Below is an article that struck a nerve. I've been down to New Orleans twice to give help, support and aid in the aftermath of Katrina. Thought I might share this with you in case you missed it.
How to Steal a Coastline
The Gulf is still in ruins -- but Bush has opened the door for the casinos and carpetbaggers, and now there's a cutthroat race to the high ground
New Orleans, ninth ward, near the infamous levee, the last Tuesday in March. I'm in the passenger seat of a spiffy black Volkswagen, staring out my window in shock. Only one word comes to mind: Hiroshima. Houses all sideways and blown to bits, cars flipped over, ground covered with glass and wire and dismembered dolls' heads. No water, no electricity, no civilization.
Katrina might as well have hit yesterday. Almost nobody has come back. Goateed white college volunteers living in tents seem to outnumber actual residents 10-to-1. On any given street, anything moving is probably either a rat or a CUNY sophomore. The death smell still hangs everywhere.
The VW stops, and I'm staring at a nearby car, crushed under a house. Next to it is a half-crumpled shack with a message written in spray paint: "Possible child body inside."
"Holy shit," I whisper.
"You ain't seen nothing yet, dude," says the man beside me.
I last saw the Rev. Willie Walker when we went out in rescue boats together just after the storm. The affable black pastor's cell phone and BlackBerry are constantly buzzing; he's always making new contacts, trying to get something organized. The good reverend is a hustler for God. I like Willie a lot. He's sincere without being a bore. And another thing: When he's my tour guide, I always seem to end up interviewing a lot of pretty girls.
Back in September, Willie had told me while standing in his ruined church, the fatefully named Noah's Ark Baptist, that he feared what lay ahead.
"They're going to take it all," he had said. "They're going to bring in the developers, and this neighborhood is going to be gone."
Willie foresaw that some combination of post-disaster zoning, forced property condemnations, infrastructural inattention and carpetbagging real-estate vultures would turn Katrina into one giant gentrification project. "They're hoping that you take the money and move," he had told people on the street.
Now Willie is leading me on a tour of the ruined city. Willie is usually a chatty guy, but now, here in the Ninth Ward, neither of us is talking. New Orleans is not a conversation. It's an image. You have to see it in person to comprehend it. It's a Grand Canyon of continuing misery and failure.
"Jesus," I say, staring at the wreckage. "What the hell have they been doing all this time?"
Willie laughs morbidly. "Nothing, dude," he says. "Absolutely nothing."
The wreckage on the ground is, pointedly, the only thing about New Orleans that hasn't changed since the storm. Without actually fixing much, everyone seems to have done a lot of moving on. On a national level, the city's official return to normalcy has been preposterously celebrated with the triumphant return of the NBA's Hornets. Even Mike Brown, the disgraced ex-FEMA chief, is enjoying an improbable Leslie Nielsen-esque career-recycling, recently making a revoltingly self-flagellating appearance on The Colbert Report. Only in America can can you destroy a major city and within six months be using your own incompetence to launch a secondary career in self-parody.
Here in New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin has been playing Hamlet, only without the intellect and eloquence. His first plan was to recommend turning some of these ruined black neighborhoods into parks, but then he quickly changed his mind when residents responded with impassioned calls for his oblong head. In the current vacuum of leadership, no one really knows what the plan is. Sitting in the Ninth Ward, I find it hard to believe that there's any plan.
"All this is a test," says Willie, waving his hand in front of the wreckage of the Ninth Ward. "We're being tested. If we keep this up, in a few years there won't be any America left at all."
One part of that test comes in the next few weeks, when the federal disaster agency FEMA is expected to settle on its new flood-zone guidelines for fallen New Orleans. Behind this seemingly innocuous decision lurks a hornets' nest of vicious racial politics that could be the final undoing of Mayor Nagin's "chocolate city." It's a drama that's already played out -- to catastrophic results -- in other parts of the Gulf Coast.
* * * *
While its wreckage lacks the Dresden-esque feel of the Ninth Ward, the ruined Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, Mississippi, is creepy in its own way. The sand-blown streets of what was once a bustling tourist trap recall Planet of the Apes, or one of Hitler's watercolors -- people all gone, somewhere. A wind-battered sign for a beachfront Waffle House blown out to sea hints that this was the capital of some mighty cracker empire gone suddenly and tragically extinct.
