Katrina: After the Flood (60 page)

“It took a Katrina to finally turn things around,” he said.

For nearly a decade, Kabacoff had been peddling an ambitious plan to reshape the historic center of New Orleans. It was about building on your assets, he told anyone willing to listen. The French Quarter and the Marigny were thriving, but what about the Bywater, a riverfront neighborhood sitting between the Marigny and the Lower Ninth Ward? Or Tremé, which bordered the French Quarter and stood out as another old New Orleans neighborhood in desperate need of redevelopment. Two new hospitals were going up in lower Mid-City, another neglected black
community. The hospital complex “looked like a little bit of Houston in the middle of New Orleans,” said columnist Stephanie Grace (first of the
Times-Picayune
, then the
Advocate
). But the new jobs would mean a boost in the median income and more retail, especially with the demolition of Iberville, one of the Big Four public housing projects. “We could use a little gentrification in this town,” Kabacoff said.

Nagin had nodded his head and done nothing whenever Kabacoff talked about his ideas, but the Landrieu transition team invited him to cochair its housing task force. That experience prompted him to lay out his vision in a long essay. “A Return to Splendor,” he called his magnum opus—and, not for the first time, was criticized by some within the black community. “People can be very touchy about race around here,” he offered.

Kabacoff felt he had done his penance long before Katrina. In the 1990s, his bête noire was Barbara Major. The two clashed over his proposal to tear down a sizable housing project occupying prime real estate in the lower Garden District near the river. His plan had him displacing hundreds of residents to build a mixed-income development he had dubbed the River Garden Apartments. “My penalty was to go to one of her ‘enduring racism’ seminars,” he said. “I brought my entire team and we all sang ‘Kumbaya.’ ” He was pleased to report that, post-Katrina, there wasn’t the same pressure on developers to kowtow to the locals. The Big Four were being demolished in stages, so vestiges were still standing, yet any residual anger was directed at the City Council and federal government, not the private developers like himself who were profiting from the decision. Each of the Big Four was being replaced by faux town houses that called to mind nothing so much as River Garden. Kabacoff was a partner in the makeover of the giant Iberville project, but largely his firm was focused on housing conversion projects in the historic riverfront neighborhoods. “There’s a lot of juice flowing through New Orleans after Katrina,” Kabacoff said, and he was intent on using any available pot of federal money to see through a vision he had been touting for the past decade. “The good news for New Orleans is that people like me, people with capacity, we stepped up,” he said. “We didn’t give up on New Orleans.”

Kabacoff preferred to see himself as a visionary and ponytailed iconoclast rather than one of the city’s wealthier developers. His girlfriend, Sallie Ann Glassman, described herself as a voodoo priestess, an artist,
and a social-justice activist. “Exotic,” the
Times-Picayune
said of the two-story home the couple built in Bywater and filled with art. They purchased a vacant furniture store nearby and renamed it the Healing Center. They painted the facade orange and leased space to an organic restaurant, an art gallery, a co-op grocery, and a yoga studio. Artists and young people moved into Bywater. Restaurants opened along with cafés, clubs, and other businesses catering to the community’s newest residents. A neighborhood that had been slowly gentrifying prior to Katrina now felt enough like parts of Brooklyn that some were calling Bywater “the Williamsburg of the South.”

How could he not feel optimistic? Kabacoff asked. Sitting in an office filled with African and Asian art and wearing Native American jewelry, he spoke of the hospital complex and its potential to remake what he had long viewed as a forlorn edge of downtown. Neglected landmarks such as the Saenger and Mahalia Jackson Theaters had been refurbished, and the storm had galvanized support in Baton Rouge around long-sought reforms such as the merger of the area’s levee boards and a consolidation of the city’s seven assessor offices. A revamped education system had everyone he knew feeling hopeful about the parish schools for the first time in at least a generation. Creativity and energy were transforming Bywater and also Tremé and Mid-City, another older part of town going through similar changes. “The city has never looked better,” Kabacoff declared.

