Katrina: After the Flood (47 page)

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School sat derelict on Claiborne Avenue, a half dozen blocks from the levee breach. The school had been deluged with so much water that dead fish were found on the second floor. King lost ten students in the flooding and twenty of its parents. A family of four lived a few blocks from the school, two honors students and parents active in the PTA. All four perished that day.

King Elementary was relatively new in the Lower Ninth—barely a decade old at the time of Katrina—yet it was beloved by parents. Even as 96 percent of its students qualified for a subsidized or free lunch, its kids scored well on standardized tests. A big reason for their success was Doris Hicks, a commanding black woman who had grown up in the neighborhood. Hicks had been the principal of King since the day it opened its doors.

Hicks was in Dallas after the storm. Her staff was scattered everywhere. They had been fired en masse after Katrina, but less than two months after the flood, a group of them started to meet. Hicks flew to New Orleans from Dallas once a month. A third-grade teacher named James Mack drove from Cincinnati. As a group, they were generally hostile to charter schools; before the storm, Hicks herself had declared them “the demise of public education.” But their priority was reopening their school, and the new state-created Recovery School District made plain they looked more favorably on those claiming the charter banner. So the
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology was born. Hicks signed up 95 percent of her old staff and put Hilda Young in charge of the board of directors they formed. With more than thirty years with the Orleans Parish school district, Young had worked both as a principal and in the district’s central office. Her job was to secure them the state certification they would need before they could open their doors. “The only school approved for a charter at the time without the help of an outside management group or nonprofit organization,” wrote
Education Week
’s Lesli Maxwell. King received its certification in March 2006.

They had a building: their old elementary school on Claiborne. The question was what shape it was in. Not trusting the new Recovery School District to tell them, Hicks called someone she knew at the Washington Group, an engineering firm in Denver that did work in New Orleans and had established a relationship with King Elementary. “They send in a team of people, and a week and a half later, I have this detailed report,” Hicks said. The building needed a lot of work, but the firm declared it structurally sound and worth saving. It didn’t matter. The people who ran the Recovery School District deemed the building a hazard and ordered it razed. “Their attitude was ‘The mayor is going to greenspace the neighborhood anyway,’ ” Hilda Young said. “That’s when we realized they didn’t want us to open.” If they were going to save their school, they were going to have to do it themselves.

Two policemen were standing in front of the school on a March morning seven months after Katrina. That’s how Hicks knew someone had tipped the district office off about their plans. A padlock was also on the school door. But Hicks, who stood more than six feet tall, wasn’t backing down. She had her engineer’s report and the support of Marlin Gusman, the parish’s sheriff. Besides, she had lined up around 250 volunteers, most of them from Common Ground, and they had a job to do. “We just cut those big padlocks off all the doors,” Hicks said. “And everybody got to work.” The police would kick them out several times during the four days it took to gut the school, but the cleanup crews would simply wait an hour or two before sneaking back so they could continue their work.

The parents of nearly a thousand kids signed up to attend King in the fall of 2006. The old building on Claiborne wouldn’t be ready for the
new school year, but the district promised them a middle school in the Upper Ninth that had been shuttered even before the storm. The building would be ready by mid-August, district officials promised, which is when Hicks wanted to start classes. Closer to the date, the district told Hicks they would need to wait until September 7. Even then Hicks found a school with moldy walls and peeling paint. “The rodents were probably saying, ‘You moving into our school?’ ” Hicks said. “They were running around like they owned the place.”

King held its first day of classes on the school’s front steps. “We broke kids into sections: kindergarten, first graders,” Hicks said. “Teachers had lessons, gave homework. Hot breakfast every day, hot lunch. I wanted the world to see. We’re ready to educate our children of color. But we seemed to be the only ones who cared about really doing that.” A few days later, the district found them an alternative building—an elementary school Uptown that had suffered only modest roof damage, but in a majority-white neighborhood.

