A Paradise Built in Hell (43 page)

Pitt, who with his partner and children nominally moved to New Orleans after Katrina, helped organize and underwrote a competition to design sustainable housing for New Orleans and has since given millions to the rebuilding effort. Originally, the project was to have generated houses across New Orleans, but after Pitt met Pam Dashiell and the HCNA, he decided all the resources should go into the Lower Ninth. Members of the neighborhood group got involved in the competition to design an eighteen-unit apartment building, several single-family homes, and a community center that will include day-care facilities. In the summer of 2008, some of the architecturally adventurous houses Pitt had helped bring into being were nearly finished. They stood on tall stilts that contributed to their resemblance to just-landed spaceships, in the empty space near the levee breach where so many houses had been smashed up by the force of the waters. A lonely expanse spread around them with only a few inhabited buildings, including the two-story house Common Ground came to own and rehabilitate. That house in 2006 was full of silt and on it was spray-painted “BAGHDAD” in crude lettering insisting that this too was a war zone. Two years later, the building was clean, newly plumbed, and a hive of activity surrounded by gardens—and a shabby doghouse labeled “FEMA,” a succinct visual joke about the government that had failed to help when it mattered most.

Housed, like NENA, in a building lent by a church, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association is a key player in the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth. Founded in 1981, the HCNA had been working with the Sierra Club on environmental justice issues that posed serious threats to the neighborhood long before Katrina. So the club and the HCNA were already in place when Katrina hit; Common Ground (the funnel for volunteers cofounded by New Orleans native and former Black Panther Malik Rahim), Emergency Communities, NENA, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and other organizations—including many church groups—emerged in the wake of the storm. Existing ties mattered enormously. New ones arose. A tangle of organizations, connections, and networks—and will and love—held together the city that had fallen apart.

The semisuburban white enclave of Lakeview at the other end of New Orleans became far more gregarious; a daughter of that neighborhood working as an anthropologist told me that many there said to her, “If it wasn’t for my neighbors, I wouldn’t be here.”

In a city like New York—affluent, well run, fully functional for the great majority of its citizens—getting back to normal was a coherent goal. In a city like New Orleans that had been falling apart for decades, plagued with corrupt and incompentent policing, courts, and government generally, undermined by poverty and divided by racism,
back
wasn’t necessarily the direction to go. The disaster was a chance for some to try to reinvent their community and their lives—a gamble, really, since it didn’t always work. It didn’t always fail either.

 

 

 

After the upheaval of the disaster came the long, hard task of rebuilding homes on the Gulf. Deciding to come back was complicated. It depended for most people on whether the neighbors were coming back. To have a home you needed a neighborhood around it. To have a neighborhood you needed a city and some of the basic services—water, sewage, schools, transit—they are supposed to provide. To have a city you needed some environmental action on New Orleans’s shattered levees and other systems and maybe some confidence in solving larger environmental problems. Which meant you needed a nation that was committed. It wasn’t, but people came back anyway, some with no guarantees whatsoever.

In a disaster like the 1906 earthquake, there was a great deal for people to do as soon as the shaking was over—rescuing, fighting fire, building temporary shelters and then those convivial community kitchens. Some felt more powerful as they took action, formed community, made decisions, functioned in the absence of the usual systems. That sense of agency was not so widespread in Katrina. The disaster did bring together many who stayed in the city. But most people evacuated, believing they would be gone a few days but then found themselves in exile. Staying in the city meant being utterly overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe, stranded by the water and seeing the authorities go berserk. Many felt helpless, even if they were not stuck in one of the terrible public shelters, and when they were evacuated, they were often put on buses and planes without being allowed to choose or even know their destination. Those who could evacuate under their own means controlled their destiny—where they went and when they returned. Those who couldn’t didn’t. Evacuees were often received kindly after their city was wrecked, but their few days away stretched into weeks and months. They were estranged, adrift, uprooted, recipients of charity more than members of a community of mutual aid. Organizing anything amid that diaspora was difficult, and so was staving off despair.

Earthquakes and fires are comparatively clean disasters; the flood of New Orleans left behind silt, mud, debris, and, indoors, toxic mold, while the unexpectedly long evacuation left food to rot in tens of thousands of refrigerators; bodies decaying in flooded homes; dead animals among the fallen trees and debris; contaminants and toxins carried by water that settled in odd places; a huge oil spill in St. Bernard Parish; a filthy, stinking, soggy mess dismaying to those who came back.

The most optimistic of all disaster scholars, Charles Fritz, had ascribed his positive disaster experiences only to those who are “permitted to interact freely and to make an unimpeded social adjustment.” This was hardly what happened in the first days and weeks of Katrina, when many felt abandoned, criminalized, imprisoned, cast out, and then like recipients of charity—or hate. Many are still displaced years after the storm—the calculus is, “If you couldn’t afford to evacuate, you probably can’t afford to come back”—and rental housing in particular has evaporated from the city. The scale of the devastation and loss meant that mutual aid was not enough. Enormous amounts of assistance from outside were required, and they came in bureaucratically choked dribbles from government agencies and in unstinting waves from the huge quantity of volunteers who came from around the country to rebuild New Orleans, tens and then hundreds of thousands. Eventually a handful of visionary projects would be launched in New Orleans, bringing real if limited benefits to a troubled place.

