In New Orleans, Home Is Still Far Away

Six months ago, a 200-foot-long barge careened over a collapsed levee during Hurricane Katrina, eventually coming to rest on the shattered remains of three houses in the Lower 9th Ward. And there it remained.

On Friday, workers with metal torches finally began to dismantle the barge. But by then, it had become a rusting, 150-ton metaphor for everything this city has been through: destruction and despair, followed by lagging reconstruction that has given way, too often, to dismal stasis.

Red tape. Bumbling bureaucrats. Recalcitrant politicians.

Tightfisted insurance companies. Old age. Sheer exhaustion.

Most everyone who once lived in Katrina’s flood path has had their own confounding odyssey of tribulations and missteps that have kept them from coming home. In the meantime, vast stretches of the city -- 100 square miles or more -- are still abandoned and rotting.

Six months after the Aug. 29 storm -- long after Mayor C. Ray Nagin estimated that residents would be able to return within 16 weeks and President Bush said he would do “whatever it takes” -- New Orleans has become paralyzed with uncertainty.

“Some days you wake up and you just think: ‘My God, what is going on?’ ” said Lora Crayon, 34, a real estate agent and bartender whose home in the Gentilly neighborhood was destroyed when it took on 5 feet of water. “It’s just stagnant. We’re all just now figuring it out. There is no help for us. There is no one coming. No one cares.”

Crayon gestured toward one lot, where the force of the water had flipped a car on its back and tore a massive hole in what appeared to have been the living room wall.

“Look at this place,” she said. “Every one of these houses was somebody’s life. Every one of these houses had a family. Kids who ran around in the yard.”

At the mention of children, Crayon’s voice caught in her throat; New Orleans, she said, is no place for young girls. Her 13-year-old daughter is living with relatives in New Jersey; every six weeks or so she sees her for a weekend. Alone, Crayon fights through every day, through every task and errand.

“I got a $1,000 electric bill the other day,” she said. “I haven’t lived in my home in six months. So I called. They said: ‘You’ll need to come into the office to speak with a supervisor.’ So I went down there and waited in line and finally a supervisor told me: ‘Oh, well, that was just an estimate. You don’t really have to pay that.’ All I did was reconcile an illegitimate bill. And that was a day of my life. Gone.”

Crayon has scraped together enough money to rent a one-bedroom apartment in an isolated “dry” neighborhood, but she is an anomaly. A third of New Orleans’ residents -- there were about half a million before the storm -- have come home.

Fewer than 15% of 15,000 businesses are open. A higher percentage of the city’s 3,400 restaurants have opened -- more than a third are operating -- but the owners say with a weary smile that they owe most of their success to the fact that so few people have functioning kitchens.

Most returnees and open businesses are jammed into an area that has become known as the “Sliver on the River” and the “Isle of Denial” -- the relatively high land, home to most wealthier neighborhoods and tourist spots, hugging the banks of the Mississippi River.

The flood never got this far, and it shows. Virtually every significant advancement hailed by city officials happens there, including last week’s reopening of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and next month’s scheduled reopening of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

There are isolated pockets of life in other portions of the city: in a far-flung neighborhood of New Orleans East, for example, and atop skinny ridges of high land.

But about two-thirds of the city remains uninhabited.

Reconstruction officials have picked up about 33 million cubic yards of debris, but they’re only halfway done, and piles of fetid mattresses and moldy drywall still line many streets. Venerable institutions in this area, such as the 270-year-old Charity Hospital, which suffered $258 million worth of damage, have no concrete plans to reopen. What was once a verdant, tropical landscape is brown and dusty. Enormous stretches of the city are still pitch-black at night.

In these areas, it seems that no aspect of the city’s recovery is going smoothly.

Federal contractors hired to tow away thousands of abandoned cars took them only as far as several lots under freeway overpasses, city officials said. They’re still there -- massive parking lots of ruined cars, caked in mud and marked with dark lines showing how high the water got. No one is sure when a second contract will be signed to get the cars out of the city.

The phone company, its network badly damaged, has decided to seize upon the storm by replacing aging copper cables with fiber optics -- a massive overhaul that could leave some pockets of the city without phone service until this summer.

The main mail-processing plant, badly damaged in the flood, isn’t expected to reopen until April. Only first-class mail arrives in New Orleans -- no magazines, no catalogs -- and there is still no delivery in much of the city.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency pledged to deliver 120,000 trailers to people whose homes were destroyed. But fewer than 45,000 are in place today. Only 4,683 of them are inside the city, and in many of those cases, federal officials have declined to hand over the keys because contractors haven’t connected the trailers to new power lines.

