Tomorrow is the much-discussed anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and politicians of all stripes are spinning the recovery to suit their agendas. I just got back from five days in New Orleans, helping United Teachers of New Orleans reorganize their union after craven politicians took the opportunity to try to smash it. The city is in a truly sorry shape, with hardly any meaningful rebuilding having taken place in the last year.
A tourist would get no real sense of how bad things are, so don’t trust your vacationing Limey friend’s account of how how things are getting back to normal in New Orleans. Landing at the airport in the unscathed and prosperous Jefferson Parish, one would find the airport largely empty of people, but in good shape. Driving down I-10 to the city’s central business district, one finds lots of roadwork and some year-old billboards mixed in with signs advertising furniture and hardware stores. Many storefronts remain open. Those that are still damaged have vinyl signs out front announcing “We’re Open!” Many of those that are boarded up have signs announcing “We’ll Be Back!”
In the central business district, most hotels are open and in pristine shape, save for the curious fact that they are occasionally overrun by crickets. The business district and the French Quarter were built on the highest ground, so they were not flooded and most businesses are open. There are tourists strolling drunk down Bourbon Street. Dozens of them. They get extra special attention at the strip clubs and are dragged bodily into bars for three for one happy hour specials by desperate bouncers. They are getting quite a deal, and likely will encourage their friends to enjoy the bargain of New Orleans.
On the other side of town, entire neighborhoods are still wastelands. Entire blocks of the Lower 9th Ward were washed away by the flood. At some addresses, you will find front doorsteps and nothing else. Houses were ripped from their foundations, carried away by the tide and landed hundreds of feet away when the storm waters receded. It is not uncommon to see a house on top of a car, a year later. At least they got most houses out of the middle of the streets.
The Lower 9th is a black working class neighborhood. It was hit hardest by the devastation. The second hardest-hit neighborhood was a prosperous middle class section called Lakeview. Here, most of these McMansions still bear the marks of the search and rescue missions: orange spray painted X’s, with dates, initials and codes indicating who who searched the house, when they did and what they found. Most of the dates are between “9/15” and “9/28” – weeks after the initial flooding! In the bottom of the X’s is usually “0,” indicating that the rescue team found no one home. On every couple of houses will say something like “found 1 cat,” “2 dead dogs,” “1 body,” “no dogs.”
Most of the houses are also still stained by the high water mark – usually eight feet high or more – well above the front door. Many of these houses have been gutted to remove the unhealthy mold and boarded up, awaiting insurance checks and federal rebuilding money. Some houses have FEMA trailers in the front yards, where residents live while they wait. Other houses were bulldozed entirely, leaving behind sandy lots. The handful of people who remain act as unofficial block captains, grilling anyone who wanders the street about what business they have there. They can give a pretty good rundown of where all their neighbors are; who’s in Houston, who’s in Baton Rouge, who’s never been heard from again. The U.S. Army patrols the streets for extra “protection” from “looters.”
Some houses in Lakeview have been repaired and look as good as new. Others have yard signs provided by the local civic organization proclaiming “We’re Coming Home to Lakeview.” These yard signs are the rebuilding process in New Orleans. It’s a cold calculus if you get an insurance check early. Rebuild, or cut and run? What happens if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars repairing your home, but none of your neighbors rebuild? Do you risk losing your life savings if you are the only house on a barren street, in a neighborhood that is still below sea level, with levies that are still the same size and strength as before, with hurricane season getting a late start?
Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” This is how individuals rebuild. George Bush doesn’t believe in society either.
Abandoned houses dot the entire city, not just the most ravaged neighborhoods. They are little Pompeii’s, frozen in time, filled with awful-smelling mold and covered in eye-high weeds and ravenous mosquitoes. In the windows are warnings from the city that if the houses are not, at the very least, gutted and boarded up by August 29th, then the city will bulldoze them and take over the land.
Under pressure from activists, the city has postponed that deadline. Most people have simply not returned to New Orleans. The population of the city is, at best, half of what it was pre-K, and, post-K, there aren’t many jobs to be found, and rent, according to the Times-Picayune, is 39 percent more expensive.
Radio and television advertisements seem to consist exclusively of ads for hardware stores, furniture stores and insurance companies promising not to screw you like your last company did. Music on the radio is excellent. I took it as a good sign when, in the cab ride from the airport, a recent song from Alex Chilton came on the radio. My guess is that the advertising revenue is so poor that Clear Channel and other corporate parents have, for the time being, walked away from their investments, leaving the local disc jockeys to play what they like. There is a very strange laid-back vibe in New Orleans. Most people who live in the city, it seems at times, are living on the last of their relief money. People saunter and chit chat. Packs of stray dogs roam the streets, some of them still wearing their tags. They may not be abandoned. Some people leave their dogs in the yards of their gutted homes, while they live in trailer parks in other parts of town. The dogs get loose and find each other, reclaiming their pack mentality.
Nature has a funny way of reasserting itself. In one neighborhood, near the Garden District, a flock of parrots (presumably escaped pets that, once again, found each other) perch on electric lines. The city is strangely devoid of other birds, however. I counted a dozen pigeons, a handful of chickadees, three grey birds that I couldn’t recognize, one osprey and three little red roosters all week. The flood water, containing a deadly mix of chemicals and oils, killed many animals and vegetation and greatly upset the ecosystem. Grass still grows, and the palm trees survived, but all the city’s magnolias are grey, lifeless husks. And, everywhere are these goddamn crickets.
I don’t want to write too much about the work that I did while I was down in New Orleans. What happened to UTNO – the bosses and politicians took advantage of the disaster to fire all the teachers and bust the union – could happen to any union. Few, I fear would be as able to bounce back and reorganize as this union. The teachers that I met have a remarkable identification with and respect for their union that I wish more unions could claim. They are pissed off at the city and they are ready to fight. The staff, too, is ready to fight. There was an inspiring moment my first night in town, when all of the union’s staff introduced themselves as organizers. Unions do this all the time. The national, or international, union steps in and throws out everyone’s business cards, telling them, “From now on, you are all organizers.” But nothing has changed, except the staff has new business cards. This staff realizes that if they are to have a union to work for they must become organizers and they are picking it up very quickly. I feel pretty good about the teachers union in New Orleans that it will be back, stronger than ever. I hope to be back to be a part of its rebuilding again.