New Orleans: One year on

More writing on New Orleans

2006-10-21T05:45:00.000-05:00

For more of my articles on New Orleans a year on from Katrina, follow the links below:

Spiked Magazine - "Nothing's simple in the Big Easy"
The Guardian - "There's no place like home"
Hackwriters - "One year on"

Macho man

2006-09-11T23:39:00.000-05:00

I’ve met three US marines in New Orleans and each encounter has been as fun and formidable as I always hoped it would. The first was in a little Irish pub just off Bourbon Street, where a crazy bartender called Emily regaled us with the tale of how she once called up Cingular (a big American mobile network) and demanded to know whether they could back up their advertised claim to have the ‘fewest dropped calls’.

There was a motley crew propping up the bar and none of us was remotely interested in the outcome of this story. But Emily’s manic approach of emphasising her points by clattering glasses down in front of us and firing drinks in every direction to head off any potential interruptions had everyone too terrified to move, so we laboured on to the end (which, you will be pleased to know, resulted in her being kept on hold for two hours only to find out the relevant research had been carried out by a company owned by Cingular). Basking in her single-handed triumph on behalf of neurotic consumers everywhere, Emily departed swinging her towel triumphantly in the air. Relieved to have survived the ordeal with relatively few glass-shard related injuries, conversation gently returned to our corner of the bar.

Before long my companion (seated on my right) began speaking in increasingly vociferously and slurred tones, as people generally seem to do over here, on the subject of George Bush. The remarks became steadily more hostile and a few references to the Pope were chucked in for good measure, before the man to my left – a 60+ mountain of pasty flesh who up to now I’d assumed was a scenic prop – suddenly rose up off his stool (no inconsiderable feat), slammed down his quadruple whisky, thrust his arm across me and pointed at my friend. “I,” he thundered, “am a Republican, a Catholic and a former US Marine.” He stood there palpably shaking in fury with his accusatory finger fully outstretched, before darkly concluding: “and I don’t like your tone.”

As introductions go it certainly wasn’t a bad one. The two if them ended up drunkenly swapping gossip about the Green Bay Packers, and all further mentions of Papal fascism and retarded Republicans were studiously avoided. I was still recovering from the experience the next night when, out of the gloom of a Frenchmen Street jazz club, another marine approached me (thankfully this one was young and still serving, so lacked some of the bile the older generation appear to have stored up). With a worryingly passive-aggressive series of twitches, furtive eye movements and delirious grins, he confided in whispers that he was a liberal who played the mandolin, a fact that he could never reveal to his soldier comrades for fear of getting lynched. “I’m the fucking outcast dude!” he exploded into my previously strained ear, causing me to leap back in undisguised panic into an unsuspecting couple behind me. His friend, also a marine, soon joined us and walked me through a step-by-step tutorial on how to procure illicit alcohol if stationed at a US airbase in Afghanistan. “It’s all about the federal mailbags man,” he kept saying whilst pouring us more drinks. The pair eventually started dancing before the liberal passed out. The other one cheerfully dragged him into a taxi, all the while mouthing ‘mailbags’ to me and offering anyone within earshot several varieties of hard drugs.

The national guard patrols much of New Orleans parish down here, as the city police are overstretched as it is by rising violence in the past year. There is also a large army base over the river on the West Bank, the result of which is that military types are not in short supply. For entertainment value alone, based on these three specimens I can’t help but feel such a presence can only be a good thing. After all, who can tell when the vagaries of Afghanistani contraband might come up in a pub quiz?

The sound of progress

2006-09-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

If you’re keen on mood swings, emotional rollercoasters and violent surges from languid cynicism to breathless optimism, then there’s no city quite like New Orleans. A positive outlook can evaporate in seconds when you come across a rotting and abandoned house in the middle of a vibrant neighbourhood, and the weight of depression can be lifted in an instant when you encounter someone quietly rebuilding their life against all the odds. In the upper 9th yesterday, every emotional extremity was up for grabs.

I went over to take a look at Musicians’ Village, an eight-acre site being developed by a Christian non-profit organisation called Habitat for Humanity. After cycling through battered houses and crumbling roads for so long, through once populous neighbourhoods that are now devoid of almost any human presence, it’s hard to describe how amazing it is to turn a corner and be confronted with the whirr of drills, scraping of saws and banging of hammers. There were scores of people milling around, cementing pathways, tiling roofs and barking orders at each other, all clad in white volunteer t-shirts and scurrying between rows of brightly coloured wooden houses in various stages of construction. Once work here is complete there will be 81 new homes and a sparkling new music center in the middle of them. It was a refreshing sight.

The project relies on volunteer labour and the plight of New Orleans has attracted a vast cross-section of American society to the site. “You’re meeting all sorts of people from the United States working here, from all walks of life,” one woman told me. She and her friend had driven from Colorado after being sponsored by friends and family; working with her were two Californian students, an insurance agent from New Jersey who was in Louisiana for a conference and the former publisher of Esquire Magazine. People sign up for as long as they can spare, creating an interesting (and often troublesome) mix of old-timers and those, like the insurance agent, who were doing a single morning shift then heading home. But, almost without exception, they were touchingly vivacious whilst throwing themselves into their tasks; clearly there is something pretty powerful about raising a house quite literally from scratch.

There is some legitimate concern about the way in which voluntary work here can be a convenient way of assuaging guilt; the motivation and practical contribution of technically-challenged accountants and corporate directors who come for a few hours then disappear was questioned by many people I spoke to, and the appearance earlier this year of Nagin, Bush and Blanco donning tool belts at the village in front of the cameras was stomach-churningly hypocritical. But that doesn't take anything away from those who are genuinely putting their all into bringing these houses to life.

The idea behind the village is that the future owners of the new homes have to put in a minimum of 350 hours of ‘sweat equity’ into the project – in other words they have to contribute their own labour to the residences they will eventually move into. Then they get a low-interest mortgage with which to buy the house (the cost of which is a heavily-subsidised $70,000). The principle is that by allowing people to work on their own homes and the immediate community in which they are situated, the new owners will feel they have a real stake in the neighbourhood, generating the kind of civic pride which in many ways was lacking in the pre-Katrina 9th ward. So many people felt excluded and abandoned by the government and society that crime and unemployment were the inevitable byproducts; this way residents will hopefully be better motivated to respect and nurture their community. It’s a scheme for those seeking to become homeowners – the mortgage is too expensive for the very poor – but as a model it could be a long-term solution to the problem of the public housing projects.

At 4007 N Roman St, Linda Nunnery was running her fingers approvingly along the newly-painted porch whilst volunteers finished off the pathway down below. The 51 year old mother of two has been living in a trailer since Katrina flooded her home in Gentilly. She is still shaken by the memories of being trapped in the Convention Center for four days after the hurricane, watching the world around her descend into anarchy. Now though, her job has restarted (she was a patient escort worker at the now defunct Charity Hospital, but the University Hospital needs her services) and she is getting a new home. “Oh good, it feels so good,” she grins. “I got to build my own house, choose what’s going in where, it feels like home. And it makes you feel proud, knowing I built that.” Linda put in 440 hours of sweat equity and will move in later this month – one of the first occupants of Musicians’ Village. “You learn so much. You’re building a house from the ground up, putting in the foundation, then the wiring, and you really find out how a house is built.” The gaudy purple exterior wouldn’t have been my choice, but the fact it was Linda’s means a lot to her. “I picked that colour myself,” gazing above the doorway. “And that’s important.”

