Katrina: After the Flood (52 page)

At Cox, Nagin had made around $400,000 a year. As mayor, his salary was $131,000. David White started sending Nagin money in the middle of the the mayor’s first term. At first it was $3,000 a month but soon $7,500 “to make ends meet with his family,” White said. But the checks stopped shortly before Nagin’s reelection. Nagin was working harder than ever before in his life, yet he wasn’t making nearly enough to cover the costs of two households. Even on those rare occasions when Seletha and Tianna were in town, it’s not as if he could even enjoy a quiet meal out with his family. “People would literally sit down at the table
with us and ask me questions about city business or about a problem they were having,” Nagin said. “I would have to take notes.”

The citizens of New Orleans paid for Nagin’s 2006 Valentine’s Day dinner with his family at the Grill Room inside the Windsor Court: $225. They bought the mayor dinner the night he turned fifty ($250) and picked up the $175 tab when the Nagins celebrated their twenty-fourth anniversary at Stella in the French Quarter. A Mother’s Day celebration at Morton’s in 2008 cost the taxpayers nearly $500. So what if some of the meals—$252 at Crescent City Steaks, $229 at Ye Olde College Inn, $290 at the Sun Ray Grill—fell on a Saturday or Sunday night? “Just another day as mayor of the City of New Orleans,” Nagin explained.

BILL CLINTON WORE COWBOY
boots, brown slacks, and a tucked-in, red polo shirt. Brad Pitt wore a gray newsboy cap, jeans, and a white dress shirt with the tails out. In March 2008, the Clinton Global Initiative hosted six hundred college kids at Tulane for a three-day discussion. On their last day in the city, students visited the Lower Ninth Ward to turn their words into action. Holding shovels, rakes, and other tools, they aimed to clean up that corner of the community where Make It Right wanted to put up a house. The two high-watt celebrities showed up for a groundbreaking ceremony, where Pitt proclaimed, “We hope to see a huge change here in the next six months.”

JOHN MCCAIN HAD VOTED
against a 2005 bill that would have granted a year’s worth of unemployment benefits to anyone losing a job because of Katrina. He also joined a group of Republican senators opposed to a $28 billion hurricane-relief measure that the Bush administration supported. Yet in April 2008, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee needed to distance himself from the Bush administration. His campaign launched a “forgotten places” tour in April 2008 that included stops in Youngstown, Ohio, and Appalachia and ended in the Lower Ninth Ward. “I want to assure the people of the Ninth Ward, the people of New Orleans, the people of this country: never again, never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way this
was handled,” McCain said. Asked whether he thought the Lower Ninth should be rebuilt, the candidate paused for several seconds and then confessed that he had no answer: “We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.”

New Orleans saw a lot of both McCain and Obama in 2008. Both supported paying for a flood-protection system that could withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Both spoke of the need to restore the coastal wetlands. Yet New Orleans always seemed more Obama’s home turf, the perfect venue for contrasting his approach with that of conservatives. In a speech he gave at Tulane, candidate Obama mentioned the twenty-five-thousand-plus families still living in trailers or a FEMA-subsidized apartment and also all the schools and hospitals and fire stations that remained shuttered.

“We have to understand that Katrina may have battered the levees, but it also exposed silent storms that have ravaged parts of this city and our country for far too long,” Obama said. “The storms of poverty, joblessness, inequality, and injustice: those are the storms that swirled before Katrina hit.” He told the audience about an evacuee he had met when he visited Houston after the storm. “We had nothing before the hurricane,” she told the future president. “Now we’ve got less than nothing.”

HEAVY RAINS IN THE
spring of 2008 caused severe flooding along the upper Mississippi River Valley. For Rush Limbaugh, the images out of places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the water ran ten feet high in the streets, called to mind New Orleans a few years earlier. The contrast between the two events, he told his listeners, was stark.

“I see people working together,” Limbaugh said of the Midwest floods. “I see people trying to save their property. I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people . . . whining and moaning—where’s FEMA? Where’s Bush? I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.”

