Michael Knight lived on Flood Street.
An auto mechanic, Knight, 44, made a home for himself in the neighborhood he was raised in, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Bounded by water on three sides — the Industrial Canal to the west, Bayou Bienvenue to the east and the Mississippi River to the south — his impoverished neighborhood has long suffered from isolation and neglect. Yet, the Lower Ninth Ward was violently thrust into the national spotlight when it flooded after the first levee breach in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. America watched as a break in the Industrial Canal levee allowed water, death and destruction to flow into the neighborhood. The damage that occurred — especially in the lower part of the Ninth Ward — was so extensive that the head of homeland security for New Orleans, Col. Terry Ebbert, told the New York Times Sunday that “there’s nothing out there that can be saved at all.”
The night before Katrina struck, Knight secured his pirogue — pronounced pee-row, these small, flat-bottom boats are omnipresent in south Louisiana, popular for a design ideal for navigating the area’s canals and bayous — by tying it to his house. After the rain slowed Tuesday morning, Knight went outside to survey the damage. That’s when he saw the water rising. Fast.
“I’ve never seen water come up that fast,” Knight recalls a week later. “It was collecting at the curb when I came out. By the time I finished smoking a cigarette, it was in the yard.”
That’s when Knight sprang to action. He untied his pirogue and recruited his brother Reginald Jackson and cousin Freddie Hicks to begin rescue efforts in the neighborhood. “It was a nightmare, just the noise,” Knight says. “You never heard nothing like that. Wind howling, people hollering for help. Just scary.”
Knight stopped counting at 200 the number of people he rescued — from rooftops, from treetops — but estimates he brought at least 400 people to safety. He worked nonstop for the first two days with no sleep, and then only took quick naps in his pirogue for the remaining three days of rescue efforts. Knight slept in his boat, securing it by fastening it to an antennae on the roof of his house, which was by Tuesday afternoon completely submerged in water.
“He’s the neighborhood hero,” says Democratic state Rep. Charmaine Marchand, a lifelong neighbor of Knight’s who represents the area in the Louisiana Legislature.
“I must have been crazy; I must have gotten possessed,” Knight says, speaking from Atlanta, where he’s living post-Katrina.
Knight had been taking his neighbors to safety on the nearby rooftop of Krantz Elementary on Caffin Avenue. But after the Coast Guard arrived, he was ordered to stop using the school, directed instead to take everyone to the St. Claude Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, where they were instructed to walk three miles to the Superdome.
“I told them I could be making double time, saving double the people, if I could drop them off at the school,” Knight says. “The trip to the bridge took twice as long. I asked them for gas. They said no. I had to siphon off gas from boats I saw floating around to keep going.”
“People like Michael Knight came out in droves when the water started to come up,” says Marchand. “Neighbors with boats helped other neighbors. We had a lot of effort, but just not enough manpower. No question the Coast Guard should have arrived sooner. The levee broke Tuesday morning. They didn’t come until Wednesday.”
Marchand sums up the delay with the same cause and effect that has contributed to the many problems her neighborhood faces: “We’re the area everyone forgets about.”
Hurricane Betsy in 1965, a catastrophic storm in human deaths and property damage but one wreaking far less havoc than Katrina, still informs much of her community’s mindset, Marchand says. “They blew the locks in the levees to save Uptown, to save the French Quarter, the richer upriver areas, in Betsy, at the expense of us,” she says. “Katrina brings back those old fears. Was this intentional? Did they do this to us again? We’re still the dumping grounds for the city of New Orleans. That’s what’s going through people’s minds in the community right now.”
Representing a 98 percent African-American area with a 25 percent unemployment rate and an average annual income of $16,000, Marchand says economics were the largest factor in determining who survived Katrina, but that racism will be the storm’s legacy.
“People want to push race aside in this, but those aren’t the people that have to deal with race like poor African-Americans do,” Marchand says. “If it were affluent whites who were flooded out and stranded on the side of the highway, I don’t think America would have let them starve.”
Like the rest of Louisiana, New Orleans is divided into numbered wards for purposes of municipal districting. Geographic descriptions in the city are as nebulous as its morality: The West Bank of the river is to the south; north or south names for crosstown streets are determined on an east-west border; upper means upriver and lower means downriver.
The Lower Ninth Ward, or the “lower Nines” as it’s called by most who live there, is the farthest neighborhood downriver in New Orleans, bordered to the east by the white-flight boom area of St. Bernard Parish. The historic neighborhood, constructed primarily in the years following the Civil War as European immigrants poured into the city, carries a unique set of burdens and glories.
It’s the lifelong home of R&B legend Antoine “Fats” Domino (who was safely rescued during Katrina from his Caffin Avenue home, though the famously private 77-year-old was evacuated to parts unknown) and late folk-art icon Sister Gertrude Morgan, who spent her life walking the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in the traditional custom of evangelical African-American women, dressed in all white, playing tambourines, singing hymns and looking for souls to save.
