Two catastrophes have befallen the United States during the Bush Administration. One was 9/11, which the Administration has seized upon with relish. The other was Hurricane Katrina, which the Administration has pretty much wished away.
The difference in response is not an accident. The attack on the World Trade Center was convenient in the extreme in justifying policies the Bush people wanted to pursue already. Katrina, by contrast, exposed embarrassing truths about a central constituency group – oil – and about central assumptions regarding property and economic process. To permit Katrina to linger in the public mind would be to risk those truths rising out of the confusion and din.
Katrina really was more than a storm, and more than a tale of hapless governmental response. It was a parable of the folly that has become the dominant narrative of the age.
The hurricane itself was not what brought destruction to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It was, rather, the egregious neglect that degraded the defenses – both social and natural – that should have protected the city against such storms.
There used to be miles of wetlands that provided a buffer for the coast. Oil development has destroyed half of them. The levees that protected the city had fallen into disrepair. Twenty years ago, engineers had predicted exactly the break that occurred during Katrina. It turns out, in other words, that New Orleans arose not just from individual enterprise and initiative, nor from organized capital in the form of the corporation. It arose not just from the process that the Bush people find convenient to acknowledge.
Like all cities, and for that matter like all private wealth, New Orleans was and is a product also of society and nature. Every dollar of property value in the city is contingent, to one degree or another, upon the social and natural commons that precedes and under-girds it. Decades of ignorance of this central fact worked almost as a form of AIDS, in that it crippled the defenses and made the city vulnerable to the storm.
Thus the parable, and thus the corresponding instinct of the Administration to bury it. To acknowledge the social basis of wealth is to acknowledge a legitimate social claim on that wealth. To acknowledge the role of nature is to acknowledge the over-riding necessity of protecting it. The preferred narrative insists that such things cannot be. Markets create wealth. Corporations solve problems. Nature is raw material. Society does not exist. That is the dogma. And then the storm said, HA!
Belief dies hard when it serves encrusted agendas, whether psychological, economic or political. Today, almost a year after Katrina, the Administration has succeeded in changing the subject. Our attentions now are elsewhere – immigration, flag burning, gay marriage and Armageddon-mongering in the Middle East. While tourists have returned to New Orleans, miles of neighborhoods are pretty much as the storm left them. Carcasses of homes and businesses sit in muddy heaps, and some 40% of the city’s residents – close to 300,000 people – have not returned.
The parable of commons neglect has been reduced to a story of bureaucratic bumbling. The narrative of social irrelevance and private wealth is if anything enhanced. Finally, aid is trickling out from Washington; but it is almost entirely in the form of checks for individual property owners. There have been proposals to enable residents to plan the rebuilding of their own neighborhoods, in a way that works with nature and restores a measure of the city’s social richness. But in Washington there has been little money and even less interest.
The Tomales Bay Institute asked Tony Dunbar, a writer and New Orleans resident, to report on efforts in New Orleans to confront the future rather than hide from it. His report follows.
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THE NEW ORLEANS COMMONS
By Tony Dunbar
Things are divided into common, public, and private…Common things may not be owned by anyone. They are such as the air and the high seas that may be freely used by everyone conformably with the use for which nature has intended them.
– The Louisiana Civil Code, Articles 448 and 449
People do not talk about their common property enough. While there is an awareness that our open spaces and clean air add up to something called “quality of life,” it is a safe bet that most of us think first about our private “things” when adding up our personal assets. It may not be our nature, but it is certainly our predilection, to focus on the economic “me” rather than the cultural and economic “we.” Yet in New Orleans, one of the realities exposed by Hurricane Katrina is that it was the neglect of the common assets of the community that caused the destruction of nearly the entire city.
These assets were nature’s gift of boundless coastal wetlands and the man-made system of protective levees surrounding New Orleans. The disintegration of these two was responsible for the loss of inestimable amounts of personal and public property, and this article presents a prescription for the renewal of these key features of the New Orleans commons. Also discussed is the startling phenomenon of people returning in great numbers to a landscape wasted by flood.
New Orleans: Summer 2006
Before August 29, 2005, New Orleans was a city where many kids could walk to school and where almost all of the residents could walk from their houses to a po-boy or pizza joint. Countless neighborhood bars played live music into the wee hours. Close by home there would likely be a park, a grassy levee, a bicycle path. If one were so inclined he or she could walk to the local polling place, a supermarket, and about a dozen restaurants or various sorts. It was a city where virtually all of the buildings – except for the downtown skyscrapers – were one or two-stories in height and where the flowers were always in bloom. It was a city full of third- and fourth-generation citizens, many of whom lived within hailing distance of their relatives. Locals were exuberant in celebration and tolerant of peculiarities. For a lot of people, that was New Orleans.
If we fast-forward to two restaurants open for dinner and a truck selling “tacos,” three burned-out houses, an orange-vested crew cleaning up mounds of trash, a padlocked schoolhouse, a reluctant herd of Washington politicians on tour, and kids and parents spread all over the country, we are talking about New Orleans today. It has been more than ten months since the storm.
Of course that old New Orleans, last year’s New Orleans, had 124 of the worst schools in the United States, reckless street crime, and one of the highest poverty rates and lowest literacy rates of any urban area in the country.
The new Katrina-busted city has a school system under state control (and a grand total of 20 functioning public schools, 11 of which are charters). The criminals, by and large, are new arrivals from Texas who came to “gut” flooded houses and decided to loot them instead. The city’s poor and illiterate have been scattered across our generous continent.
It’s an odd image, but Katrina seems to me like a snowball. It gets worse each month. We are still coming to grips with the many facets of our problems. It is going to take much longer than the politicians say.