I.
Congress and the Bush administration eased affirmative action rules immediately after Katrina, ostensibly to speed up the recovery. As a result, only around 1.5 percent of the earliest recovery contracts went to a minority-owned business, the Government Accountability Office found, or less than a third of the 5 percent normally required.

II.
The incumbent, Renée Gill Pratt, was later sentenced to four years in federal prison for siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for charitable and educational programs.

III.
“He used the plan to get the money—and then crapped all of our work and decided to create his own,” said Troy Henry, a local black businessman who was central to the writing of the UNOP report. “He tells people, ‘Congratulations if you live in one of these seventeen recovery zones but if not, good luck because you’re on your own.’ ”

IV.
Citing poor service, Home Depot severed its ties to Stone Age in 2008. The company went out of business the following year.

23

FATIGUE

In the summer of 2008, Father Hood called Connie Uddo into the rectory office. The city was approaching the third anniversary of Katrina, and he needed to tell her he was leaving. “My work here is done,” he said. He had been assigned to a naval base in Africa. He asked Uddo what she wanted to do.

By mid-2008, 80 percent of those qualifying for a Road Home payment had received a check. The average payout of just under $60,000 per household was less than what many had expected, but enough so that Lakeview was noisy with the whine of table saws and pounding hammers. Every Wednesday night that summer, Uddo’s organization sponsored a community barbecue at an empty Knights of Columbus hall that volunteers were refurbishing. The church sprang for live music, her husband cooked, and for $5 people ate unlimited food and drink (first responders and kids were free). The Starbucks on Harrison opened in June 2007. Parlay’s bar was back in business, as was the local deli and the Gulf Coast bank. “It was starting to feel like a community again,” Uddo said.

Plenty was still left to worry about. More people talked about
moving back than hired a contractor. Some were what Lakeview Civic’s Al Petrie labeled “turncoats”—people choosing to sell rather than rebuild. As much as people wanted to forget about the Urban Land Institute, the phrase it popularized, the jack-o’-lantern effect, had taken root. Road Home allowed people the option of selling their property to the state, which fed anxieties about outsiders building in Lakeview. Martin Landrieu and others came up with a program called the Lot Next Door, a citywide initiative that gave neighbors first dibs on any parcel adjacent to their own. “We were scared to death with what the city was going to do with these properties,” Petrie said. Zoning in Lakeview barred the building of multifamily units, but Petrie’s fear, and that of others, was that NORA, the agency responsible for abandoned properties in the city, would sell bundled lots to outside developers. “The last thing we wanted was tract housing that would undermine everything we were working so hard to achieve,” Petrie said.

Uddo was tempted to quit despite the work still to be done. Let Lakeview Civic wage war with the bureaucracy. Hood told her she was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She agreed but confessed, “I know if I’m taking care of other people, I don’t have to look at myself.” Maybe it was time to focus on herself. “I really wanted to say, ‘Let’s have a normal life again,’ ” Uddo said. But the experience of running the recovery center had made it hard to walk away. When your job is putting shattered lives back together, she asked herself, how do you go back to teaching tennis?

The next time Uddo saw Hood, she asked him to take a ride with her through Gentilly. Her son attended school there, and every day she saw the contrast between Lakeview and its neighbor just on the other side of City Park. Driving through the area, Hood said out loud what she had already told herself: Gentilly looks the way Lakeview did two years ago.

“Don’t you think if they had a hub of recovery, they’d be further along?” she asked him.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’d be a shame to just walk away. I’m thinking I’ve learned so much that I’m a disaster-recovery manager now.”

“Are you up for it?”

“I feel like I can do a lot of good in Gentilly.” Hood spoke with the diocese, which proved willing to keep funding St. Paul’s Homecoming Center even as it shifted its focus to Gentilly. The question was whether people there wanted the help—and if it might be too late.

IT WAS A HARD
couple of years for the McDonalds, Rhesa especially. “It was a whole new world in Baton Rouge,” Rhesa said. “Finding our way around. Finding places we liked to go. And then my father got sick.” Revius Ortique, eighty-one years old when Katrina hit, had always been a commanding figure in her life. He was now suffering from a mysterious autoimmune disorder that no doctor could diagnose. “We got to know the Baton Rouge health system quite well,” Rhesa said. He wasn’t so sick that he needed to be hospitalized, but that meant it fell on Rhesa and her mother to care for him. A husband working in New Orleans all week added to the stress.

