Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina eviscerated New Orleans and brought the nation to a standstill. Now, with only half its population back, crime at devastating levels, and rebuilding funds tied up in red tape, the city is still struggling to imagine itself as something other than a victim. Ask the Mayor of New Orleans, C. RAY NAGIN, about what it's like to drown. Even after the hurricane is long gone.
This is a transcendent time to be in New Orleans. Something powerful is growing here, shaped by the life-or-death struggle to survive and rebuild. It's reminiscent of New York City in the 1970s, or Havana in the '90s: creativity amid chaos - with live music.
In September 2005, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. There were dead bodies in the streets and houses. The city had "enough debris to fill the Superdome 10 times over," says Ceeon Quiett, Mayor C. Ray Nagin's director of communications, but it only had three working garbage trucks. "The police cars - gone, floated away. The uniforms - gone." Three hundred seventy-four city buildings were severely damaged or destroyed, among them the courthouse, so the criminal justice system was paralyzed. Vast parts of town were blacked out, with the electrical utility bankrupt. Three thousand city employees were gone. Low water pressure meant buildings that caught fire burned to the ground. The finances of the city, and the personal finances of most of its residents, were devastated - and all this at once.
Though the slowness of the return is agonizing, today much of New Orleans is up and running. Stoplights are working. People are coming home. You can feel the city regenerating, its nerves reattaching. The port is at 100 percent of pre-Katrina business. Tourism was strong for February's Mardi Gras and for the Jazz & Heritage Festival in April and May. The Saints had a strong, some say magical, season. Says Vera Warren-Williams, owner of the legendary, recently reopened black bookstore Community Book Center: "We've got to come back. There's no other option."
But things are not all right. The whole city has post-traumatic stress. Trust in government is, understandably, shattered. People are angry, frustrated, shell-shocked. A spectacular string of murders over a period of months has the city rattled. There's a serious housing shortage. People are living in Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) trailers —17,490 of them — that will blow around like tin cans if high winds come. An unknown number of squatters live in blighted houses. Too many families don't have the resources to come home. The city's back up to about 55 percent of its former population, but much of the black working class remains in exile. Republican partisans, both nationally and in Louisiana, have blocked measures that might bring the black New Orleans voting bloc back.
Protecting New Orleans with levees is the legal responsibility of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and they failed to do it. Now the same federal government that failed to protect the city has failed to pony up. "We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President George W. Bush promised in a September 2005 speech in the French Quarter's Jackson Square. But the feds haven't come through. FEMA owes the city more than a billion dollars. The main state program for disbursing $6.8 billion in federal funds to individual homeowners - the Road Home, it's called - has been appallingly slow at paying out, retarding the city's redevelopment. At the same time, there have been rumblings at the federal level about how the state has handled federal dollars slated for other recovery projects. That fiasco closed out the political career of Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, who, this spring, announced she would not seek reelection. One year into his second term, Mayor C. Ray Nagin doesn't seem to have the public's confidence. But then, people in New Orleans don't have good things to say about any politician these days.
Nagin's team has a $1.1 billion rebuilding plan for the city. What they don't have is the $1.1 billion. But they're determined to get it. Nagin, a native New Orleanian and lifelong Democrat (despite rumors to the contrary), became an internationally visible figure when the city flooded in 2005. Before running for mayor in 2002, he was a communications executive, not a politician. Despite Louisiana's historical reputation for a culture of corruption, no one alleges that Nagin's administration is corrupt. He's had no scandals. But the slow pace of recovery, though mostly due to forces beyond a mayor's control, makes him look incompetent. Many New Orleanians speak of him as missing in action, while the media tends to portray him as a loose cannon.
But during an afternoon interview in early May, Nagin came across as knowledgeable, hard-working, and engaged. He arrived a few minutes late, because he'd gone to lunch with former Vice President Al Gore. They talked, Nagin said, about how to rebuild New Orleans as "one of the greenest cities in America." Nagin makes strong eye contact, and the melody of his speech identifies him as a New Orleans Creole. He's fast with answers, but doesn't recite talking points. Nagin seems relaxed, but you'd never call him laid-back. He gives the sense that he paces himself carefully through a very long day - every day.
