Ray in New Orleans

May 2, 2008

Something I needed this month

The weekend after Ashley died, one of my oldest friends Dr. Sarah came in town for a visit, and I took her down to see the Lower Ninth Ward since she hadn't been here since the storm. We drove past a few houses I'd gutted before, and saw the usual lack of progress. We drove by Robert Green's trailer on Tennessee Street and I told her the story of how he lost a young granddaughter off his roof during the flood and found his dead mother months after the storm.

And then we drove by the house on Gordon Street.

I blogged about gutting this house with the Mardi Gras Service Corps back in November '06. It was a lonely block. One house had some renovations going on that seemed to be going slowly, and a few houses were gutted and the lawns were being kept up, but the block didn't seem to have a lot of hope, and the house itself was a mess. Lots of termite damage, some tree damage to the roof joists and the back frame of the house. A sign on the front said "For Sale By Owner: Mr. Henry" with a phone number.

There was also a light switch in the back bedroom that had a Disney character floating under some balloons which got me all choked up when I ripped the moldy sheetrock down around it.

But down the street was an uninhabitable Baptist church with a FEMA trailer outside it, and that Sunday while we were gutting, three carloads of older black folks in their Sunday best, the women all wearing their crowns, all showed up, went into the trailer, worshipped, then came out and hugged each other and shook hands and drove off. So I always had kind of a fondness for this block. It seemed hopeless on the face of it, but maybe not so hopeless if you squinted just right and held your head at the right angle while you looked at it.

In November of '07 I blogged about my tour of despair, of all the houses I had gutted which hadn't been touched since I left them, and I took pictures of this house on Gordon Street, the last one in that post, and wondered if there wasn't some sign of progress.

The windows were still broken, the house was still gutted and open, but the For Sale sign was gone, there was a storage unit out front, and there was new debris which maybe was construction debris, not demo refuse.

Well, I drove by it four weeks ago with Sarah, and check this shit out:

New doors, new windows, new plumbing (see the vents in the roof?). New sidewalks, and landscaping, and brand new trees!

It's not occupied yet, I don't think, but clearly somebody has plans for this house. And three other houses on the block are occupied now too, whereas back in '06 we felt like we were in the middle of Siberia until those church folks showed up.

Progress. Little bits of progress bring me such huge bunches of joy sometimes. Sometimes at the times that I most need them.

Posted by ray at 9:23 PM | Comments (11)

December 24, 2007

All I want for Christmas...

...all anybody wants for Christmas, is Home.

Santa, bring everybody home.

Posted by ray at 11:03 PM | Comments (4)

December 23, 2007

I missed Bastogne

I appreciate all the kind words, folks. I'm OK. That post was done right after I got home from taking the pictures so I was feeling pretty crappy. I didn't mean for it to be a big pity party for myself.

Lisa, your Oskar Schindler comment cracked me up.

I talked to Karen on the phone, and Karen has done more to save houses in this city than probably anybody else, and we both agreed that when you get emotionally involved in a house, then the first time you drive by and see an empty lot where it used to be, it feels like a punch in the stomach. And she's taken way more punches than I have, and she still feels it.

I think what goes on in my head when these things bother me, and one of the reasons I try to volunteer so much when I wasn't that big of a volunteer-type before the storm is a weird sort of survivor's guilt.

Mark, you're probably the only one that knows exactly what I mean when I explain this. New Orleans is where I grew up, it's where I'm from and it's the city that made me the person that I am. It's a city that I love more than any other place, but for various reasons, like Mark, I moved away a long time ago, and so on 8/29, I was a mere spectator. Other than making sure family members were safe, I had very little at risk personally other than memories.

It reminds me of a person portrayed in HBO's Band of Brothers, Private David Webster. Webster was part of Easy Company, landed during the D-Day operation behind Utah Beach and was wounded there, fought in Operation Market Garden in Holland and was wounded again, received the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, and stayed with the company throughout the entire war. But he was in the hospital recovering from wounds received in Holland when the unit was besieged that winter at Bastogne. Which was probably the defining moment of any American military unit during the war. And when he returned to Easy Company after Bastogne to finish out the war with them, he was never really fully accepted back by the other men. Because he wasn't at Bastogne. What he did before didn't count, and what he did afterward didn't count. Simply because he didn't go through hell at Bastogne. So he wasn't really one of them any more.

I feel like him a lot some times. Not that I wish I was flooded out, that would be nuts. But like a 101st veteran who got to avoid Bastogne, I am a New Orleanian who did not have to survive Katrina. I will always be lacking probably the most important experience that defines a New Orleanian of this generation.

I have another high school friend who is Nth generation Y'at, born on Mardi Gras Day in the back seat of a taxi stuck in parade crowds, and she has told me that amongst her writer friends, that division was not implicit, it was explicit. Writers who had lived here only a few years treated her as a tourist because during the storm she was teaching at a university in another state. "Sorry, honey, but you weren't here for it, so you don't really know." I know it hurts her quite a bit.

So I gut other people's houses not just because I want my city back, but because I did not have to gut out my own house. I wasn't here when the power was out and the only food was MREs. I was never displaced from my home, I never lost my job. I've never had to deal with Road Home, or Allstate, or FEMA.

And I cannot help but feel that that makes me somehow less of a New Orleanian than the people who did, even the people who moved here from other places only a few years ago, or the people who came home to unflooded houses and business as usual. And like my writer friend who now lives elsewhere, it stings a little. Even though I know none of you think of me that way, and really, I'm not posting this to generate a lot of "you're doing great, Ray" stuff in the comments, it's my own personal issue that does bother me and I have to work through it.

Posted by ray at 8:01 PM | Comments (9)

December 22, 2007

Mrs. Cora Foster's house is gone

I've blogged about gutting Mrs. Cora's house. I've blogged about driving by it a year later seeing it slowly decay. And I've blogged about thinking about trying one more time to get into her house and see if we can salvage some important and historic family heirlooms.

And now it's all gone.

And of course I didn't do any of the things I planned to do. I got the phone numbers for the Foster daughters, but I didn't get around to calling. Every day I planned to call and every day it fell through the cracks and I just didn't do it. Just like I came up with the idea and registered a domain name for the Care Forgot project and then never did anything with it.

Today I feel like I'm all talk.

I feel like those guys in Do The Right Thing who sit on the corner all day long and talk and bitch about the Koreans who run the convenience store across the street and talk about how they should open their own store, til one of them stands up and says "'I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that.' You ain't gonna do a goddamn thing! I tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go across the street and give them damn Koreans some more o' my money."

I possibly had it in my power to do something for somebody, and I didn't do anything.

Merry Christmas.

Posted by ray at 4:31 PM | Comments (7)

December 7, 2007

Mrs. Cora Foster's house

Mrs. Cora Foster's house, slow-mo demolition in progress.

August 2006, right after salvaging some family heirlooms and giving up on gutting halfway through due to the structural unsoundness:

October 2007, I drove by to see what it looked like. Of all the houses I've done, this was one of the special ones because of the history involved:

Karen said she saw Mrs. Cora's daughters approving the demolition a couple of months ago, so I wasn't sure it would still be there, but this is what it looks like today:

The foliage is coming back, somebody has ripped the porch roof half off, and somebody pushed the front window right out of the frame. I thought about climbing in and looking around, but I didn't have a mold mask with me (the mold is still really bad), and something about that open window said "crackhead" to me.

Apparently the city's demolition plan is to let vandals and crackheads and the elements take these houses apart over a series of decades, so that we can all grow old watching it while we pass around Klonopin and Zoloft in candy dishes.

I harbor this fantasy that one day I will happen to drive by and they'll be knocking it down, and that back closet will be ripped open by a backhoe, that closet that we could never search well because it was on the other side of a collapsing floor and a head-high ramshackle pile of moldy rotting bedroom furniture. And the demo contractors will listen to me explain what might be in that rubble, and instead of having me arrested, they'll let me dig through the pile and I'll find all that documentation on Buddy Bolden and Honore Dutrey from the Smithsonian that we never found.

And I harbor this other fantasy that one day Karen says "Ray, whatcha doin' today?" and we just fucking go over there with some masks and trespass and go Katrina-spelunking and take one last crack at finding it now that the house is a little bit drier.

If I'd had a mask, I might have been tempted today, but it's not a safe house to be alone in. At this point, I imagine it's haunted. Buddy Bolden was a crazy motherfucker at the end, and they're making a movie about him now so his ghost is probably on the prowl.

