Three Years After Katrina

Three Years After Katrina: While Republicans
and Democrats Gather and Celebrate, A City Still Searches for Recovery 

By Jordan Flaherty 
 
While much of the media focuses on conventions and running mates, the
third anniversary of Katrina offers an opportunity to examine the results
of disastrous federal, state and local policy on the people of New Orleans. 
Several organizations have released powerful reports in the past week,
examining the current state of the city; while grassroots activists
have plans to broadcast their message from the streets.  For those who
have heard only uplifting stories about the city’s recovery, the facts
on the ground offer an urgent reminder of the ongoing disaster.

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% 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% citywide (much more in some neighborhoods), while many city services
remain very limited – for example, only 21% of public transit buses
are running. 
 
Race and Class 
 
Its not only radicals that speak of race and class divisions in New
Orleans. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70% of residents
feel we’re divided by class and/or race.  The Kaiser survey also found
unity among New Orleanians: we’re united in feeling forgotten by the
rest of the US. Eight out of 10 said the federal government has not
provided sufficient support. Nearly two-thirds think that the US 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 the new New
Orleans, with no definitive 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 even optimistic figures report that 150,000
– 200,000 former residents (out of a former population of nearly 500,000)
have been unable to return.  The once nearly 70% African American city
is now estimated to be less than 50% African American, a change reflected
in the changing face of electoral politics statewide. While Republicans
have been losing across the US, 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 New Orleans as a blank slate on
which they can project and practice their ideas of reform, whether in
health care, architecture, urban planning, or 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.” 
 
The vast majority of New Orleans’ new professionals have come here with
the best intentions, with a love for this city and a desire to help
with the recovery. However, many activists criticize what they see as
token attempts at community involvement, and a paternalistic attitude
among many of the new decision makers. 
 
For example, our education system was in crisis pre-Katrina, and certainly
needed revolutionary change.  Change is what we have gotten – the current
system is in many ways unrecognizable from the system of three years
ago – but this revolution has been overwhelmingly led from outside,
with little input from the parents, students and staff of the New Orleans
school system. 
 
Shortly after the post-Katrina evacuation of the city, the entire staff
of the public school system was fired.  Not long after that, school board
officials chose to end recognition or negotiation with the teachers’
union – the largest union in the city, and arguably the biggest outlet
of Black middle class political power in the city.  Since then, the school
landscape has changed remarkably – from staff to decision-making structure
to facilities. According to Tulane professor Lance Hill, “New Orleans
has experienced a profound change in who governs schools and a dramatic
reduction of parent and local taxpayer control of schools.” 
 
The school system used to consist of 128 schools, 124 of them controlled
by the New Orleans School Board.  Now according to Hill, 88 have opened
for the fall, and “50 of them are charter schools (privatized management)
governed by self-appointed, self-perpetuating boards; 33 are run by
the State Department of Education through the Recovery School District;
and only five are governed by the elected school board.” 
 
“There are now 42 separate school systems operating in New Orleans,”
Hill continues, with their own “school policies, including teacher
requirements, curriculum, discipline policies, enrollment limits, and
social promotions.  Publicly accountable schools in which parents have
methods for publicly redressing grievances are limited to only five
schools (5.6% of the total).” 
 
Several recent articles have expressed excitement and admiration for
the new school system, including pieces in the New York Times and the
New Orleans Times-Picayune.  For school reformers, who came to New Orleans
with a desire to try out the changes they had imagined, this represents
a dream come true.  They have media support, federal, state and city
officials on their side, and a massive influx of cheap (and young, idealistic)
labor. Teach for America supplied 112 teachers last year, has committed
250 this year, and a projected 500 next year, while tens of millions
of dollars in funding is coming through sources such as the Gates and
Walton foundations. 
 
There is no doubt that some students receive an excellent education
in the new school districts, but critics are concerned that the students
that are being left behind, are those that need the most help – those
without someone to advocate for them, to research and apply for the
best schools.  According to New Orleanian Kalamu Ya Salaam, who is director
of a school program called Students at the Center, the new systems represent
“an experimentation with privatization, and everything that implies.”  
 
Although the new charter schools have been able to choose from the best
facilities and have used methods such as state standardized tests to
pick only select students (including 40% fewer special education students),
there are still serious questions over the extent to their much-heralded
success.  G.W. Carver School, the subject of a fawning NYTimes piece
last Spring, received an 88% failure rate for English and an 86% failure
rate for math on state standardized tests. 
 
