Katrina: After the Flood (43 page)

19

DARKNESS REVEALED

The East had few street signs, but Liberty’s headquarters were still easy enough to find: a wounded, six-story glass box missing several windows in a part of town dominated by subdivisions and off-ramp detritus. The hard part was finding a way inside. The front doors were padlocked. One year after Katrina, the only way into the building was the heavy metal door that Russell Labbe had used when there was still ten feet of water.

Inside, even rooms devoid of furniture and carpet still reeked, even months after the storm. The building had three elevators, but they still didn’t work. Every day Alden McDonald, sixty-two years old, and his staff walked five flights of stairs to reach the bank’s executive suite.

It had not been easy since Labbe had phoned McDonald at the start of 2006 to tell him the lights were back on. McDonald loved the idea of his lit-up glass tower as a beacon drawing people back to the East, but that also meant doing without phone and Internet while waiting for BellSouth to finish replacing trunk lines and switching stations destroyed by flooding. “We basically need to rebuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure in the eastern half of the city,” BellSouth’s director of operations said. Not until the second half of March could
McDonald reestablish phone service and the Internet connection that would finally allow him, more than seven months after it had arrived, to connect the bank’s new mainframe computer to the global banking system. Sometime that spring they lost power in the building for a couple of weeks. The salt water had corroded the bank’s underground wiring. “It was horrible,” the seventy-year-old Labbe said. “I’d start early in the morning and work till night, breaking concrete to get at wires. It made me old.” A generator on-site allowed them to at least keep the lights on and computers running.

Liberty had almost no neighbors at the one-year anniversary of Katrina. The power was still shut off intermittently and garbage pickup was erratic. Lunchtime was depressing: you’d brown-bag it, buy from a truck, settle for fast food, or drive fifteen minutes to Tremé for a table at Dooky Chase’s. The bank still had important mail sent to the Southern branch because delivery in Baton Rouge was more reliable. Before the storm the bank had thirty-five thousand customers, but was now down to fewer than twenty-five thousand and maybe as few as twenty thousand.
^I
“I have to get an exact count on that,” McDonald told a visitor that summer, before his voice trailed off. Liberty didn’t require the 150 employees it had on the payroll prior to Katrina, but it needed more than the 90 it had in August 2006. That kept expenses low, bolstering profits, but it also made it harder to generate new business. McDonald wanted to open a fifth branch in New Orleans, but the bank was having trouble finding the tellers, branch assistants, and loan officers needed.

There was good news to report at the one-year anniversary of Katrina. As expected, 2005 proved the most abysmal year in the bank’s history. But McDonald was shocked that their losses weren’t bigger. Pre-Katrina, the bank had been on pace to make around $3 million, but a few weeks after the storm, McDonald was anticipating year-end losses of $10 million or more. Yet Liberty ended up losing a more modest $3.4 million in 2005. The real surprise was 2006. Liberty reported
$2 million in earnings in the first half of a year that would prove its most profitable ever.

“Liberty seems to have done a remarkable job in a trying situation, certainly better than I ever thought possible,” said William Cunningham, CEO of Creative Investment Research, which monitors the financial health of minority-owned financial institutions. “But my concern is with the health of the bank two years, three years out, especially with so many questions around the rebuilding.” McDonald harbored the same worries. He only had to consider his own subdivision. Of 150 families, he knew maybe 10 taking steps to rebuild. He counted himself and Rhesa among the undecided. His best guess was that maybe half the East was returning.

Liberty still had no branches in the East, but McDonald opened what the bank dubbed a “recovery center.” There, a homeowner could arrange financing to finish rebuilding—and also grab one of the Liberty
I
’
M COMING BACK!
lawn signs sprouting around the East. McDonald dialed down the risk by declaring that Liberty would no longer write no-down-payment mortgages, but that also meant the bank would be writing fewer loans. He started talking more about the possibility of doing business in Texas and other places where large concentrations of New Orleans evacuees had relocated. “I’ve got to go to where my customers are,” he said.

