essay

3

Destroy to Rebuild

When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you.

There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans

after the storm, but of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul. A year later, there were at least 111,000 Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“ FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could ,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”

There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.

But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula. Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina . That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35 percent. Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry. When white people, followed by white businesses, show up in a place like Bywater, they seem not to integrate into the fabric of a neighborhood, but take it over. Many black-owned businesses on St. Claude Avenue, the fast-gentrifying strip at Bywater’s northern edge, simply never reopened after Katrina. And while the ones that took their place don’t have “Whites Only” signs in the window, their clientele suggests there’s a clear dividing line between the old and new New Orleans. On St. Claude, there’s the Healing Center (also owned and developed by Pres Kabacoff), which includes an upscale food co-op and art spaces; there are also new queer punk bars, organic juice joints, and expensive coffee shops and brunch spots. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these places in theory, Idakula said; it’s just that it feels like they’ve replaced what was before them without acknowledgment. The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people.

“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”

Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.

For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”

“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”

The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.

“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.

Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm, one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide. Police also shot and killed two unarmed people who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.

“ These are some of the 40,000 extra troops that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.

“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”

Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.

“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools. Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.

Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.

“ This is a tragedy ,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Just weeks after the storm, Governor Blanco signed Legislative Act 35 into law. The bill empowered the state to take over any “failing” school districts across the state, though its timing made it obvious that the law’s intent was to take over the New Orleans school system. Louisiana already had a law on the books allowing it to take over schools that achieved an average of 45 points or less on the state’s standardized School Performance Score for four years in a row. But by July 2004, the state had only exercised its power to take over one Orleans Parish School Board school. Three months before the storm, the state had taken over only four OPSB schools, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s schools did not fall below a score of 45 for four consecutive years. But Blanco’s new LA 35, passed in the wake of Katrina, drastically changed the state’s standards: after Katrina, any school that fell below the state average of 87.5 could be transferred to state control. The vast majority of New Orleans schools failed to meet this threshold, and the state was able to move nearly every New Orleans school to a new Recovery School District (RSD) within two years of the storm. Research from Tulane University found that many New Orleans schools fell just under that 87.5-point score but were transferred to the new district anyway, while no other schools in Louisiana that scored above a 60

were taken over by the state. Activists called the takeover an educational land grab .

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids. Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful : its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.

There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else. A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.

The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.

“ It is about breaking unions ,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina. During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.

The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.

Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.

“ The storm destroyed a great deal ,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”

Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “ There’s just been a lot of pampering , and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “ We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans .… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Soon after Katrina, the demolition of St. Thomas was fast-tracked, and the City Council began debating what to do with the city’s remaining four projects. Thanks to a well-organized protest movement and infighting in the City Council, the removal of the city’s remaining 4,500 units of public housing was delayed. But in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades, the City Council finally voted to knock down the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard), that means 12,381 people , 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two

decades, most right after Katrina.

The projects in New Orleans were also home to a well-organized tenants’ rights movement, and displacing thousands of black New Orleanians by demolishing public housing quelled a stronghold of black activism. In St. Thomas in the 1990s, activists such as Robert Horton, who goes by the name Kool Black, helped form first-of-their-kind networks for community policing and after-school activities for kids. And St. Thomas was one of the first public housing projects to establish a board of residents that worked with nonprofits in the area to ensure that government-funded services in public housing were actually benefiting residents.

In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either. Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.

“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”

The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well. Road Home, Louisiana’s main program meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out. And in 2011, a court found that Road Home distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.

Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But

they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent—to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there for the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else. A gentrifier’s intent isn’t meaningless. A new neighbor concerned with his or her new neighborhood can make strides toward healing the wounds brought by gentrification. A neighbor concerned with preserving the culture of a neighborhood or joining in political action can make a real difference. Intent helps, but intent cannot stop gentrification. As New Orleans’s history shows, being white and having more money than most people in a given neighborhood gives you more buying power, more privilege, and more autonomy than those who have been systematically held back from achieving the same levels of wealth. I believe this is why gentrifiers do not like to acknowledge that they are gentrifiers: they do not want to feel like perpetrators of violence and inequality.

The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification. And while it’s hard to sympathize with the wealthy, even

they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “ We must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not failure.”

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”

“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”

John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.

“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.

Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.

“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

I met John and Alicia Winter at a street fair on Freret Street, a previously nearly abandoned strip of land in the northeast of the city. Freret is not far from some very fancy neighborhoods. It’s just north of St. Charles, which is lined by stately houses on both sides and has a famous streetcar line down its middle, and just east of Tulane and Loyola Universities, where professors and administrators inhabit some swanky digs. The area right around Freret Street has for decades housed a sizable middle-class black population. But the commercial strip of Freret Street for decades housed mostly vacant storefronts. Now the area is rapidly gentrifying. The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in. Home values have more than doubled , from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too: between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract , the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22

percent.

Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis. In the same way the outskirts of every city host a confluence of chain stores—Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, OfficeMax—every city now seems to contain a Freret Street.

The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”

John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.

Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.

When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.

“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”

But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Down the street from the Freret Neighborhood Center is Dennis’ Barber Shop, which Dennis Sigur has run in the same location for forty-three years. He’s seen the neighborhood go from bustling and mostly black before the city’s

3

Destroy to Rebuild

When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you.

There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans after the storm, but of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul. A year later, there were at least 111,000 Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“ FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could ,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”

There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.

But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula. Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina . That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35 percent. Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry. When white people, followed by white businesses, show up in a place like Bywater, they seem not to integrate into the fabric of a neighborhood, but take it over. Many black-owned businesses on St. Claude Avenue, the fast-gentrifying strip at Bywater’s northern edge, simply never reopened after Katrina. And while the ones that took their place don’t have “Whites Only” signs in the window, their clientele suggests there’s a clear dividing line between the old and new New Orleans. On St. Claude, there’s the Healing Center (also owned and developed by Pres Kabacoff), which includes an upscale food co-op and art spaces; there are also new queer punk bars, organic juice joints, and expensive coffee shops and brunch spots. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these places in theory, Idakula said; it’s just that it feels like they’ve replaced what was before them without acknowledgment. The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people.

“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”

Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.

For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”

“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”

The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.

“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.

Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm, one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide. Police also shot and killed two unarmed people who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.

“ These are some of the 40,000 extra troops that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.

“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”

Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.

“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools. Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.

Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.

“ This is a tragedy ,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Just weeks after the storm, Governor Blanco signed Legislative Act 35 into law. The bill empowered the state to take over any “failing” school districts across the state, though its timing made it obvious that the law’s intent was to take over the New Orleans school system. Louisiana already had a law on the books allowing it to take over schools that achieved an average of 45 points or less on the state’s standardized School Performance Score for four years in a row. But by July 2004, the state had only exercised its power to take over one Orleans Parish School Board school. Three months before the storm, the state had taken over only four OPSB schools, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s schools did not fall below a score of 45 for four consecutive years. But Blanco’s new LA 35, passed in the wake of Katrina, drastically changed the state’s standards: after Katrina, any school that fell below the state average of 87.5 could be transferred to state control. The vast majority of New Orleans schools failed to meet this threshold, and the state was able to move nearly every New Orleans school to a new Recovery School District (RSD) within two years of the storm. Research from Tulane University found that many New Orleans schools fell just under that 87.5-point score but were transferred to the new district anyway, while no other schools in Louisiana that scored above a 60 were taken over by the state. Activists called the takeover an educational land grab .

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids. Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful : its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.

There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else. A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.

The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.

“ It is about breaking unions ,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina. During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.

The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.

Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.

“ The storm destroyed a great deal ,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”

Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “ There’s just been a lot of pampering , and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “ We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans .… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Soon after Katrina, the demolition of St. Thomas was fast-tracked, and the City Council began debating what to do with the city’s remaining four projects. Thanks to a well-organized protest movement and infighting in the City Council, the removal of the city’s remaining 4,500 units of public housing was delayed. But in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades, the City Council finally voted to knock down the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard), that means 12,381 people , 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two decades, most right after Katrina.

The projects in New Orleans were also home to a well-organized tenants’ rights movement, and displacing thousands of black New Orleanians by demolishing public housing quelled a stronghold of black activism. In St. Thomas in the 1990s, activists such as Robert Horton, who goes by the name Kool Black, helped form first-of-their-kind networks for community policing and after-school activities for kids. And St. Thomas was one of the first public housing projects to establish a board of residents that worked with nonprofits in the area to ensure that government-funded services in public housing were actually benefiting residents.

