History > 2007 > USA > Louisiana / Mississippi > Reconstruction (II)

New Orleans Journal

A Streetcar of Solace

Is Back in New Orleans

December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS — Like the rolling tide to seacoast residents, the low rumbling of the streetcar is a nearly internal sound for citizens here, its absence since Hurricane Katrina a painful reminder of civic ill health.

The return in recent weeks of the distinctly urban noise of grinding wheels and brakes to St. Charles Avenue, with the near completion of post-hurricane repairs, has been an occasion for joy and not because, as boosters would have it, one more tourism feather has been added to the city’s cap.

The St. Charles streetcar line is that most valued local commodity, an unbroken link to the past: the same green tin boxes rocking at the same slow speed down the same tree-shaded avenue, unchanged since the early 1920s. Only a week ago, a crucial part of the St. Charles line, from Napoleon Avenue to Carrollton Avenue, was restored; other less damaged but less historic lines, along the Mississippi River and Canal Street, have operated for months.

But it is the line that connects Uptown to downtown and the French Quarter, via St. Charles and Carondelet Street, that is the city’s living, though wayward, artery. The satisfaction is huge.

“It’s all very, very much the way it’s been, for a very long time,” said Robert Michiels, a shipbuilding engineer who paid $1.25 to ride it the other day, just for the pleasure of riding it again, down the avenue.

The streetcar has represented something else besides the connections through time and space: the city’s living room, a privileged spot for tentative social encounters across lines of race, class and nationality, in a place not otherwise given to them. Thanks to an accelerated repair schedule, that meeting place, absent since the hurricane, is back.

But that raises a question: will there still be people for it in a city missing much of its population? Less than a quarter of prestorm riders are using the transit system, buses included. On a recent morning, tourists in town for a football game packed the streetcar going Uptown. But going downtown, in the direction of the jobs, the old wooden benches were sparsely filled: a maintenance man here, a construction worker there, a housewife or two and the odd professional.

Before the storm, the St. Charles streetcar was at least an image of the social ideal. Uptown lawyers in seersucker sat by weary-looking housekeepers going to the downtown hotels. Noisy schoolchildren jostled for space with tourists from France, Rome and Australia wondering about the solemn fellow on the column at Lee Circle. (That would be Robert E. Lee.) Prim suburbanites visiting from Nashville and Atlanta, and encountering public transportation for the first time, smiled nervously past muttering bums. No other city in the South entertained such a mix.

In the worn wooden interior, bathed in the smell of sulfur and the soothing racket of clanging machinery, the fractures in the stratified city melted, slightly. And what would be deficiencies in other places — improbable premodern slowness, the occasional surly conductor, unexplained lengthy halts between stops — were virtues. The conductor sang out, ingeniously mispronounced, the names of the Greek muses that double as street names here: MEL-Po-MEEN! (Melpomene) TER-Chicoree!(Terpsichore) You were getting somewhere, slowly. Complicated reading could be accomplished.

Excellent, as a rider named Cherry Gardon put it the other day, “if you’re not in a rush to get to work” — a widely held ethic.

Now, the St. Charles line has about half its daily prestorm ridership of 10,000, transit officials say. It remains distinctly, though recognizably, a shadow of its former self.

Still, for those who have come back, the memory of the old social model remains powerful. “The streetcar is not just something convenient,” said Manuel García-Castellón, riding it recently to his job as a professor of romance languages at the University of New Orleans.

He struggled to explain why something so irrational could also be so indispensable. “Sometimes, I think I’m in the salotto of my house,” he said, using the Italian word for parlor.

In July and August, the streetcar effects a miracle: benign contact with the superheated New Orleans air. All the windows come down, the sweet, thick air rushes in, and you are in a truce with the beast of the South Louisiana summer.

The streetcar’s reconquest of St. Charles Avenue after Hurricane Katrina has been fitful. The storm sent the avenue’s old oak trees crashing down on the dense network of overhead electric lines that power the cars, destroying nearly 13.5 miles’ worth. These had to be painstakingly rebuilt; one section on Carrollton of just over a mile, between St. Charles and Claiborne Avenues, remains out.

About eight of the 1923-24 cars are operating along the line, compared with 15 to 18 before the storm. “Our ridership base — many, many of those people — are not back in the city,” said Rosalind Blanco Cook, a spokeswoman for the transit agency, who added that officials were nonetheless pleased at the turnout on the St. Charles line.

Like other elements that have struggled to come back, this one — in the telling of the riders, at least — has an intimate connection with the biographies of everyone who is asked about it.

“Me, personally, I been taking it all my life,” said Derek Batiste, who was going to his job at Wendy’s. “I took it to school, that’s how long I been taking it. Not just for tourists, no. The streetcar, it’s like part of my family.” A computer technician, Samps Taylor, savoring his ride, said, “It brings it back to where you were.”

In other places, citizens move on, leaving the historic artifacts people here believe make up the urban fabric. The ties are personal. Past proposals to build new cars for the line have been vehemently rejected.

“Whole lot of history,” said Henry Carter, riding the streetcar to a construction job. “I been catching this streetcar since ’69. Been catching it a long time.”

A Streetcar of Solace Is Back in New Orleans, NYT, 30.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/30streetcar.html

Report:

New Orleans pop. nears 300,000

25 December 2007
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Despite slow progress in rebuilding some neighborhoods, New Orleans' population is nearing 300,000, or about 65% of its pre-Hurricane Katrina size, according to a new report.

The report, compiled by urban planning consultancy GCR & Associates and based on utility hookups, estimates the population at 295,450 and predicts it will surpass the 300,000 mark soon. That will put it on par with cities like Tampa, and Pittsburgh and provide a "significant indication of New Orleans' sustained viability as a major city and as an anchor for a large metropolitan area," the report says.

Mayor Ray Nagin has pointed frequently to the population estimates as a key way to gauge the city's success at recovering from the August 2005 storm.

Some of New Orleans' hardest hit areas are still dotted with overgrown lots, empty houses and crumbling streets. But Nagin has said he thinks 2008 will be a turning point, as additional federal aid is freed up and more rebuilding grants are made available to homeowners.

Greg Rigamer, GCR & Associates' CEO, said Monday he doesn't expect the city's population to approach its pre-Katrina estimated population of 455,000 anytime soon. Rather, it will level off at about 325,000 to 350,000 in the next few years, he said.

"When you look at the (available) housing stock on the market, it's not a matter of housing, but whether we can support those who are back, both economically and from a service standpoint," he said.

Report: New Orleans pop. nears 300,000, UT, 25.12.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-25-new-orleans-population_N.htm

In New Orleans,

Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing

Draws Protest

December 14, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At a moment when the shortage of low-income housing in the city is causing significant hardship, the federal government is beginning this week to tear down thousands of apartments in the city’s four biggest public housing projects.

The plan is producing sharp opposition, which has escalated to include raucous demonstrations and, perhaps, threats of arson and other violence.

On Thursday, outside City Hall and opposite a park where homeless people are living in dozens of small tents, about 100 demonstrators chanted “Stop the demolitions now!” A few were displaced public-housing residents; most were activists and public housing advocates from here and cities from New York to California.

Though local and federal housing officials say the storm-damaged projects were inhuman places to live and should not be rebuilt, some protesters accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contended that the government’s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.

“They don’t want this city to be for the poor, working-class people,” said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former public housing resident who says she is now living in a “slum house.” Government policies favor the wealthy and tourists, she continued after the demonstration. “Everyone else, kick them to the curb.”

Meanwhile, James Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office here, confirmed that its domestic terrorism unit was investigating the source of small posters reading “For Every Public Housing Unit Destroyed a Condo Unit Will Be Destroyed.”

Lawyers for former residents continued to ask the courts to stop the plan, by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to demolish buildings containing 4,500 units, about 3,000 of which were occupied before Hurricane Katrina.

The government said private developers would replace them with about 3,300 subsidized housing units in developments that will also include homes for people with higher incomes, but others said there would not be that many low-cost units.

The debate over the plan has become a political issue. On Wednesday, John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, urged the government to build replacement housing before bulldozing the projects.

Demolition began on Wednesday night at one housing project that had been scheduled to be destroyed before the storm and will begin on two other projects this weekend.

Federal officials say the barracks-style complexes were substandard before Hurricane Katrina and were badly damaged by the storm. New subsidized housing, and vouchers for existing and new apartments, will ensure that no one who lived in the demolished projects will be left homeless, they said.

“The goal was to rebuild it, build it better, and move people into new homes,” said Jereon M. Brown, a spokesman for the housing department.

Mr. Brown said of the protesters: “Ask how many of them have lived in public housing, have been to public housing other than to protest.”