The first time Rhesa saw their old house in the Lake Forest Estates subdivision was in the spring of 2006. One visit was all she needed to make up her mind. “She told me she didn’t want go back. Ever,” McDonald said. The home sat untouched while husband and wife talked over their options. The green dot over the East had been replaced by a giant question mark. Many of their friends and neighbors had given up on the community, if not New Orleans. “We truly didn’t know what we were going to do,” Rhesa said. Complicating their decision was Rhesa’s commitment to caring for her parents. For everyone’s sake, they would need to find a home with two master bedrooms.

Rhesa thought about remaining in Baton Rouge. “My mom and I started to like it there,” she said. “We thought, ‘There’s some very nice areas there, we might as well stay.’ ” Her father was the one who insisted they move back to New Orleans. A friend came up with the solution when she suggested they consider the Park Island house where Rhesa’s parents had lived since 1989. Park Island offered them waterfront property on the Bayou St. John, yet in Gentilly and therefore closer to town than New Orleans East. Why not use their insurance settlement to turn Park Island into the home they were looking for? An architect drew up
plans that added a second bedroom suite downstairs without any structural changes, and the decision was made: the McDonalds would move to Park Island, across the street from the Nagins.

McDonald arranged for the construction on the front end of the project. Rhesa handled most everything else. “I’m driving back and forth from Baton Rouge constantly,” Rhesa said. The renovations would take more than two years—too long for Revius Ortique. He suffered a stroke in June 2008 and died several days later, at age eighty-four. Five months later, in November of that year, more than three years after Katrina, the McDonalds moved back to New Orleans. The RV that had been Alden McDonald’s temporary home in New Orleans all those months he donated to a local religious order that worked with wayward youth.

A FAVORITE STORY RHESA
tells about her husband dates back to a time before children and the big house in Lake Forest Estates. On vacation in the Bahamas, they had been looking forward to a romantic dinner but were disappointed to find a long line of people ahead of them. She next spots her husband, the bank president, a serving tray in hand, busing tables. A horrified Rhesa, the princess who grew up with her own private bathroom, almost shrieked, “What are you
doing
?” Matter-of-factly, McDonald told her, “They’re shorthanded. And I figured if we’re ever going to get a table, I need to help out.”

Friends and peers who knew him well offered the same clichés about McDonald. He was a doer. If anyone could save Liberty, they said, it was Alden McDonald. By 2008, he was making a believer of people in the wider world.
Fortune
magazine included McDonald on its “Portraits of Power” list. Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the FDIC, named him to a task force she created to find alternatives to check cashers, payday lenders, and other fringe financial institutions feasting on the working poor. In the pages of the
American Banker
, he was the “high-energy CEO” who had pulled off a miracle. Liberty booked $3.6 million in profits in 2007—nearly twice what it earned in 2004, the last full year before Katrina. “I wasn’t sure Liberty was going to
make it, but within a couple of years, we’re more profitable than ever,” said board chairman Norman Francis. “That was Alden’s crowning glory.”

Pre-Katrina, Liberty had eight branches in New Orleans. Three years later it would still have just five. Fewer people in the eastern half of New Orleans meant fewer customers, but McDonald found new business. He hired specialists who would allow him to take advantage of federal programs that gave big tax breaks on investments in low- and moderate-income communities. Liberty bought a mortgage company in Baton Rouge and another in Houston and purchased land in Jackson to build a third branch there. At the start of 2008, McDonald bought a three-branch, black-owned bank in Kansas City. It hadn’t been long ago that skeptical regulators seemed convinced Liberty would need to find a larger suitor to survive. Yet those same regulators came to him in 2008 as a potential buyer for the troubled Douglass Bank in Kansas City. There would be more feelers from regulators in 2008 as subprime loans took down the global economy, causing more bank failures.