Nation has blurry image of city
But look closer: Truth is in middle ground
Sunday, December 18, 2005
By Brian Thevenot
Staff writer
The Rev. William Maestri, the typically stoic superintendent of archdiocesan Catholic schools, nearly jumped from his seat as he watched the Saints-Jets game Nov. 27 in his temporary lodgings on the Archbishop Rummel High School campus, now a teeming, 3,000-student super-school serving Rummel students and other local students displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Maestri listened as ESPN announcers, speculating about the future of New Orleans' National Football League franchise, launched into an assessment of the city. Color commentator Paul Maguire offered his view that any free agent would be a fool to join the Saints next season for anything less than a "whole lot of green -- I mean a whole lot of money."
Then Mike Patrick followed up with his summation of New Orleans: "You have a city in New Orleans with no infrastructure, no operating schools and only a couple of operating hospitals," he said from New York. "You have no economy to support a professional football team."
Maestri fumed as he heard the words. No schools?
The archdiocese already had reopened 66 of its 107 campuses across the metropolitan area, with 37,000 students, or about 75 percent of the system's prestorm enrollment. Sixteen of those schools are in Orleans Parish, serving 7,000 students, compared with 29 city schools serving 17,000 students before Katrina.
To Maestri and other leaders in business, politics and education, Patrick's comments are just one example of the city's new national image, in which perceptions tend to run toward one of two extremes and avoid the more complicated reality in between. At one end of the opinion spectrum, some people believe as Patrick apparently does: that New Orleans is all but dead. At the other extreme, others have yet to grasp the enormity of the flood damage and the rebuilding task ahead, believing that the federal government and charities already have dropped a money bomb to make the city whole.
Neither image has helped the city and its leaders, who find themselves walking a narrow and rocky public relations path in their attempt to lure the massive amount of government aid, private investment and charitable donations needed to boost New Orleans' prospects for long-term recovery. The New Orleans-is-dead school of thought leads to hopelessness, giving national power brokers the view that rebuilding isn't worth the money or trouble. Yet a belief that New Orleans will be fine makes the area a forgotten problem, just a blip on the crowded landscape of pressing national issues and more recent news developments.
Giving the outside world an accurate, glass-half-full take on the city's predicament will be paramount in drawing outside aid and investment, said Tim Ryan, chancellor of the University of New Orleans, which will reopen in January. What the man on the street in Idaho believes ultimately may not make much difference -- unless, of course, it affects his congressman's vote on aid to New Orleans, Ryan said.
"Some people seem to think, from watching CNN reports from the French Quarter, that everything's back to normal," Ryan said. "Others seem to think the city is completely closed and nonfunctional. . . . It does seem to be the extremes as opposed to what really is happening."
Schools, hospitals
In Orleans Parish, the public schools have been slow to recover -- only two had opened when Patrick spoke; a third opened the next day -- but plans call for nearly 20 to be operating in January, including most of the city's high-achieving magnet schools. Moreover, the delay is partly attributable to political squabbles about the chartering of several schools and a state takeover of almost the entire district -- both moves widely considered a sign of renewed hope for a system that was broke and dysfunctional long before the storm.
Meanwhile, the national perception of the city's progress often ignores the suburbs flanking the city. Public schools in Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes are packed, serving a significant number of former New Orleans students. And even St. Bernard Parish, where almost no house or building escaped the flood, has restarted a school in trailers, with no help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Public and private schools inside and outside New Orleans expect a sizable influx of students when the spring semester starts, as do colleges.
Tulane University, even as it has laid off scores of faculty members and reduced its course offerings, expects 85 percent of its students to return next month. The University of New Orleans expects two-thirds of its students to re-enroll. Xavier expects three-fourths, on a campus battered by both winds and flooding.
Local hospitals are struggling. Seven have closed, including University and Charity, and current capacity is strained, said Jack Finn, president of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans. But other major players including East Jefferson, West Jefferson and Ochsner never closed during the storm or its aftermath. Many smaller hospitals, though up against some acute challenges, particularly staffing, are at least alive.
'An image challenge'
Communicating the city's progress, Mayor Ray Nagin said, remains as much of a challenge as securing the public and private investment necessary to make more progress.
"We have an image challenge throughout the country," Nagin said. "You ask what New Orleans is like today, and many people only have images of a city in crisis. And that's a concern, that they don't see the rebuilding that's going on."
At the same time, in Washington, D.C., "Katrina fatigue" has set in, Nagin said, with many bureaucrats and members of Congress either not grasping or downplaying the dire needs of the city compared with other national concerns.
"Iraq has been a major distraction, and some conservative folk seem to have all of a sudden gotten super budget-conscious," Nagin said.
From the displaced New Orleanians Nagin has visited in places such as Atlanta, Houston and Baton Rouge, the message is increasingly clear: "I'm hearing, 'I love where I am, but it's not New Orleans.' There's a general sense that people want to come back -- and come back now."