It’s not a magic wand, but the idea of getting those that can’t put up a lot of money to put in their labour instead could play an important role in post-Katrina regeneration, doing what mixed-income developments have failed to do, and help preserve a real sense of community in the rebuilt Big Easy.

Photos (from the top): Children from other states welcome the residents of Musicians' Village; some of the newly-built houses; a bumch of volunteers pose for the camera; Linda Nunnery's new home; she poses in her new kitchen

Playing games with disaster

2006-09-08T22:43:00.000-05:00

When Manchester United backtracked on sponsorship talks with an offshore gambling company and plumped for the American insurance giant AIG instead, United’s Chief Executive was quick to heap on the platitudes. “I think AIG is the right company for Manchester United,” said David Gill. “[We assessed AIG’s] size and structure, the culture and ethos. We believe we have found a good bedfellow.”

Try talking to New Orleanians about AIG’s ethos and you’re likely to get a pretty violent response. The firm were the underwriters for the Louisiana Citizens Fair Plan (known as FAIR), an insurance deal for the poorest residents who couldn’t afford their own private policies. Already trapped in an income bracket that made them the most vulnerable to natural and economic disasters, these were the citizens who needed financial assistance most when Katrina took aim and destroyed their homes, livelihoods and, in many cases, their families.

And what was the response of AIG (the world’s fourth largest company, net profits annually exceeding $9 billion)? There wasn’t one. Emails, calls and letters from desperate policyholders went ignored and unanswered, even as floodwaters slowly rotted the city. “This is the worst case that we have seen of a complete failure of an insurance company to respond to the immediate and dire situation of Katrina policyholders,” said Joanne Doroshow, co-founder of an insurance reform group, at the time. “Many FAIR policyholders were struggling economically before the storm hit, and some are now reaching the point of severe impoverishment due to AIG's failure to help them.”

AIG wasn’t the only culprit; other big companies played a role in what amounted to a morally despicable (and potentially criminal) neglect of duty to their customers. “Many policyholders who were exhausted, traumatized, and without food, water or a roof over their heads, looked to their insurance carriers to come to their aid as they struggled to survive – but what many found was not help at all, but rather resistance by insurance companies to pay them anything, leaving victims frustrated and angry, not to mention destitute,” explains Doroshow. But with their name plastered over every United shirt, and flashing up in the extensive media coverage of the Premiership, AIG have become a particularly recognisable brand in Britain, where few people are aware of their transatlantic behaviour.

What’s even more galling is that many people are still being cold-shouldered a year later, including some who remain unable to get through to AIG to ask about their claim, and others who have been informed that the insurer will simply not pay out. A class action against the firm has been filed on behalf of the 400,000 FAIR policyholders, and others are pursuing private cases. One New Orleans resident who has joined legal action against AIG (but who does not wish to be identified while the case is still pending) is planning to construct a giant banner on his roof denouncing the company – a statement that will be visible to every single visitor arriving by plane to the city’s airport.

Whether Manchester United’s sponsors will take any notice is another matter – they are no stranger to corporate scandal and negative publicity. They claim to have made a huge loss from Katrina (though the impact on them and other insurance companies has been overstated), yet the real losers are those trying to rebuild in New Orleans today. Insurance premiums have soared and in some cases an upscale but unremarkable house can now cost over $17,000 to insure annually, depressing the property market and making it harder for scattered New Orleanians to return.

All of which would make David Gill’s comments (made seven months after the hurricane) amusingly silly, if they weren’t so tragically wrong.

A preservation conundrum

2006-09-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

When the levees broke, New Orleans filled up like a bowl. After the toxic soup of oil, chemicals and sewage eventually drained away and the extent of Katrina’s damage became clear, a debate immediately started about what should be preserved and what should be surrendered to the bulldozers. It’s a debate which is still being played out today.

When talking to New Orleanians, what always strikes me is how devoted they are to this city and enthused by its culture. Every town generates some feelings of loyalty within its populace but here it’s a passionate, almost irrationally charged attachment. And it helps explain why so many are willing to risk everything financially and psychologically and come back to the devastation.

When it comes to planning the future of the area, the challenge is to preserve that spirit; retaining the unique nature of New Orleans (the clash of Creole, French, Spanish, African and American culture here is electrifying – and almost impossible to find elsewhere in the States) is the key to getting its people back home. Today I had two interesting conversations with people seeking, in different ways, to do exactly that.

Patty Gay is the director of the city’s Preservation Resource Center, an admirable organisation that fights to defend New Orleans’ historic neighbourhoods. They have published a book that pictorially depicts the soul of the city and it covers a lot more than architecturally significant homes. Patty believes that historic architecture is a fundamental building block of what makes the Big Easy special; if that is maintained successfully then the vibrancy of local, distinct neighbourhoods is far more likely to survive the creeping process of homogenisation that has corrupted many cities in America (and worldwide). “This is what is going to save our city, our culture,” she says. “The architecture of a neighbourhood is a very important part of that – it’s why people want to come back, and why you hear so many people regretting the fact that they can’t come back.”

That is not to say the city has surfaced unscathed from large-scale development. Construction of the interstate highway decimated a bustling black neighbourhood including the legendary Basin Street, the notorious Superdome was plonked slap bang in the middle of a colourful residential area that included a nineteenth century cemetery, and some believe that it was only the city’s bankruptcy in the 1980s that saved it from modernist transformation into a soulless concrete jungle. But the fact is that in many parts of the city, softly painted Creole cottages and shotgun houses remain standing, not as historical monuments but as living, breathing centrepieces of their neighbourhoods.

The most historic of these neighbourhoods were largely spared by the floodwaters, although the PRC still faces a battle with the city authorities to prevent the demolition of some important houses. But the spirit they are fighting to preserve – the sense of community that keeps New Orleans’ heart beating, is also under threat elsewhere. The shuttered-up public housing developments look set to be replaced by ‘mixed-income’ developments accommodating both poorer, working class residents who are subsidised by the state and wealthier residents who can pay the market rate. It’s a bold and contentious move, and its being pioneered here by Pres Kabacoff, an influential local property developer whose River Gardens complex is being used as a model for New Orleans regeneration.

The charge against Kabacoff and his vision is that by levelling the public housing projects, the city is making it impossible for those that lived there and who are now scattered around the country to return. There are dark rumours of developers eyeing up the prime real estate that some of the projects sit on, and the numbers of affordable housing units available in mixed-income developments simply don’t stack up. There is a fear that some of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents are being culturally cleansed out of the future Crescent City.

It’s a charge Kabacoff vigorously denies. “What the international community knows of the city (the French Quarter, the business district, etc.) is still intact, it wasn’t damaged by the storm,” he says. “But what we’re missing are the characters that give the city its life, and as a city we need to make sure we bring that culture back. And what’s more we need to recognise that the city’s workforce is of course comprised of poorer residents as well, and we need them back for economic reasons.” So why stop people returning to the projects? “We cannot recreate the ghettos of the past. Previously we segregated poor housing away from wealthy and gated communities but we’re now working with the federal government and the Louisiana Recovery Authority to change the rules of that game.”