“We were very grateful,” Hicks said. “We put letters in the mailboxes of all our neighbors, introducing ourselves and saying thank you for your hospitality. Everyone was very, very nice.” The best news from her perspective was that the district now had ample reason to find King a more permanent home in what one school official delicately called a “more demographically suitable neighborhood.” Education officials operating out of Baton Rouge put King on the priority list it shared with the Corps. Hicks and her people wouldn’t spend even a full year Uptown before the district delivered them the keys to the old place on Claiborne, now painted yellow with purple trim. It looked even better than it did before the storm.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER
she started working with Will Hood, Connie Uddo asked him to compare Lakeview to Iraq. She wanted to hear about people worse off than they were. Hood laughed and said there was no comparison. “You look so much worse,” he said.

“Worse?”
a startled Uddo asked.

“Connie, Iraq is a few bombed-out buildings. When we blow up a bridge in Iraq, we fix it. And guess what? I can skype from Iraq. Here you can’t even get a freakin’ phone line.” That night she shared her
exchange with Hood with her husband. She had conjured up the worst war zone her mind could imagine, but Mark told her of course Lakeview looked more battered than Fallujah or Tikrit. “I remember feeling sick to my stomach,” she said. Nothing had changed, but she now felt overwhelmed.

Uddo already had the phone numbers for several tree cutters from her months running a Beacon of Hope out of her home. She knew whom to contact to haul away a flooded car. The challenge was gathering more numbers. “It’s like a scavenger hunt after a disaster,” Uddo said. “How do I get that tree off my roof? What do I do with my car? How do you make sure the mold doesn’t come back? I hear there are all these volunteers, but where do I find them?” The advantage of the recovery center she was running was that she’d only need to answer each of those questions once. “We called ourselves the second responders,” she said.

Uddo proved resourceful. People complained that living in a FEMA trailer or perched on a second floor meant they had no way to wash their clothes. So Uddo used a small part of her budget to create a laundry room in a double-wide in the church parking lot. She set up computers for visitors to use and made sure they had enough shovels, wheelbarrows, and other tools for both volunteers and homeowners needing to borrow them. She also came up with a solution to contractor fraud. “You had people coming into town, slapping a magnet [sign] on their car, and saying, ‘Hi, I’m a contractor, give me thirty thousand dollars and I’ll get started on your house,’ and that’s the last you’d hear from them.” So Uddo started a version of Angie’s List: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and others who were bonded, certified, and endorsed by neighbors. Volunteers who wanted to help Lakeview called, but not if it meant sleeping on the ground in the Good News Camp. So Father Hood found her around twenty-five army cots, and they converted the upstairs of St. Paul’s Homecoming Center into volunteer housing.

Uddo had plenty of help. Another five Beacons had opened across Lakeview. There was also Lakeview Civic and Freddy Yoder’s army of block captains. “We counted everything,” Yoder said. “Sunken streets. Recessed curbs. Manholes, catch basins, you name it. If there was any damage to the infrastructure of the community, we documented it.” They’d meet every Thursday to plot the damage on grid maps of
Lakeview and prepare reports that Yoder would pass along to the city’s Public Works Department.

Uddo also had the help of a woman everyone called Miss Rita—Rita Legrand. Legrand, seventy, and her husband, seventy-five, had moved back to Lakeview a few months after the Uddos, in April 2006. She helped Freddy Yoder organize the precinct-captain system and eventually took over Lakeview Civic’s Blight committee. It was her job to police her fellow homeowners and go after those not taking care of their property.

The City Council had given communities a powerful tool when it passed, eight months after the storm, the Good Neighbor Plan. Under Good Neighbor, homeowners who had not gutted their home by the one-year anniversary of Katrina were technically in violation of the law. The bill was championed by Lakeview’s representative on the City Council. “It’s Good Neighbor that we used to pressure people into making a decision,” Legrand said. Let other communities fret over the rights of the displaced and worry that their neighbors needed more time to repair a home. “I’d really push people,” Legrand said. “I’d tell ’em, ‘Fix it up or sell it, you have to make up your mind.’ ” And if they still failed to act, she’d invoke Good Neighbor. “We started going to City Hall and pushing to have hearings,” Legrand said. “I’m very good at aggravating people when I have to.”
^V

NEW ORLEANS SEEMED STALLED
as 2006 turned into 2007. On the eighth floor of City Hall, where once the clerks were issuing four hundred residential building permits a day, now they were averaging maybe fifty. The determined pioneers who had either the money or the grit had moved home, but everyone else seemed to be in Baton Rouge or Houston or with relatives in Cincinnati or Phoenix. A second family moved back to Uddo’s street a year after Katrina. But six months later, they were
still the only two families on their block. “You brought me here to help Lakeview rebuild,” Uddo groused to Father Hood. “But instead I’m still spending all my time cleaning up.”