But the protesters, including some former residents of the projects, say the sturdy apartment buildings could be rehabilitated, especially at a time when little low-cost housing is available in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 50,000 rental units here, and damaged thousands more apartments, affecting two-thirds of the city’s rental stock. Rents have soared for the apartments that remain habitable.

Adding to the pressure on the rental market, almost 3,000 families living in government trailer parks in Louisiana must find a new place to live in the next few months, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency closes the sites it manages. By the end of the year, it will stop paying for 3,700 trailers in private trailer camps.

Some residents of the complexes and many who lived nearby said that they were delighted the projects were going to disappear and that they believed they would be replaced with something better.

Stacy S. Head, a City Council member whose district includes two of the complexes, said she had heard from many who welcomed the new plan.

“The vast majority do not want to go back to the way it was,” Ms. Head said, adding that the old projects were run-down and dangerous, and that the new buildings would help the working poor.

As for the protesters, she said, “I wish that all these people, particularly from out of town, would just leave us alone and let us improve our city.”

Some advocates for the residents said they did not oppose changes or improvements but wanted a guarantee that there would be a place for former residents in the new developments, a promise that they said had not always been kept in previous redevelopments of public housing here.

“Many residents are not against redevelopment but want an interim housing plan that gets them home,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a director of the Advancement Project in Washington, a civil rights group that is involved in the legal fight against the demolition plan.

At the project where demolition has begun, the B. W. Cooper Apartments, not far from the Superdome, residents were almost unanimous in wanting the government to finish tearing down some of the four-story blond-brick buildings that had been erected in the 1950s and closed before the storm.

“I know people need places to stay, but these places aren’t for living,” Trina Davis said, as a group of women sitting on a nearby porch talked of their hopes of moving into the new buildings that are to replace the old ones across Erato Street.

But Gertrude Luster, who was moving in nearby, said that public housing was needed for people of her age living on fixed incomes. She is 79 and receives $643 a month.

“I don’t think they should tear none of it down,” Ms. Luster said. “People need a place to come back to.”

    In New Orleans, Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing Draws Protest, NYT, 14.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/nationalspecial/14orleans.html

Katrina's wrath lingers

for New Orleans' poor

13 December 2007
USA Today
By Brad Heath

NEW ORLEANS — If the government has its way, the moldering hulks of the St. Bernard public housing projects soon will be rubble.

That has been the government's plan for more than a year — and for more than a year it has been locked in a legal battle with housing advocates here who want officials to fix up apartments waterlogged by the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina rather than tear them down. Unless the vast system of public housing is reopened quickly, advocates fear many former residents will never come back.

The result: More than two years after the storm hit, all but a few of the city's government-run apartments remain shut, surrounded by barbed wire and uninhabitable. Demolition of some began this week. Building replacements will take at least two more years.

There is little question that Hurricane Katrina hammered the poor when it inundated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, obliterating some of the poorest parts of the USA's poorest states. The question now is whether thousands of low-income residents who were displaced by the storm will ever be able to come back.

"They can't come back because there's no place for them to lay their head," says James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. "We just don't have anything for the low-income people."

While virtually no aspect of the recovery here is moving swiftly, the return of housing and services for the poor has proved particularly contentious. Much of the money the federal government promised for the job still hasn't been spent, and some of the actual work of rebuilding affordable housing has gotten bogged down in bitter local disputes.

The biggest fight here is over public housing. Elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, neighborhoods have battled over plans to open new subsidized apartments and have moved to banish government-run trailer parks. In Louisiana and Mississippi, advocates complain that many of the poor don't have the help they need.

About 40,000 families are still staying in government-funded temporary apartments and trailer parks, scattered from here to Arkansas. Last year, nearly 40% of the people who remained displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had incomes below the poverty line, according to a Census Bureau survey that offers the most recent accounting.

Officials say they are doing what they can. "We're committed to making sure that everyone who wants to come back to New Orleans can be a part of the recovery," says Andy Kopplin, the head of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which supervises that state's rebuilding efforts.

He and others either seethe or sigh at any suggestion they have been indifferent to the poor. "It's preposterous, absolutely unacceptable, outrageous — I could go on," bristles Orlando Cabrera, the assistant Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary who oversees public housing.

Still, much of the money set aside by Congress to help the poor has gone unspent.

Louisiana had by September spent 6% of the $376 million Congress gave the state to rebuild rental housing and 6% of the $26 million it got to help the homeless, according to a budget report from HUD. Mississippi had spent less than $1 million of the $100 million it got to repair damaged public housing units.

That's mainly because both states focused their initial rebuilding efforts on homeowners. But Mississippi Development Authority Executive Director Gray Swoope says officials also have struggled to navigate a labyrinth of federal rules that dictate how the money can be spent — and even when they do, new apartment complexes don't get built overnight.

Homeless population up

Without housing, some who try to come back end up in emergency shelters, under bridges or in the ruins of abandoned houses, says Martha Kegel, executive director of the homeless advocacy group UNITY of Greater New Orleans. Precise counts are nearly impossible, but a survey this year found the number of homeless in New Orleans doubled since Katrina, to about 12,000.

"Our workers go out and they see people in old warehouses," Kegel says. "Some of the conditions are appalling. Some of the places are nothing but rubble, and there are still people living in them."

Paulette Washington left the St. Bernard projects in a boat. Now she and her mother are neighbors in a senior apartment complex in Houston.

Washington grew up in St. Bernard, a phalanx of brick apartments in a working-class neighborhood inundated by Katrina. She says she can't hold a job because she spends most of her time taking care of her mother, whose legs were amputated before the storm.

Both want to go back. But with no job, no savings and no home to go back to, Washington says they're stuck. "It's beautiful here, but we don't want to be here. This isn't home," she says. "Everywhere we go we just run into another brick wall. So how long is it going to take before we can get home?"

Before Katrina, St. Bernard and New Orleans' other projects housed about 5,100 families; today, HUD estimates, they have room for about 1,800. The rest of the units are abandoned, waiting to be bulldozed. HUD began tearing down the first of those complexes Wednesday. Rebuilding projects that had become "warehouses" for the poor doesn't make sense, Cabrera says. Even before Katrina, the public housing projects here were among the nation's most notorious, ridden with crime and slumping into disrepair.

Officials blame lawsuit

HUD wants to bulldoze much of the city's shuttered public housing and replace it with mixed-income developments.

That plan stalled in court for more than a year after the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., sued to keep the projects from being knocked down.

Federal officials blame the lawsuit for further delaying the return of public housing; the group contends thousands of people displaced by Katrina could come home even sooner if the government repaired damaged public housing.

HUD's plan also would leave the city with far fewer traditional public housing units because many would be converted into standard apartments, says Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project.

The government would still pay for people to live in those units, but they would be less affordable because renters have to pay their own utility bills. It also wouldn't help the 6,000 families that have been on a waiting list for public housing since before Katrina, she says.

"If they had a chance, these people would come back in droves," Browne-Dianis says. "These were the people who were stranded at the Superdome and the convention center. They're the people whose lives weren't valued enough to rescue them and they left the city literally with the clothes on their backs. Now they can't come back."

Cabrera isn't so sure. HUD is surveying former public housing residents to find out how many want to come home, but so far the agency has had trouble filling even the few units it has reopened.

It had more than 400 vacancies in October — largely, Cabrera says, because many low-income families are wary of moving back into neighborhoods where schools and health care are not fully recovered.

"Most of the time, the answer is that they'd love to come home — but ask them again in six months or a year," he says.

States' loan programs lag

Rents on the Gulf Coast shot up after Katrina, in part because so many apartments remain uninhabitable. The typical rent in New Orleans went up 42% in the year after Katrina, to about $838; it increased about 20% on the Mississippi coast.

In response, both states have set up loan programs to help landlords repair small apartment buildings, though both programs have lagged behind far bigger efforts to repair tens of thousands of damaged homes.

For bigger projects such as new apartment complexes, both states are relying mainly on extensive tax credits that require developers to set aside low-income units. But so far, those deals have led to few finished apartment buildings.

Louisiana has already approved more than $168 million in tax breaks to the developers of 176 affordable housing projects. In return for lower taxes, the builders must promise to lease some of their apartments at below-market rates.

But only 10 of the developments had been finished by October, and work on 140 had not yet begun, according to records from the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency.

"You go through the list, and the vast majority of those projects aren't being built," says Perry, of the Fair Housing Action Center. That's partly because it can take years to build some of the bigger developments, he says, but it also reflects projects across Louisiana and Mississippi that have dissolved into bitter fights with neighbors and city officials.

In D'Iberville, Miss., Katrina hit Michael Lepoma's house with such force that it knocked the structure off its cinder block pilings and heaved it 6 feet into his backyard.

It was still standing, barely, when authorities let him return the following day, and inside even the freezer had been flung upside-down. Officials ordered that the house be razed.

