Katrina: After the Flood (41 page)

Thornton had given Uddo a check for $1,000 to help get her started. Uddo used the money to buy shovels, chain saws, and other equipment they would need to start cleaning up the neighborhood. She went searching in City Park for what people called the Good News Camp, where she was told she’d find hundreds of out-of-towners who had come to New Orleans to help with the cleanup. “I’d ask them to send as many volunteers as they could, and they’d tell me, ‘Okay, we’ll give you thirty today,’ ” Uddo said. Her strategy was to attack one block at a time. “We’d clean yards, we’d clean the streets, we’d get rid of anything we came across.” In time, she learned that the Corps was gathering each morning in a nearby grocery-store parking lot. “I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I’ve got sixty volunteers today, we’re working these three blocks, can you work behind me?’ And they’d do it.” After a few weeks, Uddo admitted, “The place was starting to look pretty good.”

CONNIE UDDO SAW HERSELF
as living in “the Mayberry of New Orleans” prior to the storm. Lots of people felt that way about pre-Katrina
Lakeview. The neighborhood had more of a small-town feel—a place apart from the rest of the city. A lot of that was geography. Lakeview was cut off from the rest of New Orleans by City Park on its eastern flank and also a pair of giant drainage canals that constituted its east and west borders. The lake constituted its northern border—or, more accurately, Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Lake Vista, the pricier community sandwiched between Lakeview and Lake Pontchartrain.

Some in Lakeview, a predominantly white province in a largely black city, dreamed of breaking off from New Orleans and creating their own municipality. The idea came up regularly at meetings of Lakeview Civic in the 1970s and 1980s. Peppi Bruneau, the area’s state representative since 1976, was one of the lead secessionists. The plot to establish Lakeview as its own town peaked a decade before Katrina. “It was 1996, 1997, when crime was going up and there was no solution,” said Freddy Yoder. “We thought we could do better as our own town with our own tax base.” When then-mayor Marc Morial learned about what was going on, he told Yoder and his allies that he would fight them with everything he had or they could agree to a compromise: Morial’s support for legislation that would allow Lakeview to create its own taxing district and charge homeowners an annual surcharge to supplement police protection in their neighborhood. By imposing a tax on themselves, Lakeview paid for extra police and reduced crime from around a thousand incidents a year to under two hundred. “Everyone was ready to make it into a racial thing, but the fact was we were fed up with not getting the services we were paying for,” Yoder said.

The charge that Lakeview was a place hostile to blacks would be leveled again when Lakeview took on what locals called doubles—two-family homes that attracted renters. Martin Landrieu was the president of Lakeview Civic when the community demanded that the City Council impose a moratorium on new doubles. “We were just worried about Lakeview getting too crowded,” Landrieu said, but he wasn’t surprised that others suspected that racial fears were behind their actions. “I’ve sat in meetings in Lakeview and heard people in leadership say, ‘We’re not going to let the blacks in,’ ” Landrieu said. “I’ve heard people say some pretty racist things around here.”

The city’s “redheaded stepchild,” Freddy Yoder said of Lakeview—the
community that received nothing unless it demanded it. Lakeview’s inferiority complex even spilled over regarding the Lower Ninth Ward. From the start, the Lower Ninth received outsize attention relative to its population and, many Lakeview residents would add, its importance. “It was always ‘the Lower Ninth, the Lower Ninth, the Lower Ninth,’ ” said Robert Lupo, whose family had owned commercial property along Harrison Avenue in Lakeview dating back several generations. Al Petrie, who lost the home he had lived in since he was ten years old, said, “A lot of us were asking why we weren’t getting the national attention like the Lower Ninth Ward.”

Americans tend to tell a myth about disasters: everyone pulls together regardless of the race or social standing of their neighbor. Yet inside Lakeview there seemed little sense of camaraderie toward other parts of New Orleans also devastated by Katrina. Jeb Bruneau, then president of Lakeview Civic, would have poured resources into Gentilly, the community just on the other side of City Park from Lakeview. But New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth, he said, weren’t worth salvaging. “In Gentilly, you had homeownership,” Bruneau offered. “You had demographics—a mix of black with some whites. You could really make a difference there.”

