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  New Orleans 
Baghdad on the
Bayou
Nicole Gelinas
To recover from Katrina, New Orleans must defeat the criminals who
terrorize its streets.
You don’t have to go to Baghdad to see what happens when government
loses its monopoly on force; just visit New Orleans. More than a year
and a half after Katrina hit in late August 2005, violent crime—already
a grave problem long before the storm—pervades the city, endangering its
recovery by driving some good people away and keeping others from
returning. In recent months, the federal and state governments,
confronting a murder rate that currently exceeds that of any first-world
city, have brought law-and-order forces to the Big Easy to try to wrest
its streets back from criminals. But any long-term solution to the
city’s crime woes must be local. Unless New Orleans itself can find the
moral and political will to control the violence, it will only be trying
to rebuild the dying city that it was before Katrina.
When New Orleans began slowly to come back to life after Katrina, it
enjoyed a respite from violent crime, one that residents and their
elected leaders thought would continue indefinitely. New Orleanians had
a “sense of euphoria about the city being a new city, that the violent
crimes just weren’t there,” says U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who handles
federal cases for Louisiana’s eastern district. But after roughly ten
weeks of peace, murders—many drug-related and acquaintance-based—started
to appear in the headlines again. Then, as the city’s population began
returning in greater numbers last spring, violent crime roared back
“with a vengeance,” as Letten puts it. The highly publicized shooting
death in March 2006 of 28-year-old Michael Frey at the hands of a street
robber in the Faubourg Marigny, a funky neighborhood on the outskirts of
the French Quarter, seemed to trigger in many New Orleans residents the
realization that things were now back to “normal.”
The numbers tell the grim story. In 2004, the year before Katrina, New
Orleans suffered 265 murders, yielding a murder rate of 56 per 100,000
residents—already four and a half times higher than the average for
similar-size cities. In 2006, the year after Katrina, the flood-ravaged,
much smaller city logged 162 murders—a rate of at least 77 per 100,000
people, even assuming the most generous quarter-by-quarter repopulation
figures available. (New Orleans has recovered less than half its
pre-Katrina population of about 470,000.) In the first 64 days of 2007,
New Orleans’s murder rate scaled even higher—more than 87 per 100,000
residents. Such a rate in New York City would mean nearly 7,000 murders
a year, well over the 2,262 it experienced at the height of its
Dinkins-era violent-crime crisis 17 years ago. Other violent-crime
indexes—from assault to armed robbery—have moved in a similar direction.
The rocketing crime rate suggests that New Orleans’s bad guys are coming
back to the city in disproportionate numbers. That shouldn’t come as a
surprise. The hoodlums, mostly members of an entrenched underclass, are
impulsive and mobile, while working- and middle-class New Orleanians
face big roadblocks to returning, such as shuttered schools. Some of the
lawbreakers may have hustled back, too, because they were having a hard
time adjusting to functional cities like Houston, which initially took
in more than 200,000 storm evacuees. Unlike New Orleans, which has long
failed at crime fighting, Houston actually arrests, charges, convicts,
and imprisons its criminals (see “Houston’s Noble Experiment,” Spring
2006).
Relentless crime was the main reason New Orleans had lost 22 percent of
its pre-1960 peak population (mostly middle-class young people, black
and white) long before Katrina. But the hurricane took a slow process of
decline—more middle-class hemorrhaging, more disorder, fewer livable
neighborhoods—and instantly fast-forwarded it to urban nightmare.
First, New Orleans’s “legacy drug dealers”—as James Bernazzani, special
agent in charge of the city’s FBI office, classifies those who were
dealing before Katrina, almost invariably single-parented young black
males—learned a lot during their months away. In Houston, still a major
drug hub despite its better policing and justice system, Big Easy
dealers met new suppliers and have now “flooded New Orleans with drugs,”
says Bernazzani. Thanks to the increased quantity on the street, the
price of a kilo of cocaine has declined nearly 20 percent since Katrina.
Dealers who can’t profit from such low prices eliminate competition
through violence.
Many dealers and other criminals haven’t returned to their old blighted
neighborhoods, since four-fifths of New Orleans’s public housing remains
closed and some of the city’s poorest tracts are still flood-ruined.
Instead, they’ve spread out to neighborhoods that were already
struggling before the storm—Central City, a sprawling, low-rise area to
the east of elegant St. Charles Avenue, for instance, as well as ample
pockets of Uptown, where residents of dilapidated housing have long
lived in proximity to university students and professionals—and made
those places much more dangerous. A study earlier this year found that
31 percent of Central City residents feel safe today, compared with 45
percent before Katrina; 85 percent said that “people being murdered” was
a concern.
Some returning criminals take advantage of abandoned housing on
half-occupied streets; others crowd with relatives in legal housing.
“You have families living doubled up, people who have serious problems,”
says Al Mims, Jr., a Central City native who came back to New Orleans a
week after Katrina. “Before Katrina,” he explains, “you had [drug]
rivals who stayed miles apart. Now, it’s like having Wal-Mart and Kmart
across the street from each other.” Mims, who lost his father in a
Central City murder nearly two decades ago and was shot himself at 19,
notes that most of his neighbors are hardworking. “Maybe 10 to 15
percent” of the area’s young people are criminals, he believes, but it’s
enough. “To have this come back after the most terrible natural disaster
. . . ” says Mims, his voice trailing off.
It’s not just the violence; New Orleanians also face a dispiriting crush
of property theft as they struggle to rebuild. In recovering
neighborhoods, criminals wait for a returning resident to install new
appliances into his damaged home, and then steal them when he returns to
his temporary housing at night. David Kent, a former deputy chief of
police who retired from the New Orleans Police Department in 1982 and
who lives in the Mid-City neighborhood, says that “salvage artists”
regularly cut and remove brass and copper pipes. “People are trying to
build their homes and their lives, and they find that their pipes are
stolen,” laments Latoya Cantrell, who is rebuilding her home alongside
her neighbors in the flooded Broadmoor area. Quality-of-life infractions
are endemic, too. When I walked through the Marigny, a neighborhood that
Katrina left unflooded, a couple asked if I had any pills to share;
residents all over the city complain of blatant drug use and open-air
drug sales. Of quality-of-life crimes, says Cantrell, “there’s no
comparison” with before Katrina.
Wealthier areas of the city, never impervious to crime, haven’t been
immune to its post-Katrina escalation. All along the river, in well-off
neighborhoods that didn’t flood, “we’re seeing a spike in crime,” says
Bernazzani.
