essay

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Hanging On

The first thing you need to know about New Orleans is that neighborhoods in New Orleans do not work like neighborhoods everywhere else. In other cities, the rich and poor live in completely different parts of town—highways, train tracks, and other vestiges of racist urban planning ensure that the rich and poor sections of cities hardly ever mix. Here, water from the Mississippi is a constant threat, so the rich live where the land is highest, and the poor live in the valleys. That has given New Orleans a chaotic topography of inequality.

For decades, the high blocks with grand houses—St. Charles, Magazine, Esplanade—hid behind them a lowland filled with dilapidated shotguns that housed New Orleans’s working class. It used to be that tourists could crawl along St. Charles Avenue on one of the city’s historic-looking streetcars, gawk at 4,000-square-foot, hundred-year-old mansions sitting atop manicured lawns, and never know that if they ventured just fifty feet beyond the avenue to the north, they’d see a neighborhood that looks nothing like the New Orleans of tourist brochures and Hollywood movies. It would be easy to drive, walk, bike, or take a streetcar from the bars on Frenchmen Street through the Disneyfied French Quarter and along Magazine Street or St. Charles Avenue and never realize that just beyond these streets lie the people the city has neglected for so long.

These neighborhoods, tucked behind the ones we usually picture when we imagine New Orleans, were poor and filled with culture and community. Tremé, Bywater, Mid-City, Central City, the Upper Ninth Ward, the Lower Ninth Ward, Uptown, and Carrollton were the places where most New Orleanians lived: the musicians, the second-liners, the undervalued laborers scrubbing the banisters of hotels.

But gentrification has challenged those geographic maxims. The rich crests of the city can no longer hold the rich, who are venturing beyond their traditional redoubts. Nearly every neighborhood in the city abutting the Mississippi River gained white residents in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Those neighborhoods—the French Quarter,

Central Business District, Bywater, Marigny, Garden District, Irish Channel, and parts of Uptown—have for decades created a kind of teapot shape of whiteness within the city, but between 2000 and 2010, Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella noted the teapot had both “ broadened and internally whitened .” The change could be seen on nearly every street, as new arbiters of hipness—coffee shops, boutiques, art galleries—bloomed on blocks with houses still devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

As the city celebrated its new life, nearly no one in power—the mayor, the governor, council people—seemed to care about the tens of thousands of black people who never returned. When I interviewed African Americans who left New Orleans after the storm, they told me they’re afraid to go back because it feels like a different city, like it’s no longer theirs, and in many ways they are right.

National newspapers and magazines have now taken an interest in the city, experiencing it, in the words of the New York Times, “ with fresh eyes and ears .” They’ve profiled ad nauseum the new, nearly all white artists, actors, musicians, and chefs who populate the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods. New Orleans, according to these publications, is filled with magic hedonism and is just begging to be explored. “ In New Orleans success is measured by how unhinged you can get,” one musician told the Times. But the city isn’t quite as gentrified as Los Angeles or New York. “ New Orleans is not cosmopolitan ,” one actress said. “There’s no kale here.”

With its narrative rejiggered from one of poverty and death into one of resurgence, New Orleans could start anew. City officials and other supporters of the change went on a PR war in an attempt to convince the world and the city’s residents that all the new people, the new restaurants, and the old streets and old neighborhoods given new names (or just rechristened with the word new in front of their old names, as in “the new Freret Street” and “new Marigny”) mean that New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, is back—back from the destruction that drove out half of the city’s population, back from economic collapse.

To be sure, the economy is doing better, and the population is approaching pre-storm levels. But back is the wrong word, because the people here now are in large part not the same people who lived here before the storm. New Orleans lost more than half its entire population , an exodus of 254,000 people, thanks to the man-made failures that allowed a slow-moving but relatively weak hurricane with an eye that missed New Orleans to decimate the city. When it came back, it came back differently: New Orleans used to be 67 percent black and only a quarter white. Now white people make up 30 percent of the city, while the black population doesn’t seem to be returning at the same rate, accounting for just 60 percent of the population, according to the 2010 Census. That change—67 percent to 60 percent—might seem like a modest one, but when you crunch the numbers the human toll is clear: by 2010, the city’s white population had just about returned to its pre-Katrina levels, while today approximately 100,000 black people are still missing from New Orleans.

