Katrina: After the Flood (29 page)

The graffiti on the refrigerators around town asked the question:
WHERE
’
S NAGIN?
“Each time Ray and I would talk, I would walk away more angry,” Ron Forman said. Much of the city was still without electricity or drinkable water. Most of its residents were living scattered across the country. People were making do on couches and doubling up with relatives. Yet Nagin didn’t seem to be working half as hard as Forman or any other chief executive he knew.

“There was this lack of engagement, this lack of urgency,” Forman said. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “I told him, ‘This is getting personal with me. We gave up everything to be behind you and you’re not doing your job.’ I was fed up.”

RAY NAGIN HEARD IT
all the time: Why couldn’t he be more like Rudy Giuliani, the New York mayor who had acted so decisively in the days after September 11? Giuliani’s star turn had produced a bestseller, followed by a lucrative speaking career, and even a short-lived run at the presidency. Nagin had a copy of Giuliani’s
Leadership
on a bookshelf in his office, a freebie he had picked up at a charity golf tournament a year or two earlier. People around Nagin doubted he had even looked at it given the mayor’s irritation when Giuliani’s name came up. Nagin would offer the same response each time. He had been marooned on a small island of high ground and slept in a blasted-out hotel that had lost its power and had no working toilets. The death total was greater inside the World Trade Center than on the streets of New Orleans. But Giuliani slept in his own bed the week of September 11, left to worry about the significant but small corner of his city that had been destroyed.

“You’ve never had a city devastated like this,” Nagin said repeatedly—to friends, to reporters, to anyone pressing him about the city’s rebuilding efforts. Insurance companies were already declaring Katrina the most expensive disaster in history. Historians were labeling the dispersal of the city’s residents the largest American diaspora in history, bigger even than the displacement caused by the winds and drought of the Dust Bowl. The American Water Works Association declared that New Orleans had experienced the most catastrophic multisystem failure by a US city in modern history. The destruction of the city’s power grid and also its gas system were unprecedented, as was the blow to the New Orleans economy. “It’s not going to be a pretty process,” Nagin said two months after Katrina, “but I’m sure the
Harvard Business Review
will be doing case studies on this for years.”

By early November, a team of fifty-plus city inspectors had graded 60,000 of the 110,000 homes in the flooded parts of the city. Two in every three they tagged with either a yellow sticker, meaning it was more than 50 percent destroyed, or red, indicating that the city thought it needed to be bulldozed. Contractors working for FEMA had removed an astonishing 1.3 million cubic yards of debris (fallen trees, wrecked cars, pieces of broken homes blocking a street, discarded furniture), yet that represented only a tiny fraction of the garbage that the authorities predicted they would need to clear. “Housing is probably our most pressing issue right now,” the mayor declared—and yet every time he or one of his people approached FEMA about trailers, they were met with excuses. The same federal government that had moved too slowly right after Katrina, Nagin said, was now dragging its feet on the recovery.

Nagin phoned his new friends inside the White House. “I told them, ‘I really can’t wait until you figure out what the final deal number is,’ ” Nagin said. Let them work out inside the Beltway whether the region would receive $100 billion or $200 billion or $250 billion. He asked the White House to free up $100 million as a down payment on money that would eventually flow to the city, “to help us cover the cost of operations for the next three to six months.” Officials promised to see what they could do, but nothing happened. While on the phone with someone from the White House, Nagin repitched a more modest version of the tax plan that David White had devised right after the storm. What if
any business or individual agreeing to move back to New Orleans got a 50 percent reduction (rather than the 100 percent they had originally asked) in taxes for seven years (instead of ten) as a way of inducing people to rebuild? Nagin was turned down.

“I’ve thrown out some pretty creative ideas,” Nagin told a pair of
Times
reporters he had invited into his office two months after the storm. The problem was that the bureaucracy couldn’t see beyond its byzantine rules. Even the city’s business community hadn’t caught up to the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans, he said. He mentioned the casino idea he had floated and their reaction to it as if he had suggested carving out an Amsterdam-like red-light district in the center of town. “I have a tendency—and I’m not being bravado about this—but I have a tendency to see things probably a little quicker than others,” Nagin said.