Intensifying the city’s crime woes further, family relationships that
were tenuous pre-Katrina—in underclass neighborhoods, mothers and
grandmothers raised children alone, with few exceptions—are now
completely broken. David Bell, chief justice of New Orleans’s juvenile
court, tells me that 20 percent of the kids who appear before him
today—for the most part, 15 or younger—are utterly without parental
supervision; he calls this a “tragic story no one is telling.” Some of
these children have left mothers or grandmothers behind in Houston and
other locales and returned to stay with relatives, who often don’t watch
out for them. Others, separated from their families in Katrina’s chaotic
aftermath, never reconnected with them. “They’ve returned home, looking
for their only parent,” Bell observes. Many of the kids whom Bell sees
have been arrested for nonviolent crimes such as drug possession or
sale, but as New York’s policing experience has shown, such crimes tend
to lead to more serious offenses.
You can drive through the vast, now-empty C. J. Peete housing project in
Central City, and if you look just at the sealed windows and doors, you
would think that no one’s been there since the hurricane. But
unsupervised teens stroll in the courtyards. In one, an SUV idles while
its occupants likely complete a drug deal, according to the narcotics
officer with whom I’m riding. Just blocks away, as the project opens
onto a main thoroughfare, black-and-white signs reading enough! enough!
enough! festoon telephone poles, decrying the frequent violence in the
area. Before Katrina, the signs had read merely—merely!—thou shalt not
kill, illustrating how a crime-ravaged community’s sense of impotent
desperation has worsened.
New Orleans has yet another Katrina-related crime problem: it has become
a kind of frontier town. Contractors and laborers have come from all
over America to work on the city’s damaged property (and from south of
the border: one joke in town is that FEMA means “Find Every Mexican
Available”). Often without their families, some buy entertainment on the
streets, including drugs and sex.
The psychological consequences for law-abiding New Orleanians of all
this chaos and criminality have been profound. In the Marigny, resident
Nora Natale expresses a common sentiment: New Orleans may have the same
number of criminals that it did two years ago, but since there are fewer
potential victims to target, things are much worse. Since Frey’s murder
in her neighborhood, Natale says, “I’ve changed my lifestyle. I don’t
take morning walks.” Last summer, she called 911 to report a shooting in
front of her house during an attempted robbery; the victim, a neighbor,
survived—and moved. Another acquaintance was run over by an
attempted-robbery getaway car (she survived, too). Natale is candid
about the corrosive toll: “I take a lot of little vacations” away from
the city, she says. “It’s been a rough year.”
Katrina’s protracted aftermath would challenge the nation’s best police
and prosecutorial forces. But the fact that New Orleans hasn’t had a
functional criminal-justice system for years has made its post-hurricane
crime predicament graver still.
No one would deny the city’s acute criminal-justice challenges since the
storm. Floodwaters heavily damaged court and police buildings; hundreds
of police officers and prosecutors lost their homes; the police
department lost its crime lab. But earlier this year, the DA’s office
released news showing that the city’s criminal-justice system wasn’t
just strained, but shattered: in 2006 and early 2007, 3,581 suspects,
some charged with murders and armed robberies, walked free from jail or
from bond, in many cases because the prosecutor didn’t have the physical
evidence to indict them within the 60 days mandated by the state
constitution. Blame the continued absence of a crime lab. But what kind
of a city doesn’t immediately replace its wrecked lab so that it can
keep hard-core criminals off the streets?
Mayor Ray Nagin’s failure to replace the lab, even after 18 months had
elapsed, didn’t come from nowhere. New Orleans was pathetically lax
about its criminal-justice system before the storm, as its weak
murder-conviction and sentencing rates show. Four months before Katrina,
district attorney Eddie Jordan—who is elected, not appointed by the
mayor—found that “a murderer in New Orleans has a less than one in four
chance of being convicted of that crime.” While Jordan wins no prizes
for his performance, the problems long predate his taking office in
2003. An independent 2002 study by the nonprofit Metropolitan Crime
Commission found that New Orleans’s felony conviction rate (as a
percentage of arrests) was the second-lowest of the 11 cities studied;
just 12 percent of those arrested in a given year were eventually
convicted and imprisoned. For the other 88 percent, the report
concluded, “the criminal-justice system was little more than a revolving
door back to the street.”
Police and prosecutors blame each other for these disastrous results:
prosecutors say that the police prepare poor reports, often based on
unreliable witness testimony, while the cops retort that prosecutors
throw out perfectly good cases.
It’s obvious what New Orleans should do, and should have done long
before Katrina. The city needs to train its police and prosecutors
better, pay them more, and manage them more professionally, in order to
boost low morale and end high turnover. Before Katrina, New Orleans’s
crime-fighting staffing levels, while modest compared with New York’s
(even relative to population), were comparable with those of other
southern cities with lower murder rates, such as Atlanta and Houston.
Since the storm, the police force has shrunk more than 10 percent,
despite new recruits; the rate of attrition is double what it was before
Katrina.
The city also must allocate its policing resources more effectively. The
NOPD should have a massive street-crimes unit to do undercover drug buys
and bust serial robbers, for example. Further, the city can’t just
temporarily ramp up its policing resources whenever it detects a
“violent crime wave,” as it has done for decades; rather, it must treat
crime as a chronic condition, as New York does. And New Orleans needs to
prosecute those individuals it does arrest and pressure judges to
imprison the ones convicted.
Most important, the city’s mayor, DA, and judges must recognize that
tolerating nonviolent offenses leads directly to violent crimes. Because
they don’t feel any incentive from the authorities to stop their
disorderly behavior, too many juveniles graduate from loitering to drug
use to drug sales to carrying weapons to armed robbery . . . to murder.
In the mid-1990s, New Orleans got a tiny taste of what good policing can
do. Then-mayor Marc Morial, confronting murder numbers that rival
today’s shocking rates—424 in 1994, or about 80 per 100,000
residents—hired outsider Richard Pennington as police superintendent.
Pennington cut corruption and implemented statistics-based policing and
other crime-fighting innovations, slashing the city’s murder rate by
nearly two-thirds by the end of the decade. But absent legal,
prosecutorial, and sentencing reforms, New Orleans never lowered crime
to a level that any other city would consider acceptable, and it didn’t
sustain its gains. When Pennington ran for mayor in 2002, moreover, he
lost to Nagin.
Good policing and prosecution cost money—and after Katrina, New
Orleans’s regular annual revenues are down 23 percent. So it’s
reasonable for the city to ask the feds and the state for operating cash
for its police and prosecutor’s forces over the next few years, in order
to give its tax base a chance to recover from the biggest
weather-related disaster in U.S. history. What’s more, since Louisiana
is running a surplus, Governor Kathleen Blanco could send the city
one-time funds to upgrade the justice system’s equipment. Over the long
term, though, New Orleans, always a low-tax city relative to its income,
must get used to taxing more and spending more to maintain a
professional crime-fighting force. Violent crime will drive middle-class
taxpayers out, or keep them out, before higher taxes will.
But fixing the city’s dysfunctional criminal-justice system isn’t just a
matter of tactics and resources, because the mess reflects a deeper
cultural problem. For over a decade, when I have pointed out to well-off
New Orleanians that the city suffers high crime because it won’t control
its predominantly underclass criminals, I have received lectures on how
the real problem is anything but failure to enforce the law. I just
don’t understand, I’m told, how bad schools, bad parenting, a lack of
inner-city jobs, or some combination of the three must be fixed first.