Lepoma had as much insurance as he says he could afford on the house, which he inherited from his parents, and he says he got a $3,170 check for the damage.

A Mississippi grant program meant to help the thousands of homeowners who did not have flood insurance gave him $6,000 more.

But rebuilding the house will cost Lepoma and his wife, Brenda, more than $50,000 — even after the couple lined up church groups to do the work.

"We could get it built if we had money for materials, but we don't," he says.

Instead, the Lepomas are sharing in the Gulf Coast's particular brand of limbo, squeezed into a government-issued trailer planted on their yard, waiting.

Between Lepoma's maintenance job and his wife's work as a cook at nearby Keesler Air Force Base, they have amassed a savings of $33,000. Even if they drain it all, they won't have enough to rebuild.

"What's just incredible to me," Brenda says, "is that the ones who are getting the government money aren't the ones who really need it."

    Katrina's wrath lingers for New Orleans' poor, UT, 13.12.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-13-katrinapoor_N.htm

New Orleans

Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage

December 3, 2007
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 2 — Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.

About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months.

But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago.

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

In some core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end, and the city has been slow to come up with ideas for what to do with those that have been abandoned. Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

Although repairs are being made and more housing is available now than a year ago, demand is still outpacing supply.

Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm.

“A lot of the city is still boarded up,” said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. “Where are we supposed to go?”

One of the more striking changes to appear lately in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm.

The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city.

The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. “We’re with them every step of the way,” Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.

“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”

Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.

“We done been through so much with FEMA till where it’s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,” Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. “They did it before. Everybody’s looking at, ‘What if?’ ”

Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.

“I don’t know what’s going to become of us,” said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. “They said get out. I’ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.”

The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help.

“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”

While the agency provides listings, Mr. Simpson said it did not necessarily endorse the properties or know much about them beyond their locations and the basics, such as the number of bedrooms.

“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”

Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness.

“FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,” said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. “It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.”

In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall — partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows. The crowd of hundreds is a mix of young and old, white and black.

Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”

Not everyone in the park is a native of New Orleans. Some people came here after the storm to do construction work without realizing they would not be able to find a place to live. Some sleep on-site in unfinished buildings; others have taken up residence in abandoned buildings or in parks.

Ken Cimino, 48, sleeps outside of City Hall, too. He does odd jobs at the Superdome, mostly picking up trash after Saints football games. Mr. Cimino drove to New Orleans recently from New Haven, Conn.

“I came here for construction work, and found the situation wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said. “I thought I’d live out of my car for a few weeks until I found a place. Used up my savings. I just got caught off balance.”

Now, Mr. Cimino says he cannot afford to drive back to Connecticut. He is just one of many laborers who find themselves without options.

Ms. Bernard said she might end up on a friend’s mother’s couch until she wears out her welcome. Then what?

“I know I’m going to find something,” she said. “I have faith. I know God’s going to work something out for us.”

    New Orleans Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage, NYT, 3.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/us/nationalspecial/03renters.html

New Orleans Homeless

Offered Hotel Rooms

November 21, 2007
Filed at 9:39 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Dozens of homeless people living in pup-tents in the shadow of City Hall packed up Wednesday and moved into hotel rooms with the help of a nonprofit group, while about 200 others remained in the camp.

The colony in Duncan Plaza has grown in the past few months with people who said a tent is the only affordable housing they could find since Hurricane Katrina, which has caused the homeless population to skyrocket.

A homeless assistance group called UNITY of Greater New Orleans hoped to convince 100 of the campers to leave for temporary housing, but only 61 accepted the offers.

''The hotel they're offering is crack city. They're not sending us to the Holiday Inn or the Hilton,'' said a woman who asked only to be identified as Donna. The woman, 47, finally took the help after a pair of UNITY workers promised to find her an apartment eventually, and warned her that the city would not tolerate the camp forever.

''You're breaking my heart. I don't want you living out here,'' UNITY worker Joycelyn Scott pleaded with Donna.

Others in the camp said they were concerned the temporary assistance would hurt their chances for permanent housing.

Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY, said disabled people in the plaza would lose no funds if they accepted a hotel room, while others would lose no more than two weeks of permanent housing assistance if they accepted temporary help for a year.

Hardin Tutt, 46, and Harry Grimmet, 48, who each relocated from Kentucky with hopes of finding work in New Orleans, said UNITY had just helped them find a two-bedroom apartment for $800. It is a steal in post-Katrina New Orleans.

''It's been great at times. It's been stressful at times,'' Tutt said of his stay in the plaza with people who shared his problems. ''But now we have something better than a tent.''

An estimated 12,000 people are homeless, up from 6,300 before Katrina, according to UNITY.

Of the 200,000 homes the 2005 storm destroyed, 41,000 were affordable rental units, according to estimates by the nonprofit group PolicyLink. Since the storm, fair-market rent for an efficiency apartment has risen from $463 to $764.

The storm also destroyed shelters, reducing the number of beds from 832 to 232, according to local providers.

City officials said Wednesday they had no immediate plans to roust people from the area.

''The mayor will not do that until we have options for those citizens,'' said city spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett. ''To just move people out would be inhumane.''

State officials said they would release $3.8 million homeless assistance funds by Friday, which UNITY plans to use to further target the men, women and children in the plaza and elsewhere in the city.

(This version CORRECTS that homeless people said they were concerned about accepting the offers). )

    New Orleans Homeless Offered Hotel Rooms, NYT, 21.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-Homeless.html

In Mississippi,

Poor Lag in Hurricane Aid

November 16, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

GULFPORT, Miss., Nov. 14 — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm.

But so far, the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners, to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state’s insurance system.

Just $167 million, or about 10 percent of the federal money, has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor, mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.

And while that total will certainly increase, Mississippi has set aside just 23 percent of its $5.5 billion grant money — $1.25 billion — for these programs. About 37 percent of the residents of the state’s coast are low income, according to federal figures.

Mississippi is the only state for which the Bush administration has waived the rule that 50 percent of its Community Development Block Grants be spent on low-income programs, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the program. It is also the only state to ask for such waivers.

State officials, from Gov. Haley Barbour on down, insist that the state does not discriminate by race or income when it hands out aid to storm victims.

“We feel like we have programs in place to address all walks of life,” said Gray Swoope, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority, which administers the federally financed grant programs.

Any delays in spending money on low-income projects have been caused by the complexity of creating the projects, said Donna Sanford, director of the disaster recovery program for the development authority. The state, Ms. Sanford said, “has done everything that we can to keep it on track and moving as fast as possible to meet the needs of everyone.”

Nonetheless, resentment at being left out of Mississippi’s economic recovery has been stirring in poor communities along the coast, and nowhere more so than in this city, hit hard by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, where the state plans to spend $600 million of the federal money to repair and improve its shipping port.

Though the expansion will increase employment here, historically very few port jobs have gone to low-income residents.

Some critics contend that the main interest of state leaders in spending community development dollars is to help big businesses like shipbuilders and casinos and the port.

The state’s spending plan “moves business to the forefront and forgets about the people on the ground,” said Anthony Thompson, pastor at Tabernacle of Faith Ministries, whose spotless church (rebuilt by volunteers) is next to a moldering subsidized housing project that he says has not been touched since the storm.

In his mostly black neighborhood in west Gulfport, Mr. Thompson said, “I see a lot of people waiting on help; I see a lot of houses still damaged.”

State officials say that programs not limited to lower-income residents help them nevertheless.

The aid to utilities helped everyone on the coast, including renters, officials say. And almost a third of the families who got money from the state’s main housing compensation program were low-income, which in Gulfport would mean an annual income of less than $39,000 a year for a family of four.

The nature of that program helps explain the unhappiness in some neighborhoods. It provided grants of up to $150,000 to homeowners who lived outside of the federally defined flood plain and so did not have flood insurance to cover their losses when their houses were swamped by the storm surge.

To be eligible, families had to have carried regular homeowners’ insurance, so that, as the governor said when he was selling the plan to Congress, “we’re not bailing out irresponsible people.”

But advocates for the poor said that requirement barred many of the least affluent, especially retirees and the disabled, who live on fixed incomes. “The fact is, people who have no money choose food and medicine, and not insurance,” said Ashley Tsongas, a policy adviser for the aid group Oxfam America. “That moral superiority doesn’t recognize the reality people face.”

Renters were also excluded from the program, as they were in Louisiana, and homeowners who had wind damage were also not covered. Some federal officials have said Louisiana’s decision to help cover wind losses is one reason its program almost ran out of money.

Two-thirds of Mississippi’s block grants have not yet been spent. In fact, few of the coastal states have spent much of their grant money, with the exception of Louisiana, which has already used almost half of its original allotment and just received an additional $3 billion for its home-rebuilding program.

