Collegiate Times

A: "Well I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that so much was destroyed, the infrastructure, physical infrastructure, but also the social networks were basically dismantled. The storm dismantled many of the social networks' infrastructures in terms of institutions, organizations, churches, volunteer associations, et cetera. It may be easier to rebuild a house, but rebuilding that infrastructure in terms of social network is more difficult and I think its also important to understand a whole, several layers of the social infrastructure was destroyed in terms of displacing large numbers of, not just poor people from New Orleans, but also the black middle class. And you're talking about school teachers. When the school system was shut down, when schools were closed,

Katrina closed schools, you basically wiped out a whole black middle class in terms of school teachers. Teachers were fired, they were scattered all over. And so to get that return of a system that is for the most part charter schools right now, and to look at the fact that you still have 70 percent of the population has returned, over 90 percent of whites have returned, but only about half of the African American community has returned. There are reasons why you have these different rates of return, and in terms of where neighborhoods have been, investments have been made to recover certain neighborhoods, where other neighborhoods have been basically somewhat slow to return, slow to recover, slow to basically rebuild. A lot of it has to do with how insurance settlements are divvied up and also pre-Katrina which neighborhoods were red lined, and which insurance companies basically would not write insurance policies in certain neighborhoods before the storm and how that impacted what happens ... there's a difference there.

And if everything were to be equal there should not be a differential between the amounts of time at which one group receive settlements because of insurance and the time of which another, same family, received their money under the federal program that was given the money to the state to dish out money for homeowners to rebuild.

Then you look at you know this whole idea of billions have been spent, almost five billion, in retrofitting the levee system, and if you look at, you know do the geography of which neighborhoods have significant increase in flood protection, and then you overlay race, its very clear which neighborhoods received five and six feet of increased flood protection and which areas received zero. And New Orleans East for example, which is about 60 percent of the landmass of the city and about 40 percent of the tax base pre-Katrina received zero protection. Zero increased protection.

Whereas in certain areas that are predominantly white and affluent, like Lakeview... these areas received five and a half feet of increased protection. There's still disparities that exist even after the rebuilding has moved (on) after three years. And so if you're talking about rebuilding on an inequitable infrastructure, and levels of protection, have basically been provided in unequal ways, and if another storm comes and you know there's another category three, four, or whatever, that's flooding then there's unequal protection even after what we have seen happened three years ago."

And those are the kind of things we are addressing. In terms of which neighborhoods are not getting cleaned up, in terms of where the contaminants that's been found, whether it's arsenic or lead, or other contaminants and its left in the ground. And people are saying, 'well you know this is a great opportunity to do the right thing and to make the city safe and clean and to green more and to make sure the schools that are being renovated and the new schools that are being built that we could rebuild green.'

And, again, I am saying that there are opportunities that are being lost and the fact that the city of New Orleans, as far as Katrina, to a large extent, has fallen off the national radar screens

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