In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either. Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.

“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”

The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well. Road Home, Louisiana’s main program meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out. And in 2011, a court found that Road Home distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.

Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent—to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there for the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else. A gentrifier’s intent isn’t meaningless. A new neighbor concerned with his or her new neighborhood can make strides toward healing the wounds brought by gentrification. A neighbor concerned with preserving the culture of a neighborhood or joining in political action can make a real difference. Intent helps, but intent cannot stop gentrification. As New Orleans’s history shows, being white and having more money than most people in a given neighborhood gives you more buying power, more privilege, and more autonomy than those who have been systematically held back from achieving the same levels of wealth. I believe this is why gentrifiers do not like to acknowledge that they are gentrifiers: they do not want to feel like perpetrators of violence and inequality.

The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification. And while it’s hard to sympathize with the wealthy, even they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “ We must understand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not failure.”

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”

“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”

John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.

“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.

Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.

“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

I met John and Alicia Winter at a street fair on Freret Street, a previously nearly abandoned strip of land in the northeast of the city. Freret is not far from some very fancy neighborhoods. It’s just north of St. Charles, which is lined by stately houses on both sides and has a famous streetcar line down its middle, and just east of Tulane and Loyola Universities, where professors and administrators inhabit some swanky digs. The area right around Freret Street has for decades housed a sizable middle-class black population. But the commercial strip of Freret Street for decades housed mostly vacant storefronts. Now the area is rapidly gentrifying. The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in. Home values have more than doubled , from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too: between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract , the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22 percent.

Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis. In the same way the outskirts of every city host a confluence of chain stores—Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, OfficeMax—every city now seems to contain a Freret Street.

The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”

John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.

Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.

When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.

“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”

But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Down the street from the Freret Neighborhood Center is Dennis’ Barber Shop, which Dennis Sigur has run in the same location for forty-three years. He’s seen the neighborhood go from bustling and mostly black before the city’s economic crash and white flight in the 1970s to gentrified now. His shop is not meant for gentrifiers—nothing prevents them from coming in, but Dennis makes no effort to attract them. His employees are black, and from what I could tell, so are all of his customers. The shop is busy, Dennis said, but less busy than it used to be. Yet he sees new businesses catering to white people opening constantly.

“Our customers are getting further and further away,” he said. “We’re struggling. But the welcome mat is rolled out for the newcomers.”

Freret’s newcomers have gotten a bit of red carpet treatment: After Hurricane Katrina, the state designated Freret a cultural district , allowing businesses opening along this strip to receive tax incentives—exemptions from income taxes for artists, tax credits for rehabbing storefronts, and the like. Only new businesses were eligible, not long-running ones like Dennis’ Barber Shop. The city also passed a zoning overlay that allowed bars and restaurants to concentrate in the area like almost nowhere else in the city. In a city that already has an abundance of liquor options, the City Council is hesitant to issue new liquor licenses, but not on Freret Street. Thanks to that zoning overlay , any new restaurant on Freret can apply for a liquor license without seeking the City Council’s approval. That allowed several new restaurants to open in rapid succession and attract a young, white, liquor-swigging crowd in a matter of months. That might not seem like a big deal, but imagine an alternative scenario in which restaurants on Freret were required to go through the same permitting process as everywhere else in the city. Imagine that many of the stores weren’t allowed to exist tax free for a number of years. There’s a chance Freret would’ve developed very differently.

Most New Orleanians I spoke with seemed to have no problem with the incentives used to lure people to forlorn parts of the city. But some took issue with the way they were used. If incentivizing businesses is often synonymous with bringing all-white, upscale businesses to an area, it seems obvious that the process isn’t working for everyone. In the spring of 2013, a hundred Freret-area residents crowded the cafeteria of a charter school to discuss a proposal to raise property taxes in the neighborhood and use the revenue to hire private security to patrol the area. At the meeting, two white people sat at the table representing those for the idea. Two black residents represented those who were opposed. There was so much opposition to the proposal—mostly black residents who feared security guards would add to the already rampant police harassment of black people in the neighborhood—that the proposal was shelved. But it nonetheless highlighted that in New Orleans, the revitalization of an area nearly always comes with tension between those benefiting from the new city and those who feel they’ve been left behind.

