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William
P. Quigley,
Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a
Job at a Living Wage. Temple University Press, 2003
Eighteen Months After Katrina
By Bill Quigley
t
r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
In cities and counties across the country Americans are
asserting their right to a job at a living wage. This
campaign has been built around the idea that those who
work full time are entitled to live above the real
poverty line. Professor and public interest lawyer
William Quigley, who helped lead the fight to give the
workers of New Orleans a raise, presents the moral case
for doing so, and argues that Americans should codify
the right to a job at a living wage in the
Constitution..From
the Publisher
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Each morning, Debra
South Jones drives 120 miles into New Orleans to cook
and serve over 300 hot free meals to people in New
Orleans East, where she lived until Katrina took her
home. Ms. Jones and several volunteers also distribute
groceries to 18,000 families a month through their
group, Just the Right Attitude. Who comes for food?
"Most of the people are working on their own houses
because they can't afford contractors," Ms. Jones said.
"They are living in their gutted-out houses with no
electricity."
Why do thousands of people need food, and why are people
living in gutted-out houses with no electricity?
Look at New Orleans
eighteen months after Katrina, and you will realize why
it is so difficult for people to exercise the human
right to return to their homes.
Half of the homes in New Orleans still do not have
electricity. Eighteen months after Katrina, a third of a
million people in the New Orleans metro area have not
returned.
FEMA told Congress that 60,000 families in Louisiana
still live in 240-square-foot trailers - usually at
least three to a trailer. The Louisiana Hurricane Task
Force estimated in December 2006 that there was an
"urgent need" for 30,000 affordable rental apartments in
New Orleans alone - and another 15,000 around the rest
of the state.
Eighteen months after Katrina, over 80 percent of the
5,100 occupied public-housing apartments in New Orleans
remained closed by order of the US Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD), which has controlled the
Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) since 2002. HUD
pressed ahead even though internal HANO documents
revealed the cost for repair and renovation was
significantly less than for demolition and
redevelopment. A professor from MIT inspected the
buildings and declared them structurally sound.
Architecture critics applaud the current garden-style
buildings. Yet HUD plows ahead, planning to spend tens
of millions of Katrina dollars to tear down millions of
dollars worth of habitable housing and end up with far
fewer affordable apartments - a clear loss for the
community.
Over $100 billion was approved by Congress to rebuild
the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion of that money was
allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under
$30 billion was for emergency response and Department of
Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for state and
local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure.
Another $3.6 billion was for health, social services and
job training, and $3.2 was for non-housing cash
assistance. Education was allocated $1.9 billion and
$1.2 billion was given to agriculture.
Louisiana received $10 billion to fix up housing. Over
109,000 homeowners applied for federal funds to fix up
their homes. Eighteen months later, fewer than 700
families have received this federal assistance. Renters,
who comprised a majority of New Orleans, are worse off -
they get nothing at all. Some money is scheduled to go
to some landlords and apartment developers for some
apartments at some time. There were uncountable generous
and courageous and heroic acts of people and communities
who stretched themselves to assist people displaced by
the hurricane. Many of these continue. However, there
are several notable exceptions.
Obstacles to public funding of affordable housing came
from within New Orleans and in neighboring parishes.
Many in New Orleans do not want the poor who lived in
public housing to return.
St. Bernard Parish, a 93 percent white suburb adjoining
New Orleans, enacted a post-Katrina ordinance that
restricted homeowners from renting out single-family
homes "unless the renter is a blood relative" without
securing a permit from the government.
Jefferson Parish, another adjoining majority-white
suburb, unanimously passed a resolution opposing all
low-income, tax-credit, multifamily housing in the areas
closest to New Orleans - effectively stopping
construction of a 200-unit apartment building on vacant
land for people over the age of 62, and blocking any
further assisted housing.
Across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, the chief
law enforcement officer of St. Tammany Parish, Sheriff
Jack Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina
presence of "thugs and trash" from "New Orleans public
housing" and announced that people with dreadlocks or "chee
wee hairstyles" could "expect to be getting a visit from
a sheriff's deputy."