NAGIN WAS CAPABLE OF
acting boldly. When, later that fall, FEMA announced it had thirty-one thousand trailers available to any Gulf Coast community needing them, Nagin invoked the emergency powers the City Council had granted him after the storm. He would have trailers delivered to parks and playgrounds around the city. He would set them up on the neutral ground in any community with the necessary utilities. Nagin also endorsed the idea of temporary tent cities in the city’s parks. “We need to let people come back home,” the mayor proclaimed.

Nagin stood strong when members of the City Council lambasted him for a plan that might mean black people would temporarily live in predominantly white neighborhoods. One white member of the council stressed the importance of parks and playgrounds in the life of a child—in a city without children. Another council member, also white, said she resented those who were insinuating that race played any role in her vote—and then said she could support putting trailers in her district if they were reserved for first responders. When the council passed legislation giving an individual council member final say over any temporary housing slated for his or her district, Nagin vetoed the bill, setting up a legal battle. Across the Gulf Coast, communities were receiving bulk shipments of FEMA trailers, but not New Orleans.

In Lakeview, people seethed over a mayor whom they had helped put
in office several years earlier. Electricity had only recently been restored, and a few intrepid souls had started to work on their homes. Now Nagin wanted to put trailers on the neutral ground on West End Boulevard, a few blocks from the neighborhood’s western border, and more trailers and possibly a tent city in City Park, which served as Lakeview’s eastern border? “A lot of us agreed that the last thing that Lakeview needed was to be turned into a trailer park for the rest of the city,” said Jeb Bruneau, then president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association. “The mayor was going to turn the park and our neighborhood into a dump”—without the courtesy, he added, of talking about it with anyone who lived in Lakeview.

Nagin backed down. He agreed to grant individual members of the council veto power over any housing built in his or her district—and fought FEMA when it attempted to set up trailers at sites his administration had already approved. The trailer parks would instead be set up on the grounds of New Orleans’s public housing projects and other places where City Hall would receive no pushback. But while the mayor and City Council negotiated, the people of Lakeview weren’t taking chances. People were emptying the waterlogged innards of their homes, and small mountains of discarded appliances, couches, and other detritus formed around the neighborhood. “We figured, why not take care of two problems at once?” Bruneau said. “So we started piling all our trash on the neutral ground on West End.” How could the city set up trailers on a stretch of grass serving as the community dump?

NOTHING SEEMED EASY, EVERYTHING
seemed to spark a fight. More than half of the city’s inhabitants were renters. What about all those apartments around New Orleans filled with people’s possessions even as their occupants were living a thousand or two thousand miles away? Landlords had plenty of motivation for rehabbing units in a market where $550 apartments were renting for $800 or more and cheap motels ringing the city were charging downtown hotel prices. The governor had seemingly done the humane thing when she placed a moratorium on post-Katrina evictions, angering landlords. Nagin, by contrast, was inclined to take the side of the landlords in a city desperate for housing. When in the last week of October Blanco, under pressure, lifted her ban,
landlords inundated the courts with eviction notices. “That’s somebody’s life in there,” a Legal Aid attorney told a Knight Ridder reporter. “You want a chance to save it.” Under Louisiana law, a person could be evicted and his or her possessions tossed into a Dumpster within ten days. But Legal Aid sued, putting the matter on hold.

The city’s pending elections precipitated another legal battle. New Orleans was slated to have its first round of voting for mayor and City Council on February 4. Any runoffs would be held one month later. The obvious question was whether the city could even pull off an election in its disabled state. Racial issues also had to be considered in a city that was majority white in the fall of 2005. Civil rights groups were threatening a lawsuit if the election was not postponed, while prominent voices Uptown were making the case that Louisiana’s secretary of state, Al Ater, in whose hands this hot potato had landed, had no legal basis for ordering a delay. At the Bourbon House late one night, Greg Meffert admitted he’d probably had too much to drink when things turned unpleasant between him and a white legislator arguing that the election would be a chance for whites to grab back control of the city while most of the black community was scattered around the country. The woman’s husband, Meffert said, needed to intervene before things turned ugly. “There was this big push to white-ify everything,” Meffert said.

