Don't forget our national shame: The gutting of New Orleans...

[marmar]

Published on Thursday, June 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Ten Months After Katrina: Gutting New Orleans
by Bill Quigley

Saturday I joined some volunteers and helped gut the home of one of my best friends. Two months after she finished paying off her mortgage, her one-story brick home was engulfed in 7 feet of water. Because she was under-insured and remains worried about a repeat of the floods, my friend, a grandmother, has not yet decided if she is going to rebuild.

Though it is Saturday morning, on my friend's block no children play and no one is cutting the grass. Most of her neighbors' homes are still abandoned. Three older women neighbors have died since Katrina.

We are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the twenty-third person found dead from the storm since March.

Over two hundred thousand people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, thirteen percent have been re-connected to electricity.

The mass displacement of people has left New Orleans older, whiter, and more affluent. African-Americans, children, and the poor have not made it back - primarily because of severe shortages of affordable housing.

Thousands of homes remain just as they were when the floodwaters receded - ghost-like houses with open doors, upturned furniture, and walls covered with growing mold.

Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50% of the billions to low and moderate income families.

Meanwhile, seventy thousand families in Louisiana live in 240 square foot FEMA trailers - three on my friend's street. As homeowners, their trailer is in front of their own battered home. Renters are not so fortunate and are placed in gravel strewn FEMA-villes across the state. With rents skyrocketing, thousands have moved into houses without electricity.

Meanwhile, privatization of public services continues to accelerate.

Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nation's laboratory for charter schools - publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools - they now control 4. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters. The metro area public schools will get $213 million less next school year in state money because tens of thousands of public school students were displaced last year. At the same time, the federal government announced a special allocation of $23.9 million which can only be used for charter schools in Louisiana. The teachers union, the largest in the state, has been told there will be no collective bargaining because, as one board member stated, "I think we all realize the world has changed around us."

Public housing has been boarded up and fenced off as HUD announced plans to demolish 5000 apartments - despite the greatest shortage of affordable housing in the region's history. HUD plans to let private companies develop the sites. In the meantime, the 4000 families locked out since Katrina are not allowed to return.

The broken city water system is losing about 85 million gallons of water in leaks every day. That is not a typo, 85 million gallons of water a day, at a cost of $200,000 a day, are still leaking out of the system even after over 17,000 leaks have been plugged.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0629-20.htm

[rudy23]

1. Thank you for getting this out there!

It is a crime that nothing more is being done in N.O., while Congress debates gay marraige, video games, and flag burning. I've said before, going through this, even on the periphery, is like being in a dream where there's an emergency, and you try to get help, but no one can see or hear you.

I was there last weekend, visiting some friends who stayed. Their house was fine, (Irish Channel), but their surroundings were wearing them down. Still, they were the lucky ones. My friend told me a heart-wrenching story about working with some inner city children. One of them was acting up, so she pulled him aside. She started to take him up a short flight of stairs, and he immediately started bawling, and screaming "Don't make me go up in the attic. There's bad stuff up there!"

That same girl was telling me they went to go stay with her family in Indiana, and they all were telling her "We don't want to hear about Katrina, we're sick of it. All those people getting handouts, just so they can go loot some more TV sets" They were angry, and taking it out on them. People just have no understanding of what happen, none.

They said it was hard to figure out what to say to people who asked "How is New Orleans doing?" It's better than people who think it's completely wiped out think, worse than people who think it's okay think. It's a unique set of challenges, and I just worry that everybody's anxiety levels stay low during this hurricane season. It's like having a gun pointed at you for 4 months. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.

[marmar]

6. You bet...

NOLA has dropped from the headlines, but we can't let people forget.

[fivecats]

2. More info available at...

I was in New Orleans two weeks ago for a conference and had the chance to take a driving tour of many of the flood damaged areas. We were shown the area by a university professor, a long-time activist in the area who put the current situation in a socio-politica and economic historical perspective that helped me to better understand the hows and the whys of the situation.

