Katrina: After the Flood (46 page)

They would need all that money and more for what Shea had in mind. A woman she knew had attended a September 11–related event at the Javits Center in New York that had been organized by a group called AmericaSpeaks. Shea’s friend had been impressed by the diversity of the crowd that had arrived at the Javits Center that day and wowed by the technical capabilities of a group that issued every participant an electronic pad for instant voting. “They’re like a production company in the business of putting on these ginormous meetings,” Shea said of AmericaSpeaks. “It’s very therapeutic. The person running the thing cries. There’s praying, there’s music.” But maybe most important, “they’re really good at creating consensus around broad issues.” Shea hired AmericaSpeaks
for what they were calling a Community Congress—the big event held in New Orleans in October 2006 to give ordinary citizens a chance to talk about the city’s future.

Shea was impressed as she watched AmericaSpeaks prepare in the months before the Community Congress. Their people put together a list of FEMA trailer camps in southern Louisiana and sent people to visit each one. They arranged for vans and buses to shuttle those needing transportation. They also contacted people in Houston, Atlanta, and other cities to spread the word.

But the Community Congress would prove a disappointment. They had expected 1,000 people but only 350 showed and half of them were staff. Three-quarters of those in attendance were white, and nearly half had an annual household income above $75,000—hardly the dispossessed population organizers were hoping to hear from. Just their luck,
NPR reporter Martin Kaste was in town for a piece on the city with no plan and captured the disappointment. “We’re like lemmings going off a cliff,” one participant told Kaste for a report that aired on NPR a week later.

VIOLENCE WAS STILL A
constant in a city that had enough problems without people killing one another. An Iraq war veteran living in the French Quarter killed and mutilated his girlfriend and then threw himself off a nearby hotel roof. On Halloween, a gunman walked into a Quarter nightclub and shot five people. Drug-related murders were on the rise and domestic violence spiked, driving up the number of women living on the street. “People don’t realize this isn’t a normal community yet,” New Orleans police chief Warren Riley told
USA Today
. Was it any wonder that a University of New Orleans political scientist found that 32 percent of returnees were considering leaving?

Chief Riley and his top people were still working out of trailers. New Orleans still had no working crime lab. FEMA had filed the requisite damage-assessment reports for the city’s police headquarters and its damaged precinct houses, but that was only the start of a long, drawn-out process. When the money might be pried from the federal treasury so work could begin on essential government buildings was one of many unknowns inside City Hall. A beleaguered police department was also contending with scandal. Six days after Katrina, the police, responding to a call for help on the Danziger Bridge, a small stretch of high ground between Gentilly and New Orleans East, killed two people and shot four others, though civilian witnesses claimed all of the victims were unarmed. So, too, did other officers. One victim was a mentally disabled man shot in the back while trying to run. Seven officers were indicted on charges ranging from obstruction of justice to murder.
^II

The year 2006 ended grimly with the murder of a drummer from the popular Hot 8 Brass Band. (The shooter killed the wrong person.) The new year wasn’t a week old and already the city had recorded eight murders. In a city where the typical murder victim was a young black man living in a high-crime area, the body count included a young Uptown woman found shot dead in her bed and a prominent local filmmaker killed during a home invasion in the Marigny district. Her husband, a doctor, was also shot, while their two-year-old son survived. “Killings Bring the City to Its Bloodied Knees,” cried the
Times-Picayune
on its front page the next day. A crowd of around five thousand showed up at City Hall for an anticrime rally and hurled angry words at both the mayor and Chief Riley. The killings, however, continued. Pre-Katrina, the police would record around a thousand violent crimes each quarter. Fewer than half the city’s population had returned, but there would be more than thirteen hundred violent crimes reported in the first three months of 2007.

“Surge in Homeless Hits New Orleans,” read a
Christian Science Monitor
headline that March. Whereas the city had around six thousand homeless people before Katrina, now an estimated twelve thousand people were sleeping in cars, abandoned motels, or under highway overpasses. Most of the city’s emergency shelters were still closed, while meanwhile a new population was demanding the attention of people such as Martha Kegel, the Stanford Law grad who ran a local advocacy group for the homeless: “people in their late eighties,” Kegel said, “who never in their lives expected to be homeless.”

