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hurricane katrina recovery
With opinions surrounding Katrina as widely colored and as deeply layered as our king cakes during carnival season, I did my best not to go into the interview series with a predetermined angle or scope for fear of skewing the story through confirmation bias.
The hurricane exposed not only race and class fault lines, but the odious fault lines of heterosexism and faith-based privilege. LGBTQ evacuees, many of whom are now displaced, faced all kinds of discrimination at the hands of many of the faith-based relief agencies.
I spoke with Wendell Pierce - most famous for his HBO series roles in The Wire and Treme - on the closing weekend of Brothers from the Bottom, a critically-acclaimed play about gentrification in New Orleans after the storm, in which Pierce played a lead role both on stage and in production.
Katrina's devastation was, by so many measures, due to the mistakes of people. And the recovery is, by every measure, due to the strength of people.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
WHAT'S HAPPENING
"It was a tale of two cities."
As the adage goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." In 2005, on the heels of one of the costliest and deadliest disasters in American history, necessity created opportunity in New Orleans and ushered in a new wave of purpose-driven entrepreneurs who took a fresh approach to the city's challenges: social innovation.
The failure to coordinate services, to plan for the needs of the population, to keep families and neighborhoods together, and to find ways to enable all those who desired to return to New Orleans to do so constitute a third disaster, one like the failure of the levees of human origin.
Most agree that the work to reinvent New Orleans remains unfinished. That's true, especially because post-Katrina New Orleans is trending back toward its old self -- a sluggish regional economy with high inequality and not enough opportunities for its residents. That was certainly not the vision.
