5th Anniversary of Katrina - A Tale of 2 Recoveries

By Michael A. Fletcher Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 27, 2010; A13

IN NEW ORLEANS The massive government effort to repair the damage from
Hurricane Katrina is fostering a stark divide as the state governments
in Louisiana and Mississippi structured the rebuilding programs in
ways that often offered the most help to the most affluent residents.

The result, advocates say, has been an uneven recovery, with whites
and middle-class people more likely than blacks and low-income people
to have rebuilt their lives in the five years since the horrific
storm.

"The recovery is really the tale of two recoveries," said James Perry,
executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action
Center. "For people who were well off before the storm, they are more
likely to be back in their homes, back in their jobs and to have
access to good health care. For those who were poor or struggling to
get by before the storm, the opposite is true."

Louisiana's program to distribute grants to property owners whose
homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina was found by a federal
judge this month to discriminate against black homeowners.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, state officials refused to offer rebuilding
grants to property owners who suffered wind damage, explaining that
the property owners should have carried private insurance. That rule
hit low-income and black homeowners particularly hard, advocates say,
because many of them were uninsured, often because they owned property
that was passed down through the generations.

The $143 billion federally funded reconstruction effort, one of the
largest such projects in the country's history, fortified vulnerable
levees, rebuilt hundreds of public buildings, reconstructed miles of
roads and bridges, and provided tens of thousands of residents with
money to help piece together their shattered lives.

But there is a sharp disparity in how residents view the pace of
recovery. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that
while seven in 10 New Orleans residents say the rebuilding process is
"going in the right direction," a third say their lives are still
disrupted by the storm.

African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to say they
have not yet recovered after Katrina, the survey found. And blacks in
the city are 2 1/2 times as likely to be low-income than whites.

"I just knew we had a rotten deal," said Edward Randolph, a disabled
Vietnam veteran who with his wife, Angela, has been struggling to
rebuild their duplex in New Orleans East. "We know we have a lot to
do, but we just do not have the money to do it."

The storm propelled them on a years-long odyssey through Port Arthur,
Tex., Houston and Arkansas. They did not return to their still-damaged
home until 2008.

The federally funded rebuilding program established by Louisiana
officials - called Road Home - offered homeowners grants of up to
$150,000. But homeowners could not collect more than the pre-storm
value of their homes, regardless of the cost of repairs.

The Randolph home was valued at just $135,000, although repair costs
were estimated by the state to be $308,000. The Randolphs were awarded
a grant of $16,649, to supplement just over $100,000 they received in
insurance payments.

This month, a federal judge ruled that the program's formula for
calculating grants discriminates against black homeowners, who tend to
live in neighborhoods with lower home values.

"We obviously disagree with the judge's action, which has stopped us
from paying out some grants, and already have appealed it," said
Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Road Home program. "I think
it is worth noting that the state did not create this program in a
vacuum - the federal government signed off on the design of the
program and any major changes we made along the way."

She added that the state has modified the program to pay out an
additional $2 billion to more than 45,000 low-income homeowners.
Overall, Road Home paid $8.6 billion to more than 127,000 homeowners.

Many of these simmering issues will not be visible when President
Obama arrives here Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of the storm
that killed more than 1,800, uprooted more than 1 million Gulf Coast
residents, and left 80 percent of this city submerged.

The visit is expected to underscore the president's support for a
region still reeling not just from Katrina but from the largest oil
spill in the nation's history, which is threatening the region's
immediate economic future. A regional group of business and political
leaders formed a coalition this week aimed at holding Obama to his
promise to restore the Gulf Coast.

Obama's visit will also underscore the strides made since the breached
floodwalls and overtopped levees left people here camping on highway
overpasses, cowering in attics and retreating to the squalor of the
Superdome and the Convention Center to escape the deadly waters.

The surreal landscape of grounded boats, washed-up appliances and
mud-choked streets is long gone, and many of the most obvious scars
from the catastrophe are healing. The Army Corps of Engineers has
rebuilt 220 miles of levees and floodwalls.

The school system, widely viewed as one of the nation's worst before
the storm, has been reborn with many charter schools. Though activists
have filed a lawsuit alleging that special-needs students are being
underserved by the new education structure, 59 percent of city
students are in schools that meet state academic standards - more than
double the number who attended such schools before Katrina.

The storm ravaged the city's hospital system, leaving many residents
in the largely black eastern part of the city a long ambulance ride
from emergency health care. At the same time, more than 90
neighborhood health clinics opened and are showing promise at
delivering preventive care and helping people manage chronic diseases
such as diabetes and hypertension.

But there is concern that many of the health centers, funded with
federal grant money that is winding down, are struggling to draw
enough insured patients to become self-sufficient.

"Everyone now has to transition to a more sustainable model of health
care," said Sarat Raman, associate medical director of Daughters of
Charity Services of New Orleans, which operates three clinics that
serve 15,000 patients in the area. "You have to have a balance of
patients."

