|
|
Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) -- 10/22/2007
NEW ORLEANS AFTER KATRINA:DEVASTATION LIKE A WAR ZONE
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
NEW ORLEANS (PAI)--The buildings sit gaping. They’re solid, even, some would say, stately. But their windows were blown out, and many are boarded up. They’re fenced in, but the grass is cut. Half the people--there used to be 960 occupied apartments in the 2-story St. Bernard public housing project--are elsewhere in New Orleans . The other half live in Houston. The buildings, people's homes, are scheduled for demolition. And St. Bernard is not even the worst part of town.
This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.
The traffic on the expressway zips along, moving more quickly than the signs that read “minimum speed, 40 mph.” In a residential neighborhood, a divided 4-lane boulevard sees a few cars, a truck or two--and a lone Postal Service van, driven by a Letter Carrier. There are no buses. And that's over almost an hour.
The catch is that this scene is during evening rush hour when, in other cities, traffic is gridlocked, bumper-to-bumper and buses are jammed with commuters. Why? There are few jobs to come home from in New Orleans and fewer residents coming home to them, says Plumbers Local 60 member Dana Colombo.
This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.
Some homes are spick and span. Others are hollow shells. And in the Lower 9th Ward, the worst-hit part of town, many are just now concrete foundation slabs behind curb cuts opening onto the street.
Some homes are half and half with what looks like monotonous and tiny mobile homes in their driveways. Those are trailer homes, provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which tried to sell them--including their toxic formaldehyde inside--to residents for $500-$1,000 each.
This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.
Unions’ plans for steel-framed manufactured housing--homes that are nicer than the trailers, being built by union labor in the architectural style of New Orleans’ famed “shotgun houses”--are going ahead, even though FEMA, the Bush regime office that is supposed to help stricken area residents, turned a deaf ear to such housing that would survive the next Katrina.
Meanwhile a 1,000-square-foot apartment that used to rent for $700 a month now rents for $1,000-$2,000, if you can find it, and if you can afford it in a city where high-paying jobs are tough to get, explains Alec Revels, a high-schooler working with his friends on repairing a car in his old Gentilly neighborhood.
This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.
Southern University, one of the nation’s historically black colleges, was closed for two years. Tulane, Xavier and Loyola Universities , all private, reopened quickly. Why? Leadership failure, says Colombo --just like the failure of leadership symbolized by GOP President George W. Bush’s infamous praise of his incompetent FEMA director: “You’re doing a good job, Brownie.”This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.
Union journalists, in New Orleans for the International Labor Communications Association convention Oct. 18-20, toured the city and the surrounding area. Their aim: Getting the word out to the country about the state of New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina. They saw scenes that would remind you of Beirut and Baghdad .
The hurricane at the end of August 2005 was the most devastating disaster in U.S. history. It wrecked the historic city on the Gulf Coast and did incredible damage to surrounding areas of Louisiana and Mississippi .
Some sectors--the higher ground along the Mississippi River , such as Uptown and the old French Quarter--were relatively unscathed. But most other structures had 3 feet, or 6 feet, or 10 feet, or 13 feet of swampy, stinky mud inside and around the 1- and 2-story homes and buildings--those that are left standing.
Combined with Hurricane Rita, which roared in several weeks later, Katrina left the area prostrate. Trotter says conditions are so bad that “nothing is going to change before 5 to 10 years, to get New Orleans up and running again.” Little help has been forthcoming, with one exception: The nation’s unions.
The Reasons Why
Two years and two months after the devastation, why does New Orleans still look like this? Explanations vary:
Some say it’s a case of race, class or both. “Those that had cars were able to get out. Those that did not, could not,” Colombo said. Others say that New Orleans is still wrecked due to sheer incompetence.
Trotter, out campaigning for a state senate canddiate, was asked which politicians were to blame--GOP President Bush, or Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, both Democrats--answered “Yes.” (Louisiana voters elected a new governor on Oct. 20, Republican Bobby Jindal.)
Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, is one of many who sees an ideological agenda to the continuing disarray. He said it started with Bush’s decision--immediately after the disaster--to waive Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules on the no-bid reconstruction projects the Bush regime awarded to favored contractors.
And the Radical Right, they add, considers New Orleans a “laboratory case” for its schemes for the entire country.
Bush’s Davis-Bacon waiver let subcontractors import workers from outside the area, some undocumented, and set low wages, which later went unpaid. When workers demanded their pay, said Saket Soni of the Workers Center for Racial Justice, the contractors called in Bush regime immigration agents to arrest and deport them.
