Hurricane recovery, Republican-style

During the 19th century, Biloxi was a resort town for wealthy white families from New Orleans and other Southern cities, and the center of a booming seafood and canning industry that rivaled Baltimore's in size and influence. Those industries, built initially on slave labor, also brought in thousands of Eastern Europeans and created unusual inroads for the Catholic Church in a largely Protestant state. But the city was strictly segregated until 1963, when Gilbert Mason, a prominent doctor and a longtime member of the state NAACP, organized a series of "wade-ins" to integrate the city's public beaches.

African-Americans soon became an important political and economic force in the city. Biloxi's population was further transformed in the late 1970s, when the seafood and shrimping industry recruited thousands of Vietnamese who had left their homeland in the wake of the Indochina War. During the 1990s, Biloxi's economic base expanded with the construction of several casinos, which the state Legislature had legalized with the stipulation that they confine their gambling to vessels and barges.

But Katrina's wrath wrecked everything within a mile of the coastline and laid waste to much of the city. The surge sent tons of water into the bay north of the peninsula, flooding the inland township of Turkey Creek, a historic community founded by former slaves in the 1860s. Television pictures captured much of the devastation, including the casinos yanked off their moorings and thrown crazily across nearby highways. Altogether, 238 people lost their lives in the area, and more than 3,000 homes and commercial structures in Biloxi were wiped out.

Because of its proximity to the water, the area around East Biloxi, the district represented by Stallworth, has become ground zero for the casino and real estate boom. Almost immediately after the storm, developers literally began walking around offering large sums of money to people willing to sell their property; some, despairing of putting together the resources to rebuild, took the money and left.

The developers "want to make the place so inundated with casinos that Biloxi becomes a little Las Vegas," says Jackie Washington, an East Biloxi resident who lost her home in the storm. "All the way around the water, they're trying to box us in." Like her, many of East Biloxi's other residents have chosen to stay and have banded together with local environmental activists, clergy and Vietnamese citizens' groups to seek a more balanced approach to recovery. They have found a champion in Stallworth.

To keep the casinos at bay, Stallworth and the activists at the East Biloxi Coordination and Relief Center came up with an interesting strategy: They began helping people buy scattered plots of land near their homesteads and organized volunteers to repair and rebuild houses. Once locals created a "checkerboard" of their properties, Stallworth says, condo developers could no longer come in and buy everything out. The strategy appears to be working; the pressure from the casino interests "is starting to abate," Stallworth says. So far, he says, volunteers working through the relief center have repaired 500 homes and built around 18 new structures.

Local activists say they have been forced to take matters into their own hands because the state has made it so difficult for low-income people to tap into government funds. Many of the initial aid beneficiaries were people who owned palatial homes on the waterfront. Yet even today, thousands of low-income applicants are still waiting for help. Washington is one of them. She applied for assistance in May 2006, and received her first response from the state two weeks ago. But the notice didn't say how much she might receive or give a date when she might expect a check. "The red tape to get it -- that's what really and truly hurts," she said.

Meanwhile, residents of other cities on the coast have watched Biloxi's influx of casinos with a mixture of fear and envy. Most of Biloxi's neighbors, including the city of Gulfport, Mississippi's second largest, adopted "smart growth" plans after the storm, designed to balance business development with the housing needs of residents. (Biloxi, under the leadership of the pro-gambling Mayor Holloway, did not.) They are concerned not only about the economic impact of casinos but also about the potential environmental effects of development.

In the town of Bay St. Louis, west of Biloxi, a group of residents have gone to the state's supreme court in a bid to overturn a decision by the Hancock County Council, made before the storm, to rezone 1,100 acres of coastal wetland to permit large-scale condominium development, without any height or density restrictions.

Coastal Community Watch, the local environmental group behind the lawsuit, has voiced concern that further destruction of wetlands on the coast can only increase the state's vulnerability to storms like Katrina. More recently, a commission of citizens recommended a ban on any new construction of casinos in Bay St. Louis, which has one gaming establishment. In the wake of Katrina, "everybody realizes we have to change," said Bob Davis, a member of that commission. "But a lot of us don't want Bay St. Louis to become a little Biloxi."

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