A Quiet Progress in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS—At night, Genevieve Bellow's house is a lantern on a lonely block. After sitting under 3 feet of water from Hurricane Katrina, her modern two-story home in the affluent African-American neighborhood of New Orleans East has been gutted and put back together with new wood floors and a pool shimmering in the backyard. But while Bellow's house is back, her neighborhood is not. From her window, Bellow looks out at boarded-up homes and weeds bristling in the yards. Most area stores are shuttered. Debris chokes drainage canals, raising anew the fear of water.

Throughout much of New Orleans, recovery from Katrina has been hindered by the city's many prestorm weaknesses and delayed by false starts. Doors to ruined homes still creak in the breeze. Whole city blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward closest to the Industrial Canal breach are now a field of prairie grass pockmarked with concrete-slab foundations and driveways ending in wildflowers. Community anchors are boarded up or abandoned, and in the case of Gentilly's Provincial House convent, scarred by fire and rotting from water.

All this and more has people like Bellow wondering when, or if, evacuees still in cities like Houston and Atlanta will return and what will happen to all the empty shells that dot New Orleans.

Now, almost three years after Katrina, the answers are starting to come—and with them, a glimmer of promise. The federally funded Road Home program, the largest housing recovery program in U.S. history, has doled out $6.4 billion to storm victims looking to sell or rebuild their homes. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will begin acquiring rights to as many as 7,000 properties that homeowners sold, often at a loss, to the program. Armed with these property rights, the city can now begin the emotionally fraught and painstaking process of weaving the properties back into the tattered fabric of New Orleans. Some will be kept for parks, community centers, and the like. Others will be sold to neighbors, new homeowners, or developers—largely distrusted here—to bundle together for large projects.

At the same time, New Orleans is pouring $1.1 billion into 17 target zones, attempting to jolt life back into commercial corridors across the city. "None of us knows how this thing is going to shake out," says Rob Olshansky, an urban planning professor at the University of Illinois who monitors New Orleans's progress. "They are making policies and plans in an extremely unpredictable environment. [Success] all depends on how people perceive the recovery."

By most accounts, the perception is that the recovery is slow but may be gaining momentum. Throughout the city, homes are being rebuilt. Electricity, water service, and trash collection are running. Schools are opening. Plans to attract big money are being hatched. In short, many are finding reason to hope.

Dreamscapes. That hope comes partly from simply having a master rebuilding plan—especially as it comes after some high-profile failures to unite the city. Mayor Ray Nagin's first rebuilding commission publicly debated whether some low-lying areas should be rebuilt at all, enraging already anxious residents. Its proposal—a dreamscape of interwoven neighborhoods, each with its own retail zones, schools, and amenities—showed some low-lying areas marked with green dots, indicating potential parkland. Some residents interpreted the dots as whole neighborhoods converted to green space. At the proposal's unveiling, residents hurled insults at the panel. Recalls Commissioner Reed Kroloff: "When you combine our errors in graphic design and our inability to correctly explain what we intended, it created a vortex." Nagin promptly ditched the plan.

More failed commissions followed, slowing the arrival of federal funds, which were contingent on an approved master plan. Last year, the Unified New Orleans Plan emerged from the scrap heap, explicitly allowing resettlement everywhere while focusing on 17 zones in the best condition. Officials increased the resources of the long-negligent urban redevelopment agency NORA to handle the influx of Road Home properties. Now steering the ship is Joe Williams, a banking executive lured out of retirement by a sense of duty to his adopted city. Nagin also imported a recovery czar, Ed Blakely, the urban planner who guided the recovery after California's 1989 earthquake. At a press conference last March, the tough-talking 70-year-old promised "cranes on the skyline" within months.

Global center. A year later, residents are still waiting. Mostly, there are big plans. City leaders are seeking seed money to lasso the resources of three of the city's universities, Tulane, Xavier, and the Louisiana State School of Medicine, into a 2.4-square-mile biosciences zone that would re-create New Orleans as a global research center. And the mayor and others are pushing a $300 million "Reinventing the Crescent" plan that would replace eyesores along the waterfront with 6 miles of parks and promenades. "New Orleans in many ways has lost sight of its greatness and lost sight of the need to reinvent itself," says developer Sean Cummings, who's spearheading the effort. Funding, however, is an issue.

Indeed, Blakely's Office of Recovery and Development Administration has largely blamed the slow start on funding delays, mostly from the federal government, while state and federal authorities blame local disorganization. Still, the 17-zone plan to entice private investment is showing signs of picking up speed. Developers are carving condominiums out of a Falstaff factory north of downtown, thanks, in part, to $1 million in city funds. Another lot nearby was sold by the city for half its appraised value to lure in another developer. And in the trashed Hollygrove neighborhood, where used tires are simply tossed in an empty lot, the city is cultivating new apartments for low-income seniors.

