Katrina: After the Flood (62 page)

“The kind of change that would have taken us thirty or forty years,” Landrieu said, “took seven or eight.”

The
Times-Picayune
ran a feature in 2011 about this community that “stands out for the economic rebirth it is experiencing even as a national recession has stymied growth.” Six years after Katrina, it seemed a retail outlet would have a hard time even finding an empty storefront. “Commercial space is getting to its saturation point,” a dry cleaner told the
paper. Where Alden McDonald and others were constantly in touch with big-name retailers in the hopes of drawing them to the eastern half of the city, Robert Lupo, Lakeview’s top commercial landlord, was swatting them away. “I can’t tell you how many calls I get from the national chains,” Lupo said. But he had to tell them he had no vacancies. “All of my businesses are happy,” he said. “People here have all this disposable income.” Lakeview had fewer homes and more double lots after Katrina, but by 2013 it had more people because of all the families that had moved there.

“The big fights in Lakeview right now are people building multimillion-dollar mansions,” Freddy Yoder said. “Housing prices are going up astronomically.”

The range of restaurants struck Cassandra Wall when one day she drove down Harrison Avenue, Lakeview’s main commercial strip. She saw more upscale eateries in a few blocks than in all of New Orleans East. Driving the side streets made her more depressed. “Compare Lakeview to the East,” Cassandra said. “It makes no sense.” Two middle-class, professional-class communities, yet one was thriving, and the other was a place she couldn’t live. “You tell me the difference between the two communities,” she requested, then supplied the answer. “Race. Of course.”

Jeb Bruneau, the president of Lakeview Civic at the time of Katrina, spoke of the grit among his neighbors when asked why Lakeview and not New Orleans East. “We didn’t wait for government but decided to do for ourselves,” Bruneau said. Connie Uddo, despite the racial bias she recognized in the Road Home program, agreed: “People want to say people here had more money. But rich or poor, black or white, if you were wiped out, you were wiped out. The difference is we got organized faster. We realized early on that government wasn’t going to be there, so we didn’t wait.”

Martin Landrieu wasn’t sure what the explanation was, but Jeff Hebert, the man his brother the mayor had put in charge of blight, said he’s puzzled over the question of Lakeview versus New Orleans East for years. Lakeview was on the right side of nationwide trends (the revival of communities closer to the core city, the community feel of its commercial strip), Hebert pointed out, while New Orleans East was on the wrong side (suburban sprawl, strip malls, office parks off the interstate). The compact size of Lakeview compared to New Orleans East was another advantage.

Yet none of those, Hebert said, offered anywhere close to an adequate explanation for what he saw going on in the two neighborhoods. “I look at the data out in the East. The high homeownership. The income numbers. The high levels of disposable income. And the answer I keep coming back to is race.”

CONNIE UDDO WAS STILL
working in Gentilly eight years after the storm. She thought about shutting down her organization, but she reminded herself of how much happier she was after Katrina than she was before. “I kind of like this Connie Uddo a lot more than the other one,” she said.

Uddo was now running two nonprofits: the Homecoming Center in Gentilly and also a group called Hike for KaTREEna. The latter had been founded when a lifelong New Orleanian named Monique Pilié quit her job at Federal Express six months after Katrina and pledged to plant a tree for every mile of the Appalachian Trail that she walked. Uddo, who had started working with Pilié around a year after Katrina, agreed to take over after Pilié moved from the area. Under Uddo, the group planted its twenty-five thousandth tree in Jackson Square in mid-2014.

Money was a constant worry. The Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana shut down its office of disaster recovery around the fifth anniversary of Katrina, so from 2011 on, Uddo has been on her own. Her survival has come largely courtesy of a wealthy benefactor whose parents had attended St. Paul, the church in Lakeview where the Homecoming Center started. Contributions came as well from Drew Brees’s foundation, and she got a $40,000 check when she was featured in a New Orleans–based episode of ABC’s
Secret Millionaire
. But even these “gifts from my angels,” as Uddo described them, wouldn’t prove enough.

“You talk to potential funders and it’s like, ‘We’ve moved on,’ ” Uddo said. “But come to Gentilly, go to the Lower Ninth Ward or New Orleans East, and you’ll see we haven’t recovered.”

