Author: Eric Jensen, Managing Editor
Almost three years after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the population of New Orleans remains just over half its size before the hurricane. With residents displaced to locations across the nation, many experts say the city’s prolonged emptiness can be attributed to problems that existed long before the storm.
New Orleans had been in a state of decline since the 1960s, shuddering under the weight of a population it could not support. A year before Katrina, about four in 10 working-age men were out of a job, exceeding the national average of fewer than three in 10. Unemployment rates spiked further in poorer, primarily black areas like the Lower Ninth Ward and Central City, from 25 percent to 32 percent without a job or not seeking work.
Dr. William Oakland of Tulane University, who passed away in September of 2007, had been studying the New Orleans economy for much of his career. He said the exceptionally high levels of joblessness were perpetuated by ineffective welfare programs. “The job mobility was very low among the poor, so they just stay where they are,” he told The New York Times months before his death. “The social welfare system shored them up,” he said. In a city that barely functioned before the catastrophe, “maybe the diaspora is a blessing.”
For some, it is. Whitney and Jeralyn Marcell, who grew up in the crime-ridden areas of New Orleans, lost their home in the Lower Ninth Ward to Katrina and relocated to Atlanta. Jeralyn told journalist Jason DeParle in 2006, “I love New Orleans, don’t get me wrong. But I thank God we are in Atlanta.” The Marcells’ new neighborhood boasts better schools, higher average annual incomes and lower crime rates. A study conducted by the Times indicated that overall, evacuees had moved to better areas than those they had lived in before.
But DeParle worries that the combined trauma of living through Katrina and moving away from home could negate the benefits of the new environment. “Katrina families differ from the classic American migrant in at least one important way: they did not choose to move,” DeParle said.
While several economists argue that the thinning of the New Orleans population will be ultimately beneficial, they may find their reasoning difficult to reconcile with former residents. Days after the storm, Sandra Allums of Matairie, a city just outside New Orleans, had fled to a Hampton Inn in Alabama. Speaking to the press, she said, “When someone says the roots are gone, what happens to the rest of the plant? It dies. New Orleans is our roots.”
Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella agrees. “Culture is people,” he said. “If half the local people are dispersed and no longer living cohesively in those social networks, then half of local culture is gone.”
Unfortunately, the dragging process of rebuilding all of the flood-damaged parts of the city has discouraged many. While thousands of displaced residents returned to vote or voted absentee in the spring of 2006, that same fall saw drastically fewer voters, producing a smaller electorate and disproportionately white City Council. This shift reflects the Katrina Diaspora’s largely poor and black composition, and illustrates the bind these citizens are in. The city does not place priority on rebuilding their neighborhoods and they are too far away to fight for themselves.
Still another obstacle remains for those who wish to restore culture and community in New Orleans. The rebuilding process has been halted by political controversy over whether the effects of Katrina were a disaster or a blessing. Republican Representative Richard H. Baker of Baton Rouge said in 2005 that, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Those who subscribe to Baker’s school of thought have no intention of welcoming the poorer residents of public housing units back into the city, branding them as detriments to economic progress. New plans to restore these housing units offer a much smaller portion at affordable prices, proposing instead a “mixed-income” living situation that includes only a fraction of former low-income residents.
With the tourist-friendly downtown areas like the French Quarter up and running two months after the storm, there is clearly no question that New Orleans should be rebuilt. The question now is for whom it will be rebuilt.
Former residents who constitute the Katrina Diaspora lament the selective reconstruction, noting that while Bourbon Street may look the same as it did pre-Katrina, their neighborhood is like another world. “If anybody asks me where I’m from, I say New Orleans,” Renee Roussell said, who now lives in Lake Charles, LA. “It’s not easy to let go. But why go back home, when nothing is what it used to be?”
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