THE CITY COUNCIL ENDORSED
the UNOP process that Rockefeller and the other foundations were funding. So, too, did the mayor. That July, a citywide meeting was held for anyone wanting to learn more about UNOP. As if people weren’t confused enough, Paul Lambert—the planner who had been hired by the City Council—took out a full-page ad in the
Times-Picayune
imploring
people not to waste their time talking to anyone from UNOP.

Lambert’s team continued to hold planning sessions around the city. They were in New Orleans East in mid-August, where they wowed a few hundred people showing up at the St. Maria Goretti Church. They showed sketches of the neighborhood populated by people enjoying the new jogging and biking paths that could be built and spoke of the “world-class health care” they could enjoy. They imagined sound barriers along the interstate, and parks where there had been low-rent apartment
buildings because, as one facilitator said, “it’s up to the community to decide where we put the greenspace.” What he and his cohorts failed to tell the standing-room-only crowd, though, is that they were fulfilling a contract that had not been voided just because the City Council had decided to throw in with a different set of planners.

Kathleen Blanco had given everyone hope that February when she announced Road Home—the multibillion pot of money to help flooded homeowners whose insurance companies had left them short. A few weeks later, the
Times-Picayune
published the Web address for applying for Road Home along with a telephone number. From that point on, virtually every article written about the lethargic pace of the New Orleans recovery mentioned Road Home and included an obligatory paragraph about the billions in federal housing aid that would be flowing into New Orleans. But first HUD needed to endorse the state’s plan, and not until June 2006 would the president authorize the money. When in August, six months after first announcing the program, Blanco was on Poydras to announce the opening of the city’s first Road Home office, she blamed delays on “government speed.” The reporters descending on New Orleans around the time of the one-year anniversary were still stressing the potential of Road Home—optimistically imagining the billions in housing dollars that would hit the city that fall.

At least a program was in place to help homeowners. Renters, though they constituted a majority in New Orleans, would be on their own. Rents had spiked 39 percent in the twelve months after Katrina—another hurdle for those of modest means anxious to get home. Most public housing units remained off-limits, and the city’s landlords didn’t seem nearly as susceptible to the pioneer spirit galvanizing homeowners around the city. In communities thick with rental units such as Central City and the Seventh Ward, entire blocks sat untouched, rotting in the heat twelve months after Katrina, making them that much harder to restore. “You drive around and you pretty much see nothing going on. It’s depressing,” said Henry Jones, who was living in a trailer in the East while he and his wife fixed up their home. An estimated sixty-eight thousand rental units were destroyed or heavily damaged by Katrina.

The state was offering no-interest loans to anyone willing to fix up or build rentals in New Orleans—except those taking the money
were permitted to charge market-rate rents. That would do little to help low- and moderate-income residents who wanted to move back to New Orleans.
^II
Those tenants looking for a below-market-rate unit signed up for federally subsidized Section 8 housing and hoped that one day their phone would ring. Early on, Alden McDonald had suggested using federal vouchers to foster homeownership and bring families home. Let a person qualifying for a Section 8 voucher (basically, anyone earning under $10 an hour) pair up with a sibling or a parent or a grown-up child to purchase a two-family home. Then ease the rules so that the Section 8 recipient could use his or her monthly voucher to help cover the mortgage. But like everything else born under the rubric of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, it was ignored.

“I’ll confess to being frustrated,” said Norman Francis, whom Blanco had put in charge of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “Without a plan, I don’t see how we bring our low- and moderate-income renters back.”

TO HER SURPRISE, CASSANDRA WALL
began working on her old house. Eventually, they’d be moving home or selling the place; either way, she figured, it couldn’t hurt to fix it up. Shortly after she started work, though, she discovered the home had been broken into. “They stole every last copper pipe out of there,” she said.

