Katrina: After the Flood (34 page)

A homeowner had to do more than show up. For many the sticking point would be the number grade the city had already slapped on tens of thousands of homes across the flood zone. The grade had been determined in a fast and dirty process based on the elevation of the floodwaters in a community, the number of feet the first floor sat above the ground, and whether a home had a second floor. The scores had a ridiculous specificity—a piece of paper would declare a home 53.14 percent
damaged—though these were at best a good guess. The expertise of the assessors was also questionable. To help it rate each house, the city had hired the Shaw Group, one of the big multinationals FEMA was using to oversee the cleanup (the federal government also used them to do construction in Iraq). The Shaw Group turned it over to subcontractors who, the
Times-Picayune
revealed, hired a pet groomer and a pizza deliveryman as inspectors.

Yet the number mattered. A number below 50 percent meant that, in the eyes of the government, you were renovating your house, not rebuilding it. Even if the federal government declared that homeowners needed to raise their homes to qualify for flood insurance, anyone with a number below 50 percent was grandfathered in. Meffert’s problem was that his inspectors had saddled the majority of homeowners with a damage assessment above 50. The city would issue a permit to those with a score above 50 if they presented a plan for raising their home—which could cost tens of thousands of dollars, or as much as $100,000 if a home needed to be lifted above the cement slabs common especially in New Orleans East.
^II
So Meffert created a quick appeals process that he programmed into the city’s kiosks.

A new number below 50 percent wasn’t automatic. Those with a damage assessment in the high 50s were treated differently from those clutching a paper showing a number in the low 50s to mid-50s. People had to put up some kind of argument to challenge the original assessment. Yet almost 90 percent of those asking for a number below 50 percent received one. By early February, the city was issuing as many as five hundred rehab permits a day.

The
Times-Picayune
had already published a long story on what was going on when the tale of the shrinking damage assessments made page one of the
New York Times
. Within forty-eight hours a quartet of unhappy FEMA officials stormed Greg Meffert’s office, threatening him with legal action. “They’re in my office yelling about how if I don’t cease and desist, they’re going to stop reimbursing homeowners and stop
reimbursing the city,” Meffert said. But he worked for Nagin, not for FEMA, “and I had the mayor and others telling me, ‘You must do this.’ ” The city’s permits office would continue revising downward people’s damage assessments.
^III
“That’s why Ray Nagin loved Greg,” Sally Forman said. “He knew he could give something to Greg and Greg would make it happen.”

Those committed to the long-term viability of the country’s federal flood-insurance program were not amused. The US taxpayer pays for the heavily subsidized flood insurance program, and in return municipalities must enforce the government’s guidelines. “If New Orleans is phonying the damage reports so as to allow inadequate construction,” said a former flood-insurance director, “they ought to get thrown out of the program.” Said another, “You can’t destroy the flood program to achieve a short-term goal.” But for Meffert, it underscored the extraordinary moment they were living through, when putting his thumb on the scale could have this profound an impact. “That was really the tipping point,” Meffert said. “We were rebuilding the whole city no matter what anyone else decided.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE SHERATON
meeting, Nagin was in Washington testifying before Congress. The mayor used that moment in the national spotlight to plead for help. His city was broke, he said, and people needed trailers. More than twenty-one thousand names were on a waiting list, but five months after Katrina, FEMA had delivered only thirteen hundred trailers. Meanwhile, he watched as the federal government allowed its contractors to fritter away millions. His people did some calculations, he said. FEMA was paying $43 a cubic yard to haul away debris. But FEMA subcontracted to a subcontractor to a third subcontractor, who hired the people to do the work for $7 a cubic yard.

“I have been put in a position to fly back and forth between Baton Rouge and Washington, DC, to beg and grovel for money, and I don’t appreciate it,” Nagin said. “I implore you. I beg you. I’m getting on my knees, I’m puckering up. Help us. Help us today.” He was back two weeks later to plead with the White House. He asked them for between $10 billion and $15 billion to help him rebuild New Orleans. You’re asking for way too much money, they told him.