With rebuilding starting up and the previous work force
still displaced, tens of thousands of migrant workers
have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery.
Many were recruited. Most workers tell of being promised
good wages and working conditions and plenty of work.
Some paid money up front for the chance to come to the
area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour
of the area reveals that many Latino workers live in
houses without electricity and others live out of cars.
At various places in the city, whole families are living
in tents.
Many former residents of New Orleans are not welcome to
return. Race is certainly a factor. So is class. As New
Orleans native and professor Adolph Reed notes: "With
each passing day, a crucially significant political
distinction in New Orleans gets clearer and clearer:
Property owners are
able to assert their interests in the polity, while
non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as
in the early eighteenth century."
New Orleans is now the charter capital of the US. All
public schools on the side of the Mississippi River that
did not flood were turned into charters within weeks of
Katrina. The schools with strongest parental support and
high test scores were flipped into charters. The
charters have little connection to each other and to
state or local supervision. Those in the top half of the
pre-Katrina population may be getting a better
education. Kids without high scores, with disabilities,
with little parental involvement who are not in charters
are certainly not getting a good education and are
shuttled into the bottom half a makeshift system of
state and local schools.
John McDonogh, a public high school created to take the
place of five pre-Katrina high schools, illustrates the
challenges facing non-charter public education in New
Orleans. The school was opened by the state school
district in the fall of 2006. As of November there were
775 students, but teachers, textbooks and supplies
remained in short order months after school opened. Many
teens, as many as one-fifth at the school, were living
in New Orleans without their parents.
Fights were
frequent despite the presence of metal detectors,
twenty- five security guards and an additional eight
police officers. In fact, several security guards, who
were not much older than the students, were injured in
fights with students. Students described the school as
having a "prison atmosphere." There were no hot lunches
and few working water fountains. The girls' bathrooms
did not have doors on them. The library had no books at
all - not even shelves for books - in early November.
One 15-year-old
student caught the 5 a.m. bus from Baton Rouge to attend
the high school. "Our school has 39 security guards and
three cops on staff and only 27 teachers," one McDonogh
teacher reported.
It took two federal
civil rights actions in January 2007 to force the state
to abolish a waiting list for entry into public school
that stranded hundreds of kids out of school for weeks.
Health care is in a crisis. The main public health care
provider, Charity Hospital, which saw 350,000 patient
visits a year, remains closed, as do half of the
hospitals in the city. It is not clear if it will
reopen. Plans are being debated that will shift indigent
care and its state and federal compensation to private
hospitals. Much of the uncompensated care
provided by Charity has shifted to other LSU hospitals,
with people traveling as far as 85 miles to the Earl
K.Long Hospital in Baton Rouge - which reports a 50
percent increase in uncompensated care. Waiting lines
are long in emergency rooms for those who have
insurance. When hundreds of thousands lost their jobs
after Katrina, they lost health care as well. A recent
free medical treatment fair opened their doors at 6 a.m.
and stopped signing people up at 8 a.m. because they had
already filled the 700 available slots for the
day.
Mental health is worse. A report by the World Health
Organization estimates that serious and mild to moderate
mental illness doubled among survivors in the year after
Hurricane Katrina. Despite a suicide rate triple what it
was a year ago, the New York Times
reported ten months after the storm that New Orleans had
still lost half of its psychiatrists, social workers,
psychologists and other mental health care workers.
In the months after Katrina, the 534 psychiatric beds
that had been in metro New Orleans shrank to fewer than
80. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
surveyed the area and found 45 percent of residents were
experiencing "significant stress or dysfunction" and
another 25 percent were worse off.
By default, the lack of mental health treatment
facilities has forced more of these crises towards law
enforcement. "The lack of mental health options forced
the New Orleans Police Department to incarcerate
mentally ill people who normally would have been taken
to Charity," said James Arey, commander of the NOPD
crisis negotiation team. "The only other option is to
admit them into emergency rooms ill-equipped to handle
psychotics who may have to wait days for care. This is
past the point of being unsafe," Arey said. "It's just a
matter of time before a mental patient goes berserk in
one of the ERs and hurts some people."
