I had vaguely recognized Wallace when I saw him in Oxford the previous day, but I couldn’t place him. We talked for a minute and he mentioned that he was a teacher and I was able to remember him. He was the hip English teacher at a struggling all-black high school in New Orleans where I had taught street law to “at risk” kids. He had John Coltrane posters on his classroom walls and tried to teach his students radical history. He made an impression on me when I taught his class because his students, who didn’t hear much, listened to him. He, in turn, listened to his students, who weren’t used to being heard.

Wallace proposed that we attempt to drive the six hours down to New Orleans in his old white Econoline van, in which he used to tour with his band, to assess the damage firsthand, to fix our homes if necessary, and to retrieve precious belongings that we had left behind. We had each just received nearly $700 in Wal-mart credit from the Red Cross, so flush with cash, we stormed the Wal-mart hardware section nervously buying anything that we thought might be useful on our trip, a trip that we had no precedent for and no way to have foreseen.

Wallace bought a set of battery-charged power tools, walkie-talkies for times we anticipated being separate, canned pineapples and water. I bought blue tarps, bungee cords, the biggest Maglite on the market and energy bars, and tried in vain to find rubber boots.

We left Oxford in his van at about 10 p.m., filled with nervous energy and hoping to slide into New Orleans just before dawn, as we had been told by friends that the security checkpoints were not up until sunrise.

There was no traffic at all as we passed through Jackson and approached Hammond, La. We had a steady stream of conversation through the night, talking about our wives, both artists, both far away, progressive politics, and our hopes and concerns for New Orleans. Occasionally one of us would note the possibility that our 12-hour drive to New Orleans and back might be in vain because we could be turned back at the city limits. But we would quickly skip over this point and again rehearse the work-related pretexts we intended to pitch if we were stopped. Maybe 10 times on the drive, one of us said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

We had a quarter tank of gas and two full five-gallon gas cans in the back of the van when we stopped for gas in Hammond, about 60 miles outside the city. We figured it would be our last chance for gas before New Orleans and we were not sure we would make the 120 miles back and forth with the gas we had. It was the only gas station open when we pulled off Interstate 55 at 2 in the morning and it was so jammed full of cars that I assumed it was a gas line full of southern-bound New Orleanians, like ourselves.

However, it turned out that teenagers, mostly black, hung out at the gas station in their cars until late at night, playing loud, bass-heavy music and talking to friends. I figured this out quickly after watching five police cars simultaneously converge on the gas station, lights ablaze, to close down the place and chase off the kids. We pulled into the now-empty gas station after circling the block and letting the dust settle. The pumps had been turned off so I walked up to the little gas station store. The glass door was locked and I stood staring in at the clerks until one came up to the glass and told us that they were closed.

In the weeks since evacuating New Orleans with my wife and two dogs and having no place to live, I have gotten used to asking for favors, begging and saying please and thank you. Through the glass, I told the clerk my “sad story.” I told him that I was from New Orleans and trying to get back into town, that I had seen a satellite photo of my roof and that it was damaged and getting worse, and then busted out the wild card that works with most men in most situations. I told him that my wife had her heart set on my getting her wedding rings and the diaries of her sister who passed away and that it would break her heart if I didn’t make it home to try to find these things and bring them back. I wasn’t lying and he could tell. He asked me if I had cash and when I said yes, told me that he would let me fill up. I thanked him, sincerely, not in the manner that I do in my normal life, when people do little more than is required.

Within minutes of getting back on the Interstate, we saw flares and police cars parked ahead on the highway, blocking the road. Wallace and I checked in on our story once again and slowed to a stop next to a tired-looking, middle-aged white police officer.

“How you doing, officer,” Wallace said.

He asked us where we were going and we explained that we were going to New Orleans, that I was a lawyer and that I had legal business related to the storm, a half truth. We showed him our identification. He responded simply, “I’m too tired to care. You can do what you want. He commented that our car smelled of gas and chemicals: “What, you got drugs in there?”

We explained that we had cans of gasoline in the back of the van. He responded kindly, “Gas? You know that’s not really safe … get out of here.”

We drove through the checkpoint and up onto the causeway, the elevated highway that runs through the swamps toward New Orleans. Since the balance of the ride back into the city would be on this two-lane road, there would be little opportunity for anyone to send us back now. We were almost home.

On both sides of the causeway, we could see the glow of the massive factories, cities of industry now back in action, spewing flames.

We were quiet for a while, eager to see our homes, our city, and knowing it had changed. We were also exhausted.

We cut around the city to the south and onto Highway 90, the old highway into the city, on the West Bank. The West Bank is part of Jefferson Parish, the white-flight suburb surrounding the city. It is the part of the city that throngs of people tried to flee into, over the bridge from the convention center, only to be turned away by armed sheriffs. Only a few days later, two white men in a van, we were trying to go the opposite direction.

The West Bank was in remarkably good shape. We passed a bingo hall with blinking lights. The Burger King was opening up, getting ready to sell egg sandwiches and Tater Tots. All of this minutes away from New Orleans. It seemed impossible.

