| The Guardian | - |
The
water submerged and smashed houses, sending residents scrambling on to
their rooftops and providing the world's media with the iconic image of a 200ft-long barge breaking loose from its moorings and landing atop homes and a school bus. ... No ...
New Orleans: houses can be rebuilt, but can trust in central government?
After
hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was clear just how unprepared the
Louisiana city was. Since then, the Big Easy's regeneration has been
mired in racial and state politics, and the crushing weight of federal
bureaucracy
Email
Errol Joseph, a
63-year-old former resident of Forstall Street at his old home – that he
has not been able to rebuild since Katrina. Photograph: Julie Dermansky
for the Guardian
Click here to see our full gallery from New Orleans
Click here to see our full gallery from New Orleans
"You wouldn't come back if you didn't love this neighbourhood.
It's just not an easy place to live," says Laura Paul, as we drive
around the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, dodging potholes.
In truth this was never an easy place to live, least of all on the morning of 29 August 2005, when the city's flood walls were breached as hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast. The water submerged and smashed houses, sending residents scrambling on to their rooftops and providing the world's media with the iconic image of a 200ft-long barge breaking loose from its moorings and landing atop homes and a school bus.
Now, more than eight years later, the Lower Ninth – the city's worst-hit ward, lying below sea level – offers a telling snapshot of New Orleans's recovery efforts. No longer resembling the flattened aftermath of a hurricane storm system, instead it appears to have been hit by a one-off tornado, with normal-looking houses abutting ruins, and occupied blocks next to empty lots, as if nature had sliced a serrated, serpentine path through this two-square-mile patch of land, 10-minutes' drive east of the French Quarter.
The state of each structure today depends on the motivations and means of homeowners, the vagaries of government regeneration efforts and, often, the assistance of organisations such as Paul's. The 43-year-old Canadian was on a roadtrip from Florida to California in 2005, broke it off to help aid workers in the months after Katrina, and ended up staying.
Paul is executive director of lowernine.org, one of several non-profits repairing or rebuilding homes to help displaced residents return to the area. She says her group averages 10 full home rebuilds each year, on a total budget of about $140,000 (£85,000). Paul lives in the area, a couple of blocks from the Mississippi. She estimates barely 30% of the 15,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned to the Lower Ninth's least-damaged parts, and only half that to the areas nearest the levee breaches. Census numbers suggest the ward's population was 2,842 in 2010 – about 71% of whom live in poverty.
Across the city, approximately 700 people died and 134,000 housing units were damaged as four-fifths of New Orleans was flooded. Katrina and her sister storm, hurricane Rita, caused an estimated $150bn in financial losses, only one-fifth of which was covered by private insurance. The $120bn in federal spending mostly went on emergency relief.
Laura Paul, executive director of lowerline.org at a construction
site in the Lower Ninth ward this year. Photograph: Julie Dermansky for
the Guardian
And so, on any given day now, up to two dozen volunteers still pay to
sleep in the lowernine.org office, in youth hostel style dorms. Around
the corner on the day of my visit, a generator brays outside a
single-storey shell as half a dozen young people carry bags of materials
and hammer at wooden slats. Like many other houses in the Lower Ninth,
its front still bears a Katrina tattoo: a green X code spraypainted by search-and-rescue teams.
"Conservative estimates have the recovery of this community taking another decade," Paul says. "Studies suggest that communities of low wealth take three times longer to recover from events like this than communities of means, which makes sense."
Just to the east, St Bernard parish was also badly affected by Katrina but has rebounded more quickly and now bustles with traffic and commercial activity. "Persistence is the key to success," says a sign at the entrance to the Chalmette oil refinery. Not the only key, perhaps. "They're by far and away better off. Because this is a 98% African-American community and that is an 80% white community. That's my opinion," Paul says. "There are all kinds of factors, okay, but if I had to boil down my opinion … People say it's not about race, it's about class. At the end of the day, in this country that's the same conversation. This is a poor black community. That's why the recovery is slow."