It’s where New Orleans first attempted to integrate its schools when 6-year-old Ruby Bridges entered kindergarten in 1960 — at Frantz Elementary, where Knight took his rescued neighbors — with the protection of a U.S. marshal escort, past rows of neighborhood ladies self-dubbed “The Cheerleaders” who hurled racial slurs, threats and tomatoes. The ugly scene was famously captured in Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With” and by John Steinbeck in his travelogue “Travels With Charley,” in which he described a revelation of human nature so repellent he left the city in disgust.
Populated for its first century with working-class Irish, Italian and German immigrants, the racial makeup of the Lower Ninth Ward changed dramatically following the failed integration of Frantz Elementary. Rather than send their children to school with little Ruby, white families responded in droves to St. Bernard Parish president and land baron Leander Perez’s invitation to white Lower Ninth Ward residents to move to the neighboring parish on the promise of all-white schools and neighborhoods.
The Lower Ninth Ward has witnessed some specific horrors that have become the stuff of local legend. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, shootouts occurred between police and Black Panthers locally headquartered in the Desire housing development, so named for its location on the street made famous by Tennessee Williams. Racial tensions following the clashes between Black Panthers and police were further inflamed during name changes at the formerly all-white Nicholls High School — named for a slave-owning Confederate general and Louisiana governor. In 1973, the school was renamed Douglass in honor of freed slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Students then wanted a mascot change from Rebels — illustrated by a sword-wielding Confederate — to Panthers in support of the Black Panthers. An enraged school board rejected the idea; the name Douglass Bobcats came about as a compromise. The community was shocked last year to read the story of a Lower Ninth Ward street gang that used a mentally disabled teen from the neighborhood as target practice, in broad daylight and on a bloody path stretching for blocks.
Sadly, the dominating legacy of the Lower Ninth Ward in recent decades is crime, specifically homicide.
“It’s the murder capital of the murder capital,” says criminologist Peter Scharf, co-director of the University of New Orleans’ Center for Society, Law and Justice, referring to statistics revealing a per capita homicide rate in the Lower Ninth Ward over the last 10 years of 120 people per 100,000 residents, a rate six times higher than that of New York City, at 12.1 per 100,000. Overall, New Orleans has a rate of 62.5 murders per 100,000 residents, according to Scharf.
“Why are we so different in New Orleans?” Scharf asks in explaining an increase in New Orleans’ homicide rate in recent years despite a national downward trend in murder. “A primary factor is the lack of interaction between the system and the lower-class subculture, a problem compounded in the isolated Lower Ninth Ward.”
“We’ve developed an intensely isolated lower class in New Orleans,” Scharf says. “The structure of our service-industry-dependent economy offers no jobs, or ones with low pay and no future. This has created a youth culture with kids who live armed, live high on drugs and with no contact with the legitimate system.”
Scharf points to a sizable reduction in the homicide rate for police districts covering the Lower Ninth Ward in the late ’90s as proof that change in policing tactics can produce positive results. After the area suffered from an all-time-high homicide rate in 1993 and 1994 (625 combined), police engaged “in a very people-oriented strategy, with cops interacting on a friendly, pedestrian level with the community,” Scharf says, adding that the shift in tactic was led by then Lt. Eddie Compass, now New Orleans’ police chief.
“Plus, they got rid of the corrupt cops,” he says, referring to a New Orleans Police Department notoriously filled with corruption throughout its history, and specifically to convicted murderer Len Davis, who patrolled the Lower Ninth Ward in the early 1990s and was both a cop with a reputation for brutality and a drug kingpin. Davis’ murder conviction in 1996 stemmed from the slaying of Kim Groves, killed after filing a police brutality complaint against Davis.
As a result of the cleanup, in 1999 the homicide rate dropped to a 10-year low of just 35. Yet, by 2003, the murder rate had nearly doubled, back up to 61 killings for that year. Scharf says much of the increase in violence stems from prosecution problems. “Stats show that in New Orleans, if you kill somebody, you have anywhere from a 6 to 19 percent rate of going to jail for murder,” Scharf says. “You have to either kill the Virgin Mary or kill someone in bed and then stay in that bed until the police come to get convicted for murder in New Orleans.”
Scharf says explanations for the recent increase in violence could be due to many key leadership changes — New Orleans has seen a new sheriff, police chief, district attorney and mayor since 1999. He also cites the lack of programs that address the root causes of crime, such as a probation system that better tracks and guides convicts and sustainable economic development.
“The wheels were coming off in New Orleans, and that was before the flood,” Scharf says of the city’s violence. “Before Katrina, we didn’t really have an effective governance to think this crime problem through. What it’s going to take as we rebuild is leadership. Leadership, and a lot of healing.”
“What’s the Lower Ninth Ward going to be like when they open the city back up?” Scharf asks. “Is it going to be more culturally and economically integrated? Or is it going to become even more racially polarized following Katrina, when you have the perception that the white establishment in New Orleans left its black citizens to die?”
Scharf and Rep. Marchand both agree that much of the Lower Ninth Ward’s future lies in the physical reconstruction of the neighborhood. “The whole neighborhood is going to have to be rebuilt,” Marchand says. “The houses are all just devastated. Even if they’re still standing, they’ve been soaking in toxins for weeks.”
