A Slow Hope: Time, hard work will rebuild New Orleans
Ginger Gibson
Issue date: 8/29/07 Section: News
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Their one-story ranch that suffered eight feet of water had been razed in late 2005. Rising among the rubble that remained on street in January 2006, only blocks away from the site of the 17th Street Canal breach, was a house unlike many others on the street, elevated on eight-foot concrete piles.
A year later, the Dazets now call it home. The five-member family moved back in January.
"We're back; this is home," Maria Dazet said. "My whole family lives in Lakeview. I grew up in Lakeview."
Standing in the open area under their living room weeks from the two-year anniversary of Katrina, the Dazets chatter with ease about the pace of recovery and their own story.
Maria Dazet fought to get assistance from the Road Home program and won. Her three children have returned to school. They belong to a successful neighborhood association. And they've accepted the pace of recovery.
"Initially in the process we had thought it's clearly beyond comingback from an evacuation now," said her husband Dan Dazet, a University alumnus. "We've come to realize that you cannot expect that it's going to be back the way it was."
"I don't see it all being fixed in my lifetime," Maria Dazet said. "I plan on living a while."
The Dazet story is the type that University Public Administration Institute Director Jim Richardson thinks New Orleans needs so the city can continue the recovery effort.
Richardson has been studying the recovery of the New Orleans economy since Katrina, but his observations are more than numbers and statistics - they're about the spirit as well.
"It's going to take time," he said. "If we gave [everyone in New Orleans] money right now, it will not go much more rapidly.
"I'm not sure there's any one thing that you can say that 'this is what we need to do.' The real element is you have to maintain that sense of 'this is going to happen,' so people do not lose faith or hope in their neighborhoods. They need to have success stories that they can build on each other."
As the city and surrounding area continue to move on the track to recovery, a process Richardson projects will take at least a decade, New Orleans marks another milestone today. And as the nation turns its eyes to the city for a progress report, University researchers continue their role in the planning and processes involved.
From coastal restoration to education, University professors have their hands in every element of the city. They also have a front row seat while maintaining an outside perspective of recovery.
EDUCATION
Vanessa Rogers lived in the Lower 9th Ward before her family evacuated and lived "a hundred places" after Katrina. She and her seven children moved back to New Orleans and are rebuilding their home. Her house was a safe haven in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, she said. It saved two families' lives as neighbors climbed on her roof to wait for rescue.
Now she volunteers at the Common Grounds center in the Lower 9th, a center fueling recovery in the most devastated area.
"We know a lot people that went through a lot of stuff," she said. "That's why I'm here volunteering now because I know a lot of people helped me out, so I come here to help out when I can."
But it's her children who have faced the most difficult recovery.
"I have a little girl that's nine, and every time she sees stuff that she had, she says well 'Oh well, I'm not dead. Thank God I'm not dead,'" Rogers said.
Jayne Fleener, dean of the College of Education, works with children like Rogers' daughter every day. The education college works with recovery planning in New Orleans and at the Renaissance Village in Baker, a FEMA trailer park that remains the home of many displaced residents.
"[After Katrina] the first noticeable difference when you drove to New Orleans was there were no kids in the streets," Fleener said. "It's nice when you go to New Orleans now - you see children, you see families."
New Orleans has proven to be a case study in school choice, Fleener said.
"The waters have washed away more than people's homes," she said. "Not only the facilities. It washed away some of the ideas about how education is done in New Orleans."
Three school systems are operating in New Orleans. This year there is the state-run Recovery School District, the school board-run Orleans Parish schools and the Algiers Charter Schools Association that receives charters from the two other entities but operates independently.
Parents can send their children to any of the school systems and can opt for particular schools within each. But the options that didn't exist before Katrina have proven to be confusing for some.
Finding a school and then understanding transportation has confounded some parents, Fleener said. But parents can choose between neighborhood traditional-model schools, programs that offer concentrations like the Algiers Technology Academy and education alternatives like the night school run by the school board.
School choice has been popular in other parts of the country, and the rebuilding of an entire school system, from the buildings to the curriculum, has allowed the model to be tested on a large scale.
The reorganization of schools includes the reconstruction of the buildings.
Many of the buildings were in bad condition before the storm and are being rebuilt in a condition more conducive to education, Fleener said.
And since the first anniversary of Katrina, the school system in New Orleans has come under new command. Paul Vallas left Chicago, took the reins of the RSD - the largest chunk of public schools, and attorney Paul Pastorek was named the state Superintendent of Education.