– Serena Jones, Volunteer and Board Member, Friends of the New Orleans Public Libraries
While everyone with a television knows how totally ruined New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region looked in the days and weeks following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, many people are unaware that most of this area looks basically the same today. Those thousands of people who were forcibly evacuated by boat and helicopter, who endured the horrors of the Convention Center and the Superdome where lawlessness reigned, who day after day were promised buses that failed to arrive – those people are still in motel rooms and apartments all across Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and almost every city in the United States. In fact, more than 230,000 people, none of the numbers is certain, who formerly lived in the New Orleans metropolitan area have not yet returned.
And why would reasonable people come back? There are precious few places to live. Vast areas of the city, dozens of square miles of single-family homes and apartment buildings, remain dark. It is possible to drive through a hundred blocks of once thriving neighborhoods in the Lakeview and eastern sections of the city without seeing an open business or any sign of life other than the occasional crew gutting a public building or, more rarely, some optimistic person’s house. You can enjoy the Milky Way at night from a series of formerly bustling Interstate exits – still wastelands of boarded-up gas stations, empty La Quinta Inns, and closed fast-food restaurants. In some places those who have made their way home have set up vigilante roadblocks to keep looters out of their neighborhoods.
Some sections are even worse. The communities immediately adjacent to the levee failures, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, and parts of Gentilly, still look like nuclear bombs were set off among them. Houses were swept away, piled on each other and tumbled on top of cars, and they are still there. Only in March 2006 did the demolition of the first of these structures, the ones actually blocking public roadways, begin (more than 28,500 houses in the Katrina-area have been marked for demolition). Anything rebuilt in these places would have to be from the ground up. Rebuilding would not be easy because electric power, sewers, gas and water service have yet to be restored to the hardest-hit neighborhoods.
South of New Orleans, the highway to lands-end in Plaquemines Parish, has only recently been re-opened by the military. The sixty-seven mile necklace of communities below the town of Port Sulphur was blown flat by the winds, and they remain flat today.
In the parts of New Orleans proper that did not flood, like the French Quarter, the Universities area, and Uptown – all close to the natural “levees” formed by centuries of sediment deposited on the banks of the Mississippi River – neighborhood life is functioning again. It is not the same as it was, but in light of the suffering of others it seems petty to complain about the piles of debris from fallen roofs everywhere, the disappearance of curb-side recycling and regular garbage pick-up, sporadic mail delivery (and the Post Office just started delivering magazines again in June), the uncertain business climate that has shopkeepers nervous about the future and professionals scouting new jobs in North Carolina, lay-offs of tenured faculty at Tulane and the University of New Orleans, the missing streetcars on St. Charles Avenue, non-functioning traffic lights, the limited health care (only one adult hospital, at this writing, is open in New Orleans), and the surprising number of deaths occurring among the elderly.
The sounds of New Orleans: first dead silence, then helicopters, then chainsaws, then nail guns, now sirens.
– Jean Fahr, Director, Parkway Partners
The miracle, however, is that people are streaming back into the city, but first…
How Did This Happen?
It is easy to say that the Federal Government has failed coastal Louisiana since that is exactly what has happened. There was, of course, the levee breach itself. Though scientific and engineering studies continue, it seems clear that one critical breach, the 17th Street Canal separating New Orleans from its neighboring parish (a wash-out that alone probably accounted for the flooding of more than half of the 95,000 damaged homes), happened just as a 1986 Corps of Engineers study predicted it would. The soil type was wrong; the concrete walls were inadequately anchored. In other words, the levee was built to fail. The Corps’ own panel reported in June 2006 that the hurricane protection shield before Katrina was “a system in name only” and that it had been extended and “improved” in recent years without regard to accurate measurements of sea level and urban subsidence.
Then there was the failure of the government to have a plan to plug the breach once it occurred, and through which a swollen Lake Pontchartrain continued to empty into New Orleans for almost a week until water levels finally equalized. Having being responsible for the hurricane protection system in New Orleans for decades, the Corps, one would think, should have had a plan in a drawer somewhere about how to contain a rupture.
South of New Orleans, the overtopping of the levees by Katrina’s thirty-foot storm surge was similarly forecast, and in fact been loudly predicted by residents of adjoining St. Bernard Parish, for years. St. Bernard was inundated, to the point that you could not flip on an electric switch, encounter a functioning traffic signal, or find an open business anywhere in the parish for about three months. The primary cause was the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO, pronounced “Mister Go”), constructed by the Corps of Engineers to shorten the distance ships travel to the Gulf of Mexico but which has eroded almost all of the buffer between the salty waters of Lake Borgne and the people who live near the forty-mile-long ship channel and which is so economically useless than before the storm an average of only six ships traveled it a week. Once it enters Orleans Parish the MRGO joins with the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway to form a funnel for any swell coming in from the Gulf and aims it like an arrow directly into the heart of New Orleans. Yet the Corps of Engineers, whose primary mission is navigation and not flood control, has for years resisted – and continues to resist – blocking this spear aimed right at the city. The sad fact is that so much marshland has already been eroded by Mister Go that even closing it tomorrow might not help much. Could the channel be filled back in with clay trucked over from Mississippi?
Then there was the failure to send National Guardsmen into the city right after the flooding began to restore order. It has been reported that the first soldiers arrived four days after the storm, but most dry neighborhoods did not see the military until Labor Day, a week past the catastrophe. It was even longer before they established their presence in the wet parts of the city.
This was a time of frightening chaos in New Orleans, when Saks Fifth Avenue and major shopping malls (and many homes) were looted and burned, and when law-abiding citizens who had weathered the storm had to resort to guarding their property with weapons. The scars from this period remain on the city landscape today in the form of boarded and burned stores and in the sleepless nights experienced by many New Orleanians. It would be easy to blame the Commander and Chief for this delayed response though he has blamed the state’s governor.