Posted by ray at 5:48 PM | Comments (5)

November 21, 2007

Wreck this house: the happier side

There are some signs of hope in gutting land. I think Road Home money is hitting enough people that things are slowly creaking to life. I talked to Shannon (ex-AWK, now at Common Ground) and she sees the same in the Lower Nine. And when things start happening, they seem to happen in clusters.

Case in point: I took some of my pictures from my last post on one of the "Godot" nights in the Lower 9, and while driving around I took one last swing down Urquhart near Andry, the place I mentioned last week as being bereft of life, where Common Ground had their block party near the first anniversary. And fuck if there weren't at least three houses being worked on. I just drove through, didn't take any pictures, but right at dusk there were two houses being attacked with tools and another house with a stack of new building materials on the porch.

Just like that, overnight, this block is creaking back to life.

My son's music teacher is one of the Jordan clan, and during teacher conferences a few weeks ago I told him how I'd worked on gutting his dad Kidd Jordan's house, and asked how they were getting along. He says the house is still gutted, they've got their money but haven't decided yet what to do with the house. They now have an apartment in Baton Rouge and a trailer at SUNO where Kidd is on faculty, and they go back and forth. It was a sad loss because they had just finished a nice remodel right before the storm, but I get the sense that they are empty nesters now and aren't sure they still need the big house where all the Jordan kids were raised. At any rate, Kidd spends more time in Europe than in New Orleans anyway; his style of jazz is too "out" for local tastes, whereas France has knighted him, and the very far out experimental jazz scene where Kidd fits in is centered in places like Paris and Berlin. And there are still Jordans in the neighborhood...one of the daughters is back in her house a few blocks away from the parents.

And Lisa's house, which we helped her gut this summer, will be occupied one of these days. Although it's still in contractor limbo, the gutting was major progress made possible by Lisa's stubbornness and the help of a few blogger friends.

And then there is Morwen.

Morwen, Morwen, Morwen.

I have never seen a bigger "FUCK YOU" to the Federal flood and all floods that may follow it than Morwen's castle, currently being reborn in Gentilly.

Before:

After (or at least in progress):

Morwen is using green building techniques, thermal wells, and a strong flood and windproof foundation, and she's WAY above the floodline now, as you can see.

This one to me is a miracle, because as everybody knows the day we started the gutting, this house was a bitch to knock down. I didn't tell Morwen at the time because she was in a low place and I didn't want her spirit to take any unnecessary knocks, but at the end of that day Sheik actually pulled me aside and said "are you sure you want to keep working on this? are you sure they're coming back? because this house is a mess and it's going to be a huge job to gut it out". She ended up getting a professional team to finish the job but I'm still proud of the work the bloggers and readers did, with the help of the Arabi Wrecking Krewe. We put a good-sized dent in it, and seeing that house way up in the air above the floodline, visiting with Morwen a couple of weeks ago while contractors of three or four varieties clambered all over the house in various places...that's the payoff.

I'm looking forward to the housewarming party.

Posted by ray at 11:52 AM | Comments (7)

November 10, 2007

My life in the bush of ghosts

I don't know if Cora Foster's house has been torn down yet, but I know that Karen saw Mrs. Cora's daughter getting the demo permit approved a few weeks back, and Karen said it was obviously a painful moment for them.

The feelings I got from seeing the house and neighborhood in the state they were in got me thinking about all of the other houses I've gutted in the past 18 months, and whether any of them had shown any progress at all. I think I've had a hand in doing around 17 houses. Surely one of them would be a success story. Surely at least one of those backbreaking days would not have been in vain.

So the past few weeks I've been driving around looking for these houses to see what's going on with them.

At first I really wished I hadn't. At first I found nothing but stagnation. This post is about those houses.

There was the first house I ever gutted, in the Lower 9 on Andry Street near Urquhart. We did this one as part of a Common Ground block party. All the CG volunteers worked in the same area, we had the neighborhood residents and activists out, people pitched in food and the ladies from the neighborhood cooked that good New Orleans food for us, beans and rice and sausages and chicken and yaka mein. And the goal was to do an entire block of houses in one day. We didn't hit the goal, but it was still an uplifting experience.

Well, the house on Andry is now fully gutted. The family china I had set carefully to the side on the front porch is broken and the pieces scattered around the overgrown yard. No sign of progress.

A house around the corner on Urquhart which I pulled nails out of for Common Ground last December is finished, gutted, open, and untouched.

In fact, when I first drove by that block where the block party was, it looked like nothing was happening. Just a row of empty, gutted, silent shells of homes.

Another house I helped de-nail for Common Ground in November, on N. Villere, I can't find anywhere. I think there is an empty lot there. Same for the house I gutted with the Rice MOB with the Mardi Gras Service Corps that same day. I can't find it anywhere. Did we gut these houses just so they could be bulldozed?

And this one, on N. Villere at the end of the road by the canal levee, that we gutted with Common Ground the day I met Darrell. The weeds are higher than the house. The house hasn't been touched since the day we left it. It's wide open to the elements. Looks perfect inside, but nobody is doing anything with it but let it rot.

Even our wheelbarrow ramp is still there on the front steps, being swallowed up by nature like everything else on the property.

The house on Sere Street in Gentilly that we gutted last spring with ACORN and First Draft Krewe is not much different. The flooded car has been towed from the driveway, and the valuables we salvaged (including the old blue wheelchair) have been moved inside, but other than that, this is a house being consumed by flora and fauna.

I think this doesn't come as a surprise, really, knowing the story of the owner and seeing how termites had eaten away at the core of the house. But still...what did we really accomplish that day?

A house I gutted on Charbonnet with ACORN a couple of weeks after that seems in limbo. It has good bones, and we met the owners while gutting, they were a sweet young married couple who were working their way through the Road Home process back in March, so I had hopes for this one. But from the looks of things, they are still working their way through the process.

They had come all the way down from Atlanta that weekend to meet the volunteers who were doing their house, and they seemed like they really want to come home.

This house we did in Gentilly with Arabi Wrecking Krewe and Iraq Veterans Against the War has no remodeling work being done on it. The gutting is done, they're storing furniture and belongings in it, but there's no progress on moving back in. This house belonged to a Vietnam Vet who grew up in the house and then raised his own family in it. At least it doesn't feel abandoned.

And one final shred of something that might be called progress, so that it won't seem like this post is all bad news. This house on Gordon St. in the Lower 9, which I helped gut with the Mardi Gras Service Corps, now has a mowed lawn and a storage unit in front of it, and the "For Sale By Owner" sign is gone and could that possibly be construction debris at the curb? Is something about to happen here? Some neighbors are back, so one can only hope. Really, that's only what one can do.

Next post will tell a few stories of halting progress.

Posted by ray at 9:54 PM | Comments (2)

November 8, 2007

A country road. A tree. Evening.

Paul Chan is presenting "Waiting for Godot", starring Wendell Pierce and J. Kyle Manzay, premiering last weekend at a streetcorner in a neighborhood of empty lots in the the Lower 9, and continuing this weekend in the front yard of a gutted house in Gentilly. Admission is free, but arrive an hour early if you want a seat, because they are turning people away.

Cass and I saw the Saturday night showing of this in the Lower 9, along with Alan and Becky, and it is f-ing fantastic.

"Waiting For Godot" is the story of two men, Estragon and Vladimir, who wait on a country road by a small tree at dusk, as they waited yesterday, and the day before, and as they will wait tomorrow, and the day after, for a man named Godot. They're unsure who Godot is, or why they wait for him, and they question whether they are supposed to wait, or whether they have missed him or whether they are possibly in the wrong place. For a while they are distracted by the antics of the arrogant Pazzo and his slave/pig Lucky, but mostly they wait, and talk, and sometimes contemplate suicide, and sometimes contemplate just leaving, and they wonder.

Godot has many interpretations, but it's the existential one I find the most appealing. It seems to clearly mirror the human condition of wondering why we are here, whether there is a reason that we are here, and whether or not there is a mysterious God(ot) who will arrive to explain everything to us. Pazzo and Lucky are the master/slave, boss/employee representation of daily workaday chores and interruptions that continually distract us from wondering about the real reason why we are here.

And the practical reality of the existential question is made crystal clear, seeing it in the Lower 9th Ward, surrounded by overgrown empty lots, with a half-collapsed house behind us, and behind the stage one block distant the brightly lit FEMA trailer of lone neighborhood resident Robert Green, Sr., flying his American flag as barges quietly ply the canal waters behind the patched levees beyond his home. Why is Robert Green here, still, today, and why will he still be here, tomorrow? What does he wait for? What lies in store for him in his solitary existence on a (now) country road, near a tree, in the evening, waiting for a Godot who may never come, wondering what will come, will anything come, while the Pazzos and Luckies careen about and argue and posture and distract us all from the big nothing that transpires daily on that country road, Tennessee Street and North Prieur, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans.