I came down here to investigate reports of immigrant recovery workers who'd been laid off, left unpaid and mistreated by various scoundrelous villains of the industrial elite -- Halliburton and their ilk. In light of other news reports to surface about the Katrina recovery effort -- including recent revelations by the General Accounting Office that millions upon millions of dollars handed out in no-bid federal contracts had vanished down a budgetary rabbit hole of dubious reconstruction projects and inflated "aid" efforts -- I thought it would be prudent to see what this corruption looked like on the business end of it.
But when I got to East Biloxi, the storm-tossed ghetto that Mississippians are quick to call "our Ninth Ward," what I heard at first was a familiar rundown of paranoid-sounding complaints about preferential treatment supposedly given to white hurricane victims. I had meetings with black activists and storm victims in which agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross were described as being involved in a sweeping conspiracy to turn the Katrina disaster area into a sort of secret Club Med resort for white people, complete with shuffleboard, back rubs and fancy dinners. "Bags of chicken," says Ruby Campbell, an East Biloxi native. "They was giving out bags of chicken in the white neighborhoods."
"We learned that the Red Cross is basically a paramilitary organization," says Jaribu Hill, founder of the Mississippi Workers' Center, "subsidized by the government."
It struck me suddenly that being an effete, overeducated, basketball-playing New Yorker who read Soul on Ice six times in college did not require me to endorse any of this paranoid bullshit. The next hurricane, I knew, could touch ground in my bedroom and nobody from the government is going to give me anything, much less a bag of fucking chicken.
The problem with racial politics in the Katrina story is that a lot of the real ugliness is buried far under the surface of this same petty and mostly infuriating he-said/she-said historical argument about Who Got What in the first days after the storm.
When I was in New Orleans after Katrina, I saw white cops in clean, crisp uniforms lazing at the edges of the flood lines while civilians of both races went out in boats into the black neighborhoods to rescue people. I also had grown black men in the Houston Astrodome complain to me that their free amusement-park privileges (some evacuees were given passes to Six Flags in the first weeks after the storm) had been cut off.
In between those two poles there is an argument to have, and those who want to can have it. My own feeling is that accusations of chicken-hoarding are an insult to white invidiousness everywhere. Institutional racism has always aimed a lot higher than chicken. And the Katrina reconstruction effort has been one of the all-time masterpieces of bloodless institutional racism, a resounding tribute to America's unparalleled ability to fuck the poor under pressure.
Biloxi has been one of the earlier test cases of the post-Katrina racial dynamic. Before the hurricane, the city had been a booming casino and vacation territory, crammed along the coastline with glitzy gaming palaces, hotels and restaurants, while remaining geographically segregated in the interior -- mostly white on the west side, mostly black and Vietnamese on the east side. Home to the state's first legal casinos after the passage of the 1990 Mississippi Gaming Control Act, Biloxi had become something of a showcase city for a new Republican ethos of vice-funded political power in an era of vanishing manufacturing revenues, as symbolized by the rise of biped swine like Jack Abramoff. This was the new America: tourism, shopping, fast food and poker, fueled by transient traffic. The old communities parked behind the casinos were the anachronism.
What's happening now is that legal processes have been instituted that are all but guaranteed to cause a rapid outflow of those poor blacks from the eastern interior, while at the same time a new wave of commercial developers will float in on a cloud of government largess. The mechanism here is an uneven application of new safety guidelines for residential homeowners, passed quietly alongside a colossal tax break for commercial investors. It's a high-stakes hand of real-estate poker, and the casinos, the condo developers and contractors like Halliburton are the ones drawing extra cards.
The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA late last year, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines.
Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less.
"Now you've got to build your house on stilts, so to speak," says city councilman Bill Stallworth, who represents the sunken, screwed portion of East Biloxi. Well over six feet tall, with a religious man's equanimity and a wry smile brought on by what appears to be extreme exhaustion, Stallworth holds his hand high above his head. "Here's where your floor has to be now."
Stallworth says the ABFE regulations add an average of $30,000 in new costs to those returnees who want to rebuild their homes -- homes that are mostly worth no more than $110,000.
And that's not all. According to Stallworth, regulations for handicapped-access ramps require ten inches of run for every inch of rise. "So what that means," he says, "is that if you have to raise your house up twelve feet, you need a 120-foot ramp. You're starting your ramp three houses down."
