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Agency Erred in Canceling Loans

to 8,000 Along Gulf,

Audit Finds

July 25, 2007
The New York Times
By RON NIXON

WASHINGTON, July 24 — The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government’s largest program to help disaster victims rebuild their houses, improperly canceled thousands of loans it had promised homeowners along the Gulf Coast after the 2005 hurricanes, a government audit has found.

The agency canceled nearly 8,000 loans without calling the borrowers or mailing them a notice, according to the audit by the agency’s inspector general. The homeowners did eventually receive a letter contending that they had voluntarily given up their loans, the report says, even though many told auditors that they actually needed the money.

The loans were canceled last year, after the agency had come under fire for being slow to give out rebuilding money, according to the audit. Former agency employees have complained that they were pressured to withdraw the loans to cut the number of applicants whose loans had been approved but not paid out.

A spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment on the report.

The Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, which is examining problems with the agency’s disaster loan program, is planning a hearing on the audit on Wednesday.

“We all wanted to see the loans processed and disbursed more quickly and the red tape removed,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the committee. “Unfortunately, even with good intentions, some disaster victims are still being left behind, and that’s not acceptable.”

The audit is the latest in a series of problems for the troubled agency, which was widely criticized for its slow response to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Earlier audits found that poor planning, low levels of staffing and problems with a new computer system had led to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of loan applications.

Steven C. Preston, the agency’s administrator, made fixing the disaster loans program his top priority when he took office last July.

But the audit found that agency employees might have cut corners to reduce the backlog. In many cases employees made only one call and sent no letters, according to the report. Because of problems with the agency’s computer system, its records indicated that these borrowers had requested that their loans be canceled.

Agency Erred in Canceling Loans to 8,000 Along Gulf, Audit Finds, NYT, 25.7.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/washington/25orleans.html

No Indictment in Katrina Deaths

July 25, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, July 24 — A grand jury Tuesday refused to indict a doctor accused of killing four elderly patients in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, ending a case that inflamed public opinion here, turned the doctor into something of a folk hero and demoralized an already-shaken medical community.

The doctor, Anna M. Pou, had been a respected medical professor on the staff of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. The Orleans Parish grand jury cleared her of accusations that she had deliberately injected the critically ill patients with a lethal combination of morphine and another drug in a sweltering hospital that had been without power for days after the storm. Charges against two nurses accused of assisting her had earlier been dropped in exchange for their testimony for the prosecution.

Dr. Pou, 51, has maintained her innocence since her arrest a year ago. Medical ethicists have said that at the very least the accusation of homicide against her raised difficult questions of what constituted appropriate treatment during a crisis; some said charges should never have been brought against her.

On Tuesday the American Medical Association released a statement praising the grand jury’s decision.

Trembling and tearful at a news conference, Dr. Pou said she had been through a “very challenging and painful” time and now planned to resume her practice after teaching for the last year. Describing how she had received the news, she said she was “at home with my husband and I fell to my knees and thanked God.”

She declined to discuss precisely what happened at the hospital after the hurricane, citing pending civil suits against her by three of the patients’ families. In previous television interviews she has said that she had simply tried to make patients at the hospital “comfortable.”

Attorney General Charles Foti of Louisiana, who had ordered Dr. Pou and two nurses, Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, to be arrested last year on charges of second-degree murder, defended the case Tuesday, saying independent expert pathologists had reviewed it favorably before it was brought.

“I regret their decision,” Mr. Foti said of the grand jurors, while criticizing the district attorney’s office for not calling on certain witnesses to testify.

But the district attorney in New Orleans, Eddie Jordan, told reporters, “I agreed with the grand jury.”

From the beginning the case has transcended the simple accusation of murder, coming to encapsulate for many here the horrific conditions and choices that prevailed in the days after the storm — and particularly on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, the day the deaths occurred, and the last day before large-scale help arrived in New Orleans.

The temperature at Memorial Medical Center was over 100 degrees, five feet of water lapped its lower floors, patients were dying, and Dr. Pou and the nurses were among the few medical professionals who had stayed behind to confront the hurricane’s aftermath at its worst flash point — the hospitals.

Patients had to be squeezed through a hole and carried up many flights of stairs to the roof to be airlifted out. There were at least 34 deaths at Memorial as patients and doctors waited to be rescued from the marooned hospital.

Those circumstances, acutely recalled by citizens here, quickly turned public opinion — as measured by letters to the editor, blogs, call-in shows and even rallies — to Dr. Pou’s side. On Tuesday, her lawyer, Richard Simmons, touched on that common knowledge, saying, “Anybody with a television set knows the cause of death.” A rally in support of the doctor last week at City Park drew hundreds of people, many of them nurses and doctors, including some who had been at the hospital.

Adding to the sense that Dr. Pou had been turned into something of a martyr was the highly public nature of her arrest last summer. Mr. Foti accused her at a news conference of having acted like “God” at the hospital in deciding that certain patients were not going to survive the ordeal. He added, “This is not euthanasia; this is plain and simple homicide.”

Those words, and the arrest, sent chills through a medical community that had been one of this city’s economic backbones before the storm and was severely reduced after it. With hundreds of doctors still living elsewhere and most of the hospitals shuttered, the case against Dr. Pou “had a demoralizing effect,” said Dr. Ricardo Febry, president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society.

“Everybody was watching this very closely,” Dr. Febry said. “Had the decision been the opposite, who knows what impact that would have had. If it had dropped in the other direction, you would have seen an exodus of people.”

Dr. Pou predicted on Tuesday that the case was still likely to have a chilling effect on local doctors. “I think it will make it difficult for clinicians to deliver care,” she said, “especially for patients that are not theirs.”

Mr. Foti’s charges were backed by an affidavit that included the testimony of hospital employees, one of whom said Dr. Pou and the nurses were seen filling syringes. “A decision had been made to administer lethal doses,” Dr. Pou told a witness, according to the affidavit.

But from the beginning, there were questions about why the doctor would want to kill the patients when others were being rescued. Mr. Foti, at his news conference last year, said he was not required to supply a motive.

Dr. Pou’s defenders here said, however, her only motives were selfless ones: easing the sufferings of critically ill patients.

“This was a doctor who was at all times concerned with her patients,” said Mr. Simmons, the lawyer.

    No Indictment in Katrina Deaths, NYT, 25.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/us/25doctor.html

New Orleans Recovery Is Slowed by Closed Hospitals

July 24, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.

On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors’ offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.

Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.

“I’ve been telling people, don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,” said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs.

Of all the factors blocking the economic revival of New Orleans, the shattered health care system may be the most important — and perhaps the most intractable.

Except for tourism and retailing, health care was the city’s biggest private employer, and it paid much higher wages than hotels or stores. But there are now 16,800 fewer medical jobs than before the storm, down 27 percent, in part because nurses and other workers are in short supply.

Only one of the city’s seven general hospitals is operating at its pre-hurricane level; two more are partially open, and four remain closed. The number of hospital beds in New Orleans has dropped by two-thirds. In the suburbs, half a dozen hospitals in adjacent Jefferson Parish are open — but are packed.

Fixing the city’s health care system “is critical both for the short and the long term,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “Short-term, having confidence that the health care residents need will be available and accessible is vital for folks who are returning,” Mr. Kopplin said. “Long-term, it’s important for employers — and health care is a huge business in New Orleans."

Studies suggest that hundreds of doctors never returned. And some of those who did, especially specialists and young physicians, are leaving, said Dr. Ricardo Febry, president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, which has lost more than 200 of its 650 members. The exodus has “been a steady trickle,” Dr. Febry said.

The city’s mortality rate appears to have risen sharply in 2006, although state and local officials disagree about the level and persistence of the increase.

With the stress of life in the flood-ravaged city, the limited health care and insurance, the lingering mold and the discomfort of living in trailers, doctors report that the patients they see are often far sicker than those they treated before the storm. And even residents with health insurance can have a difficult time finding someone to treat them.

Government officials and civic leaders are floating plans for the future of the city’s medical system, for a state-of-the-art hospital, for a cutting-edge system to cover the uninsured, even for a “bio-innovation center” that would be an engine for economic growth. The question is what will happen in the meantime, which is likely to be many years long.

“We have to find a way to survive to that point, to provide care, or our city will collapse,” said John J. Finn, president of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans.

Waiting for Care

The problems with health care hit hardest on the poor and the newly uninsured, but they also affect doctors and patients, politicians and entrepreneurs, the displaced and the returned — and everyone at any level who has the misfortune to turn up in a jam-packed emergency room.

Consider the case of Bernadine R. Fields, 50, who learned firsthand how far people have to go for major medical care. A supervisor of city 911 dispatchers, Ms. Fields was among the many laid off after the storm.

The money she had saved for her retirement went for repairs to her house in New Orleans East. By last July, she could no longer afford the $367 a month it cost to continue her health insurance, or all the medicines she needed to treat her high blood pressure, or the $250 it would cost to see a doctor.

So she kept ending up in one of the few open emergency rooms, waiting for hours. After one of these episodes in April, she was told she needed transfusions to treat anemia — but there was not a bed available in New Orleans for an uninsured patient.

Ms. Fields finally got the treatment she needed — but only after an ambulance took her to the state-run hospital in Baton Rouge, 80 miles from her home and family. She stayed there four days.

“I devoted 15 years of my life to serving the public,” she said, “and when I need to be served, there is no one to count on.”

Ms. Fields’s neighborhood in the eastern section of the city, like other stretches of town, cannot recover unless medical care becomes available there, officials say, and neither can large sections of the economy. Doctors and hospitals, though, are reluctant to return unless the population does.

“I’m just hoping and praying nobody dies,” said Frederick C. Young Jr., president of the Methodist Health System Foundation, which is working with the city to try to reopen a hospital there.

The sharp contraction in the health care industry has economic effects, too, for coffee shops and florists and medical-supply companies. Marshall F. Gerson, whose family has owned the Ellgee Uniform Shop downtown for almost 70 years, said sales of scrubs and other medical uniforms had fallen to about half their pre-storm level.

“At this time of day when times were good, it was bustle-bustle here,” said Mr. Gerson, 63, standing in his shop late one recent afternoon. Now, “the foot traffic is almost nil.”

By working harder and selling more industrial and restaurant uniforms, Mr. Gerson has kept his business going but, he said, “I’m not a happy person when I get home.”

An Era’s End

The future of Mr. Gerson’s shop — and in many ways the future of health care in New Orleans — is bound up in the thorny question of what if anything will replace the hospital known as Big Charity.

Since it opened in 1939, Charity Hospital’s imposing building downtown has provided basically all the medical care — emergency, acute and basic — for the city’s poor, and served as a training ground for generations of doctors.

Despite some community protests, Louisiana State University, which ran the hospital, closed it permanently after the storm, saying it was too damaged by basement flooding. The state plans to replace it with a $1.2 billion complex that officials believe will attract insured patients as well as the poor, will also care for veterans and will serve as an economic catalyst for the city. But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground.

The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured.

On a positive note, the city’s trauma center, which treats gunshot wounds and other serious emergencies, reopened in February at University Hospital downtown, which like Charity is part of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. But the number of beds at University remains limited, and the building is so outdated that it will eventually have to be replaced, said Dr. Cathi Fontenot, the medical director.

In the meantime, the sick have to go somewhere. Often, that somewhere is Ochsner Medical Center, a huge private hospital complex in the western suburb of Metairie that looks like a mall, with a computerized grand piano that entertains patrons in a sunny atrium.

Before Hurricane Katrina, patients waited just 20 minutes to be seen, said Dr. Joseph Guarisco, chairman of emergency services at Ochsner, and surveys found that 99 percent were satisfied with their care.

After the storm, the number of people coming to the emergency room jumped, on some days reaching nearly twice the pre-hurricane volume. The number of psychiatric patients soared.

The uninsured, who had made up a small percentage of emergency patients at Ochsner, began accounting for more than a quarter of emergency room patients. Waiting times routinely topped an hour. The patient satisfaction rate fell to 34 percent.

This year, Dr. Guarisco reorganized the emergency room and cut the waiting time back to about 20 minutes.

But the other problems remain. “The hospital, post-Katrina, struggled financially,” Dr. Guarisco said, “and it still struggles to this day.”

Bad Time for a Fracture

No one thinks that emergency rooms are a good way to provide basic everyday health care, but government efforts to attract doctors and to open more neighborhood clinics have gotten off to a slow start.

Volunteers and nonprofit groups are trying to fill the breach, treating thousands of patients a month in more than a dozen low-cost clinics in the city. In many ways, the clinics have been a success for their patients, as they are elsewhere in the country, but they represent just a drop in the city’s ocean of medical need, health officials say.

Some were open before the storm but have expanded; others are new, like the Common Ground Health Clinic, which provides free medical care four days a week in an old corner store in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter. People wait outside in the heat for the clinic to open, and it is always jammed.

One recent Tuesday, the patients included a city employee with a neck problem, a college student with uncontrolled menstrual bleeding, a bartender with high blood pressure and glaucoma, and Nellie M. Lindsey, 54, a scrap hauler who was suffering from what she called “cancer stones.”

Before the storm, Ms. Lindsey said, she would have sought treatment at Charity, but she is so happy with the Common Ground clinic — despite the long waits — that she took her adult sons and daughter there for checkups.

Most of the people who come to the clinic hold at least one job, and many are working two, said Anne Mulle, a family nurse practitioner who came from California after the storm to help and ended up staying.

In addition to longstanding problems like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, most patients have anxiety, depression and stress, which are even harder to treat, the clinic staff says.

“We can take the health piece off your worry list,” said Dr. Ravi Vadlamudi, a Tulane University doctor who serves as the clinic’s volunteer medical director. “But we can’t get you a better job market or housing market; we can’t do anything about the schools; we can’t do much with police problems. I can’t do anything about most of what bothers you.”

For patients who need more complicated care, including mammograms, stress tests and vision treatments, the clinic can make referrals to St. Thomas Community Health Center, which Dr. Donald T. Erwin founded in 1987. The fact that clinics are now collaborating — and recently qualified for federal financing — is a new and welcome development in what can seem like a bleak medical landscape, Dr. Erwin said.

Another change he has seen, he said, is that even people with insurance are having a hard time finding doctors, getting tests and continuing prescriptions, so are turning up at his clinic, where they now make up about a quarter of the patients.

“Before the storm?” Dr. Erwin continued, and held a thumb and forefinger together to make a zero.

Counseling and mental health treatment are notoriously hard to find in New Orleans these days, and doctors say this is an especially bad time to break a leg, given the shortage of orthopedists.

Even patients with the means to pay and doctors who have returned can face long waits for treatment. Dr. Myers, the internist who used to practice in Mid-City, said recently that a new patient would probably have to wait two months for an appointment, though he would find a way to get existing patients in sooner. He estimates that 80 percent of those patients have returned.

Dr. Myers said he had been trying for months to lure another doctor to the area to join his practice.

“This is a great opportunity for people who have courage,” he said.

So far, he has found no takers.

    New Orleans Recovery Is Slowed by Closed Hospitals, NYT, 24.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24orleans.html?ex=1188964800&en=f7c653637e6c07df&ei=5070

Edwards Embarks on Tour in South to Focus on Poverty

July 16, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE WAYNE

NEW ORLEANS, July 15 — John Edwards came back on Sunday to a rainy New Orleans, the city where he kicked off his presidential bid last December, to start a three-day tour of poverty-stricken parts of the rural South and the urban Midwest in a bid to draw attention to one of his main campaign issues: the elimination of poverty.

The Edwards campaign billed the event as “a break from his normal campaign schedule,” although it was anything but. At the last minute, the campaign announced that Elizabeth Edwards, the candidate’s wife, was joining the tour.

The campaign also lined up more than 40 news organizations for the trip, and reporters and the Edwardses will travel in a chartered jet. And on Monday morning, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards are scheduled to be on “Good Morning America” on ABC before hitting the road.

The eight-state tour is intended “to shine a bright spotlight on the issue of poverty in America,” the campaign said in a statement. “Edwards will meet with people struggling with poverty in order to share their personal stories with the nation.”

The tour may not be a campaign in the strictest sense. Mr. Edwards will not be traveling through early primary states, soliciting votes or holding fund-raisers. But the tour is intended to burnish his image on the issue he has made a signature campaign theme. In doing so, he is setting out to associate himself with leaders of the civil rights movement. He has scheduled a visit to Marks, Miss., where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his Poor People’s March in 1968, and the tour will end in Prestonburg, Ky., where Robert F. Kennedy concluded a tour of impoverished areas, also in 1968.

Mr. Edwards, a former one-term Democratic senator from North Carolina and the losing vice-presidential candidate in 2004, is facing an uphill battle against Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who are leading him in polls and in fund-raising. And while Iraq and health care appear to head the list of voter concerns, Mr. Edwards is promoting himself as someone who cares about the poor and who has risen from the bottom himself. In doing do, he is staking a more populist stance than his opponents.

During his tour of the Lower Ninth Ward on Sunday night, Mr. Edwards spoke to residents and others who turned out in the devastated neighborhood.

“We have an awful lot of work to do,” he said. “You take the words ‘working poor’ — these are two words that should not be in combination in the United States. Most of the country is not aware of the rebuilding by you folks. You’re not getting any help, and America needs to be there for New Orleans.”

In the neighborhood, a broad expanse littered with broken-down houses, federal emergency trailers and empty lots, the Edwardses met with local housing activists.

“Looks like what I saw when I was here last time,” Mr. Edwards said. “Some people are working to rebuild their lives, but they’re not getting much help from the government.”

In making his presidential announcement last December, Mr. Edwards chose middle-class East New Orleans as his setting, and he called for greater citizen activism in the face of government inaction. This time, he started his tour with an evening walk through the Lower Ninth Ward, which has become a symbol of poverty and long-standing government neglect.

Since 2004, Mr. Edwards has incorporated his views on poverty into his political approach. Last week, at community meetings in Iowa, not a single person attending a campaign event asked him about poverty. But at each stop, he raised the issue, speaking with passion and calling it a “moral” issue facing America.

His association with the issue also helped keep him in the public eye while he was out of office. He set up the Center on Poverty Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina law school, which enabled the school to research poverty and also provided a platform for Mr. Edwards after he left Washington.

From a strictly political standpoint, it is unclear how much Mr. Edwards will gain from this theme. Dennis J. Goldford, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, said most people who turn out to vote do not think of themselves as poor and do not identify with the message.

“Even if they may be poor, many don’t think that they are,” Mr. Goldford said. “They don’t think that he is talking to them.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Edwards has made any headway among poor voters. A Washington Post-ABC poll in July showed that he drew scant support from Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with household incomes under $20,000. Mrs. Clinton got the bulk of the support at 55 percent, Mr. Obama drew 20 percent and Mr. Edwards received 10 percent.

    Edwards Embarks on Tour in South to Focus on Poverty, NYT, 16.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/us/politics/16edwards.html

Casinos Boom in Katrina’s Wake as Cash Pours In

July 16, 2007
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN

BILOXI, Miss. — This seaside gambling resort along a stretch of the Gulf Coast, sometimes called the “redneck Riviera,” has 40 percent fewer hotel rooms and only two-thirds as many slot machines as it did before Hurricane Katrina. A major bridge that connects the casinos in this popular tourist destination to Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and other points east remains closed, and Mayor A. J. Holloway estimates that as many as 15 percent of the city’s pre-Katrina residents still have not returned.

Yet business in the gambling halls of Biloxi has reached all-time highs in recent months, so much so that Larry Gregory, the executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission, has half-jokingly barred his staff from uttering the phrase “record-setting” because “it was becoming too redundant.”

A similar story has been unfolding in New Orleans, where tourism is still in the doldrums and only 60 percent of the pre-Katrina population has returned nearly two years after the hurricane and flooding devastated the area.

Indeed, the casinos there seem to be faring even better than their Gulf Coast cousins.

Harrah’s New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina.

The casinos in this region are generating more revenue — from significantly fewer players — in large part because of the extra money that many area residents have in their pockets and fewer alternatives on where to spend it, casino executives and others in the region say.