Unlike the Lower Ninth, the upriver section of the Ninth Ward, the Bywater, was relatively untouched by the flooding that inundated the lower section on the other side of the river. In the past decade, according to Scharf and Marchand, Bywater has benefited from investment and integration.
“We had a real hodgepodge of people that was really cool: black and white, musicians, artists, a lot of gay people, the working class and corporate executives,” says Bywater resident Robert Nelson, who has been one of the investors renovating and reselling the 19th century houses in the neighborhood, buying his first property in the area four years ago for less than $7,500.
Before Katrina, Nelson was involved in the real estate market in the Lower Ninth Ward, figuring it was a prime area for investment. But now?
“What if I invest in a [new] property, and there’s no industry or economy to support people enough to pay rent or buy the house?” Nelson asks from a friend’s house in Minneapolis where he took refuge.
Nelson says part of the process he enjoys in renovating the historic neighborhood is the mixing of class and race. “New Orleans has traditionally had the separatist mentality: Separate the rich and poor, the black and white,” he says. “In the Bywater the last few years, you saw individuals fighting that old mentality. The divide America saw with Katrina and the Lower Ninth Ward, with poor and black left behind, I think that was a real eye-opener for everybody to that kind of divide we have down here.”
Marchand’s primary concern now is to make sure the Lower Ninth Ward residents are included in the Federal Emergency Management Agency windfall following Katrina. “The pie is being sliced up now,” she says, adding that environmental concerns are likely to require the majority — perhaps all — of the houses in the area to be bulldozed. But she wonders who will live in the new properties: her constituents, or those reflecting the profits of developers?
“I just ask that they put my people to work, rebuilding the houses they live in. We are the poorest neighborhood, but we have the highest homeownership rate in the city [62 percent, vs. a 41 percent homeownership rate citywide]. Why is that? Because people were born, raised and want to live here. Give the people here a chance for jobs, to make an income. People in this area have long been sacrificed. Poverty. Crime. Betsy. Katrina. Are they about to be sacrificed again during the rebuilding, in terms of jobs and money? I’m worried about that.”
Following his heroism in saving his neighbors, Michael Knight had to beg for gas through Mississippi and Alabama as he and his girlfriend drove to Atlanta, where they now are staying with her extended family. “Neighborhood? What neighborhood?” Knight asks incredulously about the future of the Lower Ninth Ward. “It’s gone, man.”
“I don’t want to be here,” he says. “I don’t want to make new friends. I don’t want to look for a new job. I want to be home. I want to be back in my raggedy-ass house.”
When I saw the date of Charlotte’s wedding, I felt like I’d been hit on the head. What were the chances? Of all the days to get married – of all the cities to get married in – my friend had chosen the exact date that I met Nick, in the city that I met Nick.
I suspect most couples don’t know the exact date of their first encounter. But then most couples probably don’t have a police report.
It took me a few days to decide to contact Nick. I’d been wrestling with that urge for five years now. My inbox was a shame trail of gushy letters typed after midnight, impulsive notes dashed off in the afternoon. All of them had cutesy subject lines, like the titles of Raymond Carver stories, but they should have been labeled the same thing: “Do you love me again? Have you changed your mind yet?”
But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:
“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I’d like to see you. Is that possible?”
I hadn’t seen Nick since he came to New York City in the spring of 2007. The morning he left, we woke early and watched an episode of “The Wire,” and then he walked me to the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I descended the steps he remained at the top, peering down and smiling. He did this whenever we parted, a habit that unnerved and delighted me at once. I’d wave him away while I stood in the security line at the airport – you can go now, I’m OK – but he would just stand there. Not going anywhere, he seemed to be saying, although that was clearly a lie. A few weeks after the New York trip, he called one Friday night and ended our relationship.
“You deserve someone who can be there for you,” he said.
I responded in the most articulate way I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, fuck off.”
—–
The story of how I met Nick is one I have told many times. I have told it at parties, and in essays (even in this publication), and so I might as well tell you now.
It begins six years ago, when I was in New Orleans for a different wedding. I was walking along a quiet stretch of the French Quarter with two friends around 1 a.m. when a kid yanked my purse and, when I didn’t let go, clocked me above the left eyebrow with a pistol. Nick was the detective on the case.
“That’s so romantic,” people sometimes say, although I can assure you it was not. It was violent and horrible, and flirting was the furthest thing from both our minds that night as I rattled off a description of the kid while holding an ice pack to the side of my head. (OK, it was not the furthest thing from my mind. I did look for a wedding ring. He had one.)
It never occurred to me that anything would come of that case. This was a year after Katrina. Bodies were still being found in abandoned attics. But eight months later, I received a photo lineup in the mail, and I was surprised to discover that even after so much time had passed, I knew exactly who the kid was, knew it in my bones. Four months after that I was flown to New Orleans to testify at a pre-motion trial. I mean, life is WEIRD, right?
