New Orleans resurgent

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But the people who had organized to recover from Katrina were determined to push on to a brighter tomorrow and, although slowed, they continued their work.

That's when the BP blowout preventer did not and oil hemorrhaged into the Gulf of Mexico and washed into the wetlands that border the city, fouling the natural environment, putting fishermen, and shipbuilders and oil people out of work and decimating business at the hotels and restaurants.

"That's three serious blows in just five years," said Allison Plyer, a researcher at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.  "But the people of New Orleans were simply not going to let the city they love, and the culture they love, die. They fought back. They are still fighting back. And the city, despite everything, is coming back."

Plyer, a resident, is not exaggerating or trafficking in rosy opinions. She and her colleague, Amy Liu of the Brookings Institute, have coordinated a multifaceted study of New Orleans since Katrina, titled "The New Orleans Index at Five," based on hard data compiled and interpreted by local scholars.

"Greater New Orleans is rebounding," they say, adding that, in several ways, the city has improved on its pre-Katrina condition.

"In the last five years, hundreds of citizens, government leaders, business and civic leaders, nonprofits, and philanthropies have been tirelessly working together to ensure that the city they love emerges from the 2005 hurricanes with all of the city's assets preserved but its flaws corrected," Plyer and Liu say in the work's introduction.

"Without a doubt, New Orleans is still a work in progress, only five years into a long period of recovery and redevelopment," they write. "This anniversary represents a good moment to assess the extent to which efforts to date are putting the city and region on a brighter course for the future."

Citizen engagement

Another epithet for New Orleans was "the Big Easy," and the motto of the town that throws the  Mardi Gras party every year, and keeps the celebration going long beyond Fat Tuesday, has traditionally been "Laissez les bon ton rouler," or "Let the Good Times Roll."

The laid-back attitude those phrases memorialize has a flip side well known to New Orleanians - apathy and social inertia. Not only let the good time roll, but let everything, good and bad, roll, because nothing can be done about changing the way things are.

"Following Hurricane Katrina, observers worried that New Orleans might continue on a path of citizen passivity, inter-communal conflict, and corruption that was part of its longstanding reputation," said Frederick Weil of Louisiana State University, one of the Index essayists.

"Instead, observers have been struck by the outpouring of citizen engagement, the rise of new or invigorated community organizations, and the calls for government responsiveness," Weil said.

Liu, who is not from the region, said that when she came to New Orleans to begin the project of assessing whether the city had made progress since the storm, she did not expect to find much.

"I was skeptical of all the talk of new community involvement," she said. "I have seen grassroots activity before, but often it does not find the political leadership to make it consequential. I was worried that Individual actions, even the actions of small groups of individuals, would not lead to real systemic change."

But once she got into the project, and studied the data and met the people involved, Liu changed her mind.

"I was pleasantly surprised," she said. "There was optimism, but there was something else, too. There was real progress. The progress fed the optimism. Now, there is optimism with passion, the passion to do more, to get done what needs to be done to make things better."

The green dot map

One of the first realizations in the aftermath of Katrina was the utter absence of capable political leadership, on the local, state and federal levels. Just like there was nothing available to plug the compromised levees, there was no political hero to step into the breach and stop the human disaster of ruined homes and vast displacement, and the accompanying social dissolution and stark fear.

Mayor Ray Nagin appeared particularly overmatched, but he did try and, oddly, one of his administration's mistakes became one of the first strong catalysts for change.

The mayor created the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and charged it with developing a plan for the city's recovery.

"The credibility of the BNOBC was harmed when the local newspaper published a staff graphic interpretive map that had large green dots over certain neighborhoods," explained Robert Collins of Dillard University in his Index essay on land use planning. "Many readers interpreted this as meaning these neighborhoods would be forcefully turned into green space and the residents would be forcefully removed."

The green dot map caused an uproar.

"People were not going to be told that their neighborhood would not return," Liu said. "People were determined to rebuild, that they were going to save neighborhoods. Once they started to come together and ask what needed to be done, a sense developed that 'we are going to get this right, we are not going to screw this up.'"

Liu said that once community groups showed they were serious about rebuilding, the business community, in many cases, allied with them, and together they pressured government to be responsive.

Broadmoor was one of the most devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans. In 2006, the Broadmoor Improvement Association reached out to Bard College in New York State and a California-based technology and mapping firm to undertake a comprehensive, building-by-building survey of the neighborhood and create a mapping system to manage the information gathered. The survey work went on in June and July of that year. These actions laid the groundwork for rebuilding and improving their neighborhood.