“There’s been this huge infusion of cash into the local economy,” said Bob Mahoney, the co-owner of Mary Mahoney’s Old French House restaurant in Biloxi. “Federal money has poured into the area. Insurance money has poured in. And wages have gone up considerably given the demand for workers.”

That demand, Mr. Mahoney said, means he now pays a starting dishwasher $8.50 an hour rather than $6; a $12-an-hour construction worker typically earns $20 an hour or more now.

But just because people here have more money does not mean they feel particularly good about their situation. Far from it.

“It’s like a barroom,” said Ted Lewis, 48, a case manager at a New Orleans homeless shelter who started coming to Harrah’s only after the casino’s reopening in early 2006. “When times are bad, people come to release stress. They drink, they gamble.”

They do indeed. Boomtown New Orleans, for instance, a casino on the edge of the city that was not flooded, booked $83 million in profit last year, nearly triple its pre-Katrina best. Here in Biloxi, even with two fewer casinos operating through the first half of the year, gamblers lost $428.3 million in the first five months of the year, compared with $418.7 during the same period in 2005.

Locals now abound at the gambling centers. Gary W. Loveman, the chief executive of Harrah’s Entertainment, said that before Katrina, roughly three out of every four people gambling at his company’s New Orleans property was a tourist; today the majority are from the city or the surrounding area, including a number of construction workers drawn to the area and other temporary residents.

“With all the bowling alleys and social clubs and churches and favorite restaurants that aren’t there,” Mr. Loveman said, “we’re getting a much larger share of the discretionary spend.”

To gambling critics like the Rev. Tom Grey, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, this new reliance on locals demonstrates that the region’s casinos are “predators feasting on the suffering and misery of an area that has seen more than enough suffering and misery.”

Casino executives say they are just giving people a place to go for diversion. Meanwhile, perhaps their biggest challenge is to talk about their success without betraying too much glee, given the pain, financial and otherwise, still being felt by virtually every other industry in town.

“Certainly we need to be sensitive to all that people have gone through,” Mr. Loveman said, even as he described himself as “very pleased” that his company has “done exceedingly well at Harrah’s New Orleans.”

To help capture as much of the population’s idle cash as possible, Harrah’s has been aggressively marketing its casino to locals — a population, Mr. Loveman said, that the property had “not paid much attention to” in the past.

At Harrah’s, the number of players is down 20 percent to 30 percent for the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005. Over all, the casinos dotting the Mississippi Gulf Coast recorded 30 percent fewer visitors in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period two years earlier.

Craig Williams, 32, is a typical customer. He used to spend a lot of his off-hours working on his house in New Orleans East — until it was destroyed by flood waters. He now lives in a rental apartment elsewhere in the city. So he logs longer hours in his job with Amtrak and is a frequent visitor to Harrah’s.

“I’ve been coming here because there’s really nothing else to do,” Mr. Williams said.

Another factor in Mississippi is a new law that allows casinos to be within 800 feet of water rather than requiring them to be on a floating barge and or riverboat. As a result, gambling concerns large and small are now more bullish on the Gulf Coast, said Mr. Gregory of the Mississippi casino commission, prompting many to invest in rebuilding and improvements.

One example is the Imperial Palace, a low-rent gambling hall prior to the storm that has been reinvented as the IP Casino Resort, complete with a spa, upscale restaurants, a fashionable nightclub and many design flourishes borrowed from Las Vegas. The IP has also added a V.I.P. check-in area and high-limit gambling pit, Jon Lucas, the general manager, said, “letting us make more of a play for the high roller.”

With only 26 percent of the rooms offered by the city’s non-casino hotels back on the market, according to the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association, Mr. Lucas says the more time people spend in a property, the more they tend to gamble.

Gamblers are playing longer, casino executives say, and they are wagering larger sums and spending more time at slot machines and table games. Despite the absence of crowds of tourists, the average visitor is contributing more to the coffers — 38 percent more in the Gulf Coast casinos, according to figures for the first three months of the year.

“I guess it’s sad,” said Sylvia Lumas, 69, playing at a slot machine at Harrah’s New Orleans. “But it’s entertainment. That’s what we’re looking for here. Everything has been so sad.”

    Casinos Boom in Katrina’s Wake as Cash Pours In, NYT, 16.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/business/16casinos.html?hp

Patchwork City

Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many

July 12, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

CONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”

Their options whittled away by government inaction, they represent a sharp contrast to the promise made by President Bush in Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005.

“Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome,” Mr. Bush said. “We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons — because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love.”

As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears.

Thousands of families have moved off disaster aid. It is not clear how many evacuees have permanently settled into their new communities, but postal delivery data suggest that more than 56,000 people have returned to New Orleans in the last year.

Those still in trailers and FEMA apartments are the least equipped to start over. In Houston, according to a city-sponsored survey in February, a third of the people in those apartments were elderly or disabled, a third were employed in mostly low-wage jobs, and a third were still looking for work.

Hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt, in fact, and the local and federal governments have done almost nothing to make it possible for low-income renters like Ms. Cole, who has a ninth-grade education, to return. Because she was never a homeowner, she is not eligible for a federally financed Road Home grant to rebuild her house, destroyed in the hurricane’s floodwaters like the rest of her neighborhood.

With rents double or triple what they were before the storm, she could barely afford a studio apartment, much less anything like the little shotgun house she had, serenaded by brass band parades, on a street traditionally used by Mardi Gras Indians on carnival day.

Despite their longing, some evacuees are afraid to return; they must choose between formaldehyde-laced trailers and a city they view as contaminated, poorly protected from floods and more violent than ever before.

For those who do not plan to go back, or just want to sustain themselves until they can, government solutions like the trailer parks have turned out to be obstacles, especially for the many evacuees like Ms. Cole, who has no car and lost her job at Jack in the Box when she could no longer get a ride to work. At Sugar Hill, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket, the public bus stops only four times a week.

Into the Garbage Can

JoAnn Anderson needs a job.

She has filled out applications and taken drug tests. She has asked people who are already employed for help. A hotel housekeeper for 22 years in New Orleans, she has called every hotel and motel in the hotel and motel section of the Memphis Yellow Pages. They are not interested.

“I keep calling them back,” Ms. Anderson said. “Once I get started working, I know they would like me because I know I do my best and I do my job. I want to work. I don’t want to just sit around getting my bones all old and everything.”

Ms. Anderson, 53, and her longtime companion, Jeffery Evans, 52, are in the category of people for whom recovery is furthest from reach. Near the end of their working lives, unappealing to employers, yet financially unable to retire, many are on the brink of ruin — or will be when their federal disaster assistance runs out.

“I was born poor; I’m probably going to die poor; and before the storm came through I was doing pretty good,” Ms. Anderson said. She and Mr. Evans paid $325 a month for half a duplex in the Uptown section of New Orleans, with “a little porch watching the laundrymat,” she said, “and a backyard.” The streetcar took her right to her job at the Columns, an elegant 1883 hotel in the Garden District. Mr. Evans built cabinets and countertops.

Now they live in a monochrome apartment complex. An empty swimming pool bakes in the Memphis heat, and frayed ropes dangle where the swings should be. FEMA pays the rent. Their social life consists of church on Sundays. For the first time in their lives, they are on food stamps, and to make them stretch, Ms. Anderson shuns the nearby Kroger in favor of a distant Save-a-Lot. Without a car, she trudges home from the bus stop with frozen turkey legs in a canvas bag over one shoulder.

For months, they searched the unfamiliar city for work — she at hotels, he at temporary agencies and, when that failed, at fast-food restaurants. But being an evacuee seemed to be enough to tip the scales against them, perhaps, the couple said, because the evacuees who took jobs right after the storm were not in their right minds.

“I didn’t really ever think that I was going to get hired, for the simple reason that I have to show my Louisiana ID,” Mr. Evans said. “It was like, I give them an application, and from their hands to the garbage can.” At one business, he said, hurricane evacuees were required to take anger management tests.

Ms. Anderson said she applied at one hotel that never responded but, weeks later, was advertising for housekeepers again. She filled out another application.

In May, Mr. Evans finally found a warehouse job near downtown. The bus ride takes so long that he leaves the house at 5 a.m. to get there by 7. He earns $6 an hour.

But Mr. Evans is not complaining. “I’ve been trying to get a job forever,” he said, “so I’m very, very satisfied that I got a job like that.”

Closed Doors for Renters

What makes this couple’s situation all the more bitter is that New Orleans is desperate for workers like them. Luxury hotels are trying to recruit temporary employees from South America. Homeowners are desperate for craftsmen and builders.

But Ms. Anderson says the city is doing nothing to bring them back, pointing out that Charity Hospital, where the poor received heavily subsidized medical care, has not reopened.

“The places where poor people, poor black people lived at, they wasn’t trying to fix up any housing,” she said. “Everything was closed down.”

Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.

Despite pitched opposition, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.

At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.

And when the homeowner program faced a shortfall, one proposed solution was to transfer as much as $667 million from the rental program to cover it, said Broderick Bagert, an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, which advocates for renters. That idea died, but the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which controls the money, recently voted to transfer 5 percent of the budget for renters to the fund for homeowners.

Walter J. Leger Jr., the chairman of the authority, said the 5 percent transfer was temporary to satisfy Congressional demands. Washington will be asked to replace the money down the road, he said.

Mr. Leger said the state’s focus had been on homeowners in part because landlords were more likely to be insured, but he acknowledged the need to do more to replenish the city’s work force. “We’d like to get more money for the rental program, if Washington will help,” he said.

Poor renters, though, are not the only ones who need a hand. Terry Coggins, the coordinator of a consortium of aid groups in Memphis, said many middle-class people were only now asking for help.

“They’ve exhausted their savings,” Mr. Coggins said. “They’ve exhausted their insurance money. They’ve exhausted their ability to drive back and forth and check on their property.”

Barriers for Trailers

In many ways, evacuees have become the region’s new pariahs, shunned by towns and parishes who have erected a number of legal barriers to keep them out.

At least five jurisdictions in Louisiana and Mississippi — St. Bernard, St. John the Baptist, and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana and Pascagoula and Ocean Springs in Mississippi — have begun revoking permits for trailers or allowing their zoning exemptions to expire. Those moves affect families still living in 7,400 trailers across the Gulf Coast, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group based in Washington that has sued to stop the evictions.

Joseph D. Rich, project director for fair housing and community development with the committee, said some jurisdictions have complained about crime in the trailer parks, prompting FEMA to provide extra security. Mr. Rich said he believed there was another motivation for banning trailers.

“There are severe racial overtones to these actions,” he said. “Because there’s all this concern that black and low-income people will be coming into your neighborhood.”

Some local jurisdictions are also fighting to prevent the construction or repair of rental units. In Jefferson Parish, the suburb just west of New Orleans, officials blocked a 200-unit complex for the elderly in Terrytown, citing concerns that it would increase crime, and they are fighting a second complex for the elderly in Marrero. Westwego, also in Jefferson Parish, has placed a moratorium on multifamily buildings.

“You have some people that just lack any degree of civilization,” said Chris Roberts, a Jefferson Parish councilman who has fought to remove FEMA trailers and block subsidized housing developments. “I think low-income housing which is not properly run invites those people.”

Mr. Roberts complained that such residents were often idle, but many evacuees have burdens that prevent them from working.

Gwendolyn Marie Allen, 55, formerly of the Uptown section of New Orleans, now lives in Renaissance Village, a large FEMA trailer park near the Baton Rouge airport. Ms. Allen is the sole caretaker for a son, 20, who was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after a violent episode in the park, and a severely retarded brother, who huddled on the bottom bunk of a bed in their travel trailer, clad only in adult diapers. In an interview, Ms. Allen periodically shushed his wordless moans by waving a green flyswatter in his direction.

“I want to get out of here, baby, this is not no house,” she said. “I want something where he can move around.”

As proof of her resourcefulness, Ms. Allen opened the freezer of the trailer’s compact refrigerator where, to make room for bargain packs of meat from the supermarket, she had removed the shelves.

“The renters aren’t asking that much, just give us a start,” she said. “Put us there, and we could do what we have to do to survive. We could catch it from there.”

    Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many, NYT, 12.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/nationalspecial/12exile.html?hp

Patchwork City

Largely Alone, Pioneers Reclaim New Orleans

July 2, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, July 1 — The sound of hammers and saws. New green grass. A few freshly painted facades. Birdsong piping from a young tree.

This is the Gentilly neighborhood today, once a backbone of New Orleans and all but given up for dead less than a year ago after flooding from Hurricane Katrina turned it brown and gray and silent in 2005.

Gentilly, home to about 47,000 people before the storm and a thin fraction of that now, is not dead. Haltingly, in disconnected pockets, this eight-square-mile quadrant north of the historic districts that line the Mississippi River is limping back to life, thanks to the struggles of its most determined former residents.

But they have had to do so largely on their own, because help from government at any level has been minimal, in their accounts. In recent weeks, some residents have reported getting checks from the state’s Road Home rebuilding program, but four-fifths of applicants have not.

Each block still contains only a handful of occupied houses. But a beachhead has been established here, a residential area critical to this city’s survival and one that before the storm was dominated by black homeowners, professionals and multigenerational citizens of New Orleans.

A similar story is unfolding in two other once-flooded family-centered neighborhoods, neither of them flashy but both equally important to this city’s future: Broadmoor, in central New Orleans, and Lakeview, in the northwestern corner, show signs of life here and there along the wounded streets. Neighbors, encouraged by the earliest post-Katrina pioneers, are moving back in.

All over the city, a giant slow-motion reconstruction project is taking place. It is unplanned, fragmentary and for the isolated individuals carrying it out, often overwhelming. Those with the fortitude to persevere — and only the hardiest even try — must battle the hopelessness brought on by a continuing sense of abandonment.

The selection process has been Darwinian, with a combination of drive, tenacity, luck and savings seeing the neo-colonizers through. New Sheetrock glimpsed through a window, often as not, was bought with scraped-together savings.

“I’m just keeping my head down,” said Albert Felton, 76, a retired mechanic who has exhausted his resources on his frame house on Brutus Street in Gentilly, near one of the levee breaks. He has done most of the Sheetrocking, painting and sanding alone, and the task remains unfinished. “You don’t see contractors out here,” Mr. Felton said. “We can’t afford them.”

Reluctantly, he admitted that discouragement sometimes got the better of him: “Some mornings, I just sit on the steps for two hours, and I go right back to Baton Rouge.” He is living in that city with his ailing wife and commuting over an hour each way to do the work on his house in Gentilly.

Essential residential New Orleans neighborhoods like Gentilly and Broadmoor, with their bungalows, Arts-and-Crafts and ranch-style houses, grew with the city over the course of the 20th century; their loss seemed to presage an abrupt reversion to the narrow port town along the river of the 1800s. Now, taken together, the rebuilding activity in the once-flooded neighborhoods points to a more hopeful future than might have been thought possible a year ago.

Statistics — fragmentary and loosely bandied about by civic boosters here — nonetheless support the idea of tentative rebirth. In Gentilly, a door-to-door survey by a Dartmouth College professor this spring found 31 percent of homes either renovated or occupied, and an additional 57 percent gutted or under construction. That meant that only 12 percent of the houses in the neighborhood had been abandoned; a year ago, block after block appeared forsaken and silent.

A few thousand hammers and nails, of course, go only so far in a city that remains stricken nearly two years after the Katrina floodwaters. With so many houses still empty, the effect of the rebuilding effort in much of New Orleans resembles a giant piece of Swiss cheese, with big gaps in settlement connected by thin strands of inhabitants. Though neighborhoods are shells of what they were, they have not disappeared.

At the same time, whole blocks in the Central Business District remain lifeless. The poorest districts, with tens of thousands of their inhabitants still stuck outside New Orleans, seem abandoned. The downtown complex of hospitals is moribund, as officials squabble over how to bring it back and as upstate legislators have plotted its relocation to another city.

The city’s port, the historic mainstay of the New Orleans economy, is years behind those in neighboring states in improvements, and shippers are complaining. The murder rate, the nation’s highest, is set to outpace last year’s, and the school system has barely begun to recover. Nearly a third of residents polled in a University of New Orleans survey released last month said it was very or somewhat likely they would leave the city in the next two years; the figure has dropped only slightly since last fall.

Still, the citizen-driven rebound from conditions a year ago is palpable. The old neighborhoods that stayed dry along the river, including the French Quarter, are lively. Restaurants are reopening, music spills from bars and coffeehouses, and tourists are returning in large numbers.

A Tentative Rebirth

The geographic boundaries of New Orleans have not shrunk. Residents have returned to virtually every part of the city in significant numbers, with the exception of the northern part of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Maps of mail deliveries, prepared by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a local nonprofit group, show the strength of the revival. Last August, for instance, an insignificant number of households in the flooded areas were receiving mail. A map compiled this spring showed that postal customers per square mile in those neighborhoods had multiplied into the low thousands. If the overall population has also increased to about 62 percent of the pre-Katrina count — from 49.5 percent last July, as postal deliveries have — that means the city’s current population may be up to 250,000 to 260,000.

It is a long way from the prestorm population of 450,000, but the effect of the new residents is clear in block after block.

“All it would take would be a handful of people to maintain the neighborhood,” said Richard Campanella, an urban geographer at Tulane University — and this is what is happening.

Today, even on streets devoid of residents, most houses appear gutted, their sodden Sheetrock and floors ripped out in anticipation of renovation, and many are being worked on. Trailers jut from driveways. In Broadmoor, homes are literally up in the air — raised on concrete pilings to comply with federal flood insurance regulations — and there is new landscaping everywhere.

In Gentilly, neighbors can occasionally be seen greeting one another across the nearly treeless streets where the magnolias were felled by Hurricane Katrina. These residents are visibly proud to have made a comeback.

The homeowners themselves — those who have laboriously reclaimed their lives in Gentilly and elsewhere around the city — have no doubt that their neighborhoods are alive. “It’s going to come back, going to come back spotty,” said Robert Morrison, a 34-year-old film industry worker in the energetic final stages of fixing up his trim two-story cottage on Western Street. “A spot here, and a spot there,” Mr. Morrison said.

Mr. Felton said the change was recent. “You couldn’t see nobody, a year ago,” he said. “A year ago, you couldn’t find people.”

The optimism on the ground is measured, however, and for good reason. It is unclear how many people are actually living in Gentilly: a renovated home does not mean an inhabited one, and one possible conclusion from the Dartmouth survey, by Professor Quintus R. Jett, is that the area contains less than a third of its former inhabitants.

Gregory C. Rigamer, a local consultant who specializes in demographic estimates for government clients, puts the population in the Gentilly ZIP code at 37 percent of its prestorm total, with similar figures for Broadmoor and Lakeview. In the devastated ZIP codes of New Orleans East, Mr. Rigamer estimates the current population at just under one-third its level before Katrina.

At nights and on weekends, even blocks clearly on the rebound are silent, which suggests many of the rebuilt houses remain unoccupied. Crime, surprisingly, has stayed largely in the poor neighborhoods that did not flood as badly.

“It’s still really quiet,” said Sherry Snyder, a nurse who has rebuilt her house in Broadmoor. “It’s really kind of strange.”

Government’s Erratic Course

The debate about whether New Orleans should consciously try to reduce its boundaries, however, seems to be over. When Mayor C. Ray Nagin repeated his resistance to shrinking the city’s footprint in his annual State of the City speech in May, he drew approving roars and applause.

“Don’t talk to me about, ‘We need to be smaller,’ ” the mayor said. “That’s like somebody breaking into your house, and they mess up your whole house, and then you get a judgment that says, all we’re going to do is fix up the living room and the bathroom because that’s all you need. We want the whole city fixed.”

But the course the mayor has set has been erratic, with a belated $1.1 billion rebuilding plan still unfinanced nearly three months after it was unveiled. Its author, Edward J. Blakely, a specialist brought in by Mayor Nagin to great fanfare late last year, has been bickering with a city agency over who is to oversee the plan’s enactment — assuming money is eventually found for it.