Remains of a blighted home in the Lower Ninth ward, where
reconstruction has moved in stops and starts, in 2014. Photograph: Julie
Dermansky for the Guardian
With their jaunty angles, bright pastel colours, landscaped gardens and solar panels, the eco-friendly houses built so far by the Make It Right foundation would command a million-dollar price-tag if they were on the Californian coast. One is designed by Frank Gehry. Many have river views – or at least, a sight of the rebuilt concrete wall that now protects the Lower Ninth from any repeat storm surge. Co-founded by Brad Pitt, Make It Right is nearly two-thirds of the way to its target of building 150 new houses here. In May it will host its second gala fundraising evening; tickets for the previous shindig cost $1,000 and up. The project's ambition and achievements are admirable, but its self-conscious architecture and idealism seem jarringly aspirational in a place that would simply settle for being functional.
Often, all that remains of Lower Ninth dwellings are the front steps and the outline of the foundations. In certain blocks, the foliage grows more than 6ft high. Hundreds of unwanted lots are still owned by the city. But there is a school. Another is under construction, as is a fire station and a $19m-community centre with a swimming pool. Some $45m has been allocated for infrastructure repairs.
Modern eco-friendly homes made by Brad Pitt's Make it Right
Foundation next to the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, this year.
Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Julie Dermansky for the Guardian
The Lower Ninth's fragmented recovery is visible in microcosm on
Delery Street. A short walk north of the busy St Claude Avenue stands a
brand-new, two-storey home painted nautical blue, with potted plants on
the front porch. No more than 15ft away is the decomposing skeleton of
what was once a shotgun house typical of the area: narrow, rectangular
and raised. There are no walls left, only anaemic beams holding up the
triangular roof. The guts of the house are gone, save for a white
porcelain toilet. A note, dated 31 July 2013 and fixed to the front
door, states that the gas service has been disconnected.
Behind a fence one block to the east, however, tanks and cannons stand in the yard of the vast Jackson barracks, home to the Louisiana National Guard and beautifully restored at a cost of $325m.
Such piecemeal regeneration gives the impression that there is no master plan for the area. In the months after Katrina, however, city planners certainly had one: turn the Lower Ninth into green space, abandon it as a viable urban centre, and save money by shrinking the city's footprint. Community pressure made that option politically untenable. New Orleanians are loyal to their neighbourhoods and protective of their history. But if the facilities aren't there, how can they move back?
"First-response disaster recovery was difficult and heartbreaking and terrible to see people in those circumstances – but it was easier to help then," says Paul. "Back then, people weren't asking: 'Are you kidding? How many of my tax dollars have been spent in Louisiana since that event? Why haven't you all rebuilt yet, what's the holdup?'"
As if to illustrate the point, repeated calls to city officials responsible for regeneration to comment on this article were met with silence.
The school system, though, has been overhauled. Technology startups are clustering in the fashionable Warehouse District and hoping that a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit will spark a recovery into a renaissance. A huge, if controversial, medical centre is under construction near the French Quarter. The quarter was largely unaffected by Katrina, and its blend of charm and debauchery is still seducing tourist hordes. A University of New Orleans study found that 9 million people visited the city in 2012, only 1 million below the record set in 2004.
They spent $6bn – an all-time high. So, while urban blight is evident only a short walk from the city's photogenic core, the most-visited parts and desirable suburbs are prospering.
"For the people who were able to return, like myself, things are much, much better," says Sandy Rosenthal, citing the improved education system and more co-operation between black and white residents. "It's been absolutely amazing."
A discarded sofa and other rubbish in front of a destroyed house in
New Orleans, in 2014. Photograph: Julie Dermansky for the Guardian
A petite 56 year old, originally from Massachusetts, Rosenthal founded levees.org,
a blog, information source and grassroots pressure group. We meet on
Bellaire Drive near the southern end of Lake Pontchartrain, in front of a
plaque sponsored by her website. It reads: "On August 29, 2005, a
federal floodwall atop a levee on the 17th Street Canal, the largest and
most important drainage Canal for the city, gave way here causing
flooding that killed hundreds." Pointedly, it adds: "In 2008, the US
District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana placed responsibility for
this floodwall's collapse squarely on the US Army Corps of Engineers."
