by CC Campbell-Rock

August 29, 2020 marks the 15^th Anniversary of the natural disaster turned man-made disaster called Hurricane Katrina. When the Coronavirus hit New Orleans, it invoked memories of Katrina. The 100 year storm allegedly claimed the lives of more than 1500 people in Louisiana. The true death count may never be known. And it changed New Orleans in ways that were unforeseen.  Hurricane Katrina created a new New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina pushed people out of their homes, many to destinations unknown. Katrina filled the city with up to 20 feet of water in some areas. The storm also killed the city’s economy and forced thousands to resettle and restart their lives. Many lost loved ones, careers, homes, cars, and every possession they owned.  Some native New Orleanians returned home. Others remained where they evacuated, built new lives, and carried on. Hurricane Katrina created a new New Orleans.

Eighty percent of the city was flooded when 27 levees were breached. The majority of the flooding took place east of Canal Street in the downtown area of New Orleans and eastern New Orleans. The lower ninth ward took on the most water, because a barge broke through the levee wall.

New Orleans lost nearly 51 percent of its 454,845, pre-Katrina 2005 population. In 2020, the city has 390,128 residents or 85.77 percent of its pre-Katrina population total.

The New New Orleans

However, a cursory look around shows that the demographics and the culture have changed.

Speaking to National Geographic Magazine in 2015, Allison Plyer says, “The storm greatly changed the physical and demographic makeup of New Orleans. Monitoring these changes is important since the needs of the city and its people are much different today. After any disaster, applicable data is wiped away—all information becomes uncertain”  Plyer works for The Data Center which is a data collection and analysis group that serves Southeast Louisiana..

“The demographic makeup of New Orleans and its metro area is much different today than it was pre-Katrina. The city has lost white and black residents, but whites now represent a larger share of the population than they did before the storm. And while African Americans are still the majority in New Orleans, their raw population drop is staggering: Nearly 100,000 fewer African Americans live in the city today than in 2000. Around 11,500 fewer white residents live there.”

GENTRIFICATION

Signs of gentrification are everywhere as black renters have been pushed to areas like New Orleans east where they occupy high rise apartment complexes, or to moderate income neighborhoods in the eight and ninth wards. Some black homeowners sold their homes, others lacked the funding needed to restore or repair their homes. They remain in the Katrina Diaspora, their homes boarded up. Others lost their homes to property tax sales. White professionals and some squatters have moved into New Orleans. A stroll along St. Claude Avenue, once a street with many boarded up businesses, is now bustling with small shops. Few are owned by Black people.

A little more than a year ago, in April 2019,  Nicolette Santos, an Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) Intern came to New Orleans to help the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity in its ongoing mission to build homes for Katrina Survivors.

Santos recorded her observations in an article entitled, Fourteen Years Later, New Orleans is Still Trying to Recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“Driving around the Lower Ninth Ward, a community just east of the French Quarter, I was taken aback by the empty plots that still break up the community. Houses that used to stand right next to one another are now spaced haphazardly away from each other, separated by empty land that is overgrown with weeds and brush. Trash piles on the corners of the streets. Signs warning against loitering further accentuate the impression that things haven’t improved. Businesses are staying away as well. A single grocery store, Burnell’s Lower Ninth Ward Market, holds the sole responsibility of providing a small range of packaged foods and fresh produce to the 1,200 people who live in the community,” Santos wrote.

New Normal Nothing New for NOLA

The intern’s observation is magnified and duplicated in the city’s seventh and eight wards. Overgrown lots, streets with a house here, one there, and gaping holes in-between like teeth missing for a mouth. Hurricane Katrina created the new New Orleans.

Since Katrina, the city’s public school system has been turned into an all-charter school, semi-privatized school system. While no one wants to say it out loud, the all-charter school district is an abysmal failure, an experiment gone wrong.

However, like Hurricane Katrina, coronavirus infections are disproportionately impacting the black community. “According to the Coroner’s data, as of June 5th black residents accounted for 77 percent of the 492 COVID-19 deaths in Orleans Parish, with white residents accounting for less than 20 percent” the Data Center reported. The population of Orleans Parish is 60 percent black and 35 percent white.

The COVID-19 deaths of blacks in New Orleans mirrors the nationwide trend. “Black Americans continue to experience the highest overall actual COVID-19 mortality rates— more than twice as high as the rate for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates,” according to the APM Research Lab.

New Orleans’ black community weathered slavery, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, racism, and discrimination from every direction. And black people here will ride out this current man-made disaster.

Despite the metamorphoses Hurricane Katrina wrought in New Orleans, in a city that is older than the United States, and the challenges to the lives of black New Orleanians brought by the 100-year COVID-19 pandemic, the black community remains resilient. Black-owned institutions have weathered the storm, the Black press and media, our fabled restaurants, and the city’s culture keepers still persist. But make no mistake. 

We persist in the new New Orleans.