The ideals sound laudable – integrating New Orleanians into communities that aren’t defined by the spending power of their residents. On the face of it, such a plan certainly seems preferable to replicating the projects as they were before Katrina, with disproportionately high crime rates and abject poverty. Yet one only has to look at the much-vaunted (and in many quarters, maligned) River Gardens to see what can go wrong with mixed-income developments. The complex replaced the 1,500 units of public housing at St Thomas yet only 400 of the new units will be 'affordable', displacing many families who have lived in St Thomas for generations. A Wal-Mart was thrown into the equation for good measure, making a mockery of the idea that the new development would foster an independent, socially vibrant community full of small enterprises. What’s more, as part of the deal, the revenue from Wal-Mart’s sales tax goes directly back into the coffers of Kabacoff’s company, giving nothing back to the city.

From Patty Gay’s perspective, River Gardens is an example of the dangers large scale planning caries with it. “It’s really a worst case scenario, to have to demolish completely and start building all the way up again. What we think really makes a neighbourhood and a city is incremental development, with people buying their own house and fixing it up themselves or working with smaller developers. There’s certainly a role after a disaster like this for big developers but for me it should be a last resort.”

It’s easy to knock Kabacoff or cloak him in conspiracy theories. Certainly his company, like others, stand to make a lot of money from the rebuilding of New Orleans. But it is a local company and there is no doubt that the previous divide between disadvantaged black neighbourhoods and privileged white ones (with a black middle-class lying somewhere in between) was unhealthy and made social cohesion more difficult. Mixed-income developments are an attempt to find a way forward. The problem is that in practice, they have been used to displace poor residents and destroy the fabric of their own communities without providing an alternative. In the long-term they could be a solution (although, one hopes, without the addition of Wal-Marts), but in the short-term they should not prevent what are essentially entire neighbourhoods from returning home to New Orleans. The right to return – something which Kabacoff supports – has to be a practical reality rather than empty rhetoric, and that means reopening the projects.

“This is a tough time to look at the crystal ball and feel very positive,” says Kabacoff, who is at least doing something to find a way out of the malaise. I genuinely believe that he has the best interests of the city at heart. But if the spirit of New Orleans is going to be preserved, and the culture of local neighbourhoods is to thrive, then large-scale, brand new mixed income developments need to be reconsidered. It makes more sense to try and identify why many poorer public housing residents feel as if they have no stake in their community and work on tackling the root causes of those feelings – promoting the public school system instead of allowing corruption to decay it, keeping public medical facilities like Charity Hospital open instead of abandoning them, give those who have to rely on subsidised housing the impression that city cares about their community rather than neglecting or attacking it. Only then, when people are allowed back into their homes and can start building their neighbourhoods up again, can the character of the city that both Patty and Kabacoff hold so dearly flourish again.

Portraits of a city: Michael D. Williams

2006-09-06T19:18:00.000-05:00

When Michael Williams – or ‘Voice’, as he likes to be known – first started his bike rental business back in 2001, everybody laughed. “When I got to the city I bought a bunch of cleaning supplies and started cleaning all the high-end businesses in the French Quarter,” he tells me, sucking languidly on a cigar. “Then I got myself together enough money to buy me one bicycle and I set it over there on that corner and started renting it out.” The corner in question is at the intersection of Barracks and Decatur, and this evening it exuded classic French Quarter charm, with horse-dawn traps trotting past local artists and coffee drinkers sitting out on the steps, all catching the last of the yellowing daylight. “Soon I had enough money to rent out three bikes, and I kept on working and kept on saving and eventually I got this store.”

The store may not look like much at the moment, but its gloomy interior (from which amputated bike parts loom out from the darkness) represents a sort of American dream, a defiant monument to what someone shunned by mainstream society can achieve through hard work and perseverance. Back in 1977, Michael, originally from Alabama, was sentenced to five years in jail (although he probably would have been out in one or two). He doesn’t mention what his crime was, although in the grand scheme of things it ended up being quite irrelevant, That’s because on his way to spend his first night in the cells he was discovered to have three marijuana joints in his pocket. At a stroke his period of incarceration quadrupled. He was nineteen. A full twenty years later, on Christmas Eve 1997, Michael emerged into a lonely outside world.

“I spent twenty years with people who killed their mommas and raped their kids, and one thing I learnt, after everything has calmed down, is that everybody still has a dream,” he says, nodding his head sagely. “And as long as you still have a dream you still have a chance.” So down he came to Louisiana, attracted by a gumbo culture and a city where anything seemed possible – crazy New Orleans, built on a raft of flood plains and smack bang in the middle of a hurricane belt. Nowhere else better embodied Michael’s life philosophy of rebounding from adversity, constructing a world out of nothing. After serving two more years in a federal prison for unresolved charges relating to his first conviction, Michael began building his own business.

The laid-back manner in which Michael tells his story, leaning up against a pillar and gesturing casually with his flamboyant gold-topped cane as he talks, doesn’t reflect the way his mind works. Ambitious, energetic and hard-wired into a million different ideas at once (some more realistic than others), this is a man who expects a lot more of himself than society expects of him. Hanging with beads and resplendent in jewellery and shades, he cuts a fantastically eccentric figure on the sidewalk – and his store is a fantastically eccentric presence within the local business community. Ostensibly a bike rental and repair outfit, it offers a plethora of services and schemes, the details of which are plastered in permanent marker over boards leaning up against the front of the shop. They include free bike rides for anyone who has visited the nearby St Louis Cathedral, special bike rentals for anyone from Texas, and of course the biggest pride of Michael’s endeavours – his fledgling law library.

“I’ve always enjoyed law ‘cos like I said, I was in prison for twenty years, and while I was in prison I studied law,” he explains. “And I thought to myself, you know every time you do business you gotta deal with law. So I opened up a law library.” Like his ‘Jobs for Guns’ programme, which aims to get disaffected and violent youngsters off the streets and into stable employment (starting with mechanical work at the bike shop), the motivation for the law library isn’t profit. In fact, if it ever gets completed, the library will be ‘donated’ for the use of everybody in the French Quarter.

The problem is that it doesn’t look like the library will ever be completed. That’s because tomorrow Michael will go to court, representing himself, to try and fight an eviction order that his landlord has brought against him. Katrina’s floodwaters didn’t reach the French Quarter but they managed to gut Michael’s store nonetheless. Devastation in other parts of the city caused a shortage of available residential and commercial property, sending rents everywhere soaring. And that means Michael’s corner store – or rather the building in which it sits – is worth a lot more today than it was a year ago.

“What’s going on here is that he wants me out the building so he can give the building to someone else at a higher price.” ‘He’, according to Michael, is the French Quarter’s biggest landowner and a month ago he announced he was ejecting Michael for alleged non-payment of rent, a charge that Michael denies and says he will prove wrong in front of a judge. “When I first rented this place it was dead round here, but now it’s coming back. So what he wants me to do is get out so he can push the rent right up.” The rent currently stands at around $2800 a month, but Michael – who has a valid lease for the property until 2008 – believes that the landowner wants to charge new occupants over $4000.

Michael suggested the landowner could buy out the remainder of the lease if he really wanted the property back, but the offer was turned down. “He’s trying to kill my whole project, my law library, everything. And he lives next door! He passes here every day. He just wants me to move out and lose everything, period. That’s morally wrong.”

With the number of different services he offers, Michael considers his business to be a company, rather than a store. That would make him the only black company-owner in the historic French Quarter, an observation he thinks is significant. “I’m the only one going through this,” he says, staring down the street. “I ain’t going to say there’s a racist thing going on, but I’m the only one this is happening to.” To try and raise awareness of what’s happening, Michael has been taking his bike and loading it up with photos and posters of the store, parking his one-man protest outside posh hotels in the Central Business District. “I produce programs like jobs for guns, I feed the homeless, I donate a law library to the French quarter,” he says angrily. “Those are the kinda things I do, and this is the richest man in the Quarter and he don’t do nothing. He don’t understand emotions or people, he only knows numbers. And when numbers don’t look right… that’s who I’m dealing with.”