Ghost town. Yet there's no escaping the blocks of warped and ruined homes. Pontchartrain Park, north of Gentilly and bordering the lake that is its namesake, was occupied primarily by retirees. With most residents too overwhelmed by the effort to come back, the neighborhood today is a ghost town. Citywide, the population of New Orleans is far below its pre-Katrina level of 454,000. The numbers are in dispute, but local demographer Greg Rigamer puts it around 308,000—a rebound of about 180,000 since the months after the storm. Most agree resettlement is leveling off. "There is a tipping point" for those people who haven't yet returned, says Rigamer, who estimates the population will likely peak at 360,000. "The sense of urgency is past. After 2½ years, you start to think of things of a practical nature, getting your kids in school, sound infrastructure, employment." With fewer people, a jack-o'-lantern effect of households and darkened lots, as in Genevieve Bellow's neighborhood, is taking hold.

Part of encouraging resettlement means allowing it everywhere, even in flood-prone areas. New homes are being built higher and "smarter," says Tony Faciane, a deputy to Blakely. "But keep in mind that emphasis for flood protection is always the levees." And the levees hardly instill confidence. While the Army Corps of Engineers argues that dramatic repairs have significantly strengthened the system, critics like Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley, are dismissive. "It may be able to withstand a Category 3 storm," he says, "but not likely." That level of protection won't be fully in place until 2011. And it's unlikely the system will ever be strong enough to protect against a Category 5 storm.

In its efforts to rebuild neighborhoods, NORA is confronting many of the city's other weaknesses. More than 150,000 jobs were lost in the storm. And one of the city's two Fortune 500 companies, the mining enterprise Freeport-McMoRan, recently jumped to Phoenix. "We had a weak economy to start with," says Ivan Miestchovich, director for Economic Development at the University of New Orleans. "Then we got pummeled."

Economics has complicated New Orleans's comeback in unexpected ways. The city has had difficulty even ascertaining who owns what property, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward, where many houses passed through generations of families with no changes in the deeds. And at least half the city's pre- storm residents were renters, few of them with insurance. Now the city is aggressively pushing homeownership for all. In a bold move, redevelopment agencies have launched a generous "soft second mortgage" program that provides down-payment assistance of up to $50,000. So far, $2 million of about $10 million has been distributed. Meanwhile, NORA is pressing 350 lawsuits to forcefully confiscate blighted property from negligent owners. Williams optimistically describes the agency's progress as "halfway up Everest."

The climb is indeed arduous. But there are some milestones. The city's public school system, once considered among the country's worst, is undergoing a renaissance as a laboratory for charter schools. With more autonomy and stricter rules of behavior, the charter schools are showing evidence of outperforming their traditional peers, though officials admit it's hard to compare pre and poststorm data. Civic activism is also reaching new heights, and the city is responding.

NORA officials are fanning across the city to personally engage residents about the future of damaged properties. On a recent visit to Bellow's house, Williams and an assistant used PowerPoints to painstakingly explain the agency's plan to bring to market the thousands of Road Home properties. There are possibilities for new libraries, parks, or schools. The city is giving neighbors a crack at purchasing next- door lots and wants most properties to stay in the hands of individual homeowners. But developers, who have been blamed for concentrations of low-income rental housing, will undoubtedly be part of the recovery effort. Bellow spoke for the half dozen gathered at her home when she told Williams, "If you sell to a developer, you don't know what they're going to do." Williams admitted there were no guarantees with developers but expressed the mayor's desire for more mixed-income housing.

While the rebuilding process has exposed the many gulfs of class and race in New Orleans, it has also been a unifying force. Bellow's neighbors swap tales of haranguing city officials—to dredge canals or clean up abandoned properties—like war stories. Before the storm, New Orleans had maybe 120 active neighborhood associations. Now, dormant organizations have been revived, and despite a dramatically smaller city, 30 new groups have been created. While there are no cranes in the sky, there are hammers, saws, and drills in homes across the city. "It doesn't have the same visual pop," admits one NORA official. "We had the most photogenic disaster in history and the least photogenic recovery."

The recovery process is likely to accelerate as the flow of federal dollars increasingly reaches homeowners like Julian Hamilton. His Lower Ninth Ward home sat for weeks in 5 feet of water. After 2½ years, with help from Road Home and the nonprofit group acorn, the house is nearly refurbished, with a new kitchen, and for the first time, central air conditioning, and insulation. Hamilton criticizes the city's response in his neighborhood, but says he's optimistic. "I see my neighbors returning," he says. "I expect the Lower Ninth to be much better than it was before." That's what NORA's Williams wants to hear. "It will be five years before you see significant visual change," he says. Williams calls the progress to date "winning ugly," but in New Orleans today, there may not be any other kind. b