Affordable Housing Institute : US

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

 

A Washington Post article from two weeks back illustrates the many ways in which markets and people are moving even if elected officials are not:

 

These days, as planners and politicians look ahead, many realize that the future of this city, which before the storm was more than two-thirds black and nearly one-third poor, swings on two simple questions:

 

Are residents coming home? If so, which ones?

 

New Orleans, Delery Street.  This is what you have to come home to.

 

It now appears that long-standing neighborhood differences in income and opportunity — along with resentment over the ghastly exodus — are shaping the stalled repopulation of this mostly empty city.

 

The New New Orleans will be smaller and economically stronger.

 

There seems certain to be a massive increase in job opportunities, skilled and unskilled.

 

It will bear little resemblance to the Old New Orleans.

 

Still, anxiety is building that New Orleans will not bounce back as Chicago did after the [1871] fire or San Francisco after the [1906] quake.

 

The fire wiped out downtown Chicago.

 

Southwest corner of Dearborn and Monroe, 1871

  

There is concern that it will be much smaller, whiter, richer and more homogeneous: an anodyne, theme-park version of the Big Easy dominated by highbrow restaurants and lowbrow bars of the unflooded French Quarter.

 

Higher land suffered less damage and has more affluent homeowners.

 

Lakeview, where 66% of children go to private school and 49% of residents have a college degree, was pumped dry within three weeks of the storm.

 

Memphis Street smells now of bleach, which kills mold, and resounds to the thwack of crowbars and the whine of chain saws.  Insurance adjusters have begun making rounds.

 

 

Lower land has lower value, and still not clean.

 

In the Lower Ninth Ward, where more a third of residents lived in poverty and 6% had a college degree, a hastily rebuilt levee failed in late September to hold back the storm surge of Hurricane Rita.  Most of the place was again submerged.

 

Delery Street, six weeks after Katrina

 

Submerged means not only that it cannot be repaired, it is getting worse, as wood rot and mold render those structures economically unsalvageable.  Geography, demography, and economics are defining who goes where.

 

But in New Orleans, where affluent whites live high and working-class blacks live low, the privileges of neighborhood quickly asserted themselves. For many, race and class predicted patterns of escape, dictating whether flight would be a nervous drive out of town or a caged week of torment and humiliation.

 

Some have the capital and mobility to return and rebuild.

 

It was a Thursday, the first of September, just four days after Hurricane Katrina, and floodwater stood seven feet deep in the living room of Robert Bouchon’s big brick house on Memphis Street in Lakeview, this city’s largest middle-class, white neighborhood.

 

The Bouchon family, though, had already assembled an interim middle-class life on the outskirts of Houston, where Robert and his wife, Cathy, together with their three young children, had fled in their minivan.

 

The Bouchon family in Houston

 

They moved into a furnished two-bedroom apartment in a gated enclave in a suburb called Kingwood. They had enrolled the children in a Roman Catholic primary school similar to the one that was still underwater in Lakeview. They had also called State Farm Insurance to collect on their house and their BMW X3, a three-month-old SUV that was submerged in the driveway back home. They registered online for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and decided for the sake of family mental health not to watch news coverage of “the craziness” back in New Orleans.

 

As the mayor makes grandiose claims with other people’s money:

 

Mayor Nagin toured shelters in Louisiana last week, telling people that in New Orleans crime was down, wages were up and jobs were abundant. He promised a FEMA mobile home [O joy!  O rapture unforeseen! — Ed.] for those willing to come back.

 

Some get better jobs and start new lives.

 

Joseph Williams, formerly of 2513 Delery Street, is not even tempted.

 

Separated by 8.5 miles and a gulf of economic difference

 

A probation officer in Jefferson Parish, Williams said he will begin work this month in a similar position with the Georgia Department of Corrections, but with a $4,000 jump in salary over the $24,000 a year he was being paid back home.

 

His wife, 28, an accountant, has done even better. Within a week of arriving in Atlanta, she found an accounting job at a small engineering company starting at $40,000 a year, a $14,000 raise over her job in New Orleans.

 

Some can’t rebuild because their home is economically unsalvageable.

 

[Ora] Goines concedes that her house is a goner, and so does her insurance company, which has cut her a check for $66,000. She says, too, that she is a goner, as far as New Orleans is concerned.

 

“I decided that I don’t have any use for New Orleans,” she said recently in the dining room of her son-in-law’s father’s house in Paincourtville. Like her daughter, she sounds angry. “I wouldn’t have thought like that, but it flooded, and I don’t trust New Orleans anymore.”

 

Planners have raised the possibility of razing much of the Lower Ninth Ward and turning it into a flood-plain park. It is talk that infuriates those who have been forced to flee and are resigned to the necessity of bulldozers.

 

“I know they are going to have to tear my house down,” said Joan Howard, 36, a housekeeper, who lived across Delery Street from Goines. “But I believe it’s only right that they build me another house — if I decide to go back.  I know it’s like a war zone down there, mister. Everything is destroyed. But I got the flood insurance.”

 

You may have the flood insurance, but that may build you a house elsewhere, not one in Under New Orleans:

 

The house stills stands, unlike many on the street. Inside, the ceiling has collapsed. Furniture, appliances and other contents appear to be have been run through a savage rinse cycle, as in a washing machine with toxic water. Webs of mold are everywhere, and the smell is horrific.

 

Meanwhile, the promise-to-performance ratio approaches 1,000 to 1:

 

Billions upon billions of federal dollars will be spent in coming months and years to rebuild the city’s levees, to support new housing and clean up the colossal mess.

 

By the time the billions arrive, the new city will already be defined, and thousands of lives changed.

 

No matter how late we are, we arrive in a rush!

 

Cities can come back — Chicago and San Francisco are proof — but New Orleans faces challenges they did not:

 

• Unlike Chicago and San Francisco, Old New Orleans was already in economic decline, not growth.
• Chicago and Francisco had logical platforms from which to rebuild; Under New Orleans does not.

 

Nostalgia makes us wish to turn the clock back, but reality precludes it.

 

The sooner we condemn and compensate, the better for all New Orleanians, those who return and those who do not.

 

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