With day care scarce - down 70 percent - and public
transportation down 83 percent from the number of
pre-Katrina buses, there is little chance for single
moms with kids.
It is impossible to begin to understand the continued
impact of Katrina without viewing through the lenses of
race, gender and poverty. Katrina exposed the region's
deep-rooted inequalities of gender, race, and class.
Katrina did not create the inequalities; it provided a
window to see them more clearly. But the aftermath of
Katrina has aggravated these inequalities. In fact, if
you plot race, class and gender, you can likely tell who
has returned to New Orleans. The Institute of Women's
Policy Research pointed out "The hurricanes uncovered
America's longstanding structural inequalities based on
race, gender, and class and laid bare the consequences
of ignoring these underlying
inequalities."
The pre-Katrina population of 454,000 people in the City
of New Orleans dropped to 187,000. The African-American
population of New Orleans shrank by 61 percent, or
213,000 people, from a pre- Katrina total of 302,000
down to 89,000. New Orleans now has a much smaller,
older, whiter and more affluent population.
Crime plagues parts of the city, and every spoke of the
criminal justice wheel is broken. Hundreds of police
left the force, and several were just indicted for first
degree murder of an unarmed mentally retarded man during
Katrina. When the accused police reported to jail, they
were accompanied by hundreds of fellow officers holding
up signs calling them heroes. The district attorney and
the police are openly feuding and pointing fingers at
each other. Judges are fighting with the new public
defender system. Victims and witnesses are still
displaced. People accused of serious crimes walk out of
jail because of incompetence and the fear of witnesses
to cooperate with police.
Others are kept in jail too long because they are lost
in the system. For example, Pedro Parra- Sanchez was
arrested six days after he arrived in New Orleans to
find work in October 2005. He got into a fight and
allegedly stabbed a man with a beer bottle. He went
through the local temporary jail in a bus station and
two other Louisiana prisons. Under Louisiana law he was
supposed to be charged within 60 days or released.
However, he never went to court or saw a lawyer. When he
did not show up for his original arraignment date last
May, a warrant was put out for his arrest, but he was
already incarcerated. He was found by a Tulane Law
Clinic attorney and was released in November 2006. Lost
in the system, he was doing what they call in the
courthouse "Katrina time."
Though crime is
issue number one in most of the city, crime is not the
cause of a city dying. Crime is a symptom of a city
dying. Crime is the sound of a city dying.
There are major problems with the drinking water system
eighteen months after Katrina. According to the City of
New Orleans, hundreds of miles of underground pipes were
damaged by 480 billion pounds of water that sat in the
city after Katrina. They were further damaged by the
uprooting of tens of thousands of trees whose roots were
wrapped around the pipes.
The City of New
Orleans now loses more water than it uses, because of
faulty pipes and joints in the delivery system. More
than 135 million gallons are being pumped out daily but
only 50 million gallons are being used, leaving 85
million gallons "unaccounted for and probably leaking
out of the system." The daily cost of the water leaking
away in thousands of leaks is about $200,000 a day.
The second major water problem is that the leakage makes
maintaining adequate water pressure extremely difficult
and costly, particularly in tall office buildings. Water
pressure in New Orleans is estimated at half that of
other cities, creating significant problems in
consumption, sanitation, air-conditioning and fire
prevention.
Insurance costs are skyrocketing for homes and
businesses. So are rents. Though low-wage jobs pay a
little more than before Katrina, they do not pay enough
for people to afford rent.