Because fewer applicants than expected applied for Mississippi’s assistance program, the state still has almost $2 billion left, some of which it plans to use for community development projects and for the port expansion.

The port, at the foot of Gulfport’s main street, flies a Chiquita banner under its American flag; fruit imports remain down but are bouncing back, though exports of frozen poultry have stopped since the storm destroyed the port’s refrigerated warehouses. The state says that the expansion will add about 1,000 jobs over the next five years, and that many of those will be reserved for low-income residents.

But some community advocates are dubious, noting that before the storm only 10 percent of the port jobs went to low-income residents. They also think the cost per job will be too high.

And they note that the port’s own master plan envisions a new tourist and casino development. “It’s not all about bananas,” said Reilly Morse, a lawyer for the Mississippi Center for Justice.

Mr. Morse and many others who oppose the port plan say the state should first ensure that all the families now living in more than 10,000 government trailers have a permanent place to live, that rental housing gets built and that all homeowners can repair their houses.

“I don’t have any problem with economic development and expanding the port, but not at the cost of people,” said James W. Crowell, president of the N.A.A.C.P. branch in Biloxi, just down the beach from Gulfport.

Brent Warr, who became Gulfport’s mayor just months before the storm, called the port expansion “an incredible opportunity for the city,” and said he had been assured that the new facilities would be devoted to maritime use, not to gambling and cruise ships. “We don’t have to make this community about neon and chrome,” he said.

Asked about the frustrations some residents have about the lack of aid in their communities, Mr. Warr said it would take time, because the development authority has to create programs all at once while making sure the money is well spent. “It’s like taking a funnel and packing it so full of money that nothing can come out,” he said.

Dorothy J. McClendon fears that none of that money will reach her east Gulfport neighborhood, Soria City, where she leads a civic group with the modest motto, “Moving Toward a Drug-Free Community.”

Because it is north of the railroad tracks which serve as a sort of levee, the neighborhood did not flood, so residents cannot get state grants, Ms. McClendon said. Few had insurance to cover their wind-damaged roofs; she is sleeping on a couch in her living room because she fears that the water-damaged ceiling in her bedroom is going to fall.

Repairs to public works and economic development projects appear to happening elsewhere; Soria City’s main business is a tiny shop selling sodas and snacks and 25-cent cigarettes. Even the program to help small landlords does not apply to this neighborhood, Ms. McClendon said, because while there are plenty of properties that could be fixed up and rented out, few were occupied right before the storm, as the program requires.

“But we’re here, we’re hurting,” she said. “We need help, too.”

    In Mississippi, Poor Lag in Hurricane Aid, NYT, 16.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/us/16mississippi.html?hp

Critics Cite Red Tape

in Rebuilding of Louisiana

November 6, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — If rebuilding anything in this storm-scarred place could possibly qualify as simple, surely it would be the administration building in City Park.

The two-story structure, built in 1992, does not have any of the features that can complicate restoring public buildings. No special historic, environmental, cultural or political significance. No history of poor maintenance or other damage (aside from the five feet of water that filled it after the levees failed). No need to be merged, moved or reimagined in response to changes after Hurricane Katrina.

Yet after almost two years of federal inspections and studies and reviews filling more than 90 pages, the administration building has been neither repaired nor replaced. And there are dozens of similarly incomplete projects at the park, hundreds in the city, thousands across the state of Louisiana.

In fact, the federal government has agreed to pay $2.3 billion so far for rebuilding Louisiana public works like schools, sewers and police stations. But so far, only $650 million — 28 percent — of that money has been spent. In Mississippi, only 27 percent has been spent of the $1.1 billion of federal tax dollars set aside to replace government infrastructure there.

There are many reasons for the slow pace of rebuilding, including antagonism between state and federal officials, and the difficulty some local leaders have had deciding exactly what to rebuild and where and how. New Orleans, in particular, released a detailed rebuilding plan only in October, and City Hall often appears understaffed and overwhelmed.

But increasingly, critics are pointing to flaws in the process the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses to pay for repairs under the “public assistance” program.

Intricate, inflexible and open-ended, the process seems to value perfect paperwork over speedy resolutions, local officials here say, and requires endless haggling over every acoustic ceiling tile and paper-towel dispenser.

“The staggering amount of time and effort and cost associated with this is just phenomenal,” said Robert W. Becker, the chief executive of City Park, which is about one and a half times the size of Central Park in New York City. “We could have made so much more progress if we had a different process.” In the meantime, Mr. Becker has been working out of a trailer.

Federal officials also express frustration that the money has been spent so slowly, but they defend the process as necessary to prevent fraud and to ensure that tax dollars are spent wisely. “It is hard work, but in the end it pays off,” said Robert L. Josephson, the chief spokesman for FEMA in Louisiana.

Through the public assistance program, the agency reimburses state and local governments for their repair and rebuilding costs; the money is distributed by the state, which can be asked to return it if FEMA decides it has not been used properly. To avoid that, the state has imposed its own layer of audits and regulations, another source of red tape.

The current disputes have mostly involved the details of more than 17,000 project worksheets FEMA has prepared for long-term recovery projects since the hurricanes hit. (A “normal” disaster, according to the agency, involves about 1,000 worksheets.)

In particular, state and local officials contend that FEMA has routinely underestimated the amount of damage caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the costs of repairing or rebuilding everything from an elementary school classroom to a sports stadium. That in turn has led to shortfalls when bids come in.

They also say the agency has repeatedly reversed itself and been reluctant to put anything in writing, and has interpreted the rules too narrowly.

“We’ve been shackled by FEMA’s approach,” said Col. Perry J. Smith Jr., acting director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, which administers the program for the state.

Federal officials, of course, see it differently. “They need to take a look in the mirror and work with us instead of pointing the finger all the time,” said Jim W. Stark, director of the Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office at FEMA.

Noting that the federal government would ultimately pay any costs it deemed reasonable, Mr. Stark said state and local governments should start spending the money available to them, without waiting for every t to be crossed. And he cited success stories like the repair of the Superdome and the relocation of a Lower Ninth Ward nursing home.

“It would be nice if all applicants could pick up that template,” he said. “I don’t quite understand why they can’t.”

But even successful — and very grateful — applicants find dealing with the program to be complicated and labor-intensive. “It is a process, not an encounter,” said Lawrence E. Stansberry, chief executive of St. Margaret’s, the nursing home Mr. Stark mentioned, which just reopened in the old Bywater Hospital. Mr. Stansberry said he had had to find a lawyer, a consultant and a lender with FEMA expertise.

For the city government, the problem has been money, said Cynthia Sylvain-Lear, the city’s deputy chief administrative officer. Legally, the city cannot put contracts out for bid without identifying the money to pay the contractor, she said, which was a particular problem when FEMA’s repair estimates were millions of dollars below the city’s.

Recently, the state agreed to set up a revolving fund that the city can draw on until it is reimbursed. City officials still worry that FEMA officials could change their minds and take back money they have obligated, Ms. Sylvain-Lear said. “But we are going to take the risk.”

FEMA officials say they have seldom done that, and say they do not understand why state officials keep raising the prospect. Donald E. Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, said he had tried to speed things up by asking local officials in the hardest-hit areas to name their top five priorities. He also plans to put information about rebuilding projects on the Internet, so citizens can learn the status of local projects and figure out “where the hang-up is,” he said.

Even critics concede that federal officials have been trying harder to help. At City Park, Mr. Becker said he no longer had to contend with FEMA about why it agreed to pay for two hinges — but not all three — on the doors in his old office building.

On the other hand, he has mixed feelings about the agency’s recent decision that the building, now gutted, is too damaged to be repaired, and will have to be replaced.

“If they told us this in the beginning, I’d have had an architect assigned a year ago,” he said. “We could have been much further along. Now I have to put my employees in trailers for another two years.”

    Critics Cite Red Tape in Rebuilding of Louisiana, NYT, 6.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/us/nationalspecial/06fema.html?hp

FEMA Offers Up to $4,000

as Home Lure for Storm Victims

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Eager to reduce housing aid to the more than 95,000 households still displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA announced a program yesterday offering up to $4,000 for relocation expenses for families or individuals who return home or find permanent housing elsewhere by the end of February.

The offer is directed at the nearly 30,000 households receiving rental subsidies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the more than 65,000 living free in FEMA trailers and the larger mobile home models.

The survivors are far-flung, with "Katrina/Rita households" listed by FEMA in every state except North Dakota. Texas had 13,632; Georgia, 880; Tennessee, 875; Arkansas, 800; and California, 160.

Applicants for the reimbursements need to be already registered and receiving disaster assistance for damaged housing in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or Texas. They may not have already received more than the current total assistance cap of $26,200. And they may not have received any other relocation aid.