When I came back to New York, I was seized by a feeling that I should send a present to the recently separated detective who sat with me after the trial while I tried to shake off a grief I could not articulate. (I sent him the first season of “The Wire.”) That gift sparked a correspondence that lasted for six months. A few weeks after the kid pleaded guilty and got 15 years, I returned to New Orleans to see Nick.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I told him once, sitting on his puffy leather couch in the nondescript one-bedroom where he’d moved after the split from his wife. “That kid gets a prison sentence, and we get each other.”
“That’s cute,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair.
“That I care about that kid?”
“That you think life is fair.”
Around the time we began corresponding, Nick moved to the homicide department. It was grueling, thankless work. Little romance in that, either, though I romanticized it anyway, besotted as I was by true crime and mafioso grandeur and David Simon. At the time, I wrote a blog about pop culture for a sex site. Of course I wanted to hear about guns and blood spatter. Nick, meanwhile, was happy to hear about pop culture and sex. We were the perfect escapes for each other, and we had both been searching for open hatches.
When people write about falling in love, I tend to cringe for them, because love requires a delusion that is deeply personal and impossible to explain to the world. So I’ll just say that I have doubted every relationship I’ve ever had, until that one. I was absolutely certain that Nick and I were meant to be together, and I was right. I just failed to specify how long.
When Nick broke up with me, I was devastated. Stunned. Nothing he said that night made sense to me, because it ran so contrary to the 500 conversations we’d had about how the other one was stitched into our DNA.
“The way I felt about you changed,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
If a duck calls you up one night, and tells you he’s an elephant, what do you say? How do you respond?
I responded the best way I knew how. “Oh, fuck off.”
In the five years that have elapsed since that conversation, we have spoken only a handful of times. We have tried to be friends – he missed me, I knew that – but then our conversations would lead me down the same sorrowful path, crying in my Stella Artois, and I’d grow incensed when he didn’t return an email or call me back.
I dated other men. Kind men, whom I quite liked. But in that eye-rolling way that is native to sensitive types, and writers, and alcoholics, and hoarders of memory and other people’s affection – of which I am batting a thousand – I held on to Nick, to the idea of Nick, to the hope represented by Nick through five years of recession woes, drinking problems and personal catastrophe. I did crazy things, which I can only admit now because I don’t do them anymore: I slept in his police shirt. I got insanely drunk one Sunday afternoon and called a dozen friends, begging them to convince me not to call him. Oh, the drama. Oh, the sturm und drang. Self-pity that could rattle the cupboards.
While I bled openly in public, he remained behind a fortress of stoicism. He is as much a cop as I am a drama queen. I don’t mean to say he is callous, because Nick is a tender person. His favorite movie is “Casablanca.” I have found this to be true of other cops, who manage to wall off some soft patch of sentiment behind the barbed wire fence. One night we were at the bar when I saw him talking with great passion to another detective. I figured they were discussing a case. Turns out, they were talking about their love for “The Notebook.”
But the few conversations Nick and I did have were a tangle of “do not cross” tape. I asked him things like, “How are you?”
He said things like, “Great.”
I said things like, “Great?” with a bit of eager anticipation, hoping he might sketch out a more detailed portrait.
Instead, he would say, “Yup.”
There was one thing Nick told me during the breakup that did make sense, and which I held on to with both fists. He said, “I met you at the wrong time.”
I’d be walking along the Hudson River one Saturday afternoon and those words would float up into my head. Well, what would be the right time? And when I moved from New York back to Dallas, a 90-minute flight between us, those words returned. Could the right time be now?
I scoured the landscape for signs that we were supposed to be together, or that he still thought about me. A New Orleans fleur-de-lys insignia at the restaurant where I was dining: What could that mean? A book about an NOPD murder crossing my desk: Why that, why now?
It was ridiculous, it was pathetic – let’s all agree as a group – but I could not stop clinging to the notion that the universe would bend itself so that our lives would entwine once more.
And then came Charlotte’s wedding.
I sent Nick an email late at night, when I suspected he’d still be at his desk, and by the time I woke the next morning, he had sent his response. Yes, he’d be happy to see me again. Lunch, drinks, whatever. It was exactly the answer I anticipated, which brought tremendous relief. But what came next blindsided me.
“If she’s free, can I invite my wife?”
So much can happen in five years. When I took those long walks along the Hudson, I used to wonder if Nick had remarried. I made up so many stories about him, and that was certainly one of them. What she might look like. Who she might be. I also wondered if he’d gotten back together with his first wife, the on-again, off-again high school sweetheart he married at the age of 22, three years after they had a baby together. Divorces take a year in New Orleans, and our relationship tracked exactly with that time period. He broke up with me the same week his divorce was final.
Even now I don’t know if the email he sent refers to his first wife, or his second wife, or his third wife or his 40th, because I could not muster the nerve to ask. The fact that I find it easier to write an essay on this subject is one of a thousand strange quirks that makes me who I am. The fact that he will not tell me any of that stuff until I ask directly is one of his.