Erected at the entrance of a large site where corps employees still work installing pumps, it may not be popular reading matter for the many who pass it each day. But it is a source of pride for Rosenthal, who used to work in marketing until she became consumed full-time by a simple goal: "I just wanted the BS to stop." With the help of activists and experts, she set out to prove that the city drowned because of engineering blunders, not bad luck. There were more than 50 levee breaches during Katrina. Badly-built walls cracked.
"I've researched this to death – nobody predicted the walls would break. That was just unfathomable incompetence, no other word for it," she says. "People don't sit back and trust the federal government any more. We used to just assume the corps was doing a good job. Not any more."
New Orleans' levees and floodwalls have been rebuilt over the past eight years at a cost of $14.5bn. New pumps at 17th Street and two other canals are the biggest unfinished projects, and will take three more years to complete. But despite Rosenthal's positive view of her city's regeneration, she is concerned that the rebuilding process has not gone far enough.
New Orleans is now protected by canal closure gates which shut when water reaches a certain height, relief wells, gauges to indicate problems, stronger levees and a pump system. The federal government has paid for a 350-mile network designed to defend the city from what is known as a 100-year storm surge – a flood with a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. But Katrina was estimated by the corps to have been stronger than that, and Rosenthal and others wanted a shield able to deflect a 500-year storm. Should such a massive storm stike today, it would cause more widespread flooding – although the defences are not predicted to crumble as they did with Katrina. The water might be up to people's knees, rather than their heads.
Water surrounds homes east of downtown New Orleans, just after hurricane Katrina hit, in 2005. Photograph: Smiley N Pool/AP
Indeed, the levees held convincingly when hurricane Isaac attacked on
the seventh anniversary of Katrina – assuming, that is, you lived
within the city. A couple drowned in their home in the outlying
community of Braithwaite, just south of a new eight-mile, 30ft wall
built to protect the St Bernard parish. A year after Isaac, homes in
Braithwaite remain abandoned. Yet the starkest sense that this is a
place in peril eminates from a sturdy, modern edifice: the Braithwaite auditorium, rebuilt in 2011 to leer over its surroundings. The floor is elevated on stilts to a height in excess of 19ft.
Several corps projects are underway in this area but local politicians are constantly pleading for more federal and state funds to bolster their limited defences, while the natural barrier provided by coastal wetlands erodes at a dramatic rate. "The political problems may dwarf the engineering problems," says John Barry, former vice-president of the state-created levee board that covers this region. "People realise that not everyone can be protected; that there are going to be winners and losers. But in the relatively near future, these losers are going to be identified. They're not going to be happy, and I don't blame them."
People march along Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans
during a funeral procession commemorating the fifth Anniversary of
hurricane Katrina, 2010. Photograph: Sean Gardner/Getty Images
"Eight years is a long time," says 63-year-old Errol Joseph, gazing at what remains of his home on Forstall Street in the northern, most barren, part of the Ninth ward. He has lived here for most of his life. The house is presently a carapace of interlocking wooden beams, with an oddly neat pyramid of rubble in the front yard.
"If I had not dealt with the Road Home programme, I would be back in my house," Joseph explains. A flooring contractor by trade, he thought he had the necessary skills and experience to complete his home. But despite insurance payouts and grants – or rather, he believes, because of them – Joseph's rebuilding attempts became mired in a sludge of bureaucracy. Years of delay ruined some of the materials he had bought, and caused faults with the elevated foundations that will cost thousands of dollars to fix.
Joseph feels betrayed and baffled by the system. "I can't afford to finish it," he says, doing the sums with a finger in the dust on the rear windscreen of his Chevrolet Astro van. Money paid, money owed, from this company, that agency – by the time he is finished, the glass looks like the whiteboard in an algebra class.
Joseph and his wife now have a house elsewhere in the city. So why will they not concede defeat and leave the wood to rot? Joseph gestures at empty lots, ghosts that give him a feeling of belonging he cannot find anywhere else; one somehow not obliterated along with the bricks and mortar, nor vanished into the potholes nor lost in the weeds.
"Miss Effie would make cornbread plates," he says softly. "Over here, the best cake you'd ever want to eat … This woman here, she'd give suppers. We'd play dominoes all night. They was family. I miss all that."