New Orleans’s moneyed, mostly white, elite—which could have played a
vital role in changing the political debate about crime, just as such
citizens did in New York—often voices this “root causes” theory. As one
longtime resident bluntly noted, “the white elite is cowed by political
correctness.”
Anger about crime in New York didn’t just come from elites; worried
working-class and middle-class voters turned out for Rudy Giuliani in
droves. In New Orleans, such citizens, mostly black, often complain
about crime, but they don’t support the measures necessary to combat it.
Just look at Jordan’s pre-Katrina report, which concluded that New
Orleans often suffered from “both jury and judge nullification”—that is,
ignoring the law—especially in cases against small-time drug dealers and
users, “regardless of the evidence” (italics mine). In 2004, juries
found nearly 60 percent of narcotics defendants not guilty, and that was
after the DA had thrown out thousands of cases. “Some trial observers
have suggested that . . . nullification . . . is based on distrust of
the police. . . . Others think it may be due to judges and juries being
unwilling to impose what they see as draconian sentences for drug use
and petty dealing,” the DA concluded. Before Katrina, prosecutors chose
to treat marijuana possession, being found with “crack pipe residue,”
and prostitution as misdemeanors, because jurors wouldn’t convict in
such cases.
Citizens also directly thwart the law in some neighborhoods. Central
City native Mims notes that the mothers and grandmothers of suspects
arrested for nonviolent crimes often beg neighborhood ministers to
persuade prosecutors to release their sons and grandsons. Underclass
mothers are often perfectly aware that their kids are involved in crime,
and even encourage it, says Mims.
One post-Katrina case illustrates the point. In early February,
17-year-old Robert Dawson boarded a bus in Dallas and made the ten-hour
trek to New Orleans with his mother, happy, according to news reports,
to be returning to Central City after nearly a year and a half. Four
hours after Dawson came home, he was dead—shot on the street multiple
times, allegedly by a teenage acquaintance, Clarence Johnson. Johnson’s
mother had reportedly given him the gun that she kept in her
housing-project apartment, and urged him to seek revenge on Dawson, with
whom he had already gotten into a fight. After the murder, police found
a family photo proudly displayed in Johnson’s home: a snapshot of the
boy, posing with a fistful of cash in one hand, a pistol in the other.
Lousy policing contributes to the general contempt for the
criminal-justice system. The NOPD does have some heroic officers; but
many are poorly managed and poorly trained, have poor morale, and do
their jobs poorly. The result is yet more jurors unwilling to convict,
since they’ve had, or their children have had, bad personal experiences
with these cops. Flawed arrests and dropped prosecutions, too, mean that
many witnesses won’t cooperate, since they know, as Mims says, that
violent thugs “will be back on the streets before sundown.” And
everybody—from white society folk who hire off-duty cops to patrol their
streets to poor black kids who carry guns while walking theirs—knows
that the only real security in New Orleans is private, not public.
Ignoring Reality
To calculate New Orleans’s 2006 murder rate, I divided the raw crime
totals provided by the NOPD into generous quarter-by-quarter estimates
of New Orleans’s population from various sources, including the U.S.
Census, the Louisiana Public Health Institute, and the city’s own
emergency operations center. The result was a shocking 77 murders per
100,000 residents—up from 56 in 2004, the year before Katrina. Using
less generous population figures, Tulane professor Mark VanLandingham
has found a 2006 murder rate of 96 per 100,000.
Whichever estimate is closer to the truth, the conclusion is beyond
dispute: post-Katrina New Orleans is a horrifically dangerous place,
even compared with such other hazardous cities as Detroit (41 murders
per 100,000 residents annually) and St. Louis (32). But instead of
facing reality, police superintendent Warren Riley held a press
conference on New Year’s Day to boast that the total number of murders
in 2006 was the lowest in 30 years—ignoring the fact that 30 years ago,
the city’s population was as much as three times higher!
The NOPD has argued that these reckonings of the city’s murder rate are
too high because they don’t include people who work in the city during
the day in their population estimates. But no city includes its
typically much-larger daytime population in its murder rate.
The police department has also tried to minimize fear by saying that the
crime rate is driven by “criminals killing criminals.” And in March,
Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry agreed. “Yes, the situation has
been bad,” he wrote. “Yet—and it’s very difficult to make this point
without implying that certain lives don’t matter—nearly all the
homicides have been a consequence of turf wars that more often than not
have involved the drug trade.”
But as Louisiana political commentator C. B. Forgotston noted in his
near-daily e-mail update on New Orleans crime, “Who cares who
perpetrates a murder . . . unless one believes that in America,
vigilantism is appropriate?” If New York newspaper columnists had
excused their city’s crime crisis in the late eighties and early
nineties by saying that crack dealers could be expected to shoot one
another, New York would never have fixed its problems. It’s strange,
too, that while New Orleans’s elected leaders and elite citizens seem to
balk at putting petty drug dealers in prison, they have no problem with
those dealers’ regularly getting the death penalty out on the street.
But at least Riley and the talking heads say something. Mayor Ray Nagin
usually chooses to avoid discussing the violence altogether. Contrast
his lack of leadership with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s frank
State of the City address this January, absent any public pressure:
“Today, crime is more than 20 percent lower than it was five years ago.
One reason we’ve been so successful is because we’ve always been ready
to look the facts straight-on—whether we liked them or not. And last
year, the fact was that . . . homicides in our city went up.”
After VanLandingham’s study came out, Riley’s chief spokesman, Joseph
Narcisse, seemed more wounded by the messenger than upset by the
message. “It hurts the city, and it hurts us all, when we look at murder
rates with those per-capita numbers,” he said. What’s really hurting the
city, New Orleans’s leaders need to realize, is murder—and their own
refusal to acknowledge it.
Since Katrina, things have gotten so bad that New Orleans’s only
effective criminal-justice presence has come from outside the city.
Early this year, the Department of Justice gave federal agencies in New
Orleans extra resources, including nearly three dozen new agents and
attorneys, to get criminals off the streets by bypassing the local
justice system altogether. The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms have embedded agents with NOPD
officers in some crime-ridden neighborhoods, and they take suspects into
immediate custody if it looks as if a federal crime has been
committed—carrying an illegal weapon, say, or peddling a rock of
cocaine. Letten, the U.S. attorney, secures indictments and prosecutes
the defendants. “Our goal is to detain, imprison, prosecute, convict,
and incarcerate these violent criminals,” he says, “to get as many
individuals into the federal system as possible.”
