Katrina: After the Flood (48 page)

In November 2006, Cassandra Wall and a couple of her sisters took part in a protest in Baton Rouge to demand the state do better. Fifteen months after Katrina and six months after the company had taken charge of Road Home, ICF had disbursed all of $700,000 to eighteen homeowners. Blanco exacted a promise from ICF to inform at least ten thousand homeowners by month’s end of the dollar amount they would be receiving. ICF did—and then sent out thousands of follow-up letters apologizing for informing an applicant of the wrong grant amount. “Road Home or Road Block?” the
New Orleans Tribune
asked on its cover that month.

In December, the legislature held hearings looking into Road Home. Only a paltry eighty-four homeowners had received a check. Legislators expressed their frustrations over a program that, from the outside, didn’t seem complex. Verify that people are whom they claim to be and that they in fact owned the property they were claiming. Check with the assessor’s office to see what a house was worth prior to the storm or use some of the hundreds of millions of dollars the state was paying the company to hire its own appraisers. The insurance payments could be confirmed by checking industry records. Both the House and Senate passed resolutions directing the governor to fire ICF International. The vote in the House was 97–1.

No one was more frustrated by Road Home than Charmaine Marchand, who for three days camped out on the capitol lawn to draw attention to her grievances. She lamented all the money the state could have saved—and the locals that could have been put to work—if the state had run the program out of its community development program. “Instead, ICF is flying its out-of-town people to Louisiana, racking up bills,” Marchand said—and also boasting about all the money it would be making off Road Home in the documents it filed to go public. Blanco convinced Marchand to take down her tent by inviting her and other New Orleans legislators to the governor’s mansion for a meeting with Michael Byrne, the former Homeland Security official ICF had put in charge of Road Home. “I share the frustrations of our people and the legislature, but common sense must prevail,” Blanco said. “This isn’t a
time to start from scratch, which would make people wait even longer.” Byrne vowed that they’d soon be sending out five hundred checks a day. Again ICF fell well short of its promises.

In February, California congresswoman Maxine Waters brought her Housing subcommittee to New Orleans for a hearing on Road Home. “I’m on the phone every day pushing for solutions,” Blanco testified. At least the governor could reach someone with ICF. Others testified about their difficulties even reaching anyone connected with Road Home. A recorded message greeted callers with a promise to return any message within forty-eight hours—except Michael Byrne confessed that winter that ICF hadn’t hired enough people to follow up on that promise.

Blanco was up for reelection that fall—November 2007. Smelling blood, Bobby Jindal declared his candidacy that January, setting up a rematch of their 2003 race. Two months later, Blanco gathered her staff together to tell them she wouldn’t be running for reelection. “I am choosing to do what I believe to be best for the state,” the governor declared in a televised address. She had already raised $3 million in campaign funds but polls showed her with only 35 percent of the vote in a head-to-head race with Jindal. “This may be the first time in history that a non-term-limited governor decided to step down rather than seek reelection,” declared Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. The only comparison Cross could conjure up was LBJ’s decision to drop out of the 1968 presidential race because of Vietnam.

In May, Mary Landrieu invited Connie Uddo to Washington to talk about Road Home at the Senate’s ad hoc subcommittee on Disaster Recovery. Only 10 percent of the Road Home applicants had received a check but a top Blanco aide announced that Road Home was on pace to run out of money long before every eligible homeowner received a payment. I’m exhibit A of the problem confronting New Orleans twenty-one months after Katrina, Uddo told the senators. “I’m the cheerleader who keeps telling people to hang in there,” she said. Yet even the captain of the pom-pom club confessed that she was wrestling with despair.

