Katrina: After the Flood (50 page)

Roughly forty-five thousand families made homeless by Katrina or Rita were still living someplace courtesy of the American taxpayer. Most had found an apartment, but thirteen thousand families were still living in a FEMA camp. The one in Convent, Louisiana (population seven hundred), was called Sugar Hill, a mobile-home park “wedged amid the refineries and cane fields,” according to the
New York Times
’ Shaila Dewan, who traveled there for an article about the dispossessed published two years after the storm.

At Sugar Hill, Dewan found Cindy Cole. Pre-storm, Cole had been paying $275 in the Lower Ninth for a two-bedroom house next to her mother’s and across the street from her aunt’s. Two years after the storm, Cole and her three small kids were living somewhere with no playground and a grocery store that was miles away. Her aunt was also staying there and looked after her kids when she got a job at a Jack in the Box, but neither woman owned a car. After Cole lost her ride to work, she had to quit. Her hometown of New Orleans was desperate for cheap labor, but Cole had no savings and therefore had no way of escaping Sugar Hill. “We in storage,” said Cole’s aunt, Ann Picard, of their bleak life stranded an hour west of New Orleans.

I.
FEMA had proven more flexible in recent years over the spending of its public assistance dollars. If, say, a municipality wanted to merge two firehouses into one, FEMA was open to letting locals do that, but those discussions, Thomas said, should have started a few months after Katrina. “By the time we all got there, a list of hundreds of public assets were already in process to be funded for rebuilding,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t impossible to reverse course on any single project, but doing so would be time-consuming and further delay the money when people were already fed up with waiting. We were playing catch-up from the moment we arrived.”

II.
The 10 percent match would be waived that same year under the new Democrat-controlled Congress, which passed legislation wiping away the obligation; the president then signed it into law.

22

EIGHT FEET ACROSS

Police in New Orleans were quitting at a rate of seventeen per month in 2007. The turnover rate in the DA’s office hovered at around 30 percent a year. In Louisiana, the law dictated that a prosecutor secure an indictment within sixty days of a felony arrest or that person walked. Before Katrina, the DA might lose two hundred suspects a year that way. After Katrina, the DA’s budget had been slashed 20 percent and that number reached one thousand.

Relations had never been good between the police and Eddie Jordan, New Orleans’s first black district attorney. But when his office indicted seven policemen in the Danziger Bridge case, hostilities between the police and the top prosecutors broke out into the open. Claiming his office could not track down a key witness, Jordan released a suspect in the shooting that had left five teens dead. A few days later, the police held a press conference to present the witness that the DA’s office claimed couldn’t be found.

Jordan resigned as DA in the fall 2007, early in his second term, not because of his office’s abysmal conviction rate or the stresses of the job. Long before Katrina, in 2003, Jordan had boldly taken over the DA’s
office after the twenty-nine-year reign of Harry Connick Sr. (yes, father of
that
Harry Connick). Jordan was the US Attorney who took down former Louisiana governor Ed Edwards on racketeering charges and busted a criminal gang thought to be responsible for dozens of murders. Within a few weeks of taking office, he fired forty-three holdovers from Connick’s office, all but one of them white, as the city would learn after the fired attorneys filed a race-discrimination suit. A jury found in their favor and Jordan’s office was facing a fine in excess of $3 million. Jordan appealed the ruling, lost, and resigned two months later, in October 2007.

Bobby Jindal was elected governor that fall. What might have been a close race before Katrina was distorted by a missing sixty thousand black voters in New Orleans—more than Blanco’s margin of victory in 2003. Bigger names on the Democratic side such as John Breaux, the former congressman, bowed out of the race rather than take on a thirty-six-year-old wunderkind. Jindal’s only misstep on a path that had him aiming for the White House seemed the personal essay he wrote as a young associate with McKinsey & Company and debating between acceptances to Harvard Medical School and Yale Law. The piece, published in a small religious journal called the
New Oxford Review
, detailed the high school crush that caused him to convert to Catholicism and the exorcism he said he witnessed in college.