The news wasn’t all bad. Before the end of 2005, Congress had approved $11.5 billion in block grants to help storm-ravaged areas, a measure the president signed. But Louisiana received barely half that money, though its people suffered three-quarters of the damage. The city’s best hope was still the Baker bill. Let people complain that the government would be reimbursing at 60 percent of a property’s pre-Katrina value, not 100 percent, but at least Baker’s proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation put the federal government on the hook for tens of billions of dollars. And it wasn’t as if there were many viable alternatives in a Washington where Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. Even Baker himself, a free-market conservative from the Baton Rouge suburbs, couldn’t believe he was championing a measure that would make the federal government, at least temporarily, the largest landowner in New Orleans.

At first, the White House had flinched at this idea of a giant buyout bill with an open-ended price tag. In response, Baker added cost controls and, shortly into the new year, declared the odds better than even that it would pass. Yet the price tag turned out to be only one concern. The president had run on the idea of shrinking government, yet Baker’s plan called for its expansion. It didn’t sit well with some that those who’d bought flood insurance all those years would be treated the same as people who’d failed to do so. And then the government would be getting into the real estate business—a realm that Gulf Coast recovery czar Donald Powell thought better left to the free market. By the end of January, the Baker bill was obviously dead.

The governor was in Washington for the State of the Union address at the invitation of the White House. “I went hoping the president would share with us what his plan was for Louisiana,” Blanco said. Instead she heard a few lines about all the country had already done for the people of
the Gulf Coast before receiving a televised presidential kiss on the cheek afterward. “It’s time to play hardball, as I believe that’s the only game Washington understands,” Blanco declared one week later in a speech before the state legislature. The next day, she threatened to block oil and gas leases worth hundreds of millions to the federal treasury unless the state received its “fair share” of the revenues.

The threat worked. It helped that the state and New Orleans had a good ally in Donald Powell. Powell, a working-class kid from Amarillo, Texas, listened more than he spoke in his first month as the region’s liaison to the White House. He met with top decision makers, but he also put on jeans and boots and talked to people he met while walking different parts of the city. “I went with no preconceived thoughts,” Powell said. “And I realized that while Mississippi was an act of God, Louisiana was an act of God and man.” On the sly, Powell was also meeting with Sean Reilly of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Together, the two of them had hatched a plan that would help make drowned-out Louisiana homeowners whole. Road Home, the governor eventually dubbed it. Under Road Home, every homeowner would receive up to $150,000 in compensation based on the pre-Katrina value of the home minus whatever insurance payments were received. (A person owning a $250,000 home who received $150,000 in insurance payments would, for example, receive a check for $100,000.)

One week after Blanco’s oil-lease threat, Powell summoned Blanco and Nagin to Washington for a hastily arranged press conference. There he announced that the president would seek $4.2 billion in compensation for Louisiana homeowners—on top of the state’s share of the $11.5 billion in block grants Congress had appropriated at the end of 2005. Blanco used the bulk of that money—$7.5 billion—to fund Road Home.

Twice Blanco had stood up to the president of the United States—and won. Despite pushback from the legislature’s black caucus, she had acted decisively when she slashed nearly half a billion dollars from the state budget two months after Katrina; she had engineered a state takeover of New Orleans’s failing schools. Yet the soft-spoken, sixty-two-year-old Blanco didn’t demand the spotlight like a lot of politicians. She was who she was—a matronly looking grandmother and earnest
public servant who would never act like the former mayor of New York after September 11. “I’m not a guy,” she told the
New York Times
’ James Dao that winter. “I can’t be Rudy, whatever that is.” Instead of praise for strong leadership, New Orleans talk-radio hosts mocked her as weepy and in over her head. Drivers applied
DON
’
T BLAME ME
,
I VOTED FOR JINDAL
bumper stickers to their cars.