Aquart has been kind enough to write up a second entry here on DU that quotes from and links to my blog over at livejournal. There I have images and commentary from that driving tour.

The more people who can spread the word about the situation down in New Orleans, the better.

...

[marmar]

14. Thanks for the links...

:hi:

[ninkasi]

3. The abandonment of New Orleans

by the Bush administration is a national shame. This shows quite clearly how little these people care about the rest of us, especially those of us who are poor, or minorities. How can America keep on claiming to be a great nation, when we allow thousands of our fellow citizens to be homeless, jobless, and feeling hopeless?

[marmar]

4. Indeed. It's an administration of sociopaths....

If the measure of a society is how it treats those who have the least, ...... :cry:

[Vidar]

5. "What's that I smell in the air--the American Dream."

[MasonJar]

7. I too have just been to New Orleans, staying in the French

Quarter. It is bustling right along...lots of tourists. As always the food was out of this world, the art and antiques incredible. We went on the tour of the Mississippi on the riverboat, the Natchez. We went to the Cafe du Monde and ate bignets and cafe au lait. But we also took a Katrina tour. The guide was a professional, but also one of the natives who had to flee. She returned quickly and the company started the tour within a few weeks of the flood. We did not go to the 9th ward since the last group to go there was stopped by the police and the tour guide arrested. She gave a personal perspective of the whole situation. We saw a shack where one of the top yacht clubs in the world had been. We saw boats and cars upside down. Street after street of houses that were not being rehabbed yet. One of the problems is that these houses now have to be raised up so many feet and owners just cannot afford to do it. These look like very simple and small houses, but not only have many been in the family for generations, they also are on the lake, or near it, and are therefore worth $400,000 range. I am afraid some of these families will be stiffed. A couple of days before my aunt and I left the Librarians came 20,000 strong. I was so pleased for the city. Tourism is their bread and butter. There were young people there helping in some neighborhoods. Tulane students have also been quite active in the city, so for the first time I sent them a nice donation. (I am after all an alumnae.)
I would have loved to have been more helpful, but it was all my aunt could do to walk in the French Quarter, since she is 84. We did at least spend money and give the town our support. By the way, the mayor called in the state police and the national guard because there had been an increasing number of gang killings. I hope that is over, so if you want to go, do it. We did not feel threatened in any way.

[Gloria]

8. What the hell is wrong with these people????

"Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50% of the billions to low and moderate income families."

[zonkers]

9. My friend is working in N.O. First off, truckers are making 300 bucks an

hour, thats fifty thousand a month. There is so much money flying around so irresponsibly, it is a joke. And nothing is getting done that makes much sense. The geological problem is way worse than anyone ever could have imagined. The city is sinking an inch a year and this is putting so much pressure on the levees, way more than just the water. The city is lost and will never recover. And while the administration may have fucked up lifesaving efforts, the mess that exists is a bigger problem than anyone wants to admit. It would take 75 billion dollars and twenty years to fix and no one wants to make that committment. They rather just turn what is left into a tourist destination for rich folks to gamble and booze.

[RangerSmith]

11. I can promise you

there are no truck drivers working in NOLA doing legitimate work making $300.00 an hour.

[bvar22]

13. Only $75Billlion?

Hey, we spend way more than that in just one year in Iraq!

The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.

[ixion]

10. The gutting of N.O. is only the beginning

in a series of 'guttings' that include the Federal Treasury, among many others. :-(

[RangerSmith]

12. It's a good article

and there should be 60 seconds of news from NOLA on every evening and cable news program to keep this all front and center. About the only volunteer organizations still going into NOLA to help are Faith Based. Everybody else has forgotten about it unless they can toss it out in some political debate.

But, I tell ya... the only people needing to be in NOLA right now are people who are there to work and people who can cover their own existence without assistance from the local authorities. The system there is broke and we don't need to be adding to the problem by sending all their jobless back.