Katrina: After the Flood (49 page)

Everyone seemed to have Ed Blakely stories. Sally Forman met him at a dinner party, where she introduced herself as the mayor’s former communications director. “I know who you are,” he told her. “You used to work for the
Times-Picayune
.” Sally Forman had never worked at the
Times-Picayune
but Blakely was insistent. “I didn’t know what to say so I just walked away,” she said. Paul Beaulieu met Blakely when the recovery czar gave a talk to a group of black journalists. Blakely was talking about various neighborhoods but not Beaulieu’s, so he asked about New Orleans East. “He acts all insulted, like how dare I question him,” Beaulieu said. “I thought he was an arrogant little shit.”

Yet New Orleans was starved for leadership. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Carey Shea saw Blakely speak at a big citywide meeting not long after he had started in his new job. “He gives this incredibly ego-laden speech, saying, ‘I’m your quarterback and I’m going to lead you and I’m going to be the one to save New Orleans,’ ” she said. “And I remember the person next to me saying, ‘My God, we finally have a mayor.’

“For some the attitude toward Ed was, finally someone is in charge. It might have been Alexander Haig, but at least it was someone.”

SHEA HAD HER OWN
problems—making sure that UNOP’s next big plenary session, Community Congress–II, was a success. Satellite centers were set up in schools and other facilities in Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas. Letters were sent to 120,000 displaced New Orleanians, who were promised transportation, child care, and food. Breakfast and lunch would include vegan options. Spanish translators were hired, as were Vietnamese. They would try reaching football fans by hosting a party in Atlanta for anyone wanting to watch the Saints play the Falcons. Admission was a promise to show up at the local satellite center the next weekend.

The price tag for Community Congress–II was steep at $2.4 million, but Shea saw it as money well spent. About a thousand people showed up at the New Orleans Convention Center on a sunny Saturday
sixteen months after Katrina. Another fifteen hundred were linked to New Orleans via giant television screens. (“Say hello, Houston!”) Half the participants had an annual household income under $40,000, and 63 percent were black. AmericaSpeaks’s instant voting system showed that 45 percent of the people supported a policy that let homeowners in the low-lying neighborhoods do as they saw fit, but 42 percent said they “strongly supported” an arrangement that would let people swap lots and rebuild in clusters. Fifty-nine percent of the people also agreed that for the city to come back, there needed to be a strategy for helping renters back to the city.

There would be more meetings. A Community Congress–III drew 450 people to the Convention Center and another 800 people at the satellite sites. “We will codify all your hard work into the law of the land,” the mayor assured participants. Another speaker laid out a program he called Elevate New Orleans, which would help neighbors cluster on higher ground. A consensus was forming around a few core ideas, UNOP’s Troy Henry assured everyone. Henry was a local consultant, black, hired to coordinate the findings of the 150-plus professionals enlisted to figure out everything from hospital-bed ratios to flood patterns. People favored a plan that treated every neighborhood the same, Henry said. A majority also believed the authorities needed to do a lot more to bring people home.

UNOP had created layers of sector captains, district leaders, and community-support people. Some among them thought it would be destructive to bring up issues such as flood risks and repopulation rates at the big community meetings. Others thought it would be irresponsible not to. They agreed to mention these touchy issues at the big plenary sessions but not center discussion around them. An artful compromise was reached by those writing the UNOP plan: “Every citizen . . . has the right to return to New Orleans,” but people also have “a right to return to a safer, smarter, stronger city.”

Yet even submission of a final plan in February 2007 didn’t end the planning process. Four months passed before the City Planning Committee gave its approval of a 510-page report UNOP had labeled a
Citywide Strategic Recovery and Rebuilding Plan
. Another month passed before the City Council gave its endorsement. Not until June 2007—nearly two years after Katrina—could the city deliver the plan Washington and
Baton Rouge demanded before they would liberate some of the recovery dollars the city so desperately needed.