The federal government is doing on a modest scale what successful cops
and prosecutors have done in New York and other cities for years now:
taking people with illegal weapons or illegal drugs off the streets,
because they’re the same people who commit violent crimes. In just two
weeks’ worth of cases, feds caught one man with an illegal loaded gun
and charged him in the federal system, one day after a local court had
given him a suspended sentence for crack possession. They caught another
suspect on a gun charge who’d been convicted of robbery less than five
years ago. And they have charged Clarence Johnson’s mother with illegal
weapons possession. (Garden-variety murder isn’t a federal crime.)
The feds emphasize that they’re not trying to take over in New Orleans,
and they’re hesitant to criticize local officials. They’re also working
within Jordan’s system, funding a small team of assistant DAs who screen
the huge backlog of pre-Katrina cases and look, too, at difficult cases
since the storm. And the FBI has deployed nine agents, all former
homicide detectives, to work in New Orleans alongside the NOPD on its
backlog of unsolved murders.
To combat unbridled property crime, meanwhile, Governor Blanco deployed
a 300-troop Louisiana National Guard contingent, Task Force Gator, last
June to patrol lightly populated neighborhoods; Mayor Nagin and the
police department had requested the help. “These are crimes of
opportunity,” says Gator’s commander, Major Dirk Erickson, pointing out
an abandoned school where guardsmen recently caught looters stripping
copper from insulated pipes. The guard’s task is vast: Erickson notes
that his troops must patrol hundreds of miles of road in neighborhoods
often less than half populated. Since June, Erickson’s soldiers, acting
as deputized state troopers, have made nearly 2,000 arrests, many of
them of looters. And while the force usually patrols and arrests without
violent incident, in early March the guardsmen encountered a bicyclist
transporting a hacksaw at 1 am in a looter-plagued area of the Ninth
Ward. The man brandished a knife, threw glass at the troops when they
attempted to question him, and then ran. When they pursued him into a
flood-ruined house, he pointed what looked like a rifle (later
determined to be a BB gun) at the troops, one of whom opened fire and
killed him.
Feds and state alike are doing something more than just helping out a
strapped city: they’re reconditioning criminals, as well as victims and
terrified residents, to understand that a functional government metes
out predictable consequences for criminal acts.
New Orleanians knew that their city was troubled before Katrina. But
today many know that the city will die unless it changes. Many
law-abiding citizens are coming home, and they’re bringing with them a
hardiness and resourcefulness that New Orleans hasn’t seen in decades,
with tens of thousands of individuals rebuilding their homes by hand.
Some of these brave souls have become political activists, insisting
that they simply won’t live with violent crime any more, no matter how
politically difficult—and politically incorrect—it is to change things.
Citizens’ anger about crime reached fever pitch in January, after two
high-profile murders: Dinerral Shavers, the snare drummer of the Hot-8
Brass Band featured in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke,
lost his life in a drive-by shooting (the killer was aiming at the
musician’s teenage son); and independent filmmaker Helen Hill was shot
in her home, as she and her husband shielded their toddler from the
unknown assailant. After the two murders, 4,000 citizens—not members of
special-interest groups, but real citizens who took time off from work
and school—marched on City Hall to protest both crime and the impotence
of Nagin and Jordan. A measure of their anger: they did not allow Nagin,
who attended, to speak.
Individuals and groups are launching freelance anticrime proposals,
insisting that the city government act on them. Ruthie Frierson is a
prominent New Orleans citizen (her husband was once crowned Rex, the
king of Mardi Gras) now wading into politics. In February, the group
that she originally founded after Katrina to
reform—successfully—Louisiana’s patronage-ridden levee boards joined ten
other organizations to unveil a “War on Career and Violent Criminals.”
The campaign’s proposals—they include increasing DA resources devoted to
violent crime and repeat offenders, starting a nonprofit effort to
record prosecutors’ successes and failures, and improving coordination
between police and prosecutors—wouldn’t be revolutionary in functional
cities. But in New Orleans, acknowledging that the city needs an
effective criminal-justice system before it can solve its other problems
is revolutionary.
The Marigny’s Natale has started a website to fight not just crime but
elected officials who refuse to address it. First on her list to
achieve: the “resignation of [DA] Eddie Jordan.” Natale represents
another necessary evolution for New Orleans. When she speaks of drug
dealers, she says that the decision to sell “is an individual choice,”
rather than excusing criminals because of their poverty and bad
educations. And Cantrell, who returned to the flooded Broadmoor
neighborhood with her neighbors to rebuild long before the government
started giving out grants, is mobilizing citizens’ patrol groups to walk
block by block and deter property crimes.
Responding to the intense pressure, Nagin and Jordan are making modest
attempts to improve policing and prosecution. New Orleans’s police
superintendent, Warren Riley, said in March that prosecutors and cops
would try to cooperate with each other, and he has launched new
undercover operations and checkpoints to net drug dealers, weapons, and
wanted criminals. The city is also installing more crime cameras, so
that it doesn’t have to rely on witness testimony. But New Orleans has
seen such responses to a “crime wave” before.
The key to sustained change is strong leadership, not treating citizens’
safety, the basic responsibility of government, as though it were the
request of some newly powerful special-interest group. Although Nagin
narrowly won reelection last spring, slow political evolution away from
business-as-usual may be occurring. In the same election, voters elected
two new city council members, Shelley Midura and James Carter, who have
begun to insist on some accountability on crime, calling Riley and
Jordan to a special session in February to grill them publicly about the
city’s failure to police and prosecute its criminals. The session
exposed to television viewers the troubling fact that Riley and Jordan
were so uncooperative that they wouldn’t even look at each other.
Long-standing tension between the two departments had reached the nadir
this winter, when Jordan, indicting seven cops for two shooting deaths
in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, referred to police officers as
“rabid dogs.”
Because New Orleans never gave its citizens the freedom from fear that
is the foundation of any healthy city, it has long failed to make
progress on other serious troubles: bad schools, dysfunctional
underclass behavior, and few job opportunities. “There is no village,”
says Mims of the proposition that it takes a village to fix the inner
city. “The village is afraid. Old people are afraid of young kids.” So
long as New Orleans remains a terrifying city, potential investors and
residents will stay away, and the national taxpayers who must spend
billions of dollars to replenish Louisiana’s wetlands, which protect the
city from hurricanes, will balk.
But with its cheap office space, beautiful architecture, real culture,
good universities, and location that’s a reasonable flight from both
coasts, New Orleans could thrive. And Katrina did the city one great
favor: in the weeks of calm just after the hurricane, many citizens saw
a different city. “We accepted before Katrina that to live in New
Orleans was to live in crime and poverty,” Natale says. “But we saw what
New Orleans could be like in the months after the storm.”
Nicole Gelinas
Don’t Knock Down New Orleans’s Projects
Just sell them off to middle-class homeowners.
23 February 2007
The Bush administration has proposed to demolish New Orleans’s four
largest public-housing projects, shuttered since Katrina, and replace at
least some of their nearly 5,000 apartment units with the “mixed-income”
housing popular today with the subsidized-housing crowd. But if New
Orleans really hopes to become a thriving city again someday, it won’t
let the federal government knock down valuable, and much-needed,
housing. Instead, Mayor Ray Nagin and the feds should open the perfectly
decent project apartments to new middle-class homeowners.
