![]() ![]() Nor has New Orleans experienced an equal opportunity recovery-in no small part because of the white civic leaders who openly advocated for a whiter, wealthier city. That wasn’t due to bad luck because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home. A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, triumphantly describing the recovery as a thing of the past when there was still so much suffering in the eastern half of the city. “I don’t see myself as a white mayor or the city as a black city,” he said.īut it’s hard to imagine a black mayor, in a style reminiscent of George W. Just a year earlier, Landrieu had protested when a writer for The Atlantic referred to him as the city’s first white mayor in 36 years. According to the mayor the city was “America’s greatest comeback story,” and he oversaw a three-month celebration dubbed “Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans.” For white communities, it was true: Lakeview, a prosperous white neighborhood on the east side that also suffered catastrophic flooding, looks better than it did before the storm because of all the new homes and businesses. Instead, the story line was what city officials dubbed the “New Orleans miracle.” In his state of the city address a few months before the 10th anniversary, Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared victory over Katrina: New Orleans was “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding,” he said. Yet the great need in parts of the city where the tourists rarely venture was not what the media-or the city’s white civic leaders-were focused on. The great need in parts of the city where the tourists rarely venture was not what the media-or the city’s white civic leaders-were focused on. The neighborhood is still missing more than half its pre-Katrina population. You can still drive blocks there and not see a single home. Most shocking is the Lower Ninth Ward, where the average resident was living on $16,000 a year before the hurricane. It is maybe 80 to 85 percent rebuilt eleven years after Katrina. Or they might have reported from New Orleans East, a black professional class neighborhood still pocked by boarded-up strip malls and abandoned businesses. ![]() They could have gone to Pontchartrain Park, a black middle class community that the actor Wendell Pierce, who had grown up there, dubbed a “black Mayberry.” Pontchartrain Park was doing no better than the Seventh Ward. On the east side they might have shot footage of the Seventh Ward, a black working-class community that was still only around 60 percent rebuilt a decade after Katrina. There, the on-air talent did their stand-ups against the backdrop of Jackson Square and the media rarely ventured to the eastern half of the city, where most of the city’s black residents lived prior to Katrina. Large stretches of New Orleans were still reeling from the disaster last summer, as those satellite trucks sat parked in the French Quarter. ![]()
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