New Orleans: A Shadow of Itself
<cut>
The color line
Within these more concentrated neighborhoods, it will be somewhat whiter, though still mostly black overall. The electorate was 57 percent black in last spring's mayoral runoff; it typically was in the low 60s before the storm.
Neighborhoods ruined now probably will shrivel further, planning experts say.
The Lower 9th Ward, still a barren wasteland, is unlikely to be rebuilt soon, if at all. Gentilly, a classic 1920s and '30s neighborhood of Arts and Crafts-style stucco houses with wide, overhanging eaves, is coming back only fitfully, with a few trailers in front yards of once-flooded houses. <b.Treme, with its 19th-century Creole cottages and shotgun houses near the French Quarter, is being reclaimed, but abandonment alternates with revival, as is the case throughout the city.
Grass-roots energy
These uncertain indicators yield to a more hopeful one: a wave of citizen activism. The storm already has toppled some of the old structures that helped cement prestorm New Orleans in poverty and despair.
Schools, a dysfunctional catastrophe before the storm, have been removed from the control of a corrupt district office; more than two-thirds are in the hands of parents and community activists as charter schools. (Students not admitted to charters, however, will have to attend a state-run school district rife with problems.)
The City Council is under the influence of impatient newcomers pledging change and pushing for tighter ethics. Voters soon will decide whether to throw out the balkanized system of seven district property assessors.
Oppressed by the midsummer heat, New Orleans is traversing a bleak trough: Planners are still squabbling a year after the storm, forests of uncut weeds grow in the medians, and progress is difficult to detect. St. Charles Avenue on a summer evening has an eerily empty feel; one plausible recent population count, based on Postal Service data, put the figure at 171,000, far fewer than City Hall's claim of 250,000. The population is thought to be roughly what it was around 1880.
From the living zone near the river, a trip north of any distance is sobering: blocks of sagging houses not so much empty as dead, and heaps of rubble and garbage with dogs and rats among them. An occasional householder can be spotted on a porch, looking out with a furrowed brow, trying to make a go of it.
New Orleans, often rudderless, filthy and still deeply scarred by the storm, is hemorrhaging some of the people it can least afford to lose. In the professional classes, nearly half the doctors and three-fourths of the psychiatrists have left, the largest synagogue says its congregation is down by more than 10 percent, and a big local moving company reports a "mass evacuation."
Tens of thousands in the African-American working-class backbone remain unable to return. They have been replaced by hundreds of Hispanic workers who have done much of the heavy lifting in the reconstruction, and live in rough conditions. Meanwhile, the only thriving industry is the back-street drug trade, pessimists note.
The outside world is scared by New Orleans. Banks, for instance, are insisting on unusually high collateral in real-estate deals, given a murder rate that is double its prehurricane level and no guarantee that neighborhoods will return to life. Basic services — water, electricity, garbage pickup — are intermittent.
"It's basically a nonfunctioning city," said Janet Howard, of the Bureau of Governmental Research, an independent nonprofit.
City Hall, meanwhile, has settled back into its habitual easygoing rhythms, a well-placed insider there reported with alarm, no sense of urgency among its officials.
With little direction from the top, long-term planning for the city's future remains incoherent. A year after the storm, there are no plans for large-scale infrastructure and redevelopment in the city.
The longer the city is without a master plan, the shakier the fate of the ruined neighborhoods, some planners say. The need will become even greater in a few days, when $7.5 billion in federal housing aid begins putting up to $150,000 in the hands of thousands of homeowners hoping to rebuild.
Publicly, Mayor Ray Nagin insists the city will come back stronger than ever, saying its repopulation is ahead of schedule even while more cautious demographers suggest it is lagging. Rejecting the idea that New Orleans must shrink, he says City Hall will not dictate where citizens can live.
"You can't wait on government," Nagin said last week. "You have to figure out a way to partner with your neighbors."
Nagin has endorsed the current version of the planning process, in which neighborhoods map out their future — only a tiny handful of the city's 73 districts have done so — and the plans eventually merge into a larger one.
Critical juncture
A big test will come soon when the City Council considers overhauling the day-to-day planning process, taking most decisions out of political hands — theirs — and putting them under the purview of professional planners. That change was accomplished a century ago in most other places. But the old system has held on in New Orleans, with serious implications for orderly reconstruction of the ruined neighborhoods and equitable preservation of those that are not.
For years, a similar argument has been made about the city's disastrous public schools, the worst performing in a state of underachievers, relentlessly preyed on by a corrupt district office. Katrina upended the school landscape.
Parents and teachers worked feverishly to get a handful of schools up and running; at the charters, parents control the money, taking charge of contracts, an area ripe for abuse when they were under school-district control.
Whether this movement will be enough to stave off grim perspectives is uncertain. Repeatedly, observers in and out of the city said the present juncture was critical to the city's future. If the ferment stops, if the hopes of citizens dry up, the outlook for New Orleans could be dire indeed.
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