The city’s priorities have been made obvious by the fact that while officials have gone on media tours celebrating the economic growth of the city ten years after the storm, the local government (along with its federal and state

counterparts) has stopped tracking or even talking about its still-exiled population. From what little research there is, we know that diaspora includes tens of thousands currently living in Houston and other cities in Texas. We know others have relocated to small towns throughout Louisiana or far-flung places such as Utah and New York . But their vanishing still haunts black communities in New Orleans today.

I’ve heard the words colonization, occupation, and genocide used to describe what happened here after Katrina. That might seem dramatic to outsiders, but what else can you call a set of policies that in their effect, and oftentimes seemingly in their intent, kicked out a small city’s worth of black people? What can you call a set of policies that encourages the white and moneyed to come in their place? The answers would seem conspiratorial if they weren’t so well documented in local newspaper articles from right after the storm, which detailed politicians and businessmen railing against the old New Orleans and sounding excited to usher in a new era. “ It took the storm of a lifetime to create the opportunity of a lifetime,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said a few weeks after the storm. “We must not let it pass us by.”

What else do you call a coordinated attempt by thought leaders, politicians, and business interests to radically change an entire city “demographically, geographically and politically,” as one real estate maven put it, except a deliberate attempt to gentrify?

To many of the black people here who have stuck it out, who have been left with little since Katrina, who feel like the city did nothing to help them back or actively dissuaded them from coming home, those words—colonization, occupation, genocide—do not feel sensational. They feel like what happened.

The first person I talked to when I arrived in New Orleans was a woman I was subletting a house from in the St. Thomas section of the city. I made a passing remark about how nice the area seemed, and she replied, “Thank God for Katrina. That really helped clean this place up.”

The block I was on, I would later find out, was located in one of the most rapidly changing sections of the city, which was made clear by the fact that no one I met in New Orleans could agree on exactly what neighborhood I was staying in. To the whites I met, it was either the Irish Channel or the Lower Garden District. To many African Americans from New Orleans, it was still St. Thomas—named after the eponymous housing projects that the city began demolishing in the early 2000s, the start of a slew of demolitions that accelerated after Katrina and left thousands of low-income African Americans displaced. Those projects have since been replaced by a private, mixed-income housing development owned by one of the biggest developers in New Orleans, Pres Kabacoff.

Soon after I arrived in New Orleans I met Ashana Bigard, who is from one of the seemingly few old-line families left in this area. She’s a forty-year-old school and prison justice advocate who was able to secure a spot in the

redeveloped St. Thomas. But she, like many here, is hanging on by a thread. By her own assessment, she told me, she does not fit into the new New Orleans.

“There’s nothing sexy about me,” she said. “I’m from here. I’m black. I’m a parent. I’m boring.”

To Bigard, this area is still St. Thomas, not the Irish Channel, the Lower Garden District, or anything else. She agreed to take me on a tour to show me how much has already been lost.

I picked her up at the new St. Thomas housing complex, rechristened River Garden, where she lives with two of her children. The new development doesn’t fit in with its surroundings. The old St. Thomas buildings looked like many traditional housing projects—multistory brick buildings surrounded by grass yards—but it was better kept and better constructed than most. Katrina spared most of the project, but the city of New Orleans bulldozed it anyway, and replaced it with hundreds of pastel town houses laid out on curving streets surrounding empty, unused, and heavily policed green space. The development is flanked by a suburban-style Walmart on one end. If it weren’t for the concrete levee holding back the Mississippi on one side and the ritzy Magazine Street on the other, you might think you’d left New Orleans.

Bigard has struggled to make ends meet since Katrina. For the last five years she hasn’t been able to find a steady job in nonprofit work, despite her wealth of knowledge—she’d worked in nonprofits with a specialty in education and criminal justice for nearly twenty years. But now, as she passes forty, she’s trying to expand her horizons to scrape together cash. Sometimes she works as a waitress at one of the new fancy restaurants in the Garden District. Sometimes nonprofits ask her to “consult” for a few hundred dollars, but usually they want her to work for free. Her latest gig is showing desks for lease in a co-working space for tech companies and nonprofit workers in a newly renovated building on a newly gentrified block in a rapidly gentrifying area on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard (often called “O.C. Haley”), named after a famed New Orleans civil rights activist who headed the city’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.

