Post Katrina New Orleans must defeat the criminals who terrorize its streets.

Baghdad on the Bayou
Nicole Gelinas

To recover from Katrina, New Orleans must defeat the criminals who terrorize its streets.

You don’t have to go to Baghdad to see what happens when government loses its monopoly on force; just visit New Orleans. More than a year and a half after Katrina hit in late August 2005, violent crime—already a grave problem long before the storm—pervades the city, endangering its recovery by driving some good people away and keeping others from returning. In recent months, the federal and state governments, confronting a murder rate that currently exceeds that of any first-world city, have brought law-and-order forces to the Big Easy to try to wrest its streets back from criminals. But any long-term solution to the city’s crime woes must be local. Unless New Orleans itself can find the moral and political will to control the violence, it will only be trying to rebuild the dying city that it was before Katrina.

When New Orleans began slowly to come back to life after Katrina, it enjoyed a respite from violent crime, one that residents and their elected leaders thought would continue indefinitely. New Orleanians had a “sense of euphoria about the city being a new city, that the violent crimes just weren’t there,” says U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who handles federal cases for Louisiana’s eastern district. But after roughly ten weeks of peace, murders—many drug-related and acquaintance-based—started to appear in the headlines again. Then, as the city’s population began returning in greater numbers last spring, violent crime roared back “with a vengeance,” as Letten puts it. The highly publicized shooting death in March 2006 of 28-year-old Michael Frey at the hands of a street robber in the Faubourg Marigny, a funky neighborhood on the outskirts of the French Quarter, seemed to trigger in many New Orleans residents the realization that things were now back to “normal.”

The numbers tell the grim story. In 2004, the year before Katrina, New Orleans suffered 265 murders, yielding a murder rate of 56 per 100,000 residents—already four and a half times higher than the average for similar-size cities. In 2006, the year after Katrina, the flood-ravaged, much smaller city logged 162 murders—a rate of at least 77 per 100,000 people, even assuming the most generous quarter-by-quarter repopulation figures available. (New Orleans has recovered less than half its pre-Katrina population of about 470,000.) In the first 64 days of 2007, New Orleans’s murder rate scaled even higher—more than 87 per 100,000 residents. Such a rate in New York City would mean nearly 7,000 murders a year, well over the 2,262 it experienced at the height of its Dinkins-era violent-crime crisis 17 years ago. Other violent-crime indexes—from assault to armed robbery—have moved in a similar direction.

The rocketing crime rate suggests that New Orleans’s bad guys are coming back to the city in disproportionate numbers. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The hoodlums, mostly members of an entrenched underclass, are impulsive and mobile, while working- and middle-class New Orleanians face big roadblocks to returning, such as shuttered schools. Some of the lawbreakers may have hustled back, too, because they were having a hard time adjusting to functional cities like Houston, which initially took in more than 200,000 storm evacuees. Unlike New Orleans, which has long failed at crime fighting, Houston actually arrests, charges, convicts, and imprisons its criminals (see “Houston’s Noble Experiment,” Spring 2006).

Relentless crime was the main reason New Orleans had lost 22 percent of its pre-1960 peak population (mostly middle-class young people, black and white) long before Katrina. But the hurricane took a slow process of decline—more middle-class hemorrhaging, more disorder, fewer livable neighborhoods—and instantly fast-forwarded it to urban nightmare.

First, New Orleans’s “legacy drug dealers”—as James Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the city’s FBI office, classifies those who were dealing before Katrina, almost invariably single-parented young black males—learned a lot during their months away. In Houston, still a major drug hub despite its better policing and justice system, Big Easy dealers met new suppliers and have now “flooded New Orleans with drugs,” says Bernazzani. Thanks to the increased quantity on the street, the price of a kilo of cocaine has declined nearly 20 percent since Katrina. Dealers who can’t profit from such low prices eliminate competition through violence.

Many dealers and other criminals haven’t returned to their old blighted neighborhoods, since four-fifths of New Orleans’s public housing remains closed and some of the city’s poorest tracts are still flood-ruined. Instead, they’ve spread out to neighborhoods that were already struggling before the storm—Central City, a sprawling, low-rise area to the east of elegant St. Charles Avenue, for instance, as well as ample pockets of Uptown, where residents of dilapidated housing have long lived in proximity to university students and professionals—and made those places much more dangerous. A study earlier this year found that 31 percent of Central City residents feel safe today, compared with 45 percent before Katrina; 85 percent said that “people being murdered” was a concern.

Some returning criminals take advantage of abandoned housing on half-occupied streets; others crowd with relatives in legal housing. “You have families living doubled up, people who have serious problems,” says Al Mims, Jr., a Central City native who came back to New Orleans a week after Katrina. “Before Katrina,” he explains, “you had [drug] rivals who stayed miles apart. Now, it’s like having Wal-Mart and Kmart across the street from each other.” Mims, who lost his father in a Central City murder nearly two decades ago and was shot himself at 19, notes that most of his neighbors are hardworking. “Maybe 10 to 15 percent” of the area’s young people are criminals, he believes, but it’s enough. “To have this come back after the most terrible natural disaster . . . ” says Mims, his voice trailing off.

It’s not just the violence; New Orleanians also face a dispiriting crush of property theft as they struggle to rebuild. In recovering neighborhoods, criminals wait for a returning resident to install new appliances into his damaged home, and then steal them when he returns to his temporary housing at night. David Kent, a former deputy chief of police who retired from the New Orleans Police Department in 1982 and who lives in the Mid-City neighborhood, says that “salvage artists” regularly cut and remove brass and copper pipes. “People are trying to build their homes and their lives, and they find that their pipes are stolen,” laments Latoya Cantrell, who is rebuilding her home alongside her neighbors in the flooded Broadmoor area. Quality-of-life infractions are endemic, too. When I walked through the Marigny, a neighborhood that Katrina left unflooded, a couple asked if I had any pills to share; residents all over the city complain of blatant drug use and open-air drug sales. Of quality-of-life crimes, says Cantrell, “there’s no comparison” with before Katrina.

Wealthier areas of the city, never impervious to crime, haven’t been immune to its post-Katrina escalation. All along the river, in well-off neighborhoods that didn’t flood, “we’re seeing a spike in crime,” says Bernazzani.

