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“AMERICA’S GREATEST COMEBACK STORY” AND THE
Fifteen years post-hurricane Katrina, has the lower ninth ward recovered?
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KATIE KOFFMAN
Koffman is a second-year Master of City and Regional Planning student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying climate change adaptation and environmental planning. Her research focuses on resilience planning and natural hazards in coastal North Carolina. She also has a master’s degree in Environmental Anthropology from North Carolina State University and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies and Spanish from Miami University (Ohio).
ABSTRACT On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, creating widespread devastation and displacing thousands of residents. In the aftermath of the storm, white neighborhoods recovered and gained population. The city regained its status as a tourist destination. However, Black neighborhoods, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, still have a long way to go 15 years after the storm. The history of the social, environmental, and economic vulnerabilities superimposed on non-white residents from the inception of New Orleans set-up the uneven recovery postKatrina. In this article, I demonstrate how the historic conditions of the Lower Ninth Ward are connected to the stymied recovery and the injustices residents faced in the subsequent 15 years.
The disinvestment of Black New Orleanians implies that the Lower Ninth Ward has never recovered. Historically discriminatory housing practices prevented residents from rebuilding their homes. Decades of inequitable and racist policies favored white homeownership and prevented Black residents’ access to loans. The city segregated its neighborhoods based on wealth and elevation, relegating immigrants and Black residents to low-lying areas that flooded frequently. This resulted in low housing values, which impacted how much Black residents received to rebuild their homes post-Katrina. Only 37% of the 14,000 pre-storm residents returned to the Lower Ninth Ward. Those who have returned are susceptible to environmental hazards, economic instability, and a lack of basic, reliable public services.
INTRODUCTION On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. The city was unprepared for the storm’s devastation, despite prolonged warnings about a scenario such as this. The most devastating effects came from the levee breach, which caused up to 12 feet of flooding in sections of the city, including the Lower Ninth Ward (LNW; Allen 2015). The flooding wiped out neighborhoods and covered about 80% of New Orleans (Rivlin 2015; Servick 2018). In 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged the poorly constructed levees failed to protect residents from catastrophic flooding (Robertson & Schwartz 2015). Approximately 1,800 people died from the storm, but no official counts of direct and indirect deaths exist (Bialik 2015; Servick 2018).
In 2015, around the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu stated the city was “America’s greatest comeback story” and “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding” (Rivlin 2016). The city’s population was growing, and it reclaimed its standing as a popular tourist destination. Neighborhoods looked better than before the storm. The Army Corps of Engineers finished a massive public infrastructure project to reinforce the levees (Robertson & Schwartz 2015). However, Mayor Landrieu’s depiction glossed over the other side of the story. African American neighborhoods that were disadvantaged before Katrina are still devastated. Thousands of Black residents left New Orleans for good.
Estimates suggest about 37% of the 14,000 pre-storm residents returned to the LNW. Approximately 700 LNW homeowners sold their land to the State of Louisiana after the hurricane (Allen 2015). Those who came back faced concerns about future flooding and a lack of resources to rebuild their homes. Many residents did not receive enough money to rebuild because of the low housing values in the ward, based on historically racist practices of zoning by city officials and redlining by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC; Allen 2015). While Katrina impacted the entire city, the historical inequities faced by the LNW set the neighborhood up for devastation and unjust recovery.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Disaster Recovery Framework describes recovery as the “capabilities necessary to assist communities affected by an incident to recover effectively” (2016). FEMA frames recovery as a multifaceted process that includes more than just the physical restoration of a place after damage. It includes the physical, emotional, and economic well-being of community members. It also strengthens the resilience of communities through means such as improving medical and social services, the education system, natural and cultural resources, affordable housing, economic resources, and infrastructure. This process also includes preparation for future events, mitigation efforts to reduce vulnerability, and improved response capabilities after a significant event. While recovery takes time, it is essential to address all vulnerable aspects damaged by a weather event and not return to the baseline conditions that exacerbated the disaster’s effects. Based on FEMA’s framework, the LNW has not recovered from Katrina due to the pre-and post-storm conditions that persist, while predominantly white wards meet recovery criteria.