Despite his insistence that he is being singled out for unfair treatment, Michael thinks that the attack on his livelihood is part of a wider, creeping process of gentrification in the city. “They’re commercialising here – that’s why they’re not putting up those neighbourhoods,” he says, referring to the shuttered-up public housing projects where residents are being refused entry into their own homes. He tried to raise the issue with Ray Nagin when the Mayor did a ‘walkabout’ down Decatur Street. “He walked right by me, anyone’ll tell you. I’m the only person on the whole strip here that had a Nagin poster up for the election – everyone else had Mitch Landrieu [Nagin’s white opponent in the mayoral contest] – and I said to him as he walked past, ‘Sir, I’m the only one here who supported you’, but he kept on walking,” Michael grimaces. “Then he got on TV and started talking about how he was gonna help people like me. But he walked right past.”

Michael’s personal story is hard to verify – more will become obvious after the court case tomorrow. But the trends he describes are very real. With rebuilding dominated by big developers, large reconstruction projects and higher rents are serving to squeeze out smaller, independent businesses for whom the costs and risks associated with returning are harder to bear. Whatever happens, Michael isn’t going quietly. One of his posters requests that passers-by invest $50,000 in Foot-Steppers, promising that it will become a multi-million dollar company within five years. Considering what he has accomplished so far, he might just be right…

Eye of the storm

2006-09-05T20:51:00.001-05:00

Criminally flawed levees weren’t the only man-made accessory to Katrina’s carnage. The wetlands of America’s Gulf Coast – a natural barrier to the storm surges produced by hurricanes – have been steadily eroded for over a hundred years, leaving the region’s towns and cities vulnerable to all manner of tropical storms.

As Michael Eric Dyson points out in his excellent book, the federal authorities were well aware of the impact the destruction of wetlands was having, with one conservation taskforce warning that the disappearance of 25 to 35 miles of land each year to the canals and shipping channels criss-crossing through the marshland was a loss of “catastrophic proportions”. In 2004 Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wrote a letter to George Bush congratulating him for supporting the restoration of wetlands in Iraq but pointing out that, ironically, Senate Republicans were blocking spending proposals designed to address exactly the same problem on the Gulf Coast.

Today, a local paper reported that residents of eastern New Orleans are stepping up pressure on the notorious Army Corps of Engineers (responsible for the levee system) to shut one of the biggest canals, the 66-mile MR-GO, and allow surrounding wetlands to recover. It is estimated that each mile of wetlands reduces a storm surge by about three inches; with the marshland east of the city sliced and diced and offering no resistance, last year’s hurricane sent waters surging towards New Orleans virtually unchecked.

And of course it wasn’t only New Orleans that suffered as a consequence. Driving over the Industrial Canal that fringes the Lower 9th Ward and sweeping out of the city towards Mississippi on the interstate, the terrible toll exacted by Katrina beyond the Big Easy is revealed.

Travelling east, the way in which last summer’s destruction manifests itself subtly changes; shattered houses and piles of wreckage begin to diminish and are increasingly replaced by wide stretches of nothingness, with grass, sand and weeds now coating a landscape once dotted with fishing shacks, condos and communities. By the time you reach the strip of beach towns past Bay St Louis on Highway 90, there is little to remind you that this was once home to scores of glitzy restaurants and tacky beach shops, sumptuous homes and seafront holiday shacks. The parade of ‘floating’ casino barges that lined the area have gone too; one of them was found beached up on a nearby motorway.

Yet, as they did after previous hurricanes like Camille, some residents are gambling high and throwing everything into rebuilding. The houses and condos that are slowly springing up in places like Biloxi, Gulfport and Long Beach are bordered (for now) by nothing beyond empty gas stations, and driveways leading to nowhere. It takes a lot of bravery to invest so much back into a place which, at the moment, feels so derilict and isolated. But no doubt the people who are doing so are confident that others will follow in their footsteps. Witnessing their efforts is a useful reminder that Katrina's winds blew away neighbourhoods far beyond New Orleans itself.

Photos of the Louisiana/Mississippi coast

Toy town

2006-09-03T23:34:00.000-05:00

In the middle of the faded splendour of the garden district, where the foliage of colonial balconies casts shadows on cracked pavements below and palatial mansions stand shoulder to shoulder with dripping trailers and piles of wreckage, I came across a collection of children's toys. They were carefully arranged on a row of steps leading up to a house that disappeared with Katrina. Dozens of teddy bears and dolls sunbathed on the granite, offering no explanation for their presence. It was one of the strangest, eeriest scenes I've ever encountered, and I stood staring at this army of silent creatures in the early evening sunshine until I heard a voice behind me.

"Sure is a strange sight, ain't it," a man said. He was short, brown and had pulled a weather-beaten blue cap down low over his face to shade his wrinkled eyes. "Somebody told me these were the toys they found after the storm, rottin' in the water. I don't know if that's true or not, but I don't know where else they came from."

Don was clutching two carrier bags which, it transpired, he was living out of. With his family holed up out of state, he had returned to New Orleans to find work and rebuild his shattered house. Despite the supposed availability of FEMA assistance, Don claimed to have nowhere to stay and was living on the streets west of the French Quarter, amongst the shadowy pillars of a monolithic interstate highway that destroyed Basin Street, site of the legendary Basin Street Blues.

If there's one commodity New Orleans is not short of at the moment it's employment, and Don had found a temporary job that very morning. He was celebrating with a cold coke; the next day he would be joining the legions of Hispanic workers who are burgeoning in the city as it seeks to rebuild. For now though, we simply stood quietly and gazed at the lines of animals, a twisted monument to playful emptiness and lost innocence, before going our separate ways.

Portraits of a city: Denise Russell

2006-09-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

When I first pushed open the door of Jim Russell’s Four Star Record Store on Magazine Street and came across Denise, she was gaping in horror at the TV. The Food Channel was showing two apron-clad women cheerily spreading dollops of mayonnaise onto a freshly-grilled corn-on-the-cob, and from the expression on her face it was clear that Denise considered this to be tantamount to heresy. From her rickety perch by the counter she glanced around for support. With the shop’s only other customer having disappeared round the back in search of some obscure LPs, her eyes fell on me.

“Could you eat that?” she demanded incredulously, jabbing her cigarette at the screen. I readily admitted that I couldn’t. Apparently satisfied with that answer she inhaled another lungful of smoke, swung off her stool, and asked me what I was looking for.

Her store is wonderfully large and cavernous, with peeling walls dotted with colourful posters advertising David Bartholomew and Jody Williams gigs from bygone days. The records sprawl out in every direction, slotted away in rows of wooden boxes or heaped up in dusty piles on the in the corner. It came to life in the 1950s after Jim Russell, Denise’s father-in-law, was fired from his job as a DJ on a country and western radio station in Canton, Ohio for playing R&B over the airwaves. “He barricaded himself in there,” says Denise proudly. “They had to call the fire department to come and get him out.”

After moving to New Orleans, Jim became a major fixture in the local music scene. “He started getting all the artists and DJs in the town together, pushing them and promoting their music. He was putting white people in black clubs and black people in white clubs and constantly going to jail for it.” The store started out as a wholesaler, with Jim hand-delivering records in his little ice-cream van, but eventually he threw open the doors to the public.