Intensifying the city’s crime woes further, family relationships that were tenuous pre-Katrina—in underclass neighborhoods, mothers and grandmothers raised children alone, with few exceptions—are now completely broken. David Bell, chief justice of New Orleans’s juvenile court, tells me that 20 percent of the kids who appear before him today—for the most part, 15 or younger—are utterly without parental supervision; he calls this a “tragic story no one is telling.” Some of these children have left mothers or grandmothers behind in Houston and other locales and returned to stay with relatives, who often don’t watch out for them. Others, separated from their families in Katrina’s chaotic aftermath, never reconnected with them. “They’ve returned home, looking for their only parent,” Bell observes. Many of the kids whom Bell sees have been arrested for nonviolent crimes such as drug possession or sale, but as New York’s policing experience has shown, such crimes tend to lead to more serious offenses.

You can drive through the vast, now-empty C. J. Peete housing project in Central City, and if you look just at the sealed windows and doors, you would think that no one’s been there since the hurricane. But unsupervised teens stroll in the courtyards. In one, an SUV idles while its occupants likely complete a drug deal, according to the narcotics officer with whom I’m riding. Just blocks away, as the project opens onto a main thoroughfare, black-and-white signs reading enough! enough! enough! festoon telephone poles, decrying the frequent violence in the area. Before Katrina, the signs had read merely—merely!—thou shalt not kill, illustrating how a crime-ravaged community’s sense of impotent desperation has worsened.

New Orleans has yet another Katrina-related crime problem: it has become a kind of frontier town. Contractors and laborers have come from all over America to work on the city’s damaged property (and from south of the border: one joke in town is that FEMA means “Find Every Mexican Available”). Often without their families, some buy entertainment on the streets, including drugs and sex.

The psychological consequences for law-abiding New Orleanians of all this chaos and criminality have been profound. In the Marigny, resident Nora Natale expresses a common sentiment: New Orleans may have the same number of criminals that it did two years ago, but since there are fewer potential victims to target, things are much worse. Since Frey’s murder in her neighborhood, Natale says, “I’ve changed my lifestyle. I don’t take morning walks.” Last summer, she called 911 to report a shooting in front of her house during an attempted robbery; the victim, a neighbor, survived—and moved. Another acquaintance was run over by an attempted-robbery getaway car (she survived, too). Natale is candid about the corrosive toll: “I take a lot of little vacations” away from the city, she says. “It’s been a rough year.”

Katrina’s protracted aftermath would challenge the nation’s best police and prosecutorial forces. But the fact that New Orleans hasn’t had a functional criminal-justice system for years has made its post-hurricane crime predicament graver still.

No one would deny the city’s acute criminal-justice challenges since the storm. Floodwaters heavily damaged court and police buildings; hundreds of police officers and prosecutors lost their homes; the police department lost its crime lab. But earlier this year, the DA’s office released news showing that the city’s criminal-justice system wasn’t just strained, but shattered: in 2006 and early 2007, 3,581 suspects, some charged with murders and armed robberies, walked free from jail or from bond, in many cases because the prosecutor didn’t have the physical evidence to indict them within the 60 days mandated by the state constitution. Blame the continued absence of a crime lab. But what kind of a city doesn’t immediately replace its wrecked lab so that it can keep hard-core criminals off the streets?

Mayor Ray Nagin’s failure to replace the lab, even after 18 months had elapsed, didn’t come from nowhere. New Orleans was pathetically lax about its criminal-justice system before the storm, as its weak murder-conviction and sentencing rates show. Four months before Katrina, district attorney Eddie Jordan—who is elected, not appointed by the mayor—found that “a murderer in New Orleans has a less than one in four chance of being convicted of that crime.” While Jordan wins no prizes for his performance, the problems long predate his taking office in 2003. An independent 2002 study by the nonprofit Metropolitan Crime Commission found that New Orleans’s felony conviction rate (as a percentage of arrests) was the second-lowest of the 11 cities studied; just 12 percent of those arrested in a given year were eventually convicted and imprisoned. For the other 88 percent, the report concluded, “the criminal-justice system was little more than a revolving door back to the street.”

Police and prosecutors blame each other for these disastrous results: prosecutors say that the police prepare poor reports, often based on unreliable witness testimony, while the cops retort that prosecutors throw out perfectly good cases.

It’s obvious what New Orleans should do, and should have done long before Katrina. The city needs to train its police and prosecutors better, pay them more, and manage them more professionally, in order to boost low morale and end high turnover. Before Katrina, New Orleans’s crime-fighting staffing levels, while modest compared with New York’s (even relative to population), were comparable with those of other southern cities with lower murder rates, such as Atlanta and Houston. Since the storm, the police force has shrunk more than 10 percent, despite new recruits; the rate of attrition is double what it was before Katrina.

The city also must allocate its policing resources more effectively. The NOPD should have a massive street-crimes unit to do undercover drug buys and bust serial robbers, for example. Further, the city can’t just temporarily ramp up its policing resources whenever it detects a “violent crime wave,” as it has done for decades; rather, it must treat crime as a chronic condition, as New York does. And New Orleans needs to prosecute those individuals it does arrest and pressure judges to imprison the ones convicted.

Most important, the city’s mayor, DA, and judges must recognize that tolerating nonviolent offenses leads directly to violent crimes. Because they don’t feel any incentive from the authorities to stop their disorderly behavior, too many juveniles graduate from loitering to drug use to drug sales to carrying weapons to armed robbery . . . to murder.

In the mid-1990s, New Orleans got a tiny taste of what good policing can do. Then-mayor Marc Morial, confronting murder numbers that rival today’s shocking rates—424 in 1994, or about 80 per 100,000 residents—hired outsider Richard Pennington as police superintendent. Pennington cut corruption and implemented statistics-based policing and other crime-fighting innovations, slashing the city’s murder rate by nearly two-thirds by the end of the decade. But absent legal, prosecutorial, and sentencing reforms, New Orleans never lowered crime to a level that any other city would consider acceptable, and it didn’t sustain its gains. When Pennington ran for mayor in 2002, moreover, he lost to Nagin.

Good policing and prosecution cost money—and after Katrina, New Orleans’s regular annual revenues are down 23 percent. So it’s reasonable for the city to ask the feds and the state for operating cash for its police and prosecutor’s forces over the next few years, in order to give its tax base a chance to recover from the biggest weather-related disaster in U.S. history. What’s more, since Louisiana is running a surplus, Governor Kathleen Blanco could send the city one-time funds to upgrade the justice system’s equipment. Over the long term, though, New Orleans, always a low-tax city relative to its income, must get used to taxing more and spending more to maintain a professional crime-fighting force. Violent crime will drive middle-class taxpayers out, or keep them out, before higher taxes will.

