Katrina: After the Flood (57 page)

PEOPLE NOTICED THE BRAD PITT
homes. They were strange but beautiful, designed by Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and other internationally acclaimed architects—brightly colored works of art erected in the barren moonscape of the Lower Ninth Ward north of Claiborne. One house looked as if it had been artfully sawed in half; a second seemed as if it were several homes fused into a single structure. Another resembled a steel shipping container, except with a front door and a wedge-shaped roof. Some stood atop stilts, and one the color of a berry-flavored drink
was built on hidden pontoons so it could float if there was another flood. “They’re the ugliest houses I’ve ever seen,” declared Henry Irvin Jr., who cut so high a profile in the Lower Ninth post-Katrina that even Mitch Landrieu once referred to him as the area’s true mayor.

The cost rather than appearances offended Alden McDonald. Pitt had predicted that each Make It Right home would cost between $100,000 and $174,000 to build, but apparently that estimate was calculated before his people priced the formaldehyde-free wood, termite-resistant lumber, fiber-cement siding, and custom-built cabinets they used. Each home was platinum LEED-certified and featured solar panels and a stylish metal roof. The average home ended up costing $270,000—or considerably more than that if factoring in the cost of a full-time executive director, counselors, a PR person, and other staff. Then it worked out to closer to $500,000 per house. McDonald appreciated that the utility bills for one of Pitt’s Make It Right homes were a fraction of what a resident would pay in a traditional home—a huge savings in the warm months. But the banker within couldn’t square the idea of spending a few hundred thousand dollars to build a home that would be worth half that amount on the open market. “He had the money to put a lot more people into homes,” McDonald said.

Yet McDonald had also sat on an airplane next to the manager of a fast-food restaurant who’d shown him pictures of the Brad Pitt home she had chosen as if she were sharing photos of a newborn grandbaby. He’d witnessed the magic of the Make It Right homes as had Thom Pepper, who had taken over as Common Ground’s executive director after the group’s founder, Malik Rahim, could no longer bear to come around. The BellSouth man had initially told Pepper that the company would never restore phone service north of Claiborne. No one from the city would ever commit to a date for new streetlights or even permanent street signs. Then the media arrived trailing Pitt and occasionally a former president. “Make It Right forced the city to start addressing infrastructure issues,” Pepper said.

Mack McClendon thought the Make It Right homes were “weird.” He resented that so few locals worked on its construction crews. But McClendon was convinced that if not for Pitt, that corner of the Lower Ninth would have been snapped up by developers intent on building
big—condos, a hotel, maybe even a casino. “I’m afraid to think about what would have happened if Make It Right didn’t build these houses when they did,” McClendon said.

“As far as I’m concerned, the hero of the Ninth Ward is Brad Pitt,” Malik Rahim said. Added the former Blank Panther, “We tried and we couldn’t do nothing. We couldn’t save it. But Brad Pitt—an actor, this white dude—did.”

YET PITT ONLY BUILT
on a few streets closest to the levee. Another twenty or so blocks were between the Make It Right homes and the St. Bernard Parish line. Most of the homes in this part of the Lower Ninth had been bulldozed. Even five years after Katrina, entire blocks remained uninhabited. Henry Irvin Jr., the area’s unofficial mayor, never doubted he would rebuild. He had bought a home in the Lower Ninth in 1964, and he would be back in his one-story, redbrick home north of Claiborne in 2009. A caved-in home sat two lots over, and a Baptist church was down the street, but otherwise he was by himself. “You can buy junk food here and you can get alcohol,” said Jenga Mwendo, who moved back into her refurbished Lower Ninth home in 2008. “You can go to church, you can fill up with gas, you can get your car fixed. That’s pretty much it. You have to cross the bridge for everything else.” For a time, Common Ground was able to operate a health clinic, but funding dried up and it closed shortly after the fifth anniversary. With no health clinics, Mack McClendon asked, was it any surprise that maybe 5 percent of the community’s older homeowners were back?

The Lower Ninth was home to five public schools prior to Katrina. In 2010, the neighborhood still had just the King charter school that Doris Hicks and her people had opened. The area still had no high school, so King’s board voted to truck in trailers to add the ninth through twelfth grades. “We couldn’t even get money from the district to pay for the modulars,” said Hilda Young, the school’s board president.

