Katrina: After the Flood (33 page)

People were getting testy. Participants vied to be heard. More than three hours into the meeting, someone mentioned the renters: nearly seventy thousand rentals had been ruined by Katrina, but their plan did not provide any help for tenants. At that, one person threw up his arms; another ostentatiously rolled her eyes. A suggestion that the committee go on record as demanding that the Baker bill provide people with 100 percent compensation for damaged properties rather than 60 percent evoked a similar reaction.

Near 5:00 p.m., Reed Kroloff asked about building permits in the hardest-hit areas. It was one thing to discourage rather than forbid people from rebuilding during planning, but it seemed crazy to have the city sanction projects with permits. But Canizaro, who had several times mentioned the late hour, was out of time: “My wife’s going to kill me if I don’t get home.” He told Curtis to get the car and be ready for him downstairs. He and Sue Ellen had dinner plans.

KROLOFF’S PERMIT QUESTION GNAWED
at Canizaro all that night and through church the next morning. It was the first thing the sixty-four-year-old Canizaro mentioned after greeting an out-of-town reporter he had invited to lunch. Canizaro drove his late-model, silver Lexus to Andrea’s, a favorite restaurant in Metairie. His wife sat with him in the front seat, the church pastor and the reporter in the back. “We issue permits, we’re telling them it’s okay to rebuild when we’re still not sure,” Canizaro said. The restaurant was only a few minutes away but he was already laying out the dilemma. He confessed he hadn’t considered the question until Kroloff raised it—yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Lunch meant more unanswered questions. The federal government had yet to issue the flood-elevation maps that might require people to raise their homes. Would insurance carriers even issue policies in the flooded areas? What about the homeowners halfway through rebuilding when they learn their block is being reverted to open space? “It’s amazing to me, the issues I hadn’t thought of until now,” he said.

THE FRONT-PAGE HEADLINE OF
the
Times-Picayune
ensured a big crowd at the Sheraton that Wednesday: “FOUR MONTHS TO DECIDE.” Several subheadlines followed. In red ink, the paper declared, “Nagin Panel Says Hardest-Hit Areas Must Prove Viability,” and below that, in bold lettering, “Full Buyouts Proposed for Those Forced to Move.” But people mostly remembered the large, four-color map of the city on the front page. An obscure graphic in the PowerPoint deck John Beckman had prepared (“I must have had two weeks of twenty-hour days,” he said) used dotted black circles to show that communities lacking in parks would benefit from additional greenspace. The circles were “large to indicate that we have not identified properties,” Beckman wrote. “Those will be determined with citizen involvement.” But that fine print didn’t make the newspaper. Instead, enormous green dots sat over New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward,
^I
above a caption that read, “Approximate areas expected to become parks.” More than one thousand people had jammed a giant Sheraton ballroom by the time the fire marshals declared that they would not let any more people inside. Members of the City Council held a press conference elsewhere in the hotel to denounce the proposal before it had even been introduced.

“This is a process,” Nagin said in his introductory remarks. “This is a journey.” The mayor, who, Canizaro said, had “signed off” on his plan at Mel Lagarde’s house on Monday, spoke as if this moment were a mere stop along the way. Lagarde also said a few words, but the day belonged to Canizaro, who looked resplendent in a dark suit and red
tie. “It’s impossible to plan a city in three months, but we’ve tried,” Canizaro said. He introduced Beckman, who asked people to imagine a New Orleans with a lot more greenspace and also light-rail lines crisscrossing it. The plan would remake commercial corridors and stressed the need for a stronger storm-protection system and called for coastal restoration. “New Orleans will be a sustainable, environmentally safe, socially equitable community with a vibrant economy,” Beckman said. He reminded people that George Bush was scheduled to visit the city the next day. The president had asked New Orleans for a workable, realistic plan that he could fund. This plan, Beckman implied, was the city’s shot at forcing Bush to make good on his promises.