But fixing the city’s dysfunctional criminal-justice system isn’t just a matter of tactics and resources, because the mess reflects a deeper cultural problem. For over a decade, when I have pointed out to well-off New Orleanians that the city suffers high crime because it won’t control its predominantly underclass criminals, I have received lectures on how the real problem is anything but failure to enforce the law. I just don’t understand, I’m told, how bad schools, bad parenting, a lack of inner-city jobs, or some combination of the three must be fixed first. New Orleans’s moneyed, mostly white, elite—which could have played a vital role in changing the political debate about crime, just as such citizens did in New York—often voices this “root causes” theory. As one longtime resident bluntly noted, “the white elite is cowed by political correctness.”

Anger about crime in New York didn’t just come from elites; worried working-class and middle-class voters turned out for Rudy Giuliani in droves. In New Orleans, such citizens, mostly black, often complain about crime, but they don’t support the measures necessary to combat it. Just look at Jordan’s pre-Katrina report, which concluded that New Orleans often suffered from “both jury and judge nullification”—that is, ignoring the law—especially in cases against small-time drug dealers and users, “regardless of the evidence” (italics mine). In 2004, juries found nearly 60 percent of narcotics defendants not guilty, and that was after the DA had thrown out thousands of cases. “Some trial observers have suggested that . . . nullification . . . is based on distrust of the police. . . . Others think it may be due to judges and juries being unwilling to impose what they see as draconian sentences for drug use and petty dealing,” the DA concluded. Before Katrina, prosecutors chose to treat marijuana possession, being found with “crack pipe residue,” and prostitution as misdemeanors, because jurors wouldn’t convict in such cases.

Citizens also directly thwart the law in some neighborhoods. Central City native Mims notes that the mothers and grandmothers of suspects arrested for nonviolent crimes often beg neighborhood ministers to persuade prosecutors to release their sons and grandsons. Underclass mothers are often perfectly aware that their kids are involved in crime, and even encourage it, says Mims.

One post-Katrina case illustrates the point. In early February, 17-year-old Robert Dawson boarded a bus in Dallas and made the ten-hour trek to New Orleans with his mother, happy, according to news reports, to be returning to Central City after nearly a year and a half. Four hours after Dawson came home, he was dead—shot on the street multiple times, allegedly by a teenage acquaintance, Clarence Johnson. Johnson’s mother had reportedly given him the gun that she kept in her housing-project apartment, and urged him to seek revenge on Dawson, with whom he had already gotten into a fight. After the murder, police found a family photo proudly displayed in Johnson’s home: a snapshot of the boy, posing with a fistful of cash in one hand, a pistol in the other.

Lousy policing contributes to the general contempt for the criminal-justice system. The NOPD does have some heroic officers; but many are poorly managed and poorly trained, have poor morale, and do their jobs poorly. The result is yet more jurors unwilling to convict, since they’ve had, or their children have had, bad personal experiences with these cops. Flawed arrests and dropped prosecutions, too, mean that many witnesses won’t cooperate, since they know, as Mims says, that violent thugs “will be back on the streets before sundown.” And everybody—from white society folk who hire off-duty cops to patrol their streets to poor black kids who carry guns while walking theirs—knows that the only real security in New Orleans is private, not public.

Ignoring Reality

To calculate New Orleans’s 2006 murder rate, I divided the raw crime totals provided by the NOPD into generous quarter-by-quarter estimates of New Orleans’s population from various sources, including the U.S. Census, the Louisiana Public Health Institute, and the city’s own emergency operations center. The result was a shocking 77 murders per 100,000 residents—up from 56 in 2004, the year before Katrina. Using less generous population figures, Tulane professor Mark VanLandingham has found a 2006 murder rate of 96 per 100,000.

Whichever estimate is closer to the truth, the conclusion is beyond dispute: post-Katrina New Orleans is a horrifically dangerous place, even compared with such other hazardous cities as Detroit (41 murders per 100,000 residents annually) and St. Louis (32). But instead of facing reality, police superintendent Warren Riley held a press conference on New Year’s Day to boast that the total number of murders in 2006 was the lowest in 30 years—ignoring the fact that 30 years ago, the city’s population was as much as three times higher!

The NOPD has argued that these reckonings of the city’s murder rate are too high because they don’t include people who work in the city during the day in their population estimates. But no city includes its typically much-larger daytime population in its murder rate.

The police department has also tried to minimize fear by saying that the crime rate is driven by “criminals killing criminals.” And in March, Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry agreed. “Yes, the situation has been bad,” he wrote. “Yet—and it’s very difficult to make this point without implying that certain lives don’t matter—nearly all the homicides have been a consequence of turf wars that more often than not have involved the drug trade.”

But as Louisiana political commentator C. B. Forgotston noted in his near-daily e-mail update on New Orleans crime, “Who cares who perpetrates a murder . . . unless one believes that in America, vigilantism is appropriate?” If New York newspaper columnists had excused their city’s crime crisis in the late eighties and early nineties by saying that crack dealers could be expected to shoot one another, New York would never have fixed its problems. It’s strange, too, that while New Orleans’s elected leaders and elite citizens seem to balk at putting petty drug dealers in prison, they have no problem with those dealers’ regularly getting the death penalty out on the street.

But at least Riley and the talking heads say something. Mayor Ray Nagin usually chooses to avoid discussing the violence altogether. Contrast his lack of leadership with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s frank State of the City address this January, absent any public pressure: “Today, crime is more than 20 percent lower than it was five years ago. One reason we’ve been so successful is because we’ve always been ready to look the facts straight-on—whether we liked them or not. And last year, the fact was that . . . homicides in our city went up.”

After VanLandingham’s study came out, Riley’s chief spokesman, Joseph Narcisse, seemed more wounded by the messenger than upset by the message. “It hurts the city, and it hurts us all, when we look at murder rates with those per-capita numbers,” he said. What’s really hurting the city, New Orleans’s leaders need to realize, is murder—and their own refusal to acknowledge it.


Since Katrina, things have gotten so bad that New Orleans’s only effective criminal-justice presence has come from outside the city. Early this year, the Department of Justice gave federal agencies in New Orleans extra resources, including nearly three dozen new agents and attorneys, to get criminals off the streets by bypassing the local justice system altogether. The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms have embedded agents with NOPD officers in some crime-ridden neighborhoods, and they take suspects into immediate custody if it looks as if a federal crime has been committed—carrying an illegal weapon, say, or peddling a rock of cocaine. Letten, the U.S. attorney, secures indictments and prosecutes the defendants. “Our goal is to detain, imprison, prosecute, convict, and incarcerate these violent criminals,” he says, “to get as many individuals into the federal system as possible.”