Meanwhile, the state has discovered it will not have enough money for its federally financed $7.5 billion homeowners’ aid program, Road Home, despite earlier assurances that it would, and even though only about one in five applicants — most of them entitled to it — have actually received money.

Mr. Felton, the retired mechanic, smiled slowly and bent his index figure and thumb into a zero when asked how much he had received. The story was similar up and down Gentilly and in Broadmoor, though checks have begun to trickle in over the last few weeks.

When government has not been an obstacle to the rebuilders, it has rarely been a help.

“FEMA didn’t help me,” said Oscar Lewis, a 79-year-old retired merchant seaman who ran out of money trying to rebuild his brick two-story house in Gentilly. He waited month after month for a Road Home check. “I had to work and scrape on my own,” Mr. Lewis said. Finally, a few weeks ago, after months of work, he received a $76,000 check.

On Their Own

Harry Russell’s freshly painted white-columned home on Marigny Street is a shiny beacon of normalcy. Mr. Russell, who came back before his neighbors, emphasized that he knew his way around government, having worked at City Hall as director of the mayor’s office of health policy.

“For me, part of my sanity is my background,” he said.

Now a professor of social work at Southern University of New Orleans, Mr. Russell used a combination of savings, insurance money and a Small Business Administration loan to restore his house. When almost all the work was done, he received about $80,000 from Road Home a week ago. “That kind of picks us up and puts us back where we were,” he said.

Closer to the spot where the levee breached, on a street still dotted with empty houses, Oliver Delacroix, 86 and sturdy, emphasized two pieces of good fortune: his eight children, who helped him bring his trim little cottage back to life, and his background as a bricklayer and mason, which allowed him to picture the reconstructed house, even when it was in ruins.

“Oh, I knew it could be done,” he said. “I knew very well.”

    Largely Alone, Pioneers Reclaim New Orleans, NYT, 2.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/us/nationalspecial/02orleans.html?hp

Aching for Lost Friends, but Rebuilding With Hope

July 2, 2007
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS — “Backwater.” Or “cypress swamp.” That is how antique maps of this city describe what eventually became its far eastern edge, an area that juts out from the rest of the old town, hugging Lake Pontchartrain, and home for centuries to little more than wildlife and trees.

This came as a surprise to me years ago, because by the time my family moved to eastern New Orleans in the early 1990s, it had long been drained and tamed and offered some of the most attractive undeveloped land anywhere in the city. More than anyone else, black middle-class families like mine flocked to it, architectural plans in hand, eager to escape the crime and congestion in the tight neighborhoods of older New Orleans. They wanted to build something new.

And they did, by the tens of thousands, creating the only major upscale black suburbs in the region, although a significant number of white and Vietnamese families lived there, too. If there was already a new New Orleans — in contrast to neighborhoods like the French Quarter — before Hurricane Katrina, then this was it: New Orleans East, as the locals call it, a collection of typically American suburbs for a most atypical American city, born sometime in the early 1970s.

About 20 minutes northeast of the French Quarter, in Lake Forest Estates, the house my family designed was bigger, better-built and higher than the one we left in our old neighborhood, so we thought we were safer, too.

We were wrong. During the storm, the Gulf of Mexico ended up in my parents’ living room. Deep water. Just poured right in to the first floor and stayed for a while.

Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans East in a shambles that way, although as a whole, it received less attention than needier black areas or equivalent white neighborhoods. In terms of size — both geographically and in population — it dwarfs the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview. It had close to 100,000 residents. As of May, about 30 percent of them were back.

Not everyone in the East was well off. And some areas did not flood. Just like the rest of the city, it had its ridges and natural defenses. But Hurricane Katrina still managed to shred the fabric of the black upper middle class living there, at a time when New Orleans desperately needs its black professionals to have a voice in the recovery process.

Some of our relatives and friends were too old and feeble to rebuild. They are gone from the city for good, and we ache for them. Others were too angry to stay, overcome by the levees’ unnecessary failures. We understand their need to move on.

Lake Forest Estates did not have power for five months after the storm. I remember the day the lights came on, though I was in New York City. My phone did not stop ringing with the kind of calls a person might expect from a third world country: “We got lights! We got electricity!”

Now things are moving, but slowly.

One of my parents’ favorite talk-over-the-fence neighbors, Michael Darnell, a lawyer, is not over the fence any more. (Not that there’s a fence any more, either.) Mr. Darnell has been unable to repair his house because of delays hampering the Road Home, the state grant program for people who lost their homes.

“From the perspective of African-American professionals, there’s still a question about where this city is going,” said Mr. Darnell, who is renting an apartment elsewhere in New Orleans. “I’m seeing a disintegration of what this community stood for, and people are still traumatized.”

The Currys, a warm, retired couple who lived two houses away, have moved to Baton Rouge. The minister who lives to our west has repaired his house and is back. The family to our east, who own a computer technology company, moved to Texas.

On a surface level, looking out across the street from my parents’ front door, it is hard to know that Hurricane Katrina ever visited. Every house in sight is redone, landscaped, pristine.

But the neighbors’ view of our house is not as nice, as my parents have put their energy since the storm into a new escape from southern Louisiana’s perils, a home in Forrest County, Miss., about two hours north. They do intend to reconstruct their New Orleans East house, perhaps by Thanksgiving.

People who knew New Orleans East only from the Interstate that cuts through it could easily miss its appeal. From the highway, one could not see the swampy beauty of its park space, or feel how the sky seemed bigger. And I still think some of the best crawfish in town is there, served in humble establishments along Haynes Boulevard.

But the giant Lake Forest Plaza, once a great mall, had badly deteriorated before the storm and was downright dangerous. Now it is mostly torn down, and there is not even a grocery store nearby. Increasingly, however, there is hope.

“All of my neighbors are back, and I see houses being started from the ground up,” said Carrie Phillips, a real estate agent in the area. “I’ve always thought, if New Orleans East can come back, then New Orleans is definitely coming back.”

    Aching for Lost Friends, but Rebuilding With Hope, NYT, 2.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/us/nationalspecial/02east.html

New Orleans Still at Risk, Army Data Show

June 21, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

After nearly two years of work, the Army Corps of Engineers revealed yesterday which New Orleans neighborhoods and blocks were the most vulnerable to flooding, and which were the best protected. The report shows that despite considerable improvement, large swaths of the city are still likely to be flooded in a major storm.

If a big hurricane were to hit today — producing flooding with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any year — parts of the Gentilly and Lakeview neighborhoods, in the northern half of the city, would probably still take on at least eight feet of water. Hundreds of flooded homes in those neighborhoods are being rebuilt by owners struggling to return.

But the report shows that the vulnerable areas within those neighborhoods are much smaller than they were before Hurricane Katrina — considered a 1-in-400 storm — thanks to the corps’ substantial improvements to the 350-mile levee system, the floodwalls, pumps and gates.

As part of the report, the corps established a Web site, nolarisk.usace.army.mil, that allows New Orleans residents to study the city on a block-by-block basis and learn what kind of damage they might expect with more than 150 kinds of storms. If it works as promised, the system will allow residents to determine the relative risk of living in the various neighborhoods of New Orleans — and whether nearly two years and $7 billion have made them safer.

The report clearly shows that some areas are less vulnerable than they were in 2005. But it could also potentially lead insurers and investors to think twice about supporting the rebuilding efforts in vulnerable areas or in the city as a whole.

Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, the head of civil works for the corps, said in an interview that local leaders were initially wary of the report and how it would be used, and that some said, “Oh boy, I’m not sure we can do this — because we’re trying to get people to move back in.” But, he said, “after we worked with them and showed them, they said, ‘this can really be a good tool for planning.’ ”

The analysis of the city’s risk, more than a year behind schedule and still a work in progress, is an enormously ambitious attempt to figure out just how risky it is to live in New Orleans, and is the first time the corps has released such a tool to the public anywhere in the nation. The Defense Department’s supercomputers analyzed scores of different storms, estimating wind speeds, storm surges and pathways and how they would affect every street in the city.

Some of the risk to New Orleans has been reduced, largely because of the construction of enormous gates across the mouths of the city’s three main drainage canals, which significantly raised the level of protection. Elsewhere in the greater New Orleans area, where the hurricane protection system was restored but not upgraded in a major way, the probability of damage does not change nearly as much: large parts of the Upper Ninth Ward could be expected to have two to four feet of water in a 1-in-50 flood, then and now.

A flood with a 1 percent chance of occurring would leave much of the Garden District relatively dry, as it remained during Hurricane Katrina, although a smaller patch of the neighborhoods to the north would be likely to flood.

City officials said the new tools would help them plan the city’s halting recovery. Edward J. Blakely, the hurricane recovery chief for New Orleans, said that while the maps show that “quite a bit of the city” remains vulnerable to storms, the dangers would diminish as further protection was built. Eventually, Mr. Blakely said, “the risks aren’t going to be different from those of a city in Florida.”

Karen Durham-Aguilera, the civilian director of the corps’ Task Force Hope, a nearly $6 billion hurricane protection system project in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana, suggested that the facts about New Orleans presented in the report were anything but bad. “This is good, because it shows a lowered risk,” Ms. Durham-Aguilera said.

“There’s no place where you can say the risk is absolutely zero,” she added.

As voluminous as it is, the report will nonetheless seem incomplete to many in New Orleans. The corps is not releasing the data on how the system to protect against 1 percent floods will perform, although officials said Monday that that portion of the report would be ready within weeks. That is the information that many in New Orleans want, because they know that what they have is not adequate but they might be willing to gamble that a major storm will not hit before 2011, when the stronger system is to be in place.

The data from the report will be used to help the corps determine what level of protection will be necessary as it upgrades levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates. President Bush and Congress have committed the corps to bring the level of hurricane protection up to withstand the kind of storm that would have only a 1 percent chance of striking — work that is to be complete by 2011. Congress has also ordered the corps to study ways of improving protection further, commonly referred to as the Category 5 study, referring to the strongest storms.

The risk analysis will also be used by other agencies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example, will use it to determine the 1-in-100 flood level for insurance purposes.

It is not clear, however, whether the computer model accurately represents what will happen in a storm — whether the corps has captured the complexity of a storm and the ability of the hurricane protection system to stand up to it. Engineers have said that little is known about the rate of erosion of levees from water pouring over the top and what elements of the system will function properly in a storm.

Federal officials acknowledged that it would not be easy to get suspicious local residents to trust the new maps.

“The real issue is going to be: Are the local people going to look at these maps and believe them?” said Donald Powell, the head of Gulf Coast reconstruction for the Bush administration. “And if they trust the maps, will they act upon the information?”

One of the biggest problems, Mr. Powell said, is that people have lived in New Orleans for generations and believe that the city would have been largely undamaged if the levees had held, but the new report says that the force of Hurricane Katrina would have caused extensive damage even if the levees had held.

“It’s that tension,” he said, “between trust and reality and history.”

William Borah, a New Orleans lawyer and an activist on planning issues, said he had not seen the risk analysis but that anything from the corps would be “taken with a grain of salt” because of the failure of the levees.

“Anybody that doesn’t question what the corps does subsequent to Katrina just hasn’t been around,” Mr. Borah said.

But Ed Link, the director of the corps’ investigation into the levee failures, said the report gave a “huge advantage” to New Orleans that no other city has.

“I don’t see it as putting a big target on New Orleans and chasing people away,” Mr. Link said. “I see it as showing that New Orleans is getting its arms wrapped around this issue for the future.”

    New Orleans Still at Risk, Army Data Show, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/us/21orleans.html?hp

Experts: Katrina Death Toll Still Rising

June 2, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:38 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The bodies are no longer being dragged from houses and buildings toppled by Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two years later many in the medical community think the storm is still killing.

Storm survivors are dying from the effects of both psychological and physical stress, from the dust and mold still in dwellings to financial problems to fear of crime, health experts and officials say.

''There is no doubt in my mind that Katrina is still killing our residents,'' Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard said this week.

''People with pre-existing conditions that are made worse by the stress of living here after the storm. Old people who are just giving up. People who are killing themselves because they feel they can't go on,'' Minyard said.

Some say an in-depth federal analysis is needed, despite a new state report that found no significant increase in deaths in the New Orleans area from January 2006 through June 2006. The state Department of Health and Hospitals is still compiling figures for the last six months of 2006.

Dr. Raoult Ratard, the state epidemiologist, said ''the only slight increase'' in deaths was in the first three months of 2006 in Orleans Parish.

But New Orleans medical officials say that jump, from 11.3 per 1,000 deaths to 14.3 per 1,000, -- a leap of more than 25 percent -- was anything but slight. Moreover, the report doesn't take into account evacuees who died while away from the city and were returned for burial.

''Our death rate was already high, that's huge,'' said Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department.

Some New Orleans doctors questioned the accuracy of the population figures used to determine the death rate, saying they might have been too high. DHH secretary Dr. Fred Cerise said he was comfortable with the population data, which he said came from the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The city was abandoned after Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, and many people did not begin returning until mid-2006.

The official death tolls in New Orleans stands at about 1,100. State health officials said deaths have not been listed as Katrina-related since the end of 2005, except for bodies found under storm wreckage. But Minyard said he believes the hurricane is still behind many deaths.

Dr. Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and head of a group that has monitored 3,000 exiled Katrina survivors, said reconstructing an individual's mental and physical state before death might help in determining exact causes of death.

''There are high rates of mental health problems among the survivors and previous research has found that mental disorders are predictors of earlier death rates,'' Kessler said. ''So putting the two together in New Orleans is not surprising.''

Local mental health professionals say they are encountering more people with psychological problems.

''We're seeing triple the number of people with mental health problems as we were before Katrina,'' said Leah Hedrick, social worker at Ochsner Hospital. ''Depression, suicidal, anxiety, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and along with that comes a lot more physical problems.''

Many storm-damaged hospitals are not operating fully, and that could help explain why other health facilities are seeing more patients.

Another possible sign that there are more deaths are paid death notices in The Times-Picayune. Before Katrina, the newspaper usually printed about a page daily. Now, three and four pages are not uncommon.

Stephens analyzed the death-notice pattern before and after the storm and said he believes it confirms more local people are dying.

His study will be published this month in the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, the American Medical Association's new publication on disaster management.

Many church congregations scattered after Katrina, and their bulletins that carried death notices may not be publishing.

But Stephens discounted that as a possible explanation for why the newspaper is receiving more death notices. Before Katrina, he said, it was routine to place death notices in both the newspaper and outlets such as church newsletters.

Minyard believes the medical community's different observations reach the same conclusion, and one day will be proven correct.

''Years from now when they talk about post-traumatic stress, New Orleans after Katrina will be the poster child,'' he said.

    Experts: Katrina Death Toll Still Rising, NYT, 2.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-Still-Killing.html

Louisiana Sets Deadline for Storm Damage Claims

May 31, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

The Road Home, the Louisiana grant program for homeowners who lost their houses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, is expected to cost far more than the $7.5 billion provided by the federal government, in part because many more families have applied than officials had anticipated.

As a result, Louisiana officials on Tuesday night set a July 31 deadline for applicants, who can receive up to $150,000 to repair or rebuild their houses. With the cutoff date, the state hopes to be able to figure out how much more money it needs to pay for the program; the shortfall is projected to be $2.9 billion.

The financial woes of the Road Home have set off a frenzy of finger-pointing between federal and state officials, who blame one another for the projected shortfall.

But it has stirred something close to despair among some Louisiana residents, who were already bemoaning the sluggish way the program has given out the money it does have; only 22,000 families statewide, out of 140,000 applicants, have received grants so far, for a total of $1.3 billion.

The new problem has reinforced the fears of many in New Orleans that they are being abandoned by the federal government, even as it acknowledges that its levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina.

“There’s no way they can ever make everybody whole, but they need to fix the thing they broke,” said Frank A. Silvestri, a New Orleans lawyer and co-founder of the Citizens’ Road Home Action Team, which has been critical of the program.

Evidence that the program is likely to run out of money has been building for several weeks as the state has finally begun making a significant number of grants since the inception of the Road Home nine months ago. The grants have averaged about $76,000, which is more than the roughly $60,000 the state predicted last August.

State officials say that many more houses turned out to have had severe damage than federal data indicated back when the program was created. They have also been surprised by a recent surge in applications, which are running at several hundred a day, almost two years after the storms, said Gentry Brann, director of communications for the program.

The state also expected private insurance companies to cover a larger percentage of the damage, said Walter J. Leger Jr., a lawyer and member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which created the Road Home program.

“Anecdotally, the companies aren’t paying,” Mr. Leger said. “National Flood Insurance paid out, but private insurers didn’t.” Insurance benefits are generally subtracted from grants awarded by the program.

But Mr. Leger and other state officials concede that many homeowners may have preferred to try to get larger grants from the Road Home, rather than fight with their insurers.

The Bush administration contends that the state itself created the shortfall by paying for home damage caused by wind, rather than limiting the program to flood damage. Insurance policies are more likely to cover wind damage than flood damage.

The decision to pay for wind damage added about 43,000 houses to the likely total covered by the program, at a cost of about $2.6 billion, according to data from the office of Donald E. Powell, President Bush’s coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

Even so, Mr. Powell “is not opposed to additional funding — if the state can make a clear case for more funds,” his spokeswoman, Susan Aspey, wrote in an e-mail message. “He wants to get this resolved as quickly as possible for the people of Louisiana, and he’s indicated his willingness to sit down with the governor and her staff to work towards that end.”

State officials, from the governor on down, say the program has always covered wind damage, and that they do not understand why Mr. Powell is raising the issue so late in the game. The state had a similar run-in with the Department of Housing and Urban Development over the way it paid out the grant money, and ended up changing the program in April.

Louisiana is also fighting the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more than $1 billion it was counting on for the Road Home program. FEMA says it cannot release the money — intended for hazard-mitigation efforts like elevating houses — because the Road Home discriminates against younger people by exempting people 65 and older from a requirement that grant recipients live in their rebuilt houses for three years.

Further complicating the financial picture is the fact that the state treasury is running a budget surplus of about $3 billion, which some in Washington have argued should be used to bail out the Road Home.

A United States Senate subcommittee that held a hearing on the program last week is likely to recommend ways to fix it in a report to be released in June, said Stephanie Allen, a spokeswoman for Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who is chairwoman of the subcommittee.

“She doesn’t think the federal government should be responsible for the entire bailout,” Ms. Allen said. “It should be a combined effort of the federal government and the state.”

    Louisiana Sets Deadline for Storm Damage Claims, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/us/31road.html?hp

Clinton says rebuilding New Orleans is an 'American obligation'

19.5.2007
AP
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that rebuilding New Orleans is an "American obligation" the Bush administration has not met since Hurricane Katrina struck.

"If talk, bureaucracy and promises were enough, we would've rebuilt New Orleans three times over by now," the Democratic president candidate told graduates at Dillard University, the historically black school devastated by the storm in August 2005.

"What you do need is action, action supported by our federal government but driven right here in New Orleans and in the surrounding parishes by people who understand the reality on the ground, action that leads to real, measurable improvements, not six months from now, not a year from now, but right now," the New York senator said.

Katrina left the campus under up to 10 feet (3 meters) of water and caused an estimated $400 million (euro296.8 million) in damage. Several buildings remain shuttered and the school administration works from a downtown office. But there were few obvious signs Saturday of the aftermath. Buildings were whitewashed and the grounds were lush with green grass.

"When Americans suffer, America does as well. Today, I want to be very clear: Rebuilding this city is not just an obligation of New Orleans or Louisiana. It is an American obligation," Clinton said.

Clinton cited a plan she outlined Friday in a meeting with community leaders that she said would speed the pace of recovery and assess progress in shoring up levees. A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, Amber Wilkerson, said the government is working to rebuild the city and that Clinton appears to be "hard at work politicizing these critical rebuilding efforts to appease her liberal base."

Mayor Ray Nagin, who attended the graduation, said Clinton raised points he has been making for months, including a need to streamline government.