AT LEAST MACK MCCLENDON
had the Lower 9th Ward Village. That provided some solace when, a few weeks before the eighth anniversary
of Katrina, McClendon received a legal notice telling him he had lost his home through foreclosure. “I could be mad at myself for letting it happen, but I’m not,” he said. He knew if not for the Village, he would have moved back into his home on Caffin Avenue. “But once you know what you’re born to do, you get up every day and do it.” He had met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus who had stopped by the Village on a fact-finding tour of New Orleans. He had given a place to stay to groups representing more than a hundred colleges and ultimately housed somewhere around twenty thousand people. How could he have any regrets?

“My mom always used to say, ‘You’ve got to find your purpose in life.’ And I always thought, What’s she talking about? Now I know. As much as I loved that house, it was still just a thing.” To keep things in perspective, he thought of his daughter’s death around seven years after Katrina. A bad fall when she was in her third trimester sent her to the hospital. The baby lived, but the doctors couldn’t stop his daughter’s cranial bleeding. “She was my baby girl, just twenty-one years old,” he said.

Around the time of his daughter’s death, McClendon put his monthly town hall meetings on indefinite hold. “I stopped because it’s one thing to agree on what the problems are, but what’s the point when nothing changed?” To get to a Village meeting, residents would drive the same rutted, fractured roads pocked by crater-size hollows that made the word
pothole
seem inadequate. They’d pass the skeletal remains of the businesses still shut down years after Katrina and the jungles of weeds growing where homes used to be.

McClendon had mixed feelings about Mitch Landrieu. The mayor at least showed that he cared about the community in ways that his predecessor had never bothered. “The Lower Ninth Ward,” the mayor had vowed at a groundbreaking for the high school the community was finally getting, “is going to become the symbol for how America can find her greatness again.” Yet McClendon was also cynical about the money the city spent on the
BREATHE LIFE
.
BREATHE LOWER NINE
. banners that lined a dozen blocks of St. Claude and Claiborne, the two main commercial strips in the Lower Ninth. “You’ll see Landrieu when you’ve got the cameras around,” McClendon said. Landrieu was there when FEMA broke
ground on a new community center on Claiborne (approved the year before he took office), and he was there holding a ceremonial shovel when they broke ground on a new FEMA-funded fire station one block away.

Before Katrina, McClendon figured that maybe ten nonprofits were operating in the Lower Ninth Ward, “and I guarantee you they didn’t have a million-dollar budget between them.” After Katrina, he counted fifty-three. “At least three or four of these post-Katrina nonprofits went through a million dollars.” He had raised all of a couple of hundred thousand dollars over the years, yet managed to house and feed tens of thousands of volunteers.

“Something went wrong when so many millions were spent and a lot of my community still looks like it did three months after Katrina.” It seemed to McClendon that enough money had been spent “to build this community four times over.”

McClendon never took foundation money, unlike so many others in the Lower Ninth. “I’m the type who would have driven a funder crazy,” McClendon said. “If I had the money in hand and saw someone in need, I wouldn’t care what that money was designated for, I’d help that person.” Instead McClendon made a different kind of mistake when in 2012—seven years after Katrina and nearly five years after he first opened his doors—he agreed to turn the back portion of his center into a skateboard park with money from a local rapper named Lil Wayne, the philanthropic arm of the soda maker Mountain Dew, and Make It Right. McClendon was savvy enough to get his funders to cover the cost of his liability insurance, but the contract he signed meant he was responsible when a building inspector told him the building’s electrical system needed a major overhaul to bring it up to code. Seven and a half years after Katrina, the doors to the center were locked.

McClendon used Facebook and YouTube to appeal for donations. “I’m amazed and humbled by the number of people who wanted this place open as bad as me,” he said when several months later he was able to reopen. Yet several months after that, he was begging for money again on an East Coast fund-raising trip that had him visiting seven states in six days. He spoke at a church in Atlanta and a synagogue in the Bronx, and visited several colleges, but raised barely $10,000. His next step was
a Kickstarter campaign that would fall more than $40,000 short of the $75,000 he had been seeking. “I’ve spent my life savings to get to this point,” he said. “I just don’t have any more to give.”