ONLY JOE CANIZARO SAID
yes when a lawyer named Jeff Thomas offered his services free to members of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Thomas couldn’t blame the others for ignoring him. He was a former biology teacher from Pennsylvania who had spent a few years in Washington, DC, working for a government watchdog group. He’d only arrived in New Orleans in 1998, to start Tulane Law. At the time of Katrina, he was an associate at a small firm whose only credential was a desire to better understand the arcane rules governing a disaster. “Right away I got up to speed on the Stafford Act and HUD enabling legislation,” Thomas said.

Thomas also read what he could about communities that had endured a major disaster. Everyone seemed to be banking on political influence, but Thomas concluded that it would make little difference who might be friends with the president. The bureaucracy had its fixed way of doing things, and so more important than Joe Canizaro or Boysie Bollinger were people able to master the language and arcane procedures of the relevant federal agencies. Thomas wrote a white paper on the need for a city recovery office staffed with people who understood the nuances of administrative law, but it was roundly ignored until Blakely offered him a job in City Hall. He would be part of the small team charged with taking the city’s recovery plan and, as he put it, “fitting it into a framework that would make people in Washington happy.”

UNOP was putting the final touches on its report at around the time Thomas started working for the city. He saw utility in a plan that set out a basic vision for New Orleans. The intense citizen involvement would give anything they produced legitimacy in the eyes of the bureaucracy. But he shook his head as he paged through plans that struck him as more a wish list than a strategic rebuilding plan. Whether it was UNOP’s plan or Lambert’s or the vestiges of what Canizaro had proposed, in each case the assumption seemed to be that the city would have unlimited funds to rebuild. “No one had had that basic conversation about how money would be an issue and they needed to set priorities,” he said.

For Thomas and others working in Blakely’s office, the job would mainly be about managing expectations. The Bush administration was claiming the federal government had already committed more than $100 billion to the Gulf Coast, but that included the $16 billion in claims the national flood insurance program would pay to policyholders and also the tens of billions spent on the rescue and temporary housing. New Orleans was in line to receive billions in FEMA “public assistance dollars,” but that money could only be spent fixing public assets (a library, a fire station, a sewer line) damaged by the storm.
^I
Only around a few hundred million dollars would be made available to the city to spend as it wanted. This was community disaster money from HUD, the coveted “flex money” that allows a community to think outside the constricting silos created by bureaucrats. All those plans to reimagine streetscapes, build parks, attract greengrocers to food deserts, and otherwise transform wrecked neighborhoods would need to be funded primarily through this one pot of money.

Introducing a dose of realism into the process was the aim of the press conference Blakely, less than three months into the job, held at the end of March. He wouldn’t and couldn’t try to fix the entire city at once, Blakely said. Instead he identified seventeen commercial corridors around New Orleans—“nodes”—that would be his focus, at least in this first phase of his tenure. Some would be in the most damaged parts of the city, but others would be in parts of New Orleans that had taken on no water because, he said, small improvements there could leverage greater investment in the city. The Lower Ninth and New Orleans East
were in line for $145 million of redevelopment money. Lakeview would receive a commensurate share. “It’s not big, and I hope you guys put that message in the paper,” Blakely said. He warned that theirs might be a fifteen-year recovery.

The “first decisive plan from City Hall,” the
Times-Picayune
declared on its front page. Members of the City Council quoted on the subject said that they were pleased. It was an impressive early effort from a man who had made so poor a first impression—at least until reporters started peppering him with questions (“Mr. Blakely, what would you tell people who’ve already invested their life savings in a community not included on your list?”) During the question-and-answer phase he blurted out, “You’ll see cranes in the sky by September.” That promise led the news that night, not the modesty of his plan. “It was a totally unrealistic promise,” Thomas said, but also about the only thing people would remember of Blakely’s plans in the coming months.

THE SUBJECT COULDN’T HAVE
been more obtuse when Senator Barack Obama addressed a mostly black audience at Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia. In June 2007, four months after Obama announced he was running for president and nearly two years after Katrina, Obama brought up a provision of the Stafford Act that requires locales to match 10 percent of federal disaster money.

“Now here’s the thing,” Obama said. “When 9/11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act—said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you got to put in. Here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do.

