TNDY 401N - Whole Class : Activity

Rebuilding Naw'lins

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 18:59:49 GMT

Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?

There was so much damage to the city, so many critical infrastructure elements that need to be repaired or replaced, it is difficult to know where to begin.

“Whether” New Orleans will be rebuilt is not even an option; why is this even part of the question? I think I’ve addressed this in previous posts, so I will not bother here. The “how” is much more important. From all the discussion in the Environment and Urban Planning research group, I’d have to place the levees and housing first and foremost.

Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has done some work on the levees, but not what needs to be done, which is they need to be completely redesigned and rebuilt. The old system has already proven itself inadequate, and we can expect more storms in the Gulf of Mexico of the same or greater severity. The levees need to be upgraded, they need to incorporate designated flood zones to mitigate stress on the levees and canals, and they need to institute a program of wetlands restoration to provide a buffer against storm surges.

Housing. Obviously, it needs to be rebuilt. We decided on mixed-use zoning as a priority, but based on Mary’s post a couple of weeks ago, about the FEMA-sponsored bus service between Baton Rouge and New Orleans coming to an end, I think this needs to be a somewhat lesser priority. Rent controls need to be put in place. The only reason New Orleans residents, residents who have jobs in the city, are still living in Baton Rouge is that rent in New Orleans has doubled or tripled from pre-Katrina levels. Residents are being shut out of the city because of greed and immoral opportunism. Rents need to be returned to their pre-Katrina rates so that the residents and workers can return to the city. Only then should attention be paid to working on the neighborhood zoning.

Obviously, there are many other things that need to be done. Police services need quite a bit of work, hospitals and other public institutions need repair and upgrades, the issue of literal mountains of garbage and toxic waste needs to be addressed. But for my money, it’s the levees and housing. Make sure the city is safe, and make sure that people can afford to return. Achieving these two things at the beginning, and the other problems will be much easier to address.

Most Important Elements in Rebuilding New Orleans

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:36:57 GMT

“Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?” Based on my research group, there are two important issues that are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt. The two issues are race, gender, age and class and levees and engineering.

Race, gender, age and class

It doesn’t matter how New Orleans is re-built if the people making those decisions are white, rich, able-bodied males and only those who are able to return to the Crescent City are white, rich families. Race, gender, class and age continue to be the “elephants in the room” in rebuilding New Orleans that no one wants to talk about, everyone is afraid to talk about and they continue to be the secrets that keeps us apart. Most whites, including liberal ones, do not want to live next door to African-Americans or Latinos, rich or white. We must also realize that New Orleans isn’t just the south or the “deep south” or the “dirty south”, it’s the deep, deep and dirty south. With the recent elections, analysts now believe the Republican Party’s strength is centralized in just a few southern states, which include Louisiana. So, while the U.S. has become the most multi-cultural, multi-ethnic in its history, certain southern states are still locked in a black versus white, rich versus poor, young versus old mindset.

Michael Eric Dyson in his landmark book, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, writes about this disparity in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina. The reporting of the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina were equivalent to episodes of Mad TV, showing many images of African-American men with no shirts on, babies without clothing and diapers, close-up images of the swollen, red eyes of Americans who had not slept for days and elderly residents sitting in wheelchairs almost dead. Missing were the thousands of other Americans, Latinos, indigenous tribal communities, Vietnamese, Filipinos and whites. It must also be stated that many of the folks who died were elderly, physically-challenged residents of New Orleans. Children, the elderly, the physically-challenged and others are dependent on the Federal government and laws and systems are in place to help them. In the African value system, the elderly are considered griots that are looked to for wisdom and advice. The American people turned away as children, who represent our future, and griots, who are the reflections of our past and seers of our future, were not treated with full-humanity! In not responding for five days, the American government was sending a clear sign that it is moving back to a Darwinian concept of existence – “survival of the fittest” mentality – with echoes of Nazism – Aryanism. In other words, we are moving backwards from acting like human beings to non-being. These should not be the tenets of the American democratic system. To that end, A Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to ones in South Africa and Greensboro, NC, should be created to record the oral experiences of the Katrina survivors, to record the lives of the Katrina dead and to work on destroying the inherent racism that exists in New Orleans.

