N.O. sees '08 as a tipping point in recovery

The way Mayor Ray Nagin sees it, 2008 is a tipping point in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the year a stronger, better New Orleans begins to rise in earnest from the ruins.

Residents want to believe. They look optimistically for construction crews, neighborhood investment and homecomings for neighbors still in exile 28 months after the storm. They also worry about housing, a crime wave sweeping the city and rising cost of living. Like the city itself, they are near a tipping point.

Carrey Britsch bought a home in hard-hit Lakeview, hoping to do her part for the recovery. But a friend living in New Mexico after the storm is put off by reports of bureaucratic foot-dragging and street violence, and questions whether returning makes sense.

"It's a make-or-break point, definitely," Britsch said at a Starbucks coffeehouse, where a painted line memorializes the watermark left by Katrina's flooding.

Janet Speyer, a University of New Orleans economist, puts it bluntly: "2008 is the year when the future of New Orleans is going to be determined."

Will it be a better city? Nagin believes so. After focusing on restoring services, stabilizing city finances and planning for the future, his administration is bracing for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid expected to bankroll neighborhood reconstruction.

New Orleans, the mayor recently told the City Council, is "getting ready to explode."

Unfolding events in 2008 will be telling.

Among them are public education reform, construction of affordable housing, rebuilding public infrastructure and attracting big bucks in corporate investment.

Then there is the emergence of new city leadership, and an almost unprecedented citizen demand for accountability of public officials.
In a racially polarized city struggling with post-storm reality, it won't be easy.

However, an early indicator came in December, when protests turned violent over plans to demolish public housing and build instead mixed-income developments.

The City Council, in perhaps the strongest political statement since Katrina, cast off racial voting lines of the past and unanimously voted for demolition.
"I don't know of a sign that's been more encouraging to me," said Elliott Stonecipher, a Shreveport analyst who has closely followed post-Katrina politics.

Stonecipher believes it probably will be about the time of the city's tricentennial — 2018 — before anyone can definitively say "this is the New Orleans that rose from the storm."

There are signs it is beginning. An estimated two-thirds of the population is back, some neighborhood business districts, such as in Lakeview, are busy and the hospitality-based economy is hosting major events, such as the BCS football championship Jan. 7.

While only about 10 percent of the population has returned to the impoverished Lower 9th Ward, rebuilding efforts such as one led by actor Brad Pitt hold promise.

"I know this kind of progress will take time, bricks and mortar take a long time, and emotions take a long time to heal, and those are the kinds of things you can't hurry," said Laura LeBon, who's renting an apartment until her home is repaired.

The recovery has been a fragile, emotion-wrenching one. Besides dealing with red-tape clogged bureaucracy, another murder or the upbeat dedication of a walking trail can create thousands of personal tipping points.

For resident Karen Gadbois, an indicator came at Christmas. The fewer lights decorating homes in her neighborhood could have signaled a mood shift.
"I would say last year there was a greater sense of urgency, with this idea that we were on the cusp of change," she said. Now, "I think there is less optimism, and more resignation."

That could change if success is achieved in long-standing problems such as education and an economy with limited opportunity.

Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas, who took over in summer 2007, has embarked on a two-year reform plan. He believes strategic shifts — such as industry-based instruction to prepare students for the workplace — can turn New Orleans into a national model for public education.

"If I can't lay a foundation in two years," he said, "they need to get someone else in here."

Eastern New Orleans resident Lisa Stafford knows change won't happen overnight. She just wants more signs it's under way in an area where many homes still stand gutted.

Stafford's personal benchmark is economic: redevelopment of a huge former shopping center, at one time a center of community life. If it happens, she believes former residents of an area anchored by the city's black middle class will come home.

"There are still a lot of people sitting back, waiting, trying to see what's going to happen before they make those final commitments on whether to rebuild their homes," she said. "I think it will make a big difference to people if they saw the city had faith in their area."

