"Last chance for city Bush forgot"
* The Australian charged with rebuilding New Orleans tells Robert Lusetich there's a lack of political will behind the recovery *
March 31, 2007
The Australian
theaustralian.news.com.au
EDWARD Blakely doesn't have time for niceties. "I'm almost 70 years old, I don't have 20 years to make this work," the University of Sydney urban planner says of his role as New Orleans's post-Hurricane Katrina recovery tsar.
The California-born Australian citizen wants to tell it like it is: 19 months since one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history, scandalously little has been done to put the Big Easy back together again.
Blakely, who arrived in New Orleans at the beginning of this year to oversee the sputtering recovery, doesn't beat around the bush. He beats straight at US President George W. Bush, who could not find room for a single mention of New Orleans in his State of the Union address.
"The ultimate responsibility for what's wrong here rests with the President of the US," an exasperated Blakely says. "He doesn't have enough money to prosecute his war in Iraq, so of course he doesn't have the money to rebuild the city of New Orleans.
"Can you imagine what would happen to John Howard if he turned his back on an Australian city after a disaster like this? For me, an outsider, an Australian, it's still very hard to stomach. The federal Government has simply decided that it doesn't need this city. It's a sad state of affairs."
Blakely, who is black, has heard the conspiracy theories: the Bush administration has created a despicable shell game with recovery funds, tying them up in layers of impenetrable red tape because New Orleans is a predominantly black, poor and Democratic-voting city.
"I can understand why people are thinking along these lines and, yes, I believe that if this were a white city, the outcome would have been different," Blakely says. "But I don't believe it's just a matter of colour. It's more about wealth. If this was a rich, white Republican city that they considered important, would it have been rebuilt by now? Yeah, I think so."
The city is about to unveil a redevelopment plan that could cost as much as $US16 billion ($19.8billion), although Blakely says $US4 billion is enough to get started.
Blakely was hired as recovery manager by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Blakely laughs as he reflects on his confidence upon arriving in the Crescent City, as it's called. He already had been through three rebuilding projects in the wake of natural disasters. Blakely had a large hand in reconstructing the San Francisco Bay area after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, then parts of Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake 13 years ago and, most famously, New York after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
He looked upon New Orleans, an alluringly romantic if frustratingly flawed city sitting precariously below sea level, as his greatest challenge; an urban planner hadn't been presented with such an opportunity since Hiroshima.
"I remember showing up to my first meeting in New Orleans and, you know, I've been through this before so I outline what we're going to do and they all laugh at me and start shaking their heads," he says. "I still thought it was just a matter of dipping into the pot the right way until I realised what's different about New Orleans. When I worked in Oakland California - where we were finished in 18 months, not just getting started - or LA or New York, we had all the political will in the world with us because it was a political winner."
To most Australians who visit this most distinctive of American cities, the Big Easy is about the French Quarter, the Garden District and other tourist destinations. There, the recovery is as strong as the signature hurricane cocktails served in large plastic cups on Bourbon Street. Though not completely back to pre-Katrina levels, the tourists are returning.
But not far from the jazz clubs and the simmering jambalaya, there is the other N'awlins: an almost Third World ghetto where poverty and crime are the only constants. It is here that Katrina hit hardest; where residents allege the US Army Corps of Engineers failed to protect them with an adequate levee system; and where the official response was nothing short of disgraceful.
"Baghdad under water" was how former US senator for Louisiana John Breaux characterised his native city in the days after Katrina struck; many people, including Australians, were trapped in a post-apocalyptic nightmare while the world watched on television. It got so bad that Sri Lanka offered assistance to the world's only superpower and so ludicrous that while the National Guard allegedly couldn't get to the city, CNN mobilised an entire news-gathering operation within hours.
A congressional investigation into the Government's response found that it was "a litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses and absurdities all cascading together".