Stallworth says that when he approached a FEMA rep about the dilemma for the elderly (Biloxi has a high percentage of retirees), the FEMA official told him, in a line straight out of Marie Antoinette, "They can build an elevator."
Like the Ninth Ward and many other New Orleans neighborhoods, East Biloxi is located on much lower ground than the surrounding white neighborhoods. Therefore, while the ABFEs in places like North Biloxi might be listed at the same levels as the East Biloxi ABFEs, the reality is that they are meaningless to North Biloxi residents whose houses already sit at those levels but are quite consequential to those in East Biloxi. Think about it: Would you bother to rebuild a house if you had to walk up ten feet just to get to the ground floor?
"I asked the FEMA guy, 'Do you understand what you're telling me?' " says Stallworth. "People will get a picture in their mind: 'You can't live here.' "
Compounding the ABFE dilemma are the usual array of bureaucratic stupidities and leprechaun tricks designed to separate the poor individual from public money. For instance: The federal government did issue a $4 billion grant for reconstruction aid under the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, through which individuals are entitled to "up to" $150,000. But, according to Stallworth, the fine print indicates that applicants are eligible to receive only the difference between the value of their insurance policies and the value of their settlements. If you have no insurance, you get nothing. If you received a $20,000 settlement on a $30,000 policy, you can't get any more than $10,000.
You can also get up to $26,500 for housing from FEMA, but in order to get the money, you have to jump through a dizzying array of bureaucratic hoops. For one thing, you can't even apply for FEMA money until you get rejected for a loan from the Small Business Administration. Why a sixty-year-old personal homeowner should have to apply to the SBA is not a question that anyone has a good answer for, but it's the rule. Even getting that rejection letter can take months (many in East Biloxi are still waiting), but it's almost worse for you if the SBA accepts your application -- then the money is not a gift but a loan, a loan you probably didn't want in the first place.
"We have at least ten elderly clients who have actually been approved for SBA loans," says Teresa Manley, vice president of Urban Life Ministries, a relief organization that has been one of the most effective aid agencies in East Biloxi. "We don't think it's right that seventy-year-old people should be saddled with thirty-year commercial loans. But they had no choice."
Then, in another trick that smacks of the chicanery-filled good old days before the Voting Rights Act, nearly all applicants for FEMA aid get a slippery bit of misdirection in the mail early on in the process.
"What we've found out is that FEMA automatically sends you a turn-down letter," says Stallworth. "At the top, it says, 'You are not eligible.' Only at the bottom does it say that you can reapply. If you have no experience with these things, you just think you're not eligible."
Of course, the way around all of this is to skip government aid entirely and rebuild your home with your own private funding, in which case the old zoning guidelines still apply. (Local officials expect a hideous patchwork of high-built and low-built houses at the end of reconstruction.) Here is where the true face of American capitalism -- protection for the seller, risk for the individual consumer -- shows itself. According to Stallworth, eighty-two percent of East Biloxi residents did not have flood insurance. I must have met more than a dozen families who had been paying homeowner's premiums for decades but got either nothing at all or a negligible settlement after the storm. The insurance companies didn't even show up on the field of play for this one: To the last, they classified most all Katrina damage as flood damage, even when the water only washed away houses already destroyed by wind and rain.
"You had people who were standing in their houses when the wind blew it down," says Marvin Koury, a real-estate adviser in Gulfport, Mississippi, "and the insurance companies were trying to tell them it was flood."
* * * *
Then there's the flip side. the Bush administration opened the door for big corporate developers by offering huge tax incentives. And they're jumping on it. According to residents, within a month of the storm, much of East Biloxi was papered with little pink fliers that read: IF YOU OWN LAND IN EAST BILOXI AND WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOUR LAND TO A CASINO/DEVELOPER, CALL (228) 239-XXXX
Around the time that FEMA was issuing its ABFEs for East Biloxi, Congress was passing the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, colloquially known as the GoZone Act. When President Bush signed the law on December 21st, he made it sound like a relief program for the little guy. "It's a step forward to fulfill this country's commitment to help rebuild," he said. "It's going to help small businesses, is what it's going to do."
Well, not exactly. GoZone does an important thing. It provides a first-year bonus depreciation of fifty percent for commercial real-estate investors within the designated areas, which include East Biloxi and most of the lower parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and western Alabama. What this means, essentially, is that investors who bought into large projects after August 28th, 2005, will pay a fraction of the usual taxes in the first year of the investment.
