Driven to Rebuild the City

The men assembled in the predawn quiet of the bus depot, jackets buttoned against the chill. They boarded the idling bus, carrying lunch coolers and hopes that they might help rebuild a city -- and themselves.

Napping or swigging sodas to stay awake, they rode 80 miles past trackless bayous and swamp towns and into New Orleans. Once downtown, the passengers were welcomed into the warm embrace of temporary employment agencies and business owners desperate for workers.

The free bus service is striking evidence of the paradox hobbling the Big Easy’s rebirth: New Orleans, where 28% of the city lived below the poverty line and thousands had stopped looking for work, now has plenty of jobs but no residents to fill them.

The reconstruction boom has been frustratingly out of reach for evacuees and others in the region without work, many of whom -- car-less, as well as poor -- had no way to get to New Orleans.

Now the bus, departing seven times daily from Baton Rouge, has become a thread of hope.

Eric Broome has spent the months since Hurricane Katrina in a Baton Rouge shelter. He hoped the bus would provide a new start -- for him and the city he loves.

“You have to have people to make a city,” said Broome, 43. “If the people aren’t here, the city’s doomed.”

Word of the jobs bonanza reached Baton Rouge resident Clifton Green in jail. Green would not say what led to his time behind bars, but he got out last month and is counting on the bus to get his life back on track.

“I’ve got a lot of stuff to pay -- lawyer, probation fee,” said Green, 48. “There ain’t nothing like a dollar of your own.”

They, along with most of the other riders, had heard the stories: Fast food restaurants are paying signing bonuses in the thousands. An entire busload -- on the second day of the bus run -- returned from New Orleans with construction jobs. State officials met them at the Baton Rouge depot and gave them work boots.

But many of those who rode into New Orleans with Broome and Green found themselves seesawing between hope and despair as they trudged from one employment site to another.

“The problem is so huge that there’s not going to be just one quick fix,” said Patty Lopez, a labor market specialist with the Louisiana Department of Labor.

But the state believes that helping its residents get work is a crucial first step, said Mark Lambert, a spokesman for Louisiana’s Department of Transportation, which oversees the bus service with the Labor Department. Some evacuees who want to return home are fast becoming dispirited as they learn it will take months, or years, to rebuild their neighborhoods. If they don’t find jobs that tie them to New Orleans, it may only be a matter of time until they give up and move out of state.

“These are our people,” Lambert said, “and we don’t want to lose them.”

*

Clouds hid the moon, and the lights were off inside the bus; some of the passengers dozed while others fought off sleep. The few awake were murmuring about the money to be made. Jerrydean Brown marveled that the other woman on the bus had reported earning $1,000 a week in New Orleans.

“There’s something down there for all of us,” she said, laughing with enthusiasm. “Seek and ye shall find.”

The dreamy banter got to Darrow Harrison. “What ethnicity is everyone here?” Harrison asked rhetorically.

All but one of the 47 passengers were black.

A recent federal study found that a third of the Katrina evacuees who had not returned home remained unemployed, and that among blacks who were still displaced, the situation was worse: Half are jobless. Since Katrina, the unemployment rate has more than doubled in Louisiana, the nation’s second-poorest state.

Harrison, who lives in Baton Rouge, spoke of how New Orleans’ black residents had been kept from returning to their damaged neighborhoods, while business leaders talked about rebuilding a “better” city.

“Who’s going to build it up? Who do you see? But when New Orleans is rebuilt, we’re going to be few and far between,” said Harrison, 56. “That’s why they’re shipping us here and there. The $13 or $12 an hour is just the scraps from the table.”

The bus pulled up to the corner of Elk Place and Canal Street; dawn illuminated the empty streets, and the passengers lined up to exit as if at the start of a footrace. Most had done their homework, compiling a list of hiring sites from fliers handed out in Baton Rouge and from word-of-mouth. They hurried off and dashed into waiting city buses, eager to be the first to the sites.