Freddy Yoder was also inclined to write off much of the eastern half of New Orleans: “I didn’t have any problem with turning areas like the Lower Ninth Ward or New Orleans East into greenspace. That made sense to me.” To him it wasn’t about elevation or race or homeownership data. “At the time, I couldn’t care about anyone else. I could only worry about my home and my community.”

YODER CAME UP WITH
the idea of block captains early on: deputize a person on every block to learn what their neighbors were thinking. Yoder, too, was behind the large map that showed up on an easel in the gym at St. Dominic, the giant church on Harrison and a favorite meeting place after the storm. Every green pin on the map represented another homeowner who was intent on moving home. Some, such as Yoder and Al Petrie, both of whom snapped up houses on the cheap from those who wanted out, needed multiple pins to represent their holdings.
“Make an offer, I’ll take it, whatever it is,” a neighbor had said to Yoder a few months after the storm. The man, Yoder said, owned a “big, beautiful house at the end of the block that was worth at least three-quarters of a million dollars.” Yoder gave him $200,000 and spent another $150,000 fixing it up. That’s how Yoder’s daughter and her family ended up living on the corner in a $750,000 home that cost Yoder $350,000. Yoder also bought the house next door to his and more lots across the street.

The leadership of Lakeview Civic continued to meet every Friday in a conference room on the second floor of the Gulf Coast Bank branch. They mapped ruptured sidewalks and abandoned vehicles and downed utility poles in the neighborhood. And they continued to work on a neighborhood plan, though for whom and to what purpose wasn’t clear. Their early efforts had been all about proving that enough of its people were moving back to merit a full share of city services. That’s what it seemed the city needed for its flooded neighborhoods—at least until the City Council hired Lambert Advisory, a small, Miami-based planning firm that a few years earlier had advised the council on housing and economic-development issues. The council had hired Lambert to help what it called the “wet” neighborhoods. Under Lambert no community would have to prove viability. There’d be no need to study elevation maps to help people think through the potential for converting areas to greenspace. That summer, Lambert sponsored a three-day planning workshop for anyone living in the wet neighborhoods. There, they encouraged residents to think big. In Lakeview, they dreamed about creating their own zoning district. There’d be no more doubles, and they would make it more difficult for landlords to rebuild houses wrecked by the floodwaters.

“We were about ninety percent done with Lambert, and wouldn’t you know, the process changed again,” Landrieu said.

Maybe it was inevitable that a third party would step in to salvage the city’s planning process. Blanco’s Louisiana Recovery Authority—the LRA—needed a plan from the city before it would give New Orleans its share of the billions of federal dollars that would eventually reach the state. And New Orleans would potentially have competing plans or maybe no workable plan at all (the City Council had limited Lambert to the city’s wet communities, and the LRA was demanding a citywide plan). “This is a city that even before the storm had very little
capacity,” said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. “So when everything hit, the inability to recover quickly could have been predicted.” Rodin, who had taken over Rockefeller only a few months before Katrina, knew New Orleans well through her husband, who had once served as dean of Tulane’s law school. Ten days after the storm, Rodin announced a $3 million emergency housing grant to help New Orleans and told her people to be on the lookout for other ways they could help. That spring, the foundation wrote another check, this one for $3.5 million, and the United New Orleans Plan was born.

UNOP (pronounced “you-nop”), as everyone called it, would be a combination of both the Canizaro and Lambert plans. Communities would work with drainage experts and demographers to talk about the possibility of reverting land to greenspace. People in the flooded neighborhoods would have their chance to share their ideas for improving their communities—as they were encouraged to do by the Lambert planners. This time, though, the philanthropists (several other big foundations would join the UNOP effort) were vowing to include in the conversation the dispossessed who didn’t have the money to participate in a process taking place solely in New Orleans. “We recognized the importance of ensuring that displaced residents had a seat at the table with everyone else,” Rodin said.