PRE-STORM VULNERABILITIES OF THE LNW The LNW’s geographic, economic, and social vulnerabilities grew from historical discrimination and disinvestment, which impacted the community’s post-Katrina recovery. In the 1800s, wealthier, white residents constructed homes in elevated parts of the city with better drainage areas, such as the French Quarter (Landphair 2007). The French engineered the land to
create levees, canals, floodwalls, and housing. Canals and ditches drained and carried water to the swamplands. After the Civil War, New Orleans built a system of gutters, ditches, and pumps that permanently altered the topography and created subsidence (Campanella 2018). While this naturally occurs when sediments accumulate and compress, sinking the land they are on, the subsidence of New Orleans is mainly due to human activity (Lux 2019). It is important to note that the construction and topographical alterations of the European settlers were built using the labor of enslaved people, and the City’s early economy centered on the slave trade (Seicshnaydre et al. 2018).
Before the Civil War, there was little racial segregation in New Orleans, but this resulted from an ordinance that prevented enslaved people from living anywhere but on their enslaver’s property. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws established segregation practices that separated people according to race in places such as public facilities and restaurants. These laws allowed states to disenfranchise residents through practices such as denying African Americans the right to vote. Additionally, cities passed racial zoning ordinances in the early twentieth century to prevent Black residents from buying homes in white neighborhoods (Seicshnaydre et al. 2018). Italian, Irish, and German immigrants, and formerly enslaved people, were relegated to low-lying, flood-prone areas, such as the Ninth Ward (Landphair 2007). Racial zoning practices—those that prevented racial groups from moving into white neighborhoods—were ended by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley, but city officials found other ways to segregate residents (Silver 1997). For example, officials used their new Euclidean zoning powers to prevent the property value blight and congestion that occurred “whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section” (Ambler Realty Co. v. Village of Euclid, Ohio). HOLC and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) prevented Black families from buying homes by denying access to real estate loans and incentivizing white families to move to the suburbs through subsidized loans (Seicshnaydre et al., 2018).
In 1914, the Louisiana state legislature authorized the construction of the Industrial Canal to connect to the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway and the Port of New Orleans. The canal brought greater economic prospects to the city (Horowitz 2020; Kaplan-Levenson 2018). The MississippiRiver Gulf Outlet (MRGO) connected the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway to the Industrial Canal by 1968. This allowed for increased shipping capacities, but also the expansion of the oil industry (Horowitz 2020). However, once completed, the canals cut the Ninth Ward and East New Orleans off from the city, creating the LNW, a physical and symbolic disconnect between the two parts of New Orleans (KaplanLevenson 2018).
Initially, the canal brought more people to the LNW to work at the wharves to export oil. The City built the Claiborne Bridge in 1957 to reconnect the two parts of New Orleans (Kaplan-Levenson 2018). However, this bridge destroyed other Black neighborhoods and displaced residents (Seicshnaydre et al. 2018). The GI Bill created a construction boom in the LNW after World War II and doubled its size between 1940 and 1960 (Horowitz 2020). At the same time, white New Orleanians used the GI Bill to move to the suburbs and remain in the highest parts of the city. The GI Bill only provided loans to African American veterans if they constructed homes in specific parts of the city, such as the LNW. Racial covenants—a stipulation in property deeds that the owners could not sell or rent homes to nonwhite people—were instituted in white neighborhoods such as Lakeview to prevent integration. Despite racial covenants being declared unconstitutional in 1948, they persisted until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Seicshnaydre et al. 2018). Even though Black residents could not move to the white parishes and suburbs, the LNW offered homeownership opportunities and economic stability not found in other African American neighborhoods within the city (Horowitz 2020). However, the vulnerabilities of this area became apparent when Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965.
The category three hurricane created a storm surge that caused the floodwalls of the Industrial Canal to collapse. About 12 feet of water inundated the LNW (Horowitz 2020; Landphair 2007). Eighty-one people died, and 6,000 houses flooded (Horowitz 2020). After Hurricane Betsy, economic disinvestment in the LNW exacerbated the neighborhood’s inability to recover from the devastation. LNW residents were not allowed back into their homes without the deeds,
which people left behind while fleeing. At first, residents struggled to access recovery loans, food, and medical care. Residents received loans to rebuild if they qualified, which placed many in debt as they attempted to recover after losing everything. However, predominantly white parishes such as St. Bernard distributed grants to rebuild, which left these homeowners better off financially and socially post-Betsy (Horowitz 2020; O’Brien & Amin 2015).