It is time for action, rather than words, he said. Asked whether he thought Clinton's speech was simply more talk, he said: "If it's heeded, it's going to be tremendous."

Clinton's speech drew applause from the crowd gathered beneath oak trees for the second commencement since Katrina.

One student, Alecia Heffner, said she had hoped the address would have included more "uplifting things."

Clinton, who received an honorary doctorate, praised university leaders and the 180 or so graduates for their commitment to restoring Dillard. Many marched at the ceremony with flags bearing the names of schools that took in displaced students while Dillard worked to reopen.

"I hope that one day, years from now, you will bring your children and your grandchildren here, to this city and this campus, you will tell them about what you did in facing the great flood and you will tell them that you loved this school too much to leave it behind," Clinton said.

Dillard evacuated two days before Katrina. Students did not return to campus until more than a year later, university spokeswoman Karen Celestan said. Classes for the spring semester of the 2005-06 school year were held at a downtown hotel where students and faculty also stayed, she said.

Enrollment this year was about 1,124 students, roughly half the pre-Katrina total, she said.

Katrina struck New Orleans and the Mississippi coast on Aug. 29, 2005, flooding 80% of the city. Hurricane Rita struck about a month later in southwest Louisiana. The region's recovery from the storms have been sluggish, and residents widely blame government ineffectiveness.

Clinton's proposals to civil leaders included the appointment of a recovery manager who would report directly to the White House and would better organize federal aid to the region.

    Clinton says rebuilding New Orleans is an 'American obligation' , UT, 19.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-05-19-clinton-nola_N.htm

In Divided New Orleans

May 15, 2007
Editorial

When President Bush spoke to the nation soon after Hurricane Katrina, he was resolute that the city would be rebuilt. “We will do what it takes,” he said. We — the federal, state and city governments; elected officials and the citizens who hire them — have failed spectacularly. Homes and schools remain empty or imaginary; evacuees and survivors wait in cramped trailers, unable to return or rebuild. A huge silence still hangs over the Lower Ninth Ward, a place every American should see, to witness firsthand how truckloads of promises have filled New Orleans’s vast devastation with nothing.

That the Lower Ninth is overwhelmingly black is not irrelevant. African-Americans were the predominant and poorest members of this city before the storm, they bore the worst of it and have the farthest journey back to stability. A study issued last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation, based on interviews last fall with residents of Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, maps the outlines of a sharp racial divide.

In Orleans Parish, twice as many African-Americans as whites said their lives were still “very” or “somewhat” disrupted. Seventy-two percent of blacks said they had problems getting health care, compared with 32 percent of whites. Blacks were more likely to say that their financial status, physical and mental health, and job security had worsened since the storm. And they expressed considerably more anxiety than whites about the sturdiness of the rebuilt levees, the danger from future Katrinas and the prospect of living without enough money or health care, or a decent, affordable home.

There was a consensus about broad categories of the recovery: solid majorities thought there had been at least some progress in restoring basic services, reopening schools and business and fixing levees. But in three vital areas — rebuilding neighborhoods, controlling crime and increasing the supply of affordable housing — most agreed that there had been no progress or “not too much.”

Even with the constant trickle of bad news, you can find minimal improvements. Thousands of building permits have been issued. A crisis was recently averted when the Bush administration extended temporary housing assistance for tens of thousands of displaced families. Some government housing subsidies that were to expire at the end of August will continue until March 2009.

It is also encouraging that administration of the housing program will shift from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has always been the logical choice, given its experience in housing needy families. Other positive signs include the halting progress toward a workable redevelopment plan, and a recent finding that the city’s population had grown to above half of its level before the storm.

The Kaiser survey even found signs of hope when it tested for resilience in a proud city. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they were optimistic about New Orleans’s future. And only 11 percent said they planned to leave.

Their faith must not be betrayed. Residents in the survey were keenly aware that their city’s fitful recovery would be devastated if the levees failed again. They put strong levees above all other priorities, including fighting crime and even basic services like electricity and water. And yet National Geographic has reported that an engineer has found signs that levees were poorly rebuilt and are already eroding. There is no room for error here.

    In Divided New Orleans, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/opinion/15tue1.html

For Katrina victims, financial pain endures

6.5.2007
USA Today
By Kathy Chu

NEW ORLEANS — For Gloria Vallery, the 20 months since Hurricane Katrina have brought a succession of financial agonies.

Too little insurance money to cover her property damage. Delays in getting a state grant for hurricane victims. Personal debt of about $40,000 to rebuild her home.

On a fixed monthly income of $1,000, Vallery worries sometimes about how she'll make ends meet. The 71-year-old retiree lives alone in a one-story, brick-and-wood clapboard house in a quiet East New Orleans neighborhood.

"It kind of gets the best of me," she says haltingly, wiping tears. "It's depressing, you know."

Vallery's plight is emblematic of the financial calamities that continue to afflict residents of Louisiana and Mississippi as they struggle to recover from the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Debt is swelling and credit is suffering as residents deplete savings and take out loans to meet expenses. People of all income levels are affected, but the most desperate are those who had the least before Katrina hit.

It's not yet clear how severely these residents' financial lives will be damaged over the long run. But foreclosures — fed in part by subprime adjustable-rate mortgages that are resetting to higher interest rates — are rising faster in Louisiana and Mississippi than the rest of the USA. (Subprime mortgages are loans with higher rates for those with impaired credit.) Bankruptcies that allow consumers to save their homes also have climbed faster in the last year in these states than they have nationally.

There are some positive economic signs along the Gulf Coast. Available labor is rebounding, tourists are returning and state grant money is starting to flow more freely. But for many residents, those economic gauges have yet to produce many tangible benefits.

That's because delays in insurance and government payouts have forced residents to rely on high-cost loans. Some can't afford to rebuild because of the high costs of insurance and building materials. Many just aren't earning enough.

Wages have risen in New Orleans and in Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss., the areas Katrina hit hardest. But many businesses have yet to reopen, so some returning residents have taken on lower-paying jobs.

Albert and Dorothy Levy's home in Arabi, a neighborhood six blocks from New Orleans' devastated Lower Ninth Ward, was flooded and destroyed. The Levys moved to Aberdeen, Miss., but returned a few months ago to gut their house and await a state grant.

Albert took a job at a Winn-Dixie supermarket, earning $10 an hour, because the school where he'd been a teacher was destroyed. Living costs are higher, the Levys say, and they're struggling to keep up. After Katrina, their mortgage lender gave them a six-month reprieve without payments. After that, the lender demanded all past-due payments immediately.

"We lived in that house for 20 years, and we were never late," says Dorothy, 56. "They started calling us, harassing us after six months, saying they'd foreclose."

Compared with some, the Levys are fortunate. Their bank delayed foreclosure after a consumer group, Acorn Housing, intervened, Dorothy says. The group tries to persuade lenders to delay foreclosures. The couple were told last month that a state grant was on its way to help them pay off the mortgage.

"I'm cautiously happy," Dorothy Levy says. "I had given up."

Others have received no such help. After Katrina, credit card issuers gave storm victims reprieves from paying their bills for three to six months; many mortgage lenders gave homeowners a year or so. Those moratoriums have largely ended, but most victims' finances haven't recovered.

Along the Gulf Coast, there are enduring signs of financial distress:

Debt loads are rising

Credit counselors and bankruptcy lawyers here say debt loads ballooned after residents lost their homes. Katrina left major damage to 287,000 homes in Louisiana and Mississippi. In New Orleans, about half the pre-storm population of 434,493 hasn't returned.

Displaced families have faced moving costs and often two housing payments: rent on their new dwellings, plus mortgage payments on their damaged homes.

"People have been trying to finance this crisis on credit cards," says Allen Flowers, a bankruptcy lawyer in Mississippi. "You have someone after Katrina being promised money and using credit cards because they think Uncle Sam is coming."

Victims' family and friends are affected, as well: "If you had relatives in other states, those people had to rack up debt to help you," says Anel Moises of Credit Card Management Services in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Even before Katrina, Mississippi and Louisiana suffered from some of the highest poverty rates in the USA. The extra financial stress from Katrina "puts a pinch on (residents') pocketbooks at a time when employment and income growth are not keeping pace," says Ivan Miestchovich of the University of New Orleans' Center for Economic Development.

It isn't only the poor; middle-income families are struggling, too. In Gentilly, La., the windows on Karen Durand's brick home have been boarded up and the house gutted. The three-bedroom home — on a street where just six of 24 homeowners have returned — was damaged by Katrina's wind, then flooded, says Durand, 44. She bought a house in nearby LaPlace and charged about $35,000 on credit cards to furnish it.

"It was like starting over," says Durand.

Some homeowners have been upset by their lenders' unwillingness to work with them once a payment moratorium has ended.

"They didn't realize that they were behind a year, and then they'd have to pay a year's worth of premiums" at one time, says Charleen Webb of the Biloxi office of Consumer Credit Counseling.

Robert Taylor of the Louisiana Bankers Association says he hasn't seen any lender based in that state require full payment after the moratorium. But "if (lenders) are located in a faraway place, and their future is not tied to the people here, it's a different situation."

Payments still delayed

The pace of insurance payouts and state grants is rising, but not enough to shore up many homeowners' shaky finances. Hundreds of people are still fighting insurers over storm damage. Thousands are awaiting state grants to close the gap between insurance and federal government payouts and their home's appraised value.

In Louisiana, the $7.5 billion Road Home grant program had paid on only 7% of the 132,378 homeowners' applications as of Wednesday. The state expects a shortfall of up to $3 billion because of higher-than-expected payouts.

Louisiana changed its program earlier this year to try to deliver money to homeowners more quickly. "We have been fighting every day to get money out as fast as we can," says Andy Kopplin of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, an agency created after Katrina to coordinate state recovery efforts.

Bertha Spadoni, 81, of Gentilly, La., has lived in a FEMA trailer next to her gutted house for eight months. She got about $65,000 from a flood insurance policy, enough to pay off her mortgage but not rebuild. She plans to use her Road Home money to do that; she recently got a check that she'll use to rebuild her home.

"It was nerve-racking while I waited" for the check, she says.

Many factors can delay payments. Donna Sanford of the Mississippi Development Authority says before her agency can issue a grant, it must check for liens on a home and any insurance payouts.

This money can't come soon enough for Leaster Archie, who is renting an apartment because her Biloxi home was wiped out. She applied for a grant last fall but still hasn't received it. "We need help," Archie says. "I need a house."

Foreclosures increasing

Foreclosures are up in Mississippi and Louisiana after being artificially depressed in the year or so after Katrina because of payment moratoriums some lenders gave.

At the end of 2005, new foreclosures in those states fell, even as foreclosures nationwide inched up. But by the fourth quarter of 2006, new foreclosures in Mississippi and Louisiana — at 1.0% and 0.7% of all loans, respectively — exceeded those states' pre-Katrina levels and the national average of 0.6%.

Delinquencies are a warning sign for foreclosures. Mississippi and Louisiana have historically suffered from some of the highest mortgage payment delinquency rates in the country. Now, the two states' delinquency rates are even higher than they were before Katrina as homeowners struggle to pay bills.

Tom Collens of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater New Orleans says, "Between delinquencies and foreclosures, there's this limbo where all these people are waiting on money."

The sharp increase in foreclosures along the Gulf Coast stems partly from "pent-up demand" from lenders that waited until recently to foreclose on abandoned homes, says Jay Brinkmann of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Melvin Rabb, 54, was already in financial straits before the hurricane. Now, his lender is trying to foreclose on his New Orleans home, according to Rabb.

He says he applied for a grant from the Road Home program in November. Five months later, he says, he's received nothing. Acorn Housing got his lender to delay foreclosure, but Rabb wonders how long the lender will wait.

Chapter 13 bankruptcies up

As payment moratoriums have ended, Chapter 13 bankruptcies — known as "save-your-home" filings — have risen more quickly in Louisiana and Mississippi in the past year than nationally.

Bankruptcy analysts say it's because consumers in the devastated states are trying to save their homes from foreclosure. "There's a direct relationship between Chapter 13 filings and foreclosures," says Henry Sommer, a Philadelphia bankruptcy lawyer.

Chapter 13 bankruptcy typically requires a debt-repayment plan; filers can repay past-due mortgage bills under a payment plan that stretches up to five years. By contrast, Chapter 7 bankruptcy erases most debts but usually requires you to pay past-due mortgage bills upon filing. That isn't a realistic option for many Gulf Coast residents.

Nationally, the gap between the two types of bankruptcies narrowed after a 2005 law made it harder to erase debts through Chapter 7. Chapter 7s still exceed Chapter 13s nationally — but not in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to Lundquist Consulting data.

Sam Gerdano of the American Bankruptcy Institute says it's too early to tell whether Chapter 13 filings will continue to exceed Chapter 7 filings in Mississippi and Louisiana. Homeowners, he notes, might file for Chapter 13 but then convert to a Chapter 7 if they can't keep up with a debt-repayment plan.

It's likely to get worse. Research by Robert Lawless, a law professor at the University of Illinois, found that after major hurricanes, bankruptcy filings in affected areas rise sharply after 12 to 36 months. Yet because of Katrina's widespread destruction and the "massive displacement" of residents, bankruptcy filings could take longer to peak and ripple across the USA, Lawless says.

Rabb, the New Orleans homeowner, says that he'd like to rebuild but that the longer he has to wait for state aid, the less likely it is that he will. The wait makes "people feel like they don't want to go home," he says.

Contributing: Barbara Hansen

    For Katrina victims, financial pain endures, UT, 6.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/money/2007-05-06-katrina-cover-usat_N.htm

Gulf Hits Snags in Rebuilding Public Works

March 31, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

MERAUX, La., March 30 — Even before Hurricane Katrina ruined it, the St. Bernard Parish Fire Station No. 6 was not much to look at, just a cinderblock and sheet-metal cube whose contents included a fire truck, a kitchen and a paint-by-numbers rendering of the Last Supper.

Nineteen months after the storm sent nine feet of water through it, the fire station remains unusable. One wall is missing; the ceiling has fallen in; a uniform still on its hanger lies crumpled amid the dried mud and tumbled furniture.

None of St. Bernard Parish’s 10 fire houses have been rebuilt, even though local officials estimate that 26,000 people have returned to the area, just east of New Orleans. In fact, across southern Louisiana and Mississippi, many school buildings remain closed, public water systems leak, roads crumble and libraries molder. Local governments cannot afford to fix them, and billions of dollars in recovery assistance promised by the federal government have only started to trickle to the region.

Local and state government officials have blamed a federal law for the failure to invest in these public works. They associate the problem with the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, the federal law that finances the rebuilding of local government infrastructure. It imposes requirements for receiving money that many towns and parishes here say they cannot meet.

The Stafford law, intended to prevent fraud, requires local governments to put up 10 percent of the cost of building projects and to advance money for repairs and rebuilding in the hope of being reimbursed later.

But state and local officials say they have no money to put up for the match, which the federal government has refused to waive for Hurricane Katrina recovery, even though it did so for New York City after Sept. 11 and for Florida after Hurricane Andrew.

There is plenty of finger-pointing between Washington and governments here over the slow pace of rebuilding, and Louisiana’s tattered reputation for financial accountability has played a role in Washington’s refusal to bend the rules.

But local officials also complain of skeins of red tape that complicate efforts to meet the law, and describe a system so geared to ensuring that federal taxpayers do not pay for “improvements” in local infrastructure that it is hard to achieve goals, like making aging sewer systems functional or merging schools to adapt to changed population patterns.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s stated goal is to return the area to the way it was before the storm. Mark C. Smith, the public information officer for the Louisiana agency that distributes federal infrastructure rebuilding aid to local governments, uses this analogy to explain the situation: “If you had a 1981 Chevrolet Chevette with a leaky radiator, FEMA will buy you a 1981 Chevrolet Chevette and poke a hole in the radiator.”

The state agency has concluded, Mr. Smith said, “that the Stafford Act is grossly and horrendously unable to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.”

Similar sentiments have been voiced by officials including Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans and Donald E. Powell, President Bush’s coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

“I’m not sure the Stafford Act anticipated a catastrophic event such as Katrina,” Mr. Powell said in a telephone interview. He said he would like to see the law allow for more flexibility and faster decision-making: “Being able to adjust to the situation at hand, like you would in the private sector,” he explained.

R. David Paulison, the agency’s director, has made FEMA better prepared to deal with disasters and more financially and legally accountable for the money it has spent, Aaron Walker, the agency press secretary, wrote in an e-mail message.

The federal government has estimated that it will ultimately give Louisiana’s hardest-hit parishes and local governments $4.25 billion to cover their emergency operating costs and to repair damaged infrastructure. FEMA said that it had paid the state $2.83 billion to pass on to local governments, but that the state had distributed only $1.28 billion as of March 23.

The state has said it has not distributed all the money in part because it does its own screening to make sure projects are eligible. Almost all of the money that has been distributed has been for emergency expenses like overtime pay, debris removal and generators. So far, the biggest complaint in Louisiana was about the requirement that local governments pay 10 percent of the costs of their reconstruction programs. The cash is not there in areas like devastated St. Bernard Parish, where every government building was flooded and the tax base remains damaged.

“I’m not sure how we would pay anything,” said David E. Peralta, the chief administrative officer of the parish. “I don’t have any money.”

Mr. Peralta and other local officials are hoping that the 10 percent requirement will be waived, as it was for New York and Florida. Indeed, an ambitious new rebuilding plan just announced by Mayor Nagin in New Orleans was counting on the waiver to make available about $324 million for public projects there.

The Bush administration said it gave Louisiana hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to cover the local matches and so has refused to waive that requirement outright. But the federal grant money was funneled through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and came with significant strings, which state officials said could make it unusable.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, has been trying to get Congress to waive the match. The pending spending bill for Iraq includes a measure for that, but President Bush has opposed the waiver (and has threatened to veto the bill because it includes a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq).

In addition, there have been disputes over what constitutes damage, which Washington can pay for under the law, and what are improvements, which it cannot.

The New Orleans water and sewer system is working but needs federal dollars for major permanent repairs to bring it back to where it was before the storm, said Marcia A. St. Martin, executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board.

But federal officials have contended that many of the system’s problems are a result of poor maintenance and have balked at financing many repairs. FEMA recently hired an outside consultant to help it figure out which of the board’s problems can be attributed to the hurricane.

“While we must continue to act as a compassionate agency, FEMA has the responsibility to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s dollars,” Mr. Walker, the FEMA press secretary, wrote in an e-mail message.

Ms. St. Martin said the problem was not with FEMA but with the Stafford Act: “FEMA is bound by regulations that did not envision the loss of a total community.”

Some local officials have said that problems may only increase as they move from performing straight-forward repairs to tackling knottier rebuilding issues.

“The problems now are more complex,” said Doris Voitier, the superintendent of St. Bernard’s schools. She has been widely praised for quickly reopening two of the district’s 15 schools after the storm, and a third will be ready soon.

But even that has been a struggle. The cost of repairs was far more than FEMA had predicted, and now Ms. Voitier is facing decisions about moving some schools to safer locations as well as merging some to address population shifts. While she is hopeful about recouping the money she has already spent to open schools, she said, “This next phase, I don’t feel as good about it.”

Relocating and merging firehouses are also under consideration in St. Bernard Parish, said Thomas Stone, the fire chief. The International Association of Fire Fighters, a labor union, is trying to lobby for money so the fire stations can be rebuilt as stronger and safer structures, not simply replaced, said Brien Ruiz, a captain in the fire department and president of the union local.

Chief Stone is concerned that otherwise there will not be enough money to do the job properly.

“FEMA’s goal is to take us back to Day 1,” Chief Stone said. “My goal is to rebuild the fire department, something I loved that has been destroyed” along with his own home and his community.

    Gulf Hits Snags in Rebuilding Public Works, NYT, 31.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/us/31fema.html?hp

New Orleans Proposes to Invest in 17 Areas

March 30, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, March 29 — New Orleans unveiled its latest redevelopment plan Thursday, choosing 17 zones where the city has decided to concentrate resources in order to stimulate investment and renewal.