On Thursday, California congresswoman Maxine Waters, who opposes the
planned demolition and wants the federally run New Orleans housing
authority to reopen the buildings to their now-displaced tenants, took
lawmakers through Lafitte, one of the four targeted complexes. Like its
three counterparts, the Lafitte projects aren’t the huge, isolated scars
of tower-in-the-park architecture that residents of cities like New York
associate with public housing. Instead, they’re low-rise brick
buildings, spaced with modest grassy courtyards and walkways and located
not far from the main streets. “These are townhouses,” Waters said,
according to the Times-Picayune. “These can be reopened.”
New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff notes that the
1940s-era buildings’ “pitched slate roofs, elegant brickwork, and
low-rise construction reflect a subtle understanding of the city’s
historical context without slavishly mimicking it.” When I lived in New
Orleans, I rode through one project slated for demolition, Central
City’s C. J. Peete, nearly every day, and always appreciated its
elegance.
Further, the buildings are basically in good shape structurally, says
MIT architecture professor John Fernandez, who has visited each complex
since Katrina. While they do need full-scale renovations, it seems folly
to tear them down, especially since they withstood Katrina so well, when
many of the city’s newer single-family private homes did not.
The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in
the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted
public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most
residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in
monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were
essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with
long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects
through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to
police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into
killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.
And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking
for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of
control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other
unparented, impulsive young men.
What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class
residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such
citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars
it needs to become a functional, healthy city—something it hasn’t been
for decades.
To attract a new middle class, the feds and New Orleans should do a
full-scale renovation of the apartments, hiring contractors who agree in
writing to do the work quickly (and who face penalties if they don’t).
Then the government should get out of the way, selling the newly
renovated apartments as condos or co-ops to returning middle-class New
Orleanians or newcomers who want to make a go of it in the city. It’s
likely the market rate for each apartment would be below $150,000,
making them accessible to families who earn $30,000 annually or so.
The federal and city governments, as sponsors, could certainly draw up
rules about ownership, like those that other condo and co-op residents
live by. They could mandate, for example, that purchasers actually live
in their apartments most of the time, rather than rent them out
long-term to tenants, and that buyers have decent credit records and
work histories. New residents would take over the administration of the
rules once the federal government had sold off a majority of the units.
With tight on-site security, perhaps paid for by the new owners through
condo fees, New Orleans could turn what’s always been a liability—a
government-subsidized encampment for an underclass mired in crime and
pathology—into an asset: a new anchor neighborhood full of committed
homeowners.
Selling “the bricks” (slang for the housing complexes) to homeowners
would transform the projects into what city and federal policy-makers
meant to create when they built them 60 years ago: decent, safe, modest
homes for aspirational citizens.
And this transformation wouldn’t just ensure truly decent, safe housing
for nearly 5,000 families. It would also show the more than 200,000
Katrina evacuees still living far from home, and the rest of the nation
too, that New Orleans is trying not to fall back into being what it was
long before the storm—a city that had passively surrendered many of its
working-class neighborhoods to violence and underclass poverty.
Nicole Gelinas
Katrina’s Real Lesson
Blame inadequate infrastructure, not poverty, for the storm’s
devastation.
28 August 2006
Though President Bush declared on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina
exposed “deep-seated poverty” in America, the disaster isn’t ultimately
a story of poverty or of race, but of the greatest failure of civil
engineering in American history. Luckily, while the nation has never
been able to solve poverty, it can solve the engineering problem at the
heart of southern Louisiana’s potential recovery.
First, some history. Like the Netherlands, much of urban and suburban
New Orleans is below sea level. New Orleans started building rudimentary
levees to protect residents and businesses from flooding in the
mid-1700s, after settlers realized that their city’s vital economic
asset, its position at the mouth of the Mississippi, was also its
greatest liability.
This liability intensified two centuries later, when New Orleans drained
low-lying swamps to build neighborhoods right on Lake Pontchartrain, and
when erosion, much of it from the digging of canals that allowed for oil
and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed half of the 2,800
square miles of wetlands that protected the coast, thereby moving the
Gulf 20 miles closer to the city. Those miles proved vital, because
storms weaken as they pass over land. Man-made shipping canals within
New Orleans would also funnel floodwaters into populated areas.
But as the risks facing New Orleans grew more complex, New Orleans’s
hurricane protection system—its levees, floodwalls, and natural barriers
such as wetlands—didn’t keep up. The Army Corps of Engineers started
building today’s hurricane protection system in 1965, after Hurricane
Betsy flooded many of the same areas that Katrina inundated 40 years
later. (The feds pay for 70 percent of the system, partly because they
earn royalties from offshore energy production.)
Katrina was the biggest test of the 350 miles of levees and floodwalls
that the Corps built and refurbished over the past 40 years—and the
system crashed, buckling under 50 major breaks and spilling millions of
gallons of water into the city. And Katrina was far from a worst-case
scenario.
The Corps’ post-mortem of Katrina tells the story: “the system did not
perform as a system,” its engineers concluded. “The hurricane protection
in New Orleans . . . was a system in name only. . . . The majority,
approximately two-thirds by volume, of the flooding and half of the
economic losses can be attributed to water flowing through breaches in
floodwalls and levees.” The failures weren’t due to construction
malfeasance or incompetence: “the system was built as designed,” the
Corps concluded. But the system was, in many ways, conceived to fail. In
the Corps’ view, it was inconsistently designed and lacked
redundancy—that is, back-up protections.
Some levees, in particular the massive earthen fortresses with wide
foundations, performed well, withstanding days of water pressure with
little erosion. But floodwalls designed as narrow vertical walls driven
into the ground—they look like the walls built on highways to block out
the noise—performed abysmally.
First, some walls had sunk up to three feet lower than their original
“authorized heights” before the storm. Second, the pressure of Katrina’s
waters wore away the walls’ narrow vertical foundations because they
weren’t “armored” with erosion-proof material, causing the structures to
topple into the water. And because the system wasn’t redundant, each
break caused additional weaknesses.
Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large
part, the reason was foot dragging—or worse—by pols on the state, local,
and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the
Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s
local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political
animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested
in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with
the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not
because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s
richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of
New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at
least gated—to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state
officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part
of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought,
Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several
decades for coastal restoration.
Public officials have unfortunately lost interest in such rational
infrastructure investment, doubtless because entitlement spending has
consumed budgets as well as politicians’ attention. As the American
Society of Civil Engineers warned last year, “congested highways,
overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the
looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation’s prosperity and our quality
of life.” As entitlement spending has gobbled up the federal budget,
spending on infrastructure has fallen to about half where it was as a
percentage of GDP 40 years ago; state and local infrastructure spending
lags as well.