He was not alone in that view. “New Orleans is such a better place than it was pre-Katrina,” Bill Hines, the lawyer once so close to Nagin, declared several years into Landrieu’s tenure. Over dinner at a favorite Uptown white-tablecloth restaurant, he, too, spoke of the strides made by the city’s underperforming schools and the demolition of the projects. His law firm had doubled in size since the storm, and his happy ending—new furniture in a refurbished home—seemed an apt metaphor for New Orleans. A decaying city that had been crumbling for decades was enjoying a massive makeover courtesy of FEMA and HUD. Tourists were spending at record levels, and the city’s convention business was strong. “New Orleans is a very hot property,” Hines said. As proof he mentioned a recent news story putting Louisiana ahead of New York and second only to California in film productions. “I’m seeing before my eyes the rebirth of New Orleans.”

Hines would get no argument from Michael Hecht, white, the CEO of Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic-development nonprofit. On the twenty-third floor of Canal Place, in an office overlooking the Mississippi, Hecht expressed concern for a “fragile black middle class” (Hines shared the same worry). But eight years after Katrina, Hecht, a post-Katrina transplant, declared the city to be in the midst of an economic renaissance. Where pre-storm New Orleans was a town growing increasingly reliant on tourism, he said, the city had invested in a giant biomedical center that promised a shift toward better-paying jobs. The tech scene that he and others had helped midwife had prompted the
Atlantic
to declare New Orleans a “start-up city.”
Forbes
listed New Orleans second in its 2011 “Best Cities for Jobs” feature, and the next year
Travel + Leisure
ranked New Orleans first in its annual list of “America’s top cities.” The latest census figures showed that the city was attracting another four-thousand-plus people each year, most of them presumably the smart, young artsy types the editors of
Forbes
had in mind when they declared New Orleans “Number One Brain Magnet in the US.” New Orleans, Hecht declared, “is one of the great comeback stories of all time.”

Even Ted Quant, an ally of Lance Hill’s who cofounded the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University, saw great improvements in the city that had been his home since 1970. Quant, who is black, occasionally visited Pres Kabacoff’s Healing Center. “There’s live music, a grocery store with great produce, a theater,” Quant said. “What’s there not to like about a place like that?” Personally, he had no complaints. He had money in the bank and found plenty of places to go when he and his wife wanted to enjoy a night out on the town. He counted himself among those dubious that the charter-school experiment would save the next generation of students, but his kids were already grown. His primary worry was for all those people working minimum-wage jobs who could no longer afford the rent. “The city does look good,” Quant said. “But for whom?”

VIOLENT CRIME OCCURRED AT
twice the national rate eight years after Katrina, even though New Orleans was a smaller, whiter city. New Orleans was also a less affordable city, the Greater New Orleans
Community Data Center reported shortly before the eighth anniversary of Katrina. Despite the economic renaissance, more than half the city’s renters were still spending at least a third of their pretax income on housing, and the employment among working-aged black men had ticked up a mere two points, from 46 percent to 48 percent. The average education level among both blacks and whites had increased post-Katrina, yet the city’s poverty rate was 29 percent in 1999 and still 29 percent when in 2013 the Data Center released its “New Orleans Index at Eight.” The Bloomberg wire service found that inequality was greater in New Orleans than any other US city except Atlanta. The disparity between rich and poor in New Orleans put the city on par with Zambia.

The remaking of public housing in New Orleans was near complete eight years after Katrina. It represented another audacious experiment watched by researchers around the country. Only one-third of the units overseen by the Housing Authority of New Orleans would house low-income residents. Another third had been set aside for moderate-income locals, which, after lobbying by Kabacoff and others, was increased from 60 percent of the area median income to 120 percent, or $71,000 for a family of four. The last third were reserved for market-rate rentals. Financing proved difficult after the collapse of the global credit markets in 2008, but Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffett, and hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson were among those funding this privatized “public” housing. The federal government chipped in an additional $18 million in FEMA dollars to pay the construction costs. Millions more in precious community development funds were also used.

