Affordable Housing Institute : US

The Brookings Institution has released a major fact-heavy study (3.6 Meg link in .pdf) that, although titled After the Storm, is really an exquisite dissection of the urban dysfunctionality of Old New Orleans, the below-sea-level city that is gone and will never come again. 

 

[Previous posts on New Orleans here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

 

It carefully details how economics, geography, and race all combined to create a city-within-a-city, where some wards gradually detached themselves from the economic polity around them and became enclaves terribly vulnerable to what happened. 

 

Even before Katrina, the New Orleans metropolitan area was growing slowly and struggling with low incomes and poverty.  Underlying these developments, meanwhile, were three especially disturbing trends that would prove unfortunate in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

 

1.       Segregation and concentrations of poverty had sharpened

2.       Sprawl and decentralization had spread

3.       A low-wage economy had developed.

 

Ironically, the unhealthy self-reinforcing concentrating forces took place only over the last half century.  In the 1950’s New Orleans would have been regarded as a model of social, racial, and economic integration.

 

It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that New Orleans and other southern cities started to see the hyper-segregation of Northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

 

Urban geographer Peirce Lewis wrote in 1976, “While New Orleans has already had one of the highest proportions of black population of all big American cities, she has — until recently — been one of the least segregated geographically.”

 

But then technology, demography, and economics all worked in ways that no one foresaw or even really saw as they happened. 

 

In 1970, New Orleans was a poor city but not one in which poverty was concentrated in large, isolated neighborhoods.

 

New land was opened up in the metropolitan area.

 

Much of the land that region consumed in the post-war years was former wetlands.  Engineering allowed the reclamation and development of this previously undevelopable land, but it remained vulnerable to flooding.  Ultimately, a much vaster swath of the region’s low-lying flood plain had been converted to subdivisions and other uses when Katrina hit than had been in 1950.

 

 

 

Between declining population and expanding land mass, the city was able to de-densify:

 

In 1970, 54% of the metropolitan population lived in the city of New Orleans.  By 2000, only 36% did.  Between 1970 and 2000, Orleans Parish [Louisiana’s equivalent of county, a legacy of the Napoleonic code. — Ed] lost 18% of its population, but every other parish in the region grew.

 

De-densification arose out of economic mobility.

 

Between 1970 and 2000, the city lost a total of 109,000 people—or 18% of its population.  Census estimates for 2004 show that the metropolitan area’s population has not grown at all since 2000 while the city of New Orleans has lost 22,400 people.

 

Those who stayed behind were generally poorer than those who left: the upwardly socio-economically mobile became outwardly geographically mobile.

 

In 1970, a high 26% of the population of the city of New Orleans lived in poverty, and there were 28 census tracts with extreme poverty rates (40% or higher).  By 2000, however, the city’s poverty rate had risen slightly to 28% but the number of extreme poverty tracts (in which at lest 40% of the population lived below the poverty line) had exploded to 47.  In other words, even though the overall poverty rate remained roughly steady for 30 years, the number of census tracts exhibiting extreme poverty had grown by two-thirds.

 

Economics correlated with race:

 

The isolation of black citizens only deepened as whites began to leave town for the suburbs in the years following World War II.  With whites leaving, the black presence in many formerly white or mixed neighborhoods increased, the gaps between black areas began to fill in, and, as [legal scholar Martha] Mahoney writes, “the outlines of large concentrations of black residents…began to take shape.” 

 

Economic mobility meant geographic mobility, and that meant that a mixed mixed-income, mixed-race neighborhood slowly but implacably became income-concentrated and race-concentrated.  Those left behind were poor, and steadily ever poorer relative to those who had fled:

 

Or as the Lewis Mumford Center at the University of Albany, SUNY found, the New Orleans metro had a racial “dissimilarity” score of 69 under which a score above 60 is considered highly segregated.  By this analysis, 69% of African Americans would have to move into another census tract in order for blacks to be as evenly distributed as whites. 

 

At the neighborhood level, the facts were unmistakable. In 2000, city neighborhoods such as the Garden District, Lakeview, and Audubon were all more than 85% white;

 

while neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, B.W. Cooper, and Pontchartrain Park were almost all 100% non-white.  Most minority neighborhoods were clustered close together in the Mid-City area and across the eastern half of the city.

 

 

 

In neighborhood terms, black didn’t beget poor; poor begat black. 

 

Both begat low-lying.