Where is our God(ot), and when will he come? Or have we missed him? Or are we waiting in the wrong place?

Posted by ray at 9:03 PM | Comments (2)

October 23, 2007

Cora Foster's house fourteen months on

I happened to be riding my bike around Hollygrove checking out the progress in the neighborhood (a few blocks are back, but most of it is deserted), and I swung by Mrs. Cora Foster's house on Monticello just to see what things looked like.

I'm still so sad and so angry.

We partially gutted this house and salvaged a lot of personal belongings out of it on the first anniversary of the storm, along with some Rising Tide volunteers and the Arabi Wrecking Krewe, and a few weeks later some volunteer rollergirls organized by Brian Denzer cleared the lot of weeds and overgrowth. There's a blog entry about it here, and Scout from First Draft put together a great video of it here:

Back then we were so full of energy and optimism. Volunteers filled the city, the Road Home program was just getting rolling, and we knew it would just be a matter of time before we would be getting people back into their houses.

Fourteen months later, for this part of Hollygrove, I have nothing but despair.

Two lots have been cleared around the Foster house. Most of the rest are gutted houses, untouched by rebuilders. Within a two block radius of her house, you can see one house occupied, and one gutted with an occupied FEMA trailer in the yard. The rest of the neighborhood, at least up at the top end by Monticello, is just gutted and abandoned.

If you look inside, it looks pretty much how we left it on that day in 2006. You can see the hole in the living room floor where we almost dropped the fridge, and the hole in the hallway where Oyster fell through (both events captured in Scout's video).:

I talked to Sheik from the AWK last spring, and he was discouraged. Said of the almost 100 houses he had done, only one person had moved back in, and a few of the houses had been demolished (against owner's wishes), including Al "Carnival Time" Johnson's house.

I wonder how Mrs. Cora is doing, up in Detroit. It saddens me to think that she may never see New Orleans again, and if she does, it won't ever look like home.

All of my recent pictures of Mrs. Cora's house, taken last month, are in a flickr set here.

I've been taking a library of recent photos of all of the houses I've gutted in the past fourteen months, and I'll post a summary later in the week.

Posted by ray at 8:06 AM | Comments (6)

October 16, 2007

What's wrong with SUNO?

There was a rally last week to protest the lack of progress in rebuilding SUNO, the historically-black university which was hard hit by the storm. Dillard is back, Xavier is back. SUNO looks, as the cliche goes, "like the storm was yesterday".

I missed the rally, but I took some pictures later that afternoon, and I have nothing but questions and outrage.

Who is in charge of the rebuilding? Where is the money coming from? How much has been spent, and on what? What is the plan?

From what I know about rebuilding, step one is clearing the moldy flooded contents from the building. Before you can muck it out, before you can remove moldy sheetrock and ceiling tiles and ruined fixtures, you have to haul out the furniture, the carpeting, the books, all the stuff that sat in the flood for so many weeks. That's step one.

From what I can tell, at SUNO, they have not done step one yet. Faculty offices:

and libraries:

and classrooms:

look like they have never even been entered. They look no better than the elementary schools in the Lower Ninth Ward, but this is a university.

The only work that seems to have been done is that these giant things that look like ventilation units surround all of the buildings:

They're new, they have stickers indicating installation in May of 2007:

But what purpose do they serve? What good do they do for a building still shoulder-deep in moldy books and furniture? Did rebuilding money go to a big fat contract for somebody to staple expensive ductwork to the outside of ruined buildings?

There is a rat here. I can feel it. There is a reason SUNO students are going to class in trailers, while money goes somewhere else and time ticks away.

An army of volunteers, from ACORN and Common Ground and SUNO students, could at least clear the muck out of these buildings, but even that seems beyond reach, when there is no leadership.

[More pictures in a flickr set here.]

Posted by ray at 12:13 PM | Comments (12)

October 8, 2007

You love despite

Overheard near the foot of Poydras Street, mid-September, 2005:

"Man, then why you here? Huh? Why you down here in the bottom of the United States of America livin in a city thas surrounded by water? And specially why you here now that you ain even sposed to be here now? Now that water's left your city in all these mean ashes you talking bout?"

"Cause I ain lovin any other place."

"You lovin it? Oh you loving all this? Whas there to love bout all this, man? You lovin this because of what?

"You cain be loving somethin because -- cause a this and cause a that. Thas nice, but that ain love. You love despite. When you love it despite the way it is, thas when you know you loving somethin."

From the extraordinary Heart Like Water, by Joshua Clark.

Posted by ray at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2007

The Democratic Katrina recovery plans

Now that I've been up to PJ's and gotten wired, it occurs to me that the last few posts would have made more sense as one big one. Oh well, I can at least do a meta post.

Links to my brief Sunday morning adventures searching for Democratic candidate Katrina recovery plans, in rough order of worthiness:

1. Obama
2. Edwards
3. Clinton
4. Richardson
5. Dodd
6. Biden
7. Kucinich
8. Gravel

If you're only interested in substance, don't bother looking past #3 or so.

Posted by ray at 11:51 AM | Comments (6)

Kucinich's Katrina recovery plan

Dennis Kucinich is short. Short on any recovery plans or even any mention of the word Katrina. Unlike any other candidates, he does have a link to his local Louisiana campaign team's page, where you can learn how to register to vote in Louisiana and can be excited by the news that Sean Penn and Melissa Etheridge are supporters. Fuck Sean Penn, where's Uncle Lionel's support?

Apparently Kucinich's Louisiana team doesn't think Katrina recovery is a big election issue.

There is a link off the main page that says "Meet Elizabeth" which really got my juices flowing, but alas, it only lets you read about her.

Posted by ray at 11:25 AM | Comments (2)

Dodd's Katrina recovery plan

You can't find Katrina very easily by going to Chris Dodd's campaign site, but if you google "katrina site:chrisdodd.com" you will at least turn up his two-paragraph statement on the 2-year anniversary, with a blog link to the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Bill of 2007 which he authored.

Kudos to him for not waiting until becoming president to start working on this issue. Anti-kudos for apparently thinking that he's all done and can move on to other more important work. I can't find his plan forward.

Posted by ray at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

Biden's Katrina recovery plan

"While the president can’t dictate zoning rules and other local decisions that must be made to rebuild the region, he can use his position ”to say this is the most pressing, immediate crisis in America,” the senator explained."

On the first anniversary of the storm, he had two short paragraphs to offer.

On the second anniversary of the storm, he was silent.

If there is a plan, or even a shred of passing interest, it is buried deep.

Posted by ray at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

Gravel's Katrina recovery plan

Seriously. The word Katrina has only shown up in passing four times in his entire web site archives, most recently on May 6. The only announcement from him around the time of the 2-year anniversary of the storm is this one: "YouTube Videos Get High Remarks from Blogger"

No plan. Not even a mention. We don't exist.

Posted by ray at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

Richardson's Katrina recovery plan

Can be found in this press release from the 2 year anniversary of the storm.

Some weak-ass shit quickly cobbled together since some kind of statement was clearly required on that day.

Posted by ray at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

Edwards's Katrina recovery plan

Like the other candidates I've looked at, Edwards doesn't have Gulf Coast recovery listed in his main list of "Issues", but at least you can go to the Issues page, enter "katrina" into the search field, and find his plan right there.

A quick read gives the impression that he's more thorough on the Katrina issues he does address, but he doesn't even mention the word insurance and he's the only one to not call for Category 5 hurricane protection (although he agrees 100-year protection is inadequate).

Posted by ray at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

Hillary's Katrina recovery plan

I couldn't find Hillary's plan at all by navigating her site. I had to google "katrina site:hillaryclinton.com" to locate it.

It's currently here.

Shorter and much vaguer than Obama's, although she at least mentions insurance reform.

Posted by ray at 10:07 AM | Comments (1)

Obama's Katrina recovery plan

It took forever to find it buried in his campaign site, but here is Barack Obama's 5-page plan for Katrina recovery:

Obama's Katrina Fact Sheet (pdf)

It hits a lot of the main points. Short on details on all of them. I'd like to see more details on schools, on insurance reform, on economic recovery.

Posted by ray at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 4, 2007

Our Rules vs. The Poor

A coworker sent me this William Raspberry editorial published a couple of weeks after the storm. It seems even more relevant today.

Discuss.

