Katrina’s flood silt soaks the portrait in the image below, but divide the picture in quadrants to absorb its details before you read on.
Does your mind first perceive the handsome graduate or nature's chaos? Does he foresee a bright future, or rue how government left New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, 98.3 percent Black fifteen years ago, 93.7 percent now, poised for a fall and abandoned thereafter? Could faded green leaves point out the potential of a once verdant setting?
Dignitaries and media landing at the $1 billion Louis Armstrong International Airport on the storm and flood's August 29th anniversary to laud the city's recovery should cross the Industrial Canal that isolates the Lower Ninth Ward from downtown.
Striking progress and need coexist in the place hardest hit and last helped; most visitors want to pitch in. But those whose reactions make network news might prefer an “in-and-out” for pictures, avoiding race realities.
“It's striking how quickly parts of the city were renewed, refurbished, reimagined almost, while other places look stuck in a time capsule,” Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith, a New Orleans teen in 2005, observed this week in a webinar.
Five visits convince me that you find what you seek when you're there.
Clearing an abandoned block for garden construction, chopping down immense hedges to discourage intruders near the home of a elderly woman living alone, repainting scarred outer walls of a house worth saving, and hanging drywall within its once and future living room, with my son and other Brooklyn Heights Synagogue members, symbolized sweat equity from 50,000 volunteers one resolute woman has recruited since the disaster from houses of worship and higher learning across our country.
Warrenetta Banks, back from two years in a FEMA trailer in Texas, armed with a mere desk, phone and map in a quaint church's cramped annex, launched a movement that has had stunning success. The Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, built in 1916, anchored folks after Katrina who replaced its ruined electrical systems, floors and pews, teaching others to repair their own properties. Warrenetta founded Lower Nine Resilient to mobilize neighbors to plan the rebirth.
“Can you believe it's been nearly fifteen years since the levees broke and flooded 80 percent of our beloved city of New Orleans? What amazes me is we still have volunteers coming,” she says, with special praise for annual assistance from Emory and Marquette Universities.
Before the storm a corporate financial officer in a high-rise building at city center, Warrenetta found her calling matching idealistic eager volunteers with aging homeowners abandoned by their government and forced to flee at the height of the nation's worst natural disaster. A fifteen foot storm surge breached levees by five feet, flooding homes. Winds tore through overhead power lines, street lights and signage. Eight feet of water was left in many homes a year later in the city's last part pumped dry.
The kitchen of an abandoned house I inspected in 2010 had an eight-foot watermark on its side, the family's thumbtacked wall calendar still on August 2005. Gale force winds smashed furniture with such force that a coffee table, couch and console crossed the living room and climbed a wall. I stumbled outside in shock, comprehending the terror.
Though FEMA either marooned them in the Superdome without water, food or medical aid, or put them, like Warrenetta, on Houston-bound buses where they landed with no visible sign of support, Lower Ninth Ward survivors endured and returned.
“I don't desire to live in any other place,” Warrenetta explains. “It's hard for people not from here to understand what it's like to lose every single thing in one day but how it's still home. New Orleans is so small that most people are related in some way and they share their humanity so you’re never truly alone.”
It's productive love.
The Guerrilla Garden, begun with trenches dug through scrub grass on a blighted vacant lot, now has fresh produce, workshops and potlucks for an area with scarce services since the Industrial Canal divides it from downtown. Landscaping, fresh paint and new construction are concrete progress signs.
The vigor with which synagogue, church and college groups join the rebuilding sows hope for bridging the nation's divisions, but truth demands the full picture.
Barren land tracts remain where broken homes still show inspectors' spray-paint markings for how many dead lay inside on that fateful hurricane day.
The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for shielding the Crescent City from flooding since it lies below sea level, forced to investigate in 2015, acknowledged its flawed work on Lower Nine levees, an unconscionable act of racial discrimination.
“He who refuses a suppliant the aid which he has the power to give is accountable to justice,” Joseph, in the Bible, declares, but his words fall on deaf ears.
Warrenetta and others — Jenga Mwendo, the Guerrilla Garden's driving force; Burnell Cotlon, the military veteran who used his life savings to rebuild a gutted building as the first local grocery store and laundromat, march on.
Pastel colors brighten rebuilt houses. “Although the architecture of the neighborhood reflects post-World War II styles including bungalows and ranches, shotgun and expanded shotgun homes from the turn of the century, and revival and adaptive styles from development in the 1930s and 40s also grace the neighborhood. Other homes of Spanish and Tudor style clad with stucco and Cape styles can also be found,” states the New Orleans City Council's Lower Ninth Ward redevelopment plan — adding that “State and Federal subsidies will be required to help residents rebuild and to attract private investment in the area.”
The late Ward “Mack” McClendon before the storm sold luxury cars for his living, then founded the Lower Ninth Ward Village, a community center for his vision of library, job training and cultural programs. “Just one-third have returned,” Mack said in 2014, “but I'd put that one-third against the world. They had to come out of the water fighting. There'd be more if we had more resources.”
US Census data supports him; the 2000 population of 14,008 was 4,378 in 2018, official neglect abetting Katrina's effect. The Lower Ninth's lack of services with shortfalls in state and federal aid contrast with the renewed business district, football stadium, basketball arena, French Quarter, and that billion dollar airport, all a mere bridge away.
With average household income down from $39,561 to $33,531, 37 percent of its people in poverty and 8.3 percent with bachelor's degrees, the Lower Ninth Ward despite a strong work ethic requires external investors.
“The Superdome — which sheltered thousands during the storm — has been renovated and now carries the Mercedes-Benz name. A new veterans hospital and $1.1 billion University Medical Center are scheduled to open,” said a 2015 Financial Post piece. “Venture capital funds and philanthropies are lining up with grants for city projects. The recovery has been uneven, however, with areas like the flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward lagging behind.”
With present need as clear as a gut punch, one wonders what it will take to move municipal leaders to act.
Reverend Steve Gonzalez, Warrenetta's long-time friend and ally, once summarizing at length outside the church, impressed upon me the importance of stories. The Lower Ninth Ward, he implied, must feel heard by the captains of industry.
As dignitaries and the media assemble soon in New Orleans, will they put their ears to the ground, listening?
The young man in the image is waiting.
Katrina flood silt soaks the still-handsome portrait, a metaphor for the Lower Ninth Ward's self-help success and needed external support.