AT LEAST ONE SET
of government functionaries were on the job: the bureaucrats in City Hall overseeing the list of condemned properties.
In July 2007, the city published so many thirty-day notices on homes deemed a “serious, imminent and continuing threat to the public health, safety, and welfare” that the list filled twenty-five pages in the
Times-Picayune
. “We don’t want to demolish anything if the owner is taking action,” a city attorney explained. “But the onus is on the property owner.” Feeling frustrated by the constant delays, FEMA officials had told the city that the agency wouldn’t pay the demolition costs for any home after August 29, 2007—the two-year anniversary of Katrina. Bulldozing a home and carting away the debris could cost anywhere between $6,000 and $10,000. City officials were determined to knock down as many as they could before the federal government’s deadline.

The city kept one list. FEMA kept another: for the demolition crews it kept under contract. Getting your home off one didn’t necessarily get it off both. IdaBelle Joshua was a seventy-nine-year-old, disabled widow temporarily living 150 miles from the two-story brick home she owned in the Lower Ninth Ward. Joshua had spent more than $5,000 gutting and cleaning her place. She even stopped by City Hall in early July, where two employees, she said, assured her that her house was safe. Yet two days later, a nephew phoned Joshua with bad news. He had stopped by to mow the lawn. The house was gone.

The
Wall Street Journal
told Joshua’s story in a page-one article by Rick Brooks. The reporter seemed to have little trouble finding people shocked to learn their property was on a demolition list. A man named Michael DeZura told Brooks about a building he was fixing up. It would have been reduced to rubble, DeZura said, if a friend hadn’t called him in Houston to let him know a city crew was disconnecting the utilities. Mary Harrison had already put a new roof on her home and had people working on the wiring and the plumbing when she heard from a neighbor that a demolition order had been slapped on her door. She spoke to people at City Hall and then phoned FEMA, but no one could help her. “They can’t find me on the list to take me off,” she said.

I.
The bands played a modified version of “The Saints Are Coming,” a song by the Skids. A recording of the song was sold to raise money for Music Rising, a charity cofounded by U2 guitarist The Edge and aimed at replacing instruments destroyed by Katrina.

II.
A jury would find four of the seven officers guilty of using a weapon in the commission of a violent crime. One, a sergeant named Kenneth Bowen, was also convicted of stomping on Ronald Madison, a forty-year-old disabled man. A second sergeant was found guilty of aiding in an attempted cover-up of the crime. The convictions were vacated in 2013 on charges of “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct” after a top lawyer in the US Attorney’s office was caught posting inflammatory online comments before and during the trial. A new trial was ordered.

III.
A federal judge found that the ordinance violated federal antidiscrimination laws. The parish was forced to pay fines and court costs exceeding $1.8 million.

IV.
“Delay, deny, defend”—that’s how a Rutgers professor named Jay M. Feinman described the insurance industry’s strategy in a book by that title published several years after Katrina. The strategy, Feinman reported, had been laid out in a PowerPoint presentation that came to light during a lawsuit against Allstate. When a policyholder files a claim, the aggressive insurance company makes a low offer, a McKinsey & Co. consultant explained: let people fight if they think they deserve more.

V.
The Nagin administration would quietly end its Good Neighbor program a year after it went into effect, citing a shortage of inspectors. At that point, there was a backlog of seventeen thousand citizen complaints that the city had yet to review.

VI.
ICF was founded in 1969 as the Inner City Fund, a venture-capital firm whose mission was to finance inner-city businesses.

21

“YOU’LL SEE CRANES IN THE SKY”

He had no written contract. There was no job description. He didn’t even have an official title, only that generic moniker the media gives anyone in a job like the one he was taking. Ed Blakely was the “recovery czar” no matter what it might say on any org chart.

The airport terminal looked like a morgue and smelled like one, too. That at least was Blakely’s perception on that winter day in 2007 when he landed there to start his new job. The ride into town was “nauseating,” he said. Again it was the stench. Eighteen months after Katrina, was it possible dead animals were still rotting in the streets? Sitting in the passenger seat of a city-issued SUV dispatched to pick him up, he saw piles of garbage everywhere. Abandoned autos were stacked in piles and tucked under overpasses. Passing City Hall, he noticed a neon sign with several burned-out letters:
C TY H L
. He shook his head and asked himself what it meant that he would be working somewhere people didn’t have the good sense to kill the sign’s switch until it was fixed.

