Freret Street Revisited
Throughout New Orleans residents band together to regroup and rebuild
When it comes to their people skills, New Orleanians have for centuries prided themselves on a couple of things: being generous in their acceptance of human frailty, and tolerant of the ghost stories told to them by others. One year since Hurricane Katrina made landfall, killing some 1,700 and uprooting thousands in a diaspora not seen since the Dust Bowl, these are a fraction of the survival skills that come in handy in a town filled with empty homes still scarred with traces of grimy floodlines-and haunted with the memories of loved ones no longer living in them.
Today the city is at under half of its pre-Katrina population of 455,000. Most residents have yet to return, and those who have managed to make their way back are greeted with the specter of levees that still cannot withstand another big storm, insurance payouts that may never come, and a city government whose push-me, pull-you planning initiatives have stalled time and again.
On Freret Street and in the city's 72 other neighborhoods, the absence of a master plan has forced residents to take matters into their own hands, to rebuild in the face of local leadership that the most charitable of Crescent City inhabitants have dubbed "nonchalant." On any weeknight, after their day jobs are done, folks get friends together to gut mold-infested homes in the Ninth Ward, recruit neighborhood kids to paint street names on salvaged two-by-fours in Broadmoor, and sell T-shirts to raise money for the likes of, say, fire stations in Lakeview. "The best things happening in this city are happening without and in spite of the government," says Lauren Anderson, director of the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services on Freret Street, where the office file cabinets are now up on cinderblocks and clients stop by with tales of skyrocketing utility bills and homeowners insurance rates that have doubled since the storm-even for houses that weren't touched by floodwaters.
In the meantime, residents disgusted with the pace of planning have begun to pull up stakes and leave, heartsick at spiraling murder rates and beaten down by the accumulation of daily indignities: monster potholes, weak water pressure, and dwindling access to day-care centers, 80 percent of which have disappeared since the storm. Some are simply getting priced out-rents have risen 40 percent, because so much of the housing stock is uninhabitable. For those who remain, the enormousness of the task can be overwhelming if you dwell on it, says Anderson. It's tough to take in the scope of cleanup necessary for a storm that created, for example, 50 million cubic yards of trash (with 8.2 million collected as of July, according to city estimates)-and that has left a quarter-million wrecked cars on the streets, which the city only recently began towing away, to much fanfare. "Sometimes," says Anderson, "the only way to be here is to live in denial."
Carnage. Sarah Parker faces the stark reality of the storm's aftermath every day at the eastern end of Freret Street, near what have long been a handful of "hot" drug corners. When U.S. News met her in December, she was lonely, missing her sister and niece who once lived next door. Today, she is growing increasingly concerned with violence that is shocking even in a city that has long vied for the dubious distinction of murder capital of the country: A quintuple homicide just a few blocks from where Parker lives forced the city to call in the National Guard earlier this summer. But not much has changed. "Oh, Lord, that crime is bad," she says, sitting on her stoop as she surveys two teens strolling down the sidewalk across the street. Notorious drug dealers, she explains as she waves congenially in their direction. "You can't let them know you're scared." While the homes across the street have recently been repainted in bright yellows and pinks, most remain empty and feel incongruous on this street where so many others remain abandoned. Next door, kids climb in and out of windows at all hours to stash drugs and light up "Lord knows what," says Parker. "They put their little stuff in the house, up under there,"she adds, pointing to the window screens.
The city recently launched a plan to reclaim abandoned property and set a deadline for gutting flood-damaged homes, but in the meantime Parker worries that her kids could be shot by a stray bullet in one of the myriad turf wars now being waged here. Every day she calls a city number to report the abandoned house next to hers, and every day she hears gunshots. She worries, too, that the house next door could go up in flames and take hers with it. For these reasons and more, Parker has struggled with anxiety and depression since the storm. But counseling is a luxury in a town where only 22 of 196 psychiatrists who were practicing pre-Katrina have returned. Parker got a boost a couple of months ago when her sister-in-law was able to leave San Antonio, her temporary home in the wake of the evacuation, to return to New Orleans. Now Parker has a confidant, and someone to help her watch her children and her daughter's new baby, her first grandchild. That baby is part of a boomlet of sorts that has hit New Orleans since the storm, where the birthrate has risen an estimated 25 percent this year.