Time hasn't done much to weary that conclusion. Roads are still potholed, homes remain unoccupied - many with makeshift blue tarps stretched across their roofs - some neighbourhoods have few stores while countless numbers of people still live in temporary emergency caravans provided by the embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"Not a single civic building has been put up since Katrina," Blakely says.
Crime is the city's only booming industry as the New Orleans Police Department - locals say its acronym stands for Not Our Problem, Dude - struggles to cope. The police chief is still working out of a caravan, there is no crime laboratory and there is still a huge reliance on the help of state and federal law enforcement.
The city is short-staffed across the board, from the fire department to hospitals, social services and schools. There are vast, ghostly acreages where virtually no one lives.
And that is the real issue facing New Orleans: cities need people to exist. New Orleans had a municipal population of 465,000 before Katrina and, while present estimates vary, most agree it's now about half. Of those who have returned, one-third report having regrets.
"It comes down to this for most people: should I return to rebuild a house where I can't even be sure if the levees will be fixed or should I pocket federal emergency relief cash and get out of Dodge?" says resident Joel Devine, a professor at Tulane University who specialises in race and poverty issues.
That's if anyone pockets any money. Of the 115,000 people who have applied for relief funds of up to $150,000 to rebuild their homes, fewer than 3000 have received any money from the Government, although that's an improvement on the 500 last December. Residents allege they fill out mountains of paperwork only to be told of further requirements, blocking attempts to rebuild.
"It's one vast shell game," Blakely says. "You can't help but wonder whether the point is that you can't get to the money."
Devine says it's merely another layer of the failure that has plagued the official response to Katrina from the first raindrop. "This has been a failure of government from the federal on down. None of them are exempted. They have stumbled from one mistake to the next, tying their own as well as the others' hands," he says.
For residents, it's the little things that are enough to keep them in Houston or Dallas or one of the other cities that have absorbed the New Orleans diaspora. Some who returned to try remaking their lives were given caravans but not keys to unlock them. "These sorts of stories have an accumulative effect," Devine says.
There are positive stories to be told about the past 19 months, but they are ones of individual determination to rise above the circumstances. Devine also believes one of the few positive effects of Katrina's devastation was to lift the curtain on one of America's dirty secrets.
"Katrina exposed the pockets of underdevelopment which exist in this country and shouldn't exist," Devine says. "People, from around the world and even other parts of the US, went, Oh my god, people are living in these kinds of Third World conditions in a big American city? How is that possible?"
The challenge for Blakely, beyond the most obvious to make it a livable city again, is to reshape New Orleans. "I think if we're honest, we'd say that this was a city that was in decline for many years," Devine says. "It was a city starving for investment in every sense of that word. I don't know that we should just start it up again because it wasn't going forward."
This is going to be a delicate issue because black activists allege that the powers that be want to make the new New Orleans a less black city. The Black Commentator online magazine has already labelled the rebuilding plan "the greatest attempted urban land theft in American history".
Blakely is confident he will find a balance to the political and racial issues that shroud the rebuilding. "It's like Redfern," he says, referring to the Sydney suburb with a big Aboriginal population and occasional street violence. "If you go in and just build some buildings, you're going to be in trouble. Building buildings here is not all that there is. This city can't just survive just on tourism and low-paying service jobs. There's no future in that."
His ultimate goal is to make New Orleans a modern city; to have neighbourhoods in which people are proud of living and which provide better jobs with better pay. But perhaps reflective of a life spent as an academic who's worked in government and understands realities, Blakely is a dreamer with his feet on the ground.
"Look, I know I'm not going to cure all the problems facing this city," he says. "What I'm hoping, if you want to talk about legacies, is that I leave behind me an organisation that can cure those problems over a period of time."
Robert Lusetich is The Australian's Los Angeles correspondent. Ed Blakely will speak at Sydney Ideas, the University of Sydney's international public lecture series next Wednesday.
www.usyd.edu.au/sydneyideas |