It did not help that all of the normal communication systems upon which American civilization is dependent – the cell phones, the internet, broadcast TV, cable, most of the telephone lines; everything dependent on transmission towers, telephone poles or underground cables – all went down at the same hectic time. (What worked? Battery-powered walkie-talkies, and they have been considered toy-store items for decades.)
And there is the week it took to evacuate the people from the Superdome with its plugged up toilets and lack of beds, and the Ernest Morial Convention Center where there were no lights, police protection, or food. And the many overpasses and bridges where thousands of refugees baked in the sun. Since responding to precisely this sort of disaster victim is why the Federal Emergency Management Agency exists, FEMA gets the blame for “dropping the ball” and for convincing a great many survivors that the current administration has no regard for poor humanity in general.
People got on the bus or stayed in the mud. 230,000 people are out of state. Why? Because the bus took them there.
– William Quigley, Director, Gillis Long Poverty Center, Loyola University
Though Katrina’s floods claimed nearly half a million cars (an indication of the wealth of even a relatively poor American city), it is widely accepted that virtually everyone with access to an automobile successfully evacuated New Orleans in response to their common sense or to Mayor Ray Nagin’s mandatory evacuation order issued at noon on a Saturday, approximately sixteen hours before the blitz. While those who were left behind included tourists, some who refused to abandons their pets, and stalwart property owners determined to protect the hearth, most of the people still in New Orleans when the hurricane arrived were the aged and the very poor.
The result of it all, the wind, the water, the mismanagement, and years of neglect of the levees, is that at least 1,575 Louisianans died in Katrina, and as of the first of the year1,800 were still listed as missing. Now that number has been pared down to about 500. More than 5,100 children were separated from their families, and not until the end of March 2006 was the last one of these successfully located and re-united.
All of that is history, as they say (though quite recent history, of course). It shows what happens when no one is minding the common store.
Quite a Mess: Why Should Anybody Care?
From the perspective of America as a whole, the following facts should be significant. The Port of New Orleans is crucial to the inland economy of two-thirds of the United States. The barge traffic coming down the river is vital to farmers and miners from the Dakotas to Kentucky. Shipping costs would increase tremendously if New Orleans were abandoned and ocean-going ships had to travel, say, one hundred miles further upstream to Baton Rouge.
Northrop Grumman shipyard is here, turning out amphibious assault ships for the Marines. So is Bollinger Shipyards, which makes tanker barges, Textron, which armors troop carriers, and a host of related fabricators and subcontractors. Military installations like the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station abound.
There are Tulane University, Loyola University, the University of New Orleans, two major historically black universities, Dillard and Xavier, and all of their related medical and dental training programs.
There Is Oil!
King Milling, president of The Whitney National Bank, which is the largest locally owned bank in New Orleans, says that “At the end of the day, everybody in the country will suffer if we don’t solve this problem.” He is an ardent environmentalist when it comes to salvaging the coastal marshland below the city, marshland that is crucial to New Orleans as a hurricane buffer but also vital to oil and gas production and commercial fishing. “Economically, thirty percent of all the oil and gas coming into the country crosses this fragile ecosystem.” And about one-fifth of the entire refining capacity of the United States is in Louisiana; the Gulf Coast as a whole contributes two-fifths.
It is an ecosystem hard hit by Katrina, and it is threatened with total disappearance. “Oil spiked seven or eight dollars a barrel from the disruption Katrina caused to the rigs off Louisiana’s coast,” Milling says. “If the storm had gone twenty or thirty miles to the west, God knows what the price would have gone to.” He pulls out a map showing how much land is expected to sink beneath the waves by the year 2050, and points out how reliant the energy production industry is upon sites like Port Fourchon, where hundreds of drilling platforms are launched, serviced and supplied, and which is destined to be submerged if the erosion is not halted. “The entire infrastructure, the pipelines for example, is built on the premise that the fragile system will continue to be there.”
There Are Fish!
Thirty percent of commercial fishing production in the lower 48 states, by weight, also comes from that ecosystem. As do thirty-five percent of the brown shrimp consumed in the United States, forty percent of the oysters and blue crabs, and the statistics go on. Louisiana’s fishing industry employed 31,400 people and contributed a local economic impact of nearly $3 billion. Katrina knocked out (at least for the time being) more than one hundred seafood processing plants and damaged or flung ashore somewhere between 1,800 and 3,500 commercial fishing vessels.
Of course, ten million tourists also come to New Orleans every year to see something, and that something can perhaps best be described as New Orleans culture. The music, the architecture, the neighborhoods, the food. It is a billion dollar per year industry. To the people who lived here, and to people around the globe, New Orleans occupies a special place in the heart. Citizens of Amsterdam might yawn upon learning that you are from the United States, but they will question you with enthusiasm about jazz music and Creole cooking if they learn that you are from New Orleans.
New Orleans journalist and self-styled native son Jason Berry says, “New Orleans was a crossroads of humanity before ‘melting pot’ became a term of art. Despite the brutal legacy of white supremacy, this is a place where people have a long history of negotiating civility and creating cultural passageways that enrich society. Our cuisine drew from many cultures and makes a high statement about what our civilization is. Our music is a mainstay of ethnic reciprocity. It is different people finding a common legacy. Our architecture, our exotic folkways, our rich human comedy, made this city special. We’re not a Disneyland. We don’t have the money for it. And without romanticizing poverty, New Orleans has had one of the most fertile folk cultures anywhere on Earth. New Orleans has given so much to the country culturally. Our music alone has influenced a generation of creative people.”
“Other cities are too sanitized, too routine, too orderly. Here you drive around a corner and you might run into anything – a parade, high school girls singing at the bus stop.”
