Katrina: After the Flood (61 page)

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“GET OVER IT”

Alden McDonald saw virtue in a city thrumming with young energy—Brooklyn on the bayou. He and Rhesa even signed up for 504 (named after the New Orleans area code), a new program in which volunteers hosted dinners for newcomers wanting to feel more rooted in their adopted city. The McDonalds would feed a dozen or so people at a time in the hopes of teaching them something about New Orleans and maybe even inspiring them to get more involved in their community. “We could use all the help we could get,” McDonald said.

McDonald was as big a cheerleader for the makeover of public housing in New Orleans as Pres Kabacoff or Bill Hines. The tours he offered interested out-of-towners now included Columbia Parc, the new development near his home, built in place of the old St. Bernard complex. “It’s one of the bright spots to come out of this thing,” McDonald said. The first shock was physical: twenty or so blocks of dreary brick tenements had been replaced by rows of brightly painted town houses, complete with wrought-iron balconies, along with the occasional low-rise Creole cottage mixed in. Columbia Parc could accept only around one-third of St. Bernard’s former residents, but McDonald focused on families
fortunate enough to secure a replacement unit. Each apartment was outfitted with a washer-dryer. Granite countertops were standard, as were stainless-steel appliances and faux-hardwood floors. An early-learning center, a computer room, a swimming pool, a health club, and a movie theater were on-site. “This was a case of an agency taking the opportunity to build things the right way,” McDonald said.

Yet McDonald was not nearly as beamish about New Orleans’s future as his peers in the white community. He also brought visitors to Pontchartrain Park, only a couple of minutes from Columbia Parc. There, in this subdivision central to the rise of the black middle class in New Orleans, refurbished ranch homes abutted houses that seemed untouched since the storm. Eight years after Katrina, McDonald said, maybe 60 percent of the homes in Pontchartrain Park were habitable. Other parts of Gentilly—areas only a few blocks from his own home—were filled with moldy houses crumbling from neglect. “See all those vacant lots?” He pointed to an empty-looking street. “They were occupied pre-Katrina.” Driving around the nearby Seventh Ward proved equally disheartening. “There’s still so much to be done.” McDonald worried about a lack of urgency given all those who had declared victory over Katrina.

New Orleans East was faring better than Pontchartrain Park or the Seventh Ward. Estimates put the population at between 80 and 85 percent of its pre-Katrina numbers. A supermarket had finally opened six years after Katrina. A second opened a year or two later. Stores and eateries were leasing space in the strip malls, at least those located along the main roads. A beautiful new library had opened a few blocks from Liberty’s office. Schools were under construction around the East. Cassandra Wall’s sister Tangee, who had remained politically active, saw the revitalization of Joe W. Brown Memorial Park as critical. Rather than use FEMA dollars to simply restore this 163-acre park, the Landrieu administration sought partners in Nike, Allstate, and the Brees Dream Foundation to make it better. The park was now home to a regulation-size football field, a state-of-the-art track, tennis courts, an indoor pool, and a rec facility that hosted after-school programs aimed at teens. The city was also creating miles of walking and jogging trails in the area. Seven and a half years after Katrina, at the start of 2013, construction began on a new hospital at the site of the old Methodist facility.

Yet eight years after Katrina, New Orleans East hardly seemed a synecdoche for the “higher and better” New Orleans that George Bush was imagining in his Jackson Square speech two weeks after the storm. Locals were happy to see construction start on a new hospital. But where once the East had two hospitals, a single 80-bed facility was replacing a 181-bed institution. The new hospital would have no maternity ward. People were happy to have a couple of supermarkets, but the East had six prior to Katrina. An occupied storefront seemed better than an empty one, but now so many were filled by pawnbrokers, check cashers, and dollar-discount stores. “From the highway, we take on the look of a poor community when nothing could be further from the truth,” said Sylvia Scineaux-Richard, president of the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission (ENONAC).

