Tourists in New Orleans’ French Quarter and Garden District would be hard pressed to see Hurricane Katrina damage if they didn’t go looking for it. On a recent visit to attend a wedding between a Glaswegian brewer and a Louisiana law professor, I ate gumbo, swayed to jazz and paraded behind a brass band between the ceremony and the reception. Not so different from a wedding I attended eight years ago in the same town. But you don’t have to venture far to see the lasting impact of the storm.
Four years after Katrina flooded most of New Orleans, killed 1,464 people and caused billions of dollars in damage, about 75 per cent of the 454,000 residents who were there before Katrina have returned. The areas that have not recovered are also the poorest. Houses in those areas — the Lower 9th Ward, for example — are away from most tourists’ eyes and many still remain largely empty. The scars of the hurricane are apparent in the form of boarded-up, mouldy houses, padlocked playgrounds and fading red ‘X’s sprayed on the doors of abandoned homes by the search and rescue teams passing through after the hurricane as they looked for survivors.
But it isn’t all bad news. Barack Obama’s recession stimulus package means that New Orleans has arguably weathered the recession better than many other American cities. On top of money to rebuild after Katrina, the city received an additional $50 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The unemployment rate is 7.3 per cent, compared to a national average of 9.7 per cent. Cynics point out that there are fewer unemployed here because the poor who left after the storm haven’t come back. That’s true, but because the stimulus package has created jobs in engineering, project management and social work, New Orleans is also attracting a lot of recent college graduates: in fact, this is now the fastest-growing big city in the US. Home sales have slowed but not collapsed, and there are construction workers digging up and replacing pipes and streetlights, rebuilding roads and schools and, critically, the levees that failed the city four years ago. New Orleans was spared the high foreclosure rates other US cities have seen thanks to additional mortgage grace periods given after the storm.
By one estimate, almost 36 per cent of housing in areas like the 9th Ward is still empty. In the Lower 9th, actor and heartthrob Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation is building 150 storm-resistant homes for New Orleans residents — the first eight have been completed and returning families have moved in. The homes are built with ‘Cradle to Cradle’ thinking — from ceiling to carpet the homes are made with ultra-efficient, non-toxic and organic materials designed to have zero impact on the environment. These solar- panelled green-homes-on-pylons have earned Pitt a place in residents’ hearts — there’s now a grass-roots campaign to elect him mayor in 2010, started by Tulane University art history professor Thomas Bayer. Number three of the 13 compelling reasons Dr Bayer lists on his website for why Brad Pitt should be mayor is ‘Angelina Jolie would be the First Lady of New Orleans’.
Across the canal in the Upper 9th is another rebuilding project: a 24-year-old teacher is heading up a fundraising drive to build a 1,000-seat football and athletics stadium for the students at G.W. Carver Senior High School. It’s no secret that athletics plays a major role in deprived areas in preventing drug use and crime as well as increasing graduation rates and getting kids into college. Many of Carver High’s top athletes saw their dreams wash away with their school and field under ten feet of Katrina floodwater. Four years later, Carver High is still operating out of prefabricated trailers in the parking lot of the former school. When athletics director Brian Bordainick arrived two years ago he didn’t have much to direct — there were no uniforms, no gym, no track and no cash. The track team ran in the potholed streets. He decided to build a ‘Field of Dreams’ — a state-of-the-art football field and track. What started out with $3 donations from parents has grown into support from Nike and the National Football League. He’s two thirds of his way towards his $1.9 million target, and hoping to open the field next September.
And beyond the tangible, there’s the slightly surreal. Kirsha Kaechele lost her home in another deprived area — the St Roch neighbourhood. She moved back and started buying crumbling homes along North Villere Street, between two cross streets named ‘Music’ and ‘Arts’, to turn into galleries. In one, entitled ‘Cloudline’, two artists suspended thousands of silver beads and filament wire, juxtaposed with household items like chairs, tables, a sofa and a piano. According to their website, the aim of the artists Mike McKay and Liz Swanson was to demonstrate ‘the meaning of loss, the significance of objects, and the corresponding relationship between chaos and stagnation’. Kaechele says the people who lived near the art project definitely got it. ‘My neighbours spent countless hours staring into the piece. It was a hit. Then a woman who hangs out on the corner came over and said, “Girl, I got to spend some real time in here. I just gonna come in, be in here and think about my dead brother” — a real compliment to the artist.’
While creating a football field or flood-proof housing or inspirational art in derelict and damaged areas of New Orleans are laudable projects, there’s more riding on them than just helping to pull the Big Easy out of its post-Katrina slump. As of October, roughly 110,000 people who left New Orleans four years ago still hadn’t been able to return home because they lost their house. In April 2010, the US Census Bureau will conduct its tally of who lives where. Data from the census helps decide congressional districts and distribution of $300 billion in federal funds. Mayor Ray Nagin wants the Census Bureau to grant an exception for former residents who want to rebuild homes in New Orleans. Unfortunately for Nagin, that’s illegal. Federal law requires the Census Bureau to count all residents where they reside as of 1 April 2010. Term limits prevent Nagin running again next year, but if New Orleans elects Brad and Angelina as its first couple, those immigration numbers might hit pre-Katrina levels again.
Comments