Levees, engineering and the environment

A wonderful article by the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, www.saveourwetlands.org/cansaveno.html, summarizes better than myself the importance of levees, engineering and the environment in rebuilding New Orleans. The article outlines 10 main steps that need to be taken to rebuild New Orleans:

1. Draw the maps. Not just a flood protection plan. At the direction of Congress, the Corps of Engineers is presently engaged in a hurry up offense to design hurricane protection for New Orleans and South Louisiana. Without knowing what our restoration goals can and will be, and without making any conscious decisions about human development in response. To be sure, we need to know what the engineering possibilities are. But they beg the question, engineering to do what? Right now, we have the cart before the horse.

2. Review the bidding. The Corps and other agencies have projects pending that could seriously compromise an all-out effort to restore the coastal zone. Morganza to the Gulf is one; several port and waterway expansions are in the wings as well, new MRGO’s (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) in the making. That Congress already authorized them is not persuasive. Like MRGO, they were authorized in a very different day under very different circumstances. Katrina changes the equation. They need to be looked at again, new restoration map in hand. They should be consistent with the future, not the past.

3. Free the upstream sediments. The Mississippi today at the latitude of New Orleans carries about 80 million tons of sediment a year. An impressive figure, until we realize that a century and half ago it carried about 400 million. We can set aside whether those 400 million tons were natural background or were bumped up by land clearing (although the diaries of Marquette and Joliet, floating down the Mississippi in the 1600s, reported silt and mud raging in from the Missouri so violently that it made their passage dangerous and discolored the waters for days). The point is that most of those silts today lie behind dams on the upper watershed. We need them, and the Mississippi is their natural conveyor belt. The bumper sticker should read: Free the Mississippi 400 Million.

4. Free the rivers. Which, until today, we have tiptoed around with a few, very expensive freshwater diversion structures whose efficacy has been further compromised by their capacity and politics. Too much money goes to too much hardware with too little output. We do not need to regulate outflows from the Mississippi with complex machinery. We can cut sills in the levees to replicate natural crevasses, and let the river do its thing.

5. Cut the upstream fertilizers. This can be reduced by 50% within 5 years, then by 50% again. Upstream agriculture is locked into a prisoner’s dilemma of chemical nutrients, most of which end up polluting the Louisiana coastal zone. The upstream states are in denial, so is Louisiana for that matter, and EPA is in hiding. It is time to insist. A less polluted river is not a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of survival.

6. Heal the marsh. This is hemorrhaging from the inside out. Push in the spoil banks. Crevasse the ones that remain. Plant grass. Pretend we’re farmers. We can build wetlands, if necessary, by hand. Not fully—manmade marshes still come out looking a little weird—but we need to rebuild a base for natural processes to then improve upon. A coast fully ceded to open water will be harder to restore.

7. Stop the bleeding. We will have to make historic commitments to hold onto even the base of coastal wetlands we currently enjoy, an order of magnitude beyond the ambition of Coast 2050. Meanwhile, we continue to permit dredging and filling of the same wetlands for access canals, waste dumps, new subdivisions and the like. Every acre of the coast we allow to be destroyed is certain loss. Attempts to mitigate these losses produce poorly, when they produce at all. More often they simply produce payments to the state, a sort of coastal-destruction tax. An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of restoration.

8. Make space for natural processes. Elevate roads and railroads. Open new floodways. Move oyster leases, consolidate energy, port and navigation facilities, zone development within protected areas and let the rest rebuild. We shouldn’t try to storm-proof the coastal zone, and the more we try to storm-proof the more we will lose.

9. Dare to think retreat. Coastal residents should be able to live where they wish, for as long as they wish. But they are also threatened, more each year. Some were wiped out entirely by Katrina and Rita. The hurricanes predicted for the next two decades will obliterate more. We should be able to maintain, on a sustainable basis, the docks, processing plants and other investment of a working bayou, if only through insurance. A sustainable economy is compatible with a sustainable zone. But residential development another thing. People and structures in the most vulnerable areas should be offered the opportunity to relocate in protected areas, at full and fair compensation. The costs of such a program will be more than offset by the savings in the attempt to protect these same residences forever, and in reduced losses to future storms. The more we delay this process, the harder it will be.

10. Face global warming. It is real. And it makes everything else we do to save the coast infinitely more difficult, if not impossible. What would such a plan look like, and what are its chances? Impossible to say, but not hard to guess. With enough bed load, use of the main rivers, active marsh healing and zero-base tolerance for new harms, we should be able to hold our own, building some deltas, shrinking some others, a process not unlike the one that created South Louisiana over many thousands of years. We could maintain. We could even grow the zone in places vital to the protection of New Orleans. And in that growing and maintaining we would support, once again, a renewable resource-based coastal community long after the oil and gas industry has run its string.

