Hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians can't, or won't, go home again. Why?
I drove through the streets of New Orleans East about three months ago. In one neighborhood, I slammed on my breaks at a remarkable sight -- one young boy of maybe 10, absentmindedly dribbling a basketball in the street. Why so remarkable? Because I hadn't seen another living soul for some time. Block after block, street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood, all there was to see was house after abandoned house. As I drove past the boy, I spied a National Guard Humvee chug slowly down a cross street. I spent hours exploring that quiet, almost echoing section of the city; A boy and a Humvee; that's all that was left to life in that part of New Orleans East.
Now, I used the word "abandoned" to describe houses in the last paragraph, but that's not quite right. The residents of New Orleans East were forced out of their houses, either by the flood waters after the levees broke or by the mandatory evacuation of the city in the days after the storm. They didn't leave because they suddenly felt like there was someplace they'd rather be. And yet here I was, 20 months after the storm, a long stretch of time after the storm waters receded and the city had reopened, and they hadn't, in large measure, come back. So why not?
In some cases, there is no place to come back to. At least, no place livable. To be a lucky homeowner in neighborhoods like New Orleans East or Lakeview or Chalmette is to have had your house gutted down to its studs, either by professional contractors or the roving bands of volunteer college students, church groups, and aid workers armed with crow bars and ventilator masks.
You might be lucky, in a case like that, but you still have nothing but a shell of a house to live in. So what's unlucky then? It means that your house stands the day it did when the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain decided to go back whence they came. That means your living quarters are caked with mud and debris and general grime whose origins you probably don't want to begin to contemplate.
But say you do manage to get your house gutted. You're in good shape now, or at least better than many of your neighbors. The next step is deciding whether or not to move your life back into its walls. Like so much of what drives the ongoing situation in New Orleans, what slows the flow of New Orleanians back into the city is money -- who has it, who needs it, who controls who gets it.
Indeed, fights over money in New Orleans have been seemingly endless since the storm. Money is what Governor Kathleen Blanco and the federal government have fought over, money that would have gone to fund the governor's Road Home Program. Road Home covers the gap between rebuilding a home and what gets covered by insurance compensation and FEMA grants.
Then there's the money that Mayor Ray Nagin has fought for to fund his 15-year recovery plan. The focus of the recovery plan is to rebuild the business infrastructure in more than a dozen of the city's sections. Without a redevelopment of business -- some of New Orleans' "open" neighborhoods lack a store in which to buy milk, bread, and other basics -- convincing residents to come back home is, if you're being generous, a challenge. If you're being more analytical, it's a fool's mission.
Of course, even with investment intended to spur business development, you're not likely to choose to open up a mini-mart in a part of town where there's no electricity. It makes keeping the bottles of Abita quite difficult. Driving through the neighborhood of Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish, just east of the city, I sped through an intersection narrowly missing an oncoming car; I hadn't considered that in this well-developed area, nearly two years after the storm, the power would still be out and the stop lights non-functional.
No electricity, no shopping, and, in some neighborhoods no functional schools as of yet. That last fact is going to keep many families with children from returning home. Any city is an urban ecosystem, and no rational creature -- no matter how strong, or self-sufficient -- is likely to make a go at living in an environment that's so clearly so badly out of whack.
Still, some have done it. The parents or guardians of the little boy in New Orleans East I saw playing basketball must have returned home, either for a short stay or for good. Why would they do it? In a place like that deserted neighborhood, their reasons are most likely deeply personal.
But in a more densely populated section of town like the Lower Ninth Ward, part of the answer is perhaps peer, or neighbor, pressure. A truck standing in a driveway of a Lower 9th home when I last visited had painted on its window this message: "I'm Back. R U?" (photo) That sentiment is on lawn signs and window posters all throughout the Lower 9th, a thickly-settled part of the city in which neighbors, presumably, feel like a bit of gentle arm-twisting and not-so-subtle might work to convince other neighbors to cast their lot once again with the city.
What are the rewards for those pioneers? In part, a new pile of trouble to greet their return home. Insurance premiums registering as high as a 144% increase over what they were before the storm. A crime rate that ranks number one in the United States in murders; this August, there was nearly one killing in the city for each day of the month.
Along with prevalent crime, mental illness is New Orleans' latest albatross. Suicides, stress, street fighting, fighting amongst families in their own homes. I've heard from a handful of New Orleanians that, with all the stresses of life they now face, the feel like they struggle every damn day to stay on this side of crazy.
We who live elsewhere in the United States talk a lot about rebuilding New Orleans, repopulating the Big Easy, fighting the brave fight for the future of the Crescent City. George Bush today said that "New Orleans is coming back," that "this town is better today than it was yesterday and it's going to be better tomorrow than it is today." New Orleans have heard a lot of that sort of uplifting, affirmative talk from their elected officials over the last two years.
But then you stand someplace like the lawn of Holy Cross High School in the Lower Ninth Ward and look out upon the both the Mississippi River and the levees that are supposed to keep this bowl-shaped area dry in future storms. And things don't seem so simple.
Say you're a once and perhaps future New Orleanians, standing on the banks of the river. Do you trust that the levees will hold this time around, that life will really someday be whole again in this city? Is it giving up not to make another go of it? Or is trying again to make this your home just plain crazy?
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Posted August 29, 2007 | 05:29 PM (EST)