– John Hankins, Chief Financial Officer, New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
John Hankins, an affable man, is the chief financial officer of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, a non-profit spearheaded by Irwin Mayfield (New Orleans’ official “Cultural Ambassador”). This is a band that sets the bar for jazz performance around the country. Hankins is especially attached to two features of New Orleans life. First there is the extraordinary “built environment” that was fabricated by ordinary people, the Creole brick masons, iron workers and plasterers who left behind the characteristic residential architecture of the city. Their legacy is block after block of gingerbread-decorated shotguns and doubles, narrow structures with front porches, packed tightly among their neighbors on the block, and each extending in a (sometimes long) row of rooms from the edge of the sidewalk to the back fence. They were well-built by the nineteenth and early twentieth century artisans who were the core of the city’s black middle class. Visitors today are astonished by the sheer number of them. Another city with three blocks of such stock would declare it the Historic District, but in New Orleans the architecture literally goes on for miles.
The other feature he admires is that “Culture here has never been a commodity. What is so unique and attractive about the city comes directly from generations of talented people who have created an innovative lifestyle. For example, you can’t go to many crawfish boils or barbeques anywhere where you don’t find talented people. Someone sings. Someone dances. There’s a plasterer who’s a talented sculptor. And take the Mardi Gras Indians.” [Here he is speaking about New Orleans’ unique marching clubs of African-American men wearing enormous, elaborate, hand-made feathered headdresses who appear at Mardi Gras and other celebrations They generally spring from a particular neighborhood or tavern and guard their traditions and turf fiercely; some theorize that their origins are found in long-ago exterminated or removed Native American tribes which sheltered escaped slaves.]
“What is so vibrant about that culture is that it is not for sale. It is not the feathered suits that are important – you can buy appliques in Honduras or make them in China – but the special culture that can convince otherwise hard-core people, big macho guys with limited resources, to invest all of their non-working time and all the money they can put together into sewing suits to see who is “prettiest.” What motivates them to do the sewing is cultural. Their chants are like Sufi chants, and like Sufis they twirl and spin to transcend to a higher spiritual dimension. It takes that to get the baddest guy on the block to stick himself in the thumb a thousand times sewing feathers. That’s what fascinates me.”
We already have by neighborhood and architecture the model of a multi-use, multi-racial, and interrelated community, the one all planners say is good for the United States of America.
bq. – Lolis Eric Elie, Columnist
In the “old” New Orleans, the poverty rate was 30%, and 70% of all adults read below the eighth grade level. So says Michael Cowan, who directs both the Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy at Loyola University and the city’s Human Relation Commission. He is a champion of interracial dialogue and helped found the Jeremiah Group, a Saul Alinsky style community organizing program, and the Shades of Praise, an interracial gospel choir. In the old New Orleans many things were wrong, “fundamentally evil,” in his view, so why is he committed to New Orleans?
“What is admirable and irreplaceable about New Orleans to me is that this is a place where the racial divide can be crossed, and when it is crossed there’s such cultural richness released here that the energy is life sustaining for me.”
Oliver Houck is a law professor at Tulane University, the founder of the Environmental Law Clinic, and one of the most persistent and intelligent critics of government’s failure to notice the catastrophic erosion of the coastal wetlands that once surrounded and protected New Orleans. When asked about what holds him to the city, he concedes, “I worked in Louisiana for ten years before I moved here and in that time I wasn?t in New Orleans five times. My appreciation level has radiated into the city from Acadiana and other parts of the state. The most desirable aspect of life here to me is easy access to its surroundings. I’ve got a 14-foot flatboat, and within an hour I can be in the marshes around Hopedale, Yscloskey, or Bayou Sauvage, or in the piney woods on the North Shore, or out on the Atchafalaya River, or in the water at Bayou Bienvenue. The ‘diversity’ I enjoy is not Mardi Gras diversity, but natural system diversity. We look flat and monotonous to casual observer, but really we are ecosystem-rich.”
“As for city life,” Houck says, New Orleans is “low-rise. It is open to the sky. It has non-threatening traffic. It’s built to human scale.”
Other naturalists repeat this refrain. For example, Darryl Malek-Wiley, who heads the Sierra Club’s environmental justice work in Louisiana: “What is the value of New Orleans to me? I’m not a big city person, but I like the neighborhoods, the walkability. A friend pointed out to me that there are fifty restaurants within walking distance of our house near Adams and St. Charles. And it’s very cosmopolitan. The restaurants are Tunisian, Mediterranean, Italian, Nuevo New Orleans, Thai; it goes on. We have many peoples and cultures.”
“I think many of us have benefited from living in New Orleans in ways almost unimaginable. We’ve probably enjoyed as nice a lifestyle as anyplace in the country. It’s been encapsulated by our tremendous history, our diverse culture of African-Americans and Acadians. Diverse groups have been here for years.”
– King Milling, President, Whitney National Bank
One might consider that the opportunity to participate in and enjoy the rich atmosphere of New Orleans is another thing owned in common by its residents, and by the world.
Why It Takes So Long, Why So Little Progress
The Government Approach: Every Man is an Island
The whole thing has been an organizational disaster. The Superdome was the wrong place to put people. No baths, no showers, no bedding. The Police department had no communications. You couldn’t call a fireman to tell him the building was collapsing.
“New Orleans will never be the same as it was before the storm. The hurricane was a real kick in the pants. The question is will it be worse or will it be better. But it will be different. There is absolutely nothing here that hasn’t been affected, from drinking the water, to getting on the streetcar, to going to the grocery store. Right now nobody is driving the bus. The Mayor changes his mind. The Governor is not forceful. The politicians are protecting their political fiefdoms. The ‘Common Good’ is not very good or very common around here.”