"It's a justification to get out of travel trailers back into a more normal life to where they are self-sustaining," said Mary Margaret Walker, a spokeswoman for the agency in Washington.

As of Sept. 25, Ms. Walker said, 95,439 households were receiving housing aid from the 2005 storms, including 29,798 receiving rent subsidies and the remainder living in FEMA trailers and the larger mobile homes.

All had been moved out of hotels and motels, but 83 survivors with complaints about the air quality in the trailers are temporarily in hotels and motels, Ms. Walker said.

To obtain the relocation money, those in trailers and the other mobile homes would need to move into FEMA-financed or private housing anywhere in the continental United States.

Recipients of agency rent subsidies would have to move to nonsubsidized permanent housing at least 50 miles from their current locations.

People living anywhere now without agency aid would need to relocate to permanent housing in the storm-damaged state that they fled, but at least 50 miles away if they have already returned home.

Relocation costs eligible for reimbursement, the agency said, are air, bus or train fares, rental vehicles, furniture movers and gasoline, as well as lodging expenses if the move is more than 400 miles. Transportation costs for boats, recreational vehicles and other large luxury items are not covered, the agency said.

On Dec. 1, FEMA is to turn over its housing subsidies to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If the relocation payments are a carrot, the government also has a stick. Beginning in March, the Disaster Housing Assistance Program will reduce rental aid by $50 a month "with the goal of leading families closer to complete housing independence," meaning an eventual aid cutoff.

    FEMA Offers Up to $4,000 as Home Lure for Storm Victims, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/washington/16fema.html

Katrina evacuees feel money pinch

8 October 2007
USA TODAY
By Brad Heath

Almost 40% of the people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina were below the poverty line last year, according to a government survey.

That survey, by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that thousands of people who fled the hurricane two years ago landed in dismal economic straits, often facing meager paychecks or unemployment after the storm scattered them across the USA. It found nearly a third of those who fled the hurricane could not find jobs last year, and thousands more weren't trying.

"People got here, but what hasn't happened is that next step to economic stability," says Don Baylor, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin. "Many of them are not economically stable."

The survey does not track people from year to year, making it impossible to determine if the people Katrina displaced were better off before the storm. Many left some of the poorest sections of New Orleans; about a quarter of the adults had not finished high school. But Katrina upended social networks "and left them to start over from scratch, which makes it much more difficult," Brookings Institution demographer William Frey says.

The nationwide Census survey, conducted throughout 2006 and released last month, offers the most thorough accounting yet of what happened to the more than 250,000 people displaced from the New Orleans area in the biggest mass migration since the Dust Bowl. The survey, which included only people who had not already returned to New Orleans, shows:

•Little work: The unemployment rate among those who left New Orleans was about 30%. Those who had jobs worked most often as cashiers, salesmen and janitors.

•Low incomes: A typical displaced family had an income of about $35,000 last year, far below the median income of $58,500 for families nationwide. Even among people who had jobs, the poverty rate was nearly 20%, and for children it was about 50%.

•Limited housing: Many evacuees still were living with friends or family. One-third of evacuees were living with people who did not evacuate.

Gilda Burbank fled with three grandchildren to Houston, where she has struggled to find work and sleeps on an air mattress in a government-subsidized apartment. "I was poor before Katrina, but I had food on the table, we went to Mass, we had clothes," she says. "Now we're poor poor. We're worse off."

One explanation, Baylor says, is that Texas employers were reluctant to hire people displaced by Katrina for fear they would soon go back to New Orleans.

    Katrina evacuees feel money pinch, UT, 8.10.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-08-katrina-evacuees_N.htm

La. Town Still Recovering From Rita

September 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:29 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CAMERON, La. (AP) -- This Louisiana town may have dried out and cleaned up since getting flattened by Hurricane Rita, but its recovery is moving in slow motion: Nearly everyone still lives in temporary housing.

The post office operates out of a trailer. The town's only bank works out of a trailer. Darlene Dyson sells shrimp from a trailer, then picks up her 7-year-old son and takes him to their home -- a trailer.

''It's not like it was before the storm, that's for sure,'' Dyson said.

Rita struck two years ago Monday as a Category 3 storm whose 120-mph wind and 9-foot storm surge ruined every structure in the southwestern Louisiana towns of Johnson Bayou and Holly Beach. It caused similar destruction in southeastern Texas.

About 100 died in Texas, including 23 senior citizens whose bus exploded during evacuations. The storm caused no fatalities in Louisiana, but plenty of property damage in Cameron and Vermilion parishes.

In all, there were $5.8 billion in property insurance claims in Texas and Louisiana, according to a Texas insurance group.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco arrived Monday morning in the town of Westlake, north of Cameron and near Lake Charles, for the second anniversary observances, including a tour of new facilities where workers are trained for jobs in the energy and construction industries. A shortage of trained workers to construct new homes and work in the state's oil and gas business is seen as a continuing problem in the recovery from the storm.

Blanco said the rest of the nation should be mindful that Louisiana went through two killer hurricanes in 2005 -- not just Katrina -- and she sought to reassure Rita victims that they haven't been forgotten.

''The Rita parishes are just as important to us as the Katrina parishes,'' she said.

In Cameron, the parish courthouse is one of the few buildings that survived Rita. It was a town of about 2,000 residents but local officials estimate today's population at about half that.

Those who have moved back, or plan to, have complaints similar to those of residents hit by Hurricane Katrina: the process of returning home is stymied by disputes with property insurers and paperwork from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Marvin Trahan, 46, is hoping his lawsuit against his insurer will be settled this year so he can move back. The storm destroyed his three-bedroom house. He now lives in Lake Charles but wants to build a smaller, replacement house on his property in Cameron.

Trahan said the pull of his hometown lies in its small-town peacefulness, plus its proximity to prime hunting and fishing areas.

''You can fish here, you can hunt here, you can do whatever you want,'' Trahan said. ''You can leave your door unlocked all night without worrying about somebody coming in. It's just a great place to live.''

Living in Cameron is especially difficult because no grocery stores or pharmacies have opened since the storm. Residents must drive 50 miles north to buy supplies. Dyson drives 53 miles to Lake Charles every Monday to buy groceries and other essentials.

''That's 106 miles roundtrip,'' she said, ''just to get a pound of meat.''

Few elderly residents have returned, partly because Cameron still has no hospital. In emergencies, ambulances must drive to a medical center in Lake Charles. A rebuilt $23 million hospital is set to open in Cameron this fall with 20 beds.

Anil Patel, owner of the Cameron Motel, said his business suffers from a lack of customers willing to pay $69.99 per night for a room.

The motel had 96 rooms but the storm washed about half of them away. His clientele is normally made up of offshore workers, but the majority of his remaining 51 rooms usually sit vacant. Patel said he and his wife -- who live in a trailer next to the motel -- are struggling.

''I hope things pick up. But I don't know,'' he said.

One bright spot in the recovery is the Ice House Bar, which is thriving since it opened across the street from the courthouse early this year, in one of the few new buildings that isn't temporary. The tavern has pool tournaments every week, while patrons take to the dance floor when country and Cajun bands are playing.

''We needed a place like this,'' said Dyson, sipping a beer in the Ice House on a recent afternoon. ''We needed a place to laugh.''

    La. Town Still Recovering From Rita, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hurricane-Rita-Anniversary.html

Patchwork City

Insurers Bear Brunt of Anger

in New Orleans

September 3, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON and JOSEPH B. TREASTER

NEW ORLEANS — Maxine Cassin, a prominent local poet, thought her homeowners insurance would be more than enough to cover the $100,000 of hurricane damage to her Uptown house here. But two years after Hurricane Katrina hit, Ms. Cassin and her husband, Joseph, are still stranded far from home; their insurer has offered them just $41,000.

Emile J. Labat III, a funeral home owner and real estate investor, thought his $300,000 homeowners policy, along with federal flood insurance, would repay him for repairing his house on Elysian Fields Avenue. But now Mr. Labat feels he was deceived. Many of his losses were not covered, and he was stunned that his deductible worked out to be $16,000.

June Rees, a retired nursing professor, gave up on living in New Orleans and reluctantly moved 75 miles away to avoid skyrocketing insurance costs. The price of her homeowners and flood insurance was going to quadruple, to $8,000 a year, and it still would not have covered wind or hail damage.

“I’ve just been ripped out of it,” Ms. Rees said of leaving her home in New Orleans, “as if somebody tore me away from everything I’m grounded to.”

Insurance companies may have paid out $11 billion to Louisianians in the two years since Hurricane Katrina, but they have also become a new villain in the tales people tell about the slow recovery here. Every neighborhood is full of horror stories about companies that reneged on their promises, offered only pennies on the dollar in settlements, dribbled out payments, deliberately underestimated the costs of repairs, dropped longtime customers and sharply increased the price of coverage.