So have Americans and New Orleanians learned Katrina’s main lesson: that
investment in physical infrastructure is vital? While it’s too early to
tell, Congress has awarded around $6 billion—only 5 percent or so of
Gulf Coast reconstruction money—to repair the broken levees and to erect
gates at key flood-prone areas. After that money is spent, though, New
Orleans’s system won’t be any less of a patchwork. Floodwalls in areas
that didn’t bear the brunt of last year’s hurricane, but that still sit
in the path of a powerful storm, remain vulnerable to the same erosion
that toppled walls during Katrina.
Beyond the fast fixes, the Corps has a year and a half to present to
Congress its plan to protect Louisiana’s coast from a “100-year
hurricane.” For one idea, they can look to the Dutch, who treat life
below sea level as an opportunity to create modern engineering marvels.
After a 1953 flood that killed more people than Katrina did, the Dutch
built sand dunes to prevent erosion, along with a functional network of
gates, walls, sluices, and pumps—and they constantly look for ways to
upgrade the network.
But to follow the Dutch lead, the pols need convincing that engineering
know-how, and the political willpower for infrastructure spending, is
the most important part of rebuilding. Moreover, how the feds and New
Orleans respond over the long term has implications for the nation, as
its own infrastructure needs grow even more complex. New York’s subways,
for instance, now need state-of-the-art protection from terrorists, and
Las Vegas and other western cities, of course, rely on complex
engineering to assure fresh supplies of water in the desert.
President Bush’s recent rhetoric thus doesn’t help New Orleans or the
nation. He still talks as if poverty, and not inadequate design and
investment in the plain, old, boring infrastructure that makes all
cities work, was responsible for Katrina’s tragic devastation.
Nicole Gelinas
Katrina Kids Suffering?
Yes, in part thanks to FEMA’s insta-ghettos.
20 April 2006
A new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health
and the Children’s Health Fund has found that many of the children whom
Hurricane Katrina displaced are suffering physically and mentally, and
their ordeal may have a long-term effect on their health. But contrary
to the study’s conclusion, the problem isn’t a lack of long-term
“disaster” healthcare infrastructure. Rather, the finding of certain
evacuees’ poor health is an urgent reminder of the real problem: the
Bush administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
warehouses too many of Katrina’s underclass families in desolate
“FEMA-villes,” throwing up pre-fab ghettos in the guise of emergency
housing.
To conduct the health study, researchers visited over 650 Louisiana
families uprooted by Katrina, and then compared the results of their
interviews with results of pre-Katrina health studies of Louisiana’s
urban populations. Six months after Katrina (when researchers did their
interviews), the Katrina children studied suffered from high rates of
depression or anxiety, with many parents reporting that kids had
acquired behavioral problems since Katrina. Fourteen percent of Katrina
children who need medication for chronic illnesses like asthma had gone
without that medication, compared with 2 percent of kids studied before
the storm.
Nearly one-fifth of Katrina kids weren’t in school at all or continued
to miss weeks of school. Nearly half of parents had no health insurance,
in many cases because they had lost their jobs in the storm and hadn’t
found new ones. Many parents (mostly mothers) considered themselves to
be in only fair or poor health, and more than half scored poorly on a
mental-health test, boding ill for their children’s future.
The researchers determined that the solution to this “emerging
humanitarian crisis” is a federal “Health Care Marshall Plan,” including
Congressional hearings, long-term Disaster Relief Medicaid with a
transition to “permanent” Medicaid, and the deployment of 1,500 National
Health Service Corps professionals to evacuee communities in Louisiana
and Mississippi.
But these proposed solutions would treat symptoms while ignoring the
true source of the problem: FEMA’s ill-conceived “temporary” housing
solution for Katrina’s underclass families.
As the researchers note, their study is not of Katrina evacuees in
general, or even of poor evacuees. It’s a study of the nearly 50,000
evacuees still living in FEMA-built evacuee trailer parks, regular
trailer parks, and hotels in Louisiana. (A casual reader of the New York
Times wouldn’t know this, since the paper headlined its article on the
study: EVACUEE STUDY FINDS DECLINING HEALTH.)
These are families who have so few financial and social resources that,
six months after Katrina, they’re still living in makeshift shelters
rather than in suitable apartments, even temporary ones, despite
available government aid to pay rent. Among them, almost certainly, are
many of New Orleans’s entrenched pre-Katrina underclass, who now have
brought with them to cramped FEMA-villes the problems endemic to
single-mother families, whose wage earners work at low-income jobs (and
are in many cases working at all only due to welfare reform), and whose
poorly educated and poorly socialized children often grow up to plague
their already crime-ridden neighborhoods.
It’s likely that these families would have scored poorly on well-being
indices before Katrina: as the researchers note, a disproportionate
number of the kids in the study “were already at excessive social and
medical risk” before the storm. And it’s no surprise that some children
(and parents) are doing much worse than before the storm, as FEMA-villes
intensify underclass conditions.
Columbia and CHF note that the jerrybuilt neighborhoods that FEMA
constructs for disaster victims are “dismal and desolate. Hastily
erected . . . in undesirable locations such as on the edge of a
commercial airport, the parks feel more like military encampments than
family neighborhoods.” The study continues: “sixty-nine percent of
caregivers [interviewed] believed there were people in their current
neighborhood who would be a bad influence on their children, compared to
52 percent . . . before Katrina.”
Indeed, even before Katrina, smaller-scale FEMA-villes, including a park
constructed in western Florida after Hurricane Charley hit in 2004, were
infamous as demoralizing centers of idleness and crime; a new
post-Katrina ’ville in northern Louisiana, home to Katrina evacuees, is
quickly gaining that reputation now.
One reason FEMA must build many of its new FEMA-villes in isolated
locations is that residents of real neighborhoods often veto such
trailer parks nearby, not wanting to live near housing-project
conditions. But the remote locations only exacerbate the underclass
nature of FEMA-villes. Because the parks are often far from
transportation, it’s hard for adults to search for jobs or suitable
housing (and, for that matter, to receive the health services they need
for themselves and their kids).
Even worse, for thousands of Katrina victims who cannot return to their
New Orleans neighborhoods indefinitely, FEMA-ville living encourages
them to think that their displacement is temporary. This state of
suspended animation is doubtless a reason why some mothers haven’t
enrolled their children in school or found work that might provide them
with the health insurance that the kids need. But FEMA, undaunted,
continues to build its ’villes. Just last week, the agency boasted that
it’s constructing 45 more “group sites” in Louisiana to house 4,000
Katrina families (or about 15,000 people) quasi-permanently. This
announcement came despite New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s correct
opposition to the construction of FEMA-villes in his city.
What FEMA should do is raze its FEMA-villes and follow Houston’s path in
helping Katrina evacuees (the city took in nearly 200,000 from
neighboring Louisiana): award temporary vouchers to displaced families
so that they can rent apartments and get on with their lives, with new
jobs and new schools and new doctors for their children.