Denise, who was born in New Orleans, grew up with a passion for music and started working in the store soon after marrying Jim’s son. “My parents didn’t segregate music, cos’ both of them were music lovers,” she explained. “Growing up in that environment, I listened to everything because they listened to everything. To this day the only thing I don’t listen to is classical. That and country, the real country yodelling stuff,” she grinned.

Denise talks to me between fielding phone calls from family members and long-distance customers, New Orleans natives checking in with their favourite record shop from distant outposts in Houston or Atlanta. Loud and confident, she effortlessly switches from passionately recounting her story, retaining eye contact as she dredges up the memories, to darting out into the store to help the trickle of customers passing through the door. She knows everyone and everything about the shop and the music it sells; like a cool but geeky professor she has complete mastery over her subject.

The store was always popular with locals before the storm and thrived on the loyalty of regular customers, many of whom relied on Denise to guide their taste in music. “I had one guy come in once – he’s of colour – and he ended up buying the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack. He came in again the next day and I tried to guess what direction he was going in, so I gave him a Metallica CD and he just loved it!” After plying him with more heavy metal albums, the customer is now an avid rock and roll fan. “Now when he comes in I don’t know what he’s gonna ask for – he came by the other day and asked me for Beethoven’s symphony number five and I just had to shrug,” Denise laughed. “But he said he loved Beethoven cos’ he was deaf, and it was amazing he had managed to produce all this music. So now he gets his kicks from classics.”

For Denise, the memories of last year are shot through with pain – both because of the harrowing experience of evacuation and due to the difficult time they’ve had since returning to New Orleans. When weather reporters abruptly revised their forecasts and announced Katrina was heading straight for Louisiana, Denise and her husband started piling the records on top of each other, covering them with plastic to protect their livelihood. By 8am the following morning the two of them had gathered together their three children as well as Denise’s parents, her father-in-law and her sister-in-law and they all headed out of the city in three cars. Two hours later Mayor Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation.

“We were stuck in the jams to Baton Rouge when some guy came on the radio and said it was clear sailing all the way to Natchez, and all the hotel rooms were available there. So we turned around, drove an hour and a half out of our way to Natchez, but there were no hotel rooms,” recalled Denise. With the hurricane making landfall, it was too late to turn back. The family spent the night in the car in a parking lot outside one of the hotels. “Natchez wasn’t hit by the storm, but we could feel the hurricane in the air and we knew it was hitting New Orleans. And all night it was just rainin’ and rainin’ on the roof of the car. That was real scary.”

A customer comes over looking for some Kermit Ruffin and Denise winds her way through the maze of CDs stretching before us, homing straight in to the right album. When she sits back down and continues with her story, her voice is lower but far more intense.

Huddled together in the cars, the family was waiting desperately for news of Denise’s brother-in-law and his wife, who was nine months pregnant. They eventually discovered she had gone into labour on the highway whilst escaping Katrina, and joined them at the hospital. “It was so crazy while we were there,” she said, looking down. “People were just yelling, everyone was arguing and miserable, we were all tired, worn out, hurt, devastated, and at each other’s throats. Nothing was getting better. And I just wanted to come home.”

They all wound up in Grenada, a tiny Mississippi town about ninety miles south of Memphis. With the hotels full, a local tycoon called Dynamite Kirk took pity on the family and installed them in his hunting cabin in the nearby woods. “It was so gorgeous. You could see deer, and at night it was so dark you could see every star in the sky, even the Milky Way.” Denise shook her head. “But we couldn’t get no radio station at this place and they only had 2 TV channels. We were losing touch with reality.”

Marooned in this strange environment and insulated from the world she had always known back in New Orleans, Denise found her sanity slipping away. “The people were very friendly, they’d give you the shirt off their back they felt so sorry for you. But I was just getting stir-crazy. I mean even things like the food were driving me mad. We’re used to eating well but this was a real small place with only one proper restaurant and they served everything with pork and beans. I mean everything. And sometimes you just felt like, ‘You know what? I don’t wanna eat fish with pork and beans.’”

She giggled to herself at the memories. “They tried to make us red beans and rice once to make us feel at home. We didn’t wanna hurt their feelings but it was terrible. It was like this soupy chicken broth thing.” A middle-aged black man who is trying out some records on an old gramophone player next to us grimaces in agreement. Denise nodded at him. “We had to get back to our hotel and flush that thing down the toilet.”

Denise returned in October to some incredible stories. Her 84-yr old grandma, who was paralysed on one side of her body, had been forced to swim to safety out in Waveland after floodwaters rose up to her neck. “She swears that her left leg moved,” said Denise. And her uncle, whose house had been destroyed in nearby Bay St Louis, had been called up by a woman who had found his graduation class ring in her garden fifteen miles away. “He had kept it up in the attic but just like everything else it flew or floated away. But this woman, who lived all the way in Diamondhead across the bay, she had picked it up and saw his name engraved on it and tracked him down.”

The winds had torn holes in the store’s roof and rain had corroded some of the labels, but apart from that things weren’t too bad, particularly because neighbours had protected the place from looters. And after they reopened business was initially good. “The phone’s were ringing off the wall, with people saying ‘Thank God you’re still here’. But after Wal-Mart (the supermarket behemoth with a branch down the road) also reopened earlier this year, sales at Jim Russell’s plummeted. “I need to make around $600 a day to cover my running costs and make a profit,” Denise said. She shows me her meticulously handwritten sales book. Page after page tells the same story - $290 here, $145 there, and then one disastrous day when she only sold three records. “It’s horrible,” she said, snapping the book shut and reaching for another cigarette. “A lot of locals who used to come in lost so much music and want to replace it, but they can’t take it all the way back to Texas. Also, a lot of them have FEMA trailers, and they don’t want to clog ‘em up with music. And some people are still waiting for money to come through so they can replace their stuff.”

Denise is convinced that the nearby Wal-Mart sent scouts round to her store – they are now stocking records by lesser-known artists like Martin Sease and hoovering up what little business remains in a city gutted of its population. Her long-term boycott of the Wal-Mart empire was tested to the limit during the evacuation after the Red Cross handed out vouchers that could only be used in Wal-Mart. “I hated myself, but we had no choice,” she scowled.

With her southern drawl filled with quiet emotion Denise explained that the store – once named as one of the top ten independent record stores in the world – could close within two months. “If sales don’t pick up I’ll have to file for bankruptcy,” she said. “So I just pray for a miracle, that some computer geek will come along and say ‘I’ll put all your records on the internet for you!’”

“What about Bill Gates?” screeches the man by the gramophone in delight. Denise laughed loudly. “Yeah, lemmee call Bill Gates, and tell him ‘hey, how bout’ helping my store out?’”

Like thousands of small business owners in New Orleans, the trials and tribulations of surviving Katrina have paled into insignificance alongside the difficulty of staying afloat financially in the aftermath of a ravaged city. The vitality that these stores bring to local neighbourhoods produces exactly the kind of character that can draw evacuees back home, yet they are struggling for survival. “You know, me and my husband already discussed moving to a different city” said Denise as she totted up the totals for the day and began tidying up the shop floor. “But it’s just not possible. After we evacuated, we realise that this is the only place for us.” If Jim Russell’s Four Star Record Store is to survive, hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians dispersed across America need to start feeling the same way.

