Thu, Aug 27, 2015 page9

• What Hurricane Katrina left behind: New Orleans’ uneven recovery and unending divisions

  Tourism and entrepreneurship are up and a river of US federal money has flowed in, but places like the Lower Ninth Ward are still defined by absence and poverty

  • By Tom Dart / The Guardian, NEW ORLEANS
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  Ronald Lewis finds it hard to believe it is 10 years since the water came, even though the newspaper clippings he hoarded in a scrapbook and pinned to a wall are yellowed now by age.

  The horrors in those decade-old stories cannot seem like distant history to anyone who lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, as Lewis does. This is where the flood rose higher than 4m and the partial, capricious nature of the recovery is obvious to daytrippers, never mind lifelong residents.

  Lewis returned, like many of his friends, but the Lower Ninth is still a section of New Orleans defined by absence. The neighbors who died or never came back. The stores and services that no longer exist. Those who had no savings or were unable to negotiate the labyrinthine insurance and compensation processes and were submerged by bureaucracy.

  

  Illustration: Mountain people

  A walk along Tupelo Street, where Lewis lives, is the Lower Ninth in a nutshell: some repaired houses, some new ones and some that are wooden skeletons, abandoned wrecks buried amid chest-high weeds. The waves subsided long ago, but their consequences never did.

  Lewis runs the House of Dance and Feathers, a miniature museum of New Orleans community culture dedicated to the marching groups that form parades for occasions such as Mardi Gras.

  A retired streetcar worker, he started his collection a couple of years before Hurricane Katrina, and started again when the flood ruined it. The house is a small shed-like structure in his backyard, costumes and books haphazardly stacked on tables, pictures sprawled on the walls.

  “I have seen the devastation of my entire community,” he said.

  However, the 63-year-old was determined to return home, motivated by local loyalty and a desire to preserve traditions.

  “I slept in cars; wherever somebody made space, because I wanted to live in New Orleans for the rest of my life,” he said.

  He lives about 6km from the city center, but that part of New Orleans belongs as much to the world as to him.

  “Downtown is for tourists,” he said. “Only time I might go downtown is if I want to buy a new hat.”

  For Lewis, the House is a way of “connecting dots” — joining people to their past, understanding how identity is a blend of culture, geography and genealogy, a collision of unique traits and common bonds.

  Linked, but distinct: That description of the people and cultures of New Orleans also fits as a summary of how the city’s districts rebounded from the hurricane. To speak of “the recovery” as if it were a single, generalized phenomenon is to overlook the nuances, for post-Katrina progress varies radically from one dot on the map to another. Sometimes even from block to block.

  For many, the aftermath of a disaster that killed more than 1,800 people, displaced more than 1 million others and caused regional damage estimated at about US$151 billion proved not so much a cataclysm as a continuation of business as usual. Given the international publicity and billions of US dollars of US federal funds, what has not changed is as striking as what has.

  Tourism is up, with numbers almost at pre-Katrina levels. So is airport traffic. There is increased investment in arts and culture, improved schools and reform of the criminal justice system. The French Quarter is as pretty by day and as wild by night as ever. However, the poverty rate of 27 percent is about the same as it was pre-Katrina, according to Data Center analysts, and is rising in the suburbs. Racial inequality remains rampant.

  The employment rate for black men was only 57 percent in 2013, the Data Center found in a study released last month.

  “The median income for white households in metro New Orleans is on par with white households nationwide, but the median income for black households in metro New Orleans is 20 percent lower than black households nationally,” the report said.

  Violent crime is lower than pre-Katrina levels, but still twice the national average. The city’s population is below 400,000, but from January to last month, more than 100 people were murdered, one-quarter of them in locations a short walk from the main tourist areas.

  “The ‘blank slate’ idea was one that you heard from many people regardless of their politics. You heard that from the most conservative and the most progressive people, that this was an opportunity to do something different. I think because of the influx of federal money and attention, there was an opportunity early to make some choices, but the idea that somehow the Katrina flood was going to be a baptism from the past, I think, was just wishful thinking,” Tulane University assistant history professor Andy Horowitz said.

  “There is a real danger in ascribing New Orleans’ situation over the last decade to the storm. I think that a lot of what you see in New Orleans you see in other American cities that are comparable to New Orleans regardless of Katrina. It is a sort of trap that we can fall into, where we say: ‘Oh, this flood’s responsible for the fact that a lot of people are living in pretty desperate situations,’ and in fact that is true of many places in America that did not flood,” he added.

  Change is obvious just across Poydras Street from the Quarter, where the business district bustles with classic signs of gentrification: Hip hotels and restaurants, expensive apartments and colorful warehouses converted into bars, coffee shops and offices. The metro New Orleans entrepreneurship rate from 2011 to 2013 was 64 percent higher than the national average, the Data Center found.