– Ed Renwick, Political Science Professor and Director, Institute of Politics, Loyola University, and Political Pollster
An informed and wise government might recognize that only it can handle the big items, such as reconstructing the city and providing shelter, support, and future guidance to the hundreds of thousands of people unsettled by the storm. Only the government can give proper attention to the state of coastal wetland erosion and to the levee system needed to protect a vital city and industry. Let us see what government has done.
First, as to rebuilding the devastated social structure of New Orleans, it has been every man for himself. The opportunity has probably passed (in fact, the opportunity was probably never noticed by the White House) to bring back the labor force of New Orleans for public works projects. A different government might have thought to enlist the tens of thousands of skilled laborers and professionals displaced by the hurricane into a jobs program, bring them back to New Orleans, shelter them in barracks if need be, and put them to work to rebuild the city the right way.
Instead, the chosen approach was “privatized” relief. FEMA selects the contractor who will do the job most cheaply. What this has meant, as anyone who cruises the streets of New Orleans knows, is that lion’s share of the work of debris removal and demolition – which is as far as the re-building process has gotten – is done by subcontractors using Latino labor from Texas (and about half of those are estimated to be illegal immigrants). This is also the workforce doing the gutting of private homes and businesses. Many of them even sleep in the buildings they are gutting, or in trucks parked in backyards, or eight to an apartment without electricity. They are perhaps even more accustomed to exploitation than the city’s former workforce.
Homeowners, left to find their own way back to the city to pick up their own pieces, find government in the way. First, there were the flood maps. Everyone from Bar Harbor, Maine to Brownsville, Texas, is aware that Congress has blessed almost everybody who lives near water with Federally-subsidized flood insurance. Without flood insurance, banks would not lend money secured by real estate in areas prone to river or coastal flooding, and real estate developers could not build condominiums by the sea. People could not have vacation homes on the beach, and few people would take the risk of building anything more expensive than a fishing shanty on stilts in New Orleans or anywhere else near the Gulf of Mexico. Whether or not one can purchase this insurance at all, and the rate one pays, is determined by a FEMA map that plots each lot’s elevation in relationship to sea level and its susceptibility to flood – its “flood zone.”
“In hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have built the city here. But it goes back to Louis XIV of France. The Jesuits who came to Louisiana told him that this spot was not a viable location for a city, and they recommended that the capital be moved to Baton Rouge. The King said my command is God?s will on Earth, and city will be in New Orleans.”
– Darryl Malek-Wiley, Sierra Club Organizer
In a process begun years ago, FEMA undertook to re-draft the “current” 1984 flood zone maps for the New Orleans area. After Katrina, no one would rely on the old flood maps, and for month after agonizing month, FEMA would not release new ones, and homeowners (often owners of lots covered in debris), did not know whether or at what cost insurance will be available in their little spot, or how high they would have to elevate their houses, or whether the Federal Government will give them “remediation” money to raise or abandon their homes, or whether they could get a bank mortgage on the property. Finally “preliminary” revised maps for the city were issued by FEMA in the spring of 2006, but the rebuilding process remains stymied because the house elevations indicated by FEMA’s maps are confusing and open to political debate, because they are “preliminary,” and because there is not yet a housing plan, or any rebuilding grants.
And where are the federal rebuilding dollars? If market forces alone govern New Orleans, thousands of owners of destroyed homes will go bankrupt and abandon their real estate, a number of lending institutions with worthless collateral could fail, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which purchase most of America?s home mortgages) will inherit huge chunks of muddy deserted slabs and have trouble staying in the black unless bailed out by Congress. Thus, there is a well-recognized need for Federal disaster assistance to individual owners of property.
A north Louisiana Republican Congressman, Richard Baker, offered a bill to create an authority which would issue government-backed bonds to pay-off home mortgages (saving the banks) and pay homeowners the remaining pre-Katrina value of their property, which they could use to re-build. Or they could deed the property over to the agency. The projected cost of the program was about $20 billion, but much of that would be recovered by the agency through future development of the property it acquired. In the heady days of 2005, before “Katrina fatigue” set in, the Baker Bill enjoyed some bi-partisan support (at least the entire Democratic and Republican Congressional delegations of Louisiana supported it), but the Bush Administration did not, fearing the creation of “a new government bureaucracy.”
Congress did, however, appropriate $10 billion in Federal community block grants that the hurricane-affected states might use for homeowner relief. Mississippi, with more Republican clout, claimed a substantial chunk of that for its own wrecked beachside towns, leaving Louisiana with about $6 billion.
This was not enough to help everybody, so a more limited rationale was developed. President Bush’s anointed “recovery czar,” Donald Powell, who was sent south after the disgrace of FEMA’s former leadership, explained that this $6 billion would be enough to aid individuals who resided in the traditionally high areas of the city but who did not buy flood insurance because they relied upon the levees. Those who lived in low lying areas and lost everything would get nothing. This was a strange formula for relief, but otherwise the math would not work.
President Bush then surprised many, editorial writers in New Orleans and New York included, who thought the administration had totally written off Louisiana. He proposed an additional $4.2 billion for the state in block grants. According to a plan devised by Governor Kathleen Blanco’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, this additional money together with the previous allocation would be enough to permit grants of up to $150,000 per homeowner to retire mortgages and get the rebuilding underway.
This critical appropriation was absorbed in the national budget debate which also involved the cost of the Iraq war and other big ticket items. The point is, it took close to a year for the money for home repair just to start to hit the streets.
Government ought to support people in achieving what they want. People should be assisted, and not panicked by threats of foreclosure and demolition.
