Posted on 10/12/2005 9:07:51 PM PDT by Libloather
Return To New Orleans Is Urged
Mayor Travels Louisiana to Tout Work, Housing
By Peter Whoriskey and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 13, 2005; Page A01
ALEXANDRIA, La., Oct. 12 -- Amid fears that the effort to repopulate New Orleans is stalling, Mayor C. Ray Nagin hopscotched shelters across the state Wednesday to assure Hurricane Katrina evacuees that the city is beginning to operate again and urged them to "come on home."
For the charismatic first-term politician, it was a novel kind of political campaign: not for votes necessarily, but for voters themselves.
It is a daunting task. New Orleans's lower Ninth Ward reopened to residents Wednesday, but few came back. Schools in neighboring communities have had their students reduced by half. Business owners are desperate for workers, and city leaders are increasingly concerned that many residents will never return.
Evacuees are scattered across 44 states, and many have vowed to remain where they landed.
Red Cross officials say about 550,000 remain in hotels and motels subsidized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Meanwhile, neighborhoods such as the Ninth Ward and lower parts of St. Bernard, Plaquemines and Cameron parishes "will take months and sometimes longer to create a livable environment," U.S. Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, head of federal Katrina relief efforts, said at a briefing in Baton Rouge.
With much of his city still vacant, Nagin launched his campaign. "My big message is: You can come back to the city," Nagin told a group of about 40 at a shelter here, a three-hour drive from New Orleans. He urged the crowd to "get back to the red beans and rice and gumbo and all those things that you love."
The crowd hooted and clapped.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
NEW ORLEANS: Residents of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, a poor, mainly black neighbourhood that lay submerged for weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, have returned home for the first time but found little to salvage.
A stream of cars, ambulances and relief vans began entering the area early on Wednesday morning under the watchful eye of National Guard troops operating roadblocks.
Some people came from as far as Texas and Arkansas, donning masks and rubber boots as they trudged down streets covered with mud and debris, the remnants of a tidal surge that brought 3.7-metre floodwaters to the working class district.
On each block were the familiar markings of Katrina's fury: cars tossed like matchsticks and dwellings stripped of doors and windows.
In one house, the body of a woman was found unexpectedly by her horrified grandson, bringing Katrina's death toll in Louisiana to at least 1022.
Others found only ruin in what remained of their homes.
"There ain't nothing in there you can take," said Ernest King, 28, pointing at a bright blue house his mother owns. King had hitched a trailer to his minivan in the hope of bringing some belongings back, but left empty-handed.
Deborah Hall met similar disappointment when she peered into the single-story white house where she was raised only to find that the living room furniture and decorations had become an unrecognisable heap of water- and mud-soaked debris.
"I was expecting to get one memory," Hall, 41, said tearfully as she stood with her brother, Wesley Hall, 47, outside the home.
Those who returned to the area on Wednesday had precious little time to survey what remained of their property. Under an arrangement with the city, they were required to leave the area by 6pm.
Some parts of the neighbourhood remained off-limits and were blocked by soldiers. At one roadblock Kurt Freudenberg of the Washington State National Guard said 20 people had tried to pass in the previous hour.
Officials imposed the restrictions because of a belief that much of the Ninth Ward, considered the area hardest hit by the flooding caused by Katrina in August and later by Hurricane Rita, was still unsafe.
Although the floodwaters have receded, the foundations of some houses have moved, making them structurally unsound and uninhabitable. Many are likely to be bulldozed once the city goes ahead with reconstruction efforts.
"It is important for people to see their homes and move forward with the process of building a new future for their families," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement released hours before the Lower Ninth Ward was reopened.
Nagin and others concede that finding housing for the city's 450,000 people, many of whom are scattered in shelters and settlement camps around the United States, is the biggest challenge facing New Orleans.
The city, which is out of money and has laid off thousands of municipal workers, is working with the federal government on a plan to temporarily house residents in hotels, makeshift trailer parks and on unused military bases.
It has also left open the possibility that whole blocks of homes may be condemned, a prospect that did not sit well with some.
"I will live in this house again," said Andrew Sanchez, 47, who stood in six inches of mud outside the house he has lived in his whole life. "Everyone may not come back, but homeowners will."
The plantation masters will not be happy.
Who knows the truth of Jesse Jackson's crusade to take workers back to NO? Fox reported last night that he went to a shelter in St Louis and left with three, two of which spoke only Spanish. Apparently, he brought busloads, but they were mostly natives of Memphis and Mobile, acc/ Brit Hume tonight.
