continue to beat the public housing battle horse to this extent on Boxing Day.

Or maybe I'm just too New Orleanian to stay that bummed out.

Baseball season starts in April and runs to October. You can't dwell the game you played last week, else you're going to get beat this week.

• Healthcare
• Public housing
• Demolitions of privately-owned homes
• Road Home
• FEMA trailers
• Public Schools
• The LA-01 election (Gilda!)

...and so many other issues. I will not wallow in misery and depression. We have Chris Rose for that.

Ray had a very thought-provoking post on the guilt he's feeling about "missing" the storm. I understand this totally. In my travels this past year (I spent over 30 weeks this year out of town on Monday thru Friday, teaching computer classes), I encountered a number of expatriated New Orleanians who really were upset that they weren't "home" to help out.

This is something that, like the WWII soldiers Ray mentions, individuals have to work out for themselves. I don't think any real New Orleanian would think less of someone who survived the storm, or who returned to the city afterwards and now work to make this a better place.

It's the carpetbaggers that think their opinions have more worth than the survivors and the displaced that I have problems with

.

For example, take Andrei Codrescu, writer, poet, and teacher at LSU. While I was gutting my house in September of 2005, I had to listen to this arrogant prick broadcast on NPR from somewhere in Arkansas, telling people how New Orleans was "dead." Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Professor. Just because you had nothing vested in New Orleans to the point where you could up and leave and stay away for an extended period of time doesn't mean the place is dead. While you were burying the city, a lot of us were working to fix the place so that your sorry ass could come back.

Now we've got bloggers from other parts of the country who haven't been to the city for years before the storm (if they've ever been here), telling us how we should proceed with respect to rebuilding. While I support anyone's right to their opinion, you'll forgive me if I choose to value some of those opinions about as much as I do an old book of coupons from K&B. If NYC, Philly, or DC were some sort of models for the way public housing should be done, and the working poor were treated with compassion and respect in those cities, I might feel like these bloggers and activists were entitled to some sort of moral superiority. New Orleans is not a blank drawing board for experiments in urban planning. My house is a better analogy, where the framework is still there, even though we had to cut out the walls. The walls and floors have to go back in, but most of the existing framework has to remain. It's all too easy to sit back in another city and say what you like and don't like about New Orleans and its residents. When you get off your ass and house-sit someone's property in a FEMA trailer to make sure their home doesn't get demolished prematurely, come talk to me. Until then, you'll pardon me if I don't find a lot of value in your moral outrage.

Then there's this from Ray's post:

I have another high school friend who is Nth generation Y'at, born on Mardi Gras Day in the back seat of a taxi stuck in parade crowds, and she has told me that amongst her writer friends, that division was not implicit, it was explicit. Writers who had lived here only a few years treated her as a tourist because during the storm she was teaching at a university in another state. "Sorry, honey, but you weren't here for it, so you don't really know." I know it hurts her quite a bit.

I'm glad I don't hang out with this type of carpetbagger. I have little patience for someone who's spent a few years eating occasionally at Domilise's and going to Rock N Bowl telling someone whose life essentially drowned in the Federal Flood that they "don't really know." I don't care if a 1982 graduate of Redeemer High School hand't been back to the city until last year, all it would take is one look at what eleven feet of water did to the place where they spent their adolescence, and the pain is going to be there. Unless the person we're talking about lived a very insular life Uptown (and Ray's description of her being an "Nth generation Y'at" indicates that's not the case), EVERY local lost something. These posers will go back to their high school reunions and hang out with people who have never experienced the loss of their town like New Orleanians have.

They can all kiss my pale white ass.

Which is why I'm surprised nobody's really addressed or mentioned DeBerry's column in Da Paper on Friday:

A fight broke out in the New Orleans City Council chambers Thursday as people opposed to the demolition of some of the city's housing projects struggled to exert some kind of influence on that morning's meeting. But if we were to go back 15 years or so -- about the same time Chuck D was the frontman for Public Enemy -- one imagines that a similarly activist crowd would have been decrying what they saw as the government's grand scheme to ghettoize and pin down the poor.

He makes a valid point here. Prior to the storm, public/affordable housing advocates in the city didn't have a problem with tearing down the projects. The argument was always over how to provide for the people displaced once they were torn down. Now, activists are trying to preserve these buildings. Asking which is it to be is a fair question.

Then there's DeBerry's money shot:

Wednesday morning, I visited the home of a 71-year-old woman who can't understand why Road Home has suddenly declared her ineligible to receive money to repair her home. She told me of her personal struggle as a factory worker and domestic to get out of the Fischer projects and buy the home that now needs repair. She'd wept, she told me, when she saw footage of people trying to fight their way back into the kind of environment she'd worked so hard to escape.
When she was there, she thought the projects were a bad place to live. And all these years later, she still thinks the same thing.

I think about some of the families who were living in the projects so they could afford to send one kid in the family to Redeemer, in the hopes that at least one kid would "get out."

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.

good first-person account here.