The Lower Ninth lost more of its earliest leaders. Charmaine Marchand announced in 2011 that she would not run for reelection due to family obligations. Her father was suffering from advanced dementia; her mother, too, was sick. She also had financial pressures as a single
mother earning less than $50,000 a year as a state legislator. She was a lawyer and needed to make more money. Another early pioneer, Patricia Jones, who had founded the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, or NENA, also disengaged from her community work to spend more time tending to family and work.

Pam Dashiell stepped down as head of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association to cofound the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, an environmental group focused on the Lower Ninth. Dashiell’s group made reclamation of the Bayou Bienvenue—the once-thriving wetlands that was now stumps in a stagnant swamp—a priority and also addressed the toxins she believed had contaminated the area’s soil. “I don’t think anybody understands the effects of climate change and global warming better than the people of the Lower Ninth Ward,” Dashiell told the
Gambit
.

Dashiell would prove the Lower Ninth’s saddest loss when she died at her desk in December 2009. She was sixty-one years old. “A guiding force in the rebuilding efforts,” Brad Pitt said of this woman he described as a “dear friend.” Her funeral was held at All Souls—the Walgreens church. Among those eulogizing Dashiell was Bill Waiters, a supervisor at a nearby Domino sugar plant. Waiters, who had taken over as the head of Holy Cross after Dashiell, had been two weeks from moving back into the Victorian home he owned near the Industrial Canal when a faulty heater in the bathroom caused the house to burn down. The fire happened on the same day he learned Dashiell had died.

THE CHURCH GROUPS AND
college students and shaggy-haired idealists kept finding the Lower 9th Ward Village, and Mack McClendon kept feeding them and providing them with a place to sleep. The volunteers attacked the overgrown lots that threatened to swallow parts of the Lower Ninth whole and took part in “buildathons” organized to help a homeowner who didn’t have the money to hire a crew. McClendon sent teams to neighbors who had turned to him for help and housed volunteers who came to work on the Bayou Bienvenue for Pam Dashiell’s group. By the five-year mark, McClendon had hosted more than ten thousand volunteers.

McClendon knew he should have been working on his own home, but who had the time—or the money, for that matter? He had thought donations and T-shirt sales would prove enough to cover the costs of running the center, but he was always dipping into his savings—to pay an overdue electric bill, to pick up the grocery tab when the center was running low on donated supplies. He could no longer afford the apartment he was renting, so his friends and volunteers helped him create a mini-loft inside the center. The light fixtures were bare bulbs dangling from exposed wires in a pair of rooms that totaled maybe 250 square feet. The furnishings were castoffs, as was the stained carpeting. His bedroom was a small dresser and a futon on the floor. “I went from a four-bedroom house with a living room, dining room, and den,” McClendon said, “to living in a little closet that had me sleeping on the floor.”

Originally, McClendon thought he was creating a community center for a neighborhood in desperate need of one. He had the outside painted an array of bright colors: green, red, purple, blue. Above the door, someone had painted
WHERE IS YOUR NEIGHBOR?
along with a giant, multicolored map of the United States. Each dot—in Maine, Montana, Arizona, Washington, Wisconsin—represented another displaced resident of the Lower Ninth. Most impressive was a handsome mosaic next to the front door that spelled out
LOWER NINTH WARD VILLAGE
, along with a we-are-the-world logo that had a pair of black arms embracing people of all races.

Inside were a warren of offices and a giant, high-ceilinged room where the volunteers slept. The “media room” was filled with donated computers, and a “homework lab” was outfitted with tables and chairs. A shed in back was filled with footballs, soccer balls, and bikes. A third room served as a lending library, stocked with donated books and tools. A couple of used desks were in the room McClendon claimed as his office, but most of the space was taken up by beat-up tables, mismatched chairs, and worn-out couches. Here McClendon hosted organizing meetings to talk about everything from the Village to the neighborhood’s future.

Slowly, the Village made the transition from makeshift hostel to gathering place. McClendon set up basketball hoops behind the building and built a stage for a weekly Open Mic Night. Four years after the flood, McClendon started hosting what he called town hall meetings on
the fourth Saturday of every month. That proved essential to a community that felt ignored and in need of public meeting space. The gatherings started promptly at 11:00 a.m. and rarely lasted more than an hour. Speakers could talk for no more than five minutes and needed to stick to the agenda.

