[Mb-civic] Whose New Orleans Will Live? - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Whose New Orleans Will Live?

By Eugene Robinson

NEW ORLEANS -- Wherever you go in this ghostly town, you hear the 
against-all-odds determination to rebuild. You hear it from evacuees 
picking through the remains of the Lower Ninth Ward and returnees in 
Lakeview wearing masks to keep out the mold and dust; you hear it from 
guests at an elegant house party in the largely untouched Garden 
District and from liquored-up Bourbon Street revelers weaving from bar 
to bar with strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads around their necks.

It's as if repeating the mantra that all the people of New Orleans are 
"in the same boat," as former mayor Marc Morial said last week, will 
somehow make it so. But if the recovery process continues to drift 
aimlessly, it appears certain that some parts of this city will live and 
some will die.

It's understandable (though not admirable) that city officials would try 
their best to avoid these life-or-death decisions. Would you want to 
explain to voters why a bunch of rich, white neighborhoods get primped 
and buffed to pristine splendor while poor, black neighborhoods get 
bulldozed and turned into green space? That's the outcome topography 
suggests, and in New Orleans topography is conterminous with wealth and 
race.

While city hall frets about politics, though, a new map of New Orleans 
is already being drawn.

In a sense, it's an old map. The wealthy strip of high ground alongside 
the Mississippi River that didn't flood -- the French Quarter, the 
central business district, the Garden District, Uptown -- resembles the 
footprint of the city circa 1850. They call this strip the Island, and 
while life there hasn't quite returned to normal, it's close enough for 
people to spend time devising new post-disaster routes for the upcoming 
Mardi Gras parades.

Out in what was marshland in 1850, much of the Lower Ninth is ruined. 
Some houses were swept off their foundations into the streets; others 
were simply pulverized into jagged piles of debris. Politics or no 
politics, whatever happens there will have to start with bulldozers.

The real problem lies in the endless city blocks, mile after mile after 
mile, that were flooded but not erased. You can start on the Island and 
drive north, toward Lake Pontchartrain, and soon you are in a silent, 
empty wasteland where all the houses have a visible waterline, sometimes 
at the windowsills, sometimes all the way up to the eaves. These vast 
neighborhoods aren't destroyed, but they aren't habitable, either.

Last week I spent a morning in Holy Cross, the part of the Lower Ninth 
nearest the Mississippi, which never had real flooding problems until 
Katrina. It is, or was, a tightknit neighborhood of black homeowners 
where roots run generations deep.

Robert Smith, a 71-year-old retiree who could pass for 20 years younger, 
has been living near Dallas since the flood, but he was back in town 
last Friday working on his house in Holy Cross. Next door, the shotgun 
house where his mother, Mildred Bennett, lived until Katrina hit -- a 
house that has been in her family for 127 years -- is being 
rehabilitated as a demonstration project by the Preservation Resource 
Center of New Orleans in partnership with the National Trust for 
Historic Preservation.

The preservationists argue convincingly that it is cheaper and smarter 
to restore these moderately flooded older houses -- which survived much 
better than newer homes, since noxious mold doesn't have an affinity for 
plaster but loves modern drywall -- than tear them down and start over 
again. That should be true, they argue, in most of the city's empty zones.

But the homeowners of Holy Cross didn't have flood insurance. They 
weren't eligible for it because the area wasn't considered a flood 
plain. Without some sort of universal grant or tax credit, there is no 
way that most of the working-class evacuees from Holy Cross can afford 
to renovate. The neighborhood remains silent and empty.

In the coming months, the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- which 
has already been so helpful -- is expected to issue new flood maps for 
the city, and those maps could be decisive. If FEMA decides a certain 
neighborhood is a high-enough flood risk, insurers and lenders will stay 
away.

No one here wants a New Orleans that consists of just the Island plus a 
bunch of widely scattered residential atolls, washed by a bleak sea of 
abandonment. But that may be where things are headed unless something or 
someone intervenes.

Oh, by the way, President Bush is scheduled to visit New Orleans this 
week. I seem to recall his promising to do whatever it takes, for as 
long as it takes, to rebuild a great city. This will be his first trip 
here in three months.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901429.html
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