The federal government is doing on a modest scale what successful cops and prosecutors have done in New York and other cities for years now: taking people with illegal weapons or illegal drugs off the streets, because they’re the same people who commit violent crimes. In just two weeks’ worth of cases, feds caught one man with an illegal loaded gun and charged him in the federal system, one day after a local court had given him a suspended sentence for crack possession. They caught another suspect on a gun charge who’d been convicted of robbery less than five years ago. And they have charged Clarence Johnson’s mother with illegal weapons possession. (Garden-variety murder isn’t a federal crime.)

The feds emphasize that they’re not trying to take over in New Orleans, and they’re hesitant to criticize local officials. They’re also working within Jordan’s system, funding a small team of assistant DAs who screen the huge backlog of pre-Katrina cases and look, too, at difficult cases since the storm. And the FBI has deployed nine agents, all former homicide detectives, to work in New Orleans alongside the NOPD on its backlog of unsolved murders.

To combat unbridled property crime, meanwhile, Governor Blanco deployed a 300-troop Louisiana National Guard contingent, Task Force Gator, last June to patrol lightly populated neighborhoods; Mayor Nagin and the police department had requested the help. “These are crimes of opportunity,” says Gator’s commander, Major Dirk Erickson, pointing out an abandoned school where guardsmen recently caught looters stripping copper from insulated pipes. The guard’s task is vast: Erickson notes that his troops must patrol hundreds of miles of road in neighborhoods often less than half populated. Since June, Erickson’s soldiers, acting as deputized state troopers, have made nearly 2,000 arrests, many of them of looters. And while the force usually patrols and arrests without violent incident, in early March the guardsmen encountered a bicyclist transporting a hacksaw at 1 am in a looter-plagued area of the Ninth Ward. The man brandished a knife, threw glass at the troops when they attempted to question him, and then ran. When they pursued him into a flood-ruined house, he pointed what looked like a rifle (later determined to be a BB gun) at the troops, one of whom opened fire and killed him.

Feds and state alike are doing something more than just helping out a strapped city: they’re reconditioning criminals, as well as victims and terrified residents, to understand that a functional government metes out predictable consequences for criminal acts.

New Orleanians knew that their city was troubled before Katrina. But today many know that the city will die unless it changes. Many law-abiding citizens are coming home, and they’re bringing with them a hardiness and resourcefulness that New Orleans hasn’t seen in decades, with tens of thousands of individuals rebuilding their homes by hand.

Some of these brave souls have become political activists, insisting that they simply won’t live with violent crime any more, no matter how politically difficult—and politically incorrect—it is to change things. Citizens’ anger about crime reached fever pitch in January, after two high-profile murders: Dinerral Shavers, the snare drummer of the Hot-8 Brass Band featured in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, lost his life in a drive-by shooting (the killer was aiming at the musician’s teenage son); and independent filmmaker Helen Hill was shot in her home, as she and her husband shielded their toddler from the unknown assailant. After the two murders, 4,000 citizens—not members of special-interest groups, but real citizens who took time off from work and school—marched on City Hall to protest both crime and the impotence of Nagin and Jordan. A measure of their anger: they did not allow Nagin, who attended, to speak.

Individuals and groups are launching freelance anticrime proposals, insisting that the city government act on them. Ruthie Frierson is a prominent New Orleans citizen (her husband was once crowned Rex, the king of Mardi Gras) now wading into politics. In February, the group that she originally founded after Katrina to reform—successfully—Louisiana’s patronage-ridden levee boards joined ten other organizations to unveil a “War on Career and Violent Criminals.” The campaign’s proposals—they include increasing DA resources devoted to violent crime and repeat offenders, starting a nonprofit effort to record prosecutors’ successes and failures, and improving coordination between police and prosecutors—wouldn’t be revolutionary in functional cities. But in New Orleans, acknowledging that the city needs an effective criminal-justice system before it can solve its other problems is revolutionary.

The Marigny’s Natale has started a website to fight not just crime but elected officials who refuse to address it. First on her list to achieve: the “resignation of [DA] Eddie Jordan.” Natale represents another necessary evolution for New Orleans. When she speaks of drug dealers, she says that the decision to sell “is an individual choice,” rather than excusing criminals because of their poverty and bad educations. And Cantrell, who returned to the flooded Broadmoor neighborhood with her neighbors to rebuild long before the government started giving out grants, is mobilizing citizens’ patrol groups to walk block by block and deter property crimes.

Responding to the intense pressure, Nagin and Jordan are making modest attempts to improve policing and prosecution. New Orleans’s police superintendent, Warren Riley, said in March that prosecutors and cops would try to cooperate with each other, and he has launched new undercover operations and checkpoints to net drug dealers, weapons, and wanted criminals. The city is also installing more crime cameras, so that it doesn’t have to rely on witness testimony. But New Orleans has seen such responses to a “crime wave” before.

The key to sustained change is strong leadership, not treating citizens’ safety, the basic responsibility of government, as though it were the request of some newly powerful special-interest group. Although Nagin narrowly won reelection last spring, slow political evolution away from business-as-usual may be occurring. In the same election, voters elected two new city council members, Shelley Midura and James Carter, who have begun to insist on some accountability on crime, calling Riley and Jordan to a special session in February to grill them publicly about the city’s failure to police and prosecute its criminals. The session exposed to television viewers the troubling fact that Riley and Jordan were so uncooperative that they wouldn’t even look at each other. Long-standing tension between the two departments had reached the nadir this winter, when Jordan, indicting seven cops for two shooting deaths in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, referred to police officers as “rabid dogs.”

Because New Orleans never gave its citizens the freedom from fear that is the foundation of any healthy city, it has long failed to make progress on other serious troubles: bad schools, dysfunctional underclass behavior, and few job opportunities. “There is no village,” says Mims of the proposition that it takes a village to fix the inner city. “The village is afraid. Old people are afraid of young kids.” So long as New Orleans remains a terrifying city, potential investors and residents will stay away, and the national taxpayers who must spend billions of dollars to replenish Louisiana’s wetlands, which protect the city from hurricanes, will balk.

But with its cheap office space, beautiful architecture, real culture, good universities, and location that’s a reasonable flight from both coasts, New Orleans could thrive. And Katrina did the city one great favor: in the weeks of calm just after the hurricane, many citizens saw a different city. “We accepted before Katrina that to live in New Orleans was to live in crime and poverty,” Natale says. “But we saw what New Orleans could be like in the months after the storm.”


Nicole Gelinas
Don’t Knock Down New Orleans’s Projects
Just sell them off to middle-class homeowners.
23 February 2007

The Bush administration has proposed to demolish New Orleans’s four largest public-housing projects, shuttered since Katrina, and replace at least some of their nearly 5,000 apartment units with the “mixed-income” housing popular today with the subsidized-housing crowd. But if New Orleans really hopes to become a thriving city again someday, it won’t let the federal government knock down valuable, and much-needed, housing. Instead, Mayor Ray Nagin and the feds should open the perfectly decent project apartments to new middle-class homeowners.

On Thursday, California congresswoman Maxine Waters, who opposes the planned demolition and wants the federally run New Orleans housing authority to reopen the buildings to their now-displaced tenants, took lawmakers through Lafitte, one of the four targeted complexes. Like its three counterparts, the Lafitte projects aren’t the huge, isolated scars of tower-in-the-park architecture that residents of cities like New York associate with public housing. Instead, they’re low-rise brick buildings, spaced with modest grassy courtyards and walkways and located not far from the main streets. “These are townhouses,” Waters said, according to the Times-Picayune. “These can be reopened.”

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff notes that the 1940s-era buildings’ “pitched slate roofs, elegant brickwork, and low-rise construction reflect a subtle understanding of the city’s historical context without slavishly mimicking it.” When I lived in New Orleans, I rode through one project slated for demolition, Central City’s C. J. Peete, nearly every day, and always appreciated its elegance.

Further, the buildings are basically in good shape structurally, says MIT architecture professor John Fernandez, who has visited each complex since Katrina. While they do need full-scale renovations, it seems folly to tear them down, especially since they withstood Katrina so well, when many of the city’s newer single-family private homes did not.

The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.

And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.

What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city—something it hasn’t been for decades.

To attract a new middle class, the feds and New Orleans should do a full-scale renovation of the apartments, hiring contractors who agree in writing to do the work quickly (and who face penalties if they don’t). Then the government should get out of the way, selling the newly renovated apartments as condos or co-ops to returning middle-class New Orleanians or newcomers who want to make a go of it in the city. It’s likely the market rate for each apartment would be below $150,000, making them accessible to families who earn $30,000 annually or so.

The federal and city governments, as sponsors, could certainly draw up rules about ownership, like those that other condo and co-op residents live by. They could mandate, for example, that purchasers actually live in their apartments most of the time, rather than rent them out long-term to tenants, and that buyers have decent credit records and work histories. New residents would take over the administration of the rules once the federal government had sold off a majority of the units.

With tight on-site security, perhaps paid for by the new owners through condo fees, New Orleans could turn what’s always been a liability—a government-subsidized encampment for an underclass mired in crime and pathology—into an asset: a new anchor neighborhood full of committed homeowners.

Selling “the bricks” (slang for the housing complexes) to homeowners would transform the projects into what city and federal policy-makers meant to create when they built them 60 years ago: decent, safe, modest homes for aspirational citizens.

And this transformation wouldn’t just ensure truly decent, safe housing for nearly 5,000 families. It would also show the more than 200,000 Katrina evacuees still living far from home, and the rest of the nation too, that New Orleans is trying not to fall back into being what it was long before the storm—a city that had passively surrendered many of its working-class neighborhoods to violence and underclass poverty.

Nicole Gelinas
Katrina’s Real Lesson
Blame inadequate infrastructure, not poverty, for the storm’s devastation.
28 August 2006

Though President Bush declared on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina exposed “deep-seated poverty” in America, the disaster isn’t ultimately a story of poverty or of race, but of the greatest failure of civil engineering in American history. Luckily, while the nation has never been able to solve poverty, it can solve the engineering problem at the heart of southern Louisiana’s potential recovery.

First, some history. Like the Netherlands, much of urban and suburban New Orleans is below sea level. New Orleans started building rudimentary levees to protect residents and businesses from flooding in the mid-1700s, after settlers realized that their city’s vital economic asset, its position at the mouth of the Mississippi, was also its greatest liability.

This liability intensified two centuries later, when New Orleans drained low-lying swamps to build neighborhoods right on Lake Pontchartrain, and when erosion, much of it from the digging of canals that allowed for oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed half of the 2,800 square miles of wetlands that protected the coast, thereby moving the Gulf 20 miles closer to the city. Those miles proved vital, because storms weaken as they pass over land. Man-made shipping canals within New Orleans would also funnel floodwaters into populated areas.

But as the risks facing New Orleans grew more complex, New Orleans’s hurricane protection system—its levees, floodwalls, and natural barriers such as wetlands—didn’t keep up. The Army Corps of Engineers started building today’s hurricane protection system in 1965, after Hurricane Betsy flooded many of the same areas that Katrina inundated 40 years later. (The feds pay for 70 percent of the system, partly because they earn royalties from offshore energy production.)

Katrina was the biggest test of the 350 miles of levees and floodwalls that the Corps built and refurbished over the past 40 years—and the system crashed, buckling under 50 major breaks and spilling millions of gallons of water into the city. And Katrina was far from a worst-case scenario.

The Corps’ post-mortem of Katrina tells the story: “the system did not perform as a system,” its engineers concluded. “The hurricane protection in New Orleans . . . was a system in name only. . . . The majority, approximately two-thirds by volume, of the flooding and half of the economic losses can be attributed to water flowing through breaches in floodwalls and levees.” The failures weren’t due to construction malfeasance or incompetence: “the system was built as designed,” the Corps concluded. But the system was, in many ways, conceived to fail. In the Corps’ view, it was inconsistently designed and lacked redundancy—that is, back-up protections.

Some levees, in particular the massive earthen fortresses with wide foundations, performed well, withstanding days of water pressure with little erosion. But floodwalls designed as narrow vertical walls driven into the ground—they look like the walls built on highways to block out the noise—performed abysmally.

First, some walls had sunk up to three feet lower than their original “authorized heights” before the storm. Second, the pressure of Katrina’s waters wore away the walls’ narrow vertical foundations because they weren’t “armored” with erosion-proof material, causing the structures to topple into the water. And because the system wasn’t redundant, each break caused additional weaknesses.

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging—or worse—by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated—to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

Public officials have unfortunately lost interest in such rational infrastructure investment, doubtless because entitlement spending has consumed budgets as well as politicians’ attention. As the American Society of Civil Engineers warned last year, “congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation’s prosperity and our quality of life.” As entitlement spending has gobbled up the federal budget, spending on infrastructure has fallen to about half where it was as a percentage of GDP 40 years ago; state and local infrastructure spending lags as well.

So have Americans and New Orleanians learned Katrina’s main lesson: that investment in physical infrastructure is vital? While it’s too early to tell, Congress has awarded around $6 billion—only 5 percent or so of Gulf Coast reconstruction money—to repair the broken levees and to erect gates at key flood-prone areas. After that money is spent, though, New Orleans’s system won’t be any less of a patchwork. Floodwalls in areas that didn’t bear the brunt of last year’s hurricane, but that still sit in the path of a powerful storm, remain vulnerable to the same erosion that toppled walls during Katrina.

Beyond the fast fixes, the Corps has a year and a half to present to Congress its plan to protect Louisiana’s coast from a “100-year hurricane.” For one idea, they can look to the Dutch, who treat life below sea level as an opportunity to create modern engineering marvels. After a 1953 flood that killed more people than Katrina did, the Dutch built sand dunes to prevent erosion, along with a functional network of gates, walls, sluices, and pumps—and they constantly look for ways to upgrade the network.

But to follow the Dutch lead, the pols need convincing that engineering know-how, and the political willpower for infrastructure spending, is the most important part of rebuilding. Moreover, how the feds and New Orleans respond over the long term has implications for the nation, as its own infrastructure needs grow even more complex. New York’s subways, for instance, now need state-of-the-art protection from terrorists, and Las Vegas and other western cities, of course, rely on complex engineering to assure fresh supplies of water in the desert.

President Bush’s recent rhetoric thus doesn’t help New Orleans or the nation. He still talks as if poverty, and not inadequate design and investment in the plain, old, boring infrastructure that makes all cities work, was responsible for Katrina’s tragic devastation.

Nicole Gelinas
Katrina Kids Suffering?
Yes, in part thanks to FEMA’s insta-ghettos.
20 April 2006

A new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Children’s Health Fund has found that many of the children whom Hurricane Katrina displaced are suffering physically and mentally, and their ordeal may have a long-term effect on their health. But contrary to the study’s conclusion, the problem isn’t a lack of long-term “disaster” healthcare infrastructure. Rather, the finding of certain evacuees’ poor health is an urgent reminder of the real problem: the Bush administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warehouses too many of Katrina’s underclass families in desolate “FEMA-villes,” throwing up pre-fab ghettos in the guise of emergency housing.

To conduct the health study, researchers visited over 650 Louisiana families uprooted by Katrina, and then compared the results of their interviews with results of pre-Katrina health studies of Louisiana’s urban populations. Six months after Katrina (when researchers did their interviews), the Katrina children studied suffered from high rates of depression or anxiety, with many parents reporting that kids had acquired behavioral problems since Katrina. Fourteen percent of Katrina children who need medication for chronic illnesses like asthma had gone without that medication, compared with 2 percent of kids studied before the storm.

Nearly one-fifth of Katrina kids weren’t in school at all or continued to miss weeks of school. Nearly half of parents had no health insurance, in many cases because they had lost their jobs in the storm and hadn’t found new ones. Many parents (mostly mothers) considered themselves to be in only fair or poor health, and more than half scored poorly on a mental-health test, boding ill for their children’s future.

The researchers determined that the solution to this “emerging humanitarian crisis” is a federal “Health Care Marshall Plan,” including Congressional hearings, long-term Disaster Relief Medicaid with a transition to “permanent” Medicaid, and the deployment of 1,500 National Health Service Corps professionals to evacuee communities in Louisiana and Mississippi.

But these proposed solutions would treat symptoms while ignoring the true source of the problem: FEMA’s ill-conceived “temporary” housing solution for Katrina’s underclass families.

As the researchers note, their study is not of Katrina evacuees in general, or even of poor evacuees. It’s a study of the nearly 50,000 evacuees still living in FEMA-built evacuee trailer parks, regular trailer parks, and hotels in Louisiana. (A casual reader of the New York Times wouldn’t know this, since the paper headlined its article on the study: EVACUEE STUDY FINDS DECLINING HEALTH.)

These are families who have so few financial and social resources that, six months after Katrina, they’re still living in makeshift shelters rather than in suitable apartments, even temporary ones, despite available government aid to pay rent. Among them, almost certainly, are many of New Orleans’s entrenched pre-Katrina underclass, who now have brought with them to cramped FEMA-villes the problems endemic to single-mother families, whose wage earners work at low-income jobs (and are in many cases working at all only due to welfare reform), and whose poorly educated and poorly socialized children often grow up to plague their already crime-ridden neighborhoods.

It’s likely that these families would have scored poorly on well-being indices before Katrina: as the researchers note, a disproportionate number of the kids in the study “were already at excessive social and medical risk” before the storm. And it’s no surprise that some children (and parents) are doing much worse than before the storm, as FEMA-villes intensify underclass conditions.

Columbia and CHF note that the jerrybuilt neighborhoods that FEMA constructs for disaster victims are “dismal and desolate. Hastily erected . . . in undesirable locations such as on the edge of a commercial airport, the parks feel more like military encampments than family neighborhoods.” The study continues: “sixty-nine percent of caregivers [interviewed] believed there were people in their current neighborhood who would be a bad influence on their children, compared to 52 percent . . . before Katrina.”

Indeed, even before Katrina, smaller-scale FEMA-villes, including a park constructed in western Florida after Hurricane Charley hit in 2004, were infamous as demoralizing centers of idleness and crime; a new post-Katrina ’ville in northern Louisiana, home to Katrina evacuees, is quickly gaining that reputation now.

One reason FEMA must build many of its new FEMA-villes in isolated locations is that residents of real neighborhoods often veto such trailer parks nearby, not wanting to live near housing-project conditions. But the remote locations only exacerbate the underclass nature of FEMA-villes. Because the parks are often far from transportation, it’s hard for adults to search for jobs or suitable housing (and, for that matter, to receive the health services they need for themselves and their kids).

Even worse, for thousands of Katrina victims who cannot return to their New Orleans neighborhoods indefinitely, FEMA-ville living encourages them to think that their displacement is temporary. This state of suspended animation is doubtless a reason why some mothers haven’t enrolled their children in school or found work that might provide them with the health insurance that the kids need. But FEMA, undaunted, continues to build its ’villes. Just last week, the agency boasted that it’s constructing 45 more “group sites” in Louisiana to house 4,000 Katrina families (or about 15,000 people) quasi-permanently. This announcement came despite New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s correct opposition to the construction of FEMA-villes in his city.

What FEMA should do is raze its FEMA-villes and follow Houston’s path in helping Katrina evacuees (the city took in nearly 200,000 from neighboring Louisiana): award temporary vouchers to displaced families so that they can rent apartments and get on with their lives, with new jobs and new schools and new doctors for their children.

Thanks to Houston, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, including many poor evacuees unaccustomed to life in a thriving city, are receiving temporary government aid—and are in positions to take over the responsibility to recover their own lives from a momentous disaster.

Nicole Gelinas
Katrina Kids Suffering?
Yes, in part thanks to FEMA’s insta-ghettos.
20 April 2006

A new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Children’s Health Fund has found that many of the children whom Hurricane Katrina displaced are suffering physically and mentally, and their ordeal may have a long-term effect on their health. But contrary to the study’s conclusion, the problem isn’t a lack of long-term “disaster” healthcare infrastructure. Rather, the finding of certain evacuees’ poor health is an urgent reminder of the real problem: the Bush administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warehouses too many of Katrina’s underclass families in desolate “FEMA-villes,” throwing up pre-fab ghettos in the guise of emergency housing.

To conduct the health study, researchers visited over 650 Louisiana families uprooted by Katrina, and then compared the results of their interviews with results of pre-Katrina health studies of Louisiana’s urban populations. Six months after Katrina (when researchers did their interviews), the Katrina children studied suffered from high rates of depression or anxiety, with many parents reporting that kids had acquired behavioral problems since Katrina. Fourteen percent of Katrina children who need medication for chronic illnesses like asthma had gone without that medication, compared with 2 percent of kids studied before the storm.

Nearly one-fifth of Katrina kids weren’t in school at all or continued to miss weeks of school. Nearly half of parents had no health insurance, in many cases because they had lost their jobs in the storm and hadn’t found new ones. Many parents (mostly mothers) considered themselves to be in only fair or poor health, and more than half scored poorly on a mental-health test, boding ill for their children’s future.

The researchers determined that the solution to this “emerging humanitarian crisis” is a federal “Health Care Marshall Plan,” including Congressional hearings, long-term Disaster Relief Medicaid with a transition to “permanent” Medicaid, and the deployment of 1,500 National Health Service Corps professionals to evacuee communities in Louisiana and Mississippi.

But these proposed solutions would treat symptoms while ignoring the true source of the problem: FEMA’s ill-conceived “temporary” housing solution for Katrina’s underclass families.

As the researchers note, their study is not of Katrina evacuees in general, or even of poor evacuees. It’s a study of the nearly 50,000 evacuees still living in FEMA-built evacuee trailer parks, regular trailer parks, and hotels in Louisiana. (A casual reader of the New York Times wouldn’t know this, since the paper headlined its article on the study: EVACUEE STUDY FINDS DECLINING HEALTH.)

These are families who have so few financial and social resources that, six months after Katrina, they’re still living in makeshift shelters rather than in suitable apartments, even temporary ones, despite available government aid to pay rent. Among them, almost certainly, are many of New Orleans’s entrenched pre-Katrina underclass, who now have brought with them to cramped FEMA-villes the problems endemic to single-mother families, whose wage earners work at low-income jobs (and are in many cases working at all only due to welfare reform), and whose poorly educated and poorly socialized children often grow up to plague their already crime-ridden neighborhoods.

It’s likely that these families would have scored poorly on well-being indices before Katrina: as the researchers note, a disproportionate number of the kids in the study “were already at excessive social and medical risk” before the storm. And it’s no surprise that some children (and parents) are doing much worse than before the storm, as FEMA-villes intensify underclass conditions.

Columbia and CHF note that the jerrybuilt neighborhoods that FEMA constructs for disaster victims are “dismal and desolate. Hastily erected . . . in undesirable locations such as on the edge of a commercial airport, the parks feel more like military encampments than family neighborhoods.” The study continues: “sixty-nine percent of caregivers [interviewed] believed there were people in their current neighborhood who would be a bad influence on their children, compared to 52 percent . . . before Katrina.”

Indeed, even before Katrina, smaller-scale FEMA-villes, including a park constructed in western Florida after Hurricane Charley hit in 2004, were infamous as demoralizing centers of idleness and crime; a new post-Katrina ’ville in northern Louisiana, home to Katrina evacuees, is quickly gaining that reputation now.

One reason FEMA must build many of its new FEMA-villes in isolated locations is that residents of real neighborhoods often veto such trailer parks nearby, not wanting to live near housing-project conditions. But the remote locations only exacerbate the underclass nature of FEMA-villes. Because the parks are often far from transportation, it’s hard for adults to search for jobs or suitable housing (and, for that matter, to receive the health services they need for themselves and their kids).

Even worse, for thousands of Katrina victims who cannot return to their New Orleans neighborhoods indefinitely, FEMA-ville living encourages them to think that their displacement is temporary. This state of suspended animation is doubtless a reason why some mothers haven’t enrolled their children in school or found work that might provide them with the health insurance that the kids need. But FEMA, undaunted, continues to build its ’villes. Just last week, the agency boasted that it’s constructing 45 more “group sites” in Louisiana to house 4,000 Katrina families (or about 15,000 people) quasi-permanently. This announcement came despite New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s correct opposition to the construction of FEMA-villes in his city.

What FEMA should do is raze its FEMA-villes and follow Houston’s path in helping Katrina evacuees (the city took in nearly 200,000 from neighboring Louisiana): award temporary vouchers to displaced families so that they can rent apartments and get on with their lives, with new jobs and new schools and new doctors for their children.

Thanks to Houston, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, including many poor evacuees unaccustomed to life in a thriving city, are receiving temporary government aid—and are in positions to take over the responsibility to recover their own lives from a momentous disaster.

Nicole Gelinas
Reconstructing New Orleans
Let homeowners serve as the ground troops.
3 February 2006

The federal government has spent billions on New Orleans’s immediate recovery, but it’s clear that Congress and the Bush administration aren’t quite sure how to proceed on supporting long-term reconstruction. Certainly the White House’s recent approval of $6 billion in block grants to be disbursed by Louisiana’s state government is not the right course, since the feds will have insufficient control over whether state authorities spend these Great-Society-style billions wisely. But the Bush administration recently rejected the most comprehensive plan that’s been presented thus far for retaining some rational federal oversight of the complex rebuilding undertaking: a Louisiana Congressman’s proposed federal buyout of New Orleans’s ruined properties.

Instead of a blanket dismissal, the White House should consider working with Representative Richard Baker, the conservative Republican from Baton Rouge who introduced the buyout bill last year and will pursue it again this year. Baker has shown himself willing to modify his bill in response to reasonable criticism, and the administration could help him perfect his plan by asking him to change it to place more financial responsibility for rebuilding flood-wrecked properties in the hands of exiled Big Easy homeowners. Such a move would join reasonable federal supervision with the power of the ownership society that President Bush rightly values.

