I’m starting to see a divide over the question of moving back and rebuilding.
I’m not talking about asshats like Dennis Hastert who question whether the city should be rebuilt at all. Hastert is a menace and ought to be quietly led away. I mean a divide amongst the evacuees on whether they personally want to go back and rebuild.
From what I see and hear, it seems like the people who got out before the storm want to rebuild. They love their city. They’re dying to get back in there and see what’s left and show the world how it can be done. Upper and middle class people, a lot of them. Business owners. Restaurant owners. The kind of people who have to buy in to make it happen.
But when I talk to people at the shelter, it’s a different story. These are the people who rode through the hurricane, who went through the hell that we saw snippets of on TV last week. Let me tell you, what was on TV is the sanitized family hour version of what these people went through. And none of them want to go back. Not because New Orleans is not worth rebuilding, not just because they have nothing left. But because they don’t think they will ever get out of their minds the things that they saw there, and they don’t ever want to see those places again.
“The horror”. That’s the phrase you hear at the Austin shelter over and over and over. They don’t want to go back, any more than a WWII veteran wants to live in Bastogne. They want to know what the jobs are like here, how much apartments cost here. They want to know if everyone in Austin is as nice as the people working at the shelter.
And these people are the poor, the working class, who really give New Orleans its flavor. It’s hard to describe what I’m talking about, and I hope I don’t put my foot in my mouth here. But there are some cities, Austin being a good example, that just “feel” like they are defined by their middle class. And New Orleans is not one of those cities, not like Austin. It has a different “feel”, as Tom Waits would say. If you just lop off the poorest 20% of the population of New Orleans, if those people become the permanent diaspora, and New Orleans thus becomes more of a middle-class kind of town, then you have fundamentally changed the character of the city.
The analogy maybe sucks, but it’d be like a gumbo without a roux.
Not to mention the practical aspects of it. If the Brennan family wants to re-open, that’s all well and good, and God I hope they do. But if their line cooks, their dishwashers, their busboys and waiters and the cabbies who bring the tourists and the guys who drive the delivery trucks for the purveyors and all those other people, if they don’t move back and don’t ever want to move back…well, it’s gonna be kind of hard to run a restaurant. Even if the tourists are willing.
And if the New Orleans diaspora stays away, it may actually be good for Austin. God, I love those people at the Convention Center, and part of me hopes a lot of them stay, shake up the provincial attitudes of this town with their crazy ways and their love for life.
But if that pattern is repeated all over the country, and thousands stay in Austin, in Houston, in Memphis, in San Antonio…I worry what will happen to the social fabric of my hometown.
I don’t know the answers. I don’t really even know the question, I guess, I’m just kind of wondering out loud, and maybe tomorrow I won’t be worrying about this at all.
The rebuilding divide, and the horror
Posted in austin, katrina, new orleans
Give it time, man. Those things they saw are still fresh in their minds. They need time to remember home as something not awful. They need time to miss what it was before instead of those horrible visions of what is there now. Everyone said they were going to cut and run after Andrew. Most came back. Some didn’t. There will always be a change and the place can’t ever be exactly as it was. It’s altered now. South Miami has never been the same, and I don’t personally feel that’s for the better.
There will be a lot of work back in New Orleans soon. There will be the kinds of jobs that draw those who live paycheck to paycheck. There will be a building boom. The ones with the zest for life you’re worried about will filter back to what’s familiar. To what they know. And work and home and the distance that time puts in our minds will make them embrace it again. Not all of them. Never all of them. But enough of them.
Home is a powerful draw. It’s what keeps an old man sitting on his roof refusing to evacuate even though the water is ten feet high and bodies are floating by. There are a lot of things we can talk ourselves out of. Home is rarely one of them.
Actually, Andrew shouldn’t be your guide; nearly nobody that got smashed came ‘back’ – at least not to anywhere near Homestead. A huge chunk of the population of Miami-Dade either left the state or moved up to Broward and Palm Beach Counties after the storm.
Not that there was any ‘there’ there in Homestead anyways, but still.
If the middle and upper classes rebuild it without the “flavor” you describe, it will just be filled up with Chili’s, Macaroni Grills, and (my nemesis) Olive Gardens, another middle-sized city paved with strip malls and restaurants with no soul, no character, and, most importantly, no flavor (in all that word’s meanings).
Our convention center has a mere 80 folks at this point. The question to return or not is about 50/50 (%) according to our newspapers.
I think the gumbo analogy is great – and you know, I’m hoping Dox is right, that the draw of home balances the horror. Some won’t ever go back, but these people? I think a lot of them, when they get back together a little, they’ll fight for it. They won’t let mother nature or FEMA or dubya take home away from them.
Speaking of restaurants, here’s a link to help foodservice workers find work,
http://cirajobs.com/
“nobody that got smashed came ‘back’ – at least not to anywhere near Homestead.”
I’m not sure where you get your information from, but that’s just not accurate. I lived just slightly north of Homestead and the Redlands and all my friends and their families, 90% of the people I went to high school with, and nearly ALL the farmers/growers stayed, rebuilt, and came back. Many of the lower class who lost everything and lived in tent city were helped into pre-fab housing that is still there and still lived in.
There is always some loss. I said that above, but the majority dug in and stuck around. But then, the majority stayed in their houses in the first place. Very few people I knew evacuated for the storm.
The exodus to Ft. Lauderdale was largely from people just north — places like Naranja where people were poor and everything busted into bits, Cutler Ridge where every third house just broke into kindling, or places like Kendall where there was enough damage to get a nice insurance check and head up north.
Dox
Great post I was noticing the same thing a couple of days ago in all the interviews I’ve been hearing. Certainly is intersting.
Another thing to keep in mind is that even if they do want to go back, as people find apartments and get jobs they’ll settle into a new routines that won’t easliy be shaken off. Especially if that ‘temporary’ situation last 6+ months.