Katrina: After the Flood (51 page)

Pitt filled in some of the details a few days later in an interview with the
Times-Picayune
. He estimated that each home would cost between $100,000 and $174,000 but the typical buyer wouldn’t pay anywhere near that amount. Anyone owning a home in the Lower Ninth at the time of Katrina was eligible for a Make It Right home. They only needed to turn over any insurance or Road Home money they received and no person would pay more than 30 percent of his or her monthly income on the mortgage. The houses would all be built north of Claiborne in the few blocks closest to the levee breach, which had a lot more empty cement slabs than intact houses. Over the coming weeks, Pitt would borrow from the artist Christo to give people a more visual sense of what he had in mind. Anyone crossing over the Claiborne bridge into the Lower Ninth near the end of 2007 saw clusters of hot-pink homes. “Not real houses,” wrote the MTV reporter who flew to New Orleans to interview Pitt, “but something akin to life-size Monopoly houses, which serve as placeholders.” Pitt went on the
Today
show to talk about his plans, as well as
Entertainment Tonight
and
Larry King Live
. King several times gave viewers the URL for Make It Right.

“We’re trying to send people to the website . . . to get families into homes by the end of summer,” Pitt told King. “We need America to come together like they did directly after the storm and help the families here meet that financing gap to build properly, to build safely. . . . We’re asking for foundations, for community groups, church groups.”

LEN RIGGIO, THE CHAIRMAN
of Barnes & Noble, also wanted to help rebuild homes in New Orleans. He, too, wanted to create energy-efficient homes elevated above the floodplain. He and his wife, Louise, wrote a $20 million check from their family foundation to create what they called Project Home Again.

Riggio hired Carey Shea, the Rockefeller Foundation’s eyes and ears
in the UNOP process, as executive director of Home Again. Like Pitt, Riggio, who lived in New York and Palm Beach, figured he would focus his efforts on the Lower Ninth Ward. Shea convinced him to build someplace else. Investing in the Lower Ninth was like focusing on the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, she told him; the need there was great, but that was true of other parts of the city as well. In February 2008, Riggio held a press conference in Gentilly, the working-class black neighborhood where he promised to rebuild 120 homes. A resident would be handed the keys to a fully furnished rehabbed home in exchange for the deed to their flooded house. The home was theirs free and clear as long as they lived there at least five years. Lucky Gentilly residents were chosen through a lottery. In the coming months, Riggio would receive a fraction of the press attention as Pitt, but then, he was the public face of a bookstore chain, not a movie star, and he chose to help a less mediagenic community.

SEPTEMBER 2007 CAME AND
went with no cranes in the sky. What Blakely produced instead was a more detailed list of the projects his office would champion. At a press event that month, Blakely was still focused mainly on the seventeen targeted “recovery zones.” He unveiled 167 smaller projects in the targeted areas that his team had culled from UNOP and the other planning efforts.
^III
They included after-school centers and health clinics and also the reopening of Methodist Hospital in New Orleans East and the restoration of the Pontchartrain Park golf course in Gentilly. FEMA had identified more than eight hundred public assets—police stations, various properties owned by the RTA, badly damaged streets—that it promised to restore to their pre-Katrina condition, but three dozen of those on Blakely’s list were in need of more than a simple repair. Blakely also announced several larger projects, including a new biomedical hospital complex that business leaders hoped would
establish the New Orleans area as a center of biomed research. The challenge would be to find the money to pay for it all.

A few months after Katrina, the federal government announced low-interest loans for businesses willing to build in the Gulf Coast region. These Gulf Opportunity Zone Bonds could possibly be used to help fund at least a few of Blakely’s proposed projects. But most everything the city had in mind would need to be funded with HUD “flex money” distributed by the state. “HUD basically tells the state, ‘Here’s the money, here are our rules, and by the way, we’ll audit everything to make sure you do it right,’ ” said Jeff Thomas in Blakely’s office. The state set aside $1.1 billion in flex money for the parishes suffering damage from Katrina or Rita. New Orleans’s share would be just over $400 million—not nearly enough to cover even this more modest assortment of city improvements.