Thanks to Houston, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, including many
poor evacuees unaccustomed to life in a thriving city, are receiving
temporary government aid—and are in positions to take over the
responsibility to recover their own lives from a momentous disaster.
Nicole Gelinas
Katrina Kids Suffering?
Yes, in part thanks to FEMA’s insta-ghettos.
20 April 2006
A new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health
and the Children’s Health Fund has found that many of the children whom
Hurricane Katrina displaced are suffering physically and mentally, and
their ordeal may have a long-term effect on their health. But contrary
to the study’s conclusion, the problem isn’t a lack of long-term
“disaster” healthcare infrastructure. Rather, the finding of certain
evacuees’ poor health is an urgent reminder of the real problem: the
Bush administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
warehouses too many of Katrina’s underclass families in desolate
“FEMA-villes,” throwing up pre-fab ghettos in the guise of emergency
housing.
To conduct the health study, researchers visited over 650 Louisiana
families uprooted by Katrina, and then compared the results of their
interviews with results of pre-Katrina health studies of Louisiana’s
urban populations. Six months after Katrina (when researchers did their
interviews), the Katrina children studied suffered from high rates of
depression or anxiety, with many parents reporting that kids had
acquired behavioral problems since Katrina. Fourteen percent of Katrina
children who need medication for chronic illnesses like asthma had gone
without that medication, compared with 2 percent of kids studied before
the storm.
Nearly one-fifth of Katrina kids weren’t in school at all or continued
to miss weeks of school. Nearly half of parents had no health insurance,
in many cases because they had lost their jobs in the storm and hadn’t
found new ones. Many parents (mostly mothers) considered themselves to
be in only fair or poor health, and more than half scored poorly on a
mental-health test, boding ill for their children’s future.
The researchers determined that the solution to this “emerging
humanitarian crisis” is a federal “Health Care Marshall Plan,” including
Congressional hearings, long-term Disaster Relief Medicaid with a
transition to “permanent” Medicaid, and the deployment of 1,500 National
Health Service Corps professionals to evacuee communities in Louisiana
and Mississippi.
But these proposed solutions would treat symptoms while ignoring the
true source of the problem: FEMA’s ill-conceived “temporary” housing
solution for Katrina’s underclass families.
As the researchers note, their study is not of Katrina evacuees in
general, or even of poor evacuees. It’s a study of the nearly 50,000
evacuees still living in FEMA-built evacuee trailer parks, regular
trailer parks, and hotels in Louisiana. (A casual reader of the New York
Times wouldn’t know this, since the paper headlined its article on the
study: EVACUEE STUDY FINDS DECLINING HEALTH.)
These are families who have so few financial and social resources that,
six months after Katrina, they’re still living in makeshift shelters
rather than in suitable apartments, even temporary ones, despite
available government aid to pay rent. Among them, almost certainly, are
many of New Orleans’s entrenched pre-Katrina underclass, who now have
brought with them to cramped FEMA-villes the problems endemic to
single-mother families, whose wage earners work at low-income jobs (and
are in many cases working at all only due to welfare reform), and whose
poorly educated and poorly socialized children often grow up to plague
their already crime-ridden neighborhoods.
It’s likely that these families would have scored poorly on well-being
indices before Katrina: as the researchers note, a disproportionate
number of the kids in the study “were already at excessive social and
medical risk” before the storm. And it’s no surprise that some children
(and parents) are doing much worse than before the storm, as FEMA-villes
intensify underclass conditions.
Columbia and CHF note that the jerrybuilt neighborhoods that FEMA
constructs for disaster victims are “dismal and desolate. Hastily
erected . . . in undesirable locations such as on the edge of a
commercial airport, the parks feel more like military encampments than
family neighborhoods.” The study continues: “sixty-nine percent of
caregivers [interviewed] believed there were people in their current
neighborhood who would be a bad influence on their children, compared to
52 percent . . . before Katrina.”
Indeed, even before Katrina, smaller-scale FEMA-villes, including a park
constructed in western Florida after Hurricane Charley hit in 2004, were
infamous as demoralizing centers of idleness and crime; a new
post-Katrina ’ville in northern Louisiana, home to Katrina evacuees, is
quickly gaining that reputation now.
One reason FEMA must build many of its new FEMA-villes in isolated
locations is that residents of real neighborhoods often veto such
trailer parks nearby, not wanting to live near housing-project
conditions. But the remote locations only exacerbate the underclass
nature of FEMA-villes. Because the parks are often far from
transportation, it’s hard for adults to search for jobs or suitable
housing (and, for that matter, to receive the health services they need
for themselves and their kids).
Even worse, for thousands of Katrina victims who cannot return to their
New Orleans neighborhoods indefinitely, FEMA-ville living encourages
them to think that their displacement is temporary. This state of
suspended animation is doubtless a reason why some mothers haven’t
enrolled their children in school or found work that might provide them
with the health insurance that the kids need. But FEMA, undaunted,
continues to build its ’villes. Just last week, the agency boasted that
it’s constructing 45 more “group sites” in Louisiana to house 4,000
Katrina families (or about 15,000 people) quasi-permanently. This
announcement came despite New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s correct
opposition to the construction of FEMA-villes in his city.
What FEMA should do is raze its FEMA-villes and follow Houston’s path in
helping Katrina evacuees (the city took in nearly 200,000 from
neighboring Louisiana): award temporary vouchers to displaced families
so that they can rent apartments and get on with their lives, with new
jobs and new schools and new doctors for their children.
Thanks to Houston, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, including many
poor evacuees unaccustomed to life in a thriving city, are receiving
temporary government aid—and are in positions to take over the
responsibility to recover their own lives from a momentous disaster.
Nicole Gelinas
Reconstructing New Orleans
Let homeowners serve as the ground troops.
3 February 2006
The federal government has spent billions on New Orleans’s immediate
recovery, but it’s clear that Congress and the Bush administration
aren’t quite sure how to proceed on supporting long-term reconstruction.
Certainly the White House’s recent approval of $6 billion in block
grants to be disbursed by Louisiana’s state government is not the right
course, since the feds will have insufficient control over whether state
authorities spend these Great-Society-style billions wisely. But the
Bush administration recently rejected the most comprehensive plan that’s
been presented thus far for retaining some rational federal oversight of
the complex rebuilding undertaking: a Louisiana Congressman’s proposed
federal buyout of New Orleans’s ruined properties.
Instead of a blanket dismissal, the White House should consider working
with Representative Richard Baker, the conservative Republican from
Baton Rouge who introduced the buyout bill last year and will pursue it
again this year. Baker has shown himself willing to modify his bill in
response to reasonable criticism, and the administration could help him
perfect his plan by asking him to change it to place more financial
responsibility for rebuilding flood-wrecked properties in the hands of
exiled Big Easy homeowners. Such a move would join reasonable federal
supervision with the power of the ownership society that President Bush
rightly values.
