The Long Road Back
Theresa Harness would like to return, but she can't. She lost her home, too. She fled before Katrina hit, with her 14-year-old son, Malik, because, she says, "I knew better." Harness had a duplex at C.J. Peete, where she lived for 26 years. The first floor was destroyed in the flooding, and she has no idea when or if she'll be able to move back in. In November, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development pledged more than $1.8 billion to revamp public housing across the Gulf Coast, starting with C.J. Peete. City officials plan to turn the place into mixed-income housing, but so far nothing has been done. Frustrated, Harness has brought along a bucket full of sponges, some Lysol, and a spray bottle of bleach. She wants to clean. She also has her cable television box in the trunk. "Cox cables wants their boxes back," she says. Right now, she can't afford the fee they'll charge for keeping it.
Surveying her old home, Harness drapes an arm over Malik's shoulder. Since they evacuated to Texas, this is her son's first time back, and he is shocked. "All of this is throwing you off," Harness says consolingly. Malik nods. "Everything's dying," he says. "The plants, the grass." Harness shakes her head. "Poor city," she says, "looking so rough and ragged."
Uptown, at the corner of Freret and Napoleon, Lee Page is thinking hard about whether he'll return to the city he loves. He's living in Houston for the time being, thinking it over. The things he used to take for granted--china cabinets, lamps, you name it--are now under his house. Concrete pilings hold the place up now, and Page has been raising them week by week, foot by foot. He got tired of waiting for the city to tell him how high to rebuild, he says, so he just up and picked a number himself: 8 feet. Workers now climb in and out of his destroyed first floor using a ladder.
Still, after all the work is done, Page doesn't know if he'll stay. Like businesses and homeowners up and down Freret, he's tired of the waiting game and fears it could be the death of New Orleans. "Even if the city made a wrong decision, we'd back them to hell," he says, "but just make a decision." A passing car honks, and Page waves. "Old neighbors," he says, shaking his head. "They've got Alabama tags now."
"Hitting a wall." For business owners, the challenges have been nearly insurmountable. At the Original Brown Derby grocery, at the intersection of Freret and Louisiana, Sam Ottallah rode out Katrina, then watched the floodwaters work their way down Freret and do the damage that the looters had not. Wading through chest-high waters, he finally made his way home--only to find that destroyed, too. Insurance paid him $113,000 for the house, but he had no flood coverage for the Derby. He sought a loan from the Small Business Administration, but like 70 percent of the applicants today, he was turned down. That meant some tough choices. "There are certain things in my house that I had before the storm that I couldn't replace," Ottallah says. "I had to keep in mind that with this money, I'm supposed to fix up my house in a way that me and my family could live in it, and to save some money for my business, too, so that my family could have a source of income."
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