PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Rebuilding in the Big Uneasy
by Mimi Yahn Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005 at 6:20 PM
meemers@surfbest.net (email address validated)

Article that appeared in the November 2005 New People. Second of series by former resident of the New Orleans area.

Like vultures descending on roadkill, the first offers to purchase flooded properties began trickling in little more than a week after Katrina and Bush’s flood destroyed New Orleans. And these were not meager offers: in the example of an acquaintance of mine, the property he’d had up for sale for about a year just wasn’t selling, no matter how many times he lowered the price. But after Katrina, the first offer—on behalf of a large property management company—was well above any price he’d ever had on it before.


At the same time, Donald Trump began making the rounds of the talk shows, beginning with Fox TV, boasting that he’d already been approached by the federal government to assist in the “rebuilding” and crowing about how only he was capable of such a monumental task. Of course, the task he was talking about was taking billions of our tax dollars and turning them into massive, pork-barrel profiteering schemes. We pay him to build private hotels, resorts and gated communities, and he pockets all the profits.


Welcome to the new New Orleans.



Though Mayor Ray Nagin’s plan for rebuilding the city isn’t quite so Donaldcentric, it is primarily a plan for wealthy developers to get wealthier, and nothing is being done to protect existing property owners or renters from the rapacious vultures circling for the kill.


Distraught and broke homeowners, left with notes to pay on uninhabitable or nonexistent houses, are prime targets for the Trump wannabes. Offers of double or triple the pre-Katrina value are nothing to developers who know that Nagin or Bush will give them billions of our tax dollars to build luxury homes, malls and business parks.


And there are a lot of distraught, grief-stricken and broke homeowners: Of the 142,690 housing units destroyed in New Orleans alone, 63,937 (or 45%) were owner-occupied. Of that figure, 41,607 were classified as low- to very low-income housing. In other words, 65% of those who lost their homes were low income, have no job, have little to fall back on, and have received little or no assistance in putting their lives back together.


The remaining 78,753 homes destroyed in New Orleans were classified as rental units, and of those, 70,414—or 89%—were classified as low- to very low-income housing. With no property to sell and no homeowners insurance to help them with living expenses, renters face another set of challenges and personal disasters, not the least of which is finding any affordable housing at all.


Meanwhile, renters whose units weren’t destroyed are already returning home to find they have no home, either: their belongings have been moved out and new tenants living in their homes—tenants who are willing and able to pay triple the pre-Katrina rent. It doesn’t matter that Governor Kathleen Blanco issued a temporary moratorium on evictions; landlords know the justice system is in disarray and judges are more concerned with prosecuting “looters,” more intent on warehousing the thousands of illegally-detained prisoners and more zealous about posting maximum bonds (up to $100,000) for stealing beer from a vacant house.

Though many thousands may never return to New Orleans, those who are attempting to return home and rebuild their lives are quickly finding that if you’re not White and well-to-do, you’re no longer welcome home.


From the local to the federal levels, plans to rebuild the poorest, predominantly Black neighborhood—the Ninth Ward—is on the very bottom of the list, and some federal officials are saying they don’t think it should be rebuilt at all. And, while other residents are being allowed back in to at least survey the damage, Mayor Nagin is still not allowing Ninth Ward residents back in (as of the date of this writing).


Yet another neighborhood—the Lakeview area which was also hardest-hit by the flood, with many homes utterly demolished—is already being rebuilt, its residents among the first to be allowed back. The difference? Lakeview is the rich, upper-class neighborhood for Whites.

Another sign that New Orleans is attempting to close its doors to Blacks and the poor is the growing numbers of private and public security forces and the escalating police violence. It’s no coincidence that, as wealthy developers attempt to carve up the city for their personal gain, security forces have been brought in to quell any potential protest or uprising, and it’s no surprise that local police are part of that intimidation.


The police of New Orleans have long been used by the ruling elite—both White and Creole—to keep the darker-skinned po’ folks in their place. In poor neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward, violent drug gangs operate with impunity because the power structure knows that keeping the people terrorized and drugged keeps them from rising up against the real enemy. And when local businesses want to fire large numbers of employees, they can always count on the local police force to show up and help with “crowd control.”