Faith and Fornication

2006-09-01T23:06:00.000-05:00

Soaked in neon and fizzing with sex, drugs and drink-fuelled debauchery, Bourbon Street should be a no-go thoroughfare for religious conservatives. Thankfully, God's messengers on earth refuse to be perturbed by a bit of partial nudity and were out in force on Bourbon tonight. With its motley collection of strip clubs, bars and shops flogging t-shirts with slogans like "Katrina gave me the best blow-job I ever had", walking through the French Quarter's main street at night is a peculiar experience at the best of times - particularly at the moment when the Southern Decadence gay festival is in town and there are hordes of topless male couples thronging sweatily on the sidewalk.

But it gets all the stranger when, in the midst of all this gleeful depravity, an 8ft-high white cross appears in the middle of the road. Clearly mindful of the biblical recommendation to join your enemies if you cannot beat them (it crops up somewhere in Leviticus, I'm told), one local Christian group has taken it upon themselves not only to construct the aforementioned cross but to actually tack a rolling electronic LED screen onto it as well. The screen, which scrolls through a number of helpful pieces of advice to late-night revellers including 'Salvation will be yours' and 'Surrender to the Saviour', dominates the block in which it is situated - no mean feat considering it was competing (at the time I saw it) with a bevy of multicoloured placards advertising 'Huge Ass Beers' below it, and a pair of girls up on a balcony above it, flashing their breasts to cheering drinkers on the road.

A small army of church volunteers were working the crowd, handing out small booklets entitled 'Help from Above' (interestingly there was also a warning that these booklets were free and not to be sold, presumably to avoid any bad sheep in the flock making a fast buck by getting inebriated punters to part with some cash for them). In an age of entrepreneurialism, the efforts of some believers to get their message across is surely to be applauded, despite the glaring contradiction between the substance of that message and the environment and style in which it is being promoted. One thing's for certain - this crack combination of devout conservatism and unabashed capitalism must win George Bush's approval.

As the news crews leave, the real story begins

2006-08-31T22:53:00.000-05:00

Bells have been rung, silences have been observed, and a humble George Bush has dined at a local pancake house and moved on. Like the floodwaters that overwhelmed the city a year ago, the national and international media presence in New Orleans has subsided, leaving residents to get on with the job of rebuilding their lives. But now that Hurricane Katrina’s one-year anniversary is over, the real story is just beginning.

With hundreds of thousands of residents still displaced and unsure of what – if any – future they have in the Crescent City, a complex but determined network of community activists and campaign groups are fighting to ensure those worst affected by Katrina’s devastation are not punished a second time over by an incompetent, if not indifferent, programme of recovery. These organisations vary from church-based outfits to collectives of young radicals who have travelled to Louisiana from across America in order to play a part in the city’s regeneration.

A common thread linking the campaigners is a belief that the official vision of post-Katrina recovery reflects a wider trend in US politics – a neo-conservative attack on public services. The city is awash with planners offering competing proposals on how a brighter, brasher metropolis can rise from the rubble of the storm. In the eyes of many, they have a clean slate to work from, with vast swathes of the area wiped out physically and psychologically by the hurricane.

The problem for residents is that the attitude of many of these planners – an attitude seemingly shared by city officials – is that the New New Orleans should be shorn of many of the social problems is was previously saddled with – and consequently shorn of the communities from which, it is claimed, those problems arose. The way to achieve this transformation? Attack the resources that poor, predominantly black residents relied upon most – namely publicly funded schools, hospitals and housing.

Conspiracy theories abound; whilst some of the more extreme rumours (including the claim that the levees protecting the poverty-stricken Lower 9th Ward were deliberately dynamited during the storm to protect wealthier, whiter parts of town) are hard to swallow, it is easy to see why many believe that the city, state and federal authorities are doing everything in their power to discourage large sections of the population from returning home.

Take public housing. In 1996 there were over 13,000 publicly-funded, affordable housing units in the city; by the time Katrina struck, that had been steadily reduced to 7,100. Now, with New Orleans facing the greatest shortage of affordable housing in its history (rents have skyrocketed in the past year), the Department for Housing and Urban Development has announced plans to demolish 5,000 of the remaining units.

For residents who have lived in and built communities around these public housing projects all their lives this is difficult to accept, not least because the units are set to be replaced by so-called ‘mixed income’ developments, which by their very nature are going to leave a lot of displaced former residents out of the equation. Unlike the wind, water and mould-battered wooden houses of the Lower 9th, most of the public housing projects are made of brick and so withstood the flooding comparatively well. In fact, those that have been inside the units say they are practically ready to be inhabited again, a ready-made solution to fulfil the city administration’s plea to “make the impossible possible and get our people back home.”

Which makes it all the more incredible that rather than tidying the projects up and getting the evacuees back inside, the city’s housing authority has spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars boarding the units up and, in one public development, even installing a 7ft-high barbed wire fence around the perimeter to keep out those who used to live there. On the eve of Katrina’s anniversary, in an incident largely unreported by the local media (who were focusing instead on Bush’s flying visit to the Gulf Coast), some former residents took ladders and boltcutters and forced their way back into their old homes. Unsurprisingly police officers soon appeared on the scene and arrested nine people (although significantly they decided not to arrest the residents themselves, all of whom were in possession of valid leases for the properties they were entering).

There are now two interesting debates going on in the Big Easy. The first is the argument over whether the public housing projects should be reopened. It’s part of the wider issue of how New Orleans should be regenerated, and whether the poorest neighbourhoods, including the Lower 9th, should be coaxed back to life at all. As one former high-ranking city official told me, people here have a tendency to think with their hearts, not their heads – great when it comes to music, art and food, but problematic when it comes to rebuilding a city.

The second is a debate within the network of campaigning groups about what their purpose is, and how they should formulate their opposition to the Mayor’s rebuilding plans. There is a disagreement over whether the broad movement is one primarily aimed at providing practical support and relief for those that need it, or whether it is a political struggle against the neo-conservative agenda – a divergence typified in the decision to use the anniversary as a chance to remember the dead, instead of protesting at Bush’s visit to the city. And amid all the genuinely powerful work being done by some ‘outsider’ groups, tension has arisen about the role they are playing in local, mainly African American, community work. A leaflet distributed at an alternative anniversary rally denounced one of the main organisations assisting working-class New Orleans residents with gutting their homes: “White folks = White racism,” it declared, “White groups are seeking to deceive the oppressed in their struggle for national liberation.”

These are the issues New Orleanians are facing as they begin a second year of recovery. Katrina was the worst natural disaster in American history but the bungled and insensitive handling of the city’s regeneration has been entirely man-made. Although the news crews have moved on following the hurricane’s anniversary, the problem of tackling that man-made disaster remains.

Images of an anniversary

2006-08-30T14:08:00.000-05:00

More photos from the anniversary (from the top): discarded placards at the rally in Congo Square; one person advertises his return to the city; residents vent their anger at the attitude of the city authorities; at the site of the Industrial Canal levee breach, the names of those who died in the lower 9th ward are read out (note the number of family members); prayers are held at the exact time the waters rushed in

(Four photos, above): the devastation of the lower 9th ward

A year on, and people find different ways to remember

2006-08-29T23:32:00.000-05:00

Allan Mercadel has spent the morning jostling amongst the crowds, enthusiastically shaking his tambourine in time with the music and shouting greetings at passers-by. “Love you all too, take care of that little one now,” he grins as a smiling pregnant woman pushes past us. “And don’t fall!” he yells after her, slapping the tambourine against his thigh in delight as she makes her way down onto the muddy path beneath us. “I’ve been knowin’ her all my life, she a childhood girlfriend from 7th grade,” he confides. He gives the tambourine a final, more doleful shake and adds quietly: “She lost her grandmother due to the storm.”