“Very, very conservative,” a political consultant who did work for Jindal said of his former client. “And very, very ambitious.” He could have added tireless, which is what many Louisianans seemed to care about most a couple of years after Katrina. Jindal won with 54 percent of the vote, making him the country’s first Indian-American governor. Celebrations were reported in Jindal’s ancestral home back in India, but not in New Orleans. Still a long way from recovery, the city was looking at four years and probably eight of a governor slashing state funding to fulfill a promise to cut taxes.

That fall saw the revival of the city’s black radio station, WBOK. The station had been another casualty of Katrina until a wealthy benefactor hired longtime journalist Paul Beaulieu as his general manager and revived it. Signs posted around town read
THE WBOK IS BACK AND TALKING BLACK!
The station’s first day on the air was less than two weeks after Jindal’s victory and a few days after Jordan’s resignation. Already
Beaulieu (pronounced Bool-yay), who hosted the afternoon drive-time slot, was talking about what he called “the big takeaway.” Beaulieu, with a voice that sounded as if he gargled with concrete, spoke of the peaceful coexistence that had lasted between black and white for years. Of the city’s business elite, he told listeners, “Their attitude was ‘We’ve got ours, we run downtown and the hotels and the restaurants.’ They were happy to let us have our political piece.” But no longer. “What I see happening here is an attempted takeover.”

There was no shortage of topics to fill the air. “The rebuilding effort has the potential to sustain hundreds of local, black-owned firms for decades to come, some experts predict,” the
Tribune
had written a few months after the storm. Yet two years after Katrina, only a small fraction of disaster dollars seemed to be ending up in the hands of black-owned firms.
^I
Road Home was another regular topic. In Lakeview, people were upset over the long wait for a Road Home check. But in other parts of the city, they were angered as well by how the numbers were calculated. People in New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth would also have to wait, but then the check they received was likely to leave them well short of the cost of rebuilding. The residents of older, lower-income black communities faced another hurdle with the Road Home bureaucracy. Some were living in a home passed down from a grandparent or a favorite aunt. Often no legal trail existed to prove someone owned a home, just his or her word and land records that had washed away with the storm. Road Home had been designed for a middle-class population, not people on the economic fringe.

In the pages of the
Tribune
, Beverly McKenna decried what she called the “built-in bias” of a Road Home program that put more money in the hands of a couple from Lakeview than New Orleans East. “Barriers erected to make it harder for people to get back,” McKenna said.
“People willing to preserve your music and your culture but it’s the rest of you they don’t want.” Shortly after Eddie Jordan stepped down, McKenna put a to-do list on the cover of the
Tribune
. A fat red check mark was next to “Get rid of D.A. Eddie Jordan.” Check marks were next to other items (“Take over public schools”), but empty boxes next to another seven. “Toss out notion of one White and one Black Council At-Large seat,” one of the undone items read. “Demolish public housing,” read another. She would put the same list on the cover six months later, this time with several more items checked off.

FIVE OF THE CITY’S
seven council seats were filled through district elections. The most prized seats were the two at-large seats, chosen through a citywide election. The top vote getter in the at-large contest serves as council president. Theoretically, in a majority black city, both at-large slots could be filled by an African American. But in a compromise reached years earlier, one had been designated the unofficial black at-large seat and the other the unofficial white one.

Oliver Thomas filled the so-called black at-large seat at the time of Katrina. A woman named Jackie Clarkson was the white at-large council member. When Nagin first proposed setting up FEMA trailer sites around the city, Clarkson had led the council opposition against the plan. In the spring of 2006, in the same election that saw Nagin defeat Landrieu, Clarkson lost her seat to Arnie Fielkow, who is also white. Fielkow had worked for the New Orleans Saints but had been fired shortly after Katrina because he wouldn’t quietly support an owner contemplating moving the team to another city. Fielkow bested Thomas’s vote total that election and took over as council president. In that same election, a local white lawyer named Stacy Head ousted a black incumbent in a majority-black district that hadn’t had a Caucasian representative in more than thirty years.
^II

The special election to replace a sentenced Thomas was held that November. “As long as it was a black majority, it was, ‘Let’s share power, there’ll be one black at-large seat, one white,’ ” Beverly McKenna said. One of the two Cynthias, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represented the Lower Ninth and parts of New Orleans East, announced that she was running for the open seat. So did Jackie Clarkson, who saw in Thomas’s resignation a chance to rejoin the council. Black voter turnout was about half what it had been in the 2006 election. Clarkson defeated Willard-Lewis by fewer than three thousand votes. For the first time in more than twenty years, the city now had a majority-white City Council.

