The following is an excerpt from our September issue:
By Jonathan Lindberg
It’s Saturday night in New Orleans and Rosie’s Diner is out of gumbo soup. Not a good sign for a restaurant in the French Quarter, famous for its gumbo soup. “We only have one cook in the kitchen tonight,” the waiter explains. “He just hasn’t had time to get around to preparing the soup. We haven’t had gumbo for days.”
Though the restaurant is large, there are only two waiters working the floor. They hurry among tables, balancing orders along with apologies for the slow cook time. When the tables begin to thin, the waiter stops to tell me they have been running crazy like this all day long. I ask him about the crowds I had seen on Canal and Bourbon Streets, in the heart of the French Quarter. “A lot of tourists have come back,” he says. A good sign to be sure. “So things are looking up? Nothing has changed?” He looks at me for a moment. “No. Everything has changed.”
He leaves it at that.
Two years have passed since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, and New Orleans is still struggling with recovery. To date, only 22% of the federal funds that Washington had set aside to rebuild Louisiana have been spent. Entire sectors of the city still remain in disrepair. But beyond the visible signs of damage, evidenced by vacant lots and slumped houses and piles of rubble still clinging to curbs, are the deeper problems New Orleans now faces, basic economics, housing and workforce woes, government gridlock frustrating the rebuilding effort, political scandals, and the fundamental question every city official is hoping to solve – how do you rebuild a city that was already worn at the seams?
Two years and only 60% of the population has returned to New Orleans. The remaining 40% have been absorbed into surrounding metropolitan areas such as Houston, Memphis, and Atlanta. Many of these 40% have assimilated to life outside New Orleans and show little signs of moving back. What this means is that neighborhoods throughout the Ninth Ward and along the Gulf Coast have either washed away or become ghost towns – vacant houses, barren concrete slabs, remnants of what had been.
Though New Orleans is working hard to become that vibrant destination it once was, the city is having to do so with 100,000 less workers, or minus 20% the workforce that existed pre-Katrina. The process has been tough. Ambitious housing and commercial projects are being scrapped, in part due to skittish investors frustrated by inactivity, and in part due to missing basic components, such as a scarcity of adequate plumbers.
Much of the workforce strain in New Orleans is being felt among the tourist industry, which is seeing the crowds return, but unable to find adequate workers to service those crowds. Still, finding enough cooks to be able to prepare gumbo is the least of New Orleans’ the problem. Four of the seven general hospitals are still closed, 13,000 families are still living in trailers, and just last month, the Jefferson Public School System announced they are nearly 100 teachers short for the current school year.
Two years and New Orleans is still weighed down by the problems of Katrina. Even more, the city is struggling with the preexisting problems Katrina only exacerbated. In many ways, Katrina could be seen as a giant finger picking off the social scabs that New Orleans had learned to deal, or rather tolerate.
Just one-half-mile from the French Quarter, only now coming alive with building projects, restaurants and hotels, resides the other half of New Orleans – broke-down neighborhoods that stretch not for blocks, but zip codes. In the shadow of the Superdome, which looms over the city, a ghost of things still-not-passed, are neighborhoods of damaged and boarded-up homes, collapsed roofs and broken sidewalks, piles of wreckage and garbage still stagnant on the corners, indicators in red spay paint signaling the places where dead bodies were found after the storm, and people, mostly African-American, still standing along the cracked sidewalks with that shell-shocked look as if Katrina has just happened. Two years later and these neighborhoods remain in disrepair. Here, there are no cranes or ladders. Here, no building projects are taking place.
Even if the rest of the country has moved on past Katrina, to presidential politics and collapsing bridges, New Orleans has not moved on, not in the least bit. Spend a few days on the Gulf Coast and you will be confronted by Katrina at every turn, in every conversation, with every page. For those who remain, two years later, Katrina is still a part of daily life.
For Jeff and Belinda Tipton of Long Beach, Mississippi, the long road to Katrina recovery turned the page just eight weeks ago, when they were finally able to move out of their FEMA trailer and into a new home.
After Katrina, the Jeff and Belinda spent eighteen months wrestling and clawing with their insurance company for even a partial compensation for their house which was completely destroyed, not one brick left on top of another. “We were in a very dark place for a long time,” the couple told me, still visibly frustrated with the recovery process they were forced to endure. “It was hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.”
Casino towns and communities like Long Beach, Gulfport, and Biloxi took on the full brunt force of Katrina and had their maps completely rewritten. Whole neighborhoods and residential blocks that were once thriving developments were left nothing more t