Hurricane Betsy created long-term damage in its wake, intensifying the social vulnerabilities in the LNW in the years preceding Hurricane Katrina. By 2000, one-third of the LNW residents lived in poverty (Landphair 2007). The average annual household income was less than $20,000, and approximately 40% of the population in the LNW had no high school diploma (Lascell & Baumann 2015). The unemployment rate in the neighborhood was 11% in 2005. Seventeen percent of the households received public assistance (Turner & Zedlewski 2006). In 2003, a study found that 56% of 258 homes in the LNW had “at least one hazard (e.g., excessive moisture or pest infestation)” (Landphair 2007). Almost two-thirds of the residents in the LNW owned multi-generational homes, but many of the houses were poorly constructed and maintained (Lascell & Baumann 2015; Rivlin 2015; Turner & Zedlewski 2006). Despite repetitive flooding, subsidence, and prior devastation from hurricanes, FEMA zoned the LNW as “low-risk” for flooding because of its proximity to the levees and did not require residents to buy flood insurance (Turner & Zedlewski 2006).
In the days leading up to Katrina, about 75-80% of the New Orleans metropolitan population evacuated the city. According to scenarios the state and FEMA ran in July 2004, a category three storm could create disastrous flooding and destruction, and residents would need a three-day warning to evacuate and avoid mass casualties (Thomas 2005). However, the City did not mandate evacuations until 20 hours before landfall. Approximately 20-25% of the city’s population remained, which disproportionately included vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and low-income residents (Horowitz 2020; Landphair 2007). In the LNW, 32.4% of the population did not have access to a vehicle or could not afford gas (Lascell & Baumann, 2015; Turner & Zedlewski 2006), suggesting that a disproportionate share of LNW residents were unable to evacuate before the storm.
IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH IN NEW ORLEANS AND THE LNW A powerful storm surge came in through the Industrial Canal from the MRGO during the storm, which caused an estimated 50 levees to fail across the city and created massive destruction in the LNW (Horowitz 2017). When the Army Corps of Engineers built the MRGO in the 1950s, it wiped out thousands of acres of wetlands that served as a natural barrier against flooding and hurricanes (Lascell & Baumann 2015).
After the hurricane, the floodwaters rose and did not subside for nearly six weeks (Lascell & Baumann, 2015). The city, the state, and FEMA were unprepared for a refugee crisis due to thousands of stranded residents, making for inhumane conditions in the Superdome and the Ernest K. Morial Convention Center. Meanwhile, police escalated violence against Black residents across the city under the guise of “maintaining order” (Horowitz 2020).
Residents of the LNW faced adversity from the beginning of the recovery efforts. The city barred residents from returning to the neighborhood for four months after the storm. Armed guards prevented residents from crossing the bridge to check on their homes as the structures were “unsafe to enter or in imminent danger of collapse” (Landphair 2007; Rivlin 2015). Garbage piles accumulated in the streets, the sewer and drain systems overflowed, toxic mold destroyed homes, and powerlines fell during the storm. The ward experienced further flooding on September 24 from Hurricane Rita (Lascell & Baumann 2015). The city razed several homes before residents could return to gather their remaining belongings. LNW residents did not receive FEMA trailers until June 2006, six months after other neighborhoods, and ten months after Katrina (Rivlin 2015).
UNEVEN REBUILDING AND RECOVERY EFFORTS The recovery efforts of the LNW continue 15 years after the storm. While the inequities of recovery are extensive, this section covers the debate about rebuilding the LNW, housing and insurance payouts, and the role of wealth. As Berube & Holmes (2015) observed, New Orleans’s efforts, or lack thereof, to rebuild the LNW reflected “a long-standing policy of neglect toward the city’s most vulnerable residents, exemplified by their continued segregation into neighborhoods of high poverty.”
In the weeks and months following Katrina, prominent figures such as New Orleans’s emergency operations director, Terry Ebbert; the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary, Alphonso Jackson; and then-mayor Ray Nagin, wrote off the LNW as unsalvageable (Rivlin 2015). This sentiment, coupled with pre-and poststorm systematic discrimination, set-up a difficult recovery process. LNW residents wanted to restore the community for its history, culture, and social value (Turner & Zedlewski 2006). The discussion about not rebuilding sections of the city targeted historically Black neighborhoods, while white communities were never in question. For example, Lakeview, a wealthy, predominately white neighborhood with similar vulnerabilities, experienced extensive flooding and destruction from a breached levee, much like the LNW (Colom 2016; Landphair 2007; Rivlin 2015; Robertson & Fausset 2015). It is at a lower elevation than the LNW, but the city allowed Lakeview residents to rebuild their homes without question (Robertson & Fausset 2015).