In September 2006, at a meeting of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, Hal Roark was installed as executive director of the Broadmoor Community Development Corporation.

"Do we want government help?" Roark said. "Yes. Do we think the Army Corps is to blame for the flooding? Yes. Do we hold them accountable and think they should pay for the damage? Yes. Are we going to wait for government help? No, absolutely not. Every neighborhood in the city wants government help, and for most of them, that's the extent of their strategy and plan. We want this help, too, but we don't intend to wait for it in making our plans and strategies."

Broadmoor did eventually get government help, and help from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, but the community organized and began saving itself first. The Belfer Center now teaches the recovery of Broadmoor as a model for reviving and improving a post-disaster neighborhood.

"Progress has been fastest and most effective among communities that have refused to wait for somebody else to help," LSU's Weil said. "The most successful communities have not tried to take the law into their own hands or point fingers of blame at others. They have mobilized their most valuable resource, their community members; they have followed the most effective strategy, working with each other; and they have taken the view that government is not the problem: it belongs to the citizens, and it can and must act as a partner to the citizens."

Community revival

Kalima Rose of PolicyLink and Laura Tuggle of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, who wrote the Index essay on the recovery work of community development groups would probably agree with Weil's assessment. But Hal Roark's characterization of "most" of the city's neighborhoods as having no plan beyond wanting government assistance - that may have applied before Katrina. But things were changing all over town, as Rose and Tuggle document.

"The community development sector was uneven in New Orleans pre-Katrina. There were a few strong organizations, but others were shells for graft," they said.

But post-Katrina, neighborhood organizations began to step up. The 9th Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, or NENA, was one of them.

"They are developing a community land trust to leverage subsidy and ensure the affordability and sustainability of the land, homes and businesses they rebuild," Rose and Tuggle wrote. "They are fostering small community businesses so that money will remain in the community. And they are focused on getting their own African American contractors on projects -confronting ongoing frustration that statutory goals for local contracting and hiring are not being met."

NENA takes a "clustering" approach to revitalization - bringing back an entire block at a time and anchoring it with commercial amenities and infrastructure. The strategy has been adopted by community development groups throughout the city.

"Groups are employing a range of strategies from property swaps, to building new homes on property owners' lots with sweat equity, to counseling distressed owners to draw down every available resource in a range of confusing options, to creating lease-to-own strategies for renters with federal Section 8 housing choice rental vouchers, to using federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to rehab properties sold to the state by homeowners who opted not to return to create opportunities for first time homebuyers," Rose and Tuggle said.

At Musicians' Village, also in the 9^th Ward celebrity musicians and New Orleans natives Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr, teamed up with the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, and utilized 18,000 volunteers to build 72 affordable ownership homes and 10 senior apartments on eight acres across several blocks.

The homes ring the blocks, with performance grounds and open space as their collective backyards. Construction recently began on the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, dedicated to the development of the next generation of New Orleans musicians.

"With this Center we celebrate this most vital part of our culture," Branford Marsalis said.

The city's large Vietnamese and Jewish communities were also in the forefront of rebuilding their neighborhoods and organizing in intelligent ways to tap into government and philanthropic funds, as well as outside technical assistance, to move their projects forward. In many cases, existing social groups, like Mardi Gras crews, joined with community groups, often from different neighborhoods, to form larger organizations that could also tap into available assistance.

"It started with the levees," the Data Center's Plyer said. "We all knew the levees were broken and needed to be fixed, and fixed in a way to prevent the catastrophe from ever happening again."

New Orleanians reformed the levee boards, filling them with professionals.

"Because we saw that we could do that, and that we could organize and bring back neighborhoods, we went after other things -- institutions, that is -- that were broken," she said. "We also learned that there is no cookie-cutter method. There are all sorts of situations, various resources, and problems and goals. But things were getting done."

Health, education and law

Katrina completely disrupted the city's health sector across the continuum of care from basic 911 services to high end specialty care. Hospital and ambulatory facilities in the city were severely damaged, some beyond repair. Only three of sixteen hospitals were in operation and these were in the suburbs. The public hospital, the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, was closed and only able to open 14 months later at one of its smaller facilities. This disaster hit a population already disadvantaged by high rates of chronic illness, low rates of health insurance, and poverty.

"Though horrific, the widespread devastation of the healthcare infrastructure gave the New Orleans region an unprecedented opportunity to redesign the health sector from the ground up," said Karen B. DeSalvo of the Tulane University School of Medicine, for the Index.

"The efforts at rebuilding and redesign began early and in earnest with stakeholders working simultaneously to restore services and to develop a policy framework that would guide and support this new vision and infrastructure," DeSalvo said.