– Wade Rathke, Chief Organizer, ACORN, whose volunteers have cleaned out more than 1,000 flooded homes in neighborhoods slated for demolition
Well, how about temporary housing? Enter the infamous FEMA trailers. Virtually everybody who fled the storm and had Katrina-related property damage was entitled to get plain white, Spartan, 25-foot long house trailer installed on their property, but only if they had available space and proper utility hook-ups. Thousands more trailers were available to be set up in clusters, on public or church-owned lots for example, to shelter residents who did not own a house, or whose house did not have a yard, or whose neighborhood had been blasted to the ground.
This program has encountered every imaginable difficulty. FEMA trailers require electrical connections. Since the local electric monopoly, Entergy New Orleans, filed for bankruptcy immediately after Katrina to avoid being liable for rebuilding the entire power grid of the city (though its parent, Entergy Corp, reported profits of $90 million in the fourth quarter of 2005 and expects a more profitable 2006), and since the Federal government has refused to appropriate money to turn on the power in New Orleans (though it did underwrite, possibly thanks to New York’s Republican Mayor and Governor, Con Edison’s added costs after 9/11), the process of getting power back to the pole in the neighborhoods drags on and on. Entergy New Orleans makes the point that it has no obligation to pay for rebuilding the whole city’s power infrastructure (a project it puts at $718 million), and could not do so without doubling the monthly bills for the remaining ratepayers. But doesn’t the fact that the lights are off in two-thirds of a major American city sound like an issue for the Federal government to tackle? What else is the Federal government for?
The proposition that FEMA trailer camps be situated in city parks was also loudly denounced by all of the members of the New Orleans City Council, and it was blocked. In fact, council members and many neighborhood groups have protested the erection of camps almost anywhere they might go – apparently in the fear that once people move into these impoundments, they will never move out. Consequently, though FEMA claims to have delivered about 4,700 trailers to New Orleans (the Nagging administration estimates that 1,600 of these are occupied), there are still 17,000 approved, and many of these are sitting in the mud in staging areas in Arkansas. Ironically, most of these are in the town of Hope. As another “hurricane season” approaches, it is suddenly recognized that trailers strapped to concrete blocks are not rated to withstand even the winds of a minor tropical storm, so perhaps it is best that they remain Arkansas.
It’s wrong to blame the local people or the state for the fact that more people have not returned. The nation has abandoned this town. This whole region is an embarrassment to the country. They give $69 billion in tax benefits to the oil industry and people are living in tents in Mississippi. Our big lumbering country with its huge bureaucracies can?t do anything fast except move military brigades.
“Last week they were filming scenes from a Denzel Washington movie in the schoolyard near our house. They put up lights, tents, food trucks and generators in no time, and they worked here for two days. And then they took it down, and they were gone just like that. The lesson is next time there’s a hurricane, don’t send FEMA, send Hollywood.”
– Bob Marshall, Outdoors Writer, Times-Picayune
It may be unrealistic to imagine that the federal government will ever score marks for effective social engineering, but how about the big public works: restoring the common wetlands and the levees?
Louisiana had more than sixteen million acres of coastal wetlands 200 years ago. By the year 2000 that had been reduced by half, for the reasons shown below. The rate of loss is about 25 square miles per year. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita quickly converted another 118 square miles of marsh into open waterway, the equivalent of 73,000 football fields, or an area twice the size of Washington, D.C. Barrier islands completely disappeared. For example, the Chandeleur chain, nesting ground for brown pelicans, royal terns, sandwich terns, and black skimmers, is gone. Can the marsh be restored? Will the broken New Orleans levee system be restored to protect the same low-lying neighborhoods? Should we “dike in” the entire Gulf Coast so that people can build subdivisions all the way to the sea? These are billion dollar questions.
“Democracy wasn?t built for the decisions we have to make.”
– Rabbi Andrew Busch, Touro Synagogue
Oliver Houck, the Tulane University law professor, argues that the very physical survival of New Orleans hinges on abandoning our total reliance on the levee system. First, pressure must be taken off the levees by restoring coastal marshes.
The eighty miles of once-thriving marshland between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans is capable of knocking down wave heights by dozens of feet. But “the marsh below New Orleans is a maze,” Houck says, “a rat’s nest of big canals and little canals. Altogether 8,000 miles of oil and gas access canals have carved up the marsh. Expecting it to absorb hurricanes now is like asking a patient to revive after you’ve cut up his stomach.”
He advocates drastically limiting development in the parishes south of New Orleans that were scoured by Katrina and blocking the watery approaches to New Orleans with permeable levees, i.e., gates, that permit water to flow through in regular weather but can be closed when hurricane-driven storm surges approach. Such “leaky levees” would be useful to block the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Passes where the Katrina surge pushed into Lake Pontchartrain and eventually swamped the city.
The advantages to these gates are that they permit the land within to benefit from natural water movements and silting, and silting builds land mass. Even hurricanes are beneficial in terms of depositing silt. He has been as far as Violet, taking soil samples. “Scientists believe hurricanes deposit more soil into marsh than river sediment does. Katrina laid down three to four inches of soil in St. Bernard Parish alone, along with the trucks and refrigerators. Hurricane barriers, on the other hand, keep out sediment. Levees mean the land within will always sink, and you must always pump. The disadvantages are that gates cost more to build and operate than levees, and real estate developers want solid levees they can build suburbs behind. If you build walls, then you can have real estate development inside them, as we did in New Orleans East [which was inundated in the Katrina flood]. The scary future of building more outer barriers to protect New Orleans, the Dutch solution, is more New Orleans East.”
He also argues that people must build “up.” “We have to raise the housing stock. Sticks under houses are the true flood insurance. Develop the high ground, even if that might mean going from green space to development, but places that flood chronically, like parts of Central City, need to be turned green.
