Faster than anyone dared predict only a week ago, New Orleans is emerging from the muck of devastation to announce its grand reopening, featuring the genteel Garden District and, soon after, the bawdy and historic French Quarter.
Signs of civic renewal and commitment are sprouting in this 287-year-old city. The first bars on Bourbon Street are pouring drinks. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is hosting a trickle of commercial flights on its runways instead of elderly patients on its baggage carousels. Business leaders are mapping plans to rebuild the city.
And President Bush unveiled Gulf Coast reconstruction proposals estimated to cost at least $200 billion.
But not far from where Bush late last week declared “this great city will rise again,” the long, hard challenge of reviving New Orleans is embodied in a vast, ruined landscape: neighborhood streets lined with moldering houses, fouled by 5-foot-high floodwaters, where everything is coated in black goo and stinks of raw sewage, noxious chemicals and death.
Depending on where you turn the tap, the quality of drinking water is not assured.
Most of these streets were never on the bus-and-carriage tour route. But they now sit at the center of the debate over how New Orleans will be redefined and who among the evacuated residents–many of them black and poor–will be part of the city’s future.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin boasted that the opening of the Algiers and Uptown neighborhoods this week, and the French Quarter a week later, will clear the way for the return of as many as 180,000 residents.
Concerns about future
Not on Nagin’s list were uninhabitable neighborhoods such as Mid-City, Bywater, Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward, where the vast majority of the city’s nearly half-million people used to live–and where entire blocks of houses are likely to be bulldozed.
Questions abound. How many residents will return, and who will they be? Will the new New Orleans be a Potemkin village, with the tourist areas revived but the lively neighborhoods behind them devoid of the people who actually define the city’s character? In the rush to bring the city back to normal, will impatience undermine the goal of protecting it from future floods? Will the push to quickly lure people back simply reaffirm housing patterns that have created poverty?
“There are a lot of nightmares about what could happen here,” said Tommy Kurtz, senior vice president for economic development at Greater New Orleans Inc., a business group that includes the city’s top CEOs.
“How do you bring people back? Will they be willing to live in a trailer for months and months while their home is being rebuilt?” Kurtz added. “This city cannot come back without the working people. If you do that, you lose the soul of the city, the cultural diversity, the economic diversity.”
The reconstruction and redefining of the Crescent City are unfolding as a story of two New Orleanses: the economic heart of downtown tourism, controlled mostly by white business interests, and the cultural soul of now-crippled neighborhoods, inhabited mostly by blacks. Up to now, the private sector has shaped the early strategy to jump-start civic life.
Bush weighed in with a reconstruction plan that includes a proposed Urban Homesteading Initiative, assisting low-income evacuees to resettle in government-owned properties.
Even if skeptical politicians in Bush’s own party agree to fund such a massive effort, though, it may take months or years, depending on environmental cleanup efforts and other obstacles, for such a program to take root.
In the meantime, evacuees scattered about the country will be waiting for a signal to return, if they choose. Among the many unknowns is how many of the pre-hurricane population of 480,000 will do so.
A poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that less than half of the evacuees now in shelters in Houston, about 360 miles away, say they will go back to their stricken city.
The survey, though, was of a limited population. One member of the survey team said questions were first asked about a week after the Astrodome opened as a shelter, so those with the means to move on already had left.
Even among those who remained late last week, some were eager to go home, including Gary Lewis, 57, a painter who escaped from his apartment in the Uptown neighborhood.
“There’s nothing like home, baby, there’s nothing like home,” Lewis said as he stood in line to get a hot dog outside Houston’s Reliant Arena. “New Orleans is one of God’s blessed cities.”
Nagin predicted last week that within a few months, New Orleans might stabilize with half its former population, with the rest able to return over the longer term as their neighborhoods are rebuilt.
“We’re not sure what kind of New Orleans we will rebuild,” Nagin said. “But we are all focused to make sure that whatever we rebuild, it will be uniquely New Orleans.”
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That is not necessarily reassuring to other black leaders, who already have begun to worry whether the new New Orleans will displace its poorest residents. The fear is that land speculators will buy up destroyed neighborhoods that had been filled with housing projects, rental apartments and quaint but often decrepit shotgun-style houses, only to replace them with more-profitable suburban-style subdivisions.
