Louisiana in Limbo

The New York Times | Editorial

Monday 30 January 2006

New Orleans waits. While some heroic efforts at rebuilding are taking place, hundreds of thousands of residents have put their lives on hold until they know what the government's next steps will be, leaving the shells of their houses as placeholders. But the Bush administration has now rejected the most broadly supported plan for rebuilding communities while offering nothing to take its place.

It has been five months since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and for many the norm is still the claustrophobic new reality of tiny trailers and multiple families crammed into single apartments. Louisiana is trying. You can hear jackhammers pounding and buzz saws whirring on Canal Street in New Orleans. Dedicated workers endure a grinding daily commute from points north, like Baton Rouge, as they try to make the city and the region whole again. But the mission is far from complete and the challenge is beyond the scope of a broken city and a poor state.

New Orleans's crisis has little relation to anything the nation has faced in modern memory, and traditional solutions will simply not help. Homeowners - many very poor people whose houses had been in their families for generations - had varying degrees of insurance before the disaster. When entire neighborhoods are devastated, their mildewed furniture and drywall piled on the roadsides, it's impossible to tell the people who are well insured to rebuild and hope that the houses all around them will somehow be reclaimed somewhere down the line.

But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.)

Instead of an alternate solution, the president's Katrina czar, Donald Powell, has offered sleight of hand, touting $6.2 billion in development money for Louisiana passed last year by Congress as if it were somehow a substitute. And in an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem, Mr. Powell says the government first needs to care for the roughly 20,000 homeowners without flood insurance who lived outside the federally designated flood plain. The real tally of destroyed or damaged homes in the region is well over 200,000. And the real need is housing for residents, whether they were renters or owners, insured or uninsured, living above the flood plain or trusting the federal government's levees to protect them from storms.

Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the wreckage of poor, low-lying New Orleans neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. That has sparked the unproductive, blame-the-victim debate revolving around whether people should have lived there in the first place. The Ninth Ward provides a misleading picture of the city, as do the relatively unscathed tourist areas like the French Quarter and the Garden District. Huge swaths of the city have the empty quality of a ghost town. Stores wait for residents to reopen; residents wait to see if neighbors will return. The city and surrounding parishes will not meet Mr. Powell's neat categories, when renters lived beside owners, insured next to uninsured. He is talking like an actuary when a leader is needed to rescue this region.

Now, Congress has a responsibility to follow its own lead rather than the president's. We were outraged once, shocked at the images on our television sets, at the poverty in our collective backyard and at the devastation of a great city. As the disaster threatens to become permanent, we have every reason to remain so.



Go to Original

Desertion
By Gérard Dupuy
Libération

Monday 30 January 2006

Katrina showed a dark face of Louisiana - the great poverty of some black neighborhoods and their relative desertion - which President Bush's ineptitude emphasized still further. Thus, the United States found itself with an immense display window it would happily have done without, given the unfavorable attention it received from those drawn to that spectacle. All of a sudden, the American president tardily discovered Churchillian accents in which to announce that America would meet the challenge and that we would see what we would see. Five months later, we're not seeing much. Or, rather, one may already wonder whether New Orleans will not settle its problem of under-developed pockets by inaction: gone with the tidal wave ...

Certainly, quite simply, many refugees don't want to move back to neighborhoods exposed to perils that meteorological specialists admit are likely to grow in frequency and scope. But, in the mode of political action used - in conformity to the political structure of this territory, but also as a matter of political philosophy - a good part of reconstruction is left to private initiative. Help yourself, yourself - and the government will end up helping you! Except that some have (perhaps) more desire and (certainly) more means than others to help themselves. Consequently, life resumes its contours and its rights more quickly in wealthy white neighborhoods than elsewhere.

With many hesitations, the famous New Orleans carnival has been maintained. All the better. Rather than surrender to a false concept of decency, the old city remembered that Her Majesty's Carnival is also defiance of (bad) fate. But respecting the tradition should also include concern for its most famous aspect: music and the people who invented it. The re-launch of the tourist industry is legitimate. The erasure of those it doesn't include is not.

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.