The GoZone law is just another hand job for the rich, of the sort that has become a staple of the Bush administration's post-Katrina strategy. If the strategy for keeping public money from reaching the poor is to force people to first stand upside down and sing "Come On Eileen" backward and blindfolded, the strategy for giving money to the rich is a little more subtle. First, you give them tax breaks for indulging in the same activity you told the poor was dangerous, then you issue aid packages that only find their way down to needy recipients long after the value has been torn from the package's spine by a string of rapacious subcontractors, each taking their cut, who of course never had to enter into a competitive bid for their trouble. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!
"The labor starts off at twenty-seven, thirty bucks [a yard], and by the time it gets down to me, it's five or seven dollars," says Richard Rispoli, a gregarious Georgian contractor who came to East Biloxi to work after the storm. In Rispoli's case, the chain started at a local construction company and passed down through three subcontractors on the way to Rispoli, who ended up not being paid at all by the last subcontractor, who simply split with the money. (The common thief who steals the last exposed bits of the public-aid package is a recurring character in the Katrina story.) Living now in a trailer in East Biloxi while he awaits payment for his work ("If the trailer's a-rockin', don't come a knockin'!" says his girlfriend, Diane), Rispoli is now faced with the prospect of selling his equipment in order to raise money for the trip back to Georgia.
Rispoli was one of the lucky ones, relatively. Vicky Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance has been compiling cases of undocumented migrant workers in the area who have been hired for recovery work -- and left unpaid -- by subcontractors of KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Some of them live in squalid trailer parks and tent cities on the outskirts of Gulfport. (KBR/Halliburton has denied using undocumented workers in their operations.)
"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them," Cintra says.
Forget bags of chicken. This is the kind of thing that made white people famous around the world -- charging the government sixty-five bucks an hour for labor, then hiring illegals to do the same work for free.
The Katrina story is just the same old story of all Earth's history, only in concentrated form. Big fish eating little fish. Little fish eating smaller fish. And the smallest fish being told they have to build plank houses on fucking stilts. And wait to be eaten.
The story here will probably end with East Biloxi slowly disappearing against a steady advance of condo developments and curio shops; sometime around 2010, the last black resident, a poor grandmother who bought her home for 60K in the Fifties, will finally sell after her property-tax bill, reflecting a new assessment, shoots past her annual Social Security disbursement.
By then, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will be running for president, and his Gulf Coast will be a showpiece microcosm of an ideal America -- plenty of condo space, casinos on every block, no abortions and no darkies. Thank you, Hurricane Katrina!
* * * *
Not long after i arrived in Biloxi, I read about a storm-damaged black church in Saraland, Alabama, where the image of Christ had appeared in a piece of drywall. As any godless Northern journalist would in that situation, I quickly raced over there in search of what I thought would be a good laugh. My carpetbagging vampire heart pumping malevolently, I went inside, put on a solemn face and tried not to burst out laughing at the sight of the "Christ" -- an incoherent ripple that looked more like a sideways version of a waterlogged Houston Texans logo than the Prophet.
But when I decided to stay awhile, I watched in shock as dozens upon dozens of people came to kneel and weep before the image. Suddenly, I felt very guilty. "Man," I thought. "How rough must your life be if you're praying to a piece of freaking drywall?"
Just then, one of the ministers, a woman named Marlette Holt, leaned over to me. "Folks," she said, "have had it tough."
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Apr 07, 2006 6:09 PM
****
Some notes from me (& a picture of me in the lower 9th Ward):
Here's one tidbit of "trivia" I learned in the midst of my two journeys to New Orleans to end with:
- If all the roofing companies in the U.S. flooded southern Louisiana and Mississippi to repair all the damage, it would take over 20 years.
The other thought I want to convey here is... as I was walking through the ruble of the Lower 9th Ward I wondered what my Grandfather Bill would have said if we could walked together with tears in our eyes, lumps in our throats, and a pain in our hearts. I can only imagine that what I was seeing was the closest (hopefully) I will ever see to what he saw when he was stationed in Japan after the end of WWII to help the rebuilding process, and was able to see the devastating outcome of war and the nuclear weapons that were deployed.
P.S. I overheard someone in the group I traveled with asked a local home owner that we were helping, "where God was in all of this?"... their answer: "in all the folks that have come to my side or the side of my neighbors."