We drove over the potholed blocks of New Orleans, past St. Thomas and through the old Garden District, to the section of O.C. Haley in a neighborhood called Central City, which is now starting to show all the normal signs of a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification. New loft buildings, two new small museums, a coffee shop, a performing arts and screening space, a boxing gym, and an upscale Mexican restaurant have all cropped up within a five-block radius in recent years. And while the revitalization of this corridor, which was decades ago home mostly to black-owned businesses, seems like a natural progression for a city doing well economically, here, like everywhere else in the city, there was more top-down planning involved than is noticeable from the street.

In 2006, Mitch Landrieu, then Louisiana’s lieutenant governor and now New Orleans’s mayor, designated Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard one of four “urban Main Streets,” allowing the city to funnel money to street improvements. The other urban Main Streets—St. Claude Avenue, Oak Street, and North Rampart Street—are also located in rapidly gentrifying areas. Soon after, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA), the agency responsible for

managing much of the land left vacant after Hurricane Katrina and for planning major development projects in the city, moved its headquarters to O.C. Haley and helped bring an $18.5 million mixed-use development to the area—mostly office space and condos. NORA was involved in funding no fewer than six major projects along the boulevard. It also loaned about $2 million to nonprofits and restaurants that now line the corridor. Finally, the city directed its anti-blight team to prioritize demolishing abandoned buildings around O.C. Haley. “ I believe in leveraging the market ,” Councilwoman Stacy Head said in justifying her government’s spending on private business on O.C. Haley rather than, say, on affordable housing. “The government’s job is to leverage the market.” And so O.C. Haley became another urban success story that in reality was propped up with millions in city cash.

It’s worth pointing out no one in New Orleans or anywhere else is begrudging the improvements to neighborhoods in and of themselves. But when improvements come with restaurants and rents many can’t afford, then tree-lined streetscapes, bike lanes, and even pothole repair become signposts for displacement and cultural loss. They’re also signs that the people who lived there before the improvements are worth less to governments than new residents. The government did not see fit to make O.C. Haley a nice neighborhood when it was poor and black and had no chance of gentrifying. Anti-blight efforts and streetscapes don’t have to be linked to gentrification, but in our current system, they almost always are.

The co-working space Bigard showed me was beautiful, the crown jewel of this gentrified block. It is located in a former elementary school abandoned by the Orleans Parish School Board twelve years ago. Now reclaimed wood and gleaming tile cover every surface. Massive chandeliers hang from its center over a 23,000-square-foot “fresh-food-focused local and organic market” that occupies its bottom level.

Bigard does not know anyone who frequents these new businesses on O.C. Haley. She said none of her friends go to the new market. She earns a commission for every desk she leases in the co-working space, but at $475 a month, she said, she couldn’t afford one herself. Bigard told me that while she’s happy to give tours of the space, she knows she’s in some way contributing to the gentrification of the area. After all, who can afford an expensive desk in an area on the border of two census tracts where over 40 percent of families live below the poverty line ?

On our drive back past the new restaurants and new movie theater and new museums, Bigard told me she felt that people like her—low-income, black, not young, with kids—aren’t welcome in newly redeveloped places such as this. Before Katrina there would not have been enough gentrifiers here to make a fresh-food market and co-working space feasible. Sure, the improvements are nice, but they don’t feel like they’re meant for her.

“Stuff like this really scares me,” she said. “When they start putting in a museum in your neighborhood, you know you’re not long for this world.”

Bigard’s life and life choices have remained largely the same since Katrina: she was an educator and activist before, and she still is. She lives in the same neighborhood and in the same city. But at one point she was able to make ends meet, and now she is not. Her life hasn’t changed, but everything around her has.

In its journey from academic jargon to popular use, the term gentrification has been stretched and pulled. In the popular press, gentrification is most often presented as the cumulative effect of the actions of individual actors—yuppies and hipsters move from the suburbs to a previously poor neighborhood and gradually change its identity. The struggles of people like Ashana Bigard are seen as collateral damage. But gentrification is bigger than that. A proliferation of hipsters, displacement, and a worsening quality of life for people like Ashana Bigard are the effects of gentrification, not its causes. Gentrification is a purposeful act, not just a trend, and so it needs a definition that recognizes the actors and actions behind it.

Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich. This trend isn’t limited to cities: for decades conservatives in the US government have been working to deregulate industry and defund our safety nets, to turn the United States from a welfare state based on the vision of John Maynard Keynes (the early twentieth-century economist who believed that a robust government was necessary to ameliorate the inherent instability and inequalities of capitalism) into a neoliberal, corporate-friendly oligarchy concerned only with increasing the share of wealth owned by the upper class.

Jason Hackworth, a professor of planning and geography at the University of Toronto, writes: “ Gentrification is much more than the physical renovation of residential and commercial spaces. It marks the replacement of the publicly regulated Keynesian inner city—replete with physical and institutional remnants of a system designed to ameliorate the inequality of capitalism—with the privately regulated neoliberalized spaces of exclusion.” In other words, gentrification is the urban form of a new kind of capitalism.

Using this definition, gentrification moves from being an unexplainable phenomenon illustrated by countless New York Times trend pieces to being a knowable and replicable act. And if we use that process-oriented version of the definition, it becomes clear that the effects of gentrification—the coffee shops, the hipsters (and the subsequent articles profiling them), Bigard’s current financial problems—are not an accident but the predictable effects of turning cities into spaces that benefit no one but those who control capital.

In every gentrifying city—that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on—you can usually trace the start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community. Usually those policies come in the form of the deregulation and privatization of urban services: transportation, education, and especially housing. By the time the hipsters arrive, the political and economic forces that paved the way for them have been at work for years.

In New Orleans, all the processes of gentrification happened at once. The chaos of Hurricane Katrina provided an

opportunity to enact gentrification-friendly policies on a condensed timeline. Politicians and the developers who supported them were able to ram through laws that likely wouldn’t have been passed otherwise. Local leaders, with the support of federal policies, used the storm to transform the city into one where capital could be squeezed out of every crevice. They privatized schools and housing, busted unions, and gave tax breaks and other incentives to anyone who would bring money to the city, with few strings attached to that investment. And, perhaps most importantly, they did everything they could to ensure that poor black people would not come back. Katrina was not the first time the city had tried to rid itself of its black population, but it paved the way for the city’s most successful attempt.

More than half of the hurricane’s human toll came from one neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, which has always been a symbol and bastion of African American culture, community, and commerce, and therefore has constantly been under attack. In the 1920s a canal was built down the center of the Ninth Ward to facilitate the transportation of oil and other industrial materials. Since then the Lower Ninth Ward has felt cut off from the rest of the city—accessible only by bridge, and lacking good public transit. That has given the neighborhood its own feel, and its residents a unique sense of distrust of the city government. Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth was nearly 100 percent black, and despite its reputation as being a poor section of the city, it was actually mostly middle-income— the median area income at the 2000 census was $37,894. The area had one of the highest rates of African American homeownership in the country.

During Katrina, the concrete barriers holding water back from the Industrial Canal broke, flooding the entire neighborhood, destroying the vast majority of its homes, and killing a thousand people in the Lower Ninth alone. After the storm, residents reported hearing loud booms as the storm encroached, and rumors flew over whether the levees holding back the Industrial Canal had been deliberately blown in order to save richer areas of the city. Journalists and politicians derided the theories as paranoid, but African Americans had good reason to believe that the government would destroy one predominantly black area to save predominantly white ones.

To understand how politicians and developers tried to change New Orleans after Katrina, it’s important to understand that the city has nearly always been actively hostile toward its black population. In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded , and Louisiana flood control officials decided their best option to minimize damage was to purposely breach a levee in Jefferson Parish, a rural section of Louisiana right next to New Orleans, in order to prevent New Orleans from flooding. The area chosen to flood was predominantly black, populated by sharecroppers who were promised money for giving up their land, and sometimes forced at gunpoint out of their houses if they refused. The sharecroppers were also forced to help clean up the destruction wrought by the flood in New Orleans. They were never compensated for the land. Then in 1965, black New Orleanians experienced displacement yet again when Hurricane Betsy flooded New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish. The pattern of destruction was eerily similar to that of

Katrina—poor black neighborhoods, including the Lower Ninth Ward, were inundated with water, while the rest of the city was left relatively unscathed.

Knowing that history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Katrina was taken by many in the city as a sign that New Orleans was once again trying to rid itself of black people. “The government is making moves to bring in certain kinds of people to New Orleans and get rid of everyone else,” Kim Ford, a nearly lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth, told me.