Our Rules vs. the Poor
William Raspberry, The Washington Post
September 12, 2005

The Duke University class I teach on family and community had no trouble with the New Orleans "looters" who smashed store windows for food and clothing. They had done their reading, so they understood that an important element of what makes a community work is the willingness of people to abide by agreed-upon rules.

But the floods and impending starvation on the Gulf Coast, they agreed, suspended the rules. Survival was an overriding "virtue," they said -- so long as the necessities weren't taken directly from another person in similar desperate straits.

And maybe even then, some of them thought. While a few would choose to die rather than wrest food from the gnarled hands of a starving old woman, several thought that the biological imperative to survive might trump even such uncivilized behavior as that.

No senseless looting for material goods (even if the purloined laptop might become the price of a ride to Baton Rouge?). No firing on rescue workers. No carjackings. But if the waters were rising swiftly enough, and the helicopter lifts were working slowly enough, one could perhaps justify elbowing one's way nearer to the front of the rescue line. After all, though one might defer to a weaker blood relative or spouse, survival is the most basic urge there is.

Then I reminded them of what they all knew: that sometime in the next few weeks, when things have returned to normal and Hurricane Katrina has been replaced by Supreme Court confirmation hearings or escalating slaughter in Iraq as Topic A, they will see on the 6 o'clock news some teenager accused of shooting a shopkeeper or robbing a convenience store or selling crack. And the youngster's explanation for his dreadful behavior? "You got to survive."

The point of this small exercise was neither to justify lawlessness nor to raise looting to a level of particular importance in the catastrophe that befell the Gulf Coast. It was, rather, to observe that the rules -- legislated and otherwise -- that make our communities work don't exist as moral abstractions. We uphold them because they work for us -- at least until we find ourselves under water.

What we forget is that some people in some communities see themselves as under water pretty much all the time.

Our rules -- deal fairly with one another, avoid violence, obey the law -- don't always make sense to them because the rules don't always make their lives more livable. And yet we think they should go on following our rules because it makes our lives more livable.

I'm talking about poor people, of course, but not all poor people. Some poor people are among the most law-abiding people I know. But some see themselves as outcasts reduced to basic survival.

They see themselves this way in part because many Americans don't see them at all. Erstwhile visitors to New Orleans still remark how surprised they were to see the masses of the very poor holed up in the Superdome or on freeway overpasses. They had no idea!

And most of us have no idea of the desperately poor in our own towns. They don't exist for us except when crime or social cost or catastrophe puts them on our screen.

And even then we are likely to miss the point of their existence. They wouldn't be poor, we tell ourselves, if they lived by our rules. A number of e-mails of the past few days make the point: Poor people are often the cause of their own poverty.

It's mostly true. There are people who, like many of those pitiful souls we saw waiting to be rescued from the floodwaters last week, are in dire straits because they ignored our well-meant advice. But some, like those ride-less New Orleans residents who couldn't get out, simply haven't been able to translate our advice into action: Stop having babies, save enough to move away, get married.

I'm not saying it's all society's fault that our rules don't work for them. But I am saying that it is in society's interest to make sure they do, rather than sit blithely while the growing gap between them and us produces a community destroying economic disequilibrium.

What can we do? At the very least, we should see to it that no one who works hard all week has to live in poverty and without access to good health care.

Posted by ray at 3:03 PM | Comments (5)

August 29, 2007

Two years later...

...and I still cry every time I hear this song.

Posted by ray at 6:10 AM | Comments (4)

August 28, 2007

Midura: An Open Letter to President George W. Bush

This is how we do things Uptown.

------

An open letter to President George W. Bush:

August 28, 2007

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for visiting New Orleans for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst federal levee-failure disaster in United States history followed by the worst federal disaster response in United States history. We’re also grateful for the $116 billion federal allocation for the Gulf Coast. That $116 billion has served you well, as your spokesmen often cite it as an indicator of your dedication to our recovery. But, it hasn’t served us as well -- it’s not enough, it’s been given grudgingly, and only after our elected officials have had to fight for it. So I feel I must correct the record about you and your administration’s dedication to our recovery and implore you to take action to make things better.

Indeed, you have allocated $116 billion for the Gulf Coast, but that number is misleading. According to the Brookings Institute's most recent Katrina Index report, at least $75 billion of it was for immediate post-storm relief. Thus only 35% of the total federal dollars allocated is for actual recovery and reconstruction. And of that recovery and reconstruction allocation, only 42% has actually been spent. In fact, while your administration touts "$116 billion" as the amount you have sent to the entire area affected by Katrina and the levee failures, the actual long term recovery dollar amount is only $14.6 billion. This amount is a mere 12% of the entire federal allocation of dollars, billions of which went to corporations such as Halliburton for immediate post-storm cleanup work, instead of to local businesses. Contrast that to the $20.9 billion on infrastructure for Iraq that the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2006 that you have spent, and it’s an astonishing 42% more than you have spent on infrastructure for the post-Katrina Gulf region. The American citizens of the Gulf region do not understand why the federal obligation to rebuilding Iraq is greater than it is for America's Gulf coast, and more specifically for New Orleans.

New Orleans has more challenges and fewer resources than we've ever had in my lifetime in the City of New Orleans. Yet, other than FEMA repair reimbursements, the only direct federal assistance this city has received from you has been two community disaster loans that you are demanding be paid back even though no other city government has had to pay back a these types of loans for as long as our research can determine (at least since the 70’s). These loans are being used to balance the city budget to provide basic services to citizens who need far more than the pre-Katrina basics.

Despite this obvious contradiction, your administration blames local leadership for our continued need for federal assistance. But this argument is disingenuous, Mr. President. There are a host of tasks that only you and your administration can accomplish for our recovery. These are some concrete steps you can take to make good on your 2005 Jackson Square promise:

* Completely fix the federally managed levees
* Fully fund our expertly crafted recovery plan
* Give New Orleans all that you have promised to Baghdad - schools, hospitals, infrastructure, security, and basic services
* Forgive the community disaster loans, as authorized by the new Congress
* Appoint a recovery czar who works inside the White House that reports daily and directly to you and whose sole job is the recovery of New Orleans and the rest of the region
* Restore our coast and wetlands
* Work with Congress to reform the Stafford Act
* Cut the bureaucratic red tape

In turn Mr. President, the people of New Orleans are more than willing to do our part. We have already:

* Consolidated and reformed the state levee board system.
* Consolidated and reformed our property assessment system.
* Passed sweeping ethics reform legislation.
* Created an Ethics Review Board.
* Hired an Inspector General.
* Submitted a parish-wide recovery plan.

Much has changed in New Orleans for the better since the storm, and more progress is coming. Civic activism is at an all time high. For the first time in my lifetime, there is an actual reform movement in New Orleans driven by the people. "Best Practices" has become a City Council mantra. We have a new Ethics Board. Our incoming Inspector General, Robert Cerasoli, is considered one of the elite in the Inspector General world, as is our new Recovery Director Dr. Ed Blakely in that world and our Recovery School Superintendent Paul Vallas in the realm of public education. We are attracting the cream of the crop. Young people from around the country seeking to make a difference in their lives are moving to New Orleans to teach in public schools, provide community healthcare, build housing, work for nonprofits engaged in post-Katrina work, and, in general, do whatever they can for the recovery because they all know what I am not so sure that you know, mainly that what happens in New Orleans over the next few years says something about the very heart of America itself.

Mr. President, we are in fact doing our part locally in New Orleans despite contrary comments by your administration. Our intense civic activity and government reform initiatives are serious indicators of our local commitment to do our part for the recovery. But we are drowning in federal red tape. We are being nickel and dimed to death by your Federal Emergency Management Agency. We are resource-starved at the city level. The mission here is not accomplished. What we need is Presidential leadership, not just another speech filled with empty promises. Our recovery's success, struggle, or failure will be intimately woven into your legacy, for better or worse. What Americans think about America is deeply affected by how this country rises to national challenges, none more significant than post-Katrina New Orleans. Fully restoring New Orleans to its formerly unique and permanent place in American culture is this nation's greatest domestic challenge. Your leadership of our country through this difficult time will serve as an American character lesson for future generations.

Sincerely,

Shelley Midura
New Orleans City Councilmember
District A

Posted by ray at 6:51 PM | Comments (7)

August 27, 2007

Fuck the Catrina

My sitemeter this morning shows a hit from Warsaw by somebody googling "fuck the catrina".

Yes, my friend in solidarity. You're absolutely right. Fuck the Catrina.

Posted by ray at 6:30 AM | Comments (1)

August 25, 2007

LA Times: After Katrina, hope and despair coexist

Hope and despair coexist in the city, within each neighborhood, and probably within every single person. I know I'm not the only one that has had moments of seeing something totally kickass and wonderful, and then a week later waking up in the middle of the night thinking "what the hell am I doing here?"