"This is home," Joseph adds, nodding to reinforce the words. "This is home."
end quote from:
In truth this was never an easy place to live, least of all on the morning of 29 August 2005, when the city's flood walls were breached as hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast. The water submerged and smashed houses, sending residents scrambling on to their rooftops and providing the world's media with the iconic image of a 200ft-long barge breaking loose from its moorings and landing atop homes and a school bus.
Now, more than eight years later, the Lower Ninth – the city's worst-hit ward, lying below sea level – offers a telling snapshot of New Orleans's recovery efforts. No longer resembling the flattened aftermath of a hurricane storm system, instead it appears to have been hit by a one-off tornado, with normal-looking houses abutting ruins, and occupied blocks next to empty lots, as if nature had sliced a serrated, serpentine path through this two-square-mile patch of land, 10-minutes' drive east of the French Quarter.
The state of each structure today depends on the motivations and means of homeowners, the vagaries of government regeneration efforts and, often, the assistance of organisations such as Paul's. The 43-year-old Canadian was on a roadtrip from Florida to California in 2005, broke it off to help aid workers in the months after Katrina, and ended up staying.
Paul is executive director of lowernine.org, one of several non-profits repairing or rebuilding homes to help displaced residents return to the area. She says her group averages 10 full home rebuilds each year, on a total budget of about $140,000 (£85,000). Paul lives in the area, a couple of blocks from the Mississippi. She estimates barely 30% of the 15,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned to the Lower Ninth's least-damaged parts, and only half that to the areas nearest the levee breaches. Census numbers suggest the ward's population was 2,842 in 2010 – about 71% of whom live in poverty.
Across the city, approximately 700 people died and 134,000 housing units were damaged as four-fifths of New Orleans was flooded. Katrina and her sister storm, hurricane Rita, caused an estimated $150bn in financial losses, only one-fifth of which was covered by private insurance. The $120bn in federal spending mostly went on emergency relief.
Laura Paul, executive director of lowerline.org at a construction
site in the Lower Ninth ward this year. Photograph: Julie Dermansky for
the Guardian
And so, on any given day now, up to two dozen volunteers still pay to
sleep in the lowernine.org office, in youth hostel style dorms. Around
the corner on the day of my visit, a generator brays outside a
single-storey shell as half a dozen young people carry bags of materials
and hammer at wooden slats. Like many other houses in the Lower Ninth,
its front still bears a Katrina tattoo: a green X code spraypainted by search-and-rescue teams."Conservative estimates have the recovery of this community taking another decade," Paul says. "Studies suggest that communities of low wealth take three times longer to recover from events like this than communities of means, which makes sense."
Just to the east, St Bernard parish was also badly affected by Katrina but has rebounded more quickly and now bustles with traffic and commercial activity. "Persistence is the key to success," says a sign at the entrance to the Chalmette oil refinery. Not the only key, perhaps. "They're by far and away better off. Because this is a 98% African-American community and that is an 80% white community. That's my opinion," Paul says. "There are all kinds of factors, okay, but if I had to boil down my opinion … People say it's not about race, it's about class. At the end of the day, in this country that's the same conversation. This is a poor black community. That's why the recovery is slow."
Remains of a blighted home in the Lower Ninth ward, where
reconstruction has moved in stops and starts, in 2014. Photograph: Julie
Dermansky for the Guardian
Regenerating in patches, rebuilding in pockets
A mile to the north however, next to the Industrial canal, where the flood was 10-feet deep and the barge came to rest, men in high-visibility jackets are carrying out construction on a surprisingly grand scale.With their jaunty angles, bright pastel colours, landscaped gardens and solar panels, the eco-friendly houses built so far by the Make It Right foundation would command a million-dollar price-tag if they were on the Californian coast. One is designed by Frank Gehry. Many have river views – or at least, a sight of the rebuilt concrete wall that now protects the Lower Ninth from any repeat storm surge. Co-founded by Brad Pitt, Make It Right is nearly two-thirds of the way to its target of building 150 new houses here. In May it will host its second gala fundraising evening; tickets for the previous shindig cost $1,000 and up. The project's ambition and achievements are admirable, but its self-conscious architecture and idealism seem jarringly aspirational in a place that would simply settle for being functional.
