New Orleans, Three Years Later

By Jordan Flaherty, Left Turn. Posted August 29, 2008.

As headlines focus on party conventions and presidential running mates, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has been largely overlooked. Several organizations have released reports in the past week, however, offering a chance to to assess the impact of disastrous federal and state policy on the people of New Orleans. The reports examine the current state of the city; meanwhile, grassroots activists have plans to broadcast their message from the streets. For those people who have heard mostly uplifting stories about the city's recovery, the facts on the ground may be shocking.

According to a study by PolicyLink, 81 percent of those who received the Federally-funded, State-administered Road Home grants had insufficient resources to cover their damages. The average Road Home applicant fell about $35,000 short of the money they need to rebuild their home, and African American households on average had an almost 35 percent higher shortfall than white households.

More than one in three residential addresses -- over 70,000 -- remain vacant or unoccupied, according to a report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. While workers with Brad Pitt's Make It Right project are working on overdrive to finish the first of their scores of planned houses in the notoriously devastated Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood overall ranks far behind other neighborhoods in recovery, with only 11 percent of its pre-Katrina number of households. The same report notes that since the devastation of the city, rents have raised by 46 percent citywide (much more in some neighborhoods), while many city services remain very limited -- for example, only 21 percent of public transit buses are running.

Divided City

Its not just grassroots activists that speak of race and class divides in the city -- a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70 percent of the city feel we're divided by class and/or race. The Kaiser survey found some unity among New Orleanians -- we're united in feeling forgotten by the rest of the U.S. Eight out of 10 said the federal government has not provided sufficient support. Nearly two-thirds think that the U.S. public has largely forgotten about the city.

The survey found large percentages saying that their own situation has deteriorated. Fifty-three percent of low- income residents report that their financial situation is worse today than pre-Katrina. The percentage of residents who say they have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness such as depression has tripled since 2006.

There is a continuing debate about how many people live in New Orleans, with no solid figures until the next complete census. But last year, the census bureau estimated a population of 239,000. Other analysts -- and Mayor C. Ray Nagin -- estimate the population to be nearly 100,000 higher. By any measurement, the growth in that number has stagnated, while at least 200,000 former residents (out of a former population of nearly 500,000) have been unable to return -- even the higher estimates of city population include enough new transplants to the city that 200,000 is a safe estimate. The once nearly 70 percent African American city is now estimated to be less than 50 percent African American, a change reflected in the changing face of electoral politics statewide. While Republicans have been losing across the U.S., Christian Coalition candidate Bobby Jindal was easily elected Governor last year, and in the city, decades of Black-majority city council shifted to a white majority.

Blank Slate or Burial Ground

Much of the change in the city is led by a new strata of the city's population -- planners, architects, developers, and other "reformers." Many of them self-identify as "YURPs" -- Young, Urban Rebuilding Professionals -- in their work with countless nonprofits, foundations, and businesses. Some have spoken of the city as a blank slate on which they can project and practice their ideas of reform, whether in health care, architecture, urban planning, or any of countless other areas, especially education. What this worldview leaves out, according to some advocates, is the people who lived here before, who are the most affected by these changes, and have the least say in how they are carried out. "It wasn't a blank slate, it was a cemetery," says poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam. "People were killed, and they're building on top of their bones."

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Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans, and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and his reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans has been published and broadcast in outlets including Die Zeit (Europe's largest circulation newspaper), Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now!.

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