Stan emailed me a link to a new LA Times piece on Katrina, two years later. It gets the tenor of things pretty much exactly right. Where there is hope, it is due to people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or with the help of volunteers and non-profits. Where there is despair, it is due to the slow pace of progress, and the feeling that government at all levels is either ineffective or downright hostile to progress.

Two years after their city was nearly annihilated by a levee failure, the residents of this middle-class New Orleans neighborhood acknowledged that their surroundings still looked pretty bad. But they also insisted that things were slowly getting better. Just 31% of Gentilly's 16,000 addresses were reoccupied or renovated as of March, according to a survey by a Dartmouth professor -- but an additional 57% were finally being fixed up.

Private citizens, not the government, deserved the credit, they said -- a source of grim humor among those laboring to mend the neighborhood.

"Of course, we should also thank George Bush, Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin," resident Robert Counce said sarcastically of the president, the governor and the mayor as the meeting wrapped up.

Posted by ray at 1:17 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

I'm registered

Are you?

Posted by ray at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)

August 3, 2007

K-Ville trailer

Honestly, I don't completely hate it. I mean, I don't necessarily like it, but I don't hate it as much as I thought I would.

Posted by ray at 10:47 PM | Comments (7)

July 19, 2007

Wreckin teh Lisa house

You've probably already read all the gory details about the wrecking party at Lisa's house at her blog, Irks and Delights, and seen Clay's FOB nonsense about his so-called superior design skills at noladishu (let the record show that his ramp design was the same design as the one Ashley and I built around the corner on the front steps, and in the true spirit of the Army Corp of Engineers, he tested the ability of his own ramp to withstand large bags of plaster being dropped on it from a second story window by...just standing on it...which means all that stuff about "32 feet per second per second" he muttered about our first chute was just so much hoodoo nonsense when it came to his design...but I digress...)

We got tons done, as the pictures suggest. Ashley, Candice, Clay, Lisa, Brandy, Ruffit, and Alan doled out destruction, while Morwen and Betts showed up at the perfect time with chicken and biscuits.

I'd been on the fence about whether all this plaster really needed to come out, other than a few clearly-damaged walls. You hate to tear out historic plaster if you can save it. But all of her contractors have been telling her to replace it, and once we got into taking it down we discovered that the plaster really was wrecked everywhere. Every wall we took out, once you got a crowbar into it the plaster would come off the wall in great sheets because it was no longer attached to the lath. Getting the plaster off the walls was pretty easy going, for the most part. Getting it to the curb was a bitch.

There's still more work to be done. The Corps will stop providing free debris removal on August 29, so Lisa needs to get all this stuff to the curb well before then. I'll try to do another group work day in early August when I get back from vacation, but in the meantime, Lisa is over there working several days a week so get in touch with her if you want to drop by for a few hours some evening to help out.

And more pictures here.

Posted by ray at 12:00 PM | Comments (1)

July 18, 2007

National Geographic: A Perilous Future

Voices of New Orleans links to this National Geographic article about the risks of rebuilding New Orleans.

It's a worthy read, with plenty of things to get pissed of about and plenty more food for thought. Also several factual inaccuracies (the "$110 billion for New Orleans reconstruction" bogosity rears its head), but overall it's a fair treatment.

Here's the money quote:

Torbjörn Törnqvist, a Dutch coastal geologist now at Tulane, is a rare scientist who is bullish about the future, seeing New Orleans' struggles with rising seas and stronger storms as a preview of what other coastal cities will soon face. He envisions a new urban landscape perfectly adapted to climate change, with restored wetlands, high-tech floodgates similar to those in the Netherlands, and a cleaner, greener, denser city. The entire pre-Katrina population, he contends, could live quite comfortably in the parts of the city that did not flood, transforming warehouses and blighted districts into new walkable, sustainable neighborhoods on the high ground.

"The situation here is a huge opportunity for the city and the nation," says Törnqvist, who says he can't imagine Holland turning its back on Amsterdam, or Italy giving up on Venice. "If we walk away, we'll miss a fantastic opportunity to learn things that will be useful in Miami, or Boston, or New York in 50 years." That kind of revival, however, would require a massive infusion of federal help, better engineering than ever before, and more social and urban planning than regulation-loathing Louisianans have ever stomached.

Because in the end, the executive summary is not "Climate change means New Orleans is toast", it's "Climate change means your city is next, and if you don't figure out how to save New Orleans you're not going to know how to keep your own ass dry in 50 years."

Posted by ray at 9:57 AM | Comments (2)

July 2, 2007

Wrecking party at Lisa's house

We did this before with Morwen's house and got a lot done. Well, it's time to help out another blogger who is still trying to get her family back into their house.

Lisa of Irks and Delights has documented her difficulties with evil insurance companies and crooked and incompetent contractors. She's finally got her money, and she's got what seems like a good contractor lined up, but she needs to finish the job of gutting her house before construction can start. If we can get a big enough group together, we can make a big dent in the project in just an afternoon.

We're looking for volunteers for this Saturday, July 7, starting around 4:00pm. The advantage to starting late is that the hottest part of the day has passed, and it keeps getting cooler as work progresses. Lisa has electricity so light won't be a problem.

The good news is that the flood water never got into the house, so there's no mold to speak of, and all of the furniture is gone so we're just gutting out damaged walls and ceilings. The bad news: Two story. All plaster. Wood lath. 12 foot ceilings. Some of the walls will be staying, but the hurricane and subsequent foundation releveling racked the house in such a way that most walls have broken plaster pulling away from the lath, so we're tearing all of that out and hauling it to the curb.

If you want to help out, you need to bring your own respirator (or at least a dust mask), gloves, and goggles, and if you have any other tools (especially pry bars, flat bars, wheel barrows, and scoop shovels), please bring those as well. Wear sturdy closed-toe shoes, and bring a clean shirt to change into at the end of the day because you are not going to want to get back in your car with your gutting shirt on.

The location is 8238 Cohn St., in Carrollton at the corner of Cohn and Dante.

Please RSVP by leaving a comment here or by emailing ragicali at yahoo dot com. I'll be there, along with Lisa and rollergirl Little Miss Ruffit.

Posted by ray at 2:53 PM | Comments (13)

June 22, 2007

Cause and effect

I walked out to the hotel pool to check on the kids, and on the way back in this above-the-fold lead story in the complimentary copy of USA Today caught my eye:

New Orleans deaths up 47%

Post-Katrina surge as city's lost doctors

By Steve Sternberg
USA TODAY

Hurricane Katrina's tragic aftermath lingered for at least a year after the storm abated, boosting New Orleans' death rate last year by 47% compared with two years before the levees broke, researchers reported Thursday.

Doctors say the dramatic surge in deaths comes as no surprise in a city of 250,000 mostly poor and middle-class people who lost seven of 22 hospitals and half of the city's hospital beds. More than 4,486 doctors were displaced from three New Orleans parishes, creating a shortage that still hampers many hospitals, says a companion study released Thursday.

A few minutes later, I'm futzing around on my free (!) in-room wifi, rebooking flights to come home a day early, and this nola.com headline catches my eye:

Feds want plans for downtown hospital scaled back
Posted by Washington bureau June 21, 2007 10:29PM

By Bill Walsh and Jan Moller
Staff writers

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration made it clear Thursday that it has serious problems with Louisiana's plan for a 484-bed teaching and research hospital in downtown New Orleans, sending Gov. Kathleen Blanco and state lawmakers scrambling to defend the project they hope will help revitalize the hurricane-worn city.

...

At the same time, [HUD Secretary Alphonso] Jackson took aim at virtually every aspect of the proposed teaching and research facility, including the size, cost, scope and long-term viability. He called state estimates of local demand for hospital beds "inflated"...

The Ben & Jerry's in the hotel gift shop is now catching my eye, since it seems to be one of the few affordable means of self-medication around any more.

Posted by ray at 10:48 AM | Comments (3)

May 31, 2007

Dambala speaks truth

Even though I'm having one of my rare "glass half full" weeks, despite the mayor's non-speech last night, this post on American Zombie rings true. I urge everybody to read the whole thing, especially people from other parts of the world:

New Orleans is sinking in a cesspool of inaction and incompetence...I'm just wondering how long we can swim. Right now it's the small businesses going down, but when the towering hotels on Canal go dorment...we're all gonna have to come to Jesus.