The words of the city’s leaders seemed to confirm her theory. The water had not yet drained out of New Orleans when real estate developers, millionaires, politicians, and conservative pundits began their campaign to convince residents and others that Katrina was a blessing in disguise. Yes, the storm was horrible, their rhetoric went, and yes, the deaths of nearly 2,000 people and the displacement of nearly half the city were tragic, but New Orleans had been poor and disorderly before the storm, and this would be a chance to do things differently. James Reiss, a businessman and descendant of a prominent Uptown New Orleans family who fled the storm in a private helicopter, gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal after his return that laid out how many elites viewed Katrina.

“ Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” Reiss told the paper. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.” Reiss would go on to chair the city’s Regional Transit Authority under Mayor Ray Nagin, taking control of New Orleans’s meager public transit options.

Then governor Kathleen Blanco presented the storm as an opportunity to rebuild and do away with the city’s history of poverty, especially in the school system. But most prophetic was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist. In a column that came out just over a week after the storm—when people were still stuck in hotels or waiting for food in the Superdome—Brooks advocated for using the storm to leave the poor sections of New Orleans behind, and encourage rich people to move in in their place:

The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago.… If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as run-down and dysfunctional as before.… In the post-Katrina world, that means we ought to give people who don’t want to move back to New Orleans the means to disperse into middle-class areas nationwide.… The key will be luring middle-class families into the rebuilt city, making it so attractive to them that they will move in, even knowing that their blocks will include a certain number of poor people.

Given how the recovery has progressed these past ten years, it’s tempting to wonder if New Orleans politicians

used Brooks’s column as a playbook. Katrina became the perfect opportunity for politicians to institute what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine capitalism,” using the chaos provided by the crisis to push through the reforms Brooks suggests: dismantling institutions that served the poor, and making the city more accommodating to an influx in capital. The result is a city that feels richer than before, but also unfriendly to those who do not fit into its new economy. Bigard is one of those people.

New Orleans has the highest percentage of native-born residents of any city in the United States. And Bigard, like many people here, has roots that go way back, at least to 1809. Her grandfather was a well-known Mardi Gras Indian. But despite her deep roots, Bigard said, she feels like she’s losing grip on her city. Over the past decade, she’s been forced to bounce between houses on Carondelet, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Louisiana Avenue, and South Lopez Street to find affordable rent. A three-bedroom house she rented on Annunciation Street, right in the heart of the Irish Channel, once cost her $550 a month; similar properties in that area now regularly rent for over $2,000. If it weren’t for her spot in the mixed-income River Garden development, Bigard said, she’d likely have to move in with her mom, or leave the city completely.

Bigard’s job prospects have been affected by the gentrification of New Orleans too. When Katrina struck, she’d been working at the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network (NOLAPON), which helps parents navigate the city’s complex school system. But Louisiana politicians used Katrina as an opportunity to shut down nearly every public school in New Orleans and replace them with charter schools. Within months after the storm hit, 107 of the city’s 128 public schools had been transferred to a new, all-charter district. When Bigard began protesting the changes, she ran afoul of NOLAPON’s new, charter-friendly leadership and was fired. Since then, she’s struggled to find work.

Like many in New Orleans, Bigard never received a college degree , though she tried, attending Delgado Community College and then the Southern University of New Orleans. But when her mother became sick, with medical bills reaching over $1,000 a month, Bigard had to drop out to look for full-time work. Her lack of a degree had never been a problem before Katrina, but the storm brought a slew of national nonprofits to New Orleans, and those nonprofits seemed less interested in working with people like her, instead preferring to bring down consultants and employees from Washington, New York, and elsewhere.

“I feel like we really got the train moving with gentrification by awarding so much money to these nonprofits and not setting any parameters on how that money was spent and who got that money and what they did with it,” Bigard told me. “A lot of these times I’d go into these nonprofits and people would want to ‘pick my brain.’ If I was wearing a suit and from New York, that would be called consulting and I would be billing you $250 an hour.… I came from a community where you’re supposed to help out your neighbors, but I’m a lot more savvy now. Now when they ask,

‘Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain?’ I would probably say, ‘What’s your budget for consulting?’”