Those in attendance, however, seemed only interested in what the Bring New Orleans Back Commission might be saying about their community. They were incensed mainly about Canizaro’s call for a 120-day moratorium on all new city permits. All around the city people were tired of fighting FEMA and battling insurance adjusters. Now the city was proposing another roadblock to recovery. “Please let us build our own homes,” pleaded a Lakeview homeowner named Charles Young. “Let us spend our insurance money, which we paid for on our own.”

“This is a big, audacious plan put together by obviously brilliant people,” said Freddy Yoder, the FEMA contractor on the board of the Lakeview Civic Association during his turn at the mike. “But you missed the boat. We don’t need a rail system. We need housing.”

Those were among the day’s more measured comments. Harvey Bender, a laid-off city worker from New Orleans East, opened his remarks saying, “I don’t know you, Joe Canizaro, but I hate you.” He then threatened to “suit up like I’m going to Iraq and fight this.” Mtangulizi Sanyika, a professor of African World Studies at Dillard University, represented a group called the African American Leadership Project. He accused the mayor of taking part in a “Katrina cleansing” that would let the city’s moneyed interests steal African-American lands. Carolyn Parker, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, was more succinct. “Over my dead body,” she told the commissioners. Another speaker decried a plan that would turn “black people’s neighborhoods into white people’s parks.”

Canizaro defended his plan. He reminded people of how much of
themselves they would be giving and how much of their hard-earned money they would be spending with no guarantee that their neighbors would return. “The city may not be able to provide services if you’re stuck out there by yourselves,” he said. But Canizaro had lost the room even before the lights were dimmed. “Telling people they can’t rebuild for four months is tantamount to saying they can’t ever come back,” said former mayor Marc Morial when it was his turn at a microphone. “It’s telling people who have lost almost everything that we’re going to take the last vestige of what they own.”

If the vast majority of those at the Sheraton that day thought the Bring New Orleans Back Commission had overstepped its mandate, some living in the high-ground neighborhoods felt that Canizaro had not gone nearly far enough. The reaction of John Kallenborn, the head of Louisiana operations for JPMorgan Chase, was typical. To him a four-month time-out while everyone talked more was nothing but a way of postponing the inevitable. Kallenborn, who had been on the mayor’s short list for the commission (he was removed to make room for a black member), pointed to Scott Cowen, who as Tulane president had laid off more than two hundred faculty members and eliminated several academic departments. Cowen was getting grief from alumni, but he was also confronting an estimated $200 million in losses. The city, by contrast, Kallenborn said, was offering Canizaro’s “crazy, halfway ideas that please no one.”

Janet Howard, another Uptown fixture, agreed: “There are some very tough decisions that have to be made here, and no one relishes making them.” Howard, a former corporate lawyer, had reinvented herself as a government policy expert. “But to say that people should invest their money and invest their energies and put all their hope into rebuilding, and then we’ll reevaluate in a year, that’s no plan at all.”

LARGE CROWDS MILLED AROUND
after the big meeting at the Sheraton. Canizaro would have been excused if he had escaped via a side door, but instead he headed into the audience. He was intent on finding Harvey Bender, the man who had gotten so personal when voicing his anger over the rebuilding plan. Bender had pointed an accusatory finger
at Canizaro and bellowed, “You’ve been in the background scheming to take our land!” Early on, Canizaro had vowed to buy no real estate or take part in any new developments—to avoid the kind of charges Bender had just made. “I wanted to set the record straight,” Canizaro said. “I wanted him to know I wasn’t going to make a dime off any of this.”

Bender was shocked when Canizaro asked for a minute of his time. Bender had attended some of the New Orleans East meetings that the Wall sisters had helped to put together in Baton Rouge. There, Canizaro was the bogeyman, the rich developer who had brought the ULI to town as a first step toward taking their land. A few days later, Bender was sitting on a silk couch in the corner of Canizaro’s office. When Canizaro invited him to stop by, Bender asked if he could bring a few allies, but he ended up coming alone.

“He just wanted to hear my ideas for what we should do,” Bender said. “My thing was that people had no idea what was going on. One day we’re hearing we’re rebuilding the whole city, the next people are talking about taking our homes. I just wanted to make sure everyone had the right to make up their own mind.”