The police violence caught on videotape last month and aired around the world is unique only in that the police actually got caught. Police violence in New Orleans isn’t new. Though the depravity and corruption of earlier decades was finally curtailed during the 1990s, some reports claim that police corruption and violence have recently been increasing. And while there’s no evidence that the police are directly aiding and abetting the violent drug gangs in poor neighborhoods (as was previously the case), recent, pre-Katrina incidents of police brutality—including a number of beatings, shootings and at least one rape—has primarily been perpetrated against poor Blacks.


In the weeks following the flood, when New Orleans was mostly evacuated and citizens were forced to forage and fend for themselves, local journalist Jordan Flaherty interviewed a resident, asking him what he saw as the biggest problem.


“It’s been the police,” the man responded. “They’ve lost the last restraints on their behavior they had, and gotten a license to go wild. They can do anything they want. I saw one cop beat a guy so hard that he almost took his ear off. And this was someone just trying to walk home.”

Like the death toll itself, we may never know the true extent of the violence perpetrated against the people by security forces. (While the official death toll from Katrina currently stands at 972, the L.A. Times reported last month that the heavily-guarded, temporary morgue in St. Gabriel is still holding as many as 800 bodies, many of which have decomposed so badly, officials say identification may not be possible.)


But we do know that much of the violence is deliberate, institutionalized and purposeful: The military was not sent to New Orleans to rescue people—Bush waited till most were already dead before sending in the troops. Instead, like the cops sent in to intimidate workers about to be fired, the military was sent in to intimidate the residents about to be forcibly evicted, their homes and lives foreclosed by the banks and sold off to the developers, the Trumps and Wal-Marts, and the wealthy cronies of a corrupt government. Welcome to Bush’s America.

In the face of this post-Katrina disaster, local activists have been joining forces to stop the pending rape of New Orleans.


One of the largest coalitions, The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition, was formed in September to ensure “that there is local, grass-roots leadership in the relief, return and reconstruction process in New Orleans.” Organized by the local progressive group, Community Labor United, the coalition has over 40 member organizations, and has already received over $150,000 from such major grantors as the Vanguard Foundation and True Majority.


Among the many issues being addressed by the People’s Hurricane Fund are: affordable housing, medical care, education, environmental risk assessment, financial and legal assistance, political and economic oversight of—and direct involvement in—the rebuilding process, and bringing people home to New Orleans.


The need for such a coalition is growing greater by the day:


<>Over 2,400 workers have already been laid off by the City of New Orleans, and thousands more have no job to come back to in the private sector. Meanwhile, Bush announced an emergency suspension of prevailing wage labor laws, and FEMA is now awarding contracts primarily to out-of-state companies, all of them paying lower wages than local companies, and most of them on a no-bid process.


<>In a p.r. move made to look as though all evacuees had been provided real housing, Bush ordered all emergency shelters to be emptied out and shut down by mid-October. As a result, FEMA is spending $11 million a day to house more than half a million evacuees in hotels.


<>Other than Governor Blanco’s unenforced temporary moratorium on evictions, Louisiana has done little to protect her people from further disaster and victimization. A moratorium on all real estate transactions should have been—and still can be—put in place immediately, as well as a moratorium on all property foreclosures.


<>The Red Cross has been the primary recipient of donations, raising nearly one billion dollars for Katrina relief. However, growing criticism of the group, coupled with their inability to handle more than short-term, emergency situations, argues for donations to be made to local, grassroots groups like the People’s Hurricane Fund. (Criticism includes reports of racist behavior by volunteers and staff, inadequate services and their policy of not sharing funds with organizations focused on long-term relief and rebuilding.)

One of the greatest fears that local activists have is that the New Orleans culture, and her people, will be wiped out; that there will be a new diaspora of Blacks in America, with no effort to reunite families and bring people home, no attempt to record their stories and remember the dead, and no stand taken against the racist corporate interests already dividing up and engorging themselves on the beautiful Crescent City.

To learn more about the People’s Hurricane Fund, go to: http://www.CommunityLaborUnited.net



Mimi Yahn is a Pittsburgh-area writer, feminist, human rights activist and singer/songwriter. She is the musical director of the Pittsburgh Raging Grannies, publisher of the Swiftian Report, and a member of the IWW and the National Writers Union. She and her husband moved to Pittsburgh several years ago from New Orleans.