The public housing fight ended shortly after the Willard-Lewis defeat. Protesters descended on City Hall just before Christmas 2007 to watch the City Council weigh in on the federal government’s decision to tear down the Big Four projects and replace them with mixed-income housing. (Nagin had already signed off on the deal.) When the seats in the council chamber filled, the police barred more people from getting inside. Demonstrators tried pushing through an iron gate, and the police responded with pepper spray and Tasers. Inside the chambers, scuffles broke out between police and some of the more aggressive protesters, with more clashes in the hallway. More than a dozen people were arrested.

Inside the chambers, the council unanimously voted to raze all four developments. After the vote, Stacy Head blew kisses to angry protesters still milling about the chamber. “A mistake,” Head later admitted.

WHAT WERE FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS
to do when they needed to house so many people all at once? The majority of the 145,000 emergency units FEMA ordered just after Katrina weren’t the larger mobile homes they would normally use after a disaster but less sturdy structures the agency called travel trailers. “Quality suffered dramatically because of the drive and pressure to put these trailers out,” Terry Sloan, a floor supervisor with one FEMA-selected manufacturer, Gulf Stream Coach, told CBS News nearly two years after Katrina. Cheaper wood products were used in these no-frills metal boxes, the ventilation was poor, and the floors and the cabinets were treated with formaldehyde, which let off toxic fumes in hot, humid conditions. Formaldehyde is a known
carcinogen that aggravates respiratory ailments, and some studies have linked it to leukemia.

Open the windows, FEMA recommended to those living in one of its travel trailers. At that point, there were more than twenty thousand FEMA trailers in New Orleans. Use the air-conditioning. FEMA assured people that the trailers posed no serious health risk—at least until February 2008, when the agency announced that tests showed trailers in the Gulf Coast emitting as much as five times the formaldehyde levels that the Centers for Disease Control deemed safe. Two and a half years after Katrina, FEMA declared the units unsuitable as long-term housing. The agency swapped in replacement units and spent $10 million a month on storage and maintenance until the bosses in Washington could decide what to do with the tainted trailers.

BY 2007, BRAD PITT
was spending a lot of time in the Lower Ninth. He and Angelina Jolie had bought a home in the Quarter at the start of the year, paying $3.5 million for a six-bedroom, five-bath property that included a private courtyard and a separate, two-story guesthouse. Then Pitt went about the hard work of winning community support for the houses he had in mind. The famous actor was there in a church rec room when people gathered to talk about the community’s future, sitting in a wobbly metal chair and drinking the same bad coffee as everyone else. Locals were happy to embrace Pitt—as long as he ceded to their demand that he build not in the Holy Cross community, as originally planned, but in that part of the Lower Ninth closest to the levee breach, where there were few houses still standing. “People there were so worried about condos or casinos or Donald Trump coming in even though it wasn’t clear that Donald Trump or anyone else wanted them, they scared away developers,” said the head of a nonprofit that looked at constructing houses in the Lower Ninth. “Brad Pitt was pretty much the only person who could do anything significant there. He was so rich and so good looking and determined that they weren’t able to drive him away.”

At that year’s Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Pitt announced his intention to build at least 150 storm-safe, environmentally correct homes in the hardest-hit portion of the Lower Ninth Ward.
Pitt wrote a check for $5 million to an organization he called Make It Right, as did Steve Bing, a film producer who had reportedly inherited $600 million from a grandfather who had made his fortune in real estate. Pitt asked his well-heeled audience to match the $10 million that he and Bing had committed.