But Parker remains terribly worried about the conditions in her neighborhood. Last month she begged her husband, Peter, to come back from his job upstate, where he was earning good money and commuting home on weekends, to live with her again. He is back now, but Sarah would feel safer if she saw more of the police-"and if they would get out of their little cars and walk some," she says.
Citywide, emergency responders are overwhelmed and understaffed. The police force now stands at 1,452, having lost 362 officers post-Katrina. The department is budgeted for 1,700 officers, but applications are down-only 12 recruits have been added in a year-while more cops leave every month, including 25 in July alone. Throughout the city, hospital beds are at a premium and patients report emergency room waits of upwards of eight hours on a good day. Firefighters, too, are underfunded and understaffed, operating on a budget that has been reduced by nearly a third since the storm.
Up in flames. Those cuts may have made the difference for the Original Brown Derby. Back in November, U.S. News met the owner of the corner grocery, Sam Ottallah, as he was struggling to scrape together enough money to rebuild his business after the storm. He did not have flood insurance, and he and his wife and children did without window shades, some furniture, and other items that Ottallah considered luxuries in the family's flooded home to save money to stock his store shelves. The store reopened and was doing brisk business. That is, until it burned down this May, felled in a four-alarm fire.
Firefighters said they would have been able to arrive sooner had they not needed to respond from a station nearly 10 minutes away-instead of one two blocks down the street that the city didn't have the funds to keep open. By the time cashier Vivian Richards-still in her pajamas-joined Ottallah at the Derby just after 5 a.m., it was consumed by flames caused by a gas leak. "He cried his little heart out," says Richards of her longtime friend and boss.But like most New Orleanians, they did not surrender to sorrow. At her local nail salon, Richards heard of some vacant property just a couple of blocks from the old shop, on Louisiana Avenue. Ottallah, Richards, and her son, Dennis, restocked the shelves and reopened for business just a month and a half later.
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.
Today, an agreement reached by the Greater New Orleans Foundation fully 10 months after the storm seeks to weave the plans of individual neighborhoods into a unified city effort, thanks to a $3.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that helped match up neighborhoods with urban planners of their choice. But while this master plan integrates the wishes of the residents, it also sidesteps key environmental concerns, say critics-and it isn't slated to be complete until the end of the year. "We hear, 'Why don't you just get in there and plan the damn thing?'" says Steven Bingler, the architect in charge of the revamped process. "But if there's anything that's come out of this whole enterprise that has major significance, it's this whole concept of democratic process and self-determination." The struggle to survive also created dynamics that many hope will be the key to a stronger city, particularly in Freret, says Anderson of Neighborhood Housing Services. "People are so much more civically engaged since the storm."
As children returned to school last week, Jesse Murdoch was fixing up his new business, an ice cream shop that he plans to open on Freret Street next month as part of a new, blue block of storefronts that have been developed since the storm. In the meantime he is living with his wife and four daughters in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer-the kind of sacrifice countless residents across the city are making to save money. Murdoch is optimistic but also filled with anxiety as his hometown enters the peak of a hurricane season that could make or break it. Like so many residents here, he is rolling the dice, hoping for the best-and gambling, he says, everything he has.
SLOW GROWTH
Back in February, U.S. News charted the efforts of residents to rebuild on Freret Street, a 3.8-mile stretch of road running from the Pontchartrain Expressway in the east to the Mississippi River bend in the west. Katrina's flood line wove in and out of homes and businesses, uprooting many lives there. Since February, a lot has happened to the denizens of Freret Street; these are their updated stories.
This story appears in the September 4, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.