Who's to blame for state of New Orleans?

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

When the Broadmoor Improvement Association recently released its 319-page neighborhood redevelopment plan, revitalization committee co-chairman Hal Roark said most of the work was "definitely happening in spite of the government. It's individuals taking their destiny into their own hands, and neighborhoods."

Standing in the space between his mold-infested Lower Ninth Ward duplex and the government trailer where he now lives, TV repairman Arnold Lewis speaks enviously of other neighborhoods that enjoy decent water pressure and city-sponsored wireless Internet service.

"There's something to be desired as far as the pace of recovery down here," Lewis, 46, says as water leaks out onto the ground from a nearby line break. "There's no phone service here. There's no cable service down here, and there's no gas."

Patricia Jones says it's no wonder the companies that provide services have been unwilling to reinvest in the Lower Ninth.

With about half the neighborhood still under a "look and leave" policy, residents have been unable to return and do basic salvage work on their houses, says Jones, who represents the Lower Ninth in the Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association. It seems to her that the neighborhood has been just about written off.

Click here for the rest.

I mentioned yesterday that I was in New Orleans on Friday, a day trip, to hang out in the mostly restored high-ground areas like the French Quarter: that's the part that most people from outside the city are seeing these days, which gives the false impression, bolstered by a frustrating lack of national news coverage, the above linked article notwithstanding, that everything is returning to normal. Everything is not returning to normal. Most of the flooded areas still lie in ruins. At least half of the city's former population is scattered to the four corners of the Earth; many are not likely to return, greatly weakening the gumbo of a culture on which everything else in the city thrived. Meanwhile, reconstruction efforts proceed at an agonizingly slow pace. Is it because it's damned hard to rebuild after a hurricane, or is it because the whole thing is bureaucratically fucked up? Probably both, but nearly nine months after I took these pictures in the Lower Ninth Ward, things remain pretty much the same, and that's unacceptable and outrageous:















If you can't read it, the spray painted warning on the boarded-up window says "WARNING TRESSPASSERS ARE CONSIDERED LOOTERS AND ARE SHOT DEAD!" An obvious relic from what I call the "Reign of Chaos" during the week after the hurricane hit, before the Feds were able to get their act together and provide much needed security.

Anyway, I don't know if it's conscious or deliberate, but the fact that this neighborhood was once mostly populated by African-Americans means that this foot-dragging on rebuilding, while many white areas, relatively speaking, are briskly reviving, constitutes racism. And the whole damned country is participating in the suffering, even if it doesn't really understand it: New Orleans was once one of this nation's few crown jewels, but it continues to be on life support in the intensive care ward. It's as shameful, in its own way, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Sometimes I feel like not a damned thing I was taught in school is true.

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