The housing policies adopted by some of New Orleans’s suburban neighbors didn’t help a city in dire need of more affordable units. St. Bernard Parish, the white-flight suburb just south and east of New Orleans, passed what its sponsor called a “blood-relative ordinance.” In a parish where whites owned 93 percent of the housing stock, the new law
dictated that landlords could rent only to family members.
^III
The parish would pass another law barring the redevelopment of any property with more than four units. The main target of this second ordinance seemed to be the Village Square, a sprawling, hundred-building complex occupied mainly by low-income African-American renters. Officials in Jefferson Parish blocked construction of a two-hundred-unit residential facility for the elderly, and at least one city there placed a moratorium on multifamily units.

Insurance companies were a constant topic of conversation in wounded New Orleans. Those who had splurged on a comprehensive homeowner’s policy learned that
comprehensive
didn’t include floods. Homeowner’s insurance generally covered wind damage, but even a hole in the roof through which rain had fallen might not be enough proof that a house had been damaged by more than floodwaters. People believed that the insurance companies offered a fraction of what they owed and then waited to see who had the will to fight for more.
^IV
The Louisiana Department of Insurance was receiving twenty thousand calls a month. Nearly five thousand people had leveled a formal complaint in 2006. Sixty-six hundred insurance-related lawsuits had been filed in federal district court in New Orleans by the first half of 2007.

Alden McDonald had no argument over his personal insurance coverage. He had received the maximum $250,000 from his flood insurance carrier plus another $75,000 or so to cover his home’s contents, but he had no roof damage and didn’t expect any more money under his homeowner’s policy. But his brother Byron needed to sue his carrier
before he received anything near what he felt was a fair settlement. Flood insurance had paid the full $250,000 on the two-story, $350,000, brick home Byron owned in Gentilly. But the Hanover Insurance Group offered him close to nothing under a $200,000 homeowner’s policy despite the hole in his roof after the wind tore off a ventilator. Hanover claimed Byron owed
them
money given the $1,500 check they mistakenly believed they sent to Byron and his wife to cover their temporary living expenses. A month before they were scheduled to go to trial, Hanover settled for an amount Byron cannot reveal given a binding nondisclosure agreement.

Insurance-industry spokespeople pointed out that carriers had collectively paid out a record $11 billion to homeowners in Louisiana after Katrina. But the $49 billion in profits insurance firms pocketed that year was also an all-time insurance-industry high. The state officials behind the Road Home program were among those convinced insurers were short-changing people. By their calculations, homeowners were paid on average $5,700 less than they were owed—no small matter for a program created to make up the difference between what a property was worth and the actual insurance payment a homeowner received. State officials figured that would add another $900 million to the cost of making people whole under Road Home.

WARD “MACK” MCCLENDON FELT
numb that first year after Katrina—asleep, he said, even with his eyes open, “hoping I’d wake up from a bad dream, except it only kept getting worse.” McClendon had planned on riding out the storm at his daughter’s home in Atlanta, but the traffic was so bad he stayed that Sunday night at a no-name motel in Opelika, Alabama. His daughter was about to give birth to her first child, but he heard about the levee breaches and returned to New Orleans rather than continue on to Atlanta, less than two hours away. “I’m telling you, I wasn’t in my right mind then,” McClendon said. Back in New Orleans, he paid way too much to hole up in a fleabag motel while waiting the two months it would take him even to see his house in the Lower Ninth Ward.

McClendon lived one block from Flood Street in a city where the
Army Corps of Engineers had its main offices on Leake Avenue. “That should’ve told me something right there,” McClendon said. “But like my mama was always telling me, I wasn’t always so good at listening.” He was a squat, dark-skinned black man with Popeye forearms and a fireplug physique. His voice, proper and refined, suggested a thespian past, but his education stopped after high school when he took a job laying cable for the phone company. McClendon was twenty-nine years old when he fell from a ladder and fractured several discs in his back. Permanent disability would pay him two-thirds of his salary for life. He spent most of the next decade bouncing around the country, but returned to the Lower Ninth just before his fortieth birthday. “I realized I needed three things in life,” McClendon said. “Good food. Good people. Good music. And no place I looked at offered as good a combination as New Orleans.”