The next day—Blakely’s first on the job—began at Le Pavillon, where Nagin had reserved a corner table for them. Donning the red power tie that his wife had picked out for him, Blakely expected to talk
strategy. At the least Blakely hoped they could settle on a job title. Instead Nagin brought along an aide and the three of them worked on a press release to announce Blakely’s hiring. Their next stop was a City Hall press conference, where reporters pounded Blakely with questions about the recovery. Back in the mayor’s office, Blakely called it a “rough and irritating start.” Nagin told him to get used to it—and then “giggled uncontrollably,” Blakely said, “like a schoolboy telling a dirty joke.”

“No one offered to help me or show me around,” Blakely complained. He found a vacant room with a desk and phone and claimed it. There was no invitation to lunch and none to dinner. That night, Blakely, who had lived most of his life in California, walked St. Charles Avenue in search of something to eat. Supper that night was a can of beans and a packet of rice. So much for southern hospitality, he thought to himself. Earlier that day, standing in front of the press gaggle and feeling “suddenly flushed and combative,” he blurted out that the city would have a plan of action by year’s end. Before going to bed on his first night as recovery czar, Blakely started on a list of questions. Atop the paper he wrote, “Who is responsible for this recovery?” Then he added a second question to his list: “What is the recovery plan?”

BLAKELY SEEMED THE IDEAL
choice when Nagin decided he needed a recovery czar. Blakely is black—no small issue in a racialized fight. And he had the credentials. He had chaired the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley until taking over as dean of the management and urban-policy graduate program at the New School in New York. He had helped Oakland recover after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and had been appointed vice chair of the committee created to rebuild downtown Manhattan after September 11. Some criticized Nagin for failing to conduct a formal search before hiring Blakely, but even those lobbing that complaint allowed that it would have led to his office door.

Blakely described himself as reluctant to take the job. At sixty-eight, he had only recently taken a position at the University of Sydney, where he was teaching urban planning and running a planning research center. He and his wife were happy there, and he enjoyed the extra money
he was earning as a consultant operating in a new corner of the globe. His wife told him he could take the job with two conditions. One was that he commit to a single year with an option for a second, subject to her approval. The other was that he keep his permanent visa, which required him to spend at least part of the year in Australia.

True to his word, Blakely made a ten-day visit to Australia within a few weeks of his start date. The media pounced, and he promised to stick around until his job was done, no matter how long it took. Within two months of arriving in New Orleans, Blakely had already broken one of his vows to his wife.

Blakely had imagined himself playing the role of a true recovery czar: the only person whose voice counted if the topic was rebuilding. Counterparts elsewhere in the bureaucracy had a different view. When he met with Louisiana officials, he demanded more control over New Orleans’s share of federal money that passed through the state. They told him no but promised to work with him. More disheartening for Blakely were his meetings with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, or NORA, the body responsible for blighted or abandoned properties in the city. It would be up to
him
how they invested precious redevelopment dollars, Blakely announced the first time he sat down with NORA. Those with NORA countered that they had already chosen shovel-ready projects to finance, but Blakely held his ground. “There were perhaps five or six people” in the world capable of overseeing their recovery, he told them, and they were looking at one of them. Let him decide what they would fund, or he was flying home to Sydney.

The wise planner first expresses his love for a city before talking about everything that needs fixing. Blakely instead expressed contempt. In that first trip back to Australia he said of New Orleans, “We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts. That is our major import and export.” He described New Orleans as “a third-world country” in an interview with the
New York Times
, an “insular” place with battling racial factions that were “a bit like the Shiites and Sunnis.” “It’s a culture of domination rather than participation,” he told the
Times
’ Adam Nossiter. “So whatever group gets something, they try to dominate the whole turf.” He had ideas for drawing newcomers to New Orleans, but he worried,
he said, what they would think of the locals. “Who are these buffoons?” he imagined them asking.