We’re standing on a non-descript patch of grass, gazing out over what remains of the lower 9th ward. A year ago, the name of this metropolitan district meant nothing to most Americans outside of New Orleans; today it is national shorthand for poverty, racial division and the evident failings of federal government at a time when its citizens needed it most. Hundreds of people, many sporting t-shirts or bandanas emblazoned with the photos of relatives killed by Katrina, flocked here for an unofficial anniversary rally but they have now moved on, snaking down the crumbling road next to the canal on their way back to the city centre. Row upon row of deserted, dusty roads spread before us to the horizon. In some places the vista is sprinkled with the wreckage of houses and the bright glint of crushed car parts reflecting the morning sunshine. But for the most part the roads border nothing but emptiness, with grass and weeds having overgrown the plot where a home once stood.

With the levee wall behind him, Allan Mercadel surveys the lower 9th

“Hard to believe ain’t it,” chuckles Allan softly. “This little bitty ass city is where the whole world wants to come.”

A year on from Katrina’s devastation, New Orleans is apparently back in business. Restaurants are throwing open their doors, tourists are returning and in less than a fortnight the New Orleans Saints will begin a new season in the infamous Superdome – an event heavily advertised on local TV with images of the American football players huddling together in the venue’s changing room, repeatedly chanting ‘There’s no place like home’. In St. Louis Cathedral, a beautiful, understated white brick building at the heart of the city’s French Quarter, the city’s political elite have welcomed President Bush to a special mass, remembering the dead and marking the progress made since rising waters overwhelmed the creaking levees and flooded 80% of the area. “The signs of progress are not always easy to see, but they are here,” announces Norman Francis, chairman of the state recovery authority. “Schools are in session, people are rebuilding, businesses are reopening and the music of life has begun to return.”

Less than four miles away, with our backs to the point in the newly-rebuilt levee wall where the Industrial Canal gushed in, Allan tells me a different story. Maligned by politicians for its crime levels and sidelined in some visions of the city’s rebirth, the lower 9th ward, with its community scattered across America, is on the defensive. “Over here we all homeowners, there ain’t no project [public housing] here, no apartment complexes – these are homeowners,” explains the 28 year old, whose family have lived in the lower 9th for seven generations. “It’s a majority black neighbourhood and people didn’t deserve to die here and lose everything. These are people who spent their blood, sweat and tears building their homes and a year later the place looks like the city dump. A year later, and there’s still debris on the streets.”

One year on, and rubble remains

Allan’s anger is shared by most of the residents I speak to. Such is the disillusionment with the city and federal authorities at their handling of the disaster and the bungled efforts at reconstruction since, poor locals are convinced that the powerful are mounting an orchestrated attempt to seize their land. Amidst the bleakness of the lower 9th, the barbed wire and boarded up windows of the housing projects and the vibrant fury of protesters in Congo Square, rumours of developers eyeing up potentially lucrative real estate and forcing out the black community are common currency. “After the storm Donald Trump and his guys were over here buying shit up and playing monopoly,” spits Allan. Whilst services such as transportation, garbage collection and social services are beginning to return to more central parts of the city and the whiter suburbs, the 9th ward seems devoid of any government presence at all save for the occasional military vehicle patrol. “We’re being left behind for a reason. They want this land. I believe there’s oil on this land, hell I used to swim in that swamp over there – I know this is good ground.”

In a seemingly inescapable cycle of chicken and egg, the city insists it cannot begin putting social infrastructures back in place without people there to make use of them. But, as Collins pointed out to me yesterday at the St Bernard housing project, how can people think of returning without schools, doctors and shopkeepers available to them? It’s difficult for underprivileged African Americans not to feel discriminated against as the city tries to pick up the pieces. Liberal whites are appalled at the suggestion that the mistakes made during and since Katrina have a racial element to them – one friend at a party bitterly chastised the British media for framing post-Katrina reporting in a black vs. white narrative – but when prominent politicians continuously disparage the value of your community to the city as a whole – albeit without directly referring to skin colour – it’s inevitable that blacks in New Orleans feel as if they are being deliberately ignored. Allan doesn’t believe that New Orleanians themselves are racist, but he is fiercely indignant at the portrayal of the pre-Katrina lower 9th in the media. “Was there crime here? Yes. But I tell you what the biggest crime is and it’s not done by the people of this city. It’s injustice – you take a group of people and put them in poverty, don’t give them jobs, don’t give them food, well then you take a pastor, a preacher, or a god damn rabbi and let him watch his wife and children starve – then watch him go steal. Everyone is a product of their own environment.”

Traffic is stuck on the Claiborne Street bridge, caught behind the parade to the city centre. As I’m weaving in and out of the cars on foot, a woman winds down the window and offers me a lift, clearing a load of papers from the back seat so I can get some respite from the exhaust fumes. Her name is Janet and she used to live just over the canal in the upper 9th. Like Allan, who was evacuated to Houston (although he prefers the term ‘kidnapped’), the mother of three has travelled hundreds of miles today to commemorate the anniversary. We swing off the main road and she shows me her house, to which she returns from Arkansas (an eight hour drive) once or twice a month to work on rebuilding. “I met President Clinton, I got pictures!” she beams, keeping one eye on the derelict side road whilst fumbling around in the seat pocket for evidence.

Janet Tobias outside her home

Her husband, a forklift tuck operator, was trapped in the Superdome after the flooding; it took two weeks for Janet to discover he was alive. Despite being fearful of another hurricane, she has thrown everything into reconstructing her home, even though her chronic asthma makes it hard to stay in the house for long. They have gutted one half of it and hope to make habitable again within three months. “Most of the homeowners I talk to, they wanna come back,” she explains, exhibiting that same pride that Allan burned with – that this was a house they owned themselves instead of relying on government handouts; a pride fuelling disbelief and resentment that so little is being done by the authorities to help them rebuild. But her anger lacks the ideological edge that Allan’s contained – a sadness at mismanagement and bureaucratic incompetence rather than a sweeping vision of oppression and inequality.

By the time we catch up with the others in Congo Square, a man is hollering to the crowd from a stage in the blazing midday sun. “Brothers and sisters, you are making a statement by being here today, and by being there at the levee,” he shouts. “Say it: ‘We wanna come home!’” he cries, and the crowd dutifully returns the call, surging forward from the isolated spots of shade under the trees and by the sno-ball van. “The proof is in the pudding,” murmurs Danatus King approvingly, President of the New Orleans branch of the NAACP. “And what you see in this pudding is the actions of the people – not the federal government, not the local government, but the people themselves.” His words reflect a righteous excitement at the rally; the city ain’t doing nothing to help us but look what we’re doing by ourselves. “I think what we see now is a stirring of the people, the beginnings of a fight back,” adds Leon Waters, curator of the flooded Louisiana Museum of African American History, just a few blocks away. “But this is not enough. I see this as a period of gathering the forces.”