Anniversary and Commemoration 
 
August 29, the anniversary of the devastation of the city, falls between
the Democratic and Republican conventions. While the Democratic and
Republican parties crown their nominees, activists on the ground will
be on the streets, still fighting for a just recovery. “It ain’t
to rain on Obama’s parade,” says Sess 4-5, a New Orleans-based
hip hop star and activist, “but the people down here need the world
to understand that its still a tragic situation. The rent has tripled,
the health care system is in shambles, we have less access to education
for our kids. The working class and poor are being exploited, while
everyone at the top is getting fat off our misery.” 
 
“We think August 29 should be holy day, not a day for business
as usual,” explains Sess, who is one of the organizers of a Katrina
March and Commemoration, starting Friday morning in the Lower Ninth
Ward, and marching into the 7th Ward.  That march is one of two activist
commemorations in the city that day, the other starting uptown, near
the BW Cooper development, one of the major housing developments torn
down this year.  “The Mayor announced to the world that New Orleans
was ‘open for business’ but we’re here to tell you that it is closed
for families,” declares former public housing resident Barbara
Jackson, who will be part of the demonstration at BW Cooper, called
Sankofa Day of Commemoration.  “Five thousand demolished homes. 
Eight thousand new jail beds. This is their one for one replacement
plan for us.” 
 
Taking to the streets is not the only agenda of local activists.  In
New Orleans, people have been organizing at the grassroots, working
together to build a movement.  In the aftermath of the US Social Forum
last year in Atlanta, a broad coalition of social justice organizations
began meeting monthly to combine efforts.  This group, called the Organizers
Roundtable, is an important spot for collaborations and community building. 
 
It’s been community, not foundations or government, that has led this
city’s recovery at the grassroots. Bayou Road – a street of Black-owned,
community-oriented, businesses in New Orleans’ seventh ward – has
rebuilt post-Katrina to more businesses than they had before the storm. 
It hasn’t been government help that has enabled these businesses to
come back, but the effort of community members coming together. It was
also local support that brought back the membership of many cultural
organizations, like the network of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, the
century-old Black community institutions who organize secondline parades
nearly every weekend throughout the year, as well as benefits for causes
such as school supplies for students. 
 
Nationally, the Right to the City alliance (RTTC), a coalition of organizations
that focuses on urban issues such as health care, criminal justice,
and education, sees the continuing crisis on the Gulf as central to
their work, referring to New Orleans as “the front lines in the
struggle against displacement and gentrification in the US.”  They
are co-sponsoring the march in New Orleans, as well as actions in seven
other cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, Providence,
San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Miami.  
 
The work of RTTC deserves special notice, as a coalition that has worked
to support the struggles of the people of New Orleans, and to bring
that struggle and solidarity home to their own communities, while taking
guidance from voices on the ground. In this time of many competing visionaries
struggling to reshape this city, that willingness to listen to the people
who lives are being affected, and to take that struggle and those lessons
home to their own communities, may be the radical change New Orleans
needs most. 
 
 
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. 
 
 
Resources for Information and Action: 
Reports: 
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center  
http://www.gnocdc.org/ 
Kaiser Family Foundation Poll 
http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/7789.cfm 
Policylink Report: 
http://www.policylink.org/threeyearslater 
Activism: 
Right To The City Alliance 
http://www.righttothecity.org/ 
Katrina Information Network Schedule of Commemoration Events: 
http://www.katrinaaction.org/node/339  
Sankofa New Orleans March 
www.sankofanola.org 
Katrina March and Commemoration 
http://katrinacommemoration.ning.com 
Safe Streets Strong Communities 
http://www.safestreetsnola.org 
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 
http://www.incite-national.org 
Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children 
http://www.fflic.org 
New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice 
http://www.neworleansworkerjustice.org/ 
Justice for New Orleans  
http://www.justiceforneworleans.org/ 
Color Of Change  
http://www.colorofchange.org 
Media and More: 
Left Turn Magazine: 
http://www.leftturn.org 
Grit TV, hosted by Laura Flanders – Week of 8/18 featured excellent
coverage of New Orleans 
http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/ 
Kalamu Ya Salaam 
http://www.kalamu.com/