“It’s going to come to the point where if you don’t have a good income you can’t stay,” Dennis Sigur told me. “There’s a growing divide between the new and the old.”

This middle phase of gentrification—after the “pioneers” have settled in and capital goes on autopilot, seeking out any

neighborhood that seems potentially profitable—tends to divide everyone in a city, not only into black and white, rich and poor, but also into groups within those groups. Gentrifiers begin filtering into self-defined niches in order to differentiate themselves from those they feel are ruining the city. No one wants to be labeled a gentrifier, and a new class emerges: the white, relatively well-off who also hate gentrification.

Leslie Heindel fits into this category. I met Leslie through her mother, Lisa, a real estate agent whom I’d visited to talk about New Orleans real estate values. But while I was interviewing Lisa in her office in the upscale Garden District, her daughter kept stopping her work and audibly sighing. Eventually Lisa suggested she chime in. It turns out gentrification is something Leslie and her friends talk about on a near-daily basis.

Leslie said she sees gentrification as an ever-present threat to her way of life. To stay afloat in New Orleans, she works at least two bartending jobs at a time in addition to the administrative work she does at her mom’s office. She, like a growing number of twenty- and thirtysomethings, rents an apartment as opposed to owning one. She doesn’t have the money to afford a down payment on one, especially now that real estate values are skyrocketing in her city.

Over cigarettes and draft beers at a bar in the Irish Channel, just a few blocks from where Ashana Bigard lives, Leslie and her friends told me about everything wrong with New Orleans today—the movie industry coming in and taking up space and houses and jobs; Airbnb, which allows people to rent their houses for short periods of time and has been shown to cause rent inflation; the increased touristification and Disneyfication of every neighborhood near the French Quarter; and the lack of community that comes with all those things.

“I’ve worked at this bar for ten years,” Leslie told me through a cloud of Marlboro Lights smoke. “There are nights I know nobody here.”

Leslie and her friends have the luxury of being middle class, so their fear of gentrification has less to do with outright displacement and more to do with a sense of being squeezed into different neighborhoods and smaller apartments and having to take on more work in order to stay in their city. They see themselves being pushed down Ruth Idakula’s metaphorical ladder.

“Everyone who grew up here has experienced a different New Orleans,” Leslie admitted. But, she and her friends said, the changes since Katrina have been different, faster, and more tumultuous.

“If you had talked to me six years ago, I would have said we were moving in the right direction,” Leslie’s friend Crista Rock, a video producer, said. “I would’ve said the movie industry is great, and all the entrepreneurial stuff is great. I don’t think anyone could’ve foreseen this. I had real big hopes for us.”

The industries Leslie and Crista complained of had been wooed here with taxpayer money. Like every state in the country, Louisiana uses tax breaks and other incentives to lure and keep companies, but Louisiana uses more of them than most places. The state gives away 21 cents per dollar of the government’s budget to companies—a higher percentage than any other state besides Texas and Michigan. In Louisiana, there’s a ten-year tax exemption for buying materials used in manufacturing, a 40 percent tax break for companies using technology developed in the state, a 25

percent tax break for companies that record sound in Louisiana, a 100 percent five-year tax break for restoring old commercial structures, and the list goes on.

In 2011, the state gave $214 million to make sure shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls stayed within New Orleans. The same year, it approved tax incentives worth $1.5 billion for Cheniere Energy, a natural gas and oil company that paid its CEO $142 million in 2013.

But no industry in Louisiana gets tax credits more often than film and television production, which is centered in New Orleans. Cheniere might’ve been the biggest single deal, but Louisiana gives away hundreds of millions for TV and movies every year. In 2013 alone, the state gave away $251 million in tax credits to the industry. Every time the A&E reality show Duck Dynasty filmed an episode in Louisiana, the show received incentives worth $300,000.

Those incentives bring to New Orleans thousands of high-paying jobs, which usually come with salaries higher than New Orleans’s median income of $36,964 . This essentially creates two economies—one filled with low-paid natives, and one filled with people who make higher salaries, subsidized by Louisiana taxpayers. That second category views Louisiana’s real estate as a relative bargain. Leslie told me most of her clients now come from out of town, especially New York and Los Angeles. And so, in her own small way, Leslie is helping push herself down the ladder.