The city contemplated not rebuilding sections of the city for environmental engineering purposes. Tulane professor Richard Campanella dubbed this the “Great Katrina Footprint Debate” as the city grappled with whether it should revert 20-40% of its landmass to wetlands (Rivlin 2015). Racism tinged the debate, since the neighborhoods slated for potential demolition housed about 80% of New Orleans’s Black population (Rivlin 2015). The discussion reinforced historical injustices and discriminatory practices that restricted Black families to the vulnerable parts of the city. The city eventually allowed the LNW to rebuild but placed barriers in the way. As mentioned, FEMA labeled the LNW as a low-risk flood area, and consequently, hundreds of families did not receive a payout for their homes after the storm (Turner & Zedlewski 2006). Residents also did not have access to basic public services such as trash collection and functioning sewers (Lascell & Baumann 2015). In 2008, the city agreed to help clear out the LNW, but as of 2015, there were houses still awaiting removal (Lascell & Baumann 2015).
The federal government and the State of Louisiana implemented a market-based recovery, which drove further inequitable recovery efforts. HUD initiated the Road Home program, one of the largest housing recovery efforts in U.S. history, with a Community Development Block Grant to the State for distribution (Rivlin 2016; Horowitz, 2020). The State then paid homeowners based either on the market value of their house or the cost of rebuilding the home, whichever was lower (Colom,2016; Perry 2010). Many Black homeowners could not rebuild because they had low housing values, and it cost significantly more to reconstruct. Homes in Black neighborhoods “generally have lower appraisal values than homes in white neighborhoods, largely due to decades of racial discrimination in the Louisiana housing market that has caused and reinforced segregation in housing” (Colom 2016; Perry 2010). White neighborhoods had higher housing prices, experienced less damage due to elevation, and received more money to rebuild. Many white neighborhoods like Lakeview recovered and prospered due to their access to resources and insurance payments (O’Brien & Amin 2015; Seicshnaydre et al., 2018).
The high rate of LNW homeownership diminished after Katrina because of the Road Home program. Road Home required proof of ownership, but multi-generational homeowners often did not have the original deed, which prevented them from receiving recovery money (Rivlin 2015). The program further exacerbated housing disparities in New Orleans since Black families could not afford to rebuild their homes. Additionally, the storm destroyed a significant portion of the city’s public housing stock, which was not rebuilt (Colom, 2016). In 2008, a lawsuit
claimed discriminatory practices in the Road Home program prevented African Americans from rebuilding their homes (Rivlin 2015). In 2010, the judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, and the state agreed to pay out $62 million to those who had not received money for their losses (Rivlin 2015).
Concurrent with market-based housing disparities and those produced by Road Home, FEMA created further issues with its infamous trailers. The agency did not have a plan to move displaced residents to temporary housing, nor subsequently from the trailers back to permanent housing. The trailers were not placed near the LNW and lacked basic amenities such as schools, public transportation, and jobs (Turner & Zedlewski 2006). Additionally, the trailers caused health problems because the levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, were five to 40 times higher than legally allowed. People developed headaches, nosebleeds, respiratory infections, and flu-like symptoms. In 2008, FEMA admitted during Congressional testimony it knew the trailers contained formaldehyde (Smith 2015).
The tension over redeveloping the LNW is ongoing. While some residents returned, the LNW is a fraction of its original size. The city demolished the only public school in the ward and did not reconstruct another for over a decade. Other delayed promises from the city and the state include a $20.5 million community center and the reestablishment of public services (Lascell & Baumann 2015). In contrast, in predominantly white neighborhoods, the city invested in better infrastructure, public transportation, and recreation facilities (The Data Center 2018). Historically Black areas such as the LNW “have been much slower to rebuild and recover their previous population levels” (Berube & Holmes,2015).
