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Race and its role in New Orleans' recovery 10 years later
By Jenny Dubin
To watch the full interview scroll to the bottom of the article.
Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015, marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. After the levees broke in New Orleans, 80 percent of the city flooded and at the time no one was sure if the city could come back.
But the city has come back. With the help of billions of dollars in federal aid, the levee system has been repaired and upgraded, there are new schools, two new medical centers and new energy. For the first time since 1960, more people are moving into New Orleans than moving out, and it’s now one of the fastest-growing cities in America, attracting a young, educated, entrepreneurial class.
However, there’s concern that this “new” New Orleans has left some behind and many people are openly questioning whether it’s an issue of class as well as race.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu is the city’s first white mayor in 32 years. “When you break it down by racial lines, you see a racial divide,” he says. “Does that really surprise anybody given what’s happened in South Carolina, given what’s happened in Ferguson, given what’s happened in Baltimore? And so the city of New Orleans shares the country’s difficulties.”
Rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing are pushing the mostly black, working poor out of the city, leading residents like actor and New Orleans native Wendell Pierce to declare that there’s a war on the poor. “Most of the things you know about New Orleans came from the very community that they wanna get rid of, you know. Jazz funerals, the second line, the cuisine. I love Portland, but we don’t need two Portlands. And that’s what we’re becoming, Portland.”
There are 100,000 fewer African Americans living in New Orleans since the storm, and nowhere is the lack of recovery more visible than in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.
Once home to an estimated 14,000 people, the poor, predominantly African-American neighborhood had the highest percentage of black homeownership in the city prior to the storm. Today, less than 40 percent of the Lower Ninth’s pre-Katrina population has come back. But one man is trying to change all that.
Burnell Cotlon wants the world to know there are parts of New Orleans that have not recovered from Hurricane Katrina. He’s on a mission to bring his community back.
“When people look at New Orleans, they see Bourbon Street. They see the French Quarter. They see Mardi Gras. But they don’t see the Lower Ninth Ward. The Lower Ninth Ward is part of New Orleans. And the Lower Ninth Ward is not recovered like the rest of New Orleans.”
Inspired by an elderly neighbor who had to take three buses just to get to the closest grocery store, the army veteran has invested his life savings to open the neighborhood’s first food market in 10 years and is determined to help bring his community back.
“I’m gonna continue to fight until I could get my neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward to look like the rest of the city. If I have to build the businesses one business at a time alone, I’m gonna do it.”
If you’d like to learn more about Burnell Cotlon’s efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward to help bring his community back, click here.