But how’s the view from the top of the ladder? If not even many gentrifiers think gentrification is good, why does it keep happening? Pres Kabacoff is one of the city’s biggest developers—he’s the one who turned the St. Thomas housing projects into for-profit mixed-use housing. And he’s intimately tied in with city decision making. He chairs the city’s Housing Task Force Committee and is a member of the Urban Land Institute, a powerful national urban planning group. When Kabacoff talks, city officials listen.

Kabacoff is a genial guy with some surprising views for a multimillionaire who makes money off private development. For example, he believes the federal government should spend way more on housing poor people, and he thinks the United States spends too much on war and not enough on things such as education. But when it comes to gentrification, Kabacoff has some troubling views for someone who wields so much power in a majority-poor, majority-black city.

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” he told me from his dark-wood-filled office, located in a building he owns downtown. “It’s certainly not a good solution to stop development to protect neighborhoods.”

In Kabacoff’s view, the best way for New Orleans to grow is to start looking more like New York and San Francisco: “We lost our middle income dramatically and it becomes a vicious cycle. The middle class don’t require a lot of services, but they pay for services that are provided. When your middle class leaves and your poor get more concentrated, your service needs go up—the tax base is gone and you go into a vicious downward spiral. And you get

what happened here, and in Detroit, and Newark, and Gary, Indiana.”

But what about the Ashana Bigards and even the Leslie Heindels—the people who feel they’re being pushed further and further down the ladder by his attempt to bring a sizable middle and upper-middle class to the city? His answer, essentially, was that this is an inevitable consequence of progress.

“It’s true when a neighborhood comes back many people who found it to be an affordable place are priced out,” he said. “But the cold truth is, if you’re going to revitalize a neighborhood that’s in bad shape or where market rate won’t go—because the amount of crime, the amount of poverty or the amount of minorities, or whatever keeps market rate uncomfortable moving there—one of the realities is that when the market rate come in, those people move to another neighborhood. It’s a pain in the ass, but they move.”

Given the city’s apparent willingness to incentivize, unchecked, the kind of revitalization Kabacoff and other major developers promote, I asked Kabacoff if he thought New Orleans was on its way to becoming like New York or San Francisco, where people are marching in the streets over gentrification, and where even those in the middle class feel like they’re hanging on to their cities by a thread.

“You might argue New Orleans could use a little gentrification,” he told me. “In San Francisco and New York, you reach that saturation point and once you reach that, people start to march. Am I worried about people marching in New Orleans? Not yet. We’ve got a ways to go.”

It’d be easy to paint Kabacoff as a villain, a 1 percenter toying with his city without regard to the people who live in it, but his ideas aren’t so different from Leslie Heindel’s, or the policies of most members of the New Orleans City Council, or the ideas of academics and planners and pundits who see gentrification and revitalization as near-synonyms. Most people who aren’t directly displaced by gentrification seem to want just enough of it to improve their lives, but not too much—they don’t want it to overwhelm their own bank accounts. Hipsters are fine with coffee but eye boutiques and banks with suspicion, yuppies are fine with the boutiques and banks but see landscapes radically altered by development as cultural losses, and developers such as Pres Kabacoff are fine with those landscapes as long as they don’t inspire protest. The problem is that these steps are all part of the same process, and once you start turning the city into a capital-accumulation machine, it’s kind of hard to turn back.

It’s hard to say what New Orleans will look like in ten or twenty years, but it’s become obvious that the city is almost solely focused on economic growth, not on repairing or moving beyond the trauma of Katrina. The press today in New Orleans rarely mentions gentrification or displacement. The politicians of New Orleans have all but given up trying to get any of the 100,000 displaced residents back to the city. Those former New Orleanians have disappeared, and the city has opened a new chapter, one that seems to contain no mention of race or class, just “progress.”

In an essay analyzing political rhetoric after Katrina, Colorado State University ethnic studies professor Eric Ishiwata writes that the storm shed light on the fact that many Americans still don’t accept the existence of extreme racism and extreme poverty in this county. The idea that there’s a group of people who on a daily basis are having their rights violated and their lives threatened occurs to many Americans only in moments of national trauma. Katrina was one of those moments. Weeks after the storm, the lead story in the September 19 issue of Newsweek would deem these “forgotten” people the “Other America.” And four days after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, explained the disastrous FEMA response by saying: “ The American people don’t understand how fascinating and unusual this is—is that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”

According to Ishiwata, phrases like these —“people we didn’t know exist,” “the other America”—show that “a large segment of Katrina’s victims had, to the point of the disaster, been cast as personae non grata—citizen-subjects rendered invisible by the reigning neoliberal ideology of a ‘colorblind America.’”