The 17 development zones, each about a half-mile in diameter, are scattered throughout New Orleans. They vary from a devastated shopping plaza in the eastern section of the city, to blocks in the ruined Lower Ninth Ward and to areas not hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina but still in need of renewal, as officials put it, including the old St. Roch Market in the Bywater area.

The plan is at least the fourth such effort since the storm, and at about $1.1 billion, notably more modest than its predecessors.

Its modesty provided some hope that, unlike the other plans that have been shelved or are in limbo, the outline presented at City Hall by Mayor C. Ray Nagin and his recovery chief, Edward J. Blakely, may come to fruition in some form.

Indeed, Mr. Blakely, an academic and a recognized expert in disaster recovery, promised “cranes on the skyline” by September. But where exactly they will be, and what they will be doing, was unclear from Thursday’s summary presentation.

While the city that tourists know has regained much of its old life, many other areas that were blighted long before the storm or that have become lifeless since, have yet to come back.

The hope is that if these 17 limited areas are redeveloped, they will become catalysts for further development around them.

Under the plan, some of the public investment will be used as loans and unspecified “other incentives” to private developers, and some will be used for the development of public works like libraries and clinics.

A common historical thread is that the designated areas are “all centered on the old markets, on which the city was built in the first place,” Mr. Blakely said, referring to public market buildings like the St. Roch, that once were neighborhood hubs.

The bulk of the money will be used on citywide projects like park improvements and traffic lights.

Development in the 17 areas will be “driven by incentives and a market-driven approach,” Mr. Nagin said at a City Hall news conference. He has long maintained that the economic market will guide New Orleans’s recovery, a process that has been playing out in the 19 months since the hurricane, though not necessarily to the city’s advantage. Developers, for instance, have been fearful of making large-scale commitments in the absence of an authoritative plan, and former residents who lack resources to re-establish themselves have yet to return.

Finger-pointing, bitterness and unrealistic expectations have helped to dissolve previous planning exercises that have emanated in a flurry since the hurricane. One recent proposal called for spending $14 billion on a grab-bag of ideas, with no parts of the city, no matter how vulnerable or dangerous, excluded.

This latest concept, with its narrow geographical focus and limited budget, struck some planners as more realistic.

“It’s promising to see somebody who is giving us a program that’s based on a realistic assessment of potential resources,” said Janet Howard, president of the Bureau of Governmental Research, a nonprofit public-policy organization here.

Still, the money is not a sure thing. The biggest chunk, $324 million, depends on Congress’s agreeing to waive Louisiana’s share of federally financed disaster recovery projects. President Bush is against forgiving this 10 percent match, which is mandated under the law, but the idea of a waiver — as was provided to New York after the Sept. 11 attacks and to Florida after Hurricane Andrew — has strong support in Congress.

Another $260 million would come from bonds already approved by voters, and $300 million more would come from a new bond sale based on selling the city’s blighted-property holdings to developers.

“I expect by the end of the summer you’re going to see a lot of activity,” Mr. Nagin said Thursday — a promise citizens here have heard before.

    New Orleans Proposes to Invest in 17 Areas, NYT, 30.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/us/30orleans.html

Census shows Katrina's effects on populations

22.3.2007
USA TODAY
By Brad Heath, Paul Overberg and Haya El Nasser

Hurricane Katrina drained nearly 300,000 people from coastal areas between Texas and the Florida Panhandle, according to new government population estimates that tally for the first time the storm's devastating toll on the Gulf Coast.

Katrina also doubled the rate of population growth in nearby counties, which absorbed tens of thousands of people the hurricane displaced, the Census Bureau's estimates show. The estimates for July 1, 2006, being released today, are the first broad measure of the hurricane's demographic imprint in the 10 months after the hurricane waterlogged New Orleans and splintered houses across Mississippi's coast.

The losses are "significant but manageable" across much of the coast, says Gregory Rigamer, president of GCR & Associates, a New Orleans planning firm. But he says New Orleans and other hard-hit places still face "a colossal challenge, and one that puts those communities at risk."

Together, 22 coastal counties in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida that were declared disaster areas by the federal government because of Katrina lost 10% of their pre-storm population, enough people to populate a city the size of Newark, N.J. That swath of beach towns and bayous had been growing slowly in the years before the August 2005 hurricane.

The losses were most pronounced around New Orleans. The city lost half its population — about 229,000 people — between July 2005 and July 2006. Neighboring St. Bernard Parish lost three-quarters of its 65,000 residents.

"We lost everything," says David Peralta, the chief administrative officer in St. Bernard Parish, which suffered some of the hurricane's worst flooding. He says more people have returned since July, but the pace is slowing. Fewer than half of the 13,900 parish homeowners who have applied for state rebuilding aid said they intend to come back, according to state reports.

"The people who are going to come back are going to come back this year," he says. "But lots of people have been gone so long they're getting entrenched where they are. They're not coming back."

Mississippi's three coastal counties, where damage was severe but less widespread, had smaller declines. Hancock County lost 13% of its residents, and Harrison County, which includes Gulfport, lost 11%. Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr says that despite the damage, he doubts the Census figures are accurate. "I think it's almost the exact opposite. Our figures show we're growing," he says.

Absorbing many of the people who fled Katrina were places such as Tangipahoa Parish, La., northwest of New Orleans, where the population grew five times as fast in the year after the storm as in the year before. Pearl River County, Miss., grew almost 9%. All told, the 149 counties within 100 miles of the coastal area hit by Katrina added 270,000 people from mid-2005 to mid-2006, more than twice as many as the year before.

"It's been hard for these places. For some, it's been a decade's worth of growth in one year," says Kirby Goidel, a political science professor at Louisiana State University. That's led to crowded roads and overflowing classrooms.

Elsewhere in the USA, Census estimates show that many Sun Belt counties continue to rank among the nation's fastest-growing areas:

•Maricopa County, Ariz., which includes Phoenix, added 130,000 residents from 2005 to 2006, the most of any county. Texas had five of the 10 top numerical gainers. Harris County, which includes Houston, gained about 123,000, many of them Katrina evacuees.

•Georgia had 14 of the USA's 100 counties registering the highest growth rates from 2005 to 2006, the most of any state. Texas had 13 and Florida, 12.

High taxes and housing costs continue to play a major role in population shifts, particularly in the New York region, experts say.

"In places like Nassau and Suffolk (counties on Long Island), housing is so expensive that you're losing a lot of young people to other states where housing is more affordable," says James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Immigration from abroad helps New York and New Jersey make up the difference and gain population overall.

"The exurbanization of the New York metro area is benefiting eastern Pennsylvania," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution.

"Taxes are so much cheaper in Pennsylvania that people can maintain their jobs in New Jersey but can buy a heck of a lot more house in Pennsylvania," Hughes says.

The flight from expensive Northeastern metro areas also is fueling phenomenal growth in Sun Belt states such as North Carolina, where the economy is strong.

Mecklenburg County, home of booming financial center and NASCAR capital Charlotte, grew on all fronts: total population up 3.9% in one year to 827,445; net gains from other counties of 18,126 people, up 22.3%; net jump in immigrants of 5.6%, or more than 4,500 people.

    Census shows Katrina's effects on populations, UT, 22.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2007-03-22-new-orleans-census_N.htm

Strike at Big Shipyard Is Yet Another Effect of Katrina

March 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

PASCAGOULA, Miss., March 12 — The long arm of Hurricane Katrina has pushed thousands off the job and on strike at one of the nation’s biggest shipyards here, workers and union officials say.

On Thursday, nearly 7,000 workers went on strike at the Ingalls shipyard, owned by Northrop Grumman, which builds ships for the Navy. On the picket line Monday, strikers said they were demanding better wages and benefits to make up for sharp post-Katrina increases in the price of everything from milk to gas to rent, which they said are bringing family finances to the breaking point.

The walkout here is believed to be the first major strike related to Hurricane Katrina, which continues to disrupt many aspects of life up and down the Gulf Coast. Few places were as hard-hit as this small industrial town, where the water crept halfway up downtown and the beachfront was wiped out, and workers spoke Monday of losing homes, cars and a way of life to the storm.

They left the shipyard, which has supported this region for decades, after rejecting a modest increase in the $18.32 an hour many now make. Workers here said the wage rise would be wiped out by a steep increase in health insurance premiums, and would be inadequate to counter the storm’s lingering fallout.

They earn some of the highest wages in the area, at Mississippi’s largest employer. But many workers said they were still struggling, speaking of payday loans from the company credit union just to buy gasoline. They said the company’s offer of a $2.50-per-hour raise over three years was not good enough, with local rents and house prices having doubled, in some cases, and a $2.59 gallon of milk now costing $4.19. Throw in a proposed $50-per-month health premium increase, and the raise disappears, they said.

“Folks have already been through a hard time with Katrina,” said Willie Hammond, a forklift driver and father of three. “They left their houses to get this company up and running, and this is how they show their appreciation? It was an insult to the employees, that little offer they made us.”

Bill George, a pipe welder, said prices in the area had quadrupled since the storm. “Half the people here are living in trailers,” he said.

Natasha Smith, a painter, said her rent had risen to $801 a month, from $669. “We’re single parents, and we can’t make it on what they’re paying us,” she said.

A company spokesman said Monday that there were no plans for negotiations. In a statement, Northrop Grumman said its offer was “fair and competitive,” and noted that other company plants in the region had accepted it. The company added: “It was our desire that this labor agreement address the financial challenges of Katrina, and we believe the proposed contract did just that.” Workers sharply disputed that contention, however.

“Katrina took everything, and now they’re trying to take the main thing, our dignity,” said Shirley Hayes, who oversees shipments on the assembly line. “They’re just playing us cheap,” she said.

John Reed, an electrician, said, “We’re living out here paycheck to paycheck, and we’re tired of it.”

Like other strikers, Mr. Reed was standing near the dusty median of the plant’s long entrance road, which was picket central on Monday. The strikers had set up tents and barbecue grills in the mild spring weather, and the blues blared from giant speakers. The shipyard’s major projects — a giant destroyer and several transport ships — loomed in the distance on the Mississippi Sound, and seagulls whirled overhead.

The shipyard has been a mainstay in Pascagoula since before World War II. Dozens of businesses here depend on its paychecks, and at quitting time the local roads are clogged. The destroyer Cole was repaired here after the terrorist attack on its hull, and over the years the yard has turned out cruisers, destroyers, submarines and ammunition ships.

Workers have not struck the plant since 1999, and local officials speak fearfully about the effects of a prolonged strike. Still, there appeared to be considerable support for the workers in town — grocery stores have donated ice, water and hot dogs.

With the company not budging, the strikers were vowing to settle in for the long haul. “If we can survive Katrina, we can survive this,” Mr. Reed said.

Indeed, the workers here displayed a remarkable nonchalance about the hardships ahead. Bobby Hinger, the steward of the carpenters’ shop, stayed at the plant during the storm, water up to his neck. Then, he said: “They gave us a steak dinner and a jacket that don’t fit us, and they said, ‘See ya.’ This isn’t about being greedy. It’s about being paid what we’re worth.”

    Strike at Big Shipyard Is Yet Another Effect of Katrina, NYT, 13.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/us/13strike.html

In New Orleans, Progress at Last in the Lower Ninth Ward

February 23, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 22 — The first new houses built in the Lower Ninth Ward since Hurricane Katrina were turned over to their owners on Thursday, creating a small island of hope in a sea of ruin.

Side by side, sparkling and bright on Delery Street at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, the two houses unveiled at a ceremony on Thursday stand out in a landscape grimly frozen since the storm. The twin pastel variants on traditional New Orleans architecture sit incongruously whole amid block after block of ruined shells with doors swinging open and windows gaping wide.

Empty during the day and dark at night, this area is a long way from being a neighborhood again, even though it has been the focus of intensive volunteer efforts and organizing since the storm. The destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was working-class and black before the hurricane, and its subsequent failure to begin recovering, have become symbols for what some see as inequities in this city’s halting revival.

That symbolism was much in evidence at the ceremony, a gathering of the homeowners and the varied volunteer forces that built the $125,000 solid pine houses, which officials said are elevated five feet and designed to resist hurricane-force winds. It was an occasion to look past the catastrophe that sent a wall of water rushing into the Lower Ninth Ward 18 months ago, at least for the moment. If the levees fail again and a similar volume of water comes through, the new houses will take only two feet of water, the contractor said.

There were promises on Thursday to bring the neighborhood back, particularly from Acorn, the nonprofit neighborhood group that organized the construction and helped finance the two houses. There was cheering, there were plaques for the volunteers, and there were speeches by politicians and preachers.

And there were the two sturdy women who had been next-door neighbors for 25 years until Hurricane Katrina blew their houses away, the owners Gwendolyn Guice and Josephine Butler, who received the keys to the new houses on Thursday.

Acorn and the volunteers built the houses on the same spot as the women’s original ones, and both women seemed overcome at being back.

“I’m all over hoops,” Ms. Guice said, switching between tears and smiles as she happily showed off her trim little green house, a subtle modification of the classic New Orleans front-to-back-hall style.

Looking out the back at a nearby school building with a collapsed roof and a muddy vacant lot where there was once a house, Ms. Guice was adamant that Thursday represented a hopeful beginning on a street that once sheltered many solid homeowners.

“A lot of people are just sitting back, waiting and seeing,” Ms. Guice said.

Her re-installment and Ms. Butler’s, she insisted, would help draw people back. And given the privations of her long exile, much of it spent in Houston, she would not be fazed by living in the ward’s darkness and isolation, she suggested.

She showed no regrets about the fate of her old house.

“I never did find the den,” Ms. Guice said. “It just shoved straight off. It might be floating in the gulf.”

Still, the complications of the demonstration project on Delery Street raise questions about its usefulness as a prototype. The two houses were financed by Acorn and a California bank, and the two women are planning to repay their loans using their insurance proceeds and money they hope will be forthcoming from Louisiana’s Road Home housing aid program. Louisiana State University’s School of Architecture helped design the houses, students from the school helped build them, young people from Covenant House did odd jobs, a church provided landscaping, and even the novelist Richard Ford, who recently moved back to the city, pitched in.

How often this process could be replicated is unclear, though Acorn has money for more loans. Some believe that a neighborhood as destitute as this one cannot come back without large-scale intervention.

“I think we have a problem of quantity, and anything that can’t be delivered in quantity is not a suitable prototype, regardless of the fantastic intentions,” said Andrés Duany, the Miami architect and planner who has played a leading role in this city’s efforts at rebuilding. “The verification is not aesthetics, not the degree of good will; it’s quantity.”

But under Thursday’s bright sun, the focus was not on the hurdles.

“If you try not to focus on how bad everything is, you can focus on what is good,” Allan Jones, an electrician who worked on the two houses, said as he surveyed the bleak landscape. “There is potential.”

Mr. Ford spoke at the ceremony of the “valiant and hopeful house-raising,” and those words captured the spirit of an enterprise that seemed as much a challenge to the future as a foundation for something new.

When Ms. Butler moved to the area nearly 60 years ago, it was still a semi-wilderness, recalled Tanya Harris, her granddaughter and an Acorn official.

“This was a shot in the dark,” Ms. Harris said. “This was a leap of faith.”

    In New Orleans, Progress at Last in the Lower Ninth Ward, NYT, 23.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23ninth.html

In Setback for New Orleans, Fed-Up Residents Give Up

February 16, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 15 — After nearly a decade in the city of their dreams, Kasandra Larsen and her fiancé, Dylan Langlois, climbed into a rented moving truck on Marais Street last Sunday, pointed it toward New Hampshire, and said goodbye.

Not because of some great betrayal — they had, after all, come back after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina — but a series of escalating indignities: the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend; the announced move to Nashville by Ms. Larsen’s employer; the human feces deposited on their roof by, they suspect, the contractors next door; the two burglaries in the space of a week; and, not least, the overnight wait for the police to respond.

A year ago, Ms. Larsen, 36, and Mr. Langlois, 37, were hopeful New Orleanians eager to rebuild and improve the city they adored. But now they have joined hundreds of the city’s best and brightest who, as if finally acknowledging a lover’s destructive impulses, have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding.

Their reasons include high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress. In other words: yes, it is still bad down here. But more damning is what many of them describe as a dissipating sense of possibility, a dwindling chance at redemption for a great city that, even before the storm, cried out for great improvement.

“The window of opportunity is closing,” Ms. Larsen said, “before more people like us give up and say it’s too little, too late.”

Mr. Langlois, who has repeatedly called the health and sanitation departments, the police and City Hall, said he despaired of receiving any response. In November, the couple bought their first house, and in December, they bought their first handgun.

“My friends here are just the greatest, hard-working, tax-paying people,” Mr. Langlois said, “and I think a lot of us are feeling under siege.”

The couple are unlikely to make any money on the sale of their house.

For every household that, like this one, has given up, there is another on the verge. Tyrone Wilson, a successful real estate agent and consultant, said he and his wife, Trina, a lawyer, had given post-storm life a fair chance. But, Mr. Wilson said, at the end of the school year they are likely to take their three children back to Dallas, where they took refuge after the storm.

“We came back, we tried,” he said. “It’s really draining, and at a certain point you sit down and you say, ‘We don’t have to go through this.’ ”

As a city in flux, New Orleans remains statistically murky, but demographers generally agree that the population replenishment after the storm, as measured by things like the amount of mail sent and employment in main economic sectors, has leveled off. While many poorer residents have moved back to the city, the “brain drain” of professionals that the city was experiencing before the storm appears to have accelerated.

Some say the overall effect is negligible. Greg Rigamer, a demographer who has done work for the city, said that the lack of housing had constrained the recovery, but that many residents remained fully committed to the city.

“The pattern in is certainly stronger than the pattern out,” Mr. Rigamer said.

But in December, the number of houses on the market peaked at a high not seen since the late 1980s, while the number of sales has trended downward since last June, according to data tracked by the Brookings Institution in Washington. Statistics kept by commercial moving companies show a net loss to New Orleans. Employers say they have raised salaries for skilled workers.

One oft-cited survey by the University of New Orleans found that a third of residents, especially those with graduate degrees, were thinking of leaving within two years.

Susan E. Howell, who conducted the survey, cautioned that the sample was small and that the poor were underrepresented. There are indications that low-income New Orleanians — those who will need the most help from a cash-strapped city —are making their way back, despite a lack of affordable housing, piling into relatives’ homes and trailers.

U-Haul, the rental company that is more affordable than commercial movers, has had more inbound trucks than outbound, according to the company’s records, and the number of public school children and new applications for food stamps in Orleans Parish are rising. In Houston, a task force that helps Hurricane Katrina residents resettle has paid more than $1 million in moving expenses for 350 families returning to New Orleans.

“This is a serious problem for the city, because one of the things we had pre-Katrina was the lack of an educated population,” Dr. Howell said. “We had too many people at the low end and not enough at the high end, and Katrina sort of fast-forwarded that trend.”

Because many poorer people have taken longer to return, they have not dealt with as many months of frustration as families with higher income and more mobility, so their staying power has yet to be determined.

Reganer Stewart, 30, a hotel maid, said she had been living with her cousin and her cousin’s mother and four children since November. In January, Ms. Stewart’s 12-year-old daughter, Brandi, joined them, but was put on a waiting list for school and could not enroll until earlier this month.

Houston, which Ms. Stewart had not liked when she evacuated there, was growing more attractive as her search for an apartment here grew longer. “Most likely, we going to leave,” she said.

In battered but proud New Orleans, abandonment is a highly emotional subject, in part because many have made sacrifices to stay and rebuild. To some, leaving now is tantamount to treason. When a report appeared a year ago that Emeril Lagasse, the famed chef, had said the city would “never come back,” reservations at his restaurants were canceled and strangers berated him. He insisted he had been misquoted.

And in response to an article in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about a woman who had decided to move on, Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans novelist, wrote: “This isn’t an easy place to be right now, and the decision to stay or go is deeply personal. But why must some people use the media to take a parting shot at the city?”