Along Mississippi's Gulf Coast, where the violent winds and an
unprecedented storm surge overwhelmed homeowners, sheared off roofs
and splintered houses, the scene has also improved.

The waterfront casinos that provide a large chunk of this state's
revenue are humming. The vast majority of residents are back in their
rebuilt homes, although thousands are still struggling to find
affordable housing because their recovery checks did not cover the
cost of the damage.

Despite the improvements, many gaps remain.

The New Orleans area has regained more than 90 percent of its
pre-Katrina population, according to the Greater New Orleans Community
Data Center.

But in the city itself, just 78 percent of the population has
returned, and a growing share of the region's poor now reside in the
suburbs. The city's population drop has been most severe in black
neighborhoods, many of which absorbed Katrina's most brutal blows.

Despite well-publicized recovery efforts, including a plan led by
actor Brad Pitt to build 150 solar-powered homes, just 24 percent of
the Lower Ninth Ward's pre-storm population has returned. There, newly
rebuilt homes stand next to vacant lots or crumbling houses. Entire
blocks remain desolate five years after the storm.

In middle-class Pontchartrain Park, not far from historically black
Dillard University, just 55 percent of households have rebuilt,
according to the data center.

Beyond the problems with Road Home, New Orleans has experienced a
dramatic spike in rental costs since the storm.

"Many low-cost apartments are gone with the wind and the water," said
Laura Tuggle, the outgoing managing attorney of Southeast Louisiana
Legal Services. "Now, we're left with New York rents on New Orleans
wages."

In Mississippi, where Katrina severely damaged more than 101,000
housing units, many residents face what advocates call a similar
inequity. Praised in the aftermath of Katrina for his can-do attitude,
Gov. Haley Barbour (R) received a series of waivers from the Bush
administration that largely freed Mississippi from the requirement to
spend at least half of his state's $5.5 billion in federal block grant
money on low- and moderate-income residents. Barbour successfully
argued that the waivers were necessary to give the state flexibility
to deal effectively with the widespread devastation.

That allowed the state to divert close to $1 billion to help
devastated utilities rebuild, to subsidize residents' insurance
premiums and to help fund the port and other economic development
projects. Meanwhile, advocates say that more than 5,000 low-income
Mississippi families have yet to settle in permanent housing since the
storm.

State officials say they are expanding the number of public housing
units beyond pre-Katrina levels and establishing programs to encourage
development of affordable rental housing.

Still, advocates say the more than $3 billion distributed by the
state's housing recovery program went disproportionately to
more-affluent residents. The plan paid up to $150,000 to homeowners
whose properties were damaged by the unprecedented storm surge spawned
by Katrina, but nothing to those whose homes suffered wind damage.

To be eligible for the initial grants, families had to have homeowners
insurance, although the state later devised a program that paid grants
of up to $100,000 to low-income, uninsured homeowners whose properties
were damaged by the storm surge.

The rationale, state officials said, was that responsible homeowners
had no way to know that they should have flood insurance in areas that
federal experts deemed to be outside the flood plain.

"The storm surge was the priority," said Lee Youngblood,
communications director of the Mississippi Development Authority.
"Mississippi had no intention of compensating people who chose, for
whatever reason, not to have wind insurance."

That formula struck some advocates as discriminatory. "The criteria
discriminated against black storm victims, who more likely than not
were renters, or, if homeowners, more likely than not lacked
insurance," said Reilly Morse, co-director of housing policy for the
Mississippi Center for Justice.

The state's formula had the effect of freezing out people whose homes
were destroyed by the wind, which along much of the Mississippi coast
meant black residents who often lived in paid-off homes that had been
handed down through the generations. The expensive waterfront property
was mostly owned by whites, while inland property, which suffered more
wind damage, was owned largely by blacks.

In Gulfport, a railroad embankment that has long served as an informal
racial demarcation line became a levee when Katrina hit.

As the surging waters crashed through their patio door and rose five
feet in their home, a white couple, Ernest and Doreen Chamberlain,
gathered their family and sought refuge on the black side of the
tracks.

Coming upon an old, wood-frame house he thought was abandoned, Ernest
Chamberlain began trying to break the door down, only to be surprised
when it was opened by Irene Walker, an elderly black woman.

"She was like, 'Mister, what are you doing?' " he recalled. "Then she
invited us in."

That's where the Chamberlains rode out the storm, even as raw sewage
backed up into the Walker home.

Five years later, the Chamberlains are back in their sunny home.
Although they had to fight with insurers and contractors, they secured
a $150,000 grant from the state to help repair the flood damage, which
totaled nearly $200,000.

Meanwhile, the Walker home sits abandoned. A church group installed a
new roof, but the interior remains untouched. The 82-year-old Walker,
meanwhile, is living with family members a few miles away.

"She hasn't gotten any help from the government for the house," said
Occelletta Norwood, Walker's niece. "She got a little money from FEMA
at the start, but that was it."

fletcherm@washpost.com Research editor Alice R. Crites contributed to
this report.