UNO's Speyrer suggests the city must step up its sales pitch to lure more private investment and jobs. The city needs to abandon the "Katrina mentality, that other people are going to help us and give us the money we need, and I think we have to start moving toward doing things ourselves," she said. A proposal for a public-private economic development partnership offers hope, though past similar attempts have yielded only modest success.

As the new year begins, Gadbois has not decided whether to stay in the work-in-progress city when her daughter graduates high school.

"Right now," she said, "leaving New Orleans feels like dropping the book halfway through, and it's a really good book. I wouldn't want to stop this story right now."

A Streetcar of Solace Is Back in New Orleans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promise of help has strings attached

She thought she did everything right. But long Road Home wait tests N.O. woman's patience

The call came Dec. 6, almost a year to the day after 69-year-old Catherine Clark had her Road Home eligibility interview, after 15 months of countless delays and unanswered questions.

A staffer from the state's homeowner recovery program was calling to tell Clark she couldn't collect the $95,287 buyout she'd been promised for her leveled Lower 9th Ward home until she cleared up three liens.

She knew something was wrong. After more than four decades working for the state and city as a nurse, she had great credit, had paid off her mortgage and had only taken on an $88,000 Small Business Administration loan in June because the Road Home process dragged.

As Clark recalled the conversation, "Who's Richard Clark?" the Road Home employee asked her.

Clark was taken aback to hear the name of her late son, who died of AIDS in 1996. The year after his death, the IRS and the state had issued liens for six years of unpaid income taxes, and his last official address was his mother's house, but Clark had cleared that up long ago. The lien couldn't possibly attach to her house, because her son never owned it.

"And who's Paul Clark?" the adviser went on, abruptly.

That name shocked Clark even more. It was her late husband, dead about 25 years, seven years before she even bought the house.

"What do they have to do with ... Hello? Hello?" she asked.

She heard a click and realized the agent had put the phone down and left. She felt like a fool, talking to nobody as Road Home employees chattered indecipherably in the background.

Ten minutes later, the unidentified woman came back on the line to say she had talked with a supervisor. Clark, flustered, immediately asked her for her name, at which point the employee hung up on her, she said.

The conversation proved a watershed for Clark, one of those moments to which so many of the 185,000 homeowner applicants to the state's hurricane compensation program can relate. It marked a low point in a constant struggle since the flood, and also the moment she realized she might just have to make it on her own and write off the endless promises that the government would make her whole.

A Road Home spokeswoman declined comment about Clark's case, citing privacy concerns.

Initially, Clark wanted to reach through the phone line and strangle the Road Home agent. Then, she wanted to go out in the middle of the street and let a car run her over, to end it all -- the stress, the cramped FEMA trailer, the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the asthma.

After living in Texas for a year after the flood, she had answered the call of politicians to come home, rebuild, on the promise of government help.

Never in her 69 years had Clark expected government handouts. But she didn't consider this a handout. She considered it just compensation for property destroyed by the collapse of shoddily built federal levees. And for the first time in her life, she desperately needed the help: Retired and on a fixed income, she couldn't build a new home without it, and she couldn't get on with her life without a home.

For more than a year, she had bought into the program's reassurances -- the money would come soon, any day now -- but now she started to doubt it might ever come.

Like many of the estimated 75,000 eligible applicants still awaiting federal rebuilding aid more than 27 months after the flood, Clark became consumed with gnawing uncertainty, trapped in rebuilding purgatory.

With her former neighbors and friends from the Lower 9th Ward scattered, Clark has few friends her age and has come to rely more heavily than she'd like on family and members of her church. She has started seeing a psychiatrist, something foreign and humbling for a tough-minded senior citizen, a Charity Hospital nurse for 28 years and a widow who raised nine children.

She felt the foundation of her life -- self-sufficiency -- crumbling beneath her.

"I've always been a strong person and always taught my kids to be strong and self-sufficient, and now I've let them down, because I'm weak," Clark recalled telling her daughter-in-law, Elvernia Clark, after the Dec. 6 phone call from the Road Home.

"You're still strong," she said Elvernia Clark reassured her. "It's just that you're elderly, and even for the young, this is a devastating process to go though. We just have to stick together and get through it together."