My frustration with our current state has drained me. There is so much awry, I don't even know where to start....corruption, chronyism, incompetence, apathy, lack of communication, lack of vision....all of this most vividly reflected in our mayor. We've marched on City Hall, we've formed alliances, we've blogged our asses off....and every time we turn around we get hit with one more scandal, one more set back ,one more blow to our very survival. But still we fight...and still we believe.

In a previous post I equated my feelings to that of a turtle pulling it's head back in it's shell.....the problems of my own city have overwhelmed me and I feel like cowering and hiding from issues on a national level. After reading the comments to that post and having time to reflect on what I was trying to express, I think I have a better understanding of what I was trying to say:

It's not just New Orleans that is dying...I think it's America in general. We are just the cynosure of the descent...the most photogenic example.

Posted by ray at 8:52 AM | Comments (1)

May 29, 2007

Breach of Faith

I just finished reading Jed Horne's Breach of Faith.

This is probably the first overall look at Katrina that I've read, other than maybe Cooper & Bloch's Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security (which was primarily focused on the federal government's response to the disaster so is not really so general).

Breach of Faith is strongest when it relates personal anecdotes, when it really digs into the real-life calculus that goes into deciding whether to evacuate or not, and how the storm and resulting flood affected rich and poor equally, though in different ways.

The book ends in the spring of 2006, so already much of the recovery narrative seems somewhat dated. He talks about the mayoral election but does not discuss the outcome; regardless, Nagin's performance is not given a pass. Horne holds out his harshest criticism for the Feds, obviously, but not in the detail that Cooper and Bloch do. And for some perplexing reason, it seems Horne has a wee crush on Governor Blanco; she comes across as a politically shrewd tower of strength who is merely misunderstood by the media...clearly a year's worth of Road Home headlines would have sucked the wind out of that angle if Horne could have seen into the future a little.

There's also a lot of fawning over Ivor van Heerden and Bob Bea, two characters whose reliability and motives are still open issues, in my view.

It's a worthy read simply for the stories of regular people, though. I was enthralled during those chapters, less so for the later material about floodwall forensics, Bea, Ivor, and the Corps, which regular followers of the issue in the paper and on blogs will find a little redundant and shallow.

(One complaint which others might find minor, but which I found highly distracting: he consistently fails to capitalize things like "coast guard", "army corps", etc., even though he is clearly talking about THE Coast Guard and THE Army Corps of Engineers. Drove me up a wall, it did. Also misspelled a few street names. Arggggg.)

Posted by ray at 10:34 PM | Comments (4)

May 28, 2007

Stafford Act victory

Lost in all the disappointment about the Democrats' caving to Bush on the Iraq supplemental is a bit of fantastic news, which may mean nothing to Democrats anywhere else but which to residents of the Gulf Coast is a great victory.

Up until now, the White House has insisted that Bush will veto any legislation that contains a waiver of the Stafford Act requirement that state and local governments match Federal disaster relief moneys to the tune of 10%. The 10% match has been waived 32 times since 1985, including at least once by the Bush administration after 9/11.

We don't have the money here to match the 10%, so desperately-needed federal funding has been held up for months. We needed that waiver to survive, Bush didn't want to give it to us, but he wanted his war more and now he has signed the waiver into law along with the Iraq funding bill.

Happy day.

Posted by ray at 8:48 AM | Comments (3)

May 19, 2007

Clinton blasts Katrina response; MSM and leftysphere don't notice

This morning, Hillary Clinton let go what sounds like a pretty withering blast at the American response to Katrina, and makes it sound like it will be a central tenet in her 2008 platform.

As of tonight, AP had picked up the story, but neither CNN nor MSNBC had even mentioned it either on the front page or in their politics sections. Although the "Wild boar runs loose in City Park" link on CNN at first seemed like it might have something to do with Hillary, alas it was a week-old story about pigs.

Equally unsurprising is the fact that the unrelenting First Draft is the only lefty-blog I read that mentions the story. The usually obsessed-with-every-minute-detail-of-the-primaries MyDD, AmericaBlog, DailyKOS, and Firedoglake are all responding with a unanimous "Katrina who?" Apparently major policy speeches aren't as much fun as polling data. Either that or a 10-point plan for fixing the rebuilding effort doesn't merit "major policy" status.

So, ya know, fuck the lefty blogosphere. Again. But keep an eye on Hillary. I want to know if she makes the same speech anywhere other than Dillard. Tell 'em in Iowa and California and Wisconsin and New York and I might start to believe you, baby.

Posted by ray at 10:45 PM | Comments (3)

May 10, 2007

Road Home 60/40 in 90, roughly, sometimes, but often not, said The Pig

Someone must have traduced New Orleans, for without having done anything wrong she was arrested one fine morning...

I'm all for descending upon Baton Rouge with bricks and petrol bombs. Who's with me?

Posted by ray at 9:45 AM | Comments (6)

May 9, 2007

John Goodman PSA for levees.org

Kick ass!

Tell everyone.

Posted by ray at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2007

MyDD: Since the Storm

Nancy Scola of MyDD turns in part two of her excellent three-part series about New Orleans since the storm.

Posted by ray at 9:13 AM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2007

Katrina coverage out in the world

A few high profile pieces in that part of the progressive blogosphere not based in New Orleans, doncha know.

Nancy Scola of MyDD pens the first of three comprehensive pieces about the state of things in New Orleans, and also is interviewed for about 20 minutes on the April 29 edition of MyDD Blog Talk Radio (her segment starts at about 13:00). Her writing is thoughtful and accurate; she gets it.

There is also a great piece on DailyKos written by ACORN volunteer coordinator Mary Rickard about last month's First Draft Krewe work day. The DK powers-that-be even deigned to elevate it to the status of a "rescued" diary, so apparently prog-blogger Katrina fatigue has taken the week off. Either that or we're the temporary beneficiaries of their Iraq fatigue. Either way, the coverage helps.

Posted by ray at 5:14 PM | Comments (2)

April 30, 2007

Fun with satellite imagery: NOFD HELP

Doodling around with Google Maps (wanted to see if it looked like it was easy to park near McHardy's Chicken on N. Broad), and I ran across this:

NOFD HELP

If you zoom out, you will see that it's painted on the Fairgrounds parking lot.

Posted by ray at 4:22 PM | Comments (2)

April 27, 2007

Kidd Jordan wrecking on WTUL

Last September, the Arabi Wrecking Krewe spent a hot Saturday afternoon gutting the house of local free jazz legend and musical patriarch Kidd Jordan. (Some gutting pictures are here.)

Schroeder came along to pitch in and also to collect audio samples for his WTUL show, Community Gumbo, and on Saturday morning's show he'll be running a feature about Kidd and the day we wrecked his house. Tune in to 91.5FM at 9:00am, or catch the online audio archive later.

Kidd also plays at the Jazz Fest on Sunday at the WWOZ Jazz Tent at 12:35. If you're a fan of really out jazz along the lines of later Coltrane, Peter Brotzmann, John Zorn, Evan Parker, or Joe McPhee, you won't want to miss this. Jordan's biggest fans are all in Europe so catching a hometown show from him is a rare treat.

Posted by ray at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)

April 26, 2007

72 minutes. 1.5 seconds

You had to wait until 72 minutes into the debate before anybody commented on New Orleans, or Katrina, or the Gulf Coast.

At that point, Obama mentioned it in passing. Spent about 5 words on the topic, or about a second and a half.

It was never mentioned again.

And this is the party that cares the most about us.

Posted by ray at 9:48 PM | Comments (1)

April 24, 2007

Federal levees: We put the "mud" in "mud hut"

Wonkette has a typically snarky piece about ABC News comparing and contrasting "mud huts" to mansions in a story about the housing market collapse.

But eagle-eyed Scout notices what Wonkette doesn't notice (since Wonkette ain't never been here): the house they picture as a "mud hut" with a For Sale sign is in fact in New Orleans, bearing a search-and-rescue X and a bathtub ring about chest high.

I mean, honestly. The mud can be shoveled out, ya know. That and the smell of fresh-baked cookies and this could be a cozy little fixer-upper! Uninsurable, but still...

Posted by ray at 4:53 PM | Comments (4)

April 16, 2007

The insurance industry is trying to kill me

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.

"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.

"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."

"What difference does that make?"

So, we're trying to buy a house. Mortgage: check. Inspections: check. Title company: check. Insurance: has caused a blood vessel to burst in my brain.

AIGDirect: The guy who answered the phone sounded like he'd just been moved up from the drive-through window at Burger King. Rude rude rude. He insists that my new house is worth $705,000 replacement value at an annual insurance premium of over $11,000, and that I cannot insure it for anything less. Needless to say I am not buying a house anywhere near that value, but even if I was, I wouldn't insure it with this douchebag. If that's the way they treat you when they're trying to sell to you, imagine how they act when you want to file a claim.

