Isle of Denial

Moments after New OrleansMayor Ray Nagin won reelection with the smallest margin in modern mayoral history, he took the podium at the Marriott ballroom and proclaimed: “This is a great day for the city of New Orleans.” We are, he said, “ready to take off.”

Well, nine months after Katrina and only days before the next hurricane season begins, one would hope. But the truth is that much of New Orleans looks the same as it did a week after the storm. “FEMA got the streets cleared,” says Jimmy Reiss, a local entrepreneur who served on Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans commission, “But other than that, not a whole lot has happened in the city.”

Indeed, more than 100,000 damaged and abandoned cars and 20,000 boats serve as grim and often surreal reminders of Katrina’s havoc-a pale blue speedboat is a by now familiar sight on Earhardt Expressway, one of the city’s major thoroughfares, and a huge barge still sits on the land side of the Industrial Canal floodwall where one of the catastrophic levee breaches occurred. Many of the eerie brown flood lines that wrapped around the majority of the city’s houses have finally been bleached out by the sun, but the properties themselves remain largely untouched, rife with mold like so many individual toxic waste sites. In the lower 9th ward, 5,500 houses were tagged by the city in January for demolition, but to date, only 119-which were not houses as much as piles of kindling-have been removed. Less than half of the city’s roughly 450,000 residents have come back but the housing shortage is severe. It is likely to be worsened by the fact that 7000 displaced residents in Houston alone will be turned out of their temporary lodging when their FEMA rent money runs out on June 30.

The lack of momentum on housing has had much to do with the mayor’s race. “Would somebody please tell us what we don’t want to hear?” local Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose asked in capital letters on election eve. He was referring to the fact that neither Nagin nor Landrieu would admit that New Orleans will necessarily be rebuilt on a smaller footprint-one that will likely not include the lower 9th and other flood-prone parts of the city. A platoon of urban planners and the mayor’s own commission urged that the rebuilding, initially at least, be concentrated on the high and dry ground otherwise known as the “sliver by the river” or the “isle of denial.” The problem though, as Rose pointed out, is that “voters live-or lived” in the neighborhoods the planners wanted given up for green space, and they cast absentee ballots in record numbers.

“It hasn’t been politically expedient to tell anybody anything,” says Reiss, who is also head of the Regional Transit Authority, an agency whose budget from July 1 will be $23 million compared to $110 million pre-Katrina. “No one has stood up and told people what the facts are-not just whether or not you should raise your house [to comply with the FEMA flood maps] but the financial condition of the city and the city’s inability to provide basic city services. You can move back in some of these neighborhoods, but you won’t have fire or police protection. There’ll be nobody picking up garbage, no bus service, and if you call 911 you’ll wait 45 minutes at best.”

One of the few areas that lately has seen momentum is crime. April’s thirteen murders match the city’s horrific pre-Katrina numbers on a per-capita basis, and in recent weeks neighborhood watch groups have been sending out blanket emails warning of gangs of teenagers as young as 15 and 16 who are committing armed robberies across the city. Sparsely populated neighborhoods provide ready hideouts and an ample supply of loot caches, while teens coming home to a city with even less than what they took with them are turning to drugs or crime or both. “They’re wilding out,” a 14-year-old boy playing hooky from school told the Times-Picayune. “They want to give off a different image than before. They want to be killers.”