In the days that followed his email, though, something shifted inside me. It calved like a glacier. It burst like the prick of a safety pin held up to the swirly rainbow curve of the world’s largest bubble. I would have told you this was impossible. I swear to God I thought I would spend the rest of my days clinging to that stupid blue police shirt, a modern-day Miss Havisham, but now I felt different about him, much as he had once felt different about me. I did not hate him. In fact, I adored him. But I did not want to see him again. The longing was gone.
I emailed Nick a week later. The subject line read, “on second thought.” I told him I thought it was a bad idea that we see each other. I told him I had been mistaken.
I had been mistaken about so many things. I’m not just talking about Nick now. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: That it is absolutely going to be this way, or it is absolutely going to be that way. It is fated. It is doomed. It is destined. It is done. I have believed so many lies about myself, for so many years, and closed the lid to lie down inside those coffins. I thought I could never stop drinking, but I did. And I thought I could never be happy in the city where I grew up, but I am. And I thought I would go to my grave crying for the cop in New Orleans who didn’t love me back, but I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I feel kind of grateful. I’d be a horrible cop’s wife. Are you kidding me?
We don’t know how our stories end, and the greatest plot twists are the ones we never saw coming. There is a line that I love. “God is a first-rate novelist.” It’s from Richard Price’s introduction to David Simon’s book, “Homicide.”
So I went to New Orleans, six years to the day after I’d been pistol-whipped, but that date has a new significance to me. Charlotte’s wedding was so lovely. It was full of personality, and color, and the peculiar language shared by two people as their lives interweave. After the ceremony, we paraded through the French Quarter behind a brass band in a Second Line procession. As we passed crowds watching us on Chartres, I kept wondering if I might catch a glimpse of Nick. I did not. But somebody did run into Leonardo DiCaprio. (Life is WEIRD, you guys.)
The next afternoon I took one last stroll through the Quarter before heading out of town. I snapped a picture of the sign on Royal Street, the same street where I had been mugged, the street where I first told Nick I was in love with him. That street is a knot of complicated meaning to me.
I couldn’t help laughing at the big ONE WAY sign hanging right below it. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I took it as a message from the universe that it was time to move on.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Beneath the veneer of New Orleans’ vibrant culture lies a history of tragedy. From the yellow fever outbreaks of the 19th century, the many catastrophic storms that have visited the city, the violence of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the vast social dysfunction of contemporary New Orleans, this is a city that has known adversity throughout. It is sadly fitting, then, that Occupy NOLA is one of the few occupations to have witnessed a death at the encampment. Last week, 53-year-old Ronald Dean Howell, known as “Curly” or “Old School” to friends, was found dead in his tent. The coroner’s chief investigator, John Gagliano, stated that the cause of death was “complications from alcohol abuse.” According to other occupiers, the man was homeless, and likely relocated from another tent city at Calliope Street and the Pontchartrain Expressway, which was closed by authorities on Oct. 27.
Occupiers throughout the country have naturally found themselves sharing space with local homeless populations: the most vulnerable and marginalized of the 99 percent. This has been particularly pronounced in New Orleans, which continues to struggle with an acute homeless problem stemming from the devastation of the city’s housing stock during Hurricane Katrina. According to data provided by UNITY of Greater New Orleans, the city’s largest homeless nonprofit coalition, the homeless rate remains 70 percent higher than prestorm levels, with nearly 10,000 people lacking some form of permanent shelter. Many of these suffer from serious mental and physical illnesses, including high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. Howell’s story is typical, and his death would probably have gone largely unnoticed had it not occurred in the midst of this burgeoning movement. Instead, his passing has served to illuminate the systemic problem of homelessness in New Orleans, while also raising suspicions about the city’s motivation in closing down his previous home on Calliope Street.
In post-Katrina New Orleans, affordable housing has become a serious issue. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, four of the most recognized public housing sites were demolished: Lafitte, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete. This came on the heels of contentious debate in the city council, which voted unanimously in favor of the demolition despite vocal opposition from community members. According to the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), these units were replaced by mixed income housing, each managed by various private developers.
Meanwhile, the general housing stock was devastated by the storm. According to HUD, 75,000 units were destroyed, and 45,000 remain abandoned today. The diminished supply has naturally resulted in increased rents across the board. In the same HUD report, the median cost of housing in New Orleans increased 33.2 percent, from $662 in 2004 to $882 in 2009 (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, the rate for the most affordable housing has risen dramatically. According to Linda Gonzalez, the Director of New Orleans Mission, a nonprofit providing services for the homeless, “basic apartments cost about $250 before the storm and are now up to $500 to $700 depending on what area of the city.” This is confirmed by data from the HUD report that shows the number of units available in the $300-600 range has fallen from 66,300 in 2004 to 19,300 in 2009. Affordable rents have greatly dissipated in the city, while wages have stagnated as part of the larger, national trend. In response to the HUD report, UNITY Executive Director Martha Kegel was then quoted as saying: “We have more unaffordable rent than even New York City. That’s because we have very high rent and we have very, very low income.”