PRESENT DAY HAZARDS IN THE LNW ASSESSED
Environmental hazards
The federal government recognized that the MRGO was partly responsible for the flooding in the LNW and St. Bernard Parish and closed the Canal in 2009 with a 1.8-mile surge barrier (Horowitz 2020). The Army Corps of Engineers spent over $14 billion to upgrade flood infrastructures that included levees, floodwalls, and the world’s largest water pump, which displaces 20,000 cubic feet of water per second (Craig & Sellers 2019; Frank 2019). Despite these improvements, subsidence and rising sea levels will soon render the infrastructure useless (Craig & Sellers 2019; Frank 2019). In 2016, scientists found that the Lower and Upper Ninth Ward sink at a rate of 1.6 inches per year, which is faster than previous studies showed (NASA 2016). Additionally, Louisiana experiences about one centimeter of sea-level rise annually (Milne 2018). In August 2019, intense weather tested the levees and worried residents. Large quantities of rainfall and snowmelt from upriver caused the Mississippi River to sit right below the top of the levees as Tropical Storm Barry approached New Orleans (Masters 2019). Meteorologists expected the slowmoving storm to drop an extra 18 inches of rain on the city, testing the levees’ capabilities (Craig & Sellers 2019; Masters 2019). While the levees did not breach, warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico, climate change, subsidence, and rising sea levels further increase vulnerabilities for areas such as the LNW.
FEMA Flood Maps Reassessed
The FEMA flood maps continue to create controversy in New Orleans. After Katrina, FEMA reclassified much of the city as “high-risk”. However, in 2016, the flood maps were revised when the city lobbied the federal government for less stringent flood regulations, which removed over half of the population from the high-risk zone. Jared Munster, the Director of Safety and Permits in New Orleans, stated it “is absolutely a great victory, and it represents to us that the federal government is very comfortable in our level of protection” (Kailath 2016).
While New Orleans officials believe they did enough to mitigate flooding, this endangers vulnerable residents. Flood maps create a false sense of security, and people do not buy flood insurance if they are not required to (Kailath 2016). The LNW is not in the lowest-lying part of New Orleans, but its history suggests it is a high-risk area (Rivlin 2015). As discussed, many households could not rebuild in the LNW with the lack of flood insurance, and a false sense of security continues 15 years later.
Social Vulnerabilities
Social vulnerability increased in the LNW after Hurricane Katrina as the neighborhood experienced increases in poverty and unemployment and a deteriorating state of housing. Those who left New Orleans for good after Katrina were likely African Americans, renters, and unemployed (Fussell 2015). As of 2018, the city’s population was up to 391,000 people, or 80% of the pre-storm population. There are approximately 93,000 fewer Black residents than there were pre-Katrina, while there are 8,000 white residents that never returned to New Orleans (Mosley 2020).
In recent years, the city resurged in popularity among white professionals in high-tech industries. The post-Katrina economic boom did not benefit all residents evenly, as most new jobs only paid minimum wage (100 Resilient Cities 2015). Seven of the ten job fields that grew after 2010 were in “tourism, administrative services, and retail” (Perry 2017). This growth in low-wage jobs relates to the growing wealth gap between white and Black populations in New Orleans. Since 2005, white median household income increased by 40% to over $60,000, while Black median household income is around $30,000 (100 Resilient Cities 2015; Rivlin 2016). Childhood poverty in the city increased to 40%--double the national average (Rivlin 2016). Communities such as the LNW face barriers to recovery because of low-wage employment, a lack of access to affordable housing, and a lack of economic investment from the City and State for the parish’s recovery (100 Resilient Cities 2015).
CONCLUSION Fifteen years after the storm, the LNW still has not met FEMA’s definition of disaster recovery. There is a lack of physical restoration of homes and infrastructure in the ward. The levees were repaired but are likely to be ineffective in the coming years due to subsidence and climate change. The LNW’s economic conditions reflect the economic disparities and wealth gap between white and Black New Orleanians from measures of homeownership to median income. The recovery is not holistic nor continuous as FEMA, the state, and the city inequitably approached post-storm restoration haphazardly. The disastrous recovery reflects the need for better pre-disaster and post-disaster planning, which could have helped to avoid the mistakes that cost residents in the LNW and other Black neighborhoods their livelihoods and exacerbated historical inequities.
The slow and ineffective recovery efforts of the LNW were not an accident. The manipulation of the real estate market, segregation, and deliberate policies at the local, state, and federal level favored white New Orleanians. While white neighborhoods in New Orleans have recovered and prospered, thousands of Black residents never returned to their homes. Continued failures at the city, state, and federal levels in the aftermath of the storm only compounded the harm inflicted on the LNW. As Rivlin (2016) explained, “Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm. A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. That wasn’t due to bad luck; because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home.”
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CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors attest that they have no financial interest in the materials and subjects discussed in this article.