Often, all that remains of Lower Ninth dwellings are the front steps and the outline of the foundations. In certain blocks, the foliage grows more than 6ft high. Hundreds of unwanted lots are still owned by the city. But there is a school. Another is under construction, as is a fire station and a $19m-community centre with a swimming pool. Some $45m has been allocated for infrastructure repairs.
Modern eco-friendly homes made by Brad Pitt's Make it Right
Foundation next to the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, this year.
Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Julie Dermansky for the Guardian
The Lower Ninth's fragmented recovery is visible in microcosm on
Delery Street. A short walk north of the busy St Claude Avenue stands a
brand-new, two-storey home painted nautical blue, with potted plants on
the front porch. No more than 15ft away is the decomposing skeleton of
what was once a shotgun house typical of the area: narrow, rectangular
and raised. There are no walls left, only anaemic beams holding up the
triangular roof. The guts of the house are gone, save for a white
porcelain toilet. A note, dated 31 July 2013 and fixed to the front
door, states that the gas service has been disconnected.Behind a fence one block to the east, however, tanks and cannons stand in the yard of the vast Jackson barracks, home to the Louisiana National Guard and beautifully restored at a cost of $325m.
Such piecemeal regeneration gives the impression that there is no master plan for the area. In the months after Katrina, however, city planners certainly had one: turn the Lower Ninth into green space, abandon it as a viable urban centre, and save money by shrinking the city's footprint. Community pressure made that option politically untenable. New Orleanians are loyal to their neighbourhoods and protective of their history. But if the facilities aren't there, how can they move back?
"First-response disaster recovery was difficult and heartbreaking and terrible to see people in those circumstances – but it was easier to help then," says Paul. "Back then, people weren't asking: 'Are you kidding? How many of my tax dollars have been spent in Louisiana since that event? Why haven't you all rebuilt yet, what's the holdup?'"
As if to illustrate the point, repeated calls to city officials responsible for regeneration to comment on this article were met with silence.
Winners and losers. And yet more losers
Many people never did come back. The population of New Orleans slumped from 485,000 in 2000 to an estimated 230,000, 11 months after Katrina, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Centre. By July 2012, it was back up to 369,000.The school system, though, has been overhauled. Technology startups are clustering in the fashionable Warehouse District and hoping that a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit will spark a recovery into a renaissance. A huge, if controversial, medical centre is under construction near the French Quarter. The quarter was largely unaffected by Katrina, and its blend of charm and debauchery is still seducing tourist hordes. A University of New Orleans study found that 9 million people visited the city in 2012, only 1 million below the record set in 2004.
They spent $6bn – an all-time high. So, while urban blight is evident only a short walk from the city's photogenic core, the most-visited parts and desirable suburbs are prospering.
"For the people who were able to return, like myself, things are much, much better," says Sandy Rosenthal, citing the improved education system and more co-operation between black and white residents. "It's been absolutely amazing."
A discarded sofa and other rubbish in front of a destroyed house in
New Orleans, in 2014. Photograph: Julie Dermansky for the Guardian
A petite 56 year old, originally from Massachusetts, Rosenthal founded levees.org,
a blog, information source and grassroots pressure group. We meet on
Bellaire Drive near the southern end of Lake Pontchartrain, in front of a
plaque sponsored by her website. It reads: "On August 29, 2005, a
federal floodwall atop a levee on the 17th Street Canal, the largest and
most important drainage Canal for the city, gave way here causing
flooding that killed hundreds." Pointedly, it adds: "In 2008, the US
District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana placed responsibility for
this floodwall's collapse squarely on the US Army Corps of Engineers."Erected at the entrance of a large site where corps employees still work installing pumps, it may not be popular reading matter for the many who pass it each day. But it is a source of pride for Rosenthal, who used to work in marketing until she became consumed full-time by a simple goal: "I just wanted the BS to stop." With the help of activists and experts, she set out to prove that the city drowned because of engineering blunders, not bad luck. There were more than 50 levee breaches during Katrina. Badly-built walls cracked.
"I've researched this to death – nobody predicted the walls would break. That was just unfathomable incompetence, no other word for it," she says. "People don't sit back and trust the federal government any more. We used to just assume the corps was doing a good job. Not any more."