"[Vallas] as well as Pastorek, by coming from the prospective each comes from, some of the political issues, hopefully, will be disrupted," she said.
But education is also an issue for students who haven't returned to New Orleans, Fleener said. There are children who continue to be tracked throughout the East Baton Rouge Parish schools who are from New Orleans.
"There still remains a sense of being unsettled. That's been an aspect even two years later," Fleener said.
THE ECONOMY
Dan Dazet's family evacuated to Baton Rouge. His business operates out of both New Orleans and the capital city, and the option to move his operations to the Red Stick and remain in Baton Rouge was possible. But the family missed home too much, and Dan Dazet returned to operate his company in New Orleans.
The return of businesses is a key element in the recovery. Without employers, those living in the city have no means of making a living. And without the crucial services those businesses provide, those who return have trouble finding even the most basic needs.
Dek Terrell, University director of the Division for Economic Development, helped write a report on the impact an and recovery of businesses in the New Orleans area. The report includes business and labor statistics in the seven-parish metropolitan area.
Orleans Parish saw the largest increase in the end of 2006, Terrell said, demonstrating some of the largest signs of recovery since Katrina. And while the number of businesses opening has begun to slow, he said, there continues to be an increase in the number of people working.
Orleans Parish had 69 percent of its pre-Katrina business capacity opened at its peak, it has tailed off since then, Terrell said. And while there are since 2,000 fewer employers than before Katrina, the increases have proven to be encouraging, he said.
The "retail trade" and "health care" sectors are down about 40 percent from their pre-Katrina totals, according to the report, about the same as the population, which is projected to be down 40 percent.
The tricky part of evaluating business and labor statistics is comparing them to the population. If only 60 percent of the population has returned, then they can likely only support 60 percent of the pre-Katrina business size.
But no one has a fool-proof way to measure a constantly changing population.
Population projections have been based on school enrollment, utility services like power hook ups, the amount of water being used and door-to-door surveys. Richardson said he projects there are between 240,000 and 270,000 living in New Orleans, a range based on varied projections including the census and education officials. The higher numbers are those from utility projections.
"I think those are reasonable numbers, not pie-in-the-sky numbers," he said.
Also making population, economy and recovery numbers difficult to compile is the existence of an underground economy that was not present before Katrina. The presence of undocumented migrant workers has made projecting population and evaluating wages more difficult.
Omitting undocumented workers from current population and wage statistics does not present an accurate depiction of New Orleans. But because many of the workers will not remain after rebuilding is completed, omitting the underground economy presents a picture of those that have returned permanently, Terrell said.
FLOOD PROTECTION
When the Dazets rebuilt their home, they elevated the front door eight feet from where it first stood. The decision was made to help mitigate future flooding. But Dan Dazet said he has no pretense that his family is safe from rising waters.
"People walk around, and they talk about, 'Oh, the line on your house was up to here, so you know how high you have to build it now,'" he said. "My opinion is that's sort of arbitrary. Who knows if it's not going to be 10 times the height next time or two feet of water. You just don't know. We just have to move forward."
Richard Twilley, oceanography professor and associate vice chancellor of the Department of Research and Economic Development, has worked with the Louisiana Recovery Authority and state officials to craft a protection and coastal restoration plan.
"The verdict is still out as to whether we're going to learn from our experience," Twilley said.
Twilley sees the formation of an extensive plan to restore coastal wetlands and buffer zones and provide adequate levee protection as a positive step toward recovery. But the state remains at the tipping point, he said, depending on if that plan is implemented.
"You cannot go into this thinking that was a once in a lifetime experience," he said. "It will happen again. You've got to go at this vision and planning to minimize the risk."
The state cannot just implement a portion of the comprehensive plan, he said. Added levee protection will not ensure safety, he said, recovery must include restoring natural barriers have been destroyed - the state's wetlands.
The decision to close the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MRGO, is a step in the right direction, Twilley said.
The construction of MRGO was an "environmental mistake," he said, and closing it will allow for the restoration of protection barriers.
"The [Army Corps of Engineers] took too long to acknowledge that this was a mistake," he said. "At least they've done it, and I applaud them for doing it."
If the state can implement the plan, then recovery should continue on a steady pace, he said. But if it can't, it becomes irresponsible to rebuild in some areas, Twilley said.
"We have to be very careful about the consequences if we don't fix the coastal landscape," he said. "We have to look again at where people live. If we don't do some things for our coastal landscapes, we have no business putting people back in those places."
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Contact Ginger Gibson at ggibson@lsureveille.com
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