And I've managed to put my finger on it. I'd seen a boobtoob like that big-ass boobtoob recently, and it was at the fishing camp down da bayou where we took the Boy Scout troop camping last month. The dads love this place, because the boys can fish in the bayou and they can watch LSU. It's a happy trade-off.

Thing is, there's a reason that big-ass boobtoob is down in a fishing camp. It's old. It's the sort of thing someone who is into large screen boobtoobs bought several years ago, and has now tossed out to make room for their plasma, high-def, big-ass boobtoob.

That does one do with a perfectly good, albeit old, big-ass boobtoob? Some folks put it in a fishing camp. Others might give it to someone who doesn't have a boobtoob.

In any case, dangerblond is right. It's none of our fukkin' business.

Shame on Da Paper for trying to make this woman into St. Ronald of California's apocryphal "welfare queen."

...as David Crosby used to say, this time from Jeffery:

Prior to the flood, New Orleans was an ailing post-industrial city increasingly reliant on the insufficient tourism industry to provide a faint echo of a once healthier, more diverse economy. Back then the tourists were annoying. They came and partied and peed on our houses and then went home and told ignorant stories about a place about which they had no real clue. Who knew that one day the tourists would be re-designing the same neighborhoods they never bothered to visit or understand before?

This is the bottom line, and one of the areas where I'm most disappointed in the our political leadership. They're getting rolled by carpetbaggers.

The fire station at Elysian Fields Avenue and Pelopidas Streets in Gentilly. As you can see from the sign in the photo, this station was a WPA construction project built during the Great Depression. NOFD gave the building back to the city in the early 1980s, and it was converted into a storage facility for the New Orleans Recreation Department. It was being used by NORD until the Federal Flood. This is how it looks today:

This part of Gentilly was once a vibrant commercial district, with Zuppardo's Economical Supermarket on the corner of Elysian Fields and Gentilly, gas stations, fast food places, a K&B Drugstore, strip malls up a block on Gentilly Road, and McKenzie's "Chicken-in-a-Box." Behind the fire station are a number of small office buildings, housing doctors, dentists, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and several other small businesses. Farley's Florist was one block down on Mandeville.

Post-storm, the supermarket is now an empty lot, torn down because flood damage. The McDonald's is now a Chinese buffet (arguably an improvement), but at least Chicken-in-a-Box is back. Down the street, Dillard University still struggles for survival after being heavily damaged by the Federal Flood.

Gentilly is a mess, and it's very slow in returning. The Baptist church Elysian Fields by I-610 has been rebuilt, and Brother Martin High School repaired their damage and re-opened in January of 2006. Residences are extremely slow returning, however. Drive down St. Anthony Blvd. from Gentilly to Robert E. Lee, and you see way too many FEMA trailers. The site of those white disasters is a mixed blessing. Their numbers indicate that the property owners are trying to come back. That there are so many of them two years later means there are way too many obstacles in their way.

DailyKos diarist mlharges has written some very compelling diaries on Gentilly, particularly this one on Jean Gordon Elementary just yesterday. He returned to the school where his girlfriend worked pre-storm and documented its current state and that of the neighborhood. While his counts on houses in the neighborhood behind the school (which was on Robert E. Lee and the London Avenue Canal) aren't scientific, they jive with my observations around Elysian Fields, as well as further down Paris Avenue, in my wife's old neighborhood by Cabrini church. His observations:

Walking up and down the block, I counted twenty different properties in that street. Before the storm each property had a slab on grade home of approximately 1800 square feet. Today the count is as follows: two homes repaired and occupied, a third repaired and for sale or for rent (which ever happens first) and a fourth being repaired and raised. Six empty lots where homes once stood. Two of the remaining ten homes have piles of debris where the owners have cleared out flood damaged belongings but have done nothing else. The remaining homes are untouched.

20% of those houses have been repaired. 30% have been razed, with no likelihood of new ones being built on those slabs.

Two of Gentilly's Catholic church parishes are still closed, St. Raphael on Elysian Fields and St. Frances Xavier Cabrini on Paris Avenue. The entire property around Cabrini was leased to Holy Cross School this year. They've torn down the church and are moving forward to build a new school on the site, moving out of their historic Ninth Ward home. On the positive side, St. James Major parish, on Gentilly Blvd., just off of Franklin Avenue, fared much better, to the point where their school building now is able to house St. Mary's Academy, an all-black girl's high school whose New Orleans East campus was badly damaged.

Fridays are now going to be "Gentilly Fridays," because there needs to be an increased level of awareness of the plight of this neighborhood. It's impossible to say that one neighborhood or one aspect of the city's problems are more important than others at this stage--that's like saying that one Gold Star Mother's suffering is more than another's. What Gentilly is lacking is publicity. Residents of public housing have Bill Quigley and his staff, along with scores of activists and protesters. Da Nint' has Brad Pitt, Harry Connick, Jr., other celebrities, and many folks in the local music community. Gentilly has nothing more than a lot of middle-class families who are wrestling with re-building, dealing with insurance companies and Road Home, all while trying to earn a living.

