BETWEEN THE LINES Q&A with Jordan Flaherty

Between the Lines Q&A

A weekly column featuring progressive viewpoints
on national and international issues
under-reported in mainstream media
for release Sept. 1, 2010

5 Years After Katrina,
New Orleans Recovery is
a Tale of 2 Cities

RealAudio

MP3

Interview with Jordan Flaherty,
community organizer with Louisiana Justice Institute,
conducted by Melinda Tuhus

katrina

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of the levees in New Orleans, recovery is underway, but slowly. Three-quarters of the city was flooded, destroying more than 180,000 homes, displacing about 300,000 residents and leaving 1,800 people dead in the disaster. Studies have found New Orleans' metropolitan area has recovered about 90 percent of its population and 85 percent of its jobs. But much remains to be done in the Ninth Ward and elsewhere.

The government's demolition of storm-damaged public housing has resulted in the loss of two-thirds of affordable housing units; many neighborhood schools have not been rebuilt, downtown's Charity Hospital remains closed and the city's public transit system has not yet been restored.

Jordan Flaherty moved to New Orleans in 2001, survived Katrina in 2005, and has worked as a community organizer for the past several years. He is on the staff of the Louisiana Justice Institute and his book, "Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 6," was published earlier this year by Haymarket Books. It follows the struggle of New Orleans residents for justice after the disaster. Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Flaherty, who describes the post-Katrina situation as an example of survival of the fittest, where those with the most resources get access to funds, to rebuild housing and betters schools, while the poorest citizens often do without, or are forced to leave New Orleans.

JORDAN FLAHERTY: During the storm, 80 percent of the housing in the city was flooded, but some of the housing that was not flooded was actually the public housing, which was very well built and some of it occupied some of the high ground in the city that was less in danger of flooding. Many of the public housing units could have been reopened almost immediately after the water drained out of the city. But people with power chose to take this as an opportunity to close up that housing. Congressman Richard Baker, Republican from the Baton Rouge area, said, "We've been trying to do something about public housing. We couldn't, but God did."

And so they used the storm as an opportunity to shutter up the public housing and kick people out and that's been part of the mass displacement that's happened to the population in the aftermath of Katrina is the displacement of the people who used to live in public housing. With the public housing closed, in general, that's been part of the lack of affordable housing in the city overall. Just in the last year, housing prices have gone up 63 percent. In the first year after the storm, rents in many neighborhoods doubled for renters.

And part of the problem was compounded also by the fact that the main federal program to help rebuild -- the Louisiana Road Home Program -- was designed strictly for homeowners. There was no funding at all for renters. And even within those homeowners, that program was racially discriminatory. A judge in the past week found it was likely racially discriminatory in the way it handed out funding, and the reason was that the funding formula was based on property values. So wealthier and whiter neighborhoods received more funding to rebuild their homes than African American neighborhoods, and on average African American homeowners received about 40 percent less funding to rebuild than white homeowners. You could have the exact same home, built in the same year, with the same design and the same amount of damage, but if it was in a white neighborhood, it received more money than if it was in a black neighborhood.

So, blatant racial discrimination, and that 40 percent less funding that African Americans received, for many people that was the exact difference between being able to rebuild and not being able to rebuild, a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and people couldn't put that money up by themselves. And finally, let's remember this was an accident that was caused by the federal government. These levees were supposed to hold up to a Category 3 storm, but in fact, the winds of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans were only a Category 2; the brunt of the storm missed the city and hit Mississippi.

So we should've been able to not receive any flooding if the levees had been built the way the Army Corps of Engineers had promised, but instead our city was flooded, devastated, and people did not receive the help to rebuild or come back, and we still are in the situation with thousands of empty units, still damaged units, neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward filled with vacant lots.

BETWEEN THE LINES:Jordan Flaherty, New Orleans had a notoriously bad school system before Katrina, and it's gone through major changes since then. Talk about that.

JORDAN FLAHERTY: One of the first actions that was taken by the city and the state in the aftermath of the storm is that they fired all of the teachers in the school system; 7,000 school teachers and other staffers including janitors, lunchroom workers. They refused recognition of that union that previously had been the largest union in the city, the teachers union. They basically displaced that population, which was the largest source of black middle-class power in the city.

That group of folks, 7,000 middle-class African Americans -- mostly African Americans -- who lost their jobs, that became much harder for that population to come back; it was a big part of the displacement of African Americans that cut across lines of class. You then had the school system -- 128 schools pre-Katrina, 124 of them were under the control of the school board -- the state basically seized control over those schools and now we have a situation where five of them are under control of the school board; the rest are either under control of the state, or they've been chartered.

There are indeed some excellent schools available, but you have to be a student that has a parent to really advocate for you, to do the research about what the best schools are and get their applications in so you can into that best school. So again it's the survival of the fittest recovery, where those who have the most resources going in, get the best schools, get the best housing, get the most recovery funding, and those that need the most get the least.

BETWEEN THE LINES:We should talk a little bit about the construction of a better levee system, and what about coastal restoration as a way to protect New Orleans from future storms?

JORDAN FLAHERTY: The oil companies have dug 10,000 miles of canals throughout the southern coast; we're losing a football field of land every 45 minutes due to coastal erosion; about 40 percent of that coastal erosion is directly because of that oil company drilling, where the salt water from those canals is brought into the freshwater marshes and destroys the marshes and erodes the coast. Hurricane Katrina would have been barely felt in New Orleans if we had the coast that we did even 20-30 years ago, but our coast has been destroyed by the greed of the oil companies, and the rest of the country has profited because of this cheap oil they've gotten, while the people of New Orleans have suffered.

What we need is not just the levees repaired, and to answer your question directly on the levees, I think there has been some work done but not nearly enough. But we really need a full coastal erosion program; we need stimulus money to go toward creating jobs in coastal restoration, because if we don't restore this coast that has been destroyed, the city will continue to be at risk even if we had the best levees possible.

Contact the Louisiana Justice Institute at (504) 872-9134 or visit their website at www.louisianajusticeinstitute.org

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Melinda Tuhus is a producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 50 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending Sept. 10, 2010. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Melinda Tuhus and Anna Manzo.

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