3rd blog

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 03:07:23 GMT

I’m not sure I totally understand this question, but I’ll give it my best crack. I think I’m supposed to answer: what issue have you studied so far that, if not resolved correctly, actually makes the reconstruction of New Orleans a project of debatable merit? From what I’ve heard from my fellow classmates, I think it’s safe to say that none of us has seriously doubted whether the Crescent City should, in fact, be rebuilt. But the question as I read it implies that SOMETHING was indeed supposed to get us to ask ourselves just that question.

So I thought back to discussions from my R-group…

And I realized: if the education issue isn’t solved, it’s worth asking whether or not New Orleans should be rebuilt. Now, I would be as outraged as anyone else for the city of jazz, Tenessee Williams (all the great artists, writers, chefs we’ve talked about) to be allowed to linger away. But really, if those artists and musicians still have a city to be creative in, it means their kids are going to school in that city. And if those schools are failing the kids as they have so much over the last few decades, I really wonder if it’s fair to the kids. In other words: the argument that New Orleans should be saved for the sake of its culture risks making thousands of innocent children educational martyrs for the cause of that culture.

If the city can’t get its schools right this time around, it should consider whether it might be wiser to say to families: “you know, we really think you’re better off moving to Atlanta/Houston/Phoenix to educate your children. We can’t help you here”. I still am not sure how to solve NO’s education problem: my current thinking is that we don’t try to reinstitute the school district, and instead use a system of semi-autonomous charter schools, each of which would be affiliated with a university or college in the state.

Allowing generations of children to enter adulthood without learning to read properly is a crime that’s committed all over the country, to be sure. But for quite some time, it’s been committed more consistently, and more severely, in New Orleans than anywhere else. And it looks like things are getting worse, not better. Regardless of how much I love jazz, I am not so adamant about preserving its birthplace that I am willing to pay the price of thousands of uneducated kids unprepared to compete and succeed in society.

“Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied...

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:28:33 GMT

“Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?”

By Tyler Reeb

Discard rotting legacy infrastructure to make way for 21st century innovation, and, promote moral decency in the New Orleans rebuilding process—am I asking too much here folks? A quick tally of the post-Katrina scorecard says I am. The basic infrastructure required to sustain any humane city is in ruin, the majority of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina citizens have not returned, and the governmental (municipal, state, and federal) responses to the storm are as indecent now as they were in the minutes, hours, and days after the guaranteed threat of an immensely destructive category-five hurricane approaching the Crescent City was confirmed.

Okay, with that said, I can take a stab at the question for this third and final post. Firstly, to me the question of “whether” New Orleans will be built is irrelevant. It will be built; my singular concern is “how” it will be built. Talk to leaders in urban planning, environmental, engineering, sociological, and countless other vital disciplines and they will undoubtedly agree that technology, systems, and best practices exist to, theoretically, rebuild New Orleans into an enlightened and modern metropolis that celebrates its rich histories and cultures. The catch is, of course, translating such a theoretical blueprint of modern enlightenment into a reality in the context of the laissez-faire style of American governance. This gets to the much larger issue of the shocking third-world conditions that exist in communities throughout the U.S., the wealthiest nation in the world. On all levels of government, the focus is increasingly on the “haves” at the expense of the shrinking middle class and many other hard-working segments of society—ergo, more and more “have nots.”

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go off topic and launch into some treatise on what’s wrong with America. I don’t need to. New Orleans is a case study in what’s wrong with our country right now. Many well intending voters feel vindicated after the Democrats took control away from Republicans in the house and senate in this month’s election. But will Democratic lawmakers push for funding to the tune of $10 billion to rebuild New Orleans levies to category-five specifications? Or, like their colleagues on the other side of the aisle, will they continue pouring hundreds of billions of taxpaying dollars into the quagmire in Iraq while U.S. citizens in New Orleans and countless other towns and cities suffer?

Thinking about New Orleans’ many challenges in depth can prove exasperating. Yet I remain an optimist. I can envision the emergence of a splendid new New Orleans (and I have truly enjoyed discussing ideas toward that end across disciplines with my fellow classmates). But I know that no meaningful rebuilding process will take place unless two foundational charges are met: those of truth and reconciliation. I am currently looking into whether any substantive legal action has been taken against FEMA and the Whitehouse for proven intentional negligence that led to the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents. I am also curious if any other forums have been created to record the experiences and search for lessons from the Katrina disaster. I will keep you all posted. In my humble opinion, if the American people cannot face the truth about the Katrina disaster and no attempt is made to reconcile the many crimes committed against the countless victims, then the rebuilding process will lack the necessary ethical underpinnings and wisdom to proceed on a track that adheres to a moral decency learned from past mistakes and tragedies.

good work Daniel

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:50:46 GMT

Hello Daniel, this is Henry. I really liked your last blog entry. i had to fight the urge to go back and revise mine- i kow if i did i would steal a lot of your words. great job. I really liked your incusion of the race issue. this is something that needs to be addressed.