In her essay, solidly supported by a wealth of data and charts, as are all the essays in the Index, DeSalvo shows how a vision of a high-quality, cost-effective and accessible health system was made a reality through "deliberate policy actions and grassroots activity."

"A unique convergence of community and policy efforts resulted in an empowered and forward-thinking health sector reform movement that has lead to transformational change in what was the most ineffective health system in the United States to one that can be a model for others," DeSalvo said.

Not only is the care better than that available prior to Katrina, but patients receiving care in the system "report better care than the average American" receives, she said.

The New Orleans public school system was struggling pre-Katrina and is now much improved, due to concerted citizen action and public support, according to Andre Perry of the University of New Orleans and Michael Schwam-Baird of Tulane.

They point out that the state took over the worst performing schools in the city, and the city and  state together created numerous charter schools - that is, publicly financed but independently managed schools. School choice was made available to all families in the city and poor teachers and administrators were removed and replaced.

"Student achievement has improved since Hurricane Katrina, by some measures at a faster rate than before the storm," Perry and Schwam-Baird said. "Fewer schools in New Orleans are now considered "academically unacceptable" according to the state's accountability system. This evidence is widely cited by supporters of post-Katrina school reform."

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called the New Orleans school reforms "compelling."

The criminal justice system was also broken, and New Orleanians set out to fix it.

In January 2007, 3,000 residents took part in a March for Survival. Suited businessmen, groups of uniformed schoolchildren, mothers with infants in arms, elderly couples, and anti-crime activists marched through downtown streets and converged on City Hall, sullenly protesting the city's latest wave of lethal violence.

New Orleans long had a reputation for street crime, police brutality, official corruption and a criminal justice system that seemed to perpetuate crime through ineffectiveness. But that march was a sign that post-Katrina New Orleans was not goinhg to stand for it any longer. The protest fostered a movement already afoot, a movement for change in the neighborhoods and in the system.

A Crime Coalition was formed from an alliance of major business, civic, faith-based, and service organizations, and became an effective fundraiser and influential voice for more effective law enforcement strategies targeting violent crime.

The City Council formed the Criminal Justice Committee and its chairman, Councilmember James Carter, initiated a citywide Crime Prevention Roundtable titled "Best Practices for New Orleans' Criminal Justice System."

Carter authored an ordinance that established the Independent Police Monitoring Division within the Office of the Inspector General. The ordinance passed the Council unanimously in June 2008, supported by a strong coalition of advocacy organizations, community groups, and business and civic leaders.

"Recommendations for instituting both IG and IPM offices predated Hurricane Katrina, but insufficient pressure from citizens permitted political inaction, and neither materialized," wrote  Nadiene Van Dyke, Jon Wool and Luceia LeDoux, in their contribution to the Index.

"However, the rhetoric post-storm had changed: calls for transparency by an engaged citizenry combined with new leadership determined to make government responsive and accountable, trumping traditional institutional and political interests," they said.

This determination to fix things focused on the limping, overburdened public defender's office.

"For the first time, the need for adequately funded, professional indigent defense in New Orleans was acknowledged," Van Dyke, Wool and LeDoux said. "With a $580,000 state grant, a $2.8 million federal grant, and a $400,000 annual state appropriation, New Orleans' public defenders' office began reinventing itself."

The criminal justice system has begun to turn around, to serve the citizenry rather than entrenched interests, the authors said. But they admit that there is a long way to go, with plenty of poverty exacerbating the situation on the streets and the reforms greatly dependent on the kind of leadership the city can muster.

"It remains to be seen whether decision makers will choose to reinvent rather than rebuild the system," the authors said. "The Independent Police Monitor, autonomous, codified in law, and guaranteed a steady funding stream, will assure greater police accountability and transparency unless a concerted assault on the legislation is successfully mounted."

But the several other anti-crime and anti-corruption initiatives so far taken are "vulnerable to funding cuts and political whimsy," they said.

Oil's future

Author after author throughout the Index acknowledges that, although there are quantifiable advances in nearly all social and political spheres since the storm, much more still needs to be done and greatly depends on the continued commitment of residents, local leaders and monied assistance from philanthropies and Washington, D.C.

Another section of the Index report argues that New Orleans has to learn to live with its watery environment. Both the recession and the oil spill are indications that the city and region must learn to expand and diversify its economy.

"New Orleans' economy has traditionally been based on four industries - oil, shipbuilding, commercial fishing and tourism," Liu said. "Each one of those industries was sinking before Katrina, and have been further hit by the recession and the oil spill. Some people have been looking at developing new industries in the region."