Fewer low-rent complexes were along the I-10 than before the storm. Some had been converted to luxury apartments, and even those still filled with Section 8 tenants were upgraded to comply with new zoning rules championed by ENONAC (minimum square footage, a washer-dryer in each unit, a three-story height limit). Yet abandoned apartment buildings were still visible from the highway, as were the restaurants and big-box retailers that still hadn’t reopened. Walmart was returning to the East, but not the giant mall next to Liberty Bank or the movie theater in which McDonald had invested. Commercial strips a few blocks off the highway were still in shambles. Commercial properties in the worst shape—those whose owners failed to do basic maintenance such as mow the lawn or board up broken windows—were singled out by Tangee Wall and her allies during one of their “blight rallies.” Their targets included a hospice, a nursing home, and a pair of churches. “You’ll hear people say, ‘I thought this place would have been better a loooooonggg time ago,’ ” Wall said. “They’re giving up, leaving their home to the mortgage company and starting over somewhere else.”

Some subdivisions in the East had few empty homes. But others still had fewer than 80 percent of their pre-Katrina population eight years after the storm. Cheap Chinese restaurants and seafood shacks and the big fast-food chains were well represented, but nice restaurants and decent stores were lacking. The Eastover golf course was still closed. McDonald estimated that one-third of his friends had not returned
to New Orleans. “I still have family members stuck in Houston. Some cousins,” McDonald said. “They’re terribly homesick. But people had to make choices.” They found a better job, according to McDonald, or they were reluctant to move home when their kids were doing well in school. “A very different population lives here now.”

Liberty Bank continued to expand, moving into the Chicago market at the start of 2013 when it bought a failing black-owned bank there. Soon, McDonald was wrestling a new, enviable worry: slowing down the pace of growth so that the bank, which now operated branches in seven states, didn’t cross the $1 billion threshold. If it did, it would have to submit to more rigorous regulatory exams. “I’m too old for that,” McDonald said. After more than forty years at the helm of Liberty, McDonald had been on the job longer than any other sitting black bank president. Approaching seventy years old, he took to calling himself “the grandfather of black banking.”

McDonald looked at the Uptown elite differently after Katrina. He had let his membership in the Business Council lapse, he said, “because I did not approve of their behavior after Katrina.” Many peers whom he considered friends before the storm he now held at a distance. He would rejoin the Business Council seven years after Katrina—only once he was convinced that the organization was interested in promoting diversity.

“Ninety percent of what they were pushing for in Dallas they got,” he said—and the remaining 10 percent seemed still in play. In 2011, a downtown business group hung banners along the streets reading
WELCOME TO YOUR BLANK CANVAS
—presumably referring to places at least some people considered home. Communities such as Bywater and Tremé were now out of reach to many with deep roots there, forcing people to find cheaper housing outside the city. The tradition of second-line parades—the brass-band-led celebrations that take place in the city’s black neighborhoods—continued, but not without controversy. Events that before Katrina attracted a mostly black crowd of maybe a couple of hundred were drawing a mostly white audience of fifteen hundred. The worry among some black New Orleanians was that transplants were so eager to embrace the local culture that they threatened to suffocate it. Ill feelings were compounded when the newcomers drawn to Tremé by its rich history then called the cops to enforce a long-ignored city ordinance that prohibits the playing of live music on the streets after 8:00 p.m.

McDonald felt especially frustrated with the town’s hotel and restaurant owners. His father, a waiter for fifty-two years, was very much on his mind whenever industry people asked him for a meeting. For many hotel chains, they told McDonald, their New Orleans property was the most profitable in their portfolio. Restaurants were able to charge more for food and drink without any drop-off in business. The future only looked bright for a tourism economy that they declared more profitable than ever.

“Then tell your people to give the workers a raise!” McDonald countered. “I’ll tell them, ‘You correct this or you’re going to end up with a population so poor they’re not going to be able to even afford the rent here.’ ” The homeowner who paid $600 a year in property tax before the storm was now looking at an annual bill of nearly $2,000. Flood insurance rates had increased threefold. Homeowner policies had gone up by around the same amount. People’s water bills are slated to more than double by 2020 to pay for much-needed repairs to an ailing water and sewer system. “What that means is the poor will stay poor and the middle class can never get ahead,” McDonald said. Liberty was thriving, but not those McDonald and others had wanted to help when they started the bank in 1972.

“GET OVER IT.” THAT’S
what Jimmy Reiss wanted to tell people still bringing up Dallas eight years after Katrina.

Sitting in the ground-floor café of a Poydras high-rise, Reiss spoke of the twenty years he had spent “working my ass off and getting only shit. Racially, they were against something a white man tried to do even if it was for the good of everybody.” He read from a one-page stat sheet he had brought with him that showed New Orleans circa 2005 to be a high-crime city with too many unemployed black men, lousy schools, and a crumbling infrastructure. His only crime after Katrina, he said, was that he had proclaimed the obvious: New Orleans had too many poor people.

EIGHT YEARS AFTER KATRINA,
Cassandra Wall gathered with her family at her sister Petie’s home in New Orleans East. Cassandra’s niece—Petie’s oldest—had just given birth. Petie had invited everyone over to celebrate.

Cassandra couldn’t have been happier for her niece and her husband. But as invariably happened when Cassandra was in New Orleans, she felt relieved her visit would be short. “I’ll go and be glad I went, but I feel out of place,” Cassandra said. “Being there, I feel the disconnect. I feel the loss.”

Thanksgivings and Christmas dinners were still held in New Orleans. The five of them made the effort to get together around Mardi Gras and for other celebrations, and also for the occasional dinner because it had been too long since they had seen one another. “I’d still describe ourselves as close,” Cassandra said. “We still love each other. It’s just different.” They agreed to avoid certain topics, and tensions would flare when invariably they ended up talking about them anyway.

“Cassandra changed a lot,” Petie said. “It’s not just geography. Her opinions about New Orleans changed and that’s been hurtful. Because this is home.”

Cassandra had thought it was inevitable that eventually she would end up back in New Orleans. The house in Baton Rouge, she always thought, was about giving Brandon stability while he went to school. Surely New Orleans would be ready by the time he finished high school. But occasionally she’d drive through the old neighborhood, and all she could see were the homes that were still unoccupied and the same
FOR SALE
signs from the last time she’d visited. Brandon graduated in 2011 and matriculated at Xavier. Her son was living back in New Orleans, yet, two years later, she was still in Baton Rouge.

“I live here but I don’t consider Baton Rouge my permanent home,” she said. “I feel disconnected from both places. It’s a bad feeling.”

Her sisters didn’t want to believe she had given up on New Orleans. “We’ve all done our share of traveling, overseas, all over the US,” cousin Robyn said. “We’ve all talked about it, how we’ve never found a place that compares to New Orleans.” Tangee, Petie, and Robyn were working hard to make New Orleans East what it once was—and felt the sting every time they heard Cassandra say, “The home I know doesn’t exist anymore.” Even Contesse—prickly, contrarian Contesse—chose New Orleans when she moved back into the old house they’d inherited in Central City.

“Well, I happen to love traditions and customs, they’re important to me,” Robyn had said at one of their gatherings. She figured if Cassandra
felt she had the right to vent her opinions about the place where they lived, they had the right to offer a counterview. Petie nodded her head in agreement. This time Cassandra remained silent despite the implied criticism that she didn’t care about the things that made New Orleans unique. Cassandra was tired of their disappointment, and they tired of what Petie described as “her constant negativity about the place I happen to live.”

“All this divisiveness,” Petie said, “started when the two of them”—Cassandra and Contesse—“didn’t want to come home.”

“You go through a traumatic event like this,” Tangee said, “and it’s never going to be the same.”

From the perspective of her sisters, maybe Cassandra’s greatest transgression was that she came to this realization before the others. “A tragedy happened and destroyed what we had,” Cassandra said. “You just have to move forward and build something new because—and there’s no way around it—it’s gone and never coming back.”

MARTIN LANDRIEU—SON OF
a politician, brother of the incumbent mayor—was too much of a diplomat to declare the new Lakeview a vast upgrade over the old one. “I can’t use the word
better
given the circumstances,” he said. But eight years after Katrina, he marveled over Lakeview’s makeover. For years, he was part of a group working to draw a younger demographic to a neighborhood that, pre-storm, was dominated by older, smaller homes. “We didn’t have the closet space young families wanted, we didn’t have the amenities.” Katrina corrected that. Modest-size ranch homes were torn down and replaced by sturdy two- and three-story places. Homes that survived the bulldozer had undergone six-figure rehabs that meant all-new kitchens, bathrooms, and open floor plans in vogue.