New Orleans could lose 80 percent of its African-American population in the wake of Hurricane Katrina unless there is a special effort to help poor people return to the city, says a report on the storm's impact.
The study, based on satellite maps of New Orleans and the nearby coast and census data, confirms what many residents suspected: Katrina inflicted disproportionate damage on poor neighborhoods with high unemployment and a high number of renters. These people were unlikely to have home insurance or the necessary resources to return and rebuild.
In the city of New Orleans, three-quarters of the 354,000 people who lived in the areas worst damaged by the storm were African-American, and 29.2 percent were poor, the study found. Nearly 53 percent were renting and did not own their own home. More than 10 percent were unemployed.
"The danger in the current thinking about rebuilding is that it specifically excludes important elements of the population whose neighborhoods were destroyed, and who won't find a place in the future city. Disproportionately that means people who were African-American and below the average income of the city," said John Logan, a sociologist at Brown University, Rhode Island, and author of the study.
People living in public housing are said to have even less chance to return to their city. The local authorities have closed all public housing in the affected areas.
"If the future city were limited to the population previously living in zones undamaged by Katrina it would risk losing about 50 percent of its white residents, but more than 80 percent of its black population. This is why the continuing question about the hurricane is this: whose city will be rebuilt?" the study says.
African-Americans have already voiced fears that the new city to emerge from the wreckage of Katrina will bear little resemblance to the New Orleans of old -- specifically that it will no longer have a black majority.
Mayor Ray Nagin recognized those fears earlier this month when he pledged that he would rebuild New Orleans as a "chocolate city."
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS