President Obama will visit New Orleans Thursday to mark the city’s progress on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, but most black residents say the government-funded recovery still hasn’t reached them.
On his visit, the president intends “to celebrate the remarkable revival of an American city,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday. In a speech, Mr. Obama also will touch on the need to combat climate change to lessen the severity of such storms.
“This is, once again, a thriving, exciting place to live and do business,” Mr. Earnest said. “In the mind of the president, this is an indication of what communities can do when they band together. And they had the strong support of the federal government as the people of New Orleans and the people of Louisiana, and either party, would readily tell you.”
But a majority of blacks in New Orleans, 59 percent, said in a poll released this week that the city has “mostly not recovered.” Despite the federal government having spent more than $100 billion on rebuilding the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast since 2005, most black residents in New Orleans “feel life in the city has gone downhill since then,” said the survey by Louisiana State University.
And the Urban League of Greater New Orleans issued a 167-page report Wednesday that gave a damning assessment of the recovery of the city’s black community. The unemployment rate of black men in the city is 52 percent, compared with 8.8 percent nationally.
The report found that blacks composed 90 percent of the city’s prison population, even though blacks account for 59 percent of New Orleans’ total population. More than half of all black children in the city live in poverty, and the income gap between white and blacks is widening, the report found.
“New Orleans is one city,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at a forum Wednesday. “It can’t go forward unless everybody goes with it.”
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and the city’s former mayor, said far more needs to be done.
“Everyone wants the rising tide,” Mr. Morial said. “The rising tide lifts all boats, but the rising tide does not lift people who are not in a boat.”
There is a sharp racial divide in attitudes about the Katrina recovery a decade after the storm. Among white residents of Louisiana, 78 percent believe the state has “mostly recovered.” And most white residents feel that life in New Orleans is not only better than it was in the aftermath of the hurricane, but better even than before the storm hit.
Mr. Earnest said such differing assessments of conditions in New Orleans “were evident before the storm,” and said it’s one reason that Mr. Landrieu has urged residents to “set their sights higher” and move beyond comparisons to life prior to Katrina.
Mr. Landrieu made an appeal Wednesday for unity in the city.
“We have this fight all the time: Is the city white? Is the city black?” he said. “If we can ever find a way to bridge that divide and keep everybody moving in the right direction, that I believe is the right thing for the city of New Orleans.”
There are persistent independent indicators that conditions are worse for poor residents. The poverty rate in New Orleans is now worse than the national average and worse than other fast-growing Southern cities, according to the Data Center, a nonprofit that analyzes data for southeast Louisiana.
“The poverty rate in New Orleans has risen to pre-Katrina rates and is now a crushingly high 27 percent,” the center said in a report on the 10th anniversary of Katrina. “While white males have seen increasing employment rates, black males have not, and by 2013, black households earned 54 percent less than white households in metro New Orleans. On these and other indicators of inclusion, metro New Orleans is performing worse than the nation and other fast-growing southern metros.”
The national poverty rate was about 14.5 percent in 2013, according to the most recent figures available from the Census Bureau.
Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane on Aug. 29, 2005, packing winds of 125 mph. The storm surge and flooding killed more than 1,800 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Georgia, and displaced about 1 million residents.
In New Orleans, nearly 80 percent of the homes were damaged or destroyed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which came under withering criticism, along with President George W. Bush, for inadequate preparation and a weak response, called it the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
Combined with two other hurricanes that hit the region that year, insured losses totaled about $57 billion, in addition to $17 billion in claims paid by the National Flood Insurance Program.
While New Orleanians point to progress such as a stronger levee system, a $1.1 billion hospital and a network of charter schools, many residents believe the city is far from the recovery that Mr. Obama envisioned when he visited as a presidential candidate in 2007 and accused the government of failing the city.
In addition to rebuilding the levees, Mr. Obama promised to rebuild damaged rental properties, and his administration agreed to continue with plans from the Bush administration to rebuild as many as 51,000 apartments at a cost of $1.4 billion. But PolitiFact said this month that just 16,100 units have been built, at a cost of about $948 million, and the rest of the money was reallocated to other recovery programs.
Despite considerable transportation funding from the federal government, the city’s transportation system is rated worse now than it was before Katrina, with less than half of the buses and streetcars that were operating before the storm.
Environmentalists, too, urged the president Wednesday to do more for the Gulf Coast wetlands.
“We are not going to protect our coastal communities from future Katrinas until we fix our main defenses — the vanishing coastal wetlands that buffer the winds and tidal surges of violent storms,” said David Yarnold, president and CEO of the National Audubon Society. “President Obama certainly will see progress when he visits New Orleans. But the wetlands are disappearing at the alarming rate of one football field an hour, and much remains to be done.”
The Data Center calls coastal erosion and rising sea levels “the most existential issue that New Orleans faces.” The group said that, since 1932, the region has lost nearly 30 percent of the land that protects it from hurricane storm surge, and saltwater is increasingly infiltrating groundwater within levee walls.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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