  “Before Katrina there was nothing. There was no sense of possibility that the city could ever change. I think there is a generation that had given up,” said Tim Williamson, cofounder and chief executive officer of the Idea Village, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping startups, which produces a major annual entrepreneurship festival. Gaudy painted light bulbs sit inside flower vases on tables in the Village’s industrial-chic headquarters.

  Williamson said the flood pushed a city in desperate need of help to look outside for guidance and inspiration.

  “The day after Katrina, in a way, everyone became an entrepreneur, everyone had to restart,” he said. “The problem that existed were these closed networks that had grown over 40, 50 years. Those insular, corrupted networks were fractured after Katrina. The entrepreneurial spirit was evoked from the ground where people decided: ‘I want to be in this place because I love it and therefore I am going to rebuild it.’”

  One of those people is Kenneth Purcell, founder of iSeatz, which builds booking engines for travel companies, such as Orbitz, and counts American Express among its clients. Purcell created iSeatz in New Orleans in 1999, moved the company to New York after Katrina, then heeded the call of home in 2007, despite colleagues telling him it was business suicide.

  Now iSeatz has about 50 local employees and powers US$2 billion a year in bookings through its software. While far from rivaling Silicon Valley, Purcell believes the city is nourishing a boutique technology scene that woos workers attracted by lower costs and the Big Easy’s obvious charms.

  “Unlike in the years prior to Katrina, the entrepreneurship movement here is not fleeting and it is not based on people with false resumes and big talk and not a lot of delivery. People are coming here and making a difference,” the 41-year-old said, sipping iced tea on a terrace in one of the city’s most bucolic spots, Audubon Park.

  “People are coming in from places where the infrastructure works and saying: ‘Why the hell are these streets so torn up? Fix the damn potholes. Why is crime so bad? Let us do something about this. Why is the school system so terrible? Let us reinvent this whole thing,’” he said.

  “Had Katrina not happened, the infrastructure would not have been leveled and so I do not think that those people — who are coming in for jobs unrelated to what they are trying to change in a lot of cases — would be able to be heard by the conservative existing population, the locals that have been here for years and driven by the potholes and known the schools were not the best and the medical system was not the best, but you just drive around the potholes,” he added.

  New Orleans is still a city of drunken bachelor parties staggering past the neon lights and strip clubs of Bourbon Street, hurricane rum cocktails in hand, and it is still a city of charity workers repairing homes damaged a decade ago.

  One of the most prominent such non-profit organizations, the Saint Bernard Project, on the Lower Ninth, has welcomed 100,000 volunteers, development manager Elizabeth Egle said. As many as 155 are scheduled on some days this month. Often they are high-school students.

  “These are kids who were like, five, when Katrina happened,” Egle said.

  The Project has built or rebuilt about 600 houses in the past nine years in New Orleans and another 300 elsewhere in the nation, she said. It gets about 15 calls for help a week on average, which is more than last year. An estimated 95 percent of clients are victims of contractor fraud. Most are black and living in poor-quality rented accommodation in New Orleans.

  Using efficiency techniques developed with assistance from Toyota, projects and people are tracked and directed from a room with wall-to-ceiling whiteboards covered with flow charts, instructions and codes. Equipment is stored in a facility that resembles a branch of the Home Depot.

  Their rebuilds are spread around the city, including a smartly painted home in Gentilly, nearly 10km from the Lower Ninth and less than 1km from the site where the London Avenue Canal’s inadequate defenses were breached, despite a water level about 1m below their top. Last month, the activist group levees.org, which describes the floods as the worst civil engineering disaster in US history, opened a permanent exhibition next to the reconstructed wall.

  “MYTH BUSTERS,” one information panel reads. “Contrary to popular perceptions, 50 percent of the city is at or well above sea level.”

  With so many vacant lots it was not hard to find the space to construct it.

  “Before we built this park it was an illegal dump — debris, mattresses,” group founder and executive director Sandy Rosenthal said.

  The grass is mostly trimmed in this ethnically diverse, middle-class part of town, but the house next to the open-air exhibit has a hole in the roof, which makes it look like it was hit by a meteor the size of a couch.

  Errol Sanders browsed the displays with a friend. This was his neighborhood. The 44-year-old railroad worker grew up on the other side of the canal, where Paris Avenue meets Treasure Street, a few blocks from Elysian Fields Avenue.

  “We used to have parties, crawfish boils, everybody would come to our house and sit in our backyard,” he said, gesturing at empty space. “This used to be Miss Evans’. This was the Mirabeau Apartments right here.”

  Before Katrina hit, his family left town “like it was any other day, any other hurricane.”

  “We never made it back home,” he said.

  Sanders now lives in Houston, a six-hour drive away, like tens of thousands of others who relocated permanently.

  “For a lot of people, Katrina was actually a stepping stone, and I hate to say that. For a lot of people, they were able to make a life elsewhere they never could have had in New Orleans,” he said.

  Yet, like Lewis, Sanders remains connected to the city: Not through bricks, mortar and museum pieces, but through memories and his cherished New Orleans cellphone area code.

  “I will never lose my 504,” he said.

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