Under the Baker bill, a new federal public authority, the Louisiana Recovery Corporation, would purchase any and all of about 200,000 wrecked homes in the state offered for sale to the government by their owners. The LRC would compensate homeowners and mortgage lenders, but not in full. Mortgage lenders would receive about 60 percent of the value of each home’s pre-Katrina loan, and owners would receive about the same percentage of their equity. The feds would then prepare suitable land for redevelopment, and would auction such property off to private developers for rebuilding and resale, with the first option to purchase going to displaced residents. The LRC also would work with homeowners who don’t want to sell out to help them refurbish their properties.

Baker’s original bill seemed to suggest that lenders would be paid off in full; the 60-percent provision is the Congressman’s reasonable response to criticism that such a bailout of banks that loaned billions to people who invested in property below sea level would create an intolerable moral hazard. Skeptics might ask: Even at the 60 percent rate, wouldn’t the LRC still create a massive moral hazard by retroactively indemnifying homeowners and lenders for the risk of investing in a flood-prone area without adequate insurance?

But the moral-hazard issue here is not as clear-cut as it seems. New Orleans residents understood that their properties would flood sometimes, but not catastrophically; they thought, reasonably, that the levees designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in response to previous floods would protect their homes. Those levees, of course, gave way after Katrina, due in part to failures on the part of the Corps as well as on the part of state and local officials, who were responsible for maintenance.

Now the first responsibility of top federal reconstruction official Donald Powell is to decide—and state clearly—which parts of the city the government’s floodwalls can reasonably protect. If it’s not possible to protect citizens in some areas—such as low-lying Eastern New Orleans, including the Ninth Ward—it’s time for the feds to let evacuees know. If this is the case, the government should officially condemn New Orleans’s most vulnerable tracts, offering property owners and mortgage lenders some compensation for the loss of their land along the Baker model.

Top federal reconstruction officials—not the local authorities or FEMA through its flood-insurance program—must decide this matter, because they retain responsibility for rebuilding levees and floodwalls to the strength needed to protect New Orleans’s lowest-lying neighborhoods reliably. If the federal government lets New Orleans make the decision on where to rebuild, the decision falls prey to yet another moral hazard: the city might let people rebuild everywhere, in order to avoid the political fallout of permanently redlining whole neighborhoods, knowing that Washington will bail homeowners out if the levees fail again.

But if it is possible to rebuild some, or all, of the low-lying parts of the Big Easy with reasonable assurances of safety, then it’s time to get to work. Washington can pave the way for reconstruction by working with New Orleans to build adequate levees, of course. It should also work with local authorities to set out clear and non-negotiable reconstruction standards. No house will be issued a permit for occupancy unless its main living quarters are elevated enough from the ground to withstand future floods. Properties must be built to wind- and flood-resistant standards, as has happened in vulnerable areas of Florida.

The White House needs to press Baker to reshape his bill in one further area. Handing off thousands upon thousands of acres of land to federal contractors for long-term site preparation can’t possibly be the best way to rebuild a major city, when the land is currently owned by individuals who have a stake in their neighborhoods.

Government ownership and resale of large swaths of New Orleans would be prone to intense political interference at the local level, especially since the LRC would leave much of the actual decision-making about which areas to rebuild and which to return to nature in the hands of local officials. The region’s Democratic caucus, egged on by national pols, would contort the redevelopment process to make sure that the remade city retained its exact pre-Katrina racial and political demographics. Mayor Ray Nagin has already promised exiles that the Big Easy will remain a “Chocolate City” (that is, majority black), and Senator Hillary Clinton has snidely mused that the White House doesn’t want to rebuild New Orleans because “all those Democrats might come back.”

Worse, if local officials retain oversight over areas to be sold off to developers after site preparation, as the Baker bill proposes, it’s quite possible that all of this federal funding would result in the kind of massive 1950s-style urban-renewal failure that often emerges when politicians and politically connected developers design large-scale construction schemes. As urban-planning guru Jane Jacobs observed, tracts planned and built up all at once rarely succeed; urban areas need unplanned diversity.

Baker’s bill can address these criticisms. Instead of offering to buy out the homeowners who have obvious stakes in New Orleans’s rebuilding, the bill should treat exiled homeowners as assets who can be leveraged for the city’s recovery.

Some exiled from New Orleans are eager to return. “My parents worked too hard for this house for me to give it up,” said Melvina Valentine, lately of Houston, of her flood-damaged home in the Carrollton area of New Orleans. “We want to rebuild ourselves, but we need help,” said Hortense Langs, who owns a home in the Bywater neighborhood; Langs is living in Houston now as well.

Longtime New Orleans homeowners like Valentine and Langs can help jumpstart the hard work of rebuilding New Orleans’s neighborhoods. Indeed, some pioneer homeowners are already gutting and reconstructing their homes one by one, with practical help on the ground from volunteers.

Once the feds set clear rules, they could build on the modest work that residents are already doing. Baker could modify his bill so that federal money goes toward homeowners in suitable areas—not to buy out their property, but to give them the money to rebuild it themselves.

Congress and the Bush administration could award funds to homeowners to hire approved contractors to rebuild individual homes to the new standards, or give the homeowners the funds to do the work themselves, releasing the money on a rational block-by block reconstruction schedule, with clear deadlines for work completion in specific neighborhoods (builders who can’t conform to standard deadlines and costs would be dropped quickly from the program). Under this plan, citizens could return to their neighborhoods and recommit to New Orleans with their labor, consumption, and tax revenues—with the city taking responsibility to ensure that the level of public services increases incrementally with each rebuilt block. Homeowners who don’t plan to return to New Orleans could accept government money to rebuild their homes anyway, to sell the property later and to avoid some of the loss on a foreclosure (or they could rent their rebuilt homes out, taking advantage of New Orleans’s newly tight real estate market).

What if a homeowner— one without much equity in his home, say—chose not to participate? A year or so after the program’s launch, it would be time for the local and federal governments to step in—condemning properties that remain abandoned, and awarding property owners (and their mortgage lenders) an amount based on what the rebuilt area is worth at the time of the buyout. The government could sell these individual properties—not vast tracts—to new developers, helping to fund its own program.

No, this program wouldn’t be cheap. But awarding more money to individual homeowners and less money to local and state governments via large-scale federal grants will minimize political waste. Giving homeowners the resources to rebuild their neighborhoods block by block will allow citizens, not the government, to rebuild the Crescent City—and they’ll do it better and faster than the pols ever could.