New Orleans, which had fourteen thousand public housing units in the 1990s, now had fewer than three thousand low-income apartments. The federal overseer the Obama administration sent to run the Housing Authority of New Orleans was issuing more rental vouchers than in the past, but participation by landlords in the Section 8 program had dropped steeply post-Katrina. At the eight-year mark, the city had thirteen thousand people on its voucher waiting list and another three thousand families waiting for traditional public housing.

The RTA was still running only half the number of bus lines as before Katrina. Those who couldn’t afford a car in a city in which one in every three people earned under $20,000 a year faced much longer
waits for the buses that did run. Before Katrina, a bus on the Galvez line, which connects the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards to the rest of the city, ran every seven minutes during peak ridership hours, said Mitchell L. Guidry Jr., the RTA’s director of planning. Eight years after Katrina, a bus ran every forty minutes. The city’s streetcar lines also suffered from tight funding. Where once twenty cars ran on St. Charles during the commute hours, now there were eight. The typical wait was now fifteen minutes rather than five.

Nearly 80 percent of the city’s public school students were attending a charter school eight years after Katrina. Articles reported on the New Orleans schools miracle, and counter-articles exposed such claims as a myth. In 2013, Oprah Winfrey’s production company debuted
Blackboard Wars
, a series about a failing New Orleans school and the high-profile charter champion determined to prove his method can work in any environement. Less than a year later, abysmal test scores and falling enrollments caused the school to shut its doors.

“This is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest,” Arne Duncan, US education secretary, offered around the fifth anniversary of Katrina. “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.” Parent advocate Karran Harper Royal was among those offended by the remark and also baffled by it. Royal was a black woman who had for twenty years been fighting for better schools in New Orleans. More recently, she had started answering the complaint line for a group she was a part of called the Education Equity Roundtable. Some days she was receiving two or three calls from unhappy parents looking for the group’s help.

“If I had to choose, I’d vote to go back to the old system,” Royal said. “People needed stability after Katrina, but instead we got a system where schools are constantly opening and closing and you can never be sure where your child is going next year. There was a lot of dysfunction in the old days, but at least your children attended community schools. At least you knew the people and knew they cared.”

NEW ORLEANS COULD BOAST
of its beautiful new flood-protection system, but the gift came with a price tag. The Corps was transferring
responsibility for the levees in stages, and state and local officials were scrambling to find money to staff the pumping stations and pay for basic maintenance. That included the cost of occasionally raising the earthen levees to account for rising water levels and a sinking landscape. The levee boards had the authority to raise funds through property taxes, but any increase first had to be approved by a majority of voters in districts that covered several parishes.

The state’s receding coastline was another worry. The federal government had spent multiple billions on a storm system with a built-in obsolescence if the wetlands continued to disappear. Between 1932 and 2010, according to the Data Center, the New Orleans region lost 948 square miles of coastal wetlands—nearly one-third of the marshland that served as a natural defense against storm surge. After Katrina, a new Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority was formed. Eventually, the legislature approved a $50 billion, fifty-year coastal restoration master plan. State and federal dollars would be used to fund the hundred-plus projects the state’s master plan identified to help Louisiana recover and protect its coastal lands. But even including fines related to the BP oil spill, the state had raised less than $3 billion by early 2015.

One of the regional flood-protection districts saw an obvious way to fund some of the work: make the people who helped cause the problem pay to help fix it. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East, or Slfpa-E, voted unanimously to file suit against nearly a hundred oil and gas companies. Their industry carved up the southeastern Louisiana marshes, the suit argued, accelerating the loss of the wetlands and making New Orleans more prone to flooding. So why shouldn’t the gas and oil interests pay to help correct the problem? “This protective buffer took six thousand years to form,” wrote John M. Barry, the author and historian who served as the board’s vice chair. “Yet . . . it has been brought to the brink of destruction in a lifetime.”