Alden McDonald Jr., the chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce and one of the city’s most prominent black business leaders, is acutely aware of that danger in a city that, before 80 percent of its area was inundated by floodwaters, was 67 percent African-American, according to the Census Bureau.
“We have to make sure housing is affordable and decent and that it serves poor and middle-income people,” he said. “We have to make sure New Orleans remains a city for everyone.”
McDonald, who lost his house and 10 branches and offices of his company, Liberty Bank & Trust, the third-largest black-owned bank in the nation, will at least have a seat at the decision-making table. He is one of 16 New Orleans business leaders–eight black and eight white –chosen by the mayor last week for a special commission to help oversee the rebuilding process.
Paul Farmer, executive director of the Chicago-based American Planning Association, said it remains to be seen how the city will concentrate investment in the rebuilding effort and whether it will “either discourage or prevent investment in certain areas.”
Farmer warned that rushing to fix New Orleans’ problems with housing and neighborhood development could backfire.
`That’s a big problem’
“Time is the enemy of good decision-making,” he said. “There is this rush to put everything back the way it was, that we’ve got a big problem here and we need a big solution, and that means go find somebody who can deliver 7,000 homes right now. That’s a big problem.”
Leaders must grapple with another huge challenge: Even as they race to repopulate the city and restart its economic engines, they must try to build a gigantic new system of floodwalls, levees and pumps to protect the resurrected city they envision from the next catastrophic storm.
“If you can pump the water fast enough and build the levees high enough, New Orleans can be secured,” said Jeff Anding, director of convention marketing for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. “To attract the kinds of investments we need from those who would want to put new infrastructure into the city, it has to be done.”
For now, though, much of that higher-concept, longer-term economic development is on indefinite hold.
“Just before this disaster happened, we were working on things like attracting venture capital for technology commercialization,” said Kurtz, of the Greater New Orleans group.
“Now we’re trying to figure out where to get trailers to house workers at the Folgers plant so the city can get some coffee flowing.”
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Getting New Orleans back on track
As the floodwaters continue to recede, New Orleans is beginning to show signs of recovery, some sooner than initially anticipated. Sections housing about a third of the city’s population were scheduled to be reopened this week while the downtown and French Quarter–the city’s economic centers–prepare to get back to business.
WATER REMOVAL RATE
Capacity (before flood): 38,495 cubic ft. per second
Current: 6,230 cubic ft. per second
PORT ACTIVITY (main terminal)
Normal: 700 containers unloaded
Wednesday: 150 containers unloaded
COMMERCIAL FLIGHTS
Normal: 174 departures
Tuesday: 3 departures
BRIDGE REPAIR: A Netherlands-based company has started to repair the twin span bridges on Interstate Highway 10 that are the primary access routes to the city.
SEAPORT: Ship traffic resumed Monday. Officials, estimate it will be six months until the port is back to its capacity.
AIRPORT: The city’s airport reopened to passenger traffic Tuesday, offering a tiny fraction of the normal flights. Officials say airline activity will pick up in coming weeks.
WATER REMOVAL: Last week, officials were pumping water out at a rate of 9 billion gallons per day, much less than the rate the pumping system could achieve before the hurricane. Water covers about 40 percent of the city, compared with 80 percent just after Katrina.
RESTAURANTS AND BARS: A handful of New Orleans’ more than 3,000 restaurants and 800 bars have remained open, with others expected to reopen as residents return.
HOTELS: The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and
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Visitors Bureau says that by later this week many hotels should be open, with about 20,000 out of the city’s original 38,000 hotel rooms used to house relief workers.
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: Bus, streetcar and ferry lines
remain out of service.
REOCCUPYING THE CITY: Officials are gradually reopening sections of New Orleans that experienced little or no flooding. The areas are home to about 180,000 of the city’s half-million residents.
FRENCH QUARTER: Scheduled to reopen Sept. 26
Sources: New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, City of New Orleans, Entergy, Port of New Orleans, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tribune and news reports, ESRI, TeleAtlas, GlobeXplorer, Earthsat (1999)
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