New Orleans' levees and floodwalls have been rebuilt over the past eight years at a cost of $14.5bn. New pumps at 17th Street and two other canals are the biggest unfinished projects, and will take three more years to complete. But despite Rosenthal's positive view of her city's regeneration, she is concerned that the rebuilding process has not gone far enough.
New Orleans is now protected by canal closure gates which shut when water reaches a certain height, relief wells, gauges to indicate problems, stronger levees and a pump system. The federal government has paid for a 350-mile network designed to defend the city from what is known as a 100-year storm surge – a flood with a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. But Katrina was estimated by the corps to have been stronger than that, and Rosenthal and others wanted a shield able to deflect a 500-year storm. Should such a massive storm stike today, it would cause more widespread flooding – although the defences are not predicted to crumble as they did with Katrina. The water might be up to people's knees, rather than their heads.
Water surrounds homes east of downtown New Orleans, just after hurricane Katrina hit, in 2005. Photograph: Smiley N Pool/AP
Indeed, the levees held convincingly when hurricane Isaac attacked on
the seventh anniversary of Katrina – assuming, that is, you lived
within the city. A couple drowned in their home in the outlying
community of Braithwaite, just south of a new eight-mile, 30ft wall
built to protect the St Bernard parish. A year after Isaac, homes in
Braithwaite remain abandoned. Yet the starkest sense that this is a
place in peril eminates from a sturdy, modern edifice: the Braithwaite auditorium, rebuilt in 2011 to leer over its surroundings. The floor is elevated on stilts to a height in excess of 19ft.Several corps projects are underway in this area but local politicians are constantly pleading for more federal and state funds to bolster their limited defences, while the natural barrier provided by coastal wetlands erodes at a dramatic rate. "The political problems may dwarf the engineering problems," says John Barry, former vice-president of the state-created levee board that covers this region. "People realise that not everyone can be protected; that there are going to be winners and losers. But in the relatively near future, these losers are going to be identified. They're not going to be happy, and I don't blame them."
People march along Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans
during a funeral procession commemorating the fifth Anniversary of
hurricane Katrina, 2010. Photograph: Sean Gardner/Getty Images
Road Home paved with good intentions
In the wake of the flood, money surged into New Orleans. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided nearly $20bn to help Louisiana recover from Katrina and Rita, the hurricane which followed a month later. The state's Road Home programme claims to have channelled about $9bn in government funds to more than 130,000 residents. But Road Home was beset by administrative problems, and the subject of a discrimination lawsuit settled in 2011 because, typically, it handed out grant money based on a home's pre-Katrina worth, rather than the cost of fixing the damage. Which was advantageous to people who lived in more expensive, white areas."Eight years is a long time," says 63-year-old Errol Joseph, gazing at what remains of his home on Forstall Street in the northern, most barren, part of the Ninth ward. He has lived here for most of his life. The house is presently a carapace of interlocking wooden beams, with an oddly neat pyramid of rubble in the front yard.
"If I had not dealt with the Road Home programme, I would be back in my house," Joseph explains. A flooring contractor by trade, he thought he had the necessary skills and experience to complete his home. But despite insurance payouts and grants – or rather, he believes, because of them – Joseph's rebuilding attempts became mired in a sludge of bureaucracy. Years of delay ruined some of the materials he had bought, and caused faults with the elevated foundations that will cost thousands of dollars to fix.
Joseph feels betrayed and baffled by the system. "I can't afford to finish it," he says, doing the sums with a finger in the dust on the rear windscreen of his Chevrolet Astro van. Money paid, money owed, from this company, that agency – by the time he is finished, the glass looks like the whiteboard in an algebra class.
Joseph and his wife now have a house elsewhere in the city. So why will they not concede defeat and leave the wood to rot? Joseph gestures at empty lots, ghosts that give him a feeling of belonging he cannot find anywhere else; one somehow not obliterated along with the bricks and mortar, nor vanished into the potholes nor lost in the weeds.
"Miss Effie would make cornbread plates," he says softly. "Over here, the best cake you'd ever want to eat … This woman here, she'd give suppers. We'd play dominoes all night. They was family. I miss all that."
"This is home," Joseph adds, nodding to reinforce the words. "This is home."
end quote from:
No comments:
Post a Comment