Under the Baker bill, a new federal public authority, the Louisiana
Recovery Corporation, would purchase any and all of about 200,000
wrecked homes in the state offered for sale to the government by their
owners. The LRC would compensate homeowners and mortgage lenders, but
not in full. Mortgage lenders would receive about 60 percent of the
value of each home’s pre-Katrina loan, and owners would receive about
the same percentage of their equity. The feds would then prepare
suitable land for redevelopment, and would auction such property off to
private developers for rebuilding and resale, with the first option to
purchase going to displaced residents. The LRC also would work with
homeowners who don’t want to sell out to help them refurbish their
properties.
Baker’s original bill seemed to suggest that lenders would be paid off
in full; the 60-percent provision is the Congressman’s reasonable
response to criticism that such a bailout of banks that loaned billions
to people who invested in property below sea level would create an
intolerable moral hazard. Skeptics might ask: Even at the 60 percent
rate, wouldn’t the LRC still create a massive moral hazard by
retroactively indemnifying homeowners and lenders for the risk of
investing in a flood-prone area without adequate insurance?
But the moral-hazard issue here is not as clear-cut as it seems. New
Orleans residents understood that their properties would flood
sometimes, but not catastrophically; they thought, reasonably, that the
levees designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in
response to previous floods would protect their homes. Those levees, of
course, gave way after Katrina, due in part to failures on the part of
the Corps as well as on the part of state and local officials, who were
responsible for maintenance.
Now the first responsibility of top federal reconstruction official
Donald Powell is to decide—and state clearly—which parts of the city the
government’s floodwalls can reasonably protect. If it’s not possible to
protect citizens in some areas—such as low-lying Eastern New Orleans,
including the Ninth Ward—it’s time for the feds to let evacuees know. If
this is the case, the government should officially condemn New Orleans’s
most vulnerable tracts, offering property owners and mortgage lenders
some compensation for the loss of their land along the Baker model.
Top federal reconstruction officials—not the local authorities or FEMA
through its flood-insurance program—must decide this matter, because
they retain responsibility for rebuilding levees and floodwalls to the
strength needed to protect New Orleans’s lowest-lying neighborhoods
reliably. If the federal government lets New Orleans make the decision
on where to rebuild, the decision falls prey to yet another moral
hazard: the city might let people rebuild everywhere, in order to avoid
the political fallout of permanently redlining whole neighborhoods,
knowing that Washington will bail homeowners out if the levees fail
again.
But if it is possible to rebuild some, or all, of the low-lying parts of
the Big Easy with reasonable assurances of safety, then it’s time to get
to work. Washington can pave the way for reconstruction by working with
New Orleans to build adequate levees, of course. It should also work
with local authorities to set out clear and non-negotiable
reconstruction standards. No house will be issued a permit for occupancy
unless its main living quarters are elevated enough from the ground to
withstand future floods. Properties must be built to wind- and
flood-resistant standards, as has happened in vulnerable areas of
Florida.
The White House needs to press Baker to reshape his bill in one further
area. Handing off thousands upon thousands of acres of land to federal
contractors for long-term site preparation can’t possibly be the best
way to rebuild a major city, when the land is currently owned by
individuals who have a stake in their neighborhoods.
Government ownership and resale of large swaths of New Orleans would be
prone to intense political interference at the local level, especially
since the LRC would leave much of the actual decision-making about which
areas to rebuild and which to return to nature in the hands of local
officials. The region’s Democratic caucus, egged on by national pols,
would contort the redevelopment process to make sure that the remade
city retained its exact pre-Katrina racial and political demographics.
Mayor Ray Nagin has already promised exiles that the Big Easy will
remain a “Chocolate City” (that is, majority black), and Senator Hillary
Clinton has snidely mused that the White House doesn’t want to rebuild
New Orleans because “all those Democrats might come back.”
Worse, if local officials retain oversight over areas to be sold off to
developers after site preparation, as the Baker bill proposes, it’s
quite possible that all of this federal funding would result in the kind
of massive 1950s-style urban-renewal failure that often emerges when
politicians and politically connected developers design large-scale
construction schemes. As urban-planning guru Jane Jacobs observed,
tracts planned and built up all at once rarely succeed; urban areas need
unplanned diversity.
Baker’s bill can address these criticisms. Instead of offering to buy
out the homeowners who have obvious stakes in New Orleans’s rebuilding,
the bill should treat exiled homeowners as assets who can be leveraged
for the city’s recovery.
Some exiled from New Orleans are eager to return. “My parents worked too
hard for this house for me to give it up,” said Melvina Valentine,
lately of Houston, of her flood-damaged home in the Carrollton area of
New Orleans. “We want to rebuild ourselves, but we need help,” said
Hortense Langs, who owns a home in the Bywater neighborhood; Langs is
living in Houston now as well.
Longtime New Orleans homeowners like Valentine and Langs can help
jumpstart the hard work of rebuilding New Orleans’s neighborhoods.
Indeed, some pioneer homeowners are already gutting and reconstructing
their homes one by one, with practical help on the ground from
volunteers.
Once the feds set clear rules, they could build on the modest work that
residents are already doing. Baker could modify his bill so that federal
money goes toward homeowners in suitable areas—not to buy out their
property, but to give them the money to rebuild it themselves.
Congress and the Bush administration could award funds to homeowners to
hire approved contractors to rebuild individual homes to the new
standards, or give the homeowners the funds to do the work themselves,
releasing the money on a rational block-by block reconstruction
schedule, with clear deadlines for work completion in specific
neighborhoods (builders who can’t conform to standard deadlines and
costs would be dropped quickly from the program). Under this plan,
citizens could return to their neighborhoods and recommit to New Orleans
with their labor, consumption, and tax revenues—with the city taking
responsibility to ensure that the level of public services increases
incrementally with each rebuilt block. Homeowners who don’t plan to
return to New Orleans could accept government money to rebuild their
homes anyway, to sell the property later and to avoid some of the loss
on a foreclosure (or they could rent their rebuilt homes out, taking
advantage of New Orleans’s newly tight real estate market).
What if a homeowner— one without much equity in his home, say—chose not
to participate? A year or so after the program’s launch, it would be
time for the local and federal governments to step in—condemning
properties that remain abandoned, and awarding property owners (and
their mortgage lenders) an amount based on what the rebuilt area is
worth at the time of the buyout. The government could sell these
individual properties—not vast tracts—to new developers, helping to fund
its own program.
No, this program wouldn’t be cheap. But awarding more money to
individual homeowners and less money to local and state governments via
large-scale federal grants will minimize political waste. Giving
homeowners the resources to rebuild their neighborhoods block by block
will allow citizens, not the government, to rebuild the Crescent
City—and they’ll do it better and faster than the pols ever could.
New Orleans |