Like the people in Mexico City in 1985, the people of New Orleans won a lot of battles. The early plan to just raze the low-lying areas that were often also the low-income areas was killed off by people like Pam Dashiell, and citizen pressure forced the city government to recommit money to rebuilding some of those neighborhoods. ACORN, the group that works on housing issues with poor communities around the country, is head-quartered in New Orleans, and Wade Rathke, its founding director, told me, “Even if you take some of the most aggressive plans—to take away fiscal ability and land control from local officials—they didn’t succeed.” Public housing was largely razed, though some affordable housing was to be built on some of the sites—and Rathke points out that “it’s impossible for me to pretend that we weren’t losing it in city after city for twenty years. To win in New Orleans would have been to reverse what we’ve been losing everywhere else.” He was not happy about the hundred thousand people who hadn’t come back three years later, but he noted that the labor scarcity had meant a rise in wages for a lot of the city’s service economy and other jobs and a rise in employment levels in a city that had long been hemorrhaging work. There were victories and improvements. But a lot of people were still uprooted and suffering. Rents were up, essential services—hospitals, day care—were greatly reduced, the homeless population doubled, and by the third anniversary of the disaster, the city had 71,657 vacant, ruined, and uninhabited houses. Many were permanently exiled, stranded in toxic trailers in remote locations, homeless, or overwhelmed by the task of trying to return. (The kind of bureaucracy that strangled official response is demonstrated by the rule that forbade FEMA to spend disaster-relief money on permanent structures; the toxic $70,000 trailers consumed money that in a less inflexible system could’ve been used for rebuilding or for sturdier, saner shelters.)

The commitment was extraordinary. When I first visited the Lower Ninth, six months after Katrina, it was eerily abandoned. No one lived there, and there were no streetlights. The storm seemed to have just happened. Cars were still tossed over fences, houses sat in the middle of streets, other houses existed only as splintered wreckage, and a lot of the street signs that weren’t missing were homemade. Those signs said a lot about the people who’d come back in advance of their own government to try to bring the Lower Ninth back to life. Every time I returned, the place was different—wreckage disappeared, signs appeared, houses were reclaimed, yards mowed from the six-foot-high weeds that had sprung up, and more and more signs of life were apparent—but like so many other neighborhoods, it was still missing a huge portion of its people and its future remained utterly uncertain.

Waves of volunteers arrived in the city, many of them focusing on gutting houses and beginning the long, hard journey toward rebuilding a habitable city. Others provided food, counseling, medical care, and more. National organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross showed up to fufill their mandate. Existing local organizations shifted their purpose or intensified their mission, as did the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and many churches. Churches from around the country sent delegations down to do a week’s work on a project; for many it was a profound experience. For a few years, thousands of college students went to rebuild New Orleans as an alternative spring break. New local organizations arose, from the radical People’s Hurricane Relief Fund to the upper-class Women of the Storm, who used their access to bring in politicians to see the devastation firsthand. Counterculture groups played an important role, from descendants of the black power movement to hordes of young white anarchists. An extraordinary amount of love and work went into the effort to revive a city that had been pronounced dead shortly after August 29, 2005.

T
hanks to Katrina, the Bush administration lost its mandate of heaven. Perhaps the president and his team should have lost it in the chaos of September 11, 2001, but they cannily framed that situation in a way that led to a surge of patriotic fear and deference and defined the administration as decisive, powerful, unquestionable—until the summer of 2005. Only then did the media and public begin to criticize the administration with the fearlessness that should be part of every era, every democracy. Many reporters standing in the ruins of the Gulf voiced unscripted outrage over the incompetence, callousness, and cluelessness of the federal government during the catastrophe. After Katrina, people who had been afraid to criticize the administration were emboldened to do so. It changed the tone nationwide, and Bush soon became the most unpopular president in American history.

On September 1, the president said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” The media later obtained videotape of him being warned of that possibility on August 28. The public too began to speak out more fearlessly that summer. Poverty and race became issues again. MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann was so outraged by Katrina that on September 5, 2005, he launched into a furious, widely circulated tirade against the Bush administration, the beginning of his Special Comments that were routinely the most hostile critique of the president in the mainstream media and one of the most noted. “It wasn’t Iraq that did George Bush in—it was the weather,” he said in 2007. Bush’s own pollster, Matthew Dowd, said later, “Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. . . . I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.” By then a liberal black man with a background in community organizing had become a serious contender to succeed that president in the 2008 election—an unimaginable possibility not long before; and another Democratic contender for the White House launched his campaign in New Orleans and made poverty its central issue. The nation shifted, not only from deference to the president but from fealty to the politics of the far right, and Katrina was the turning point.

Bush had been on a five-week vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when the hurricane hit, and he waited a few days before deciding to return to work in the nation’s capital. On the way, he had Air Force One swing low over New Orleans. Being photographed sitting comfortably looking out an airplane window at a city in which people were still stranded did not help his image. His vacation had been disrupted already, though. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq a year earlier, had camped outside the presidential expanse to demand that Bush meet with her. Harrowed by grief at her son’s death, she tried to make sense of it by demanding the president tell her “for what noble cause did my son die?” She thus became a major voice in the antiwar movement, a surprising role for a suburban mother of three and devout Catholic who had hitherto led a quiet life, surprising most of all to her.

At that moment in August of 2005, the rangy blond mom with her unstudied, heartfelt, and sometimes outrageous speech became the narrow point of a wedge opening up room to debate the war. She set up a tent in a ditch by the road to the presidential ranch in Crawford on August 6, and supporters began to gather, bringing their own tents and vehicles and building an impromptu village around what began as a small vigil. They named it Camp Casey, after her dead son whose image was everywhere. During a slow news month, this standoff between a bereaved mother sitting at the gates and a president who wouldn’t show his face became a huge story. Her son’s death had been her disaster; that she made something remarkable of her response to it was clearly her salvation.