3rd post

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:44:59 GMT

The Zulu krewe decided that the rebuilding of New Orleans is imperative to the country, but the rebuilding will require a sequence of steps that must be followed for a successful return of the city to the vibrant and exciting position it has held for generations. Although I’ll be writing of the repair process as completed in steps- this will be a long process and most of the steps will overlap. I think a Triage style approach is the best tactic. We need to treat the worst injuries to New Orleans first. It is going to be a huge job to rebuild the city and the best approach is going to be to rebuild the most basic necessities of the city first - then move onto less pressing- but important aspects of the city. With the passing of each step- the local citizens will take more responsibility for themselves. The most fundamental need of a city is law and order. Without a show of force from the police- people won’t feel safe to return, business will stay away, rescue workers, construction workers, no one will want to come.Once it is safe for people to come, the next step is to clean up and rebuild businesses. People around the area need work. The second step will be the building of hospitals. This is a fundamental need for all people and to ignore this will result in more needless deaths. This will be an expensive process, but the government will have to pay. Construction and clean up is a good way to start the employment process. The more work that is completed, the more people will come. This fourth step will get the city in the shape that we all remember. This is one of the most important steps in recreating what was. The Rebuilding and cleaning process will take years, but once it is started, once we have a growing population- the process of healing the city will begin.The city will need to employ its citizens in the clean up process. Once the locals are working, they can help pay for some of the repairs to their own homes. When most of the economy is gaining momentum, we will be ready for the next step, the re-establishment of music, tourism and the arts can commence. New Orleans is world famous for its arts and its re-establishment is a major concern. When New Orleans has begun to again resemble the vibrant city of yesterday, people will again come. Musicians, writers and artists will again have the world-wide impact that it once had.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:05:24 GMT

There have been various elements which my colleagues and I have viewed as essential for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Perhaps the most crucial concern for the reconstruction of the Crescent City would begin with providing safety for her citizens with the construction of a new levee system. We believe the building of a new levee system will help to give people in New Orleans a sense of psychological and actual satisfaction, thus alleviating fears in the still suspect inadaquacies of the present system. The present system has only been bandaged from the disastrous breakthrough and overflow of the tumultous waters brought on by the furious deadly forces wrought by Katrina. The restoration or redesign of the same pre-Katrina level levee system should not be a solution at any level of decision making.

Our research group, Evironment and Urban Planning, supports and recommends a collection of the world's best experts be summoned to seek resolution to the problematic and faulty New Orleans levee system and prepare the way for the implementation of a viable and effective levee network. We believe the system of levees built by the Dutch should serve as a model for the redesign and reconstruction of a new levee project. Once a safe levee system has been effectuated in New Orleans, we believe more former residents who have been displaced since Katrina will begin to return home. The repatriation of those citizens of New Orleans will help her to regain some of her cultural allure and enchantment.

In order for New Orleans to regain her magnanimous appeal and mystique there must be a focus on the economic redevelopment of the tourism business and industry related operatives. We found that the tourism sector as of September 2005, was the second largest employer in New Orleans. Annual tourism in New Orleans is a $5.5 billion enterprise. The tourism industry will benefit New Orleans by hosting more conventions and meetings business providing much need economic revenue. The hospitality industry will also play a big part in the revitalization of New Orleans as tourists begin to flock back to the city.

As for industrial progress, our research group believes technological innovation is essential for a redeveloped New Orleans. At the forefront of this future growth and advancement in technology, we believe the Louisiana Technology Council should be given more of a key role in helping to insure the encouragement and advancement of technology applications and to help make better the long range competitive basis of a successful economic infrastructure in New Orleans.

With economic prosperity in New Orleans, we believe the private sector should help with the housing issues in New Orleans. We believe that new or revised zoning codes for redeveloped communities should not be race, gender or poverty specific. We feel that its time for segregated communities to end in New Orleans. As far as public housing, those delapidated areas should be demolished and redeveloped into decent residential neighborhoods. We have found one overarching endemic condition within the fiber of New Orleans that has existed since the city's inception which continues to challenge every aspect of our recommendations and solutions to truly help this city.

