Invisible City By Ashley Shelby. In the days following Hurricane Katrina, as the sick and the dying were finally being evacuated from New Orleans" now infamous Convention Center, US Representative Richard Baker, of Baton Rouge, commented publicly that there was a bright side to the worst natural disaster in United States history: !We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," he said. !We couldn"t do it, but God did." When President George W. Bush left his Texas ranch, where he"d been vacationing during the Katrina disaster, he circled the New Orleans area, visiting more affluent regions of the disaster-ravaged Gulf Coast, which were populated mainly by oil industry workers. Around the time he landed at the New Orleans airport for a visit he said he was not looking forward to making, images were streaming out of downtown New Orleans of corpses baking in the sun outside the Convention Center, and thousands of desperate, hungry, sick residents who had been waiting days for basic aid. Bush"s first comments upon landing in New Orleans were jokes about the fun he had in the French Quarter back when he was drinking. A few days later, former first lady Barbara Bush visited the Houston Astrodome, where thousands of Katrina victims had finally found shelter. After visiting with displaced New Orleans residents – overwhelmingly black and poor – she said that she found the prospect of the evacuees who had been moved to Houston wanting to stay in her home state !kind of scary". Of the evacuees themselves, she mused that !so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them". At first, many progressives considered these comments racist in nature, or, at the very least, race-based: The Bush Administration, they said, would not have been as initially indifferent to both the magnitude of both the disaster and the human suffering wrought by it had the sick and suffering been white. But as time has passed, the politics of disaster recovery – perhaps the ugliest politics of all – have revealed that this is not mainly a story of black and white. It is, instead, a major, and perhaps decisive, battle in the American class war. In the last 100 years, the visual markers of class – the dirtied overalls of the day laborer, the begrimed face of the child from the Lower East Side tenement, the crisp summer suits of the Long Island Gatsbys – have dissolved into a colorless paste smeared across the American sociological landscape. The upper class moonlights as the middle class and the middle class can sometimes appear upper crust. The working class can sometimes pass for middle class, and the upper middle class gentrify the working class neighborhoods. It"s become the kind of human stew aspiring politicians use as market-tested symbols in political speeches. But for anyone who wondered – or ever asserted – that the era of class is over, Katrina showed them that class is still a defining element of American society. Not since Agee and Evans showed the world the lined, hungry faces of the Dust Bowl has the poverty of so many – the kind of poverty that many Americans have convinced themselves no longer exists in any large degree – been put on display. As Katrina wrought its havoc, Americans were reintroduced to a famous and beloved city, one that had long draped colorful Mardi Gras garb over its woes. The country"s second poorest city, New Orleans" poverty rate is nearly triple the national average. The illiteracy rates among public school children is an appalling 40% (the country"s national average 2%). It is among the most crime-ridden metropolises in the United States, with a murder rate that is the highest in the nation. After Katrina"s floodwaters began receding, there was hope that the profound shock of both the images of the victims and of the politicians who had crowed so loudly of America"s mighty preparedness would instigate some changes to flawed social policies. But while politicians gave press conferences, FEMA officials appeared on CNN, politicians delivered tarmac speeches, there was, in the words recorded in those crucial days following the disaster, astonishingly few words of hope offered to the displaced of New Orleans – specifically, the displaced poor. Perhaps the most important capital in the economy of recovery, hope is a pervasive theme introduced into the dialogue, almost immediately.