Al Ater asked FEMA for $2 million to replace voting machines damaged in the flooding. FEMA turned down his request, just as its people said no when the secretary of state asked the agency to underwrite the cost of sending notices to displaced residents to let them know they could vote by absentee ballot. The Bush White House even rejected Ater’s request that FEMA share with the local election authorities the addresses of evacuees. Without help, Ater said, New Orleans would not be ready to hold an election by early February. To figure out what to do, Ater, who had been in office for less than two months when Katrina hit, assembled an advisory group. Members included both party leaders and civil rights advocates. The plan they devised included satellite polling places in Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, and other cities home to a large number of evacuees. Based on their recommendations, Ater said the elections needed to be postponed for at least eight months.

A Republican mayoral hopeful sued. So, too, did the developer Pres
Kabacoff. A federal judge was sympathetic but emphatic. “Mr. Ater,” she told him, “if you don’t set a date in April, I’m going to do it for you.” Shortly thereafter, the secretary of state announced that the election would be held April 22 with runoffs scheduled for May 20.

Dueling bureaucrats were the main combatants in the fight over Charity Hospital. Founded in 1736, Charity was the country’s oldest public hospital,
^I
built after the death of a wealthy shipbuilder whose will instructed that his fortune be used to finance a hospital for the city’s indigent. Since the days of Huey Long, Charity had been housed in a handsome art deco–style building on the edge of the central business district. The staff, working with dozens of military personnel, had scrubbed clean the first three floors of the twenty-story hospital when the state agency that ran Charity ordered them to stop. We’re concerned for your safety, the authorities said, but the doctors, nurses, and others on whose behalf the state was acting saw the move as nothing but a cynical play for a bigger FEMA payout. For years the state had sought to demolish Charity and replace it with a hospital that no longer had as its main purpose treatment of the city’s uninsured. The state, several doctors charged, saw Katrina as a way to get the feds to pick up the bill.

At first those ordered to stop working on Charity defied an order they saw as irresponsible in a city with an acute shortage of hospital beds. They would be chased out several times before the state locked the building. Their makeshift crews—populated with medical professionals—had worn shorts and T-shirts while working on the building. But when the state invited television crews inside the shuttered facility to see the damage for themselves, they insisted that everybody sign a medical release form and wear protective suits. The magic number in post-Katrina New Orleans was 50 percent. FEMA would pay to tear down and rebuild a structure rather than simply repair it if the damage estimate exceeded half the replacement cost. A consultant for the state declared that fixing the facility would equal 65 percent of the replacement cost, but a FEMA representative, doubting the damage was anywhere that extensive, said
the agency would do its own assessment. In the meantime, this twenty-seven-hundred-bed hospital sat empty.

Public housing was proving another flash point in post-Katrina New Orleans. More than five thousand families were paying rent each month to the Housing Authority of New Orleans at the time of Katrina, and HANO, as everyone called the agency, had another two thousand apartments sitting vacant. Many of HANO’s residents were older New Orleanians, but four in every ten residents worked. They were the working poor who changed bedpans, cleaned hotel rooms, and washed dishes. Reopening public housing as fast as possible seemed critical to reigniting the city’s economy. But rebuilding the projects also meant inviting back a portion of the city’s population living on public aid or disability.

Most public housing residents in New Orleans lived in complexes of low-rise, stolid brick buildings built in the 1940s and 1950s. Two of the city’s four largest housing projects escaped Katrina with little damage. In this city desperate for affordable housing, at least a couple of thousand units could be made habitable with only cosmetic improvements. Yet that wasn’t necessarily welcome news in a city where people were imagining much of New Orleans as a clean slate. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” Richard Baker, a ten-term congressman from Baton Rouge, a Republican, was quoted as saying after Katrina. “We couldn’t do it but God did.” What a waste of a disaster, some argued, if the authorities simply allowed HANO residents to move back into their former homes.