The occasional splashy effort to help the Lower Ninth was still made. In 2013, the year the Super Bowl returned to New Orleans, a group of large homebuilders and the NFL Players Association announced Touchdown for Homes with the idea of building dozens of homes at a barren edge of the Lower Ninth. They paid for three and stopped when they were able to sell only one to a qualified buyer. The streets were in terrible shape, the listing agent told a
Times-Picayune
reporter one year after the Super Bowl. The adjoining lots were choked with weeds, and there were no stores and no public transportation. “It shouldn’t be like that eight years after the storm,” she said.

Brad Pitt and Make It Right were still building homes in their small sliver of the Lower Ninth Ward. Fund-raising was an issue for many Katrina-inspired organizations, but not Make It Right. The group raised $5 million at the 2012 New Orleans fund-raiser Ellen DeGeneres hosted. A year later, Chris Rock was the MC and Bruno Mars was the featured entertainment. The organization raised another $4 million. The problem was scale. The Lower Ninth had eight thousand homes before Katrina. Eight years later, Make It Right had built ninety homes, and a group called Lowernine.org had done maybe seventy. Common Ground had done ten.

Nearly a decade after Katrina, it was still possible to drive several blocks in the Lower Ninth without seeing a single occupied home. Data from the US Postal Service showed that of the mailing addresses in the Lower Ninth before Katrina, only 32 percent were now occupied. At that rate of reoccupation, it wouldn’t be until around 2040 that the area recovered its population.

Epilogue

Ray Nagin was thicker around the middle. Gray flecked his mustache. A spell of gout had given him a pronounced limp. In January 2014, nearly four years after he had left office, Nagin was again in New Orleans, to stand trial in a federal courtroom. New Orleans, now a few years shy of its three hundredth birthday, had long been known as a city on the take. Yet Ray Nagin the reformer—the outsider who vowed to clean up City Hall—was the first mayor in its history to be indicted on crimes committed while in office.

There might even have been a time when New Orleans would have relished the idea of Nagin on the witness stand, explaining his lackadaisical manner or his inability to act more decisively when so many were looking to City Hall for leadership. But the charges against him, while serious, wouldn’t force him to explain his failings as mayor. Instead, this man about whom people had said at least he was honest was defending himself against claims that he used his position as mayor to enrich himself.

Federal prosecutors had assembled a strong case—so seemingly airtight that the legal experts trotted out by the media all seemed to assume the former mayor would accept the lighter sentence the government was offering him in exchange for a guilty plea. One by one, others indicted by the US Attorney’s office in New Orleans had agreed
to testify against the mayor in return for leniency. Those included not only Greg Meffert, the former chief technology officer and close Nagin confidant who had pled guilty to taking more than $600,000 in kickbacks,
^I
but also several executives who had done business with the city. One, Rodney Williams, the owner of Three Fold Consultants, claimed his firm had had no success securing city business until he and his partners invested $60,000 in Stone Age, the countertop-installation business Nagin owned with his two sons. After that, they secured nearly two dozen city contracts worth $3 million. Williams pled guilty to bribery in 2012. Frank Fradella, the former CEO of Home Solutions of America, told a similar story. Eager to capitalize on the billions in recovery dollars being spent in New Orleans, Fradella, who’d pled guilty to bribery charges in 2013, invested $50,000 in Stone Age, sent the company two truckloads of free granite, and picked up the tab for the private plane that flew Nagin, Meffert, and others to a Saints play-off game in Chicago in 2007. Home Solutions of America received $4 million in contracts for post-Katrina repair work.
^II

If found guilty, Nagin was looking at the possibility of twenty or more years in jail, but the former mayor denied he had done anything wrong. “I really think he believed he could Ray-Ray his way out of a jail sentence,” Ron Forman said.

The morning Nagin was slated to testify, he arrived at court looking carefree, carrying a take-out cup of coffee. He joked with people he knew in the hallway and winked at others. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer walked him through his story, and Nagin, looking relaxed, spoke to the jury. On the witness stand, he was again the affable elected official boasting of all he had done to help the citizens of New Orleans in a crisis. He assured the jury that the safeguards he had put in place meant that not even he, as the city’s chief executive, could show favoritism to any contractor. He made jokes and maintained his breezy attitude even after the prosecutor began his cross-examination. Nagin’s lawyer complained that Assistant US Attorney Matthew Coman was crowding his client,
but Nagin said he didn’t mind. He invited his adversary to get as close as he’d like. “I can deal with it,” the former mayor said. “We’re friends.”