[CPEO-BIF] New Orleans - Who will return?

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The Economics of Return
Class, Color May Guide Repopulation of New Orleans

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post
October 19, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- It was a Thursday, the first of September, just four days 
after Hurricane Katrina, and floodwater stood seven feet deep in the 
living room of Robert Bouchon's big brick house on Memphis Street in 
Lakeview, this city's largest middle-class, white neighborhood.

...

When Katrina blew in and levees gave way, the high water, in many 
neighborhoods, was colorblind and classless. It clobbered Lakeview, a 
leafy and serene white area where longtime residents cannot remember 
serious flooding, as cruelly as the Lower Ninth Ward, a black 
neighborhood with a long, dismal history of high water.

But in New Orleans, where affluent whites live high and working-class 
blacks live low, the privileges of neighborhood quickly asserted 
themselves. For many, race and class predicted patterns of escape, 
dictating whether flight would be a nervous drive out of town or a caged 
week of torment and humiliation.

These days, as planners and politicians look ahead, many realize that 
the future of this city, which before the storm was more than two-thirds 
black and nearly one-third poor, swings on two simple questions:

Are residents coming home? If so, which ones?

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801910.html

--
Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org


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