The Davis-Bacon ruling immediately displaced 85 IBEW electricians who were ready and willing to restore power to businesses and homes in the crippled city. “Your services are no longer needed,” is what they told IBEW, Hammond said. Tracie Washington, CEO of the Louisiana Justice Institute, called all the developments since Katrina “a blatant assault on workers rights,” starting with that Davis-Bacon waiver.
In another case Washington cites, her institute got pulled into a lawsuit over demolition of damaged homes. The Bush regime slapped red stickers on houses, ordering their demolition, without telling the residents--in or out of the city. “They come home and they won’t have a house. Where is due process or law in this?” she asks.
“The one thing the city didn’t bank on was federal judge Marty Feldman. He’s very conservative. When he heard that, he ruled: ‘Don’t mess with somebody’s property rights,’” stopping demolitions. Many of the houses are salvageable.
The Bush ideology continued through the “Road Home” program, a federal effort supposed to help area residents with funds. Instead Bush used the money for, among other things, $500,000 for an outside consultant just to do accounting of the funds. Meanwhile, insurance companies refused to pay area residents for damages to their homes, including cases where they would pay nothing unless the home was more than 50% damaged, residents told Press Associates Union News Service.
“People are trying to come back and they can’t get housing,” says Head Start worker Kim Butler, who adds that happened to two of her co-workers.
It continued in the schools. Louisiana stripped the Orleans Parish (County) school board of control over all but 5 of New Orleans ’ 120-plus schools. They were split between a “charter school” district, a new state-run district, and the board’s five.
“The federal government sent money not to the teachers, but to the state,” added Head Start worker Butler . Head Start got so little it had to lay off teachers.
The real aim, said Brenda Mitchell, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, one of AFT’s oldest affiliates and then one of the largest union locals--with 4,700 members--in the South, was to destroy the union. It now has 1,100 members.
“In a city of working poor, those that were assaulted first” were members of the middle class, Washington said. “The teachers were most of the middle class. They were the first. The bus drivers were next--and they built New Orleans East,” she added.
That’s another part of the ideological agenda.
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1560 represents the bus drivers--and Nagin first cut the buses by 80%. They’re now at only half their pre-Katrina levels, if that. There’s a bus stop on that 4-lane boulevard running past the St. Bernard housing project in Gentilly. There was no bus in sight while journalists were in the area for more than an hour.
St. Bernard and three other public housing developments had their residents forced out. The developments are shuttered, sealed and threatened with demolition. Tenants are planning to sue to return. Take the public housing, which was integrated, away and the message is “We don’t want you back,” Washington adds.
The Ray of Hope: The Union Movement
In all the devastation and the lack of reconstruction, there is one exception and one ray of hope: The union movement.
In a right-to-work state, in the non-union South, the nation’s unions are investing $750 million from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and Building Investment Trust in reconstruction. That includes building manufactured housing, and constructing retail and health care facilities. It also includes training local people--some of whom were jobless beforehand--in skilled construction trades.
A pre-apprenticeship program established by the AFL-CIO Building Trades at the Gulf Coast Construction Career Center has trained 103 people so far, including 5-6 women, in six graduating classes, each in 3-week courses. They’ll be apprentices with the Electrical Workers, the Sheet Metal Workers, the Plumbers, the Painters, the Ironworkers and the Carpenters, among others. Those apprentices will be future union workers in a city whose construction union market share is below 12%.
The alternative, said Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlon Gusman, who addressed the latest Oct. 19 graduates, may be unemployment, or jail. “This is the positive story about people getting training, moving on and helping our recovery,” he says.And the federation’s commitment to reconstruction of housing has led the Metal Trades to sponsor the manufactured housing plant, along the Mississippi midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge . Its workers can assemble the steel frame in modules for a 523-square-foot efficiency-apartment/house, with a full kitchen, bedroom/living room, full bath, storage space and a front porch, in a matter of hours.
With additional work by other crafts, the frame becomes a house, New Orleans style, in a few days and without the hazards of warping associated with wood or collapse associated with hurricanes. The steel is bolted to the foundation, after all.
But Ray Taylor, president of the firm, Housing International Gulfcoast, Inc., of Reserve, says their year-old operation has hit resistance from traditionalists, despite the aim to help area residents come back to homes.
In a meeting in Mississippi on providing affordable housing to the 36,000 families who lost their homes to Katrina there, the state was unresponsive. “’Why would you want to change what we’ve designed? And why use steel at all?’” Taylor quoted Mississippi officials as saying. “They had the opportunity to replace those FEMA trailers that are reeking of formaldehyde with something that is wider, longer, nicer and give some dignity to people trying to come back home. And they rejected it,” he added.
Meanwhile the rest of the U.S. , except labor, seems to have forgotten Katrina’s victims. The net result, as Trotter said, is a 5-year to 10-year recovery time, at best.
This is New Orleans , two years and two months after Katrina.