While I was in NOLA I got a feel what was going on there. These are my observations of what I heard, saw, and experienced. First of all there is a racial component that is difficult there. Racism is still very much alive. The hurricane hit the poor the hardest. The poor is a demographic is probably the hardest to recover as well. If you had any type of financial resources you could rebuild and it's not a problem. If you are poor then you are still in a Fema trailer if you were lucky enough to get one.
Enter the problems with housing. As you can imagine with a shortage of livable homes the cost of rent has at least doubled or tripled. A lot of the public housing projects are on the list to get bulldozed and changed into mixed housing. There are some housing developers who stand to make a lot of money if this happens. What happens instead is that there politicians who stall the process. There is a lot of bureaucracy that also stalls progress. Such as filing 5 different forms at 5 different locations. This especially afflicts the uneducated, often illiterate, poor.
When Katrina hit it displaced a lot of poor black people. I get the feeling that the many of the upper class whites where happy with this and often looked down their noses at them. Example, many didn't want to or weren't interested in seeing the damage. Closing down public housing effectively keeps poor out. The down side to this is that if you have a small business you need people to work. If those people are displaced and can't come back to NOLA then it is hard to find labor. The large businesses can rebuild because of backing by large corporations. It was sad to see the small restaurants, and business still closed. What the end result is that the economy of New Orleans is effectively stalled. So the rebuilding is being stalled as well.
Enter the problems with housing. As you can imagine with a shortage of livable homes the cost of rent has at least doubled or tripled. A lot of the public housing projects are on the list to get bulldozed and changed into mixed housing. There are some housing developers who stand to make a lot of money if this happens. What happens instead is that there politicians who stall the process. There is a lot of bureaucracy that also stalls progress. Such as filing 5 different forms at 5 different locations. This especially afflicts the uneducated, often illiterate, poor.
When Katrina hit it displaced a lot of poor black people. I get the feeling that the many of the upper class whites where happy with this and often looked down their noses at them. Example, many didn't want to or weren't interested in seeing the damage. Closing down public housing effectively keeps poor out. The down side to this is that if you have a small business you need people to work. If those people are displaced and can't come back to NOLA then it is hard to find labor. The large businesses can rebuild because of backing by large corporations. It was sad to see the small restaurants, and business still closed. What the end result is that the economy of New Orleans is effectively stalled. So the rebuilding is being stalled as well.
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