Geography, Developers
On the suggestion of commenters here, I connected up with ACORN, the progressive group that has stepped into the breech and gutted out thousands of homes in New Orleans in the last 20 months or so. Darryl Durham is both a jazz musician and the lead coordinator of ACORN's Home Clean-out Program. The goal of the Clean-out Program, said Darryl, is fairly simple: to strip moldy, mud-caked houses down to their 2X4s. What's left is only the roof, foundation, frame, and siding. Homeowners sign an agreement with ACORN pledging that they will both rebuild and not resell their rebuilt home. Gutting a single home costs ACORN about $1,000. Compare that, said Darryl with the $5,000 to $14,000 a contractor will charge.

New Orleans is a beautiful and compelling city, architecturally. (An architect I met there who studied at Tulane praised the city as a fantastic classroom.) While so much made pre-storm New Orleans an attractive city to be, Darryl suggested that it was also a difficult place for any new real estate development to take root. It's a matter of geography, for one thing. New Orleans is bounded on the north by Lake Pontchartrain and on the south by the Mississippi. (See the Google Earth image above. The big blob is the lake and the squiggly thing the river.) Much of the housing stock in the city is family-owned and has been for generations. Hurricane Katrina, said Darryl, was something like a "perfect storm" for real estate developers. As things stand, it's tempting for land owners to sell. For developers, said Darryl, it's a game of attrition, waiting to see who falls into arrears with taxes or insurance.

Home Owners and Home Ownership
Focusing on homeowners in New Orleans is an attempt to try to bite off a smaller piece of the Gulf Coast rebuilding puzzle. Of course, from the perspective of New Orleans as an urban ecosystem, its health is connected to the prospects of long-term, rooted residents -- and the buildings they live in. What might run counter to assumptions is how many people that approach addresses. The owner-occupancy rates in the Lower Ninth Ward, for example, ran near 60% in 2000.

According to ACORN, rebuilding -- at least the very early stages of it -- began just after the storm. In the early days and weeks, much of the telecommunications infrastructure was down and solid information was hard to come by. Some New Orleanians started to self-organize via text messaging on their cell phones. In that confusion over what to do next, ACORN launched a "Do Not Bulldoze" campaign to protect the infrastructure for those owners who wanted to hang on to their homes. The ACORN campaign has since become "No Land Grab."

Gutting, Compliance, Psychology
ACORN's first step towards protecting a property is to clean out the home itself. ACORN, to be sure, isn't the only group engaged in gutting and rebuilding. Habitat for Humanity has been doing work, as have Catholic Charities and Hands On and others. Without these NGOs and social groups and church groups and college kids who come to New Orleans to volunteer, Darryl said, "we'd be sunk."

Part of the need for gutting programs is simple: compliance. The city of New Orleans passed a "Gutting Ordinance" that required that homeowners to gut and board up their properties by the one year anniversary of the storm, August 29, 2006, and to keep the lawn continually trimmed. (I can't figure out what the sanctions have been for homeowners who have missed that deadline.) But more than that, suggested, Darryl, the need is psychological. Coming home to a house still full of destroyed belongings and caked with mud with mold creeping towards the ceiling is discouraging. To the right and above, an example: a house on Tennessee Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward where the coffee pot was still filled with what I have to assume is Katrina waters.

But at some point, you have to start to wonder, are there just too many stimuli stacked up on the side of not rejoining the life of this city? Homeowners have to contend with property that may well have been destroyed, while still lashed to a mortgage they're obligated to keep paying. Some homeowners paid off their mortgages with their insurance money -- they own what's left of their homes flat-out, but have little left for rebuilding. Some are contending with insurance premiums having increased some 144.5% (!) in some parts of the city. Schools are still closed. Roads aren't in great shape. In some neighborhoods, basic utilities are still out of service. In Chalmette, I drove my rented PT Cruiser right through an intersection and came close to an oncoming car because I didn't expect that the stop lights would still be out.

Road Home, Governor Blanco
Part of the answer to whether homeowners are re-establishing their homes in post-storm New Orleans lies in the state-level Road Home program pushed by Governor Blanco. I heard Road Home talked about on the radio and by residents quite a bit. What the program does is cover the gap left by insurance and FEMA grants, providing up to $150,000 for rebuilding and reselling. According to the Times-Picayune, federal involvement in Road Home was the final straw in Blanco's decision not to run for re-election. HUD officials were critical of the way that the program distributed payment in installments and urged that it be made in one lump sum. From the Times-Picayune: "Blanco viewed the demand as the latest in a series of partisan actions by the Bush administration that have had the effect of halting the recovery."

(Beyond the federal involvement in Road Home, though, Blanco's campaign has said that the prospect of John Breaux getting into the race made it hard for her to fundraise. Breaux has since decided not to run, citing the confusion over whether he met the necessary residency requirements.)

Stafford Match, FEMA, and President Bush
Money is naturally a big part of the situation in New Orleans -- who has it, who wants it, where it's going to go. The excellent First Draft blog has ably highlighted the conundrum concerning the question of how much Louisiana and local government are expected to contribute to unlock federal monies. Here's the situation. The 1998 Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act created the system by which a Presidential Disaster Declaration triggers financial assistance through FEMA. State and local governments must match 10% of the federal funds that go to rebuilding. Officials in Louisiana say that they just don't have the money, and have asked for a waiver.

