Freret Street Revisited
Throughout New Orleans residents band together to regroup and rebuild
Throughout the city, three quarters of locally owned shops are now back in business, compared with less than half of the national chains. Celestine Dunbar is hoping to be among this number soon, praying for one of the small-business grants that she hopes will be more available once the city has a unified plan. In the meantime, during one recent meeting, Freret Street business owners agreed to help Celestine and her family plan some fundraising to get their restaurant, Dunbar's, running again; it was flooded out and closed following the storm. The New Orleans soul food institution had hosted local politicos and national celebrities. But without flood insurance, Dunbar and her daughter Peggy Radliff have struggled to reopen. Dunbar is now cooking out of her home to make some cash, and without the money to pay contractors, the family plans to gather on Freret in the months ahead and rehabilitate the place, slowly, week by week if they have to. But Dunbar remains concerned about whether she will be able to employ 15 full-time staffers, as she did before, in a city where salaries are rising in the face of worker shortages and a labor force that is 30 percent smaller post-Katrina.
Housing. Those without the means to get back to their hometown at all feel neglected, too. In June, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to demolish several public housing complexes throughout the city, including C.J. Peete on Freret Street, home to former New Orleans residents like Theresa Harness, now living in Houston, and her son, Malik, 15. U.S. News spoke with them in December , when Harness returned to clean out her old apartment in C.J. Peete, an apartment she'd lived in for 26 years. Theresa and Malik have been trying to get back home to New Orleans ever since. "We can't find a place to stay yet," says Malik. There have been protests surrounding the announced closures-local casino Harrah's, desperate for workers, weighed in to support more affordable housing-but Malik just has Mardi Gras on his mind, already wondering if he'll be able to play his alto sax in his old school, to parade next February in the one city where it is the cool kids who are in the marching band. "I really wanted to get back home," he says. "But we're just going to work harder to make sure we get back next year."
Residents in neighborhoods forced to prove their viability had to make sure they made it back even earlier, when the city's Bring New Orleans Back commission unveiled what became known throughout town as the "green dots" debacle. The plan set aside some of the hardest hit, most flood-prone neighborhoods for parklands, including predominantly African-American areas like the Lower Ninth Ward, a decision that enraged residents and sparked charges of racial discrimination. The city later backtracked, saying that if those neighborhoods could prove their viability and the intent of residents to return, they would survive. And so neighborhoods banded together, offering fellow communities advice on the fine points of navigating city council. Throughout the summer the Freret neighborhood, in which only a small section was green-dotted, received tips and borrowed volunteers from the Broadmoor community just to its north, a neighborhood that was badly flooded and had to fight for its life to prove its viability to the city.
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