Knowledge-based industries, tied to institutes of higher learning, are growing, as is the insurance industry, Liu and Plyer said.

"The oil spill has turned people's attention to the wetlands," Plyer said. "People realize now that restoring and preserving the wetlands has to be a part of rebuilding the city."

Plyer said that New Orleans could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster an opportunity to lead the nation in developing alternative energy industries.

"Maybe the scientists and engineers out of work from the oil and gas industries could be put back to work restoring the wetlands," she said. "We all need to think long and hard about moving away from an oil-based economy."

Not everyone is of the same opinion. Eric Smith, a Tulane professor and head of the Tulane Energy Institute, while complimentary of much of the work of the GNODC and the Index, thinks that the oil industry is vital to the city and the region and should be fostered rather than abandoned.

"Some of their policy proposals do not reflect the decades of effort or the multi-billions of dollars that it would take to transition to a new age economy," Smith said of the GNODC.

The question, said Smith, is not "whether it would be desirable to diversify the economy. It definitely would be an improvement.

"But, it's a bit like telling the New York area to forget about financial activity or publishing because they haven't been doing too well recently, that they should retrain everyone to compete with Boston and Silicon valley," he said. "Publishing and financial services are what New Yorkers do. What Louisiana does is focus on marine transportation, oil and gas, and tourism. Both cities do what they do because they are able to do it best."

Smith advocates that the federal government lift its moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf - in place in the wake of the oil spill, and while the cause of the disaster is investigated - because the ban is severely hurting the oil industry, which is the largest industry in Louisiana, and the likelihood of another ruptured well catastrophe is slight.

There is concern that, now that the oil leak has been plugged, the nation's attention will turn away from the region and leave New Orleans and the surrounding area to fend for itself. Plyer dismisses the significance.

"The media may turn away from New Orleans, but the people of New Orleans have worked hard for the city they love over the past five years, and they've seen some positive results from their labors, and I feel sure their efforts will continue whether or not they are in the media spotlight," she said.

Plyer added that the commitments of certain organizations and, most importantly, of the federal government, to stand with New Orleans in its efforts to revive are solid.

Government support

The federal government is a big player in New Orleans recovery. Since taking office, the Obama administration has freed up over $2.25 billion in FEMA public assistance dollars for Louisiana recovery efforts. It has helped over 12,300 low-income families in disaster rental housing secure more permanent housing and provided $85 million in new HUD housing vouchers.

To date, over 220 miles of levees and floodwalls have been repaired and restored to pre-Katrina levels of protection.

The Department of Justice has provided over $130 million in grants to renew damaged and displaced local criminal justice systems ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and is working, at the request of New Orleans' new Mayor Mitch Landrieu, with the New Orleans Police Department to improve local criminal justice efforts.

Landrieu has also been working closely with the State of Louisiana and HUD officials to expedite the expenditure of the city's unspent $411 million in Federal Community Development Block Grants.

The federal Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services has provided $40 million in grants to bring 944 medical professionals to New Orleans for at least three years. In addition, $7 million in grants have been provided to fund community health centers in New Orleans that serve more than 50,000 people. To replace a veterans hospital destroyed by the storm, in June 2010 VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and local officials broke ground on a new 1.5 million-square-foot VA medical center in downtown New Orleans.

In addition, Louisiana has dedicated $247.5 million of its Federal Community Development Block Grant disaster recovery allocation to provide school districts with funding for repairs and improvements.

The population, which had dropped from 455,188 before the storm to 208,548 afterwards, has climbed back to 354,850. The city is back to 80 percent of its pre-Katrina households and 78 percent of the population. African American communities, traditionally the poorest, have had the hardest time returning, with the percentage of blacks in the city dropping from 66.7 percent in 2000 to 60.7 in 2008. About 88,000 blacks have not yet returned.

And poverty persists, and homelessness, and crime. Plyer, Liu, their colleagues and many others, including the city's new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, admit these difficulties. Yet they all see that positive change has happened, is happening and, with work and commitment, will continue.

"One of the most striking aspects of the post-Katrina period in New Orleans is how people who had never really taken part before have been drawn into civic affairs," said LSU's Weil.

He added that post-Katrina New Orleanians were 24 percentage points above the national average in the likelihood of attending a public meeting at which town or school affairs were discussed.

Perhaps New Orleans is transforming from the city that care forgot to the city that residents remembered.

Go here for the Greater New Orleans Data Center's Index report and here for information on the Belfer Center Broadmoor Project.