The overall planning process for the rebuilding of New
Orleans has been derailed by several competing planning
operations. The mayor initially created a Bring New
Orleans Back Commission, which met for months. While the
Bring New Orleans Back Commission was operating, the
Urban Land Institute, a think tank based in Washington,
DC, created and released a report of recommendations in
January 2006. After several months of hearings, the
Bring New Orleans Back Commission issued a report from
the mayor's office, but it was never funded. In April
2006, the New Orleans City Council awarded a federally
funded $2.9 million grant to a Miami consultant to
create a plan for the 49 neighborhoods of New Orleans.
A fourth planning
process, the Unified New Orleans Plan, was launched in
spring 2006 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation
to integrate all the planning processes. In September
2006, the New Orleans City Council plan was released,
while the UNOP process was just getting underway - that
fourth plan is starting to wind up now.
These problems
spread throughout the Gulf Coast, far beyond their most
graphic illustrations in New Orleans. As Oxfam
documented, government neglect has plagued the
rebuilding of smaller towns like Biloxi, Mississippi,
and rural parishes of Louisiana, leaving the entire
region in distress. In Biloxi, the first to be aided
after the hurricane were the casinos, which forced
low-income people out of their homes and neighborhoods.
In rural Louisiana, contradictory signals by government
agencies have slowed progress, and in some cases
reversed it. Small, independent family
commercial-fishing businesses have been imperiled by the
lack of recovery funds. The federal assistance that has
occurred has tended to favor the affluent and those with
economic assets.
Visitors to New Orleans can still stay in fine hotels
and dine at great restaurants. But less than a
five-minute drive away lie miles of devastated
neighborhoods that shock visitors. Locals call it "the
Grand Canyon effect" - you know about it, you have seen
it on TV,
but when you see it in person it can take your breath
away.
Our community continues to take hope from the resilience
of our people. Despite lack of federal, state and local
assistance, people are living their lives and repairing
their homes. People are organizing. Many fight for
better levee protection. Some work for affordable
housing. Some are workers collectively seeking better
job conditions. Neighborhoods are coming together to
fight for basic services. Small-business owners are
working together to secure grants and low-cost
rebuilding loans. Others organize against crime.
We graciously accept the kindnesses of strangers who
come by the hundreds every day to help us gut and
rebuild our homes. Churches, synagogues and mosques from
around the country come to partner with local
congregations to rebuild and resource their sisters and
brothers.
The new Congress appears poised to give us a hand.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), head of the
House subcommittee overseeing HUD, delivered pointed
questions and criticisms to federal, state and local
foot-draggers recently and promised a new day.
Young people are particularly outraged and activated by
what they see - they give us hope. Over a thousand law
students alone will come to the Gulf Coast area to
volunteer over spring break with the Student Hurricane
Network.
Connections between the lack of resources for Katrina
rebuilding and Iraq and Afghanistan are clear to
everyone on the Gulf Coast.
Despite guarantees of the United Nations Guiding
Principles on Internal Displacement that people
displaced through no fault of their own have the right
to return to their homes and to expect the government to
help them do so, far too little progress has been made.
As Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) of Kansas
City observed in a recent public hearing, "When it is
all said and done, there has been a lot more said than
done."
But still, each day, Ms. Debra South Jones and her
volunteers drive into New Orleans east to dish out hot
food and groceries to people in need. In the past
eighteen months, they have given out over three million
pounds of food to more than 130,000 families. We never
dreamed we would be still be so needy eighteen months
after Katrina. We look forward to the day when she will
not have to feed us, when we will not need volunteers to
gut and fix up our homes, when we can feed ourselves in
our own fixed-up homes in a revitalized New Orleans.
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[Bill Quigley is a
human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola
University New Orleans--http://law.loyno.edu/~quigley/
-- he can be reached at
Quigley@loyno.edu
. If you would like to learn more about Ms. Debra South
Jones and the work of her organization, Just the Right
Attitude, see http://www.jtra.org
]
Source:
Truthout
/ February 27. 2007
posted 28 February 2007 * *
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor. The Katrina Papers
provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with formthe search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social historylies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.Hank Lazer
The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W.
Ward, Jr. $18.95
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updated 2 December 2008 |
