Katrina's Legacy

Pic by Colleen Mullins - full article at NYTimes 

When FDR came into office in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, he turned his attention to creating dozens of programs and projects to

• a) feed the children and unemployed poor families, and
• b) create jobs for those who had no work, and 
• c) creating massive public hospitals in large cities, smaller ones in others, and funded universities across the nation to find and teach students with the best attitudes, most-likely-to succeed chance to be good physicians ... and gave them all support possible to treat the sick, teach poor and uninformed parents how and why to raise sound, healthy kids, and
• d) build public housing ... large complexes and smaller ones ... where the same families meeting a, b, and c ... could live in safety and grow into solid'American taxpayers, and raise their kids accordingly.

In my city of New Orleans there are pluperfect examples of all these.

But the examples I want to bring up are the great Roosevelt public housing projects in my city. The whole world has heard of them ... Desire, Magnolia, Calliope, Lafitte, Iberville, St Bernard. Florida - these and others housed generations of New Orleans families, Anglo, African-American and Hispanic, not poverty-stricken - just underemployed, between FDR and Ronald Reagan. 
Then ... after Katrina ... when billions in federal relief justifiably flowed into the New Orleans area because it's government-designed levies and flood walls collapsed, killing 10,000 people and almost destroying an historic American city - the first two or three public focuses of the federal government were in reforming local public housing.

Though virtually all but the most wealthy citizens were either without social problems, efforts turned to wipe away the stain of ghettos formed around the city's old housing projects by razing them - again, while their residents had been redirected to other cities, and maintained there with federal support - and quickly, with contractors and workers brought to New Orleans from across North America, building smaller 4 and 8- unit housing, then up to ten or twenty-unit housing groups. 

Today, where earlier, rather dilapidated, overcrowded and massive had stood, attractive small groups of homes are spread among the centuries-old live oaks that previously hid the sins of earlier leaders. 
Within five or six blocks of our townhouse off St Charles Avenue in the garden district, families lead good lives, their children safe in the handsome new public charter school structures that replaced the old, scandal-ridden school system.

New hospitals are everywhere. 

When Barbara and I made that trip to Texas in front of Katrina we had no thought that anything in New Orleans might be improved by it - only that it might possibly survive it.
But today our city is pretty glorious - not without flaws, and certainly not finished. But better than when our sons grew up here, and almost certain to improve even more.

Ask anybody - in any neighborhood in town ... Katrina - the monster became our best friend in the end.