Family offers support

Before Katrina laid waste to her neighborhood, Clark evacuated to Houston with her three daughters and their families. They stayed in a hotel for two weeks before a church group in Temple, Texas, near Waco, offered to help pay for an apartment for Clark. Her son Jeffrey Clark, a New Orleans firefighter and first-responder during Katrina, had stayed in New Orleans through the storm and, first chance she got, she came back to visit him and see the home she had purchased in 1987, where she started a new life after her husband's death.

It looked like kindling on a campfire: walls collapsed, wooden boards askew, foundation cracked. She wiped away tears, then struck a Vanna White pose for a photo that belied her despair.

She went back to Temple and her donated apartment, but after a year, she missed New Orleans and her independence terribly. She had enough flood- and homeowner-insurance proceeds to pay off the mortgage on her destroyed 9th Ward home, with enough left over to put into the purchase of a new home. She decided to come home and make a go of it.

She figured the Road Home benefit would get her over the hump by allowing her to pay fully for a gutted house in eastern New Orleans, across from one of her sons, and providing enough cash to renovate it into one last home. She applied Sept. 20, 2006.

Her children told her to come back around Thanksgiving 2006. Her son, Rodney Clark, would move back into his house in eastern New Orleans before it was done, so his mother could live in the FEMA trailer in his front yard until she could secure her Road Home grant.

Jeffrey Clark went with his mother to her initial Road Home eligibility interview Dec. 8, 2006. It would prove a harbinger. Clark, recalling the interview, said she felt the adviser was talking down to her and began to cry.

"Don't ask her any questions," Jeffrey Clark jumped in. "I'm here. Ask me. You're upsetting her. This is already painful for her, so just deal with me."

He turned to his mother and projected the strength she'd always exuded raising him and his siblings.

"The choice is yours," he said. "If you want to go through the process, fine, but just realize this is the government. The people aren't going to be nice to you. They don't understand."

Jeffrey Clark and his wife, Elvernia, had already made up their minds. They lost their home and several rental properties in the storm, but they weren't going to fool with the Road Home.

"If I'm going to fight it, I'll fight it for her, because she needs it more than we do," Elvernia Clark said.

And so Elvernia Clark became her mother-in-law's Road Home advocate, fighting numerous battles ever since, so far to no avail.

Roadblocks abound

In the heady early months of the Road Home, everyone's expectations were more than a little off. The head program administrator promised 500 grants a day by January 2007, then backed off. The governor, fed up with early delays, ordered 10,000 award commitments in November 2006, but the letters that went out were filled with errors and it would take more than six months to actually pay that many grants.

After Clark went through her Road Home eligibility appointment in December 2006, she thought she'd see the money soon, so she bought a gutted house near Jeffrey and Elvernia's home for $70,000. She only had $50,000 left from her retirement savings and insurance payments, but her sons kicked in another $20,000 so she wouldn't have to get another mortgage.

But then the months started dragging on. Calls to Road Home went unreturned. Finally, in April, came the coveted yellow grant award letter, but it brought only another disappointment. It undervalued her 9th Ward house by $20,000 and offered her $77,000.

Elvernia Clark went to work. She called the state Office of Community Development, which oversees the program, and the agency assigned a caseworker. On April 16, the Road Home's Elizabeth Hill clarified in an e-mail that, indeed, the award should be $95,287. With Elvernia working the phones, Clark's prospects seemed to brighten.

In June, the Road Home informed the Clarks that the program had begun a title search, something they thought would take a couple of months at most. But five months later, still no news.

Last summer, desperate to move on, Clark relented and took out a mortgage in the form of an SBA loan, so she could begin working on her new home. While Jeffrey worked on his house, he started the work on his mother's, shelling out $17,000 for a roof and electrical wiring.

No resolution in sight

In November, Clark mustered the energy to drop in on a Road Home closing office in Clearview Mall in Metairie, hoping she could demand some answers.

