NorthWest Carrollton in the Village Voice

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Building Blocks
Neighbor by neighbor, house by house, New Orleans struggles on
By Anya Kamenetz Tuesday, Aug 22 2006

"I've lost all sense of what's normal," says New Orleans resident Bart Everson. His house, which took on five feet of water, stands at a crossroads in the city's recovery—one of the points where people staring at destruction must decide whether to stay or go. At the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, he and his wife are back in their Mid-City home, in a neighborhood where fewer than 30 percent of the families own the place they live in and which most visitors might see only on their way to Jazzfest.


Absentee landlords have abandoned more than half the nearby buildings in his district. His neighbors across the street, an elderly African American woman with her three grandchildren, are gone, replaced by someone who seems to be a squatter. Newly arrived Hispanic laborers are paying twice the pre-Katrina rents, yet some have no electricity or gas. Some pile their unbagged garbage in the street. The block around the corner is full of FEMA trailers, and across the street is a grocery store untouched since the storm. Inside, rats scurry over a floor slick with rot.

And yet Everson, who works at Xavier University, and his wife, who teaches school, have no plans to leave. They are renovating their flooded first story. They complained to their City Council member about the garbage and the rats, and used Spanish-language flyers to persuade new neighbors to clean up. And most of all, the Eversons are active in their neighborhood organization, which like dozens around the city is working independently to devise a plan for rebuilding. Their group is proposing to form a community redevelopment corporation to buy blighted houses and provide a path to homeownership for those willing to renovate them.

"We want to give people a reason to move to Mid-City," Everson says, especially people from more wrecked neighborhoods who can't afford to buy in the areas that stayed dry. "I really think we are the best of the worst, as far as a flooded neighborhood that's coming back."

If you want to get what's going on in New Orleans right now, you need to understand Everson's state of mind, which he describes as "tightly bridled optimism." People here have always read the map as a checkerboard—rich and poor, safe and dangerous, white and black. One year post-Katrina, the grid has acquired a few more dimensions. Multiply the August 30 flood line by the percentage of renters vs. homeowners, and by the distance from the "sliver on the river" or the "Aisle of denial"—the dry area from the French Quarter to Tulane University—and you get a rough index of viability.

The grassroots commitment of individual residents like Everson is the X factor in the fate of each of the city's 73-odd neighborhoods; still-inadequate hurricane protection and an absence of citywide coordination are the immovable variables that threaten them all.

Add to that mix the big money and big plans coming at the beginning of September. Up to $150,000 in homeowners' assistance is coming through the Road Home program, federal grants administered by the state Louisiana Recovery Authority. But for rental housing and every other city planning issue, no one knows what exactly will be funded, or how and when. John McIlwain of the Urban Land Institute, a national urban planning and developers' trade organization, has been advising in the process officially and unofficially for the past year. He says Mayor Ray Nagin has just a few weeks to designate someone who’ll make sure the money goes where it's supposed to. "There is a window of opportunity now with the plans in place and the money coming in,” McIlwain argues. “If they're not coordinated by a strong organization, the money will be wasted."

On the other hand, he says, "One thing I think is really positive is that the neighborhood groups are involved in the planning effort . . . . Recovery has to be neighborhood based and block by block."

Dozens of neighborhood organizations have either been formed or greatly expanded, even in the most devastated areas, and suddenly everyone knows the local city councilperson by name. "I knew my neighbors to wave to," says Karen Gadbois. After the storm, she co-founded the Northwest Carrollton Civic Association and is now trying to get elderly neighbors back in their homes, shut out a big-box store, and improve police response. "I've called them and they literally say, 'If you'd like to report an emergency, press 3--it's like calling Cox Cable, except you're calling 911." At a recent 2nd District community police meeting, she says, a man reported that a gunshot victim crawled under his FEMA trailer and died.

Talk to neighborhood activists citywide and you hear the same chorus of complaints: housing blight, decaying infrastructure, resurgent crime, and a lack of leadership. "The mayor is invisible," says Maitri Venkat-Ramani, a Shell Oil geologist who hears drug deals outside her house on Magazine Street.

"He's done nothing for the city," seconds Linda DeGruy, who moved back into the Iberville projects in June without authorization and is withholding rent. She’s suing the Housing Authority of New Orleans for her right to stay. While most of the city's public housing remains closed and slated for demolition, around 250 residents have returned to this development, some with permission and at least 29 without it. The drug trade is back here too, with a vengeance. Cleveland Young, one of a group of men standing outside Iberville's corner grocery with beers on a Sunday afternoon, says he got out of prison in the spring after five years and is "just trying to survive."