“We wanted to minimize venting,” McClendon said. “The idea was that we had business to take care of and didn’t have time to waste.”

While McClendon’s firm hand as a moderator impressed his fellow activists (“Mack ran the best meetings,” said Common Ground’s Thom Pepper), his cooking skills were what guaranteed a crowd. “When we wanted to really turn people out, I’d do one of my seafood boils,” McClendon said, though in his mouth it sounded like a seafood
burl
. A stalwart few dozen were regulars at these monthly meetings that typically focused on a single topic: the lack of streetlights, say, or the government’s failure to take care of abandoned properties under its jurisdiction. “But if I told people I was burling seafood, I could pretty much guarantee standing room only,” McClendon said. The real business seemed to happen in the hours before the crowds arrived when McClendon, standing in front of a humongous, restaurant-size silver pot, a spoon in hand, would talk strategy and plot with others to save their community. On those days McClendon—who prior to Katrina barely made time to vote—seemed to be at the center of whatever was happening in the Lower Ninth.

CONNIE UDDO KNEW IT
would be hard starting over in a new neighborhood given her race, her outsider status, and also the size and complexity of Gentilly. It’s pre-Katrina population was roughly four times that of Lakeview and had a daunting twenty-two neighborhood associations. Money, too, separated Gentilly from Lakeview. Gentilly had small pockets of affluence, such as Park Island on the Bayou St. John, where Ray Nagin and Alden McDonald lived, but the average home there sold for around $150,000. “You don’t see contractors out here,” a retired mechanic named Albert Felton, seventy-six, told a reporter who found him working by himself on his Gentilly home a couple of years after Katina. “We can’t afford them.” Uddo opened St. Paul’s Homecoming Center at the start of 2009 in a Gentilly house that volunteers had refurbished.

Uddo was cautious her first few months in Gentilly. She met with the president of each neighborhood association. She complimented them all on the job each was doing and stressed that she was there to help, not tell them what to do. Each association head shared with Uddo more or less the same set of stories. People wanted to return but didn’t have the money to rebuild. A lot had started to rebuild but ran out of money long before they could finish, often because they had been ripped off. “I feel like ninety percent of the homes I work on in Gentilly involve some kind of contractor fraud,” Uddo said.

Road Home was another culprit. In her testimony before a Senate subcommittee in May 2007, Uddo spoke about the program as thwarted by bureaucratic incompetence. In Gentilly, she recognized the more basic flaw in Road Home. Sheetrock cost the same whether you lived west of City Park in Lakeview or east in Gentilly. So, too, did an electrician and a roofer. Yet Road Home decreed that the same three-bedroom, two-bath arts-and-crafts home was worth $100,000 less in Gentilly than in Lakeview. It still cost around $200,000 in post-Katrina New Orleans to rehab a two-thousand-square-foot house even if insurance and Road Home only added up to $140,000.
^I

Gentilly was three-quarters black, but several years after the storm, no one seemed to care that Uddo was a white woman from Lakeview. “By that point, if you were saying, ‘I can help,’ it didn’t make a difference what race you may be,” Uddo said. She gave each resident she met the same small speech. She talked about her success in Lakeview but
stressed that she wasn’t a miracle worker. “All I can promise you is that I’ll do my best,” she would tell someone walking into her group’s offices. “I’ll look for funds to buy the materials you need to work on your house. I’ll look for volunteers to help you. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take, but I’m not leaving you.”

That last point impressed Cathey Randolph, who had worked as a case worker at Uddo’s Lakeview center. “So many people came around promising this and promising that, and then they’d just disappear,” said Randolph, who is black. “Connie stayed.”

Uddo’s role as a second responder evolved. Whereas in Lakeview her job had been more about the community, in Gentilly she focused on individuals. A lot of the job now was finding outfits willing to donate supplies and volunteers able to do specific work. When the kitchen and bath manufacturers were in town for a meeting at the Convention Center, that proved a perfect opportunity to help the Davis family, who for years after Katrina were still preparing their meals on a hot plate and a microwave in an upstairs bedroom. A volunteer group gave the Davises a new kitchen, along with two other families that had turned to Uddo’s group for help.