As we approached the bridge, we reached another roadblock, manned by the Crescent City Connection Bridge Police. The officer standing guard was bleary-eyed and looked as if he were about to fall over. He hardly listened as we told him why we were traveling into the city. He had no objections. Wallace asked him how he was doing. His pain poured out. He told us that he had lost his house, that the floodwater had risen to the roof, and that it was destroyed. He said that the insurance adjuster said that his policy didn’t cover flood. He told us that his wife and kids were in Florida, that he was worried about them and wanted to be with them but only managed to talk to them for a few minutes at a time because he was worried about roaming charges on his phone and because cellphone service was constantly cutting out. He told us about a classic Bronco that he had just finished restoring and about the huge tree that had fallen on it. We asked him when he would be relieved so that he could take care of his home and his family, and he laughed. He explained that there weren’t many officers on his detail and that they were all working 18 hours a day, unsure if they were even going to get paid. Wallace asked him whether his union was doing anything to help him. He laughed again, saying, “Union: You’re not even allowed to say that word around here.”

We thanked him, sincerely, and drove off. As we pulled away, I saw him go back to sit with his fellow officers, none of whom could probably bear hearing each other’s sad stories another time. Each, perhaps, waiting to talk to the next couple of guys trying to pass into town who were willing to listen.

The city was dim as we passed over the bridge. We could see a big military ship docked on the side of the river next to the convention center. Within minutes, we reached my house, five blocks from the Superdome. It was still dark.

I inspected the house with my flashlight, and it looked the same as I had left it. I unlocked the door and walked into my high-ceilinged living room, and could smell the aroma of home, slightly stale, a little sour, but distinct. No water had come in; the flood had not reached us. I drank some water from the cooler I had left stocked with four five-gallon jugs, then went upstairs, where I did not know what I would find.

I crept up the stairs, almost blind in the dark with my flashlight off, but knowing the steps, because I was finally home. At the top of the stairs I reflexively switched the light on, to no avail. I flipped on my flashlight and saw that my ceiling had collapsed from above. From the right angle, I could see the night sky through the wound in my roof. There was soggy sheetrock and wet bits of insulation, made of shredded newspaper, everywhere. I wanted to start cleaning up then and there but realized it was absurd, that there was still more to see. I crossed through my wife’s studio, unblemished, with her paintings on the walls, and then into our bedroom, where the ceiling had also collapsed onto our new pillow-top mattress, which we had talked about with joy every night since its purchase as we got into bed.

I climbed the narrow ladder up into my attic, walked carefully along the rafters, then climbed through the hole in the roof I had seen from below. I nervously walked up the back face of my double-pitched roof and could see with the flashlight that large portions of the roof were damaged and exposed. Jitters passed through my body. I had been awake for almost 24 hours, I was standing on my roof in the middle of the night in my abandoned city, and I felt nauseated. Even under the best of circumstances, I have no business out on a roof. But anticipating the damage, I had brought up a tarp, some screws, and Wallace’s new drill. I tried to secure the tarp over some of the damaged areas, but I began to feel my feet slipping on the remaining roofing tiles beneath my feet.

Knowing that I was a danger to myself, I slid back down the hole and made my way downstairs and told Wallace what I had seen and what I tried to do. He told me that he was good on roofs — he would come up with me. We made our way back up. He did most of the work. He explained that we weren’t really accomplishing anything but that it was good to try, that I could tell my wife that I had tried to repair the roof in the middle of the night, and I would be a hero. I felt pathetic and scared but comforted.

Before making our way back downstairs, we watched the city come awake. New Orleans never had the early-morning hustle and bustle of other American cities but, instead, a few people heading to work, a few stragglers still trying to find their way home. In New Orleans, sunrise meant “go to sleep” about as much as it meant “wake up,” even among many of us who lived there. Now, however, with the city empty of its citizens, sunrise signified only wakeup time to the soldiers who, that morning, occupied the high-rise apartment building on St. Charles Avenue, the great Mardi Gras parade route, a block behind my house. They wandered out the building, absent-mindedly gazed up at us on the roof, and got down to the business of brushing their teeth and shaving with little cups of water in their hands.

Back downstairs, I cleaned up what I could and packed some things and brought them down to the van. I found the rings and the journals but had lost the list my wife had given me. I panicked, knowing that I was in no state to make decisions. Everything seemed pointless by this time. Miraculously, I got through to my wife on my cellphone.

“Nikki, I can’t find the list. I’ve lost it. All I can remember are the rings and the journals,” I told her.

She could hear in my voice that I was not well, that I hadn’t eaten, and that I was exhausted. She said, “Billy, you got everything that matters. Go downstairs, eat some beans from a can, and sit down for a minute. Promise.”

She has said these kinds of things so many times in this house as we restored it from a shell, as I worked myself into the ground with my job, and her words put me back together, a little bit anyway. We got off the phone and I grabbed as much as I could remember, neglecting her advice for the time being.