And it is not just talk. Though, traditionally, relatively few customers sue their insurance companies, about 6,600 insurance-related lawsuits have landed in Federal District Court here; 3,700 of them are pending. Few have gone to trial. Some homeowners have settled; other cases have been dismissed or sent to state courts, which are also handling thousands of disputes.

Thousands of formal complaints have been filed with the Louisiana Department of Insurance, 4,700 of them in 2006 alone. That is just a tiny fraction of the number of people who feel aggrieved, regulators say: for half a year after the storm, calls to the department reached 20,000 a month.

Louisiana estimates that, on average, homeowners have received $5,700 less than the state believed they should have after the storm, leaving the government’s rebuilding program, the Road Home, responsible for covering an extra $900 million of losses for 160,000 families. And even that program, originally expected to cost about $7.5 billion but now projected to cost several billion more, is not paying enough to make many homeowners whole again.

The usually eye-glazing topic of homeowners insurance is so incendiary now that State Senator Walter J. Boasso, a Republican turned Democratic candidate for governor, has proposed jailing insurance executives found to have acted in bad faith.

Disputing Damage Causes

Insurance companies say the $11 billion they have paid for damage to houses in Louisiana is a record. But they have refused to pay for damage they contend was caused by flooding — which is generally not covered by homeowners insurance — even though many people here believe much of that damage was caused by hurricane wind, which usually is covered.

Several lawsuits here and in Mississippi accuse insurance companies of trying to overstate flood damage so that taxpayers would pick up more of the tab through the federal flood insurance program, which has paid out $13 billion in Louisiana. These contentions have prompted several federal investigations. In other cases, customers are arguing that the companies used deceptive business practices, putting pressure on engineers and insurance adjusters and deliberately underestimating the costs of repairs.

Industry spokesmen say that most homeowners are satisfied and that 99 percent of homeowners’ claims have been settled. Any problems stemmed from the huge size of the disaster, they contend, or from homeowners’ failure to buy adequate insurance or to read their policies carefully. Rising rates, they say, reflect a more realistic sense of the risk homeowners assume by living in dangerous coastal areas.

“The insurers did an admirable job under very difficult, unique and extreme circumstances,” said Robert P. Hartwig, the president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. “The vast majority of homeowners affected by Katrina are happy and pleased with the settlements they received from their insurers.”

But in New Orleans, many people say that just because they stopped fighting their insurers does not mean they are satisfied.

“You’re so worn down by everything you’ve been through that you just don’t have the fight left in you,” said Yolanda Moon, who had expected to receive $39,000 from her insurance policy for wind damage. Instead, she and her husband got $3,000.

Profits and Pain

Byron McDonald admits that by neighborhood standards he may have spent too much money — $350,000 — to build his two-story brick house in the Gentilly neighborhood here, which was finished in 2000. But Mr. McDonald, 61, said he wanted a place he could live in until he died, so he was not worried about the resale value.

The owner of a party supply company, Mr. McDonald bought the maximum flood policy available from the government program, $250,000, and about $200,000 in private homeowners insurance to cover wind damage.

After the house took on five feet of water during Hurricane Katrina, the government flood program paid Mr. McDonald the full amount, plus $67,000 for contents.

Mr. McDonald believed that his private insurer, the Hanover Insurance Group, was supposed to pay for damage above the flood line. Hurricane Katrina’s winds had torn a ventilator off the roof, leaving a big hole for rainwater to pour through, and the water had damaged hardwood floors upstairs and kitchen cabinets. He said he had $200,000 worth of wind damage.

But Hanover’s response was different from the federal flood program’s. The company assessed him a $5,000 deductible and has paid him only $900, he said.

Hanover, he said, did pay him $1,500 for temporary living expenses, but then demanded it back when it decided that his losses had come from flooding. He said he had spent $53,000, mostly to rent places to live in other parts of the state. Dealing with his insurance company, he said, “is like talking to a wall.”

Because Mr. McDonald has sued Hanover, Michael F. Buckley, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the claim. But he said Hanover had paid more than $500 million for damages from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and was “proud of the work we’ve done in response to the storm.”

Other homeowners and insurance adjusters say Mr. McDonald’s situation is part of a regionwide pattern in which insurance companies have tried to reduce the amount they owe policy owners, often by shifting the costs to the taxpayer-supported flood insurance program. One group of former adjusters who contend these practices have occurred filed a federal whistle-blower lawsuit, hoping to collect a share of anything the government might recover from insurance companies.

The group’s lawyer, Allan Kanner, said he had gathered evidence that private insurance companies are putting the burden on taxpayers to cover the companies’ own losses at more than 150 homes. Included are four on the eastern edge of New Orleans that he says received about $95,000 apiece, even though their damage had been caused by wind and rain, not flood.

The insurers, including State Farm and Allstate, the two biggest in Louisiana, adamantly deny that they improperly shifted claims to the federal flood program. “When the wind blows for a certain number of hours before the levees broke, it’s a difficult call,” said Joseph Annotti, the spokesman for the Property Casualty Insurers of America. “But the adjusters made the best call they could.”

A federal investigation into similar accusations in Mississippi is continuing.

The insurance companies have, however, scored a victory in federal court here, where a judge ruled recently that, in effect, anything homeowners collect in federal flood insurance should be deducted from the amount that private insurance companies may owe them, said Gregory P. DiLeo, a lawyer representing policyholders.

Although the judge intended to make sure that owners could not earn a profit from their insurance payouts, “Homeowners are saying, ‘That’s not fair. I paid for two coverages,’ ” Mr. DiLeo said.

The complaints about low payments to hurricane victims come on top of widespread criticism that insurance companies are profiting off their customers’ pain. The critics cite record industry profits of $48 billion in 2005 and $68 billion last year, while policies cover less and cost more.

Insurance companies, which traditionally have made much of their profits by investing premiums until the money was needed to pay claims, are now paying back to policy holders less of the premium money they collect, according to data from the A. M. Best Company, which evaluates insurers.

These trends began well before Hurricane Katrina hit, but the most recent period “has been the worst,” said J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America.

Insurers say they began paring back coverage and raising rates on home insurance when costs from big claims began eating into their profits, and as competitors selling only auto insurance began luring away their most lucrative customers.

In 2005, home insurers in Louisiana and in other coastal areas lost billions because of Hurricane Katrina and other storms, said Mr. Hartwig, of the insurance trade group, even as profits went up elsewhere in the country and for other kinds of insurance. Last year, profits went up throughout the industry because no hurricanes made landfall in the United States.

Mr. Hartwig said that insurers were not insensitive or greedy, but that “an insurer that is financially weak or insolvent is no use to anybody.”

Premiums Out of Reach

The extensive damage done by the storms of 2005 has sharply raised the cost of homeowners’ insurance in the region, for those who can find a policy at all. Those costs have become a major impediment to recovery.

“It makes it very difficult for people, particularly those of marginal means, who want to come back, to rebuild,” said Lawrence Ponoroff, the dean of the Tulane University School of Law here. “It is very tough on institutions and on attracting new business to the area.”

The higher premiums have made buying a house — or selling one — here more difficult, said Lynda Nugent Smith, who has been selling real estate here for 34 years. “All of a sudden your insurance goes from $2,000 a year to $6,000 a year,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s just that cherry on top that makes the whole pile of ice cream and whipped cream fall over.”

Spiking insurance prices have also discouraged builders from putting up much-needed rental housing here and are causing big problems for nonprofit groups trying to develop housing for the poor and the elderly.

One such group, Enterprise Community Partners, has 11 projects on the drawing board, but only one deal has closed. And the insurance on the project is about $2,100 a year per unit, almost seven times more than it would have been before the storm, said Michelle K. Whetten, Gulf Coast director for Enterprise. “Another issue,” she added, “is getting a policy at all.”

James J. Donelon, the state insurance commissioner, said that some companies were no longer writing new policies in Louisiana and that many were raising prices, increasing deductibles, and cutting coverage for wind and hail. (The state is so worried that insurers will stop doing business there that it has agreed to spend $100 million in incentives to lure companies.)

Mr. Annotti, the insurance industry spokesman, said the billions of dollars paid out for the unexpected surge of hurricanes in recent years has pushed insurers for the first time to focus on how crowded the coastlines have become with expensive homes and businesses.

“From a business perspective,” he said, “you look at the coastal markets and the catastrophic exposure and you say, ‘That’s a dangerous place to write policies. I need to charge more or limit what I’m writing.’ ”

State laws are supposed to protect long-time customers from losing their insurance; even so, many people in Louisiana report that their insurance policies have been canceled.