Funding even a single project would prove an endurance test. That much became clear to Blakely and his staff after they submitted to Baton Rouge their list of projects they wanted funded. A month later, a consultant working for the state sent them a flow chart laying out the steps required to secure HUD money. It measured eight feet across. “It took us six months just to get two feet,” Thomas said. Battles within City Hall also needed to be waged. “We were just this little group of thinkers in the corner coming up with nifty ideas,” Thomas said. “Everything we did had to be blessed by these other departments.”

The biomedical center proved the most controversial item on Blakely’s list. Maybe building a hospital complex on the edge of downtown would establish New Orleans as a center of biomedical research, maybe it wouldn’t, but if Blakely’s plan was successful, it would mean the city would no longer have a public hospital. This “anchor for the city’s economic recovery,” as Blakely sold it to Nagin, was slated to cost more than $1 billion to build. For Blakely’s idea to work, the city would need the money the state would be receiving to rebuild or replace Charity Hospital. They would need, too, money the federal government planned to spend refurbishing the city’s VA hospital, which was badly damaged in the storm. Federal officials were on board with a proposal that had them building a hospital on the same site as the state’s so long as the city found a suitable property. State officials also signed off on the deal. Callers to WBOK had been urging the mayor to demand that the state refurbish
Charity. Instead the city was plotting a new facility that guaranteed that the old hospital would never reopen.

The disenchantment of the activist set deepened as the plan took shape. Blakely ceded control of parts of the project to the state because the state had stronger eminent domain authority than the city. The site the city chose to build the twin hospitals was a neighborhood just east of downtown that had suffered only mild flooding and was coming back a lot faster than most. Many homeowners there had restored their homes or were doing so when the city unveiled its plans. The city needed sixty-seven acres to build the two hospitals, which meant tearing down or moving 250 homes, 150 of which had been deemed “historically significant” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Several blocks heading east-west were permanently closed off to traffic, as were several blocks going north-south. When the Department of Veterans Affairs threatened to pull out of the deal and build outside the city, Blakely promised them $75 million in HUD disaster money to offset their construction costs—one-fifth of the city’s precious flex dollars. The price spiraled from $1.2 billion to nearly $2 billion, by which time the naysayers had renamed the project the Tajmahospital.

WHERE WAS NAGIN? THE
Tribune
’s Janet Stanton even ran a joke column asking that question. Was the mayor suffering post-traumatic stress disorder? “Was he bored with the job?” Stanton asked. “Ready to throw in the towel? Mortally wounded during battle by those he considered friends?” Talking to people around Nagin, she tried to suss out what might be going on, but “even the mayor’s most ardent supporters dropped their eyes and shrugged.”

Nagin’s greatest attribute was that he looked the part of mayor. Even in the early months after Katrina, Nagin seemed to glide through the city, flashing a smile for the cameras, reassuring people. Yet now Blakely was the front man everyone saw on television and quoted in the news. One of the few glimpses of Nagin midway through his second term was that of a mayor angry at the media. He threatened to “coldcock” the news director of the local CBS affiliate over the station’s demand that the mayor produce a copy of his work schedule. By the start of 2008—with more than two years left in his term—he was granting few interviews to local media.

But Nagin didn’t entirely disappear. In February, the mayor and Chief Riley were together for a photo op showing off $1 million in guns and other equipment the city had secured to fight against soaring crime. Joking around, Nagin picked up one of the assault rifles and aimed it at his chief. The next day, the mayor’s press office sent out an angry release arguing that Nagin had merely been lowering the gun when a
Times-Picayune
photographer snapped the shot appearing in that morning’s newspaper. That May, Nagin mentioned a homeless encampment near City Hall during a welcome speech he delivered at the Convention Center. The real solution to homelessness in the city, he joked, would be “some bus tickets . . . one way.” Another time he suggested that a murder rate that was tops in the nation wasn’t all bad because it “helps keep the New Orleans brand out there.”

Ed Blakely said he felt as though he were working inside a “cocoon”—and a tense, unpleasant one at that. “Black people have a hard time taking instruction from white people,” Blakely said. “It’s really bad. I’ve never encountered anything like this.”