This demonizing culpirt is the race issue. Our research group has concluded that the racial attitudes of probably most white southerners in New Orleans will not change. And let us not forget that New Orleans is in the entrenched heart of the Deep South, can you say, Dixie? Ouch! Another factor perhaps as salient as race issues of course is class issues. The multiethnic faces of the lower/middle and lower/poor class were the ones we saw in the media as victims of Katrina. If race and class can somehow be put aside the city of New Orleans has an opportunity to truly be rebuilt, can you say an idealized egalitarian society? Wow!

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 05:15:19 GMT

Danielle Cummins

“Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?”

Rebuilding New Orleans, a city with a vast historic background and a vast living community, is a multifaceted, complex problem which contains many significant elements which need to be dealt with. Among these issues, several stand out, among which are 1) Safety, both in the physical environment and in the communities with regards to crime, violence, and racism, 2) Rebuilding the public school system and smoothly reintegrating displaced children back into their New Orleans schools, 3) Keeping displaced citizens connected and informed, 4) Maintaining the historically musical, literary, and artistic heritage of New Orleans while allowing this heritage to grow and change, 5) Helping New Orleans residents, both those who have been displaced and those who remain in the city, to rebuild their homes and lives.

Before any other issues about rebuilding can be addressed, one of the first issues which needs to be looked at is whether or not it is possible to make New Orleans a safe place in which to live as regards to the physical environment. Several mistakes were made with the construction of the levies which need to be understood and then not repeated. Other places built below sea level such as the Netherlands should be looked at and their engineers consulted. The city needs to be made secure against a category 5 hurricane. If this cannot be done, the citizens need to be aware of this. However, with greater care and understanding as well as collaboration which should result from Hurricane Katrina, the building of more secure levees is possible and should be a top consideration.

The issue of violence, both for people who live in the city and for those who visit, is a difficult problem which needs to be worked on. The law enforcement agencies in the city need to be examined carefully. Also, the causes for increased violence need to be discovered and if possible remedied. A more racially integrated city would be ideal, but would require a complete turn around from a historically turbulent racial scene. Such a turn around could not happen by itself, but would be the result of extensive dialogue between many people, careful city planning, and a willingness for people from different backgrounds to work together.

In order for the city of New Orleans to sustain itself in the future, it needs to be able to sustain its children. The public school system in the city has had a history of extensive inefficiency. The New Orleans public schools need more funding and teachers. If the children in New Orleans receive a better education, they will be able to support themselves and their families and so decrease the presence of poverty. Children coming back into the city need to have a smooth transition, especially after all they have been through. The New Orleans schools should have a way to communicate with schools all over the country which have displaced students attending them, so that they are able to develop a curriculum for returning students.

A means of communication between all displaced citizens as well as between people involved in the rebuilding process should be established so that different levels of dialogue can take place. People need to be aware of the issues and what is being done about them and also have a say in the process. Some form of online communication could perhaps be utilized.

In the wake of the hurricane, the artistic heritage of New Orleans needs to be preserved and then allowed to grow. Support for organizations such as the high school level New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, which has programs for fields such as music, visual arts, dance, and media, will help the artistic tradition in New Orleans to survive and expand. Support for professional musicians in New Orleans is linked to the reconstruction of their venues as well as their homes. In addition to the music, the literary heritage of the city could be a source for tourism, and the creation of literary sculptures could be a way to bring in more income for the city as well as local artists.

One of the most important and difficult problems in rebuilding New Orleans is how to help the people of the city to rebuild their homes, businesses, and lives. That question has many layers, but even on the surface, the rebuilding of their physical environment, is an issue that will require a lot of help from people outside New Orleans. As the rebuilding process will take a very long time and a lot of money, it is necessary for us to keep on remembering the people of New Orleans and do what we can to help them. These are just some of the most important elements about rebuilding New Orleans which need to be taken into consideration. One thing is certain: the people of New Orleans are in need of help. Hopefully the Crescent City’s displaced citizens around the country will encounter compassion and support.

Third Blog.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 03:11:44 GMT

Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?

    It seems fitting that this would be the final blog entry that we, as a class, were asked to write on.   This is the very nature of our discussion, and at the heart of all of our hard work. However, as many of us have realized, this is a very difficult question to answer. The rebuilding of New Orleans is difficult on many levels, and over time it seems that the voices of New Orleans residents are becoming more and more faint.