On another occasion, Ms. Brite said, “If a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don’t desert it just because it can kill you. There are some things more valuable than life.”

Such fierce sentiments help explain why a dozen people who were planning to move or had already done so declined to speak on the record for this article or allow their name to be used. One man, a chef, said he wanted to remain anonymous because he was likely to return someday. A university professor said she did not want to compromise her employer’s ability to recruit.

“If I was going to be really politically savvy,” she said, “I would say that I was going to do a job search about this time anyway.”

The decision to leave is especially difficult for natives, said Elliott Stonecipher, a demographic analyst in Shreveport, La., even if they are going no farther than the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

“They just won’t talk about it; they do not want to talk about it,” Mr. Stonecipher said, adding that the reluctance shows just how unusual the city is. “It’s remarkable that they just don’t want anybody to know that they gave in.”

Others have unimpeachable reasons: Paul Gailiunas, a doctor whose wife, Helen Hill, was murdered in their home last month, left immediately for South Carolina.

As for Ms. Larsen and Mr. Langlois, they have taken in all the fury at those who are leaving, in newspapers, neighborhood forums on the Internet and even in the bars and cafes of their neighborhood, the Ninth Ward. But while many of their own friends had expressed disappointment, none had blamed them.

“Not only do they understand why we’re leaving,” Ms. Larsen said, “but they say, ‘You know what, I’m thinking about getting out of here, too.’ It’s like they’re waiting for that one more bad thing to happen.”

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting.

    In Setback for New Orleans, Fed-Up Residents Give Up, NYT, 16.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/us/nationalspecial/16orleans.html

Severe Storm Adds to Troubles in New Orleans

February 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 13 (AP) — A powerful storm overturned FEMA trailers and tore apart businesses early Tuesday, heaping more misery on neighborhoods still trying to recover from Hurricane Katrina. An 85-year-old woman who had nearly finished remodeling her hurricane-damaged home died in the storm.

Dozens of homes and buildings in New Orleans and across the river in Westwego were ripped apart by what appeared to have been a tornado, and about 30 people were reported injured, city and parish officials said.

“There is just so much destruction,” said Mayor Robert Billiot of Westwego.

The wind tore the roof off one Westwego hotel, collapsed homes and tossed around trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In New Orleans, at least 10 to 15 buildings were destroyed, said James Ross, a spokesman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin.

Radar data provided “pretty convincing evidence there was a tornado,” said Robert Ricks of the National Weather Service.

Mike Wiener, a FEMA spokesman, said the agency had assessment teams in the areas affected by the storm. “Right now our concern is with the safety of the travel-trailer residents,” Mr. Wiener said. “We’re going to get them adequate housing as soon as possible, whether it be a hotel room or another trailer.”

Another storm hit south-central Louisiana, damaging buildings in New Iberia and on the outskirts of Breaux Bridge in St. Martin Parish, but it did less damage, and there were no reports of injuries.

In the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, the 85-year-old woman, Stella Chambers, died after winds slammed into her FEMA trailer, ripping apart the trailer and her newly renovated home and scattering debris over 200 feet.

Hellean Lewis, a neighbor of Ms. Chambers, said the woman’s daughter had banged on her door. “Her face and head were covered with blood,” Ms. Lewis said. “It was running down her side. She was crying and screaming, ‘Help me! I can’t find my mother!’ ”

Ms. Lewis said her son went through the debris and found Ms. Chambers, who at that point was still alive and crying for her daughter.

In Westwego, Tanya Clark, 38, sorted through the rubble that had been her home, looking for whatever she could salvage. Ms. Clark’s left arm was in a sling because her shoulder had been dislocated when the storm threw her 10 to 15 yards. Her son, Blaise, had a gash on his jaw. They had not been able to find their dog and two cats.

“I just hope I don’t find my pets under all of this,” she said.

    Severe Storm Adds to Troubles in New Orleans, NYT, 14.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/us/14tornado.html

In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing

February 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and CHRISTOPHER DREW

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 4 — When the body was brought out, the two little boys did not stop chewing their sticky blue candy or swigging from their pop bottles. The 18-year-old mother wheeling her baby came to watch, and the teenager with the spiky hair and the bulky duffle coat was laughing up on the worn stoop.

Only the cries of Linda Holmes — “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me, Jesus, oh my baby!” she said, over and over — were a tip-off that this was her teenage son Ronald the man in the lab coat was laboring to pull out of the empty apartment in the Iberville housing project.

It was another death in New Orleans — violent, casual, probably drug related and, by the time the sobbing and the laughter had faded, covered over in the silence that is the only resolution of many such killings here. The gurney holding Ronald was pushed into the coroner’s van, the gawkers stepped back from their balconies and the police furled their yellow tape. “It’s messed up around here,” said the mother with the stroller, Ariane Ellis.

There has been no arrest.

There were 161 homicides in this city last year, and there have been 18 so far this year, making New Orleans by most measures the nation’s per capita murder capital, given its sharply reduced population. Many of the victims and the suspects are teenagers. About two-thirds of the deaths have gone unsolved: the killers, in many cases, continue to walk the streets and are likely to kill again, the police say.

Other cities have plenty of murders. But only in New Orleans has there been the uniquely poisoned set of circumstances that has led to this city’s position at the top of the homicide charts. Every phase of the killing cycle here unfolds under the dark star of dysfunction: the murderers’ brutalized childhoods, the often ineffectual police intervention, a dulled community response, and a tense relationship between the police and prosecutors that lets many cases slip through the cracks.

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation loosened the fragile social restraints even further, making the city perhaps more dangerous than ever.

The storm also pushed a teetering criminal justice system over the edge. The evidence in hundreds of criminal cases was lost, and the flood destroyed the police crime lab, which has not been rebuilt. Often, drugs cannot be tested at other locations before the deadline for bringing charges. Yet the police are trying to stop the violence by arresting more drug users and street dealers, many of whom are quickly released, spinning the jail door faster than ever and fueling the carnage.

In the Central City neighborhood last June, five teenagers in a sport utility vehicle were killed in a drug feud. The police said the 19-year-old suspect had been arrested 11 times in the previous 30 months. But he had been acquitted on an attempted murder charge, the district attorney’s office had dropped some of the other charges for lack of evidence, and he was out on bail on drug and gun charges at the time of the killings.

Last year, about 3,100 people who were arrested, mostly for drug offenses, were released from jail or their bail obligation when the deadlines passed for charges to be filed, records show. That was nearly three times the rate before the storm. More than 500 others were released in January alone, including one in a murder case and two arrested for attempted murder.

In some neighborhoods, people refer to “misdemeanor murders,” or “60-day murders,” the length of time suspects can be held without charges. The police superintendent, Warren J. Riley, often blames prosecutors for refusing other cases and the courts for letting violent suspects out on bail. Though Mr. Riley declined to be interviewed for this article, he recently told Gambit Weekly, a local newspaper, that he was tired of having to re-arrest the same people who had been let out of jail.

“We can’t be as successful fighting crime as we would like to be until the rest of the criminal justice system works like it’s supposed to work,” Mr. Riley told the newspaper. “We have to keep hard-core felons in jail.”

But the district attorney, Eddie Jordan, and several judges say that shoddy police work, and a general mistrust of officers by witnesses and jurors, doom many cases. Witnesses also fear retaliation on the street.

“It’s an insurmountable problem,” Mr. Jordan said. “By the time the investigative report is presented to our office, a good number of witnesses are no longer available or have gotten afraid to testify. That’s the biggest problem in murder cases.”

And even as city and federal officials announce new anticrime measures, doubts persist.

Terry Q. Alarcon, a longtime criminal court judge, said, “The criminal justice system has always had two major problems: a lack of funding and a lack of cooperation.”

A Legacy of Mistrust

The Police Department’s history of brutality and its emphasis on minor arrests have fed the mistrust and alienated many people who might be witnesses. Prosecutors and judges have criticized police officers as failing to investigate cases sufficiently, taking too long to write arrest reports and ducking subpoenas to appear in court.

As a result, the district attorney’s office has typically been able to go forward with only half to two-thirds of the cases the police have brought. With most assistant district attorneys earning only $38,000 a year, the turnover in Mr. Jordan’s office is high, and the experience level is low. Several studies by the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a local nonprofit group, show that as few as 12 percent of homicide arrests end in jail sentences.

Mr. Jordan said he had not been to the Police Department’s weekly crime statistic meetings for three years, ever since an argument had broken out at one of them over whether he was prosecuting enough cases.

More recently, he and Superintendent Riley have pledged to work more closely together. But tensions shot up again after a grand jury, at Mr. Jordan’s direction, indicted several police officers on first-degree murder charges stemming from the shooting of a retarded man in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina.

City officials recently announced a host of actions, including the mounting of more cameras in crime-ridden areas and the increasing of foot patrols to rebuild community trust. The city is raising pay levels to attract more police officers and better prosecutors, including several who will focus on convicting the most violent repeat offenders. (In a few months, most prosecutors will be earning $50,000.)

Federal authorities have put up $5 million for a new crime lab, and they are sending more prosecutors and undercover drug agents to help.

But even in criminal justice circles, there is a recognition that arrests and convictions alone will not break the killing cycle.

“You can put a cop on every corner, and you will not stop the murders,” said Eric E. Malveau, who has worked as a prosecutor and a public defender. “As long as you have a large population that is uneducated and has no job and no hope, what else is there to do but sell drugs? Until you fix that, it’s hard to see the problems getting much better.”

‘Killing Is In’

The killing is integrated deep into the community. Residents say the routine nature of the violence stifles a sense of outrage, for reasons of physical and mental self-preservation.

“Last week I buried one on Tuesday, and the one who killed him was buried on Wednesday,” said the Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., a burly former policeman turned minister who has campaigned against the violence here. “And I buried another one on Friday. And the one I buried Friday, somebody shot part of the family later that night.”

Mr. Raphael posts signs on telephone poles that say “Enough!” at murder scenes; often, neighbors are reluctant to let him do so.

The police blame drugs — drug debts, or drug deals gone bad, or grabs for drugs, mostly crack. Many of the drug gangs dispersed after the hurricane and have since regrouped, ending the brief lull with a greater intensity of infighting now concentrated in fewer neighborhoods.

On the street, a 10- or 12-year old can get up to $30 for being a bicycle lookout, and teenagers can get up to $1,000 for helping to move drug stashes.

But apart from the drug trade, those living with the culture of violence say that often all that is needed to set off a deadly shooting is a misdirected look, an epithet or a turn down the wrong block into an alien neighborhood.

“They killing each other on, whatever,” said Terrol Wilson, 40, a lifelong Central City resident and a former convict who is now a truck driver and a member of the New Hope Baptist Church. “People right now, they’re not scared to kill now. That’s how they rockin’ right now. Killing is in.”

Mr. Wilson served 15 years in prison for burglary and drug-possession convictions, beginning at age 15. He says he has seen people shot in the street in New Orleans since he was a child, and he has known people who have pulled the trigger. But now, he says, the killings are coming faster, and residents have little interest in helping investigators.

Miming an aggressive look, Mr. Wilson suggested that that posture alone might be considered a pretext for killing on the rough blocks of Central City. He described how successive killings became easier, once the first was accomplished, for some of the teenagers with guns.

“I’m not worrying about my shooting my second person, because I’m bucked up right now,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s like, that’s what’s up. For some of them, it doesn’t matter — my second killing, my third killing.”

The killings have spilled into the city’s suburbs, which last year recorded 78 homicides, the highest tally in more than two decades. The police said evacuees from Hurricane Katrina had been involved in many of them.

“They get their first hit, it’s like, they can do anything,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s like shooting marbles for them.”

There was Ivory Harris, for instance, known as B-Stupid in Central City, twice arrested for murder before the hurricane and twice let go. “A quiet little boy,” said Mr. Wilson, who had grown up with the boy’s mother.

B-Stupid logged his first arrest on murder charges at 16, for a killing in the C. J. Peete housing project.

“He was trying to gain respect on the street,” another Central City acquaintance, Lyle Mouton, said. The police re-arrested Mr. Harris, now 20, in March on new murder charges.
 

A Wall of Reserve

Arrest hardly means conviction, however. And in this city, with its codes of neighborhood silence, both are the exception.

At the murder scene in the derelict Iberville housing project, where Ronald Holmes was pulled out of the apartment, several people told a reporter they had seen a young man run across the courtyard, then heard a shot. But as the police were doing their work, going in and out of the abandoned apartment — officers said they had found drugs inside — the residents, several dozen at least, hung back.

A wall of reserve separated them from the police: nobody could be seen offering up evidence. The Iberville tenants were as oblivious to the men in uniform as they were to the exhortations of a preacher droning steadily through a microphone at the back of the courtyard.

“Without witness testimony, we’ve got nothing,” Deputy Chief Anthony Cannatella, a senior police official on the scene, observed pointedly.

Three teenage girls sat on a stoop, watching the detectives. “They kill people every day back here,” said one of them, a half-smile playing on her face. She ran off when asked her name. In an apartment adjacent to where Mr. Holmes had been shot, another young woman ducked inside rather than give her name.

Most of the violence involves black men killing other black men. Out of the 161 homicide victims last year, 131 were black men. Most of the suspects were also black men.

When the pattern of black-on-black violence is occasionally broken, white fear and outrage are redoubled. This happened earlier this month after the killing of a white filmmaker, when thousands of people marched on City Hall to demand change, a majority of them whites.

The small showing of black marchers saddened Mr. Raphael, the minister. In the 2006 murders, he said, “99 percent of them were black-on-black, and we did not march. As a community, we could not bring ourselves to respond to that.”

In New Orleans, Mr. Wilson said, “the motto is, beef or barbecue.” If you “beef” — go to the police — then do not expect to be enjoying barbecue anytime soon.

Distrust of the police and fear of the gunmen make the motto nearly beside the point. Few people beef.

Annie Randolph’s daughter and nephew have both been lost to the violence. Nobody was arrested, said Ms. Randolph, a resident of Central City. She called the police once, but warily. “I said, ‘Don’t come to my door.’ Because if they come to my door, whoever did the killing is going to see it.”

Bessie Minor’s son and grandson have both been killed; the police and the prosecutors showed minimal concern, she said.

“In that time, they didn’t really worry about who did the killing,” said Ms. Minor, who is also a resident of Central City.

In this view, the police are part of the problem, not the solution — “an occupying force,” Mr. Raphael said. Meanwhile, people in his neighborhood and elsewhere in the city are “living in tremendous fear,” he said.

“I mean, most of these murders are in front of people,” Mr. Raphael said. “When some of these murders happen, it’s really a disrespectful thing to the entire community. You have children out there, older people, and this person will come into the community and shoot an AK-47.

“That’s saying to the community, ‘I don’t care nothing about y’all, you better not say nothing about it,’ ” he said. “In broad daylight. To me, it’s demeaning to black men.”

    In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing, NYT, 5.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/us/05crime.html?hp&ex=1170738000&en=7bbf1e609d0475fd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Court Clears Way for Suit on New Orleans Flooding

February 3, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Residents of several neighborhoods in the New Orleans area that were hardest hit by flooding after Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over their claims that a government-built navigation channel was largely to blame, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

Successful lawsuits against the corps could result in billions of dollars in damage payments.

Since the flood, those who lived in the devastated neighborhoods near the east side of New Orleans — including the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish — have contended that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet caused much of their damage by intensifying the surge from the storm. The damage, they say, was foreseeable.

After residents filed lawsuits, the government tried to get them dismissed. The corps argued that it was protected from lawsuits by the Flood Control Act of 1928, which grants it immunity from liability for flood damage caused by flood-control projects, like levees.

But yesterday, Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, cited previous cases saying that the channel was not a flood-control project. Instead, Judge Duval said, the cases say the channel — known locally as Mr. Go — was built as an aid to navigation, so the protection from liability might not apply. And so, he said, the questions deserved to be decided at trial.

Pierce O’Donnell, a lawyer for those suing the government, called the ruling “a landmark victory for the Katrina victims.” But Joseph Bruno, another lawyer for the residents, acknowledged that the judge’s ruling was only the first step.

The 76-mile canal was completed in 1965 as a shortcut for ships heading from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Environmentalists and local officials have long argued that it has done great damage to the coastal environment by piping salt water inland and killing off the cypress swamps and grassy marshes that serve as natural barriers to storms.

During Hurricane Katrina, several scientists have said, the canal was a crucial part of a funnel that amplified the storm’s surge and brought its waters into the heart of the city.

A spokesman for the corps in New Orleans, René Poché, declined to discuss pending litigation. The corps has previously argued that the channel did not contribute greatly to the disaster, but announced a plan last year to close the outlet to navigation. That plan does not go far enough for the channel’s critics, who demand that it be filled in and the wetland buffer restored.

Also yesterday, President Bush nominated a new leader for the corps, Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp Jr. of the Army. If approved by the Senate, General Van Antwerp will succeed Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, who announced last August that he intended to resign. General Van Antwerp has been serving as commanding general for the Army accessions command, which manages recruiting and initial training.

    Court Clears Way for Suit on New Orleans Flooding, NYT, 3.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/washington/03corps.html

Judge Puts Settlement on Katrina in Question

January 27, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

A federal judge in Mississippi, citing the need for more information, has rejected — at least temporarily — a settlement by State Farm Insurance that was expected to provide several hundred million dollars to help policyholders rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina 17 months ago.

In an eight-page order, Judge L. T. Senter Jr. of Federal District Court in Gulfport, Miss., said he was rejecting the agreement because it did not provide enough information for him to conclude that it was “fair, just, balanced and reasonable.”

State Farm said last night that it had expected the agreement to be approved and that it now looked forward to addressing the judge’s concerns.

The lead trial lawyer in the case, Richard F. Scruggs, and Mississippi officials also expected court approval.

Last night, Mr. Scruggs and Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, said they were optimistic that the agreement would be revived. Mr. Hood said he was confident that State Farm would “fix the things that need to be fixed.”

In the agreement, State Farm said it would pay at least $130 million to policyholders and participants in the negotiations and said costs to the insurer could increase by another $600 million. The State Farm settlement was expected to be a model for other insurers to use in seeking settlements, which would help jump-start the lagging recovery of Mississippi’s coast.

The dispute with State Farm and other insurance companies centered on the insurers’ refusal, as stated in their policies, to pay for damage from the heavy flooding — driven by the high winds of Hurricane Katrina — that swept over the Mississippi coast on Aug. 29, 2005. Some insurers refused not only to pay for flood damage, but declined to pay for harm to houses that had been battered by wind and waters.

Even so, the insurers paid $5.3 billion for wind damage to more than 330,000 homes in Mississippi and $10.3 billion for nearly a million homes in Louisiana. The rejected settlement did not include homeowners in Louisiana.

The settlement, which was announced on Tuesday, was twofold. One part settled 640 lawsuits arising from the hurricane for $80 million; the other required State Farm to reopen up to 35,000 damage claims that state officials and trial lawyers said had been underpaid. In that part, State Farm had agreed to pay at least $50 million.

Judge Senter’s order dealt exclusively with the second part, the reopening of the damage claims. It was not clear whether the settlement of the 640 lawsuits would proceed. But during the negotiations, participants said that State Farm had refused to settle unless both the lawsuits and the 35,000 damage claims were parts of one agreement.

A spokesman for State Farm, Phil Supple, said yesterday that the two elements were separate. But he would not respond to questions seeking to clarify the linkage and whether the entire agreement might be scuttled if the judge’s concerns about the 35,000 damage claims could not be resolved. In an interview, Mr. Scruggs said he expected the settlement of the 640 lawsuits to stand, partly because State Farm has already paid the first installment.

“We’re going to start dispersing those settlement funds next week,” Mr. Scruggs said.

As part of the overall settlement, Mr. Hood, the Mississippi attorney general, agreed to drop a criminal investigation into State Farm’s handling of hurricane damage claims and to remove the company from a civil lawsuit accusing it and other insurers of treating policyholders unfairly.