Uddo used trees to lift people’s spirits and perhaps her own. She knew little about landscaping so she turned to Al Petrie, who headed Lakeview Civic’s beautification committee. Petrie used his connections in the oil and gas business to raise $75,000 to start a tree fund. Teams of volunteers did the planting, including around a dozen West Point cadets who spent their spring break in New Orleans. Crews started digging on upper Canal Street, planting live oaks, slash pines, bald cypress, and other trees. “People would honk their horn, they’d raise their fists out the window,” Uddo said. “People would stop their car, get out, and cry. It meant a lot.”

Meanwhile, Uddo and everyone else in flooded New Orleans struggled with the Road Home application process. “It took a master’s degree to figure out the forms,” Uddo said. She eventually convinced Road Home to send a counselor to her center once a week. “Every week we’d have a line out the door,” she said. The better she got to know the Road Home representative, the more dispirited she would feel. “Policies are inconsistent,” the woman confided in Uddo. “Every day something changes—and then you have some employees saying one thing and some saying something else.”

People who had once struck Uddo as eager to move home were giving up. Even some of those who were back home seemed to be losing their nerve. “They’d tell me it was their neighbors that made them love Lakeview,” Uddo said, “but now the only neighbors they have are the rats and possums and raccoons living in the blighted houses all around them.”

THE ROAD HOME PROGRAM,
as conceived, was simple. Road Home would make up the difference, up to $150,000, between the pre-storm worth of a home and the insurance payments people received. There were caveats. A homeowner who’d lived in a flood zone but failed to carry flood insurance was penalized. Those choosing to walk away from a property were sent a smaller check than those who committed to rebuilding. But
for those rebuilding, the math was easy. If a couple received $220,000 in insurance payments for a home an assessor appraised at $300,000 prior to Katrina, they would receive a Road Home check for $80,000.

Blanco insisted that Rita victims be included in Road Home. “I’m governor,” she said. “Am I going to say to people hit by Rita, ‘You were in the wrong storm, sorry’?” She also decided to hire an outside firm to administer the program. “There was this constant chatter, this repetition that Louisiana is corrupt,” Blanco said. She wouldn’t give Washington more excuses for holding up the state’s money. In June 2006, the state hired ICF International to decide how much each homeowner would get.
^VI

The price tag for ICF’s services was a staggering $900 million. That was more revenue than the company had booked in the previous four years combined. This consulting firm that boasted of the work it did for the federal government and global oil companies was based a thousand miles away in Virginia, explaining a travel budget of $19 million. A month before securing the Road Home deal, ICF filed to go public. So on top of everything else, the executives put in charge of what was being billed as the largest housing-recovery program in the country’s history were distracted by an impending IPO. By summer 2006, more than 80,000 people had submitted a Road Home claim. By year’s end, 123,000 had applied.

Every Road Home applicant was photographed and fingerprinted. ICF blamed the policy on the antifraud guidelines established by the LRA. Nagin brayed that the company was treating people like criminals. A state senator from Baton Rouge named Cleo Fields facetiously suggested that the company should take a DNA swab from every homeowner. The fingerprints were only an early safeguard in a process that Daniel Rothschild, a researcher with the Mercatus Center, a conservative policy group at George Mason University, found had fifty-seven steps, until ICF trimmed it to a forty-three-step process. ICF would demand documents that a drowned-out homeowner wouldn’t reasonably be expected to have.
Everyone seemed to know someone who’d submitted a thick packet of supporting materials only to be told that ICF couldn’t find it.