“It will take years to build our levees back to where they were before Katrina,” Houck says. “Maybe twenty years to build them high enough to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. And the price of huge dikes is simply enormous. Then you have to maintain them. There might be lots of enthusiasm to start with, but when the bills start coming in they’ll cut corners. The cheapest version of a levee is 17th Street Canal, which is built on dirt and clay, but that sort of construction failed in New Orleans, and it certainly won’t hold up in the wet soils of the marsh.”
“I’m not a bulldoze and turn it all into green space advocate. But there are many opportunities for flood control. There are natural water sinks, areas so low it floods when it rains, currently occupied by ruined houses. We could allow those sinks to operate and not rely exclusively on pumps. Much of 9th Ward, on the other hand, is high. Even Gentilly has its ridge. Properly raised houses there would not typically flood even with the levee system we have today, if the levees do not fail. In our real world there is a very excruciating conversation yet to be had.”
Some scientists believe that the remaining oil and gas beneath the Gulf of Mexico will be depleted in thirty more years. If the future of New Orleans is tied too closely to great levees, what will be the government’s incentive to maintain these levees thirty years down the road?
The nation has a right to ask, “why do you rebuild?” But if we subsidize vacation homes on the Outer Banks, if the government pays for massive water projects in the Arizona desert, New Orleans ought to get equal treatment. If the nation wants to adopt an intelligent environmental ethic, that would be good. But do it all across the nation, not just in New Orleans.
– Bob Marshall, Times Picayune
Bob Marshall, Outdoors Editor of the Times-Picayune, has also been writing for years about the frightening loss of the wetlands protecting New Orleans because the marshes happen to be spectacularly rich attractions for recreational hunters, fishers, and birders. Yet when Katrina hit, he was on assignment backpacking in Glacier National Park and did not realize the scope of the Katrina disaster until two days later when he was returning his rent-a-car and saw the reports of the devastation in the Canadian press. “I realized, about the same time the President did, that the big one had occurred.” He scrambled to get back into Louisiana to catch up with his newspaper and his story.
To gain first-hand information for an article soon after the storm he flew in a small plane over the marsh and residential lands south of Port Sulphur (site of an old Freeport-MacMoran mine) in Plaquemines Parish. The storm had actually made its first landfall fifty miles further down the highway in Buras at 6:10 am on August 29, 2005, and Port Sulphur was at the northern edge of its full-force assault. The parish itself consists of two long strips of land, one on either side of the Mississippi River, that follow the river to its mouth. Each strip is sandwiched between the river levee on one side and the Corps of Engineers-constructed barrier against salt water lakes and the Gulf on the other. Between those outer levees and open water the maps show hundreds of square miles of marsh, but most of that land has washed away since the maps were drawn.
What Marshall saw on his post-Katrina fly-by was lots of water. The Mississippi River itself was its typical brown color, carrying an unimaginable volume of silt from the heartland of North America. That silt, which once flooded freely over the delta south of New Orleans, building new land at a steady rate, is now directed by jetties deep into the Gulf and over the edge of the Continental Shelf. This causes the navigational channel of the river to stay clear, but it also causes the marshes, starved of new dirt, to sink gently from sight.
Between the river levees and the outer levees, Katrina’s waters still covered the skinny lands of farmers, fishermen, charter captains, and oil-field workers. “There was nothing but black water there. It was a mix of oil, dead cows, cars, houses, a toxic soup, and it was still fifteen to twenty feet deep. Three hundred feet in the air, you could smell it.”
Whole rafts of shrimp boats were stacked in the marsh. “The pogey fish plant [turning menhaden into cat food] in Empire was under water. The Venice Marina was gone. There were houseboats in the marsh. The biggest shock was flying back up to Hopedale in St. Bernard Parish. It was gone. Shell Beach was gone. Blacky Campo’s marina, his house, his brothers’ and sons’ houses, all gone. Yet the tin roof on top of the Campo hoist, which always flopped around, survived. The storm surge through there [storm surges are not sudden events, but domes of water built up over a period of days] was twenty or thirty feet. The marsh grass looked like a shag carpet that had been rolled up.”
He believes firmly that the key to New Orleans’ survival in the face of nature lies in rebuilding marshes, not further development behind levees. “We’ll need to build levees fifty feet high if we don’t restore the wetlands. The subsidence of the delta is a given. Sea level rise is accepted as a fact in most of the world outside of Pennsylvania Avenue. We are in a period of increasing storm activity in the Gulf of Mexico. Every two feet of marsh absorbs a foot of storm surge. Katrina certainly should have told the nation the value of wetlands.”
His prescription is a bitter one. “We should declare the entire coastal zone as critical to the national defense and the economy. The government should use its powers of eminent domain. Everything in Plaquemines Parish below Port Sulphur should be off-limits to development. The Mississippi River should be allowed to re-enter the marshes through culverts. It would take some engineering, but the opportunity exits now because there is no one there now. If the towns are allowed to rebuild, they should do so within ring levees. In St. Bernard Parish, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet needs to not only be closed but filled back in so that communities like Shell Beach are back on land and not a quarter of a mile out in Lake Borgne like they are now.”
Given that Mississippi River commerce is vital to America and that the river needs a salt water port; given that there is no economical way to move the Port of New Orleans upstream; given that the nation wants to protect its Gulf oil and gas production and importing infrastructure; given that New Orleans is one of America’s greatest contributions to the world community (not to mention home to hospitals, universities, skyscrapers, sports arenas, and thousands of houses) New Orleans must be protected from hurricanes. Going forward, maintenance must focus on reversing wetland loss in a time of rising oceans. It must focus on what sort of system the nation will willingly pay for now, and ten, twenty, and thirty years down the road. Any plan to protect New Orleans will ultimately be useless unless it addresses these two realities. They have never been components of the plan before. Perhaps Katrina has pointed the way.