In Washington, U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, said he also has encountered both schools of thought about the city. He relayed a conversation with the Department of Homeland Security in which he sought help boosting medical services in New Orleans.
"They said, 'OK, we know you need medical services, but there's no people there, right? So you don't need that much,' " Jefferson said. "Some people think the city is paralyzed, that it's depopulating and it's never going to get out of it, so there's no need to spend money. . . . But that's an odd way of saying 'stay where you are.' "
The day after the Saints game, Maestri tried to vent his frustrations to ESPN, but the best he could do was to get, as he put it, an unresponsive voice on the telephone that "sounded like a 20-year-old, somebody's nephew at CNN who needed a job."
"They wouldn't hire me to comment about NFL football, of which I know nothing, and yet they hire him to comment about New Orleans, of which he knows nothing," Maestri told the person who took his call.
He said he hasn't heard back from ESPN.
Crowded suburbs
Part of the national perception about the impending death of New Orleans stems from outsiders viewing the current state of rebuilding in a city-centric way, rather than looking at the metropolitan area of 1.2 million people as a whole. The outsiders' take on New Orleans also almost completely ignores suburbs such as Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes, where residential and commercial life have quickly rebounded despite the severe damage incurred in isolated areas.
"If you look at the suburbs, it's a boomtown," Ryan said. "There's tremendous economic activity, but I don't think the world beyond New Orleans sees that. It's just not something the national press is reporting on."
Large suburban parishes Jefferson and St. Tammany, which sustained extensive but not catastrophic damage, find themselves booming with both business and population growth even as they struggle with their own rebuilding challenges. Both parishes have seen traffic skyrocket as people displaced from heavily damaged areas use the parishes as staging areas for the eventual return to their homes. Some people may stay permanently, but it seems many, if not most, want eventually to return to their homes and neighborhoods, the presidents of St. Tammany and Jefferson agreed.
Nagin said the current population of the city is about 100,000, down from about 475,000 before the storm. But although Houston and Atlanta have grabbed the spotlight as new homes for displaced New Orleanians, tens of thousands of people haven't gone nearly so far. As change-of-address filings with the U.S. Postal Service reveal, a third of displaced New Orleanians remain in the state, as do more than half of suburbanites from the area.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said he expects his parish to serve as a temporary haven for New Orleanians for months, perhaps years.
"We're a staging area right now," he said. "We've had Christmaslike traffic for more than a month in Jefferson. Housing remains the No. 1 demand and concern."
That concern already has drawn substantial investment, in the form of national builder KB Home, in partnership with the Shaw Group, which recently announced plans to erect 20,000 houses on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish.
"That's an incredible vote of confidence in the future of the greater New Orleans area," Broussard said.
Housing, people boom
In St. Tammany Parish, the housing market has exploded with an influx of residents from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. Houses are selling at a double-digit premium above their prestorm value, and rents have gone up even more. It's too soon to tell whether the many residents and businesses that have relocated to the north shore will stay.
St. Tammany officials say the parish's new population could swell to 350,000, from a prestorm level of 216,000. In many sectors of the parish's economy, business is booming. Traffic on St. Tammany roadways was up 74 percent in one recent survey, Parish President Kevin Davis said.
At the same time, large portions of the parish were hit hard by wind and flooding, prompting a huge reconstruction effort. "We're dealing with destruction, recovery and a booming population all at the same time," Davis said.
With the national viewpoint focused almost exclusively on New Orleans, Davis said, he is frustrated that officials in Washington seem to know little about either the destruction or the growth in St. Tammany, or if they even realize his parish is considered part of the New Orleans area. After weeks of fairly unproductive haggling with FEMA to get trailers, Davis let some of that frustration loose in a conference call with Donald Powell, the rebuilding czar appointed by President Bush.
"Do you realize that it's getting ready to be 32 degrees down here, and we've still got people living in cars, trucks and houses with no Sheetrock?" Davis said he told Powell.
"He said, 'Wait a minute, who was that? Who said that?' " Davis identified himself and repeated what he had said, but the conversation went on to the next parish president, with no concrete commitments of help.
Uptown bustling
In Orleans Parish, it would be hard to overstate the damage. Though some people already are starting to rebuild in devastated areas such as Lakeview and eastern New Orleans, the huge swaths of flooded territory remain largely dead zones. Even with photographs and video images spanning the globe, few people seem to understand the scope of the disaster until they see it firsthand.
Helen Betts of Kansas City has a close connection to the storm: Her daughter, Kate, who lives Uptown, stayed with her for more than a month after evacuating. Still, when Betts came to the city for the first time and drove through Lakeview, the 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish, she was stunned.
"The area took up so much more space than I ever dreamed it would have," she said.
Local entrepreneur Troy Henry of Henry Consulting, a local contractor, now splits his time between New Orleans and Houston. Many Texans he meets have sympathy for the city but still don't have a real sense of how catastrophic the flood damage was, he said. Moreover, they seem to think the city already has dipped deeply into the federal treasury and become a heaven for contractors.