Mr. Hood said he was continuing the lawsuit against other insurers. On Thursday he urged other insurance companies to follow State Farm’s lead, to settle hundreds of other lawsuits and to reopen thousands of storm damage claims.

In rejecting the agreement, Judge Senter raised concerns about a lack of detail on how much money policyholders might receive. He noted that State Farm had agreed to pay at least $50 million for reopened claims. But, he said, “there is no way I can ascertain how this sum compares to the total claims” of the approximately 35,000 homeowners, nor “how thinly this large sum may be spread.”

He said he was also troubled about the potential unfairness of an arbitration process intended by the negotiators to provide an appeals process for homeowners who requested that their claims be re-evaluated. He said that under the agreement, arbitration hearings were to be limited to two hours and that there was no apparent provision for legal representation for homeowners.

Judge Senter said the agreement also failed to provide information on what the lawyers had done to justify an agreed-upon payment of up to $20 million in relation to reopening the 35,000 damage claims. The lawyers are to receive another $26 million for settling the 640 lawsuits.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said he thought Judge Senter was being “extraordinarily careful to attempt to protect the interests of all the homeowners.”

Professor Tobias said he did not think the settlement “was all over,” but, he added: “A lot of work has to be done to satisfy this judge.”

    Judge Puts Settlement on Katrina in Question, NYT, 27.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/business/27insure.html

Big Insurer Will Pay 640 Katrina Claims

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

In a move that is expected to jump-start rebuilding along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, State Farm Insurance said yesterday that it had reached an agreement with state officials to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to owners of homes along the coast that were wrecked by Hurricane Katrina.

The agreement settles lawsuits filed by 640 homeowners and allows thousands of others to reopen damage claims that State Farm previously closed. Insurance executives said they expected the outlines of the deal to be adopted by other carriers.

The agreement does not apply to New Orleans, where the failure of the levees left much of the city underwater for days. Lawyers and insurers say no similar settlement talks are in progress there.

For State Farm, the nation’s largest home insurer and the biggest in Mississippi, the settlement allows for “a just, speedy and efficient resolution,” as a spokesman, Phil Supple, put it.

It would also remove a major public relations headache. While State Farm and the other insurers may have had some strong legal arguments, they have been widely perceived as insensitive. In many cases, residents whose houses were reduced to concrete slab foundations received just a few thousand dollars in payments. Some received nothing.

Under the settlement, 300 homeowners who lost everything will receive their full insurance coverage. Mississippi officials said 1,000 others would receive at least half, with the opportunity to negotiate for more.

“A lot of people on the coast are going to see money in their pockets sooner, rather than have to go through a long, drawn-out process of court proceedings,” Mississippi’s insurance commissioner, George Dale, said yesterday.

The core of the dispute was whether the damage to the houses was caused by high winds or surging floodwaters as Hurricane Katrina swept across the coast on Aug. 29, 2005. The insurers said their policies covered only wind damage. But in many cases, they also refused to pay for damage caused by a combination of wind and water.

The settlement does not affect the terms of coverage in the insurers’ policies, but some insurance experts said they expected that the carriers would ultimately rewrite their policies to specifically bar coverage of damage from storm surges.

In the settlement talks, which began last fall, State Farm insisted that the Mississippi attorney general, Jim Hood, drop a criminal investigation of the company’s handling of storm damage claims. It also demanded that he abandon a civil suit against it and other insurers.

The final sticking point in the agreement had been over the framing of a few sentences that would end the criminal investigation. Mr. Hood convened a grand jury last week that began hearing evidence.

The two sides reached agreement in a meeting yesterday afternoon in Jackson, the state capital. Then lawyers for State Farm and Richard F. Scruggs, who represents hundreds of storm victims and played a major role in drafting the settlement, flew to Gulfport on the coast, to seek the endorsement of Judge L. T. Senter Jr., the federal district judge overseeing most of the insurance disputes.

Judge Senter had suggested that he would like to see a global settlement, and some participants in the talks said the first money could begin to flow to storm victims as early as next week.

Under the agreement, State Farm will pay an initial $130 million and perhaps several hundred million more by the end of the year, depending on how many policyholders requested that their claims be reopened. About 35,000 homeowners along Mississippi’s 70-mile-long coast are eligible. Among the homeowners who will benefit from the settlement are Senator Trent Lott and Representative Gene Taylor, both of whom lost their homes in the storm and were denied payment by State Farm.

Since Hurricane Katrina struck, the insurance companies have paid $5.3 billion for damage to more than 330,000 homes in Mississippi and $10.3 billion for nearly a million homes in Louisiana.

They have raised rates sharply because, they say, the risk of severe storms has increased. They have also refused to renew many policies in vulnerable areas. The settlement disclosed yesterday is expected to have minimum effect on the cost of coverage.

State Farm got a vivid picture of the hostility toward it in the first jury trial a little more than a week ago. Judge Senter abruptly declared that State Farm had failed to prove its case and the jury quickly came back with a decision requiring the company to pay $2.5 million in punitive damages to a couple in Biloxi who lost everything in the storm. The judge also awarded the couple the full value of their insurance policy: $223,000. State Farm had maintained that it owed them nothing.

Randy J. Maniloff, a lawyer at White & Williams in Philadelphia who represents insurance companies, said yesterday that it was clear that the bad publicity had been a big factor in State Farm’s decision to settle. “They spent 80 years building up a brand,” he said, “and the adverse publicity from these lawsuits has been clearly doing damage to the brand. It just flies in the face of their portrayal of themselves as good neighbors.”

Indeed, according to people close to the talks, it was State Farm that first suggested a settlement in a telephone call early last fall to Mr. Scruggs, the lawyer.

Mr. Scruggs, who came to prominence by filing lawsuits against the tobacco industry, reached an agreement in principle with State Farm two weeks ago.

But Mr. Hood, the state attorney general, and Mr. Dale, the insurance commissioner, expressed reservations. Both officials said they wanted to make sure that homeowners got the best possible deal. Mr. Dale, though, said it was also important that any agreement not be overly burdensome for the insurance companies.

Mr. Scruggs, whose home in Pascagoula was destroyed along with those of many neighbors, said that resolving the coverage dispute had been “the most personal and most difficult” work in his 30-year career. He has not settled with his own insurer. But for his work on the settlement, he will share as much as $46 million with lawyers from half a dozen firms — to be paid by State Farm on top of its payments to homeowners.

In the agreement, State Farm said it would pay $80 million to settle the 640 lawsuits and to reopen, at the request of homeowners, up to 35,000 other claims. The insurance company agreed to pay at least $50 million more on the previously closed claims.

Participants in the talks estimated that State Farm could pay a further $250 million to $600 million, depending on how many people reopened claims. For the 300 homes that were swept away, State Farm agreed to pay the full insured value. Those homes were insured for $69,700 to $2.34 million. The owners of the 340 other homes, with varying degrees of damage, are to receive an average of $124,400.

In the review of closed claims, homeowners may accept a new offer from State Farm or insist on binding arbitration in hopes of receiving more money. Storm victims are also free to ignore the settlement and file separate lawsuits against State Farm. But few are expected to do so.

    Big Insurer Will Pay 640 Katrina Claims, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/business/24insure.html?hp&ex=1169701200&en=f3a3a00d88ae1f33&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size

January 21, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 20 — The empty streets, deserted avenues and abandoned houses prompt a gnawing question, nearly 17 months after Hurricane Katrina: Is this what New Orleans has come to — a city half its old size?

Over and over, the city’s leaders reassure citizens that better days and, above all, more people are in the future. Their destiny will not merely be to reside in a smaller city with a few good restaurants and curious local customs, the citizens are told.

But some economists and demographers are beginning to wonder whether New Orleans will top out at about half its prestorm population of about 444,000, already in a steep decline from its peak of 627,525 in the 1960 Census. At the moment, the population is well below half, and future gains are likely to be small.

“It will be a trickle based on what we know now,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a consultant and demographer based in Shreveport, La. “Low tens of thousands, over three or four or five years, something in that range. I would say we could start losing people, especially if the crime problem doesn’t get high visibility.”

The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city’s failure to thrive.

In this view, the storm was merely a grim exclamation point to conditions decades in the making. Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that.

Hurricane Katrina may have brutally recalibrated the city’s demographics, setting New Orleans firmly on the path its underlying characteristics had already been leading it down: a city losing people at the rate of perhaps 1.5 percent a year before Hurricane Katrina, with a stagnant economy, more than a quarter of the population living in poverty, and a staggeringly high rate of unemployment, in which as many as one in five were jobless or not seeking work.

Political leaders, worried about the loss of clout and a Congressional seat, press for people to return, but a smaller New Orleans may not be bad, some economists say. Most of those who have not returned — 175,000, by Mr. Stonecipher’s count — are very poor, and can be more easily absorbed in places with vibrant job markets, they say.

Large-scale concentrations of deep poverty — as was the case in New Orleans before the storm — are inherently harmful to cities. The smaller New Orleans is almost certain to wind up with a far higher percentage of its population working than before Hurricane Katrina.

“Where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can’t see a way out,” said William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University who has studied the city’s economy for decades. “Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.”

Others, however, worry that permanently losing so many people threatens the city’s culture — its unique way of talking, parading and eating.

“Culture is people,” said Richard Campanella, a Tulane geographer who has written extensively about the city’s neighborhoods. “If half the local people are dispersed and no longer living cohesively in those social networks, then half of local culture is gone.”

The new doubts also take into account the current barriers to repopulation, including the well-documented failure of the state’s Road Home aid program for homeowners, the loss of tens of thousands of jobs since the storm, the crime problem and delays in rebuilding moderately priced housing. Official efforts — local, state and federal — to rebuild the network of hospitals, schools and public housing projects that once served the city’s huge poor population have been faltering. But they also look at what New Orleans was before the storm.

The low population figure, 191,000, which was reported by the Louisiana Recovery Authority in November last year in the most credible survey to date, was about half the 444,000 count in a Census estimate before Hurricane Katrina. The number was surprising, dashing expectations of a “big return,” as one economist put it, and was hotly disputed by local officials. Still, upticks, if there are any, are imperceptible: the percentage of prehurricane gas and electric users who were getting service, for instance, remained the same between April and November 2006, the Brookings Institution reported last month.

“Our expectations were just wrong,” said James A. Richardson, an economist who directs the Public Administration Institute at Louisiana State University. “I don’t believe it will ever be 450,000 again. I think New Orleans did not need 450,000 people to support the economy you had at that time.”

With no real place for the poorest of the evacuees in the economy before the storm, New Orleans may have permanently lost that part of its population. Supporting that notion is an unpublished analysis by Mr. Oakland, the former Tulane economist, which shows unusually low rates of participation in the labor force before Hurricane Katrina.

Thus, a frequent impression of prehurricane travelers to New Orleans — that there were “a lot of people hanging around, going nowhere,” as the Nobel-winning Columbia University economist Edmund S. Phelps, a sometime-visitor, puts it — turns out to have a statistical basis.

The statistics, which compare the number of people actually working with the total working-age population, suggest “there are a lot of people out there not working,” said Mr. Oakland, referring to the period before Hurricane Katrina. Or, he said, they were working in an underground economy, not measured by statistics. If not actually illegal, he said, it was not very profitable.

In New Orleans, before the storm, about 4 out of 10 men in the working-age population were out of a job or not looking for one, compared with less than 3 in 10 nationally.

Employment had dropped sharply in the city from 1969 to 1999, Mr. Oakland writes. More than half of young black men ages 16 to 24 were not in the labor force. Unemployment rates among young blacks were above 25 percent. “The data is showing New Orleans is really a basket case,” Mr. Oakland said.

In the city’s poorest areas, the numbers were even more discouraging. In places like the Lower Ninth Ward or Central City, half of all working-age people were not looking for work, Mr. Oakland wrote. The real unemployment rate in these impoverished, high-crime areas, which would include those not looking for work, would have been a “whopping” 32 percent, he wrote.

Compounding the city’s difficulties, and, in effect, helping to stem the population loss, was a secondary factor: the direness of the city’s poverty, and its concentration. Those conditions helped make the city’s poor population exceptionally immobile. New Orleans was also poor not only in absolute terms, but also in relative terms. The poorest 30 percent of households had a lower share of the city’s total income than the comparable slice in any other similar Southern city, Mr. Oakland found.

“The job mobility was very low among the poor, so they just stay where they are, and the social welfare system shored them up,” Mr. Oakland said.

The city’s population was thus “out of equilibrium, if you would say that,” Mr. Oakland added. “It’s not normal to have that level of nonparticipation in the labor force.”

Haunting the city’s effort to repopulate, too, is the incalculable toll inflicted by ghosts from its past — a political legacy of corruption and patronage, and a deep racial division with a far more distressing passage toward integration than was experienced, say, in Atlanta.

Looking to the future, another 50,000 people might eventually be added to the city’s population, Mr. Oakland suggested, but there are no guarantees.

There has been little to no construction of cheap housing that would enable the return of the largest category of those still displaced, Mr. Stonecipher noted.

A second category of people, 50,000 or more who have established themselves elsewhere but who could return, may be even harder to recapture, given the combination of past weaknesses and continuing present-day hurdles.

“The longer it lasts, the more likely it is that our population is plateauing, the longer the uncertainty continues,” said Janet Speyrer, an economist at the University of New Orleans.

    New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size, NYT, 21.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/nationalspecial/21orleans.html?hp&ex=1169442000&en=95d873f2499ecf46&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Thousands march to protest New Orleans murders

Thu Jan 11, 2007 9:23 PM ET
Reuters
By Russell McCulley

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Several thousand people marched to New Orleans' city hall on Thursday to protest a wave of murders that has gripped the city and put in danger its halting recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

They angrily urged local officials to do more to stop crime and to speed up the pace of rebuilding the city that was 80 percent flooded when Katrina struck on August 29, 2005.

"We have come to lodge our complaint," Reverend J.C. Raphael told the crowd. "We have come to declare that a city that could not be drowned in the floods of a storm will not be drowned in the blood of its citizens."

Large sections of New Orleans remain damaged and mostly deserted 16 months after the storm.

Tourism, the lifeblood of the local economy, is down and less than half of the city's pre-storm population of 480,000 has returned after fleeing Katrina.

New Orleans had one of the nation's highest murder rates before Katrina and still does. In 2006, 161 people were killed, giving the city a murder rate more than four times the national average, according to FBI statistics.

There have been 8 murders since January 1, with the recent killings of a local musician and a female documentary film-maker in particular sparking anger.

Several speakers at the rally expressed concern that the violence will discourage both visitors and residents from returning to New Orleans.

Nakita Shavers, the younger sister of musician Dinerral Shavers, who was gunned down in his car two weeks ago, choked back tears as she called on citizens to "stop the violence."

"I'm attending college right now, and my intention is to come back and become a prominent politician for this city," she said. "But the sad part is, if the violence keeps up the way that it is, I won't have a city to come back to."

Mayor Ray Nagin and police chief Warren Riley said this week police would use traffic checkpoints, crime cameras and beefed up street patrols to try to bring order to the city.

They attended Thursday's rally, but only listened as many of the speakers criticized them for inaction.

Nagin later told reporters he would put all his efforts into stopping the bloodshed.

"My pledge to the citizens of New Orleans from this day forward is that everything that I do, going forward as your mayor, will be totally and solely focused on making sure that murders become a thing of the past in our city," he said.

    Thousands march to protest New Orleans murders, R, 11.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-12T022208Z_01_N11171577_RTRUKOC_0_US-NEWORLEANS-MURDERS-MARCH.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-4

News Analysis

Storm Left New Orleans

Ripe for Violence

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 10 — The storm of violence that has burst over this city since New Year’s Day can be traced in part to dysfunctional law enforcement institutions, aggravated by a natural disaster that turned the physical and social landscape of New Orleans into an ideal terrain for criminals.

Eight killings have occurred in 10 days. New Orleans, the United States’ murder capital by many measures in 2006, is well on its way to keeping that distinction in 2007. Since July 2006, there have been at least 95 murders per 100,000 residents, and possibly a higher ratio depending on how the city’s depleted population is counted, said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans.

Frightened citizens now see their city as a stalking ground, roamed with impunity by teenagers with handguns — an image that may not be far off the mark, experts here say.

There are a variety of reasons for the descent toward chaos. An automobile-bound police department is reluctant to walk the streets and interact with the city’s residents. It is at war with the district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting seven officers for a deadly shooting soon after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Judges in the city’s courts regularly rule in favor of criminals.

Completing the grim picture is an already fragile social structure in the city’s poorest wards that has been all but destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Moving back to town, in many cases, are “kids with guns, and without parents,” said Mr. Scharf, who predicted a year ago that the city was in for a tidal wave of violence.

The police, feared and hated by the city’s poor, get no cooperation from them in solving crimes. “Stop that snitchin!” is the inscription on the T-shirt of a man waiting for a bus on Canal Street. In killing after killing, police officials have begged for witnesses to step up, to no avail.

The result is an unwitting carrying out of the classic Maoist strategy of guerilla insurgency: criminals swim like fish in the surrounding sea, protected by a population that finds no reason to give them up, and is often afraid to.

Frustrated, police officers have been known to lash out at residents. Disturbing police brutality cases — officers beating up, or even shooting, random African-American men — are now competing for headlines with the latest killings.

Infuriating the police agency he must work with, Eddie Jordan, the district attorney, referred to the police as “rabid dogs” after he indicted seven of them last month in the shooting death of two men after Hurricane Katrina.

In this violent city, the Police Department’s arrests are usually not for crimes of violence at all, but for drugs. Such arrests constitute 65 percent of the city’s total, twice the national average, according to a study by the city’s independent Metropolitan Crime Commission. And the problems only continue once an arrest is made. In 2003-4, only 7 percent of those arrested were sentenced to prison, only 5 percent of all convictions were for violent offenses, and only 12 percent of homicide arrests resulted in jail, the study found.

In addition, New Orleans judges go light on sentencing, the study found: they give felons jail time far less often than do judges in other states’ courts.

The last time there was a murder conviction in New Orleans was in August — and in that case the judge later reduced the offense to manslaughter, according to the district attorney’s office. The judge, Charles Elloie, who publicly expressed sympathy for criminal defendants, has since been suspended for returning suspects to the streets with little or no bond.

"There’s a lot of factors converging here,” said James Bernazzani, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s special agent in charge in New Orleans, “based on local institutional dysfunction, a population that wasn’t educated, and a state judicial system that doesn’t mete out consequence for criminal activity. And you’ve got a citizenry that doesn’t cooperate.”

The way out of this conundrum is not easily seen by experts or by citizens weary of pledges by local officials — there was another one Tuesday —to make things right. Checkpoints, sheriff’s deputies, clergy intervention: all were earnestly promised, under the glare of television lights, in an open-air setting in the heart of the New Orleans killing grounds, the Central City neighborhood.

“It’s like Casablanca, round up the usual ideas,” said Mr. Scharf, the criminologist.

The surge in killings is a threat to the city’s faltering repopulation campaign.

“People I’ve never heard talk like this, die-hard New Orleanians, are weeping, talking about leaving,” said Mary Howell, a civil rights lawyer here. “It’s palpable.”

Many people are looking to the federal government for help, and are hoping the United States attorney, Jim Letten, might prosecute a few of the murder cases normally handled by the district attorney’s office. Mr. Bernazzani said Wednesday that “where we can find the federal hook, Jim Letten has agreed to take the case,” adding that additional federal agents were being recruited for New Orleans.

Meanwhile, citizen advocacy, the catalyst for most post-hurricane reform here, will make itself felt again Thursday with a march on City Hall intended to highlight the killings.

Tim Seeman, who runs the kitchen at Parasol’s, a restaurant that recently was held up, sees some hope in this awakening.

“This is nothing new,” Mr. Seeman said. “This has been brewing for years and years. But finally people are admitting it.”.