Eric Broome breezed into a conference room in the reopened Marriott Hotel with a confident air. He had loved his life in New Orleans, but the chronic poverty and scarcity of jobs frustrated him. What work there was, he said, was reserved for those with connections. For a period, he commuted to Baton Rouge to work as a maintenance man in a casino.

Now Broome’s car, along with his apartment in New Orleans East, is destroyed, and he feels trapped in a Baton Rouge shelter. His ex-wife and two children are in Texas, and he doesn’t know when he’ll see them again.

He has been dreaming of finding a way to get back to New Orleans, where he figured he finally had a clean shot at a good job. It took only a few minutes for Anita DuPriest, a recruiter for the Penmac staffing agency, to hire Broome to clean damaged buildings for $8 an hour.

DuPriest said the bus was a “godsend” for her clients, who are desperate for workers, and for people like Broome. But, she added, Broome and hundreds of evacuees scattered throughout the South were still in need of housing.

“Where are the shelters they promised these people?” DuPriest said. “These people want to come home and get their jobs back. We can’t get them home, so the jobs are going to people from somewhere else.”

Many New Orleanians complain that too many jobs were being filled by Latino workers, who sometimes were housed in work camps and bused to New Orleans by reconstruction companies. Longtime residents such as Broome were left on their own.

Broome concluded that $8 an hour wasn’t going to be enough to rent an apartment near New Orleans, so he walked to a luxury hotel in the French Quarter to apply for a second job as a maintenance worker. He settled into a plush couch with a view of a swimming pool in a courtyard and waited.

A few minutes later, a woman came by, shook Broome’s hand and told him that the maintenance job had been filled. “What we need right now, desperately, is a third-class license,” the woman said. Did Broome have one?

He had never heard of the document, required by City Hall for maintaining boilers and similar tasks. He bristled, saying he had been doing maintenance for 10 years. “Right now, I’m trying to reestablish myself,” Broome said, hoping for a sympathetic ear.

He found none, and stalked out of the French Quarter. “That’s what it was like before,” Broome said angrily -- rigged.

*

More than 7,000 passengers have ridden the buses since the service began Oct. 31, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which funds it, says it will continue until at least Feb. 28. State officials do not track individual riders but say that, increasingly, people are using it to commute regularly to newfound jobs.

“At first, it was overwhelmingly people going down and looking for jobs,” said Lambert, the transportation spokesman. “Now we have a core base using the service.” Other communities in southern Louisiana, with their own pools of jobless evacuees, are agitating for their own stops.

The first bus leaves Baton Rouge at 4:30 a.m., but Clifton Green had no trouble making it. He is used to early hours. For 10 years, Green rose at 5 a.m. to take a city bus to a Baton Rouge park, where he emptied trash bins. But he lost that job three months ago, when he went to jail. His wife is also unemployed, and they have a teenage daughter to support.

With all the evacuees pouring into Baton Rouge, the unemployment rate there has surged to nearly 12%, prompting unemployed Baton Rouge residents such as Green to seek out the hiring halls of New Orleans.

As he got off the bus, Green said he wasn’t picky. “I’m just looking for work.”

He and his brother-in-law, Doney McCallop, also headed to the Marriott, where they leafed through job listings compiled by the state.

“Fifteen an hour ... it’s in Metairie,” Green muttered. McCallop flipped the page and found a job downtown. “Janitor ... $6.50 an hour.”

Their faces fell. The better-paying jobs were a dozen miles away, in suburbs such as Metairie, requiring additional transportation they didn’t have. Many employers wanted them to commit to relocating to the New Orleans area but couldn’t provide housing.

After wandering the city for another four hours, talking with recruiter after recruiter, Green and McCallop gave up. They boarded the return bus to Baton Rouge and said they weren’t coming back.

Days later in Baton Rouge, they bumped into a recruiter for a New Orleans hotel who offered them jobs that paid $8.50 an hour. The two men rose early again to meet another bus -- this one chartered by the hotel -- at 5:30 a.m.

The bus never showed.