The weather was gorgeous, and hundreds of thousands of people were getting their Jazzfest on that week, but the mayor's team wasn't partying. They were in the fluorescent zone, focused on the nuts and bolts of policy, plans, and procedure, doing the unglamorous, mind-numbingly complicated work of government to get their city on its feet. "This isn't a job," said Ceeon Quiett. "This is a mission."
Meanwhile, hurricane season is coming. The water's warm this year.
VIBE: What do you feel was promised in Bush's Jackson Square speech? What do you feel has yet to be delivered?
Nagin: I heard a pretty specific promise that New Orleans was important to the nation. And the President was offering that the country was going to do whatever it took to help New Orleans to be rebuilt - bigger, better, and stronger. And you know, I think we're moving toward that. It's just moving so slowly. I think if you compare the resources that have flowed to Louisiana versus the resources that have flowed to Mississippi, he's still got a lot of work to do.
What do you want people to know about the situation now?
The big thing I want people to know is that when they talk about $100 billion being spent on the Gulf Coast, most of that was spent on debris removal, and repairing the levees, and the troops that were here, and food after the storm. Very little of that money has gotten to the city of New Orleans and the other cities like it.
We have a billion and a half dollars worth of infrastructural repairs that the federal government is required to do, that they haven't reimbursed us for. We're supposed to get 3.9 billion of the Road Home dollars for our homeowners to repair their homes, and that money has not flown. I think they've only issued about 7 percent of the checks.
Why?
Number one, political will. [Number two,] I think there's a certain amount of incompetency. And thirdly, they're trying to set up some bureaucracies from scratch to handle an overwhelming challenge when - with the Road Home, for example - just using the financial institutions, the banks, would have expedited the money. The way the money flows is from the feds to the state, and then hopefully to us. There's a billion and a half dollars that is pending, and it's just . . . frustrating to go through all the bureaucracy. What we're trying to do now is get Congress to pass some legislation to allow us to get the money directly.
What are some of the other obstacles right now?
Our infrastructure. Trying to get the streets repaired, trying to get the sewage and water system repaired. We just got all our traffic lights up and streetlights, so the challenge of finding the funding necessary to get that done - that's why we went to Wall Street. We're now borrowing money from the bond markets to get a lot of this done, in anticipation that at some point the federal and state dollars will flow.
The city's budget is borrowed at the moment, is that right?
A big chunk of it is borrowed - the community disaster loans. Probably at the end of the day, we'll owe the federal government a little over $200 million.
What isn't under the Mayor's control? The city's schools are controlled by the state, right?
One misperception people have is that the Mayor of New Orleans controls all these various entities. The school system is controlled by the state. A lot of the dollars that flow from the federal government are controlled by the state. Superdome, City Park, Riverfront, you name it - a lot of the critical assets are controlled by the state.
What can you do?
We have a responsibility to deliver critical services, so we're going to other sources to get the money we need to stand the city up. Besides being mayor, I can use the high profile that this event has afforded me. I can go anywhere in the state and get a message out. I can go anywhere around the country and get a message out. So I advocate all the time for this city. I can meet with any congressional leader on both sides of the aisle. I can get into the White House. I have a bully pulpit, and when we do get our hands on a few dollars, we try and stretch them to the max. We have some federal dollars, and the Road Home program was moving so slow, we took 10, 12 million dollars and leveraged it into $55 million to put together a loan program with no interest to our citizens. Those are the types of things we can do when we get resources.
What's the No.1 priority in terms of getting New Orleans back together?
Housing. If we can continue to improve the [amount of] housing stock that's available, whether it be home ownership or whether it be apartments, then the rest will take care of itself.
How confident are we this summer about the levees?