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!You bring us hope," the mayor of Grand Forks, North Dakota, Pat Owens tearfully told President Bill Clinton at a press conference soon after the dikes were overtopped by the raging Red River in 1997, resulting in one of the 10 worst natural disasters in American history. !It may be hard to believe," Clinton replied then, !but you can rebuild stronger and better than ever." Clinton"s famous compassion in the days after the Grand Forks flood is something that seemed absent from the Bush Administration"s tepid response to the Katrina catastrophe. !A lot of people are still in shock and have not had time to focus on some of the things which will make the losses most painful," Clinton said to flood victims in "97, !the things that have been lost in these homes, the records of family occasions, the letters from World War Two, the letters from the kids that go off to college, all the things that people will have to come to grips with in the days ahead." The strange absence of encouragement and comfort from federal and local officials could have easily been dismissed as a public relations flaw, the glassy-eyed response of overworked, overwhelmed officials who were already facing withering criticism for their performance. But as the weeks ticked by, the lack of !bigger, better, and stronger" rhetoric from the Bush Administration and local Louisiana politicians would come to seem strategic: there was no sense in providing hope to the sorts of people they hoped might never return. To rebuild a city, you must first take it apart. In the dismantling, things that have long been hidden, perhaps even buried, come tumbling out. These are usually private affairs, shared by a single town, and they occur long after the disaster – and the media – has passed through. Recovery is, for that reason, largely a mystery, and the realm of private contractors, city planners, legislators, urban development teams, and city councils. The closely held dreams of an
Urban Development Director may suddenly seem possible with a clean slate. Blighted neighborhoods may finally be improved with federal dollars – or, better yet, annihilated. Dead downtowns may be resuscitated with the aid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These are civic dreams that are only realized when there"s enough money to make fundamental infrastructure changes. Cities are only given an opportunity to rebuild when they are destroyed. And in no other circumstance is the illusion of parity more perfectly shattered than in the rebuilding of a city following a disaster. The first signs that New Orleans" lower-income and working classes might not be accommodated in the new New Orleans came in October. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson told the Houston Chronicle that New Orleans was !not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again". New Orleans" Ninth Ward neighborhood – a poor, largely black neighborhood that suffered hugely in Katrina – has been among the first neighborhoods to be written out of the new New Orleans. Preliminary reports have thousands of homes in that area slated for demolition, a not completely unexpected outcome of a disaster of this magnitude. Neighborhoods that have been deemed environmentally vulnerable often undergo massive structural changes after a disaster like a flood or hurricane. In Grand Forks, when the Red River of the North overtopped 52-foot dikes, washing through the city of 52,000 people, three neighborhoods, all in the shadow of the dike, were literally wiped off the map. Rather than rebuild these working class neighborhoods, the US Army Corps of Engineers deemed the land on which they were built a 100-year-floodplain (the term comes from the probability that a catastrophic flood is likely to occur there once every 100 years and it is therefore an undesirable residential location.) As a condition of federal rebuilding funds offered to the city to reconstruct their drowned city, Grand Forks had to agree to demolish the
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homes on that land, and turn the space into Greenways – large swaths of green space devoid of human habitation. These were necessary measures. Though often discussed in terms of natural phenomena, disasters are social products, a kind of pathology in the everyday sociology of a community. A natural event – such as a hurricane – only becomes a !disaster" when human lives are affected. And human lives are affected in this way only when those lives and the force of nature intersect, as they did on the floodplains in Grand Forks. Remove the humans from those floodplains, and you removed the chance of a future disaster. At the time, the city of Grand Forks, and the federal government, which had required the moves, termed the demolition of the homes in these neighborhoods !sacrifices" for the good of the community. It went without mention that the three !sacrificed" Grand Forks neighborhoods were home to the city"s lower-income and working class populations – overwhelmingly white, like the rest of the city. It also went without mention that another Grand Forks neighborhood, also vulnerable to the next catastrophic flood, had been spared: Reeves Drive was the city"s wealthiest neighborhood. Although Reeves Drive was also likely to suffer damage in another flood, its large, sprawling homes went untouched. Former residents of the demolished neighborhoods came to realize that the concept of shared sacrifice did not come into play in the politics of recovery. For the working class in Grand Forks, there was no new affordable housing; the new developments that cropped up during the rebuilding process and were, so the city said, meant to replenish the city"s housing stock were priced at two and sometimes three times the cost of the homes that had been destroyed. Grand Forks" working class, like the populations of most working classes in cities struck by disasters, had nowhere to turn and little hope to start fresh. The same scenario – writ large – is shaping up in the rebuilding of New Orleans. The city"s obvious environmental vulnerabilities – it is located below sea level and has been sinking for years, is built on the unpredictable Mississippi river, and faces the hurricaneharbor that is the Gulf of Mexico – as well as its deep economic and social rifts had made New Orleans one of the country"s most problematic metropolises. Its public housing was concentrated in its urban center; meanwhile, private developers looked to the suburbs to build communities to house the whites who were, like so many others around the