Cassandra was still making regular trips to New Orleans. She visited her mother, who was sick with cancer, and made the long drive when her sisters tried to revive their tradition of Sunday-night dinners. But she also felt the pull of her new life in Baton Rouge. She had found work teaching composition at a local community college and was making progress reviving her tutoring business. Her husband was having a
hard time dealing with a job that meant a demotion in responsibility, and Katrina was taking a toll on Brandon. He was doing well in school, but he was looking at another school year in Baton Rouge, rather than eighth grade back in New Orleans with his friends. “You’re fighting here, you’re fighting there,” Cassandra told her sisters. “You realize you can’t fight everyone and everywhere at once.” That was her way of informing them that work on her old house would cease until further notice.

Tangee was the first of Cassandra’s sisters to move back into her home. She burned through most of her savings, but she was intent on showing the world that the East was coming back. “Our community paid our taxes,” she declared at around the one-year anniversary, with her home around 80 percent rebuilt. “We pumped money into the economy. We deserve the right to return like any other part of New Orleans.” On Saturdays, she ventured farther east to a meeting in the Village de L’Est, a Vietnamese community coming back faster than other subdivisions in the area. “A group of us decided to get behind this push for everyone in the East to pull together, rather than it being a subdivision-by-subdivision thing,” Tangee said. Father Vien The Nguyen hosted the weekly meetings. Petie showed up at these meetings when she could, as did Robyn.

Petie was making progress on her place but at a slower pace than Tangee—room by room, Petie said, “if not one wall at a time.” Whenever she had the money, Petie would head to Lowe’s, where day laborers, almost all of them Latino, lined up each day looking for work. “You go saying you’re looking for people to hang Sheetrock and offer one hundred dollars a day,” she said. “And then if they do a good job, you pay them more and keep them going to the next thing.” One year after Katrina, she figured her home was about 40 percent rebuilt.

Robyn was back in New Orleans, but she hadn’t done any work on her home. She was busy at work and didn’t feel like competing for contractors, plumbers, and electricians. “It was crazy, the prices people were asking,” Robyn said. “I took my time because I could afford to.” Once the lease expired on the condo she had rented in the Warehouse District, she moved back to her mother’s home in Broadmoor. Cassandra’s sister Contesse was still in Baton Rouge. Contesse had gutted her home to preserve her investment, she said, but that was it. “I’m not
making up my mind,” she announced, “until the people in charge make up theirs.”

Tensions formed between the sisters. That was obvious one year after Katrina when the five of them gathered at a crowded Barnes & Noble café in Metairie to talk about the recovery. That week the
Times-Picayune
had run a page-one story declaring that without a major upgrade to the levee system, New Orleans East, sandwiched between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain, with MR. GO acting as an accelerant, would remain vulnerable. The article reinforced for Tangee the desire to fight for the East, but for Cassandra it was another reason to wait until people in Washington had a chance to work things out.

“I’m not coming back until I know we have Category 5 protection,” Cassandra said.

“We need a massive protest in Washington to make sure that happens,” Tangee responded. “It’s our constitutional right to have our government protect us.”

The five of them agreed that life would not be easy for anyone choosing to rebuild. The question was what responsibility they had as de facto spokespeople for the area. “Only the strong will survive,” Petie declared.

“Then why are you encouraging everyone in the East to rebuild?” said Contesse, who made no effort to hide her irritation. She was single and self-employed. She sometimes struggled to make her bills. Even if she had wanted to start rebuilding, she didn’t have the savings to float a six-figure repair bill while waiting on insurance companies and any help the state might provide through Road Home.

“If a community doesn’t come back,” Petie said, “people will condense. They’ll move to an area that’s coming back.” She sounded like Joe Canizaro, suggesting that people pour everything they had into returning—and if it didn’t work out, our apology for having put you through all that trouble.

“It’s dangerous to encourage people to move back someplace where there are no hospitals,” Contesse snapped. “You don’t encourage people to come back when there are no schools or adequate day care.” Pre-storm, Contesse taught an average of thirty students at her seminars on intellectual property. Could she even draw a class of ten if she moved
back to New Orleans right now? “I love my community like everyone else, but it’s not fair what you’re asking of people,” Contesse said.