Republic: Will write me a policy. However, if my house was built before 1950 (it was), it can't be worth more than $300,000 (but it is). So let me understand the logic here: an old house in great condition in a historic neighborhood that didn't flood is not insurable by Republic, but if I have a post-war McMansion on a slab in Lakeview that got 15 feet of water, they'll write me a policy.

I want to scream.

Fireman's Fund: Will write me a policy. However, if my house was built before 1950 (it was), it can't be worth less than $750,000 (but it is).

I want to kill. Apparently these guys haven't talked to the folks at Republic.

So far, all I'm coming up with is FAIR Plan. The so-called insurance of last resort for people with bad credit. It's insane. I have money. My credit is spotless. I have a great house in a great neighborhood, but I'm falling into this weird crack where if I had either a shittier house or a mansion I could get insurance, but for a merely great house, I can't.

I'm not even complaining about the expense of the thing. They simply will not write me a policy.

Posted by ray at 10:34 AM | Comments (27)

April 7, 2007

Young at heart

Housegutting today with retirees from New York. Mostly it was charming, including brunch afterwards at Elizabeth's in the Bywater (grillades and grits and OMFG the biscuits), and nothing at all like this video. I'm just saying.

(My kids find better stuff on YouTube than I do now.)

Posted by ray at 10:10 PM | Comments (5)

April 5, 2007

Children of Men of New Orleans

While canvassing with Common Ground last month, I wandered briefly through Joseph A. Hardin Elementary in the Lower 9th Ward. It was a sad and lonely place, untouched since the storm.

Then last week, while watching Children of Men for the second time, I was reminded of it when the protagonist and his cohorts are sheltering in an abandoned school. It was a similar scene...art work on the walls from kids who are who knows where, writing on the blackboards from classes long forgotten.

What's weird is that it never occurred to me why there would be an abandoned school in the film. Everything in Children of Men has a purpose, every backdrop makes a statement. State-sponsored suicide kits, immigrant concentration camps, "foogees" and "fishes" and End-times cults...everything is exactly in its place. But it only just now occurred to me that in a future without children, all schools would be abandoned and desolate. I missed the point of it completely. It's like my mind just glossed over it, because abandoned schools are such a fact of life where I live now and so it seemed unremarkable in the movie.

Anyway, when Athenae of First Draft took a picture of the front of the Hardin school, and I mentioned to Scout that I'd been inside, she asked if I wanted to go back to take pictures and I jumped at the chance.

Scout's pictures are here.

Mine are in a flickr set here.

But here are a few samples.

These photos were all taken more 19 months after the storm. The blackboards inside still say "August 26, 2005". The school has not been touched.

And it's a school in a neighborhood which no longer has children, so maybe it's not so far off from the movie anyway.

Posted by ray at 11:46 AM | Comments (3)

April 3, 2007

First Draft weekend, Israeli defense, and the state of housegutting

Writers and readers from First Draft were in town last weekend to see K-ville up close and to put in a day of work. We hooked up with ACORN to finish gutting a house right next to the west levee of the London Avenue canal. Details and a few pictures in Athenae's post here. (I remember lots of pictures being taken, does anybody know who has the photo mother lode?)

Athenae talks about the neighbor, Mr. Victor, who wanted everybody on the crew to know every detail of what is wrong with the world post-Katrina. One thing he told us was that the Israeli army was guarding Dillard right after the storm (right across the canal from where we were working). Everybody I've asked has said that's crazy talk, and that just because the guy was super sweet and bought us all chicken doesn't mean you should believe everything he says. Israeli army? Indeed, it sounds farfetched.

So I turned to Google. And it turns out that Mr. Victor knows what he knows:

A few miles away from the French Quarter, another wealthy New Orleans businessman, James Reiss, who serves in Mayor Ray Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority, brought in some heavy guns to guard the elite gated community of Audubon Place: Israeli mercenaries dressed in black and armed with M-16s. Two Israelis patrolling the gates outside Audubon told me they had served as professional soldiers in the Israeli military, and one boasted of having participated in the invasion of Lebanon. "We have been fighting the Palestinians all day, every day, our whole lives," one of them tells me. "Here in New Orleans, we are not guarding from terrorists." Then, tapping on his machine gun, he says, "Most Americans, when they see these things, that's enough to scare them."

The men work for ISI, which describes its employees as "veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or 'Shin Beit'), Other restricted intelligence agencies." The company was formed in 1993. Its website profile says: "Our up-to-date services meet the challenging needs for Homeland Security preparedness and overseas combat procedures and readiness. ISI is currently an approved vendor by the US Government to supply Homeland Security services."

ISI is Instinctive Shooting International. More information here if you feel like pursuing it.

As for the housegutting itself, I have to admit I'm somewhat conflicted about it lately. It does seem like the gutting era is coming to an end. Common Ground has finished all the houses on their list. Arabi Wrecking Krewe has shifted from a volunteer labor model to more of a grant coordination role. ACORN's web site says that they will be gutting through next August, but in talking with the coordinators there, they are already starting to wind down and may be done by the beginning of summer.

To be honest, as much as I want people to get back into their homes, I'll miss this. It's been as much therapy for me as anything else. It helps me a little with my (admittedly nonsensical) survivor's guilt over being in Austin when all this happened, and with stress relief from my job which seems to consume so much of my time that I'd rather be putting to use doing something for my city.

So what's next? Rebuilding. And that is so much harder to get off the ground. Rebuilding requires skills, insurance, and licensing. Even simply hanging sheetrock requires a level of thought and care and precision that ripping out sheetrock does not. Face it, if you make a mistake gutting a house, nobody is going to make you put it back up and gut it over again, so gutting is uniquely suited to throwing armies of unskilled spring breakers at in a way that reconstruction is not.

Habitat for Humanity has the construction thing down to a science, and massive resources to bring to bear, but their model is putting new homeowners (who qualify financially) into new homes. If you're one of the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who own a gutted home but can't scrape together enough money from insurance and Road Home to rebuild it, then Habitat can't help you. What we need is an organization like Habitat, with a different goal. We need Rehabitat for Humanity.

Mardi Gras Service Corps has put a couple of people back into their homes. ACORN and Arabi Wrecking Krewe are wrestling with how to do the same. Common Ground is focusing on other worthy causes.

There is a gap here, and I don't really know how to fix it.

In the high tech world, when a company develops a technology or a market that is outside of the business they're in, sometimes they spin off a new company. I wonder (and maybe I'm talking out my ass here) if there is some way that Habitat could spin off a small portion of their infrastructure and their expertise into a new Rehabitat organization, that would focus on the unique issues in the storm zone where people need to rebuild existing homes, not just build new homes. Give people like MGSC and ACORN a leg up rather than letting them struggle trying to build whole organizations from scratch while Habitat continues to follow its traditional model which doesn't exactly match the problem down here.

Posted by ray at 7:40 AM | Comments (8)

April 2, 2007

Where were you people last fall?

The recent dust-up over Google's changing out of satellite data for pre-Katrina images in their Google Maps application has had me scratching my head. I mean, I know this happened last fall and I know that we bitched about it in the blogosphere back then. And I know the maps have been out of date all winter because I've been househunting, and so every time I look at the satellite map of a potential new neighborhood, I'd have a conversation with the wife that went something like this:

R: Hey, check it out! There's a park with a baseball field right around the corner from that house on Constance!

G: Excellent!

R: How come I haven't seen it, though? I rode my bike all over that neighborhood.

G: Are you sure it's not a FEMA trailer park now?

R: Doh!

What I don't get is, for everybody who has been so pissed off about this the past week...where the fuck have you been? Did you really just notice? Do you just not use Google Maps much, or are you just kinda sorta generally oblivious to your surroundings until you find something on a blog to get outraged about? Did people really think that Ray Nagin would be doing something like this in order to increase tourism? Ferchrissakes, the same Ray Nagin who thinks Greg fucking Mefferts is some kind of technology guru is supposed to be able to have any kind of pull at Google?

Jeffrey now links to the official Google explanation (they made the change back in September, and last night they changed them back):

Given that the changes that affected New Orleans happened many months ago, we were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments. Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we're happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing. That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening.

[P.S.: the snarky tone above is not directed at my friends. Just those other people.]

[P.P.S.: This FEMA trailer park still had a baseball diamond on it last week, at least as far as Google Maps is concerned. There's a darling little camelback double for sale on Constance just a couple of blocks away, if you're interested. No word on when baseball might return to the neighborhood, though.]