So under law, President Bush can waive the Stafford match requirement once per capita costs exceed $65. The match was waived in South Florida after Hurricane Andrew when costs reached $139. In was waived for my new home town of New York City after September 11th when they reached $139. In fact, it's been reportedly waived 32 other times since 1985. Post-storm recovery bills in Louisiana now stand at about $6,700. Donald Powell, the coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding has said, "I'm not sure the Stafford Act anticipated a catastrophic event such as Katrina." But don't look for the White House to issue a waiver any time soon. They've put it plainly (pdf): "The Administration opposes a waiver of the State match requirement." The Fair Assistance in Recovery Amendment proposed by Mary Landrieu would waive the requirement. FAIR was a provision in the supplemental bill that Bush vetoed on Monday (you know, the one with the Iraq troop withdrawal timetable.)

The Nagin/Blakely Recovery Plan
That "no" on the federal level has quite an impact on the local level and for the long term. The recently announced 15-year rebuilding plan crafted by Ray Nagin and recovery czar Ed Blakely has buoyed hopes. (And the timeline doesn't seem to have scared people off. ACORN's Darryl Durham pointed to the rebuilding of North Dakota and Minnesota since the Red River flood of 1997, where it has taken a decade for some measure of rebuilding to take place.)

The city's rebuilding plan spends about $1.1 billion and targets 17 areas, with the goal of spurring development along business corridors. New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, whose residents have been a wee bit concerned that recovery plans would leave them out altogether, have been targeted for $145 million in investments. A wide swath of people in the city seemed quite encouraged by the plan. But, a problem -- a sizable chunk of the money, $342 million, is slated to come from the waiver of the federal match that Bush has refused to give.

From Here on Out
Mary Rickard, ACORN's web campaign coordinator, told me that the lesson she thinks that Americans should take from New Orleans is that "if we can write off this city, we can write off your city." Is this a brief window, a few year respite where the French Quarter is hopping and hope is still in the air before things go south? Sitting at a packed Cafe Du Monde, drinking a cafe au lait and eating beignets while a pair of musicians play on the corner, it's easy to think that all is well. But can a city long survive when so many of its constituent parts are under duress? "We're making history. Good or bad, we're making history," Darryl said.

Of course, discussions about housing stock and home ownership rates and federal policy twists and turns are inadequate when it comes to capturing the full scope of this storm. When I mentioned to Darryl that "the storm" is all consuming here, he said his mother, who came to visit him in New Orleans, said the same thing -- everywhere you go, it's all people talk about, and it's everything in everyone's lives. I for one am not sure I've ever been in a circumstances where there is such sustained focus. Even on election night, you talk about other things. Even at a funeral, or on safari in Masai Mara, or, I'd imagine, on your wedding day. But the storm is everything in New Orleans. Wait until hurricane season comes around on June 1, said Darryl. Last year, that's when people really start acting strange.

The Future of Music
And take those musicians at Cafe Du Monde. As I mentioned, Darryl is himself a jazz musician and worries about the fate of the young musicians in the city. I have a hazy memory of being a kid of maybe about 10 and walking through the Quarter and seeing a young boy playing the trumpet (?) next to an older man. I remember just marveling at how talented and independent a human my age could be. So many artists were displaced and having a tough time getting back -- and with them, much of New Orleans culture. Along those lines, anyone know anything about the Harry Connick/Branford Marsalis/Habitat for Humanity Musicians' Village project?

[Here's as good a time as any to recommend the excellent Voices from the Storm, an oral history collection from Dave Eggers McSweeney's outfit. Featured are a number of local artists and musicians, including trumpeter Kermit Ruffins.]

Darryl and I got to talking about the music business -- about distribution models and the new Internet radio performance fees and how TLC (you know, T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chili) went bankrupt to get out of their record contract. People get locked into financial situations and find it difficult to get out, he said. It's an old story for musicians. And it's a situation not unfamiliar to many New Orleanians as they try to make sense of their new circumstances.

Beyond Buildings: Mental Illness
Every indication is that, from the perspective of the individual, the process is bewildering and emotionally traumatic. Again, the fantastic First Draft blog has covered what is beginning to look like a plague of depression in the Gulf Coast. Among New Orleans kids, there has been a 400% post-storm increase in clinically-diagnosed depression alone. Somewhat less quantifiable are stories like these:

A murder/suicide in Old Town Bay St. Louis (Mississippi) has stunned the Hancock County community. Police say prominent Bay St. Louis businessman Carl Heitzmann shot his wife, Mimi to death then turned the gun on himself.
...

Chuck Benvenutti, a relative of the victims, said, "Carl and Mimi are casualties of Katrina. They're just as much casualties as those people who lost their lives. Depression is here in Bay St. Louis. Dealing with the post-Katrina, you can't begin to fathom unless you're living here. And you don't realize how bad it is for some people until something like this happens."

Pick Up a Hammer
So many aspects of this story are sorta intangible and somewhat complex -- the scourge of depression, the future of jazz, 15-year plans, federal feuds, and much much more. But one thing that is concrete and simple in New Orleans is the rotting housing stock. I've talked before about how I spent some time during my trip touring affected neighborhoods like Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and the Lower Ninth Ward. I wasn't alone -- there are tour buses traveling through the city on what I heard called "misery tours." One place a tour like that might pass is a community tool-borrowing shop in the Lower Ninth Ward. There was a sign out front with a message that I wish I had gotten down exactly, but the gist was this: "Hey tourists! Put down the camera and pick up a hammer." So while I was there I decided to go all participant observer and do exactly that.

But that's for another post. This one is plenty long enough!