If another Katrina came the same route, we probably wouldn't experience the same kind of flooding we had last time. Those levees have been repaired. The problem is that the entire system that covers the metropolitan area is not up to those same standards, so we do have some weak points in the levee systems. A different route by a different storm could create some problems for us.
What's happening with wetland restoration, which is critical for protecting the city from storm surge?
There's not a lot of clarity. Levee protection is one thing, but that coastal barrier or support system is huge for us as we try and fight another Katrina. Congress has allocated some dollars, but there's really no master plan. We're gonna try and push for a master plan that the state can adopt. It's critical for us.
It's easy to see people are stressed out here. What's the prognosis for getting more mental health professionals?
It's very challenging right now. Our community has very little in the way of formal techniques and resources to deal with the post-traumatic stress. There are very few mental health beds out there, very few psychiatrists and psychologists in the community. So there are lots of people walking around that have issues that we're trying to deal with. Unfortunately, the best place for them right now as far as mental health professionals is probably in the parish jail, which is not good. It's going to take the state and the feds providing us with some assistance, because we don't have the resources to do it ourselves.
The dispersal of so much of the African-American community of New Orleans has upset the political balance of the state.
New Orleans is still dispersed. We only have about 54 to 55 percent of our population back, and it was a huge voting bloc that propelled a lot of people into office. We'll see if it changes this time - we're going to find out this fall with the governor's race. All the state legislators are up, and all the other state elected officials.
So there's a certain Republican motivation not to have people come back?
Well, there's always this . . . red state / blue state debate. And now the front-runner for governor is a Republican, so a lot of people are talking about that.
Thinking about what kind of city New Orleans is going to be, and who's going to be living in it, how is bulldozing the Lafitte projects [a mostly undamaged public-housing complex on a large chunk of desirable real estate that's been padlocked by the feds since Katrina, with Nagin's approval] anything but a land grab?
Prior to Katrina, a lot of the housing developments were substandard, and people were suffering as a result. Post-Katrina, there was lots of talk initially after the storm that "this may be the opportunity to change some things and not have as many poor people in New Orleans." In the midst of all this talk, I think, racial tensions got really high, trust went down the tubes, and now we're faced with a lawsuit that is stopping some major redevelopment of four major public-housing projects, including Lafitte. As far as a "land grab" is concerned, it's still going to be owned by the government. It's projected to be a mixed-income community, with a lot of different people coming back. Everyone who was living in the Lafitte will now have the opportunity of moving back or living in that neighborhood.
But River Garden [the "mixed-income" redevelopment of the former St. Thomas project] was supposed to have that kind of promise too, and it didn't really come through.
[Lafitte and] River Garden are like apples and oranges. That was definitely a broken promise, and lots of people were disappointed. This is different. You've got neighborhood groups involved in the development of Lafitte. You have churches involved that are absolutely committed, and the city has awarded 192 properties to the developers to make sure that they offer a lot of those residents home-ownership opportunities.
So you're saying that if those projects go down, the people who lived there before are going to get a chance to live there again?
That's the only way I would think about supporting it, is that everyone had the right to return. And what I'm understanding now is, it's gonna be a phased demolition and redevelopment and not a total demolition.
A lot of people feel like you're missing in action since you got re-elected.
There's a lot of fear in the community. Certain segments of the media have perpetuated this thing about, "I'm traveling too much, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that." I continue to do my media appearances. I continue to be out in the community, doing…meetings, whether they be district meetings or individual meetings in people's homes. I will continue to try and work hard. But I think a lot of people expect instant results. It's going to take us some time to get back to what they were accustomed to.
Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Many people around the country still think that there's water in the streets in New Orleans and all sorts of toxic stuff, and that's just not the case. For the most part, the downtown areas and the places the people would visit are doing fine and are back up and operational. People from all around the country should come and see this city for themselves. And then venture out and go see some of the devastated areas where people are trying to rebuild their lives. They'll get a true appreciation for the scope of this challenge.
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