The marchers reach Congo Square

That evening, Janet has got her hands on tickets to the day’s big official event, an all-star ‘remembrance’ concert at the New Orleans Arena. The glittering stage is a million miles away from the simple apparatus at the gatherings in Congo Square and the lower 9th, but strangely the mood is somewhat similar – a joyful triumphalism, with genuine mourning shot through with a determination to make the city great again. “This city gonna come back stronger,” yells one of the comperes, and the fans lap it up, screaming their approval as the spotlights roll over them. But there is a moment of uneasiness as the crowd awaits Stevie Wonder and the same compere makes a plea for residents to get involved with the latest incarnation of the city’s recovery plan – Mayor Nagin’s ‘Unified New Orleans’ proposal, which gives each neighbourhood a chance to input their own strategies for regeneration. “This is important,” pleads the presenter as he vainly tries to make the website address heard above chants for Stevie. “The Mayor’s in the house tonight and I know you’re gonna wanna show your appreciation.” After a few seconds of doubt the crowd do break out into enthusiastic applause. “He tried to do his best,” said Janet. “Cos this never happened before and most people, they not giving him credit.”

One anniversary, but a myriad of different commemorations, each reflecting different priorities and alternative mindsets as the city moves into its second year of recovery. Tomorrow some members of the public housing projects will burn effigies of Nagin and other dignitaries, like HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson. The message of unity in progress propagated from City Hall has little resonance in Iberville, or CJ Peete, or on the other side of the Industrial Canal. Everywhere there is the same determination to come back stronger, but in these areas the determination is all the more potent, borne out of a feeling that residents are fighting a second battle after the storm: first they had to survive the waters, now they are resisting the city’s attempts to abandon them.

“Of course we’re gonna rebuild,” concluded Allan as we left the levee wall behind us and went our separate ways. “We could rebuild with a fraction of the money that’s been misappropriated. But its the citizens keeping each other together, no one else. We saved each other with stolen boats, now we saving each other again.” He looked down at my ticket for the evening’s concert and smiled, shaking his head. “Just don’t believe the hype,” he said, and walked off into the emptiness.

"We finally cleaned up public housing" - pictures of stolen homes

2006-08-29T00:17:00.000-05:00

More photos from the public housing projects (from the top): Members from the Rebirth jazz band play outside boarded up units in Lafitte; many former residents like Mike believe that they are being forced out so that developers can turn the attractively located project into luxury homes and businesses; while the French Quarter and business district is clear, the recovery effort in areas like CJ Peete seems barely more advanced than soon after the storm; residents watch the world go by in Iberville

Right of Return

2006-08-28T19:05:00.000-05:00

Public housing is struggling to recover in New Orleans, the victim of long-term decline and a sustained conservative attack that has been going on for years. "What Katrina did is give these folks a scapegoat," a young black man called Collins Jasper told me this morning. We were standing in the blazing mid-morning sun outside his home, separated from it by a length of 7ft barbed-wire fence that stretched off into the distance. He showed me around St Bernards project, the community where he grew up and the place from which he is now barred, physically kept out by spiked metal and political inaction. With tens of thousands of public housing residents displaced and dispersed by Katrina, HANO (The Housing Authority of New Orleans) and HUD (The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development) have spent over a million dollars boarding up units that were barely flooded and hiring security personnel and guard dogs to keep the legal inhabitants out. The Housing Secretary recently announced that 5,000 units would be destroyed, accelerating a gutting of the area's affordable housing stock that began years before Katrina.

Being made of brick (instead of wood, which is riven with mould after flooding), most of the housing units were left relatively undamaged after the waters rose. In many cases, the putrid swamp that enveloped the city barely reached the ground floor. So why the forced closures at a time when New Orleans is supposed to be encouraging and welcoming its scattered citizens back home? Some city officials argue that with only sporadic incidicences of residents returning to the developments the authorities cannot devote the basic services and amenities required to serve people in all areas of the city - it's hard to organise healthcare, schooling and waste collection to regions of the city where there are only isolated pockets of inhabitants.

But the residents, who have set up a small but moving 'tented city' on the other side of the road from the units, disagree. They believe the powers-that-be are seeking a smaller, whiter city with no place for people like them. "Who's gonna do their cleaning, their waitering, their greeting when we all gone?" snorts Collins mother Sharon, a 57 year old who has been living in Houston, Texas for the past year. The public housing projects have always been seen by many as a byword for crime and poverty - Republican Congressman Richard Baker, from nearby Baton Rouge, infamously declared in the storm's aftermath that "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." - and there is real anger amongst the residents that they are being forced out of their own communities because they are seen as undesirables. "Look at these places," says Collins angrily as he pressed his head against the fence, "these places fine. We wouldda moved back in the next day if we could, because we don't need no lights, no gas. We can get candles. But this is our home. We want the nation to see this is something they are stealing from us - they are stealing our heritage, our pride, our homes."

Him and Sharon have no truck with the notion that it is unsustainable to try and rebuild communities in this poorer areas. "My elementary school was just three blocks away," says Collins, pointing down the deserted street "Anyone had any problems, they go talk to Dr Wiley over here," he nods, jerking his finger in the opposite direction. "And see Bynums over there? I weren't even a wet dream when that family moved into the neighbourhood. We are a community, but we are being denied that community because how can we live and maintain ourselves when the government keeps out out of our homes?" "This is it for talking," agrees Sharon soberly. "It's time for action."

The derelict pharmacy opposite St Bernard

Back in downtown, our guide round the projects - a relief worker called Sean who is living over in the lower ninth ward - gets in to some light-hearted banter with a fellow Wisconsin Packers fan who walks out of the Sheraton hotel. "What you folks doing over here anyway?" the man asks Sean after they have finished discussing the team's prospects for the coming season. "We're with a non-profit organisation helping with the reconstruction," replies Sean. "Hey, I'm helping with the reconstruction too!" grins the man, pointing at a cap emblazoned with the words 'Roof Krewe 2006'. "We're building the superdome roof. But we're definitely for profit!"

There are thousands of out-of-state businessmen and workers making a fortune from the huge contracts put out to tender for the recovery effort. None of the money is going to the projects. As the mans lopes off, Collins parting words come back to me: "They say you can't understand a man before you've walked a mile in his shoes. You need to swim a mile with us in this toxic water before you can even begin to appreciate the mental anguish these people are going through," he said, gesturing towards the small huddle of residents sitting in a clump of shade by the fence. "We'd do anything just to be home."

Collin and Sharon by the barbed wire separating them from their home

Arrival

2006-08-27T23:08:00.000-05:00

People told me that everyone in New Orleans had a story, and they were right. The taxi driver, a father of three from the suburb of Metairie, launched straight into an unprompted overview of the city a year on from Katrina, lambasting local and federal politicians as we lurched around corners. "The people here have learnt not to believe what they're told," he explained. "No, sir. We won't be believing anything they tell us again." Reassuring words, as officials are currently insisting that Tropical Storm Ernesto - currently brewing over Cuba - will only brush Florida, leaving Louisiana undamaged.

In a city politicised by a man-made tragedy, it wasn't surprising that people were so ready to volunteer their opinions on what had gone wrong - before Katrina, during the crisis and in the painfully slow reconstruction efforts since. And it was equally predictable that it wouldn't take long for the conversation to steer towards race. The driver, a portly, rambunctious white man who slapped the wheel at regular intervals to emphasise his points, shook his head and said what a shame it was that the blacks in power were so corrupt. "At least the whites would leave some money for the people," he sighed. In fact, Mayor Nagin's administration is a product of white elite support and increasingly despised by the black populace, as alienated as the city's white population by his desperate "chocolate city" gaffe.

As we sped over the 17th street canal, my Russian companion, a student from Moscow who was in the city when Katrina hit and has returned from the anniversary, described swimming to higher ground. "We were swimming through this toxic mix of chemicals and shit," he said quietly, gazing out the window, "and pushing bodies aside."