When announcing the launch of Road Home in March, Blanco called it “our ticket to rebuild, recover, and resume our productive place in our nation’s economy.” The ads the state commissioned to advertise the program called it “Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s Road Home.” People around the governor imagined putting all those five- and six-figure checks in the hands of Louisiana voters. To their mind, Road Home would cinch her reelection, but Blanco herself was dubious: “I told my staff, I said, ‘This sounds like a politician’s dream, to hand out cash. Federal money.’ But I told them, ‘It’s going to be miserable. Because there are people who are going to think it wasn’t fairly done. No matter how fairly we structure it.’ ”

I.
But not Lakeview, given its proximity to City Park and other parklands there.

II.
Those with an assessment above 50 percent qualified for up to $30,000 in federal grants to underwrite the cost of raising a home.

III.
FEMA had its rigid ways, but Meffert was a computer geek before he was a top city official. “We took their formula and burned it into our kiosks,” Meffert said. FEMA carried through on its threat of an audit, but the city had the documentation they needed under FEMA guidelines to modify a number. The city passed its inspection without any problem.

16

LIMBO

Christmas in 2005 for the McDonalds had been low-key. The children flew to Baton Rouge, rather than New Orleans, the family’s home base for the foreseeable future. Christmas was more somber than in years past, but the holiday also took on larger meaning. They had all survived Katrina. “We had a lot to be thankful for,” McDonald said. The kids joked that for once it was easy to pick out gifts for their parents, who pretty much needed everything.

The McDonalds tried not to think about all they had lost in the flooding, but with everyone taking snapshots, it was hard not to brood over the missing photographs and memorabilia. They’d stored most of their pictures upstairs, but their favorites were in scrapbooks on the ground floor, destroyed with everything else. McDonald had boxes of newspaper clippings and photos, along with other keepsakes. He kept the boxes in a nearby storage facility that also flooded.

They tried not to think about their house in New Orleans. McDonald’s seat on the mayor’s panel only made him more aware how uncertain the future was for communities such as his. Yet his insurance company was giving him until the middle of January to send them an itemized list
of his house’s contents. “They’re asking me to write down everything I had in the house and how much I paid for it,” McDonald said. That’s how he spent his free time during the holiday break.

McDonald had agreed to serve on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission thinking that he would help prevent the city from devising a plan that treated the hardworking poor different from others. Yet he couldn’t play hero when his fellow commissioners barely even mentioned the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. Instead McDonald focused on smaller but critical issues such as the disconnect between the pre-Katrina price of a person’s home and the post-Katrina cost to make it habitable. By McDonald’s calculations, a modest, twelve-hundred-square-foot home in the Lower Ninth Ward was worth maybe $70,000 at the time of the storm. The same home in the Seventh Ward, where he grew up, might be worth $90,000. Yet the price tag for restoring either home would exceed $100,000. The spread in middle-class Gentilly was disturbing, too. There, a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot home worth maybe $200,000 before Katrina would cost roughly $250,000 to fix up. A lot of his neighbors in New Orleans East would be looking at the same problem. An estimated two-thirds of the damaged homes in New Orleans were valued at less than $125,000, but it would take a lot more than that for most to rebuild. “Some of us knew if we used pre-Katrina assessments for compensating people,” McDonald said—as the governor was proposing to do under Road Home—“nobody in the black community was coming out anywhere near whole.”

His neighbors may have resented members of the ULI as outsiders, but McDonald saw them as a talented team of housing experts and financial wizards who could help him think through his ideas. For most of the week the ULI was in town, McDonald described himself as “holed up in a hotel room with all these brilliant minds,” wrestling over a plan that would let people rebuild regardless of what an assessor or an insurance company had said their home was worth before the storm. The blueprint they concocted after three days and nights sought to reshape New Orleans without needing to impose a ban on anyone.