White volunteers and whites working for nonprofits have replaced much of the black middle-class labor force here. It’s hard to get accurate numbers on exactly how many white non-natives came to work in nonprofits and schools after the storm, but anecdotes from residents here suggest there are quite a few. There were at least 375 Teach for America members in New Orleans schools by 2013. Hundreds of Habitat for Humanity volunteers from across the country constructed homes for free that might have otherwise been built by local laborers. As Nat Turner, a black transplant from New York who operates a farm and education center in the Lower Ninth Ward, told me, “The guys you see standing around on corners drinking beers, those used to be the guys that would repair your roof or wire your house.” And white, college-educated professionals working for nonprofits, mostly people from the Northeast, seemed to take the place of people like Bigard. Geographer Richard Campanella estimates that about 5,000 new nonprofit workers showed up directly after the storm, followed by more than 20,000 young, mostly white, college-educated people working in nonprofits and other high-skilled, specialized sectors such as the booming movie industry (which was lured to New Orleans with very generous tax credits).

After struggling to find work for years, Bigard signed up for Section 8 housing vouchers in 2012. The vouchers came from a federally funded program that helps people pay for rent in privately owned, market-rate houses and apartment buildings. But the next year, thanks to a federal budget sequester, the Housing Authority of New Orleans was forced to revoke 700 Section 8 vouchers, including Bigard’s. For a few weeks, Bigard was homeless.

Eventually she found the place where she lives now— River Garden. Back when it was St. Thomas, the development provided 1,500 families with public housing. But after the city demolished St. Thomas and handed a contract to private developer Pres Kabacoff, it was built back with only 606 units, only a fraction of which are publicly financed low-income housing. There are also 62 units open to low-income families but financed privately, made affordable by tax credits that expire in 2017 . Bigard lives in one of those units, and once that tax credit expires, developer Pres Kabacoff could make her unit market rate. It’s not clear if he will, but given that a unit like hers rents for $1,200 to $1,500, according to the River Garden website, there’s little to incentivize him to keep the rent low. If that happens, Bigard says, she isn’t sure where she’ll go.

“I came back after Katrina because I love my city,” Bigard told me. “I feel like even with everything that’s happened, people still greet you here. They talk to you. They lift you up. There’s no place like that. But whether I’ll be able to afford to live here, that’s another story.… I’m going to claw, climb, do whatever I can to try to stay here. I’d like to able to purchase a house and have a good used car in my own city. Will I be able to do that? I don’t know. I pray so. I hope so.”

Even if Bigard stays, she said, she feels like she’ll be left behind, watching on the sidelines as the new New Orleans envelops her old city. The St. Thomas projects used to be dangerous, but they also were a wellspring of

activism and culture. One of the most successful tenant organizing movements in the country, the St. Thomas Residents Council, was birthed on the grounds now occupied by River Garden and Walmart. Bigard and others told me about the legendary parties and barbecues that happened nearly every weekend in St. Thomas. There was a sense of community and camaraderie. Now most residents, isolated in semi-detached single-family homes, don’t talk to each other. And the rest of New Orleans, it seems to Bigard, is headed in that direction too: unfriendly, individualistic, boring.

Bigard, like many others here, understands that the arrival of new people is out of her control. Her biggest qualm with the new people in New Orleans isn’t that they’re here but their lack of appreciation for what makes the city unique. She said they don’t seem to understand that having a city filled with music—jazz, bounce, hip-hop—sometimes involves people practicing their instruments and making a lot of noise next door to you at odd hours. They don’t seem to understand that people like Bigard might have kids who sometimes make noise. The attempt at cultural control and dampening seems particularly egregious at River Garden, where residents in recent years have staged protests against management for reporting them to police for minor violations of housing bylaws: music being too loud, kitchen cabinet knobs missing, light bulbs out. “Jim Crow Can’t Live Here Anymore!” read one sign at a protest in 2013.

“It used to be you’d see people sitting outside in St. Thomas, maybe playing some music, somebody barbecuing, children playing,” Bigard said on a drive around the now desolate streets of River Garden. “You won’t see that shit around here anymore. That’s what connected us. Now you’re not allowed to be a New Orleanian here. Yeah, this was high crime and high poverty. But the crime and poverty haven’t gone anywhere. You’ve just spread it around, and you’ve just taken away the beauty.”