RAY NAGIN WAS NONCOMMITTAL.
Talking to a gaggle of reporters as he left the Sheraton ballroom, he stressed that they were just at the proposal stage, but also added, “The realities are that we have limited resources to redevelop our city.” The following day, Nagin met with the president. There were no alcohol-free beers or late-night cigars this time, only a brief tour through the parts of the city that had remained dry. “The contrast between when I was last here and today . . . is pretty dramatic,” Bush said. “It’s a heck of a place to bring your family.”

Nagin seemed to endorse the Canizaro plan at a public hearing the following day when he said, “It’s the way we’re going to go, with some tweaks.” Reporters assumed he meant dropping the idea of a temporary moratorium on permits. But then the mayor sat down with David White, the friend he had given a spot on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. “I told him that from a planning standpoint, it probably made a lot of sense,” White said. “But from a human standpoint, it made
no sense at all.” There were also the politics to consider. “A lot of people in the black community were looking at the first property they ever had in their family,” White said. And with the mayor’s race only a few months away, White counseled, “It sounded like the government was talking about taking that property away.” One week after declaring his support for Canizaro’s plan, Nagin announced that one of his “tweaks” would be his opposition to any proposal that limited people’s choice to rebuild wherever they chose.

“I’m a property-rights person,” Nagin said. “I have confidence that our citizens can decide intelligently for themselves where they want to rebuild.” Anyone wanting a building permit, he said, was welcome to stop by City Hall to pick one up.

CANIZARO’S URBAN PLANNING REPORT
had only been the first in a series of presentations the commission was unveiling that month. The education committee, headed by Scott Cowen, called for more autonomy for individual schools and greater accountability. The commission’s government effectiveness committee endorsed the idea of consolidating the city’s seven elected property assessors into a single office. Its economic-development committee stressed the need for the city to revive its port, by modernizing and pursuing new business. By then, though, no one seemed to be listening.

Despite the mayor’s words, Canizaro was acting as if his plan had Nagin’s full blessing. He announced that Ray Manning and Reed Kroloff would be heading up the neighborhood planning process that his committee had recommended. Neighborhoods would start meeting by February 20; by March 20 they would need to have a list of residents committed to returning. By May 20 the buyouts would begin. Kroloff and Manning identified a dozen teams of experts and even worked up a budget of between $6 million and $8 million. Apparently, a FEMA official speaking without authorization promised Canizaro and others that the agency was good for the money but then his replacement said that funding such an effort was forbidden under the law.

In February, the City Council decided to hire its own planning team. Their experts would help people rebuild rather than make up their
minds. The council used $3 million in community development funds to hire the technical consultants needed to make their plan a reality. Meanwhile, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, unlike the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, had the statutory authority to approve or disapprove projects that the federal government would be funding through the state. Sean Reilly, a two-term state legislator who had made a fortune in his family’s outdoor-advertising business, was the most outspoken of the LRA’s members. “Someone has to be tough, to stand up and to tell the truth,” Reilly said. “Every neighborhood in New Orleans will not be able to come back safe.”

People were upset when two weeks after Canizaro’s presentation, the president devoted only 160 words in his State of the Union speech to what some were calling the biggest disaster in US history and failed to mention New Orleans. But then, the mayor had promised Bush a blueprint for rebuilding by the end of December. Here it was the end of January and the federal government still didn’t have a plan to act on.

Nagin meant it when he said he would not stand in the way of anyone wanting a building permit, no matter where in the city he or she lived. “People want permits to let them rebuild, let’s give ’em permits,” he told Greg Meffert, whose portfolio included the city’s Department of Safety and Permits. Meffert shifted extra inspectors and other employees to the eighth-floor permits office. He reprogrammed the touch-screen kiosks the city had installed pre-Katrina and set them up in a large, open room at the end of a hallway. Roving “greeters” were assigned to help people in the fashion of airline agents working the check-in machines at airports. Others talked to people waiting on a line that on some days reached out the door to Poydras. “We’d literally see thousands of people in a week,” Meffert said.