RAY NAGIN’S POLICE GUARD
sat outside a private dining room at Antoine’s in the French Quarter. Two years into the mayor’s second term, he had asked his old ally, Bill Hines, to meet him for dinner. Occasionally, a waiter would need to enter the room, but otherwise, it was just Hines and the mayor in a room that would more comfortably seat twenty. “It was almost like we were getting together as old friends to clear the air about this thing that happened between us,” Hines said. “He got off his chest how the white business community deserted him and how that made him feel.”

The two spoke for something like two hours. “I could say he was almost Richard Nixon–like, in a bunker, sharing all these resentments,” Hines said. The two shook hands at the end of what Hines described as a “very strange dinner” and would never speak again.

NAGIN AT LEAST HAD
his family. Seletha and Tianna, his daughter, were still in Dallas, as best anyone could tell, but his sons were in New
Orleans. Eight months before Katrina, Jeremy and Jarin had founded Stone Age, a home-improvement company focused on granite and marble kitchen-countertop installations. Nagin had put up the seed money and figured he’d be a passive investor. But that was before Katrina turned a modestly interesting idea into a potentially lucrative one. Half the city needed new countertops—and Stone Age’s strategy was to establish itself as the go-to countertop installer for one of the big-box retailers in town.

“Like any father,” Nagin said, “I wanted to help my sons.” And also help himself. His parents, Nagin’s son Jeremy said, “have invested a significant amount of our family net worth and taken on major debt to put this company in position for growth.”

Stacy Head, the newly elected member of the council, gave Nagin a chance to make himself invaluable to Home Depot. At the end of 2006, the company announced its intentions to build a new store in Central City in Head’s district. Home Depot would bring two hundred jobs to a desolate part of town, but it needed the city’s permission to block off several streets. Eager to please her new constituents, Head proposed a “community benefits agreement”: the store could have its zoning changes in exchange for a $12.50-an-hour minimum wage and a promise to hire from the neighborhood, among other concessions.

Ray Nagin phoned Home Depot CEO Frank Blake. “I got a voice mail from Mayor Nagin saying that he understands we have a problem with a neighborhood group and asking whether we need his assistance,” a baffled Blake wrote to Kent Knutson, the company’s chief lobbyist. “Do you know what this is about?”

“Most likely, it’s about Nagin’s son’s desire to be a vendor,” Knutson wrote back, “and install kitchens/countertops for us using a company that he and his dad own together.” Knutson labeled Nagin and also the community group Head was working with “shake-down artists.” The difference, though, Knutson added, was that “Nagin wanted work for Stone Age” while “the community groups wanted higher wages and money for projects.”

Nagin sent e-mails to other Home Depot executives, promising to help them any way he could. When the City Council held a hearing on Head’s plan, the mayor sent his economic-development director to testify. We’re elated Home Depot wants to move into Central City, she said,
and oppose the idea of a binding community-benefits agreement. Under the terms the city reached with the company, there was no binding agreement, just a promise by Home Depot to consider qualified low-income applicants from the area. A month later, Home Depot chose Stone Age as the exclusive granite installer for several Home Depot locations.

Nagin negotiated Stone Age’s rates on behalf of his sons. He met with Home Depot officials at the Stone Age storefront and signed e-mails he sent to executives there “C. Ray Nagin, mayor.” Cane Womack, the Home Depot manager in charge of service contracts for the Gulf Coast region, didn’t know what to say when Nagin asked him to direct ten to twenty jobs a week to his sons. In Womack’s view, Stone Age was a young company not ready for that workload. But he complied, the Home Depot manager said, because if “you tell the mayor no, it could cause some problems for you.”

A year into their arrangement, Nagin complained to Womack that Stone Age wasn’t getting enough jobs to justify the money they had spent on the special equipment Home Depot required them to purchase for certification. Despite some complaints about Stone Age’s work, Womack tried to placate the mayor. “Given the political nature of this relationship,” Womack wrote in an e-mail to a fellow manager, “I think it’s better to move forward.”
^IV
When in March of 2008, the
Times-Picayune
’s Gordon Russell broke the story of Stone Age’s relationship with Home Depot, he quoted several competitors in the granite business who felt they had been unfairly passed over in favor of a small, untested firm.