Posted by ray at 5:08 PM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2007

A Very First Draft Weekend

Scout Prime and the First Draft gang are coming down to New Orleans in a few weeks with a gaggle of readers in tow, to put in some volunteer time gutting houses with ACORN. They'll be here March 30 through April 1, and will be gutting on Saturday, March 31. Then that night, Dangerblond will be hosting Geek Dinner 3 at her house in Faux Metairie with the First Draftees as special guests.

Obviously, if you're geek enough to be reading this, you're geek enough to participate in either or both the work day and the party night. If you want to come out gutting with us and be sexy like these people:

(and I mean, seriously...chicks dig guys with big crowbars, and sweaty dusty girls are HOT) then get in touch with me (ragicali at yahoo dot com) and I'll get you the form you need to fill out for ACORN. No word on which neighborhood we'll be in, but work is generally from 7:30am to 2:30pm, and all equipment will be provided.

And regardless of whether you can make it out during the day, you definitely need to come to the Geek Dinner that night at Dangerblond's. You can RSVP at the Geek Dinner wiki.

Posted by ray at 9:09 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2007

Elie in the Washington Post

Lolis Eric Elie has a moving editorial in the Washington Post today:

If, say, Cuba or Venezuela had seized 24 square miles of American territory, the call to arms would have been immediate and decisive. But because coastal erosion is an enemy neither foreign nor domestic, we seem willing to surrender to it. We've retreated behind the excuse that New Orleans can't be saved. We've abandoned our can-do pride. In the Netherlands, the Dutch have managed to craft a flood-control system that protects the huge percentage of that nation's land that lies below sea level. These days Americans lack the money, the ingenuity, the patriotism, the humanity of the Dutch.

Posted by ray at 5:11 PM | Comments (1)

January 22, 2007

First Draft walks the walk

Scout and Athenae and Mr. A from First Draft are coming to New Orleans for a long weekend of gutting and investigating and a little bit of food and music and fun thrown into the mix, and they want their readers to join them.

Check out the details here.

I had the honor of meeting Scout during last summer's Rising Tide conference, where she helped clean out Ms. Cora's house in Hollygrove. She's a keeper, and I look forward to meeting the rest of the gang in March.

Posted by ray at 10:04 PM | Comments (1)

January 17, 2007

DYK Reading next week

For all you locals, another reading and book signing for Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? will take place next Wednesday, January 24, at the Jefferson Parish Library, 4747 W. Napoleon Avenue in Metairie.

I'll be reading from my story, "I Was A Teenage Float Grunt", and other DYK authors David Rutledge, Sarah Inman, and C.W. Cannon will be reading as well. Copies will be available for purchase at the event.

The festivities start at 7 PM.

Posted by ray at 11:10 AM | Comments (3)

December 13, 2006

Debris removal may end in two weeks

From the T-P, it seems that continuing curbside debris removal beyond the end of the month hinges on action being taken during the current legislative special session:

The Legislature’s refusal thus far to accede to Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s spending plans for the state’s windfall could spell the end of curbside debris removal in New Orleans come Jan. 1, when the federal government will begin requiring local parishes to share the cost of the task.

Blanco has proposed setting aside $100 million of the $827 million left from last year’s budget to cover the 10 percent local or state match that FEMA will require for debris removal in five hard-hit parishes in the new year. But more than halfway through a 10-day special session, the Legislature has refused to approve Blanco’s efforts to tap into the extra money. Marie Centanni, a Blanco spokeswoman, said the governor “is looking for alternate sources of money,” but expressed doubt another pot of money could be tapped.

While the feds are still willing to shoulder 90 percent of the price tag for removing debris, paying the 10 percent remainder would constitute a major burden for local governments, and officials in Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration have said they can’t afford it.

Veronica White, the city’s sanitation director, said last week that curbside debris pickup will effectively end if the state can’t come through with the money because the city can’t pay the difference.

This would be disastrous for the New Orleans recovery. House gutting progress, as slow as it's going now due to a shortage of volunteer labor, would grind almost to a complete halt because you would need to line up a construction dumpster at the job site before being able to start gutting the house. For volunteer groups with limited budgets, it's hard enough just getting five people and a wheelbarrow together on any given Sunday.

What a stupid fucking situation.

Posted by ray at 9:45 PM | Comments (9)

Trombone Shorty on Studio 60

I read about this in this morning's T-P, and I'd never heard of the show (I don't watch much TV) but obviously Trombone Shorty is the man.

Go here, and click on the link on the right to watch the video.

If this doesn't make you cry, you have no soul.

Posted by ray at 9:09 AM | Comments (3)

December 10, 2006

Darrell

I took a friend down to Common Ground's Lower Ninth Ward project today to put in some gutting hours. We did a house on N. Villere, the last house on the left next to the levee. It looked tiny from the street, but the rooms seemed like they went on and on.

At lunch time a car came around with hot food for everybody. Blackeyed peas, beef stew, fried corn, and french bread. The guy serving the food was named Darrell (I hope I'm spelling that right) and once we discovered we were both locals, he and I got to talking about stuff that you don't usually talk about much with the other CG folks, who are great goodhearted people but they ain't from here, y'know?

We talked about the recovery. Talked about food. Talked about the Saints. Talked about the May 3, 1978 flood, and he told me a little about Betsy, which he is just barely old enough to remember.

Pre-K he was living in the Tulane/Gravier area, renting. There is no Road Home for renters, there was no renters insurance, so everything he owned is gone and isn't coming back and there's nobody around who's going to help him replace it. He was a waiter at Brennan's and made good money, like the Brennan's waiters do, since waiting at Brennan's is a serious profession.

He evacuated to Arlington, Texas, and just returned 45 days ago. Everybody told him not to come back. It sucks in New Orleans, they said, but he came back anyway, cried for three days, and ended up volunteering for Common Ground in return for housing at St. Mary's. Brennan's said they would take him back once he's ready to come back, but he can't work at Brennan's while dorming at St. Mary's because he has to be impeccably groomed, starched and pressed, and you just can't maintain that personal regimen when you're living communally with a bunch of volunteers.

So he has a chicken and egg problem. One of the many chicken and egg problems that people face. He can't rent his own place without a job, but he can't get his old job back without first getting his own place. So he feeds the Common Ground house gutters while he tries to sort out how to get sorted out.

"Man, I have sunk pretty low from where I was," he says. And I want to argue with him, because he could be doing nothing while he's unemployed, and instead he's down here working hard helping the people who are trying to help the city. I could say goofy shit like "doing the Lord's work." To me, he seems good and righteous. But I keep my mouth shut, because I know when I get finished for the day, I get to drive back to my nice comfortable Uptown apartment. Catchy sayings like "doing well by doing good" are a luxury that only the financially fortunate can afford. I honestly can't say that I understand shit. I have no advice. I haven't walked even a yard in his shoes, and I don't know that I'm even capable of doing it.

I told him he needs to let me know when he's back in at Brennan's and we'd go down for the five-course breakfast. And he said he'd show me the stuff that is better than Bananas Foster. I hope I see him again soon under better circumstances. He deserves a break.

Posted by ray at 9:04 PM | Comments (5)

December 7, 2006

IVAW Video

Gordon Soderberg from New Orleans Voices for Peace has posted a video of the wrecking at Rene Petersen's house in Gentilly last month, featuring interviews with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and lots of wrecking action footage of IVAW and Arabi Wrecking Krewe folks.

Please check it out.

Update: I'm getting a lot of hits from people linking to the video through my page, and I just want to reiterate that the original source for the video can be found at the New Orleans Voices for Peace site here: http://www.neworleansvfp.org/node/3958. Definitely follow that link, they've got lots more there about the war, IVAW, and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

Posted by ray at 12:03 AM | Comments (4)

November 26, 2006

Wrecking with the IVAW

This week we had a busload of folks from Iraq Veterans Against the War in town gutting out houses. I want to say "a busload of kids", because from my aged point of view, when I first saw them I thought they were another bunch of college kids...except they've all been to Iraq, as infantrymen, engineers, and military police. They committed to serve their country only to have that commitment used and betrayed by their government, and now they're down here serving their fellow Americans.

We did the houses of two veterans this weekend. Vietnam vet Rene Peterson, who runs the Louisiana chapter of Forgotten Warriors, escaped from the second story of his Gentilly home with his wife by swimming to the 610 overpass on the back of a floating sign. And veteran Tommy Dunne has worked with the Arabi Wrecking Krewe for a long time while his own house in New Orleans East had yet to be gutted.