NEW ORLEANS -- The 2010 census figures about New Orleans made news (here, here, and here, for example), but the stories all came out at the height of the uprising in Egyptian cities, so you may have missed them. But, since they were all written from within the conventional narrative of the 2005 flooding (big storm, natural disaster), you certainly missed the more disturbing implications of those numbers.
There are 118,000 fewer African-Americans in New Orleans than in the previous census. We know that approximately 100,000 of them were evacuated in the wake of the catastrophic flooding of the city. "Evacuated" means they were loaded onto planes, trains and buses, essentially given a one-way ticket to a destination unknown to them until they arrived.
Now for what we don't know. According to Allison Plyer, of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which makes it its business to collect all available statistical information on the area, we don't know where those 100,000 people are now, whether (as Barbara Bush famously predicted) they're happier in their new environs or whether they ache to come home. No public or private entity has thought it important to track those folks who were so suddenly uprooted. We have better information about the movie preferences of minor-league ballplayers than about these survivors of a major catastrophe.
Now to the implications. The flooding of New Orleans was "the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl", according to the co-leader of one of the two major forensic engineering investigations into the disaster (Google ILIT report from UC Berkeley, as well as the Team Louisiana report from LSU). Culpability for the flooding rests not with Mother Nature -- 20% of New Orleans flooded during the city's most serious previous brush with a major storm, 80% flooded in 2005 -- but with the US Army Corps of Engineers, according to those two reports, and to the decision of a US Federal judge in the only lawsuit stemming from the flooding to go to trial. The reports blame four and a half decades of design and construction mistakes and misjudgments. The Federal judge blames conduct rising to the level of "criminal negligence". As a result, 20% of the population of a major American city has gone...we don't know where.
And recent information available to that same part of our government indicates that Sacramento, California, may well be next.
And the entire official population of Washington, D.C., persists in its silence, and inaction, on this subject.
ADDENDUM: Some more things we do know. According to a couple of sources, housing agencies in New Orleans are, or have been, receiving a large number of requests for assistance in returning to the city. Post-flood, rents in New Orleans have risen by a third, while most public housing was demolished. After a long wrangle, federal government assistance, with many complications, was made available to compensate homeowners, but very little was done to compensate landlords. Hence, far more owner-occupied housing has been restored than rental housing.
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You're funny. Why do idiots live 12 feet below sea level anyway? And why is it the taxpayers of the entire country's responsibility to pay for the levy system?
No, Katrina was Mother Natures doing. Of course the dummies who lived there have found a judge who will soak the taxpayers with all the costs.
FYI, " Woods " they went back to Africa. What kind of statement is that, don't they have the same name and SS# , and the government cannot find them. This government knows very well where they are.
Alot of the love for Nola is really a love for the built enviroment much of which is gone. Where is a guy who is a porter at a hotel and has four kids gonna live? On Magazine Street next to a coffeeshop? Yeah. If the houses aren't there anymore then they are going to have to go live in a cheap block of public housing in Houston which is not quite as charming as drinking a Forty ouncer of the stoop of your falling down shotgun (which IS actually charming).
There's probably a real estate factor here as well. Speculators and such. There's just no place for some of the natives to live anymore.
And for you dummies who think this is some sort of "master plan" then you're indicting Obama into the plan cause he hasn't done anything either.
It's a combo of a terrible accident and a impossibly incompetent beaurocracy. It IS a tragedy for sure.
The city is fixing itself, very slowly. The love for NOLA is a complicated thing, as complicated as its history. I wouldn't peg it on just one thing, especially something as ephemeral as the "built environment." I for one didn't move there and do not love it for that reason.
Untrue. Chernobyl is a disaster that continues; Chernobyl nuclear power plant's meltdown made an entire physical area permanently radioactive/toxic (give or take a few 55,000 yrs).
Thank you for the reportage on the failure of our Fed. government to aid landlords. Renters are holding up the U.S. economy by paying nearly all their monthly income to rental property owners who in turn are responsible for property taxes that fund municipalities. To deny rental property owners the same aid that is given home owners on the basis of who the property serves, violates both renters and rental property owners 14th Amendment rights to access to law. However, I am uncertain of anyone's entitlement to Federal disaster aid. The US government must examine the fact that rental property owners provide the much need dwellings for regular tenants who have never owned property and former home owners who lost their properties.
Actually, THAT'S untrue. Because the Russians left, life around Chernobyl was able to spring back quickly and it is practically a nature preserve, with lots of healthy flora and fauna. I'm not saying I'd go live there now, but pretending it's a toxic wasteland and will be for 55,000 years is downright false.
=Not only did President George W. Bush ignore the suffering of the hurricane/flood victims--mostly the poorest residents who couldn't get out in time--until news reports of the disaster and videos of the survivors forced some half-hearted gestures from the White House, the "recovery" effort was similarly,
and consciously, delayed.
=U.S. corporations (banks, gaming casinos, developers) looked at the wasteland of the devastated
"lower ninth" and saw an opportunity. There never was any intention of re-building these neighborhoods which, pre-Katrina, had the highest rate of African-American home ownership in the country.
=Instead, corporate leaders, and their allies in Baton Rouge and Washington, decided to keep much of the flooded zone in an un-redeveloped state, to be used as a buffer against future catastophes;
and to re-build in the "safe areas," with an emphasis on hotels, casinos and luxury housing/condominiums.
=In short, the "plan" was not to replace the housing that had been lost with an affordable mix of new homes and apartments (that would allow the residents to return "home"), but to create a brand-new, profit-making venture that would attract wealthier residents and tourists.
=Adding insult to injury is the fact that this massive real estate scam has been funded using taxpayer-provided "disaster relief" funds and low-interest government "redevelopment" loans.
Really shameful.
I am in contact with a small group of evacuees/survivors who are disabled, who are still stuck in limbo in Baton Rouge. Those who have been able to find their way back to the city have already done so. Associated Catholic Charities of Baton Rouge is working with the rest of them, fewer than 100 individuals altogether, to continue to work towards returning home. (Once the rebuilt housing developments -- don't call them projects -- are opened for occupancy, these folks should have first dibs on apartments and townhouses there.)
We all love the historical romance of the spirit of New Orleans, but the reality of life for many there seems to have been as unpaid 'extras' for the Bourbon Street show that worked for the few, but not for the many. The days of subsistence living are disappearing everywhere across the country, and hopefully New Orleans with find the creativity to build a real economy that supports real salary paying, tax paying jobs for all it's people.
The drug dealers found out in Texas & Georgia that the criminal justice systems there were much harsher on them than what they were used to in New Orleans so most of them have come back. Many people found jobs and a better life elsewhere and may never return to New Orleans.