Before we left, Wallace handed me two garbage bags and told me that I should clean out my fridge. It hadn’t occurred to me. I opened the door and began to retch at the smell. I tried to wrap a cloth around my face, but it kept dropping down. The worst were the chicken cutlets in the freezer that turned to mush when I grabbed them and then leaked through the cellophane wrap, all over my hands. I dragged the garbage bag through my house to the curb. Immediately flies swarmed to it. Wallace sprayed bleach on the floor in my living room and cleaned up where the bag had leaked. I will love him forever.

When I got my bearings, Wallace introduced me to two dogs that had come up to him while I was upstairs. They were already peacefully resting in the kennels he had brought with him in case we ran into strays. They knew that they had hit the jackpot and weren’t going to do anything to mess it up. He had already named one of them. The black Lab puppy was Sancho Panza, after Don Quixote’s sidekick. He asked what the names of the cross-streets were on my block, as Carondelet, the name of the street, didn’t seem like an appropriate dog name. I told him that they were the names of muses, Clio and Erato. He named the baby pitbull Clio, the muse of history.

We got into the car and drove to his house. On the way, we looked for my Jeep, which I had parked in a garage to protect from flooding, but it was gone. It had been liberated. I hoped that whoever took it made it out of town with their family. Maybe they will drop me a postcard from El Paso, or where ever they are, when they are done using it. No hard feelings.

Wallace’s house was in much better shape than mine, and he made quick work of packing, cleaning out his fridge, and getting us back on the road. I could tell that he felt kind of bad that his house wasn’t damaged like mine. I was just glad that I didn’t have to go up on another roof.

As I waited for Wallace, I met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard who had come up to the house, thinking that we were holdouts and intending to encourage us to leave. They were very sweet and I offered them cigars, a recently acquired vice, which they initially declined. They had both signed up for the National Guard before Sept. 11 to help pay for college. While I could tell that they both had their hesitations about the “war on terror” and their pending deployment to Afghanistan, they were patriots, in the best sense. One of them, a lieutenant, told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there and that in Oregon the place would have been bulldozed and rebuilt so that kids could have a proper place to learn. He seemed troubled that all of this was happening in America. He realized that many of the problems that he was seeing in New Orleans existed before the storm and wanted to know why people had put up with it and why they hadn’t voted the people out of office who let this happen. I told him I didn’t know but that maybe we could change things in New Orleans in the future. He seemed hopeful. I felt less certain.

I introduced them to our new dogs, who were happy to have a little attention. One of the guardsmen told me that there were dying dogs everywhere, and it made him incredibly sad. He said, blankly, “These starving dogs are the saddest thing … after the dead bodies.” They quickly changed the subject.

After being yelled at by holdouts, the police and their commanders, they had made their first friend in New Orleans. I told him how to pronounce the street names properly and what each neighborhood was called and what they were like. I stressed that Esplanade Avenue is pronounced like “lemonade” and that they should correct any of their superiors who say it otherwise. They both laughed. I offered the cigars again and they accepted. As they were walking away, one of them accidentally bumped my leg with the barrel of his M-16. He was embarrassed, as though I might not have noticed the massive guns that both of them were carrying. To ease the tension, I said to them, “You’re the only two 22-year-old men to ever come to New Orleans and not get drunk or laid.” They laughed hard and started walking away again.

“What we wouldn’t give,” they said.

I told them to come back and visit when it was a city again and that they would surely have a better time.

Wallace and I got back in the van and started to head out of town. Before we left his neighborhood, Bywater, we came across some scrappy-looking guys and we pulled over to see if they wanted any of the water or food that we had left in the van. They introduced themselves, saying, “They call us holdouts.” They turned down the water and food, saying they had plenty of canned food and that they had gallons of water in their hot-water heaters. They explained that they had been bathing in the Mississippi but that “it was beginning to get nasty.” They wanted bleach to keep things sanitary, but we didn’t have any. They settled for some Orange Clean, cat food that we had brought for strays, and a five-gallon can of gas for their generator. They told us to tell others to come home: “Bring people back. Tell them that it is OK. That you can make it here.”

We drove off and left our occupied city. I slept most of the drive back as Wallace, still solid, drove. I woke up as we were approaching Oxford and told Wallace to pull into a convenience store so that I could get some beer. It was around 8 at night and we had been on the road for a full day. I brought a six-pack of Budweiser to the register, and the cashier told me that they couldn’t sell beer on Sundays anywhere in Lafayette County. Broken-hearted and shocked, I told her my sad story, but she was inflexible. I thanked her and left, with new resolve to return home to New Orleans as soon as possible.

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.

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.

This year’s American State Litter Scorecard, published by advocacy group the American Society for Public Administration, put both Nevada and Louisiana in the bottom five — echoing the assessment of T+L readers who ranked Las Vegas and New Orleans among America’s dirtiest cities.

Likewise, the American Lung Association releases an annual State of the Air report, listing cities with the least (and most) pollution. Not surprisingly, Los Angeles fared poorly again this year — but so did Phoenix, which T+L readers actually ranked among the top 15 “cleanest.”

“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.

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.