    As a member of the Environment and Urban Planning group, I discovered first hand just how difficult the idea of rebuilding New Orleans has become. From rebuilding the levees, to the discussion of zoning the city, re-introducing tourism to the city, and deciding on what types of homes can be rebuilt in the city and where, this was not an easy task. It seems to me that one of the most important aspects to rebuilding the city is to ensure that New Orleans is a safe place for it's citizens and visitors. The first portion of this is in restructuring the levees to ensure that the city will be able to withstand a hurricane, without the possibility of another catastrophic levee breach. To do this, we have decided that the Dutch would need to be contacted, as they have experience with working with a below-sea-level population.

    Aside from safety concerns, and making sure that the city is as safe and healthy for the people that call New Orleans home, as well as the people that carry a piece of New Orleans in their hearts, it seems impossible to answer this question, not being a citizen of New Orleans. The city, rich with culture and heritage, deserves to be rebuilt and re-imagined by the people who know the city best. Yes, they will need outside resources and support, however decisions on architecture, city zoning, schools, community, etcetera, deserve an insider voice.

    What this class has taught me is that New Orleans is unlike any other city in the United States, however, so much like every other city in the United States. New Orleans is a place full of art, history, music, people, culture, heritage and stories. Each of those stories deserves to be heard, and each of those stories deserves to be preserved. Despite the extreme amounts of damage in and around New Orleans, I believe it is possible to preserve the heritage and history of this city, even with new buildings and new ways of life, as long as the people that know the city the best (it's citizens) have a strong voice in the rebuilding plan.

    I agree with my fellow classmates that the rebuilding needs to be put into practice. It is not enough for someone to say that "it will be rebuilt,” we must see results. Progress is possible. With decision making put in the hands of the citizens of New Orleans, partnered with the compassion and commitment of those outside of New Orleans, can make this a possibility.

New York Times Editorial

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:57:13 GMT

I read this moments after I wrote my blog entry below...

Katrina's Purgatory
    The New York Times | Editorial
    Saturday 18 November 2006
    Excuses sound hollow when you're trapped in a flimsy trailer. For Gulf Coast residents waiting for long-promised government housing assistance, patience has given way to anger, and anguish. What is clear more than a year after Hurricane Katrina is that their needs - and the demand for action from the American public - have largely gone unmet.
    In Louisiana, only 28 families have received their share of the federal dollars intended to help them repair or replace their homes. After a local uproar, and a strict new deadline from the governor, the number of residents approved for funds is now just under 5,000 - out of nearly 78,000 applications.
    Louisiana's housing reconstruction authority should not bear all of the blame for this problem. All the gears of government grind too slowly for the victims of the storm. It took the Bush administration nearly six months to request the necessary rebuilding funds. Congress hemmed and hawed until June before approving the legislation. Down the coast, Mississippi's program has also been plagued with delays.
    The federal housing money alone is not going to solve the difficulties faced by Katrina's victims, particularly in New Orleans. The normal market mechanisms on the Gulf Coast have been shattered, and they need to be repaired if Katrina's victims have any hope of putting their lives back together. Local banks are filling up with a reserve of billions of dollars in private insurance money. The Louisiana Recovery Authority points out that many victims who have been approved for help still have yet to ask for their checks.
    Some people have shown amazing faith and determination, pressing on and putting construction costs on their credit cards. But other residents, in spite of their will to rebuild, are unable to use the funds for a host of reasons. Contractors are nearly impossible to find, and high prices reflect their scarcity. Insurance rates are rising to levels unaffordable for the average homeowner. Many victims have missed bill payments or lost sources of income, hurting their creditworthiness and leading to higher interest rates on any loans they might need.
    The normal hard decisions of real estate are amplified a thousand times by the possibility that a house in an empty neighborhood in a broken city could be worthless. Imagine every house in your neighborhood is damaged or destroyed. The average government award in Louisiana is $60,200, and it will cost more than that to replace your house, and more than it was worth before the storm, when every house on the block was whole and children played out front. Do you rebuild?
    The president's Katrina czar, Donald Powell, is soft-spoken and deliberative. Those qualities have served him well in the past, but not now. As the government's emissary (and the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), he has a powerful pulpit and the ability to summon all the key players - major lenders, buyers of loans like the large investment banks and Fannie Mae, and federal regulators - to help fix the system. Mr. Powell needs to speak out more forcefully and act more aggressively.
    The ruin of a region and the historic city of New Orleans could not be more important, and the tangle of destruction is nowhere near unwound.

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 19:03:19 GMT

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:57:37 GMT

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:19:19 GMT

photos

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:15:59 GMT

mardi gras photos