Middle-Class Exiles Struggle for a Foothold

Kevin “Lippy” Mawby is a middle-class guy who used to make a good living with the music store he owns in the French Quarter. Now he’s staying with friends in Austin, Texas, has a couple of changes of clothes and what little remains of the $200 that he had in his pocket when he fled Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina has robbed him of his living, he says, and the government doesn’t have a system in place to help evacuees who aren’t destitute.

“I’m afforded virtually no assistance because all the resources are going to the desperately poor,” he said. “My belief is that relief agencies don’t know how to deal with a middle-class refugee. My problem is that I’m going to look like a crybaby if I say I’m out of work.”

He is not alone. Many members of New Orleans’ middle class find themselves stranded between not-yet-destitute and watching their bank accounts shrink because they have lost their source of income.

Even those who think that they could restart their lives in the city cannot try; they are barred from reentering the area for the foreseeable future.

In some cases, the cities where they have found refuge are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Most of the displaced seem to be still taking stock of what has happened, but some have already found new jobs and made the decision to settle in where they are, at least for now.

The American Red Cross is providing temporary shelters in 18 states for 142,000 people, while the Salvation Army has taken in 32,000. But the number of people needing housing is estimated at half a million. By early this week, more than 315,000 people had registered for federal and state assistance. Huge crowds, including many from the middle class, are lining up for food stamps all over Louisiana.

Phyllis Ditta, who owns a home in the fashionable New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers, said some of her neighbors had applied for food stamps, so uncertain is the state of events.

“I’ve got neighbors with half-million-dollar homes who are getting food stamps,” said Ditta, a cement company owner who gave her employees five weeks’ pay in advance as Katrina approached. Ditta is staying with her son in Los Angeles; he drove to pick her up in San Antonio.

More common, perhaps, was the case of lawyer Gretchen Grisbaum, whose New Orleans firm is transferring her to Dallas for at least six months. Earlier this week, she was allowed into her Jefferson Parish house to gather clothes and clean out her refrigerator. She planned to drive her mother’s car to Dallas because hers is on the fifth floor of a parking garage.

“As we speak, I’ve got one cardboard box in front of me and don’t know what to put in it,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’m in cutoffs and a T-shirt, and I’m aimlessly wandering around the house trying to figure out what I need. Hopefully, I’ll come back in a month. None of us know what we’re going to do.”

The same is true in Houston, where evacuated professionals such as nurses, social workers and teachers are looking for work in the aftermath of the Aug. 29 hurricane.

Larry Temple, executive director of the Texas Workforce Commission, said he has received requests from around the country asking about hiring displaced professionals.

“A firm called and said, ‘We can hire five architects,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘Fine, I’ve got them in a hotel here.’ ”

Even evacuees who held good jobs in New Orleans are unsure whether they want to return.

Craig and Melanie Shipley fled just minutes after water destroyed their home, with time only to grab their wedding pictures and insurance documents. They’re staying in a Houston hotel and presume that their recently refurbished home is “beneath 10 feet of water.”

The Shipleys -- he works for a restaurant, she for a utility company -- think that they may never go back to New Orleans, even though Melanie is a native.

“We finally got our home settled and now it’s all ruined,” she said. “Do I want to go back to a city I love? Or do we want to start over somewhere because the memories are too awful to remember? I just don’t know.”

The tales of coping are as varied as the thousands of people who were forced to flee.

When Dr. Matt Vibbert, 32, left New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit, he expected to be gone a few days. His team of doctors was not activated so he and his wife packed enough clothes for a few days and headed to his parents’ home in Dallas. “Our house is flooded and, frankly, I just don’t care,” he said Wednesday.

Vibbert finally turned off the television rather than endure reports of colleagues at New Orleans’ hospitals, struggling to keep patients alive.

“It was agonizing. You know the impulse is to just get in a truck and go down there.”

When it’s all over, he plans to return with his wife, Jami, 27, to rebuild their one-story home in the Mid-City area. Meanwhile, Jami, a Tulane law student, has returned to her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to complete the semester.

Attorney Casey Fos, 42, of Covington, La., has no plans to return home. “What’s there to go back to?” he asked Wednesday.

