Katrina: After the Flood

Gary Rivlin

4 ideas

1. Road Home grants tied to pre-storm value

   Louisiana's federally funded Road Home program calculated rebuilding grants on the lower of a home's pre-storm market value or its repair cost. Because houses in Black neighborhoods such as New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward had been appraised lower, partly through historic segregation and redlining, their owners often got far less than it cost to rebuild. A fair-housing lawsuit against HUD ended in a 2011 settlement that changed the formula, but by then many families had already given up or run out of money.

2. The green dot map of 2006

   In January 2006, the mayor's Bring New Orleans Back Commission released a planning map. Green dots on it marked flooded, mostly Black and working-class areas that might become parks or green space instead of being rebuilt. The public backlash was so fierce that the city dropped any coordinated shrinking of its footprint. The result was a haphazard 'jack-o'-lantern' pattern of rebuilt and empty lots, left to whoever could finance a return.

3. Disaster recovery amplifies pre-existing inequality

   Aid formulas are keyed to property values, insurance coverage, and people's capacity to navigate bureaucracy. So recovery money flows to the people who already had assets and time to wait. Neighborhoods that were wealthier and whiter before the storm came back faster and more fully, while poorer ones stayed partly empty ten years later. The disaster did not level the city; the rebuilding process sorted it along the same lines that existed before.

4. Catastrophe as cover for institutional reset

   View the post-disaster period as a window when institutions can be torn down and rebuilt in ways that would be politically impossible in normal times. They turned most schools into charters and demolished large public housing complexes. These changes were framed as recovery but amounted to permanent redesigns of who the city served.

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