Acclaimed environmental scholar Robert Bullard will speak at Tech today at 4 p.m. in Engel 223. Bullard will speak on "Race, Place and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast" which is the focus of his new book due to come out February 2009 from Perseus Books Group.
Q: What is going to be the focus of your talk?
A: "It's basically, the book is looking at the rebuilding, recovery, and revitalization of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast post-Katrina."
Q: Are you making suggestions for improvements or just studying the effects of it?
A: "What we are looking at is, examining some of the environmental, economic and sociable issues that existed before the storm, pre-Katrina, and examining any lessons that have been learned over the past three or four decades in addressing vulnerable population after natural and man-made disasters. And so the focus is mainly race and class dynamics in the allocation of resources in terms of how insurance settlements are made, what areas are slated for rebuilding and how the recovery and cleaning, in terms of the geography, spatial locations, and race. And particularly looking at the fact that Hurricane Katrina was considered one of the worst environmental hazards -- (a) catastrophe -- in the country. And, in particular, when you talk about the destruction of houses and the flooding of 80 percent of the city, and the contamination that was left from receding flood waters and contaminating sediments, and examining what happened after the storm, but also putting in context what were some of the environmental problems and environmental justice problems were before Katrina that we had been working on the for the last 25 years. ... So, it's looking at how race, class, factors, figure in to rebuilding the city of New Orleans as well as rebuilding the Gulf Coast, how investments are made and how they are skewed oftentimes.
Q: And have you made any conclusions from all the data you have been researching and analyzing about some of the differentiations some of these, like you said, these sort of middle-class people who had all of the available amenities and the lower classes that did not?
A: "Yeah, as a matter of fact we did a major report for the Russell Sage Foundation called 'In the wake of the storm, race, environment and disaster after Katrina,' and we had some preliminary findings from that report, and what we did is expand that study to look at not only the environment in terms of the physical environment but also to look at how resources are being allocated in terms of what the differential and disparate allocations of funds means for the ability of people of color and, in this case, we are talking mostly about African Americans and Vietnamese and Latinos to return. And one major conclusion, which was a major finding in our study before the storm, is that race and vulnerability go hand in hand.
And that there's still a racial dynamic playing a part in terms of which communities get services, which communities were left behind and which communities are provided resources to recover, and this is true before the storm, in terms of which communities did not have access to good public transportation for putting people to get to jobs. A third of black people in New Orleans don't have cars so the people who are left behind in New Orleans, before the storm, in terms of behind in where jobs have moved to, and where economic development is occurring, is away from many African American communities. The spatial mismatch is real. These are the same people who were left behind in the disaster. So when you combine that kind of analysis to talk about the continuing of building on vulnerability and not addressing some of the legacy issues of the communities that were threatened environments before the storm, these are the same communities that are struggling to come back clean, green healthy."
Q: To me this is sort of remarkable because 2005 was Katrina, and seems as if the community has had a lot of time, or at least a lot of opportunity to ameliorate this situation, and are you finding that it is getting better, it is getting worse, is it remaining stagnant, or what?
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
Just because people think that its OK and everything has achieved a sense of normalcy because you have Mardi Gras and you have jazz fest, and you have all the festivals, et cetera. But if you move beyond the French quarter and certain areas in to the very heavily damaged areas, there's still a lot left to be done and in some cases its almost as if nothing has been done to rectify the problem of that disaster that catastrophe.
Q: You actually perfectly segued me in to my next question, which is: Has this tremendously unfortunate disaster possibly become a blessing in disguise and will New Orleans perhaps rise out of this as one of the emerging leaders of sustainable development?
I would hope so. I would hope that these opportunities would avail themselves to get more and more organization leaders and public-private partnerships, some of that is going on right now, but I think that it's hit or miss.
In terms of, for example, transportation, and if you're talking about rebuilding a city and rebuilding in a way that can deal with some of the emerging issues around vulnerability and climate change and this whole question of justice, rebuilding in a way that can have livable, walkable, compact neighborhoods where you have areas where there are alternatives to driving, with green space and buildings that are green and schools that are green and even transportation that's green.
And those things are not just pie in the sky, that it's a great opportunity to do that and to allow New Orleans to be one of the showcase cities for seeing how you can create this smarter, fairer, greener city. But you know, if you talk about this whole issue of sustainability, if we just talk about rebuilding in away that is economically viable and in way that environmentally sustainable, if the issue of the equity component is not addressed, I think it's a major piece that may get left off.
The fact that New Orleans has a tremendous housing shortage and a housing shortage at the lower end, in terms of working class houses and apartments as well as housing for low income. Before the storm the average one bedroom apartment was $600, today it's over $1,300 -- its doubled in some cases. And so the access to afford housing is a major issue and for that layer of working-class employees who basically fill the jobs of the service industry whether it's restaurants, hotels, or the tourist industry, there is a tremendous housing shortage for those workers. So you have to be able to provide this mixed income housing for a population, if you want to make sure you are not just gentrifying and only allowing the pop that are in the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum, to return and enjoy this city that will come back is coming back in certain areas.