Sorry Ray, your failure to plan, failure to act, failure to hire real live policemen, failure to direct the levee funding towards safer levees, failure to find a functional command post after the storm, failure to keep your big mouth shut instead of spreading wild lies about your own city in an effort to blame others for your own shortcomings has killed the city.
It's dead.
How fast, or even whethewr New Orleans comes back to life or not, depends on precisely how fast you and Blanco and Landrieu step down and allow others to clean up the mess you've created.
New Orleans, as long as Nagin and Blanco are in power, is dead. Stick a fork in it.
A person I used to work with came home and found out that his neighborhood had had 20 ft of water...what a homecoming.
And the trees are dying.
New Orleans had a noteworthy urban forest, as they call it, one which got written up in the silvaculture journals that talk about that sort of thing...
Some look to repopulate the region (on the gubmint's dime, of course).
Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, confers with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin over lunch in Jefferson Parish, La., Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005. Jackson arrived with about 200 job seekers and New Orleans residents evacuated during Hurricane Katrina. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
Jesse ain't looking to repopulate N.O. - He's just looking for the governments money.AWB
pathetic
Maybe there are better opportunities about 5-6,000 miles East.
5-6,000 miles east?
Isn't that in the ocean?
That would take honor and a sense of civic duty over personal aggrandizement - both of which are in short supply amongst the Dims.
Is insurance paying out like its hurricane difference or flood damage.
I live in the next town over from the Rapides Parish Coliseum and have a better link from the Alexandria Town Talk on Mayor Nagin's visit here:
http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051012/NEWS01/51012024
These people Nagin spoke to, with the exception of one particularly vocal Ninth Ward woman who seems to dominate both our local TV and newspaper coverage, don't appear too interested in going home. The reason the shelter counts are dropping is because people are getting financial assistance from various sources and they are using the money to put down rental deposits on apartments and houses in Alexandria/Pineville. The classified listings for rental apartments in the Town Talk are almost non-existent these days (except for apartment complexes that have ongoing advertising contracts, so those ads appear every day anyway).
When you talk to displaced people in Rapides Parish, they have been encouraged by the kindness of the community that rushed to embrace them when they first arrived. As a result, their short-term goal is to either find jobs in the Alexandria area or to start their own entrepreneurial businesses from their new homes.
Naturally, there is a serious downside to this for people who were already Alexandria residents. God help anybody who was unemployed before Katrina and Rita hit, because the newcomers get the sympathy vote every time when it comes to getting hired. Longtime locals find themselves sitting on the sidelines without jobs as employers embrace the "survivors" instead. And while Mayor Nagin brags about how he is abolishing minimum wage jobs in New Orleans, here in Alexandria employers are going by the economic law of supply and demand. With so many people flooding the local workforce hungry for jobs, employers can drop wages to $6.00 per hour (minimum wage is $5.15 here) and actually get away with it. Everyone knows there are plenty of people out there desperate enough to take the job at any price.
Take a look at another link from the Town Talk which is more indicative of what's really happening -- FEMA is planning to put up trailer park cities in Pineville.
http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051012/NEWS01/510120311
Mayor Nagin can take all the photo op cues he wants from Jesse Jackson, but I don't think he accomplished anything on his tour of the shelters. He can make all the sentimental sound bite quotes he wants about eating red beans and rice on Mondays, but I think those pots will be cooking in Alexandria and Pineville instead of New Orleans from now on.
Ain't no sitcha thang.
So y'all come on back now so we can get those numbers back up where they belong.
I've been thinking about it, and it may not require voluntary action to get Nagin out of the way.
That whole deal with sending the cops to Vegas before the floodwaters had even gone down?
Uh-uh, no way.
Then we hear the Feds are looking into ghost cops, who have been used to get Fed money for the city?
We'll see how it turns out.
Then when you start looking into the levees that failed in Cat-1 conditions?
Not sure Blanco and Landrieu will face charges over that mess, but I'm willing to bet that when the story breaks, they don't get elected dogcatcher in Louisiana again.
If it ever breaks, that is.
If not, well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Reporters may always think and act like reporters, but they are the only stereotypes to be found.
The real question?
How long, and how many $billions do we throw down the toilet before it gets flushed?
"How can we make money from this?"
Isn't that what katrina did?
That photo depicts to modern day SLAVE TRADERS.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.