“When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with your own money. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not going to wait for you to scratch it together—because you’re part of the American family.’ ”

Katrina was different, though. Despite pleas from local officials, the Bush administration had been reluctant to do the same with Katrina money. “What’s happening down in New Orleans?” Obama continued. “There the feds were asking, ‘Where’s your dollar? Where’s your
Stafford Act money?’ Makes no sense. Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans, they don’t care about as much.’ ”
^II
Obama would be accused by conservative commentators of “whipping up race hatred and fear.”

WHEN INSIDERS SPOKE ABOUT
the city’s next mayor, one name came up more than others: Oliver Thomas. Even George Bush could be counted as a Thomas admirer. That, at least, is the way Karl Rove told it in his memoir. The president attended a meeting of local leaders in March 2007, where he spoke with Thomas. “Afterward, Bush remarked it was good that at least one New Orleans official had his head on straight and his focus right,” Rove said.

The same storm that shrank so many elected officials had the opposite effect on Thomas. The storm enlarged him. This son of the Lower Ninth had slept in his fourth-floor office in City Hall the night of Katrina. He then spent much of the next week out on the boats, pulling people out of the water. At night he camped out on the second floor of his flooded home. A constant presence in those early months after Katrina, a baseball cap on his head and a smile usually on his face, this large man with a soft voice and appetite for people called to mind Bill Clinton. His public persona was the everyman who seemed as adept at charming the aging Uptown doyenne (“You’re getting younger and more beautiful every day”) as reaching young toughs in the hood. Around a year after Katrina, he held a press conference calling on the housing authority to fix up its buildings rather than tear them down, but then added that they should limit the tenants to people willing to work. “If your legs don’t hurt, you can walk somewhere,” he said. “If your arms don’t hurt, you can pick something up.” He consistently polled above 40 percent with whites and double that with blacks.

Then, a couple of weeks before Katrina’s second anniversary, a
contrite Thomas appeared on television, apologizing for taking nearly $20,000 in bribes.

People wanted to believe the best of Thomas. His home had flooded after Katrina, he was the tireless advocate in an all-consuming job that paid $40,000 a year. Yet the truth was far more prosaic. He struggled with a gambling problem, and several years before Katrina he had taken payoffs from a black businessman worried he would lose his parking contracts with the city after Ray Nagin took office. Thomas saved his constituents the expense and the bitter taste of a drawn-out legal process by pleading guilty and relinquishing his seat after thirteen years on the council. “I cannot begin to describe the anguish I feel for disappointing you,” Thomas said through tears after entering his guilty plea in a federal courtroom. “You trusted me, and I have placed that trust in question. You have every right to be angry and suspicious. I am deeply sorry.” The judge sentenced him to thirty-seven months in prison.

THE CITY COMMEMORATED THE
second anniversary of Katrina much as it did the first. Nagin rang a bell at precisely 9:38 a.m., and again he welcomed the president to New Orleans. For the second year in a row, Bush visited a newly christened charter school—this time Doris Hicks’s school in the Lower Ninth. The night before, the president dined at Dooky Chase’s, a favorite for the city’s black political class. For once Bush would be in New Orleans and not be on the defensive. The president had signed legislation authorizing the Corps to spend another $7 billion improving the levee system. He was about to sign a second bill that would free up another $3 billion for Road Home, bringing its price tag to $10.5 billion.

New Orleans had more good news that summer. The US census estimated that 288,000 people were living in New Orleans two years after Katrina—up significantly compared to 170,000 twelve months earlier. About half the Road Home applicants had received a check from the government, and the city’s sales tax revenues were approaching pre-Katrina levels. But as always, any number of reminders remained that the city was still far from recovery. New Orleans still had two-thirds fewer hospital beds and corresponding long waits at the hospitals in the
surrounding parishes. “I’ve been telling people, ‘Don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,’ ” said a Mid-City doctor who’d moved his practice to the suburbs. The city had two-thirds fewer day-care centers. Even the population numbers were deceptive given all the planners, relief workers, and other do-gooders temporarily calling the city home. About 200,000 of the city’s pre-Katrina population of 455,000 were still living someplace other than New Orleans.