People such as Martin Landrieu felt as if they were trapped in a real-life version of
Groundhog Day
, where they’d need to repeat the sequence until they got it exactly right. “This was a time when there’d be all these little restarts in every aspect of your life,” Landrieu said. The insurance company would claim it never received the stack of receipts you sent a month earlier, or “it was the insurance company calling to tell you, ‘Oh, yeah, your adjuster left, we need to assign you to a new person,’ or it was calling the credit-card company for the third time because they still weren’t sending to the right address. You’d keep having to have the same conversation over and over.”

That summer, the team UNOP assigned to help the people of Lakeview develop a plan found Landrieu and the rest of them still meeting on Friday mornings in a borrowed conference room on the second floor of a flooded-out bank. “When UNOP came in and said, ‘Okay, tell us the ten things you like most about your neighborhood and the ten
things you like least,’ I almost threw up,” Landrieu said. Even if Rockefeller was what the city needed, it’s not what Landrieu and his counterparts wanted. “At that point, we had been doing this for going on eight months,” Landrieu said. “What I wanted to do is shoot them the bird and say, ‘Fuck you.’ ” Instead they shared their concerns about doubles in Lakeview and the effect of rentals in their community. “Nearly two years of meetings,” Landrieu said, “and I’m still not sure what they were about.”

THE CROWD WAS SPARSE
for a protest held that spring at an abandoned senior center in the Lower Ninth Ward. Maybe seventy-five people showed up despite a rostrum of speakers that included the City Council president and a state legislator. “It’s not easy but I try my best to make it back for events like these,” said one participant, Ruston Henry, a second-generation pharmacist who served as president of the Lower Ninth Ward Economic Development Association. The storefront his father had opened north of Claiborne Avenue forty-five years earlier had been destroyed like most everything else in that part of the Lower Ninth. Henry was working in the pharmacy department of a Walmart outside Jackson, Mississippi. Before the rally started, he pointed across the street to a shuttered church and a boarded-up elementary school. An old, white Buick LeSabre sat under a crush of rubble. “I already feel like we’re losing the area,” he said. Some were advocating that the Lower Ninth be returned to swampland, but Henry worried about wealthy interests buying up large tracts of land to put up condos, casinos, or something else that no one who lived there wanted. “We keep hearing about these developers coming around who want to take our land because they have all these dreams for our neighborhood,” Henry said. “The American Indians, I know how they feel now.”

Charmaine Marchand spoke that day. So, too, did Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represented the Lower Ninth Ward (and a large stretch of New Orleans East) on the City Council. But the day’s main draw was Oliver Thomas, who had just made headlines with a comment about New Orleans needing doers, not those who are “soap-opera watchers all day.” He expected the criticism that rained down on him for his
comment, he told the crowd, “because that’s what happens whenever you talk about poor people being less dependent and taking care of themselves.” He exhorted the crowd not to wait for government and led them in a chant, “Do it yourself.” Yet months would pass before the first trailers were delivered to the Lower Ninth. By the time they started arriving that summer, Connie Uddo had been living in her home for more than six months. Denise Thornton had been home for nine.

In Lakeview, New Orleans East, and other more prosperous communities, people paid someone thousands of dollars to gut their homes or they did it themselves. For most in the Lower Ninth, hiring someone to do the work wasn’t an option, yet how were they going to spend a few weeks in New Orleans to work on their home? They might be able to cover travel, but where would they stay in town for a few weeks? “None of us had money for hotels with the prices they were charging,” said Charmaine Marchand. “We couldn’t stay with family or friends because their houses were all destroyed.” Despite red-tagged homes in Lakeview and other communities, only in the Lower Ninth Ward were activists standing in front of a bulldozer to stop the city from destroying a home without its owner’s knowledge.

The same kinds of efforts taking place in Lakeview were also taking place in the Lower Ninth. Starting about six months after Katrina, a group of dazed residents started showing up at the Sanchez Community Center on Claiborne, not far from the levee breach. There in a dank, windowless room crawling with mold, they sat on rusty chairs in a part of town still without electricity. They knew that most of New Orleans, if not the entire world, felt their neighborhood should be left for dead, but they did what they could to help each other rebuild. They affixed a map of the Lower Ninth to poster board and had people write their name and number on a small piece of paper. Residents used a green pin if they intended to rebuild, yellow if they had not decided. People started bringing food. The wider world soon found them: Charmaine Marchand, organizers from other communities.