As such, the homeless population has grown so rapidly that “tent cities” have become a relatively common occurrence. The Occupy NOLA encampment, located at Duncan Plaza, is not the first of its kind. In 2007, a homeless camp took shape in the same location, eventually growing to include 249 individuals, according to UNITY. That encampment was ultimately closed by the city, beginning Nov. 21 of that year. Then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration worked with the nonprofit community, including UNITY, to relocate these people to a mixture of hotels or apartments. A similar encampment at Claiborne and Canal with about 150 individuals was broken up in similar fashion the following July. In both cases, the nonprofit community was provided prior notice and allowed to make assessments of the physical and mental health of people at the encampment.
The most recent closure, however, has diverted from this practice. While City Hall spokesman Ryan Berni stated that all of the “usual groups were included in the process,” some relevant organizations say they were not involved. Linda Gonzales, director of New Orleans Mission, which is just across the street from the Calliope encampment, says she was not given any prior notification. When asked if this was unusual, she replied “Yes. They typically call and let us know when they are going to do a sweep. I guess they just didn’t need us.” Meanwhile, Mike Miller, lead outreach worker at UNITY, said “We weren’t involved with the Calliope closing, and the plans did not meet our standards for humanitarian enclosures.” He says they were only given a few days’ notice, and that the city actually fenced off the camp a day prior to the announced closure date.
Miller further explained that his team was unable to make appropriate evaluations prior to the closing. “We knew it was coming. Were we given a specific date? No. We were not given an opportunity to assess the physical and mental health of the individuals at the encampment.” When asked about the city’s claim that the vast majority of the population was provided some form of temporary or permanent housing, he responded “Whatever their numbers are, I take it with a grain of salt. I don’t believe it because we are dealing with the same faces.” He emphasized that the city was essentially just “rearranging the problem” rather than solving it. “By shifting people around, you lose people: the sickest of the sick.”
Given the city’s diversion from the norm in closing this camp, some Occupy protesters have grown suspicious that the city maliciously intended to use the homeless as pawns to help destabilize their movement. Nia, who is integrally involved with the movement, said: “It would be utterly ridiculous to not think of the possibility that this was done with that intent.” While she emphasized that the group has welcomed the homeless population to the camp, she also explained that much of the group’s organizing capacity has been exhausted by attempting to meet their needs: providing food and tents, dealing with security issues, and trying to integrate them into the movement. Furthermore, she points to a potentially coordinated effort of authorities throughout the country to destabilize these movements by displacing homeless communities to the Occupy encampments. She said: “People have been coming here from throughout the country saying they have had the same exact experience with long term homeless (in their occupations).”
City officials, meanwhile, deny such machinations. When asked why the Calliope encampment was closed, mayor’s office spokesman Berni said: “Anytime there is a large encampment, there is a risk to public health and safety. What we did underneath the expressway was a lengthy process, in ensuring the necessary housing and vouchers to help people get back on their feet.” When asked if he thought that anyone from the Calliope encampment may have relocated to Occupy NOLA at Duncan Plaza, he was willing to admit that “some people” probably did.
However, the scene at the camp suggests the effect was probably more pronounced. What began as a few dozen people has grown to over 100 permanent campers, the vast majority of whom are homeless. On the increase in homeless numbers since the Calliope closure, Nia said: “There was an immediate slight increase. Then, a bunch of people were given hotel vouchers, which was fine, until they ran out and they came here.” Another Occupy NOLA organizer, Dehlia Labarre, corroborated the hotel voucher story, saying “We have reports of a number of people who were given a week-long voucher and then ended up here when it expired.” Berni, meanwhile, denied any knowledge about expired vouchers.
Adding to peoples’ suspicions has been the overly compliant nature of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) with regards to the encampment. Only one arrest has been made thus far at the site, and that was of a “machete wielding transient” that NOPD public information officer Frank Robertson said “had nothing to do with Occupy NOLA.” He explained that there have been no further reports of violence or noise complaints. When asked if they have any plans to close it down, he refused comment. However, he did admit that the police have “undercover officers in the area of the camp.” This rather surprising admission suggests that the NOPD may be focused on covert means of destabilizing the movement, rather than facing the scrutiny that would come with overt confrontation a la New York, Chicago and Oakland.
Evidence seems to point to intent by the city to diminish Occupy NOLA. If authorities were genuinely interested in protecting protesters’ First Amendment rights as Berni claims, would the NOPD be deploying undercover patrols? Meanwhile, the concurrent closing of the Calliope camp is suspicious, given the break from past trends and discrepancies in reports from the city and homeless nonprofits. Furthermore, the city’s claim that most of the homeless at that camp were provided alternate housing is contradicted by the reality on the ground at Occupy NOLA, where dozens of tents have sprouted up since that closing.
Malicious intent or not, the reality is that authorities have failed to address the underlying issue of inequality at all levels of government. Decades of conservative orthodoxy, attacks on the social safety net, stagnant wages, and rising education and housing costs have culminated in a level of precariousness unseen in decades. It is hard to envision a more appropriate illustration of this than frustrated youth occupying public space together with the most marginalized members of the population in the “city that care forgot.” While the death of Ronald Dean Howell was probably unavoidable, the tragedy of poverty and homeless can be conquered. By refocusing debate on the needs of the marginalized majority, the Occupy movement has taken a significant step forward in this continued struggle.