When bureaucracy and money shortages aren’t hampering progress, raw emotion often steps in. City officials announced plans to haul away the remains of about 100 houses that were swept off their foundations and planted in the middle of the street.

It was seen as a tiny step forward in a city where tens of thousands of homes probably would be bulldozed. But even that was met with outcry; some say the displacement of storm victims has been so traumatic and disorganized that the owners of those houses have not had a chance to salvage any belongings from the rubble. On at least one occasion, bulldozers were chased away by demonstrators.

Uncertainty has frozen progress in many pockets of the city.

Tens of thousands of people are still fighting with their insurance companies. And many of those who have received settlements aren’t paying their mortgages because it’s unclear whether patches of the city will be deemed unsuitable for redevelopment.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ new flood maps have been delayed and aren’t expected until this summer. Those maps could say, among other things, that certain neighborhoods would no longer be eligible for flood insurance, or that some pockets of the city would have to be put on blocks or stilts.

The new hurricane season, meanwhile, is less than 100 days away and repairs to the city’s levees are 40% complete, federal officials said last week. Some Corps officials have acknowledged that even with the repairs, it is unlikely that the levees would withstand another storm as powerful as Katrina.

“We know now,” City Council President Oliver M. Thomas Jr. said, “that America was not prepared for this.”

Residents have digested, as best they can, the dizzying equation of reconstruction. Many have come up with this answer: Give up on New Orleans.

When Carolyn Taylor’s father died last February and her mother, living alone in the Lakeview section of the city, turned 80, Taylor began to understand that one day she would have to clean out her childhood home.

But she didn’t think it would be like this: her graying hair covered in a shower cap, her face protected by goggles and a dust mask, sweating on the dead grass in the yard as she scraped the mold off a set of dining room chairs.

Taylor’s mother, Vivian Crist, had lived in the Lakeview area her entire life. In 1954, Crist and her husband built a pillbox brick home on 30th Street. They raised their four daughters there, including Karen Crist, who also came to help with cleaning out the home.

The water and mud claimed almost everything, buckling the floors, ripping custom-made cabinets from the walls, destroying the blades of a steak-knife set but sparing the ivory handles. “Dear God. Who is prepared for something like this?” Taylor said. “We had to break out the windows to throw all of our family’s belongings into the street.”

It all went into a pile, still on the curb out front, containing the picture of Taylor’s grandparents, who were emigres from Sweden, and the marble collection a younger sister amassed 50 years ago.

In hasn’t gotten any easier in the months since. Vivian Crist’s flood insurance policy has paid a settlement -- but, she said, her homeowner’s insurance company says it owes her $1,000 for the house and nothing for its contents.

She is not at all sure that the 17th Street Canal levee, which is six blocks away, will hold up the next time. Only one neighbor has returned; every other home remains abandoned. Even if she could afford to rebuild -- and even if she were allowed to under the new flood plan -- at her age and with all that’s happened, she’s not sure she has the energy.

“I can’t cry anymore,” Crist said. “I’m all out of tears.”

Once they’ve salvaged everything they can, Crist will have the remnants of her house torn down and hauled away. Then she’ll sell the land -- maybe to the neighbor across the street, who is buying up as much as he can, though he might wind up having the whole block to himself.

Then she’ll drive away for the last time, to move in with one of her daughters in Tampa, Fla. New Orleans will have one fewer resident, a scene that is playing out time and again across the broken city.

Not every tale in the flooded stretches of New Orleans is so desperate. But it is telling that one of the few success stories is hailed as a miracle: “The Miracle of Versailles.”

About 15 miles east of downtown New Orleans, the community of Versailles is nestled into the edge of a long, thin reach of the city called New Orleans East.

Once home to 90,000 people, including most of the city’s black middle class, New Orleans East is almost entirely deserted. But it’s never been busier at the Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church.

The Rev. Nguyen The Vien, church pastor, points out that the 6,500 people in his congregation before the storm were used to difficult times. Many of them had been displaced twice before, once when they moved from North to South Vietnam, then again when they fled for refugee camps as Saigon fell.

Among them is 88-year-old My Huynh, whom Vien was giving a lift home on a recent afternoon. Stranded and alone after the storm, she picked up fish that had been deposited on her street by the flood, filleted them, salted them and dried them on cars that had been abandoned on her block.

“The military found her and brought her out, but she was calm as could be,” Vien said with a chuckle. “She was fully prepared to be there for a month or more.”

Within days of the storm, Vien recognized the Catch-22 of New Orleans’ redevelopment: People want to return to revived neighborhoods, but neighborhoods will be revived only when they are repopulated. Vien determined that if he brought enough people back to Versailles with him, local officials would be forced to provide them with enough infrastructure to survive. He was right.