 

 

 

Federal policy contributed to this, as expressed by the venerable if perpetually troubled Housing Authority of New Orleans — indeed, HANO’s mission, to house the poorest of the poor, actually contributed to the ghetto-ization of HANO properties.

 

Over 60 years, [federal low-income housing] policies catered to the very poor by concentrating many of them in special enclaves that in New Orleans lay almost exclusively in the lower-lying, more flood-vulnerable sections of the city.

 

This wasn’t merely Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market, but the economic hand of money flows and the architectural hand of property development:

 

As it happens, the Housing Authority of New Orleans—created by state law in 1937—was the first such agency in the United States to receive federal funds for slum clearance and publicly subsidized housing.  What resulted, as the money flowed for 30 years, was the creation in collaboration with the housing authority of 10 big public housing projects—all now almost entirely black, and all sited in what would become some of Katrina’s most dire flood zones.

 

The first six projects opened in the early 1940s, and included four developments for the blacks (Magnolia, Calliope, Lafitte, and St. Bernard) and two for whites (St. Thomas and Iberville).  [For a snapshot of HANO’s troubles, click on those links and see what stories pop up. — Ed.]

 

Alas, racial segregation in public housing was not unique to New Orleans — it was practiced throughout the country, no less so than in Boston, where the desegregation of South Boston public housing projects in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s led to violent clashes.

 

 

Boston school busing, 1974

 

Legal scholar Martha Mahoney notes explicitly that the all-black Lafitte replaced a historically mixed neighborhood of whites, blacks, and Creoles, and that several others increased racial concentration in the city. 

 

Similarly, when the 1949 Housing Act funded 5,000 new dwelling units for New Orleans, the local housing authority located the new developments adjacent to existing ones, nearly doubling the size of several projects and so enlarging the federal enclaves.  The Magnolia extension, for example, displaced the homes of black doctors and ministers near the Flint-Goodridge Hospital as well as the remnants of an old slum area.

 

Additional isolation followed the construction of three more new projects between 1956 and 1964.  The huge Desire project (where Desire Street crosses Abundance), for instance, placed 262 buildings containing 1,860 apartments on a geographically isolated tract, cut off from the rest of New Orleans by two canals and two sets of railroad tracks.  Comments Mahoney: “Due to its size and isolation, Desire deserves the label ‘federal ghetto’ more so than any of the other New Orleans projects.”  Similarly isolated was the Fischer development, which lay on a point of land across the Mississippi River from the rest of New Orleans.  Fischer imposed a large, concentrated project on a small, less-populated black community, according to Mahoney.

 

HANO properties are at the epicenter of the tragedy:

 

By 1985, Mayor Ernest Morial estimated that city housing projects’ population contained no less than 50,000 New Orleanians — or 9% of the city population.

 

One out of every 11 New Orleanians lived in public housing.  By US standards, that is appalling.

 

What flooded was not just low-lying, it was also, by economic and geographic legacy, the poorest:

 

The location of the city’s oldest, highest-value sections along the crescent-shaped, higher-elevation “natural levee” of the Mississippi ensured that the areas like the French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Garden District, Uptown, and Audubon escaped the worst flooding.

 

By contrast, urbanization of the lowest-lying areas of the “shallow bowl” just lakeside of the natural levee as well of low-lying areas arcing east into the Ninth Ward ensured that neighborhoods like Leonidas, Mid-City, Gert Town, B.W. Cooper, the Seventh Ward, and the Lower Ninth Ward were all inundated. 

 

Cosmology has revealed to us that when a body’s mass becomes too great, its gravity becomes stronger that centripetal forces, so that the star collapses and becomes a black hole where not even light can escape.  For all practical purposes, the black hole drops out of the universe.

 

That’s what happened, demographically and topographically, in New Orleans: some neighborhood became black holes of poverty, immobility, and vulnerability.

 

Even on the eve of Katrina’s landfall, the areas in which the 10 federally funded projects were located—the B.W. Cooper neighborhood, the Desire area, the Iberville area—retained some of the area’s greatest concentrations of black residents.  All but one of the neighborhoods has an overall census tract poverty rate greater than 40%.  All but one of these often-lower-lying African American neighborhoods were flooded.

 

 

 

Having thus deconstructed the city’s implosion — first economic, then social, finally geographic — the Brookings authors go on to make housing policy recommendations for reinventing New Orleans.  I’ll cover these in a future blog post.

Send post as PDF to