"I didn't even get in the door," Clark said. "There was a table in front, with some employees and a security guard and they just said, 'This is for appointments only.

That was followed by the Dec. 6 phone call that brought back painful memories of a lost child and drove Clark to the depths. Her daughter-in-law, who describes herself as "a very aggressive person," started hassling the title company, HGI Catastrophe Services, repeatedly dialing random extensions at its LaPlace headquarters until she got a warm body on the other end of the line, then faxing documents showing the liens should have no bearing on her grant.

Now that Jeffrey and Elvernia Clark are back in their home, he wants to start on his mother's 2,300-square-foot house: installing drywall, plumbing, windows, flooring, an alarm system, garage doors, doing the landscaping and painting. Estimated cost: $38,000. Then they can find some furnishings.

But that should exhaust the SBA loan. Even if she gets the $95,287 from Road Home, most of it will have to go directly to paying off the loan, according to state and federal rules. If she is lucky, the remainder could be just enough to pay back her sons for their help purchasing the new home, but then she'd have nothing left.

That is if she ever gets the Road Home money. If not, she'll have less than nothing left -- and a large debt.

After venting her anger, and working through her angst on a psychiatrist's couch, Clark has started the process of finding peace with her new life, whether the government comes through or not. She has immersed herself in a new spiritual community at the New Israel Baptist Church in eastern New Orleans.

She attends worship services, Bible study and takes a leading role in its Life Builders missionary program.

There, she has found support and more people, like her family, who have encouraged her not to become overly dependent on the government coming through.

"It seems like every time I take one step forward, the government sends me 10 steps backward," Clark said recently to the pastor, the Rev. Douglas Haywood.

Haywood worried that she might be suicidal, but the preacher also saw a lot of pride and positivity in Clark. He thinks it helped her to see the church develop and grow, even though it started operating again in 2006 with no seats, no lights, no heating or air conditioning and plenty of ugly structural damage.

Haywood bucked the naysayers and started an unfinished church as an inspirational message to its downtrodden members: "If we can do this at church, you can do it at home, too."

New Orleans Cracks Down on Corruption

Fed up with crime and political corruption, New Orleans' business leaders in 1952 organized to flush out the twin poisons they believed were harming economic development.

It was a time when illegal gambling and the Carlos Marcello crime family operated openly in a city that was a bustling business hub.

Fast forward 55 years. Gambling is legal and the mob has faded into obscurity. The city's economy is a shadow of its former self, thanks to the 1980s oil bust, an exodus of big businesses and the shattering blow of Hurricane Katrina, which ran off at least 2,000 employers.

As New Orleans' economy struggles to get back on its feet, street crime and political corruption have re-emerged as spoilers. But a wave of recent federal convictions shows New Orleans' most chronic image-killers -- crooked politicians -- are under assault.

For a city trying to convince corporate America to make long-term investments in the city's rebuilding, the crackdown couldn't come at a more important time.

A key player is the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a crime and corruption watchdog, safe house for tipsters and craw in the side of those with political punch and sticky fingers.

''It's pretty tough to be a whistleblower in the state of Louisiana,'' said MCC president Rafael Goyeneche, who has headed the group since 1989. ''Many people won't risk themselves, their families and their business associates if it means putting them in jeopardy by stepping forward. So, we're a conduit of information for those who don't want to be identified.''

The MCC, inspired by the Chicago Crime Commission formed after World War I, is the antithesis of the idea that size equates with effectiveness.

Besides Goyeneche, there is one investigator, a researcher, a community relations person and an office manager. Much of the annual budget of $677,000 is donated by businesses.

The MCC keeps a stealthy but effective profile. Federal officials said it played a key role in bringing down two suburban state judges who took bribes from a bail bondsman. FBI special agent in charge Jim Bernazzani also said the organization helped with a probe of corruption in the Orleans Parish School Board, which resulted in 30 convictions.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten calls the commission ''an important player'' in law enforcement. ''While they are not a law enforcement agency, per se, they have been instrumental in getting people with information on public corruption to come forward and they've been able to pass on information themselves to investigators,'' Letten said.