"They think the money has already arrived in New Orleans, that there's a pot of gold there and a feeding frenzy where people are getting busy rebuilding the city," Henry said. "The president makes an announcement, and they think the check arrived the next day."
At the same time, amid all the grim realities in flooded neighborhoods and the struggle for federal aid, outsiders tend to underestimate the level of private reinvestment and everyday life that already have returned to the city's historic neighborhoods on high ground along the river.
Back Uptown after her tour of the damage, Betts sat in the bar where her daughter works, The Kingpin, surrounded by all the signs of normal life in New Orleans: a full complement of patrons watching NFL football; a flea market outside on the neutral ground; a Mardi Gras dance team practicing its steps outside. With a combination of about three-fourths of its prestorm regulars and a new influx of contractors and other outsiders, the bar was ringing up more drinks than before the storm.
A few blocks away on Magazine Street, cars full of shoppers and diners crawled the length of the narrow thoroughfare, never topping 15 mph in traffic. There, as on St. Charles Avenue, the businesses owned by locals were almost all open even though fast-food chain restaurants remained closed.
At the corner of Magazine and Nashville streets, the Starbucks was still closed. But across the street, the locally owned coffee shop Café Luna had almost no empty seats on a Sunday afternoon, after an even busier morning.
"We've been popping," Zeke Falcon said as he served coffee to a steady stream of customers. "We're definitely busier than before the storm." Co-worker Dominique Ellis, 21, agreed, and said being open has created good will among customers.
"It's calmed down since those first days, after CC's reopened," she said of another neighborhood coffeehouse. "When I first started, three weeks after it opened, there were lines out the door. It was crazy. But we still have some days like today, where it's been nuts. . . . And we still have people who come in and tell us, 'Y'all were open first, so I'm not going anywhere else from now on."
Encouraging signs
In the long term, many people see schools as the prime bellwether for the metropolitan area's revival. Indeed, many families' decisions on whether and when to return may turn exclusively on education options.
Just four months after the storm, encouraging signs aren't hard to find. Jefferson Parish public schools already have climbed back to about 85 percent of their prestorm enrollment of about 49,000 students. Of 84 schools operating before the storm, 80 are open, Superintendent Diane Roussel said. That reality contrasts starkly with the perceptions of many people Roussel met on a recent vacation to California.
"They think there's still looting in the streets, that there's water, that we're not allowed back in," she said. "They don't have a real conception of what's up and running. I think that's because some of the TV focus has been on the areas of destruction."
Jefferson schools are serving at least 7,600 public school students displaced from other parishes. Another 4,700 public school students from New Orleans have enrolled in Jefferson private schools. The public system has not laid off any employees, Roussel said, because it anticipates it ultimately will serve at least 90 percent of its original enrollment, if not more. The situation is similar in archdiocesan Catholic schools, which serve students across the metropolitan area, including Orleans Parish.
Maestri and other administrators said families have sent a clear message: They want badly to come back home, and many already have. Some still have jobs and homes, but even some who don't have returned anyway, he said. Some students work as their family's sole breadwinners because their parents lost jobs, said Rummel High School President Michael Begg.
Rummel, operating on a platoon system with morning and afternoon shifts, has taken in displaced students from more than a dozen local Catholic schools. As an afternoon shift arrived recently, hallways and courtyards teemed with students wearing the uniforms of their home schools.
Of the original Rummel students, who have been attending the morning shift along with some transplants, 84 percent have returned, officials said, with more expected in January.
Another building on the campus has been taken over by Christian Brothers School, a private middle school formerly in City Park that has recaptured 95 percent of its 300-student enrollment.
Christian Pittman, 13, attended St. Charles Catholic in LaPlace for a short time but said he is thrilled to be back at his home school. He is living during the week with his uncle, Don Rowan, who is the school's religion teacher.
"We lived by the Lakefront and we got 2 feet of water in the house," Pittman said. "But my mom's trying to get a FEMA trailer."
The family will live in the trailer and the upstairs of their damaged home, he said. "I just want to stay in New Orleans," he said. "I like the atmosphere, and everybody likes it here. It's like a family."
A loyal bunch
Much of New Orleans' image problems predate the storm, Maestri said, and are in some sense self-inflicted, given that the city's own marketing has long focused on an excess of alcohol and food, and Carnival madness. Now, the city's future may depend on the extent to which it can highlight other equally strong sides, he said.
"We're seen as a fun place, a party place, and also a place with a lot of corruption," he said. "The rest of the country doesn't look at us as hard-working, committed to community.
"But New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods and a city of families, families who have gone to the same schools, worshipped in the churches and engaged in the same businesses for generations. And that's what's really distinctive about New Orleans," Maestri said.
"New Orleanians are fiercely loyal. It's hard to get a New Orleanian to leave New Orleans, and it's easy to get them to come back."
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