When the electric company blanched at Vien’s demand for power, he brought photos of hundreds of people attending Mass on Sundays, and signed papers from hundreds more saying they were preparing to come home. Soon, the lights came on. City officials managed to get a company to deliver giant bladders of water to the church for drinking and cooking -- no small matter, considering that the water system wouldn’t be functioning for months.

The church has served as the base of what is, effectively, a collective movement; Vien collects money from shopkeepers who have reopened so that he can hire cleanup crews to prepare stores that still need work.

Today, the church and the surrounding community have made progress that seems staggering in comparison with the surrounding areas.

More than 1,000 members of the congregation are living within a mile radius. Another 1,000 can’t yet move home but drive into New Orleans every weekend to work on their houses. Ninety-five percent of the families that made up the congregation have pledged to return.

The church recently held a meeting at which urban planners devised intricate plans for community housing, a retirement village and a pedestrian bridge connecting residential areas to the business district. Vien organized a community-wide poll on the plans, the results of which were turned into colorful mock-ups and posted on bulletin boards in a lecture hall.

Not only did FEMA agree to bring in 199 trailers for temporary housing, but Vien persuaded the agency to design the power, water and phone lines for them so that they could be used once the retirement community is built on the same lots.

Dozens of businesses have reopened.

“The critical mass is here to do a lot of things,” Vien said. “We have enough people to patronize our businesses. So more businesses reopen, and that engenders more confidence in the community, so more people move back. It’s a snowball effect.”

Vien acknowledges that he was lucky in several regards.

Versailles received only a portion of the floodwater that most surrounding communities shouldered. The trailers are coming partly because the Catholic Diocese owned 28 vacant acres near his church and agreed to use it for temporary housing -- and assumed all of the liability for it, which the government did not want to do because Versailles was still so isolated from other functioning pockets of the city.

In the end, Vien said the progress had its roots in community, in the fact that almost all of his congregants’ ties date back generations to three tiny villages in North Vietnam.

“We have an implicit obligation to help each other,” he said. “People want to return, to be with each other.”

Ron Williams is trying to make a go of it too -- but with his closest neighbor five blocks away, it is a lonely and strange existence.

Born and raised in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans, Williams had lived in a two-story house on Piety Street for 38 of his 42 years.

The business where he worked as a mechanic was destroyed in the flood. All of his tools were lost. His home has no gas, no power and no telephone line. FEMA delivered a trailer last week but declined to give him the key because his block had no power; agency representatives told him that they could not certify the trailer’s safety until it got powered up.

The only utility he has is running water -- cold water only, and it is gray and cloudy. It is allegedly safe to drink, but Williams doesn’t trust it, and it is hard to blame him.

Like many of the “pioneers” in the badly damaged portions of town, Williams has a wild-eyed look about him.

“I’m about to commit hara-kiri,” he said. “Or I’m going to knock somebody off. Or I’m going to take a propane tank and fill up my house and go to sleep forever. I’m on the edge, man. The edge.”

The rats, Williams said, have grown to the size of cats.

Willie Brinston, 63, the neighbor who lives five blocks away, sleeps with a .38-caliber revolver under his pillow. That’s in case someone tries to break in to steal his generator, though it is connected to one of the raw studs in his home by a thick steel chain.

Katrina has had a devastating and disproportionate effect on the city’s black community, which before the storm made up about two-thirds of the population. At this point, it is conventional wisdom among many blacks that they are being bulldozed to make room for a smaller, wealthier, whiter city.

Last month, Robert D. Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, wrote a tongue-in-cheek outline of a “20-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans.” It included such mock measures as denying household disaster loans to poor residents and concentrating rebuilding efforts in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

It soon became clear, he said, that it wasn’t much in the way of satire, because much of it was coming true.

The federal government, it turned out, was granting household disaster loans to a higher percentage of white residents than black residents. Architects of the city’s reconstruction efforts took the position that the government should focus its immediate rebuilding efforts on neighborhoods that fared better in the storm -- which happened to be, for the most part, wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

There have been no provisions incorporated in the city’s rebuilding plans for renters, an omission that disproportionately affects black residents and poorer areas.

“To some people, it sounds like paranoia or some conspiracy theory,” Bullard said. “But look at what is happening.”

On the ground in his nearly empty neighborhood, Williams puts it simply: “There is nothing to populate.”

“What’s the incentive, even if you want to come back?” he asks. “You’re going to bring your family, your wife and kids, to this? I look every day for a glimmer of hope. And I haven’t found one yet.”