McClendon ran his own small salvage yard in the years leading up to Katrina. Mostly he spent his time restoring antique cars. He’d buy junkers for a few hundred dollars, if not the price of a tow, and then haunt the antique-car shows in search of parts. “You can make ten times the money you put into them,” McClendon said. “But you drive ’em and think about how much work you put into it and you don’t want to ever let them go.” He was up to fourteen cars at the time of Katrina. The floodwaters destroyed all of them. None of them were insured.

The house he owned on Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth proved a bigger blow. It wasn’t much to look at from the street: a narrow, two-story place with a plain exterior. But McClendon knew he was looking at his dream home the first time he stepped inside. The old house had wood floors, high ceilings, crown moldings, and a pair of tiled fireplaces. With four bedrooms upstairs, it was a lot more house than a single divorcé needed, but he had eight kids, and though all of them were grown, he liked that he could offer them a sanctuary if they ever needed it. He paid $72,000 for this handsome old home only a couple of blocks from the Mississippi. He redid the floors downstairs and restored all the wood molding and baseboards. He installed new cabinets in the kitchen and spent weeks working on the old, wooden banister leading up to the second floor. In July 2005—one month before Katrina—he rounded up several friends to help him move furniture. He had finished work on the first level and was moving everything downstairs to start work on the second.

“Had I reversed it,” McClendon said, “I would have saved just about everything.” Instead five feet of floodwater sat in his home in the weeks after Katrina and he lost everything but a duffel bag of clothes. He had survived, unlike hundreds of his neighbors. But sitting alone in his lousy hotel room, he said, “I really felt like there was a personal vendetta against me.”

McClendon put his name on the waiting list for a FEMA trailer. He jumped when after about six months the agency offered him a trailer in Slidell, more than thirty miles from his home. The first anniversary of Katrina came and passed before FEMA delivered a trailer to his property on Caffin. Home was now a three-hundred-square foot, white rectangle with water that never quite got hot enough, but he was back in the Lower Ninth, gutting his home. It felt like forward motion.

Still, sifting through the remains of his life, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for himself. “What’s it like to lose everything overnight?” he asked. “I can tell you.” In a culture in which our possessions can define us, he continued, he had nothing. Only later, sitting in his bare office in a strange-shaped, multicolored building he dubbed the Lower 9th Ward Village Community Center, lighting up yet another Kool as executive director of the refuge he had created, could McClendon declare, “Katrina is the best thing to ever happen to me.”

PEOPLE WORKING WITH COMMON GROUND,
the volunteer group that Malik Rahim founded in the days after Katrina, posted hand-painted street signs around the community. That way at least they knew where they were when driving around the Lower Ninth. Confrontations over the city’s aggressive demolition plans were now being fought in the courts rather than on people’s front lawns. The Episcopals staked an important flag in the community around a year after Katrina when they sanctioned the Lower Ninth’s first house of worship. The Church of All Souls first met in a parishioner’s garage but soon moved into a building that had been used by a big discount drugstore chain. St. Walgreens, people called it, or the Walgreens church.

Brad Pitt started showing up in the Lower Ninth after Katrina. The star had first fallen in love with New Orleans while there in 1994 to
work on
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
. “Everything was sexy and sultry,” he said. “I’d ride my bike all over the place, amazed by the architecture. I’d return to New Orleans every chance I could.” He was in Calgary shooting a new Jesse James movie when Katrina hit, but a few weeks later he was in New York, attending the first Clinton Global Initiative. That proved all the inspiration this self-described “architecture junkie” needed. Pitt reached out to William McDonough, a leading voice in the sustainability movement, and teamed up with the group Global Green USA, which had already started doing work in the Lower Ninth. “There is a real opportunity here to lead the nation in a direction it needs to be going, and that is building efficiently,” Pitt said at a press conference eleven months after Katrina. He put up $200,000 to fund an international design competition in search of architects that would help build environmentally friendly, storm-safe homes in the Lower Ninth.