Goyeneche, a former New Orleans assistant district attorney, said the commission gets about 100 tips monthly on its local hotline, and another 20 or so on a new statewide corruption line. About 15 to 20 percent provide enough information to warrant consideration. Tips that show particular promise are passed on to law enforcement and prosecutors, often on the federal level where virtually all successful public corruption cases in New Orleans are handled.

For example, in 2005, a woman who alleged she was raped by a deputy city attorney in his private law office -- after being offered help on a municipal charge -- came first to the MCC, expressing doubt that local authorities would do anything. The commission forwarded its investigative report to federal prosecutors, who obtained a civil rights conviction and life prison sentence against the official, Henry Dillon III.

''We don't self-initiate any of our investigations,'' Goyeneche said. ''We have to be told what rock to look under.''

The commission also protects its informants. Goyeneche has been threatened a few times with jail unless he revealed an identity. In the MCC office, there is a photograph of Aaron Kohn, its first head, behind bars in the 1950s for refusing to do so.

The prime methods of corruption against local businesses include pressure to hire politically connected contractors, the hiring of ''ghost employees'' who are nothing more than a paycheck from a business and direct payoff demands from government officials for business or zoning changes.

''There isn't anything new,'' Goyeneche said. ''It's almost like these secrets have been passed down from one generation to another.''

For example, several close associates of former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial have been convicted in connection with skimming money from an energy-management contract signed by City Hall. Morial has not been accused of wrongdoing.

''These individuals basically leveraged their relationship with the mayor's office and siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars through some of subcontractors that were awarded contracts,'' Goyeneche said.

Goyeneche said the business community realizes more than cocktail party talk is needed about corruption. Many business leaders, fed up with public rackets, ''are not only willing to meet with the FBI, in many instances they are willing to wire up and provide the information that the FBI needs,'' he said.

Joe Exnicios, senior vice president at Whitney National Bank and chairman of the MCC board, said he got involved about six years ago because ''the perception that folks have outside of Louisiana and particularly New Orleans have is one I'm not very proud of.''

''Everyone likes to think they are operating on a level playing field,'' Exnicios said. ''If there is any public corruption taking place, or even the belief, it hinders companies from moving in here and companies that are here from expanding.''

Not all of MCC work involves criminal activity. The group also keeps an eye on public ethics and how limited criminal justice resources are being used.

For now, Goyeneche doesn't see a major influx of out-of-state businesses making their way into New Orleans -- partly due to the city's reputation.

But that will change, he predicts, as corrupt activities become more hazardous in New Orleans and local businesses spread the word around the country.

How Does a Hurricane Wreck a Sewer System?

From Harry Shearer

That's the question that comes to mind when you read Leslie Eaton's NYT piece on the former leader of St. Bernard Parish, Junior Rodriguez. On the plus side, it's probably the first MSM look at Da Parish, a standing rebuke to the media meme that "Katrina" mainly hurt black folks. It's also nice to see the little details Eaton picks up, like Benny Grunch and Wop Salad and the temporary battle for the post of Parish President between Junior and, well, Junior Jr. But, starting from the headline and continuing repeatedly through the article is the hoariest mass-media error of the "Katrina" story: the notion that a hurricane did all this. It reaches absurdity at this graf:

But the sewer system has not been rebuilt, whole neighborhoods remain abandoned, and rows of white FEMA trailers still cover acres.

How does a hurricane wreck a sewer system? It doesn't. What happened to St. Bernard Parish is what happened to New Orleans, the failure of a system of levees and floodwalls that resulted in more than half a hundred breaches, driving a foot-high (or higher, in some areas) wall of water through the table-flat Parish.

Did Leslie Eaton ever wonder why the nearby Mississippi Gulf Coast, which did indeed get whacked by a hurricane, didn't have to rebuild its sewer system? If not, she continues to miss, along with most of her colleagues, the story of what Dr. Bob Bea of UC Berkeley calls the "greatest man-made engineering disaster" in the history of the country.