Renee Ledoux cried when the National Guard and sheriff’s deputies showed up at her front door and warned her she needed to get out to avoid water gushing from the Mississippi River after a floodgate was opened for the first time in four decades.
But by the 5 p.m. deadline Sunday, the 44-year-old Ledoux and her boyfriend Billy Hanchett decided to ride it out one more night on air mattresses inside the empty home in Krotz Springs. They have a camper they plan to stay in on a friend’s property outside the flood zone.
“We really don’t want to go,” Hanchett said. Ledoux added that she felt blessed that they had the camper because a lot of others have nowhere to go except shelters.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama planned to fly to Memphis, Tenn., on Monday to meet with families affected when the river flooded there as well as local officials, first responders and volunteers.
Deputies all over Louisiana Cajun country were warning residents to head for higher ground and most heeded it, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect heavily populated New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.
Days ago, many of the towns known for their Cajun culture bustled with activity as people filled sandbags and cleared out belongings. By Sunday, some areas were virtually empty as the water from the Mississippi River, swollen by snowmelt and heavy rains, slowly rolled across the Atchafalaya River basin. It first started to come, in small amounts, into people’s yards in Melville on Sunday. But it still had yet to move farther downstream.
The floodwaters could reach depths of 20 feet in the coming weeks, though levels were nowhere close to that yet in the towns about 50 miles west of Baton Rouge.
About 11 miles north of Krotz Springs in the town of Melville, Mary Ryder, her fiance and her fiance’s father were loading up a trailer with as many belongings as they could fit to drive over the levee to stay with relatives on the other side of town. Ryder lives in a mandatory evacuation area, where water is starting to creep into backyards. They worried about what might happen if a broader evacuation is ordered.
“They say we have to leave town. We have nowhere to go,” she said. “What are we going to do? I have no idea. We need help up here.”
The spillway’s opening diverted water from the two major Louisiana cities — along with chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi’s lower reaches — easing pressure on the levees there in the hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic floods.
That choice angers John Muse, who drove from Lafayette to Melville to help his 86-year-old father-in-law Clovis Cole move his belongs. He said officials seem to be paying more attention to the concerns of Baton Rouge and New Orleans than people who live in the basin.
“They hurt a lot of feelings by putting that water in here like they did,” he said. “What’s happening here, I’ll tell ya, it’s not fair.”
In Butte LaRose, some 50 miles downstream from where the Morganza spillway was opened, Chalmers Wheat, 54, was among the few left — and even he was headed for his father’s home in Baton Rouge outside the flood zone. He and his twin brother, Chandler, were making a few final preparations to protect his home with plastic lining and sandbags.
“It’s almost like a ghost town,” said Wheat.
It will be at least a week before the Mississippi River crest arrives at the Morganza spillway, where officials opened two massive gates on Saturday and another two Sunday. There are 125 in all. The Mississippi has broken river-level records that had held since the 1920s in some places.
The Army Corps of Engineers has taken drastic steps to prevent flooding. Engineers blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off floodwalls protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The Morganza flooding is more controlled, however, and residents are warned each year that the spillway could be opened. A spillway at the 7,000-foot Bonnet Carre structure in Louisiana also has been opened.
Just outside Krotz Springs, 23-year-old Jake Nolan said National Guard troops knocked on the door of his home in a subdivision to tell his mother of the evacuation order. He said they advised her to have white towels and have access to the roof if they planned to ride it out — presumably in case of a rescue — though that didn’t appear to be part of any official instructions. And besides, he didn’t need an order to leave with his wife and three children.
“I don’t want to be stuck here if the water does get bad,” said Nolan, who planned to stay with a sister in Port Barre.
It seemed animals didn’t want to be stuck anywhere: Deer, hogs and rabbits have started running from the water flowing near the floodgates, said Lt. Col. Joey Broussard of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. An electronic sign on Interstate 10 warned of a possible animal exodus: “Wildlife crossing possible. Use caution,” it read.
Despite the mandatory evacuation order, Krotz Springs town clerk Suzanne Bellau said it was unlikely the sheriff’s office would force people to leave. For most, the worst part was wondering what may happen. National Guardsmen were building a second levee to bolster protection for the town.
“It’s the unknown, that’s the problem,” Bellau said. “Is it going to come into their homes or not? And the people who are leaving, what are they coming back to?”
Associated Press writer Kevin McGill in New Orleans and AP Video Journalist Robert Ray in Krotz Springs, La., contributed to this report.
Deputies warned people Sunday to get out as Mississippi River water gushing from a floodgate for the first time in four decades crept ever closer to communities in Louisiana Cajun country, slowly filling a river basin like a giant bathtub.
Most residents heeded the warnings and headed for higher ground, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.