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country, fleeing the cities as the poor, black population grew. These developments were, of course, far beyond the reach of the lower and working classes, and it was meant to be that way. And now, housing advocates fear that Mayor Ray Nagin"s Sin City-style vision for New Orleans – Nagin has suggested making Las Vegas-style gambling a central part of the city"s new economy – will leave the poor of New Orleans with nowhere to stand. In the Ninth Ward, which has become a kind of talisman in the burgeoning New Orleans class war, it is likely that displaced residents will never return. Not because they don"t want to, which is the story city officials are beginning to circulate, but because they can"t. Just as many of New Orleans" poor did not have resources to get out of the city ahead of Katrina, they will likely not have the resources – or the reasons – to get back in. For anyone looking for a job in the rebuilding boom, fair wages are no longer guaranteed. President Bush suspending legislation like the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which requires employees to pay locally prevailing wages. Ostensibly designed to help local bosses rebuild critical infrastructure quickly, chances are the people hit hardest by this suspension will be the minority workers who will likely make up a big part of the recovery workforce. Bush and his fellow Republicans also continued pushing for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and for spending cuts in programs like Medicaid and food stamps. The logic: a strong economy is good for rich and poor alike. However, going by the economic records of Clinton and Bush in regards to tax cuts and spending, this appears to be flawed logic. When, in 1993, Clinton raised taxes on wealthy Americans, the economy expanded – and poverty rates plummeted for the remainder of his term. Bush"s 2001 tax cuts have led to poverty rate increases each year. In an article for The American Prospect, cognitive scientist and author George Lakoff denounced such policies: !For the first time in history, a wartime president and his allies in Congress have sacrificed the nation"s well-being to their ideology by asking nothing from those that have prospered so much from the collective work of all Americans." Taking care of the wealthy first at the expense of the working poor, Lakoff contends, is an affront to the American tradition of shared sacrifice and mutual responsibility. Robert Greenstein, the director of the Center on
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Budget and Policy Priorities, told the New York Times in October: !We"ve gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that lowincome people will be asked to bear the costs." One major cost to the low-income population will be the loss of the Ninth Ward neighborhood. The fate of the Ninth Ward, city and federal officials point out, will be the fate of many of New Orleans" neighborhoods – located in an environmentally problematic area prone to more flooding, they will be !sacrificed." HUD officials have said that the Ninth Ward in particularly is simply an unsafe locale for a neighborhood due to its susceptibility to flooding. Interestingly, another floodsusceptible neighborhood, the largely white and affluent Lakeview, a neighborhood that was swamped by Lake Pontchatrain"s floodwaters, has not merited comment from HUD officials and seems safe from the wrecking ball. Working with what urban developers are already calling a !blank sheet", housing officials like Jackson are preparing the way for a wealthier, whiter New Orleans. And many believe that eager developers and ambitious politicians are making plans to engineer poverty out of the city altogether – not by implementing better policy, but by simply making it impossible for low-income and working class individuals to live there. !If we can get rid of 100,000 of the lower class that are takers and not givers to the community, we"d be much better off," one real estate appraiser was quoted as saying by the Times-Picayune. The Bring New Orleans Back board has been charged with creating a vision for the new New Orleans. The 17-person advisory board, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is stocked with CEOs and other shining lights from the business world: Joseph Canizaro, a multimillionaire developer; David White, a close friend of Nagin"s; Donald Bollinger, Jr., another multimillionaire businessman, among others. A Frankenstein of federal dollars, corporate interests, red tape, and private sector ambitions, the Bring New Orleans Back advisory board has no appreciable low-income or working class presence. Nagin, whom political analyst and author Earl Ofari Hutchinson accuses of being !bankrolled by corporate interests", won the mayoral election with less than a majority of the black vote in New Orleans.
Katrina, the lack of a low-income housing expert on the Bring New Orleans Back advisory board does not bode well for the poor of New Orleans who hoped to return. The low-lying, 98% black and poor Ninth Ward, among the last of the New Orleans neighborhoods to be reopened by Ray Nagin, may be allowed to revert to swampland. An environmentally responsible decision, perhaps; but with no intention of providing replacement housing stock for the displaced residents, it leaves a large chunk of New Orleans" poor homeless. Some activists believe that rather than reinforcing class divisions, Katrina"s !cleanup crew" will simply get rid of the undesirable classes, that they will engage in class cleansing. There will be no conservative (or liberal) on a white horse galloping to the rescue of the lower-income and working classes of New Orleans; with low voter registration rates and even lower paychecks – making them unlikely political donors – the poor of New Orleans might as well be invisible. And with Democrats providing no viable solutions, and being too weak to implement them if they could, it"s been left to grassroots activists to ensure the lowerincome and working classes of New Orleans are written into the new New Orleans rather than out of it. Organizations like the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the NAACP are publicly demanding that residents of neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward be allowed to return to the communities in which they"d made their homes or, at least, have a say in what happens to their neighborhood. And a grassroots movement to get displaced residents and other representatives of the working classes in positions of decision-making in the reconstruction effort is underway and slowly gaining support. Americans have always cultivated and jealously protected an image of classlessness and the illusion of unlimited social and economic mobility. But as the world watched the images streaming out of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a truth, long buried, emerged, shattering this illusion. Rather than erasing class lines, the Katrina disaster may allow politicians to erase an entire class from their city.
!This stirred black suspicions that his administration would tilt heavily towards business interests and ignore the city"s escalating numbers of the poor," Hutchinson wrote. As it has become clear that the plans for New Orleans were looking inhospitable to the city"s large lower-income and working class population, activist groups, progressive think tanks, and even large national organizations like the NAACP have been stepping up their efforts to get a seat at the table. With low-income affordable housing making up approximately 90% of the rental units destroyed by
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