Take Terral E. Miller, a sales executive who bought his first and only house in the Lakeview neighborhood in 1981. “We were very happy there, we enjoyed it very much, and it was almost paid for,” he said of the two-story tan-brick house that backed up to the 17th Street Canal, which breached after the storm.

Shortly after the storm, Mr. Miller, 50, was found to have colon cancer, which has since spread to his lungs and forced him to retire. He lives in an apartment in a different neighborhood. Earlier this year, he said, his insurer canceled the policy on the shell of the Lakeview house, on the ground that the house was unoccupied, leaving him without any liability coverage.

With everything else he was going through, that was the last straw, Mr. Miller said. In April, he had the house bulldozed.

    Insurers Bear Brunt of Anger in New Orleans, NYT, 3.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/us/nationalspecial/03orleans.html?hp

2 Years After Katrina,

Bush Sees Hope in New Orleans

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — President Bush toured New Orleans today, delivering a message of hope to a city devastated by wind and flood two years ago and still divided over the speed and effectiveness of federal help.

Mr. Bush led a moment of silence at a school, asking for “the Almighty’s blessings on those who suffered,” then envisioned “a more blessed day” just ahead. “And there’s no better place to do so than in a place of hope, and that’s a school,” he said.

“Hurricane Katrina broke through the levees,” the president said. “It broke a lot of hearts. It destroyed buildings. But it didn’t affect the spirit of a lot of citizens in this community.”

But while Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco accompanied Mr. Bush on his visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, and was praised by the president for being a problem-solver and “an educational reformer,” there were plenty of reminders of the rifts between the Bush administration and state and local officials on whether enough was being done for New Orleans.

Across town, for instance, Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered a bell-ringing to mark the anniversary of the moment when the levees broke, The Associated Press reported. Two years ago, both the governor and the mayor bitterly criticized the slowness of the federal response, whose shortcomings were symbolized, especially for the administration’s critics, by Michael Brown, then the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who sometimes seemed bewildered by the catastrophe.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a front-page editorial accusing the Bush administration of steering more money to Mississippi than to Louisiana, where the damage was greater, and questioned whether Louisiana was being short-changed because Democrats are more powerful there than in Mississippi. (Mr. Bush did carry Louisiana in 2004, as he had done in 2000.)

The Ninth Ward charter school visited by Mr. Bush is itself a symbol of recovery. A fourth-grade teacher, Joseph Recasner, recalled that the school was inundated by up to 18 feet of water two years ago, and that people who had taken refuge there were rescued from the second-story windows. Today, the school seems mint-new, with bright hallways with names like Dream Avenue.

But to get to the school, the president’s motorcade crossed a canal with new white cement wall that had “Hindsight” painted in large red letters. Along the route, considerable damage was still visible, with boarded-up houses and lots strewn with debris.

Ahead of Mr. Bush’s trip to the Gulf Coast, the White House issued a “fact sheet” detailing $114 billion in relief to the region, not counting $13 billion in tax relief. The president’s Gulf Coast rebuilding chief, Don Powell, told reporters that $96 billion of that aid has already been made available to local governments, The A.P. reported.

Alluding to complaints that not enough money has reached the people who need it quickly enough, Mr. Powell implied that local officials were at least partly to blame, The A.P. said.

On Tuesday night, President Bush and his wife, Laura, dined with community leaders at Dooky Chase, a famed restaurant that has been closed since the hurricane struck but is scheduled to reopen soon.

The reopening of Dooky Chase will doubtless be heralded as another sign of the Crescent City’s rebirth. But long before the flood, New Orleans was at least two cities — the jazz-filled, pleasure-celebrating, European-style community cherished by tourists, and the everyday New Orleans, marked by deep pockets of poverty, a rundown public school system and a police force with a checkered history. Those problems were not washed away by the floods.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from New Orleans.

    2 Years After Katrina, Bush Sees Hope in New Orleans, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us/29cnd-bush.html?hp

Anger, Sadness

Mark Katrina Anniversary

August 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:31 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn't seem to subside.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

On Wednesday, protesters planned to march from the obliterated Lower 9th Ward to Congo Square, where slaves were once allowed to celebrate their culture. Accompanied by brass bands, they will again try to spread their message that the government has failed to help people return.

''People are angry and they want to send a message to politicians that they want them to do more and do it faster,'' said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, a Baptist pastor and community activist. ''Nobody's going to be partying.''

At New Orleans' Charity Hospital, a 21-story limestone hospital adorned with allegorical reliefs, public officials will attend a somber groundbreaking for a victims' memorial and mausoleum that will house the remains of more than 100 victims who have still not been identified.

''It's an emotional time. You relive what happened and you remember how scattered everyone is now. There are relationships now that are completely over,'' said Robert Smallwood, a local writer. ''The city has been dying this slow death. In New Orleans, you can't escape it. It's bad news everyday.''

In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour saw progress. He said Wednesday in Gulfport that about 13,000 of his state's families are still living in FEMA trailers, down from a peak of 48,000, and he expects they could all be out of the temporary housing in a year.

''We made a huge amount of progress,'' Barbour told NBC's ''Today'' show. ''The character of Mississippi was revealed and it was very positive.''

New Orleans churches planned memorial services, including one at the historic St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and ring bells in honor of the victims. People throughout the city will hold their own private ceremonies to remember where they were when Katrina hit, and what they lost.

''Everyone who gives it any thought, and I can't imagine who hasn't, has to reflect on his or her own personal experience during that time, and also look at how far we've come,'' said Larry Lorenz, a journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

A candlelight vigil is scheduled in Jackson Square at dusk, right around the time the French Quarter may start getting tipsy with street parties and anniversary revelers, as happened last year.

The anniversary is an opportunity for the city to recapture media attention to tell the nation what's happened to New Orleans since Katrina. Reporters, television crews and photographers have, once again, flocked to the city.

The day has also attracted a passel of politicians -- President Bush chief among them. He and Laura Bush arrived Tuesday night and dined with Leah Chase, the Queen of Creole cooking, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and musician Irvin Mayfield.

Several presidential contenders, including Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have visited in recent days.

While politicians have used the anniversary to pitch policy, think tanks, scholars and activists have released a steady stream of reports on the state of recovery.

Meanwhile, an international people's tribunal has been convened to take testimony from victims. The tribunal is being spearheaded by legal activists trying to build a case under international law accusing the United States of human rights abuses during and after Katrina.

    Anger, Sadness Mark Katrina Anniversary, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-Anniversary.html

Governor Refuses Blame

in 35 Hurricane Deaths

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

ST. FRANCISVILLE, La., Aug. 28 — Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco was summoned to a courtroom on Tuesday to testify in a homicide case over Hurricane Katrina’s single biggest loss of life, and she refused to take blame for the deaths of 35 patients who drowned at a nursing home.

Ms. Blanco repeatedly parried lawyers for the two accused owners of the nursing home, St. Rita’s, in a trial that has become a grim commemoration of the storm that struck exactly two years ago.

Ms. Blanco was called as the owners, Salvador and Mabel Mangano, face charges of negligent homicide in the deaths of 35 enfeebled residents of St. Rita’s in St. Bernard. It was a moment that replayed some of the darker resentments that have swirled around Ms. Blanco since the storm.

The governor, though often on the defensive, was having none of it.

She was aided by protective prosecutors. They say the Manganos are culpable for failing to remove patients as three other nursing homes in their parish did, and warnings of all sorts abounded. Prosecutors suggested that financial concerns had a role in their decision.

The owners’ vigorous defense has sought to shift responsibility to officials at all levels, federal authorities for faulty levees and state and local officials for failing to issue the clear-cut mandatory evacuation order that would have given the Manganos no choice.

The largest target in that strategy was Ms. Blanco. Rock-bottom in public opinion polls partly because of her handling of the hurricane disaster effort, the governor, a Democrat, announced months ago that she would not seek re-election this year.

The lawyers made little secret of the hope that an unpopular official might shoulder blame. Ms. Blanco made strenuous efforts to stay out of court. In the end, state appeals courts offered her no shelter, and she was forced to account for her actions in the hours before the storm hit.

“You, Governor, never issued an order of mandatory evacuation,” a lawyer for the Manganos, John Reed, said.

Suggesting, as she did all morning, that local officials were properly at the forefront, Ms. Blanco responded, “I did not issue that order, because all of the local governments were deeply engaged in getting people out and helping them to evacuate.” Through a morning of questioning that was at times hectoring, Ms. Blanco remained calm. The lawyers grew heated. She never sought to turn the tables or take a leading role.

She acknowledged at the beginning of her testimony that she was nervous, and her conduct did not dispel that characterization, recalling her moments of public unease in the hurricane crisis.

“Did you have the authority to order a mandatory evacuation at 9 o’clock on Saturday?” some 30 hours before the storm hit, another lawyer, James Cobb, asked.