Days ago, many of the towns known for their Cajun culture and drawling dialect fluttered with activity as people filled sandbags and cleared out belongings. By Sunday, some areas were virtually empty as the water from the Mississippi River, swollen by snowmelt and heavy rains, slowly rolled across the Atchafalaya River basin. The floodwaters could reach depths of 20 feet in the coming weeks.
The spillway’s opening diverted water from heavily populated New Orleans and Baton Rouge — along with chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi’s lower reaches — easing pressure on the levees there in the hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic floods.
About 11 miles north of Krotz Springs in the town of Melville, water was already starting to creep into some people’s backyards. Parts of the town not protected by levees were under a mandatory evacuation order. Glenda Maddox’s husband had temporarily reopened the gas station he closed in December so people could fuel up before they leave.
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” she said. “We don’t know if the levee is going to hold up.”
The station’s shelves were mostly barren, save for a few soft drinks and bottles of motor oil. Only cash was accepted 7/8 7/8– no credit cards.
In Butte LaRose, some 50 miles downstream from where the Morganza spillway was opened, no water was expected until at least later Sunday. But Chalmers Wheat, 54, was among the few left — and even he was headed for his father’s home in Baton Rouge outside the flood zone. He and his brother were making a few final preparations to protect his home with plastic lining and sandbags.
“It’s almost like a ghost town,” said Wheat, who was getting some help from his twin brother, Chandler.
Sandbags were still available in the center of town, but there were few takers Sunday.
Krotz Springs is roughly 30 miles closer to the floodgates, and deputies ordered people to evacuate Sunday morning even though the water hadn’t yet arrived.
Wayne Duplechain, who lives in the parish about eight miles outside Krotz Springs, said he would have his family stay in a camper parked on his son’s property outside the flood zone. He hoped to return, though, and ride out the flooding. He has three layers of sandbags stacked 2 feet high surrounding his ranch-style, brick house and figures the water won’t start lapping against them for seven or eight days. Plus, he has a generator and a boat to escape in if the water gets too high.
“It’s going to be slow-rising, so I’ll get out if I have to. I’m not totally stupid,” he said. “If it comes over the sandbags, I’m leaving.”
It will be at least a week before the Mississippi River crest arrives at the Morganza spillway, where officials opened two massive gates on Saturday and another two Sunday. There are 125 in all. The Mississippi has broken river-level records that had held since the 1920s in some places.
The Army Corps of Engineers has taken drastic steps to prevent flooding. Engineers blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off floodwalls protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The Morganza flooding is more controlled, however, and residents are warned each year that the spillway could be opened. A spillway at the 7,000-foot Bonnet Carre structure in Louisiana also has been opened.
Just outside Krotz Springs, 23-year-old Jake Nolan said National Guard troops knocked on the door of his home in a subdivision to tell his mother of the evacuation order. He said they advised her to have white towels and have access to the roof if they planned to ride it out — presumably in case of a rescue — though that didn’t appear to be part of any official instructions. And besides, he didn’t need an order to leave with his wife and three children.
“I don’t want to be stuck here if the water does get bad,” said Nolan, who planned to stay with a sister in Port Barre.
It seemed animals didn’t want to be stuck anywhere, either: Deer, hogs and rabbits have started running from the water flowing near the floodgates, said Lt. Col. Joey Broussard of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. An electronic sign on Interstate 10 warned of a possible animal exodus: “Wildlife crossing possible. Use caution,” it read.
Despite the mandatory evacuation order for some people, Krotz Springs town clerk Suzanne Bellau said it was unlikely the sheriff’s office would force people to leave. For most, the worst part was wondering what may happen. National Guardsman were building a new levee to bolster protection for the town, in addition to a levee already standing.
“It’s the unknown, that’s the problem,” Bellau said. “Is it going to come into their homes or not? And the people who are leaving, what are they coming back to?”
That was also true downstream in Butte LaRose, where Chalmers and Chandler Wheat had been making last-minute preparations. Chalmers Wheat figured his house would be all right so long as the water level didn’t exceed 2 feet.
“If the water gets higher, we’re pretty much …” Chalmers Wheat said, before his brother chimed in: “Screwed.”
Associated Press writer Kevin McGill in New Orleans and AP Video Journalist Robert Ray in Krotz Springs contributed to this report.
The author in a red dress in a Second Line processional
through the French Quarter. (Credit: Laurence Kretchmer) 
A homeless man sets up a tent at Occupy Seattle on Oct. 5, 2011 (Credit: AP/Ted S. Warren) 
42nd street, New York City 
Water diverted from the Mississippi River spills through a bay in the Morganza Spillway in Morganza, La., Saturday, May 14, 2011. Water from the inflated Mississippi River gushed through a floodgate Saturday for the first time in nearly four decades and headed toward thousands of homes and farmland in the Cajun countryside, threatening to slowly submerge the land under water up to 25 feet deep. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Credit: AP) 
A member of the Louisiana National Guard stands guard as water diverted from the Mississippi River through a bay in the Morganza Spillway begins to fill a pasture in Morganza, La., Saturday, May 14, 2011. Opening the Morganza spillway diverts water away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Credit: AP) 