In other words, until they were abandoned by their governments and forced onto bridges where CNN cameras delivered images of them into the homes of millions of Americans, poor black people’s lives in New Orleans rarely weighed on the conscience of Americans, even the Americans meant to protect them, such as FEMA director Michael Brown.

Katrina opened a window that allowed us to peer into the real America, but as soon as the disruptive event was over, that window closed, and the country’s consciousness went back to its usual state of ignoring the fact that black people, especially low-income black people, are daily denied democracy and equality in this country. As Ishiwata points out, we didn’t just go back to forgetting that issues of inequality and racism exist; we went back to forgetting that an entire group of disenfranchised people exists.

Closing that window explains why it took only days before people seemed to stop caring about the rebuilding of New Orleans, to stop caring that nearly 100,000 African Americans were not able to return after the storm. To many politicians and thought leaders such as David Brooks, the idea that we’d need to get a majority-black, majority-poor city back to its former self seemed unnecessary, even irresponsible. After taking a tour of the Houston Astrodome, where thousands had been bused after Katrina, former first lady Barbara Bush told a radio show that people seemed better off there than in New Orleans.

“So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said. “So this is working very well for them.”

Less than a week after the storm, when asked if he thought billions should be spent rebuilding New Orleans, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said: “ I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me .… It looks like a lot of that place should be bulldozed.”

The country’s collective ignoring of black New Orleanians’ lives also explains why there was no federal effort

undertaken to figure out where exactly all the evacuees from Katrina had ended up. Ten years later, not one federal agency is studying the diaspora caused by Katrina. The biggest study of their whereabouts was performed by the nonprofit RAND Corporation, and that tracking program ended five years ago.

A decade after the man-made failures that preceded and followed Katrina tore New Orleans apart, the “other America” narrative has been completely forgotten. The chasm has closed. And a new narrative—one of rebirth and growth—has overtaken the country’s popular media. The city has been “resurrected ,” according to the Daily Beast. Its growth is an “economic miracle ,” according to the National Journal. The city is indeed growing at a rapid clip, making its way up the lists featured in business magazines and newspaper travel sections of the top ten places to live or work or fall in love. New Orleans, despite the tens of thousands still missing from it, is “back.” And now, with the benefit of hindsight, despite all that went wrong, and all those the recovery failed, its leaders are confirming that, yes, just like David Brooks said, Katrina was truly a blessing in disguise.

This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as “People are starting to move to that neighborhood,” or “No one used to go there, but that’s changing.” The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance. This is what is happening in New Orleans and every other gentrifying city. If you ignore the destruction of the lives of the people who’ve always mattered the least, things are going great. If you acknowledge that their lives exist and that they matter, then it becomes immediately obvious something is terribly wrong. So what does it mean that we are not only ignoring these people but increasingly erasing their narratives in the name of progress?

Here’s the image we’ve created of the gentrifying city: People are experiencing New Orleans through fresh eyes and ears. People are moving to Detroit to change it and make it better. They’re spotting areas of Brooklyn that have yet to be discovered. They’re finding San Francisco’s next hot markets . They’re discovering renewal in the ruins of abandoned sections of town. Neighborhoods are being revitalized . Entire economies are being turned around .

But we know that from the perspective of the gentrified, revitalization looks like displacement, new business opportunities often look like racial preference, and hot neighborhoods mean a loss of community.

I think both these perspectives are true: some people are discovering neighborhoods they think are hot, others are discovering they can no longer afford to live in those neighborhoods. Some people really are finding hope in the new New Orleans and the new Detroit; others are not. Whether or not gentrifiers, policy makers, and others with power and money can grapple with both narratives—the one about discovery and betterment, and the more complicated, uncomfortable one about loss, about economics and race—will determine the future of our cities.

As Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “ Private investment shapes cities , but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.”

So what image of our cities do we hold in our hearts?