    Storm Left New Orleans Ripe for Violence, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11orleans.html

State Farm Is Settling Gulf Claims

January 9, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

State Farm, the biggest home insurer in the nation, is in the final stages of settling hundreds of lawsuits over its payments for homes wrecked by Hurricane Katrina along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, lawyers briefed on the talks said yesterday.

The settlement of 639 lawsuits for $80 million could be the first step in resolving a bitter legal battle between homeowners and their insurers that had threatened to drag on for years and has already slowed Mississippi’s recovery since the storm in August 2005.

As part of the proposed deal, which other insurers are expected to adopt, State Farm has agreed to review and possibly increase payments to as many as 35,000 additional homeowners. In some cases, these homeowners received only a few thousand dollars for homes along the Mississippi coast that suffered major damage or were destroyed.

The talks do not apply to homeowners in New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana.

State Farm, under the tentative accord, would provide an average of about $125,000 to homeowners who filed lawsuits, although the payments would range from as little as about $2,000 to about $2 million.

The treatment of those cases would serve as a guide for increasing payments to any of the 35,000 homeowners who request a review of their claim, according to lawyers privy to the details.

Similar settlements with the dozen or so other insurers in Mississippi could provide hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery along the coast. It would also close a painful chapter in the public relations history of the carriers who have been portrayed by opposing lawyers as coldhearted in refusing to pay for much of Katrina’s devastation.

“This is an opportunity to change public perception,” said Randy Maniloff, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represents insurance companies, and who has not been involved in the talks.

The heart of the dispute in Mississippi as well as in Louisiana has been over the coverage of flood damage. Flooding was far worse in Katrina than in most previous hurricanes.

The insurers argued successfully in Mississippi that their policies did not provide coverage for any kind of flooding. But Judge L. T. Senter Jr., of Federal District Court in Gulfport, Miss., rejected the argument by insurers that if any flooding damaged a house, the insurers then had no responsibility for any other damage caused by Katrina’s high winds.

More than 2,000 homeowners in Mississippi alone filed suit against their insurers. Under terms of the tentative settlement, State Farm would pay at least $50 million for claims that were previously closed, and some lawyers say the cost for State Farm could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, depending upon how many homeowners requested their files be reopened and the extent of damage to their houses. A similar deal with other insurers could lead to an estimated 100,000 other closed claims being re-examined, lawyers briefed on the talks said.

Insurance experts said State Farm’s willingness to engage in settlement talks should not be interpreted as a concession that it did anything wrong. They said a final agreement would almost certainly say, in effect, that State Farm was neither acknowledging nor denying objectionable practices. Further, they said, State Farm would not want to set precedent on future payments for flood damage from hurricanes.

“They’re willing to settle,” said Gary S. Thompson, a Washington lawyer who represents individual and commercial policyholders, “because they know they would have to go through a long, arduous journey examining each and every claim.”

That could take years, some lawyers said. In the meantime, State Farm’s reputation would be further battered and, facing any jury drawn from the ranks of Mississippi’s hurricane victims, State Farm could easily “lose most of the cases,” Mr. Thompson said.

Jury selection began yesterday in federal court in Gulfport for the first trial against State Farm over Katrina damage. That case, which was not part of the settlement talks, was filed by Norman and Genevieve Broussard. Only the foundation slab of their home in Biloxi remained after the hurricane. State Farm refused to pay their claim, saying all the damage was caused by floodwaters.

The insurers have already paid $5.2 billion for damage to homes throughout Mississippi for Katrina and $10.3 billion for damage in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana.

To close the deal, State Farm wants the approval of Mississippi’s attorney general, Jim Hood, and the state’s insurance regulator, George Dale, lawyers close to the talks said. As a condition of the deal, these lawyers said, Mr. Hood would be required to drop a criminal investigation into State Farm’s handling of claims as well as a civil lawsuit against State Farm and other insurers.

In a statement late yesterday, Mr. Hood said: “I am working day and night attempting to get our coastal residents a fair shake in the insurance litigation.” He added, “It would not help our negotiations to disclose any details at this time.”

Lee Harrell, a deputy to the insurance commissioner, would not comment on the talks but said that the regulators consistently monitored insurance agreements to make sure that they were fair to both policyholders and the insurers.

Phil Supple, a spokesman for State Farm, acknowledged that the insurer had been in settlement talks but he said that a final agreement had not yet been reached. “At this point,” he said, “we have no settlement.”

He said State Farm would absolutely like to settle the cases: “We see it in the best interest of policyholders, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and State Farm.”

Richard F. Scruggs, who has been leading a team of about a dozen lawyers against State Farm, said that talks toward a settlement began early last fall and that he hoped to see a final agreement this week. “All the details are finalized,” he said.

The last element, he said, was the approval of the attorney general and the insurance commissioner. “We are awaiting,” he said, “a decision from the state officials who have helped craft the settlement.”

    State Farm Is Settling Gulf Claims, NYT, 7.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/business/09insure.html?hp&ex=1168405200&en=59288cb2fa48a5d5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lessons for Homesick Evacuees

on How to Be Houstonian

January 7, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Jan. 6 — Hurricane Katrina evacuees take note: You’re not in New Orleans anymore.

It’s time to “think like a Houstonian.”

That is the message from two displaced New Orleanians in a lighthearted new video prepared by Houston social agencies to help survivors of the 2005 hurricane find work and establish new roots here in the nation’s fourth largest city.

Of 106,393 suddenly unemployed evacuees who took refuge in the Houston area, 28,508 had found jobs through November, according to WorkSource, an arm of the Texas Workforce Commission, which made the seven-minute video with the City of Houston and Neighborhood Centers Inc., a nonprofit aid group, for the Community Settlement Network, a group of aid organizations. But many newcomers still need guidance, said Cindy Gabriel, communications director for the network and a producer of the video, to be posted on local Web sites.

Ad-libbing a little riff on “The Wizard of Oz,” the volunteer stars, Durrell Johnson and Rashida Jackson (she wears Dorothy-style pigtails), voice amazement at the unfamiliar skyline and lament the lack of oyster po’ boy sandwiches with cheese before getting down to a series of recommendations.

“You have to know a little bit about the city and know how people think here,” says Ms. Jackson, 29, formerly an adjunct professor of health promotion at the University of New Orleans and now working as a case management supervisor at Neighborhood Centers.

Mr. Johnson, 36, who worked for an AIDS foundation in New Orleans and is now a case manager at Neighborhood Centers, agrees. “That’s what you do,” he says, “you think like a Houstonian.”

A Houstonian is prepared, they agree — prepared for lots of paperwork. Keep index cards with notes of previous jobs and employers.

A Houstonian does not keep a cellphone with a 504 New Orleans area code. “You want to make sure that the employer knows that you are planning on staying in Houston,” Mr. Johnson says.

Make sure, Ms. Jackson agrees, “to put a 713 or 832 or another local number on that application.”

And Mr. Johnson chides, “You should leave the rap or jazz intros out of your voice messaging system so that employers know that you are serious about finding a job.”

Don’t regale prospective employers with tales of narrow escapes, he cautions: “You should think about going forward as opposed to backward.”

“Now that you’re in Houston looking for work,” Mr. Johnson says, “you should think of yourself as a Houstonian, not a homesick New Orleanian.”

Ms. Jackson finds a rainbow in Houston. “I don’t know about you,” she tells Mr. Johnson, “but the city’s kind of starting to grow on me.”

    Lessons for Homesick Evacuees on How to Be Houstonian, NYT, 7.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/us/nationalspecial/07video.html

New Orleans looks

at possible curfew to stem crime

Updated 1/6/2007 5:34 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — This city, which has recorded at least eight killings this year, is looking at imposing a curfew as a way to help stem the violence, police Superintendent Warren Riley said Saturday.

"It's something we're just sort of talking about, to see if that will make a difference," he said. A previous curfew, along with fewer people in the city because of Hurricane Katrina, seemed to be effective, he said.

Some residents have called for a march on City Hall Thursday to demand action by city officials in response to the violence. On Saturday, Riley and Mayor Ray Nagin sought to reassure the city that they are doing all they can to make New Orleans safer.

Both men said they understood citizens' concerns, but Nagin urged residents not to make decisions on whether to stay in this still-rebuilding city based on the recent killings.

"I would say to all citizens who are here, this recovery is going to continue to be difficult. We're going to have periods of time when we feel very comfortable, and we are going to have very tough periods where we're going to feel very uncomfortable," Nagin said.

Officials are working to reverse the violent trend, "and we will be successful," Nagin said.

"This is a tragic incident, but we've had murders over the past year-and-a-half or 10 years, and I understand there are tipping points," Nagin said. This may be one such tipping point, he said, that "galvanizes our community to really step forward and help us to solve this."

Riley said he believed the city had begun to make progress in stemming the killings last month. As of Saturday morning, the number was at least eight, a police spokeswoman said. Riley said some of the recent killings appear related; others, retaliatory.

What's occurring now is part of a chronic problem that Riley said goes back to the city's school system and what he sees as the city's failure, over many years, to adequately educate and provide job opportunities for citizens. He said he's also concerned about making sure "hard-core criminals" are prosecuted and kept in jail.

There will continue to be problems until the criminal justice system, which has struggled since Hurricane Katrina to get court cases moving again, is improved, Riley said.

In November, the sheriff of neighboring Jefferson Parish, which ended the year with a record number of homicides, vowed "extreme" measures to get the crime problem under control, including dispatching armored vehicles, with cameras, into target areas. Those vehicles have been sent out on an "as-need" basis, a spokesman said.

Riley said that while he cannot afford to follow suit, because the city is cash-strapped, law enforcement officials are being proactive.

    New Orleans looks at possible curfew to stem crime, UT, 6.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-06-new-orleans-curfew_x.htm

Katrina Victims Find a Solution:

Modular House

January 6, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — Of the hundreds of houses swept away by Hurricane Katrina in this small Gulf Coast town, only a fraction have been replaced. The price of building materials has skyrocketed, and the services of even mediocre contractors can be hard to come by.

But on East North Street recently, a swarm of workmen put the final touches on Gwen and Rudy Cardreon’s new home, a tan ranch house that sprang up, on 11-foot piling, in a matter of days. Constructed in three pieces in a factory hundreds of miles away, the house came equipped with carpets, curtains, even ceiling fans, but looks as if it were custom built in the Cardreons’ yard.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Mrs. Cardreon exclaimed, standing in her new kitchen as construction workers hammered on the wooden staircase outside.

Before the August 2005 hurricane, so-called modular houses like the Cardreons’ were almost unknown in Mississippi, where houses tended to be the traditional “stick built” on site or mobile homes. Modulars have been popular until now mainly in Northern states with short building seasons and high labor costs.

But since the storm, modular houses, which range from simple shotgun-style cottages to fancy minimansions, are starting to appear across the Gulf Coast, as public officials and private citizens search for ways to speed the slow pace of recovery and begin experimenting with new forms of shelter.

Modular houses have a number of advantages over conventionally built houses, their advocates said. For example, once they are delivered, modular homes can sometimes be completed in days, rather than months. They are relatively easy to perch up on stilts to comply with flood zone rules. They require less local labor in a region where there is more than enough construction work to go around. Some are less expensive than conventional houses — they range from $50,000 to $500,000 — and manufacturers say some can withstand 160-mile-an-hour winds.

The number of modular houses on the Gulf Coast is still small; perhaps 400 have been installed in Mississippi in the last year, said Fred C. Hallahan, a consultant in Baltimore who tracks the modular business.

But Mr. Hallahan and other experts expect the trickle of modular housing to grow rapidly this year, and perhaps lead to even bigger changes.

“Really, if we look back 20 years from now, we could see a dramatic shift in the way houses get built,” said David W. Hinson, a professor of architecture at Auburn University in Alabama.

In Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 70,000 houses and apartments, according to state estimates; more than 30,000 families in the state still live in the small trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Though Mississippi is widely considered to be far ahead of Louisiana in terms of recovery, only 2,480 building permits had been issued by the end of November for new home construction in the hardest-hit counties along the coast, according to the governor’s office.

Officials cite many reasons for the slow going, including insurance issues, wetlands regulations, permit backlogs and infrastructure problems. And, of course, money: many people are still fighting with their insurance companies, and over the summer, Mississippi’s grant program to help homeowners rebuild ran into some of the same bottlenecks that still plague Louisiana’s Road Home program.

But after several adjustments, the Mississippi program has distributed more than $500 million to more than 8,000 homeowners, said Donna Sanford, who supervises the program for the Mississippi Development Authority. Last month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development approved a second phase of the program, to help low-income applicants and those who lived in the flood zones.

With the prospect of money finally starting to flow to housing, experiments are going on across the Gulf Coast as people look for ways to build more quickly, more cheaply and with more resistance to hurricanes.

Builders are exploring houses made of steel or concrete, and are considering putting housing above stores, as they do in concentrated urban areas like New York City. Volunteer groups have been ordering house-in-a-box kits from New Hope Construction, a nonprofit supplier in Tennessee that often works closely with churches.

Lowe’s, the big building supply chain, says it will be selling everything necessary to build a Katrina Cottage, designed as a low-cost, high-quality alternative to trailers.

[Directed by Congress, even FEMA has gotten into the act, awarding about $400 million on Dec. 22 to various state-sponsored pilot programs to replace its travel trailers with roomier and sturdier housing.]

But the big push seems to be modular housing, which is being used not just by private developers, but also by Habitat for Humanity and Catholic Charities in New Orleans.

“It’s the only answer, it is simply the only answer in Mississippi,” said Fred Carl Jr., the founder of the Viking Range Corporation, who served as the Hurricane Katrina housing coordinator for Gov. Haley Barbour.

Mr. Carl said he was trying to lure a major modular manufacturer to the state. “We need nine or ten thousand houses a year,” he said.

There is already one home-grown modular builder in Mississippi, Safeway Homes, which Buddy Jenkins and his brother started in 2005. “We’re really a stick-built house moved in component parts,” Mr. Jenkins said of his tidy houses, which are rated to withstand high winds.

At the company’s spotless plant in Lexington, a small town north of the state capital, Jackson, Joel E. Smith walks a visitor through the 16 stations where the houses are framed and insulated by about 100 workers. The ducts and plumbing are installed, fixtures added, doors and windows placed, and each half of a house is tightly screwed and glued.

Once they are delivered, a crane will lower the halves onto a foundation, where they will be joined, and a roof, also built at the plant, will be attached. The basic house costs about $58,000, company officials said, but the final cost will depend on the land, the foundation, the developer and whether the owner has chosen any extras like arched windows.

Safeway Homes has built about 250 houses, Mr. Smith said, and could make as many as three a day. But there are hurdles. Some are regulatory; building inspectors are often unfamiliar with modular housing, and customers must buy through a developer rather than from manufacturers. And some consumers still equate modular houses with mobile homes, in part because they are sold by many of the same manufacturers. That image problem is being tackled by Victor Planetta, a developer based in Louisiana who, with his son, Victor Jr., has started putting modular houses in their Mississippi developments.

Their showplace, on the main highway into Bay St. Louis, near Pass Christian, is a bright yellow, two-story house on pillars with a fountain burbling out front and a big motorboat named Beyond Belief out back in the canal.

The house, which was trucked in several pieces from a Genesis Homes plant in Lake City, Fla., and assembled on the site, has crown moldings, granite, silk flowers and tassels; there is even an elevator. More than 1,000 people have visited the house, which will sell for about $425,000, the Planettas said.

Here in the Pass, as the devastated town is known, about three dozen simple modular houses, including Gwen and Rudy Cardreon’s, have been installed though a program called Home Again. Phil Eide, who runs the program for ECD/Hope, a community development organization, said that modular housing had been harder to deal with than he had first hoped. For example, it takes 41 steps to get a permit, he said, and some suppliers make promises they do not keep.

But the program has attracted backing from James L. Barksdale, the former Internet executive and investor who served as chairman of Mississippi’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, who just bought about 35 modular houses that Home Again will place in communities.

Mr. Barksdale said he had become frustrated with the lack of progress in returning affordable housing to the Gulf Coast.

“My goal,” he said, “is to prove to people that we can do this, and then let it become a lot bigger program.”

    Katrina Victims Find a Solution: Modular House, NYT, 6.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/us/06modular.html

New Orleans Small Biz

Has Big Struggle

January 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- It's nothing for Myra Landry to go a day or more without making a sale at her French Quarter collectibles shop. What she earned in a day before Hurricane Katrina, she's often lucky to make now in a month.

Landry, who sells knickknacks and miniature collectibles ranging in price from 50 cents to $5,000, says she hasn't drawn a salary since the storm hit Aug. 29, 2005 -- drying up much of the leisure and tourist trade -- and has relied on loans and savings to stay in business.

Across New Orleans, where some storefronts remain boarded up and the general pace of the recovery remains sluggish, Landry's story is a familiar one. Shop owners say they've cut hours in response to a reduced customer base. Some have closed or are considering closing. Those that remain say they need more customers and action by government and trade groups to avert a crisis.

State and local tourism officials acknowledge the city's tourism-reliant economy is struggling, but say they're taking steps to help. Among them:

-- A $100 million, federally funded grant program for small businesses in hurricane-hit communities along the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

-- Marketing New Orleans with the message that the Big Easy is open for business, especially the tourist attractions.

Some business owners laud the effort, but say it falls short.

What the region needs, they say, is a well-financed marketing campaign and a flag-bearer to deliver the message, such as Mayor Ray Nagin or Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

''2007 right now looks like it's going to be a struggle,'' said Ralph Brennan, whose family owns some of New Orleans best-known restaurants. ''I don't see much difference between 2007 and 2006 yet.''

Government and tourism officials focused on recovery of infrastructure in 2006, but also on public perception damage control. The University of New Orleans estimates tourism contributes about $4.9 billion annually to the not-very-diverse local economy. So the race was on to keep conventions and travelers coming.

One high-priority target was $185 million renovation of the storm-damaged Louisiana Superdome. With $115 million of federal money kicked in, the stadium reopened to national fanfare September, giving tourism officials a burst of optimism.

But overall, the results were mixed. Only about 40 percent of the convention business booked for 2006 actually took place. And even big weekends or once-reliable events, such as Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and the Christmas-New Year holidays, failed to live up to hopes.

Roughly one-third of the city's estimated 9,600 businesses of all kinds have closed since Katrina, according to estimates in a state-commissioned study. More are struggling.

Mark Wilson, president of the French Quarter Business Association, says at least half the more than 450 businesses in the Quarter are in that category -- many are antiques or high-end specialty retailers such as Landry.

''If the state, which is sitting on so much money right now, could find more to give the city of New Orleans to market tourism, it would have a drastic effect -- and immediate effect -- on business and the French Quarter,'' Wilson said.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversees distribution of federal relief dollars, has allocated $20 million to market the city. Tourism officials, who say that extra money won't stretch far, have promised an aggressive new marketing campaign, with cable TV and magazine ads, but, so far, have provided few other details. A recent campaign featured celebrities with ties to New Orleans urging people to ''come fall in love with the New Orleans all over again.''

LRA also has approved a $100 million, first-come, first-serve grant program for hurricane-affected businesses. The program is tied up in red tape, needing approval of the Legislature and federal officials, but would provide eligible small businesses with grants of up to $20,000. The goal is to help as many as 7,000 businesses with fewer than 50 employees, said Robin Keegan, LRA's director of economic and workforce policy.

Officials hope to start sending out checks in a few weeks, Keegan said.

Local lenders will administer the program, and help shop owners put together marketing and business plans, she said. LRA also is starting a $38 million, no-interest loan program, with awards capped at $250,000.

''We really want success,'' Keegan said.

So does Gunter Preuss. But the owner and chef of Broussard's in the French Quarter is skeptical. Preuss, who said he relied on loans and savings to stay in business until he finally broke even in the fourth quarter of 2006, said he considers the $20,000 grant ''an insult.''

Still, neither he nor Landry is interested in giving up.

''It's not depressing to me, because I know we have to do this because we want this city to come back,'' Landry said. ''We have to take the hard knocks, too.''

New Orleans Small Biz Has Big Struggle, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Katrina-Small-Business.html