He has got a new job in the Dallas office of a national law firm, Jones Day, and he and his wife, Andrea, are looking for a house in which to raise their two boys, Jakob, 5, and Jonas, 3

He didn’t take much time to make the decision. “Monday, you watched TV. New Orleans had dodged a bullet. Tuesday, the levees started to break. Wednesday morning, I made the decision: I’m not going back to New Orleans any time soon. And I need an income,” Fos said.

He has a cousin in Dallas whose family transformed their house into a refugee center for displaced family members.

When he got there, he did a computer search for names and phone numbers of Dallas law firms, and began dialing.

“Hello, I’m Casey Fos. I’m an evacuated lawyer from New Orleans. May I speak to your managing partner?”

Almost immediately, the managing partner at Jones Day responded. “Can you be in tomorrow at 10 a.m. for an interview?” he asked.

“My response was, ‘I have no suit.’ ”

“He said, ‘I understand your situation. Come in in shorts if you have to.’ ”

Fos bought a pair of casual dress pants for the interview and began training at the firm Tuesday. “The bottom line is I don’t see New Orleans getting back on its feet for a while,” he said.

Jeri Cain Rossi never wanted to leave New Orleans. She stayed through the storm, in part, because she didn’t have any way to get out. She doesn’t own a car and couldn’t find space with friends who hit the road to flee the hurricane.

The night before the storm, Rossi and her friends scribbled their names and Social Security numbers on their bodies with Magic Marker in case they didn’t make it. It was part gallows humor, but also a chilling reminder that anything could happen. “It toughened us up,” she said.

Finally, she and some friends “commandeered” a van left behind by a friend who evacuated before the storm. Now, the 47-year-old author is living in San Francisco, sleeping on a friend’s couch and looking for work. She was able to buy a plane ticket from Austin to San Francisco.

“The city of San Francisco is opening its arms to the lost city of New Orleans, especially artists,” Rossi said. “I’m making friends every day.

“I will go back, but my greater intuition is to stay here,” said Rossi, who has lived in New Orleans for 11 years. “It’s my home ... [but] I’m relocating here right now.”

Barbara Jourdan, 52, rode out the storm in a hotel in New Orleans’ central business district. When the floodwaters rose, she and her family left in a convoy of five cars. “We started to see looters and a whole bunch of crazed people,” she said. “We got really anxious to leave.”

They drove to their niece’s home in Buford, Ga.

With 22 family members crammed into a four-bedroom house, they have initiated bathroom and cooking schedules and trips to Red Cross shelters. “We’re just glad to be alive,” Jourdan said. “We have running water and lights. It’s so much better than where we came from.”

Jourdan left New Orleans with two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, something to sleep in and a pair of shoes. “We just need the basics so we can clear our heads and focus on what we’re going to do,” she said.

“We’re in a lovely home, but we don’t want to be an inconvenience.”

At the beginning of the week, Jourdan, who processed military data for the government in New Orleans, was told that she has a new, similar job -- and housing -- in Millington, Tenn., northeast of Memphis. She plans to drive there next week. “I am blessed,” she said.

Jourdan does not know whether she will return to New Orleans. “I’m ambivalent now,” she said. “I don’t want to go through this again. If they can put enough of the city back together so that it looks like a city again, maybe. If they repair the levee, that’s the main thing.”

Stacy Komendera, 35, a managing partner at McCarthy Komendera Associates, a New Orleans executive recruitment firm, is attempting to run her business from donated office space in Chicago. “We’re trying to set up remotely,” she said. “It’s hard.”

As Komendera attempts to get her firm up and running, her 3-year-old daughter, Reagan, is staying with relatives in Cincinnati, about 500 miles away. “That’s the hardest part,” she said. “The only thing we took from New Orleans was our baby. I haven’t seen her since Sunday.”

According to satellite photos, Komendera’s office in New Orleans’ Garden District has roof damage. “It leaked like a sieve on a regular rainy day,” she said. “We’re just hoping we can salvage old files, or anything.”

A graduate of Tulane University, Komendera hopes to return to New Orleans as soon as she’s allowed.

“We have faith in New Orleans,” she said. “It’s a great city. It’s going to be a smaller city, but it can be a better city.”

Contributing to this report were staff writers Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta and Tony Perry in Houston.