“It’s not exactly — the procedures that behave that way,” Ms. Blanco said. ‘‘The governor allows local officials to do that, because local citizens follow local officials.”

The testimony hardly seemed a clear victory for either side. The prosecutors had called Ms. Blanco pre-emptively, knowing that the defense was planning to do so.

The trial, in its third week, has featured much of the prosecution’s case, with testimony from tearful relatives about last moments of contact and evidence of the meager evacuation plan at the nursing home, one nine-passenger van for the 100-bed center.

The Manganos are the only people facing criminal charges arising from deaths in Hurricane Katrina.

The prosecutors have set the Manganos’ decision to ride out the hurricane against the uncomplicated judgments of three operators of other nursing homes in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans. The three chose to evacuate and saved virtually all their residents.

In the Manganos’ case, bedridden patients died as a sudden wall of water engulfed St. Rita’s nearly to the roof in about 20 minutes. Many of the several dozen survivors did so only because their mattresses were encased in plastic, and they floated to the surface.

The defense asked why the state transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, having taken charge of evacuating nursing homes in theory in a state emergency plan, had failed to do so.

“He was very annoyed with himself that this new duty hadn’t fully focused,” Ms. Blanco said.

The governor said the effects of any plans, new or old in the face of a sudden overwhelming crisis that erupted rapidly, were tenuous.

“Everybody,” she said, “was scrambling to make sense out of a situation that had nothing sensible about it.”

    Governor Refuses Blame in 35 Hurricane Deaths, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us/nationalspecial/29katrina.html

Patchwork City

A Billion Dollars Later,

New Orleans Still at Risk

August 17, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — Six inches.

After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.

Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.

By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.

“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”

New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.

The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.

The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city.

And its most successful work, building enormous floodgates to cut off the fingerlike canals that brought so much flooding into the city, had a divisive effect. The gates now protect prosperous neighborhoods like Lakeview, and though corps officials say there has been no favoritism, the effect has been to draw out old resentments and conspiracy theories in a city that never lacked for them.

“We have spent a lot of money and gotten some very good patches, but we’re putting them on this decayed old quilt,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an author of an independent report on the levee failures. “We’re still with this damned patchwork quilt.”

As a result, the city still lacks a system that can stand up to that 1-in-100 storm, let alone one like Hurricane Katrina, which the corps calls a 1-in-396 storm. The work that could build the more robust system — originally estimated at $7 billion, and now at least twice that — will not be completed until 2011 at the earliest, and experts agree that even that level of protection will be less than the city needs.

The corps is working on a two-year, $20 million study to find ways of providing even more protection, but it will not even be released until December.

Without a strong rampart of protection against storms, New Orleans will have a hard time persuading its far-flung residents and businesses to return and rebuild. Matt McBride, an engineer who became an anti-corps gadfly on flood-protection issues, left the city along with his wife after deciding he simply did not trust the new system.

“There’s too many things that can go wrong,” Mr. McBride said.

Maggie Carver, a Gentilly resident now living in Woodstock, N.Y., but hoping to get back, said she thought that all the time and work would have resulted in more progress and a clearer sense of safety than she had seen.

“If I sell my house and put everything into rebuilding and living in New Orleans and it happens again, then where am I?” Ms. Carver asked. “I’m in a boat somewhere with four Jack Russell terriers and my grandson. I won’t have anything.”

Patching the System

The corps has hardly been idle in the two years since the flooding. It quickly mobilized a force that grew to as many as 3,300 workers in the New Orleans area, and its cranes and bulldozers belch exhaust at waterways all over town, installing walls of concrete, massive pumps and mounds of earthwork.

Ultimately, though, the corps was trying to patch up a 350-mile system that was unfinished and vulnerable long before Hurricane Katrina, and the haphazard results are clear. It has repaired breaches on the east bank of a waterway called the Industrial Canal with 4,000 feet of stolid, well-armored floodwall to protect the still-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, even though few people are living there and there is little sign of the neighborhood’s return.

Across the canal from that floodwall, however, the walls that stood up to the storm have not yet been raised, even though they protect an inhabited neighborhood. That means they remain at their pre-Katrina height, lower than the new wall and vulnerable to being overtopped. They have been strengthened against catastrophic failure if water flows over the top, but floodwaters would nonetheless flow into Gentilly.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an old navigation channel that many scientists say destroyed wetlands and contributed to a funnel effect that increased the damage to the city, has yet to be sealed off. The corps has said that proposals from contractors for doing so are on their way, but that work, too, may not be complete before 2011.

Then there are the new pumps at the mouths of the city’s main drainage canals, which will be turned on if the huge new floodgates have to be closed to keep out lake water in a storm. Two reports said that the pumps, ordered in a rush of planning before the 2006 storm season, were a troubled operation from the start, and that if a storm had hit in the first year after Hurricane Katrina, severe flooding could have occurred.

Experts who have looked at the situation in the year since then say that things have improved, and the pumps are working as planned. But community activists say they suspect that the corps has not yet fully fixed the problems.

On a broader scale, the essential but daunting work of restoring the wetlands along the Gulf Coast, which can reduce the effect of storm surges, has yet to get under way in earnest.

Analyzing the Risk

Col. Jeffrey A. Bedey, commander of the corps’ Hurricane Protection Office, acknowledged that the work so far has been piecemeal, because the scale of project is so enormous. The drive to provide protection against that 1-in-100 storm by 2011, Colonel Bedey said, is more thorough.

He said the maps that will predict the impact of that work, which could be published before the end of August, “should show Upper Gentilly looking very good,” and much of the rest of the city besides.

And so, he said, the analysis that many people will have to make is, “Am I really willing to take the risk between 2007 and 2011” that no big storm will overpower the work done so far?

That requires more than an analysis of risk; it requires a calculus of hope. And it is not a question that needs to be asked only in New Orleans. It is the same question that comes up when a steam pipe in New York City explodes or a bridge 1,200 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans collapses. Getting infrastructure right is hard, and keeping it strong takes vigilance. And that means safety, uncomfortably, is a relative thing.

“If people were looking for a quick and easy answer — is it safe? — there is no easy answer,” said David E. Daniel, the president of the University of Texas at Dallas and the head of a panel that monitors the corps’ investigation of the Katrina disaster.

Some can live with thoughtful uncertainty more comfortably than others. Marion LaNasa, a homeowner in Lakeview, said he loves New Orleans and cannot imagine being happy anywhere else. “If you were really smart, would you stay?” he asked. “Probably not. But there’s more to life than assured comfort and no risk.”

Ms. Pratcher said she would continue to demand change — and to pray. “I do believe in God,” she said. “He’s the person I’m calling on now to help us, because man isn’t doing it.”

Going on Instinct

The corps has repeatedly urged local residents to come to its community briefings or to look over the flood risk data, available on its Web site at nola risk.usace.army.mil, that provides possible water levels by street address.

Mr. LaNasa, who works for Lockheed Martin at the Michoud Assembly Facility east of town, said that when the risk maps were unveiled in June, he and his wife sat at the computer and looked at the likely flooding in their home in Lakeview. He saw it as evidence that the family should stay, but his wife, who is not from New Orleans, was less certain.

“She certainly saw a lot of dark colors, which indicates a lot of water, which is distressing to her,” Mr. LaNasa said.

What he saw, though, was that the area around their house, close to Lake Pontchartrain, was relatively higher and, potentially, drier. “We’re pressing ahead — I’m not dwelling on the risk,” he said. “My wife is pressing ahead with me, but a little more skeptically.”

After climbing the learning curve, he said, “the decision is going to be an emotional decision,” just a more educated one. “Ultimately, you have to go with your gut.”

Others seem to be trusting data from a higher authority. On St. Ferdinand Street in the Desire section of the Ninth Ward, Ora M. Singleton, 70, was standing in her still-ruined front yard pulling grass out by the roots. It costs too much to have it mowed, she explained.

Ms. Singleton wanted to get rid of the grass until she can move back into the house — a process that looks, from the appearance of the place, as if it may still be a while. She has put on the new roof and installed new windows, but there is still much to be done after the house took on 7.5 feet of water.

She is close to the west wall of the navigation canal that the corps acknowledges is lower than the new one on the other side. But she has not been able to go online to look for information. “I don’t have the Internet,” she said.

If she had, she might have seen that her home still stands in a spot where waters from a 1-in-100 flood would reach six feet. Other nearby areas could expect to take on eight feet of water.

“I love my city,” she said. “I was led by the Lord to come back.”

Will she do anything different, then?

“This time we’ll not furnish our home with all that nice antique furniture,” she said. Her mailbox was swept away, but she has precariously wired a new one to the rusted fence. The mailbox is white with delicate letters: “Home Sweet Home.”

A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk, NYT, 17.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/us/nationalspecial/17protect.html