Without neighborhoods like Gentilly, the city's tax base goes down the tubes. With no property and sales taxes coming in from blue-collar and professional families, the services needed to allow the working poor their "right of return" will never get put back into place. The people rebuilding in Pontchartrain Park, or over on Cameron Blvd., or off St. Bernard Ave. need help, prayers, and support. They need political representation at City Hall, in Baton Rouge, and in Washington that will give them the opportunity to return to a productive and happy life in the city they love.

In his song "Rednecks," Randy Newman sums up David Vitter's position on public housing in New Orleans. Vitty-cent has risen in opposition to a housing bill proposed by his senate colleague, Mary Landrieu. Landrieu's bill would require a one-to-one replacement of public housing units. Tear down a unit, it has to be replaced by a new one. Vitty-cent, of course, doesn't want to build public housing that will be occupied by the Eebil Coloreds. His response to Landrieu's proposal that he can't believe we need the units. Then there's this comment:

Vitter has said the bill "wants to re-create the New Orleans housing projects exactly as they were."

This is a good example of the code-word racism that Vitty-cent has been famous for since he succeeded David Duke in the LA State Legislature. To the white-flighters of Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes, "exactly as they were" means all those black folks who were laying on the leg of hard-working white people. There's also the perception of crime--many white folks believe that razing the projects will somehow magically lower the incidence of violent crime in the city. That Vitty-cent would pander to the redneck vote in the state is no big surprise. When I saw the headline, however, my first thought wasn't that he was pandering, but how a defeat of this housing bill actually becomes a win for Landrieu. She's standing for re-election in a Louisiana that is much more red than when she ran her last tough campaign in 2002. If the Republican party gets behind State Treasurer John Kennedy (Landrieu's main opposition next year), one of the things they'll throw up is how "liberal" she is. Taking steps to bring more black folks back to New Orleans will most certainly be viewed by rednecks as a policy out of sync with Randy Newman's song. Thing is, Landrieu needs even more of those rednecks to vote for her this time around. Watching this housing bill go down in flames, stifled by Vitty-cent's delaying tactics is a huge win for her. A defeat gives her an issue on which to campaign in the city, and takes away something that Kennedy can hang on her. Some would argue that this is a pretty cynical attitude, particularly at a time when the odds are so stacked against public housing residents. Mary Landrieu is extremely afraid of being labelled a "liberal," and runs from that moniker regularly. For all the pride she takes in getting defense appropriations through the Senate in her fund raising literature, there's not much bragging about pulbic housing going on. The bottom line is that New Orleans' most vocal public housing advocate is Maxine Waters. Jefferson is too busy defending himself. Landrieu's motives are suspect because we're in an election cycle. And the Republicans are signing along with Randy Newman.

They're putting the video back on YouTube. I can understand a bunch of volunteers being intimidated by an organized business, and it's a good thing they got some pro bono legal advice:

"Initially, we bowed to the threat of legal action, not because we felt we had done anything wrong, but because we lacked the money to defend ourselves against a powerful international trade group. But now that two prominent law firms, Adams and Reese LLP and Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, have offered to defend our First Amendment rights on a pro bono basis, we are prepared to defend ourselves in court, if necessary."

Let's see how far ASCE wants to carry this. You're either part of helping New Orleans or you're not.

In spite of all the hand-wringing I've seen, read, and heard on the subject of public housing, the issue I don't see any housing advocates willing to tackle is what to do with the people they would have return to public housing. There is no government infrastructure to support people living in poverty at this time. If you re-open public housing, where will the residents get health care? Where will their children go to school? How will they get to jobs without efficient public transportation? "Right of return" is a good emotional slogan, but there's still nothing for people living in poverty to return to, and that's not going to change until there is a change of administrations at both the local and federal level. Even then, the little unsympathetic carpet-bagging turd who just got elected governor will be a huge roadblock in any effort to help people.

But at least he's taking a stand:

EDWARDS STATEMENT ON HUD PLAN TO BEGIN DEMOLISHING PUBLIC HOUSING IN NEW ORLEANS THIS WEEK Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Senator John Edwards today called on HUD to reverse its plan to begin demolishing public housing in New Orleans this week and urged the New Orleans City Council to stand strong in defending housing for city residents. Edwards said in a statement: “There is a housing crisis in New Orleans today – the result of government policies that have failed the people of the Gulf since Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Rents have doubled, families are being evicted from FEMA trailers and now the current administration is now trying to make a bad situation worse. “I am calling on HUD to postpone its plans to destroy affordable public housing until replacement housing is ready. Knocking down historic and livable housing today that withstood the winds of Katrina with the bulldozers of Bush is counterproductive to the goal of giving residents a home to which to return. Decentralizing poverty by encouraging new mixed-income income makes a lot of sense – I’ve proposed creating 1 million new housing vouchers to do exactly that. But eliminating housing where people could live in a city where a desperate shortage of shelter exists makes no sense at all. “I urge the City Council to reject the demolition permits HUD needs for its plan to destroy hope for current and displaced New Orleans residents.”

Wouldn't it be nice if two sitting senators could make a joint statement, pointing out all the things they could do to HUD to make their lives miserable, should they allow the demolitions to go forward? Hmmmmmm....