The Local Leaders’ Approach: We Can Design a Better Place
While the federal government has staggered across the New Orleans stage, its massive bureaucracies achieving very little but levee patches in the months since the flood, the city’s local business and political leadership has struggled heroically to come up with “a plan.” Soon after the city was drained of what locals call the “Corps of Engineers’ flood,” the mayor appointed a Bring New Orleans Back Commission, chaired by real-estate developer and “Bush confidant” Joseph C. Canizaro. Over a three-month period, when all else was in disarray, the Commission held hundreds of meetings involving a large number of civic activists who were themselves digging out from the storm. It produced an “Action Plan” in January 2006 that proposed re-design of virtually every aspect of urban life and landscape. It called for a neighborhood-by-neighborhood planning process where citizens would somehow be brought together (even those dispersed across America) and would decide what was best for their own slice of New Orleans. They would be supported by staff planners, architects, and technical people. The process would begin in February and end in May 2006. For this to work, the plan relied on two things: passage of the Baker housing-grant bill, or some equivalent, and FEMA funding for the planners. Neither occurred.
FEMA declined to provide the several million dollars the planners believed they had been promised to assemble the technical staff. Lead planner, architect Ray Manning, assailed FEMA’s “broken commitment” and said, “We were sold a bill of goods by the federal government.”
Yet the plan had content. Peter Trapolin, an architect who has made a career of redesigning New Orleans landmarks, as in turning abandoned downtown warehouses into luxury apartment complexes, was active on the Commission’s Urban Planning Committee. He talks in glowing terms about why the New Orleans “sense of place” is stronger than in other US cities, how New Orleans has a “way of life,” which includes “walkability,” rubbing shoulders daily with “the arts,” and easy access to the outdoors and fishing. He believes in planning, and he embraced the Commission’s vision for New Orleans because, “We kept getting it wrong. We had poverty, crime, lack of planning, corruption, and bad politics. The people active in the Bring New Orleans Back Commission all see this as an opportunity to change those aspects of the way we were. We believe we can preserve and enhance what we loved. And make the city better.”
The committee issued a plan which envisioned a new landscape for most of New Orleans. Under that design there would be light rail rapid transit linking downtown with the airport and also linking older, high-and-dry, parts of the city with several new communities which are to be built in the “Infill Development Areas.” These are the neighborhoods where the old, flooded houses would be cleared off and the land raised to permit new construction. These new communities would have many of the characteristics of those submerged by the levee failures, and they would be erected on lots formerly occupied and bulldozed through the power of eminent domain. There would be new housing around a series of parks, nearby schools and libraries, a commercial boulevard and neighborhood greenways, perhaps an “environmental center and wetlands park” (which could also be maintained as a natural sinkhole to enhance drainage).
Outside the boundaries of these planned “infill” developments, the Commission identified large, formerly inhabited “Neighborhood Planning Areas,” whose residents, according to plan, could assemble to evaluate their interest in re-occupying the land and determine their own fate. The unpleasant conclusion drawn by many who had homes in these special planning areas – which were huge – is that their neighborhoods were being targeted for abandonment in the short term and demolition and a developers’ land grab in the long term.
The plan upset other residents by drawing big green circles on the map of the city depicting “Areas of Future Parkland.” These six big circles take in much of the enormous black middle class neighborhoods of New Orleans East and Gentilly, the Lower Ninth Ward, and the mixed Broadmoor/Gert Town section of the city that contained (pre-Katrina) about as many $600,000 homes as $60,000 homes. The Committee further called for a moratorium on building (re-building) permits in most of the city while the plan was considered, an idea the Mayor hastily rejected. In fact, thousands of homeowners rushed to get their building permits as soon as details of the report leaked out for fear that the planners were scheming to take away their property. In December 2005 alone, 3,000 building permits were issued; ten times the norm. In the month after the report came out, 8,000 permits were issued.
The planners’ dream, and there is no denying it was a dazzling one, might someday be realized since its sponsor, Ray Nagin, was re-elected mayor, but not on the schedule anyone predicted. The original timetable called for neighborhood “charettes” to conclude their work in May 2006 and for reconstruction money to be in hand, and for “property acquisition” and neighborhood rebuilding to commence, by the end of August, 2006. Perhaps 2007 is now more realistic.
One sad truth is that the tax base of New Orleans, skimpy to begin with, was shattered by Katrina. The planners raised the intelligent question: how can a financially strapped city provide police, fire protection, and schools to small pockets of citizens if they are allowed haphazardly to reclaim their old blocks. The planners would favor orderly return, and there are models showing how this might occur. For example, John Edwards, a professor of Economics at Tulane, has studied the city and concludes that New Orleans before the hurricane had a very stable population, almost unique in moving-van America. “Ninety-six percent of our people were native to the United States, and 84% were born in Louisiana. Though we were poor, though our public schools were among the worst in the United States; though we were segmented, with blacks scoring one-third as well as whites who attend public schools, people did not leave. The high cost of going elsewhere, the ignorance of other cities, kept people here. They would accept a lower standard of living here. But Katrina forced them to move, and now they have a new world before them. The decision to come home is now governed by how much it costs to get here, what they have to give up, and the current uncertainty of living in New Orleans.”
He predicts that the people “at the top” will return, but that to get the unskilled laborer back, New Orleans will have to entice her with higher wages and better public services, such as decent public schools. This is, of course, already obvious in the abbreviated hours many grocery stores and eateries are open and the highly publicized “$6,000 signing bonus” paid to workers at area Burger Kings who stay on the job for six months.
Some enticement is necessary, common sense would predict. For anyone dependant on public services such as hospitals, child care and buses, there is an advantage in staying out of New Orleans. Since more than 100 New Orleans public schools have not reopened, there is only one functioning adult hospital, and many neighborhoods have insufficient water pressure to fight fires, is a safe bet that most refugees are “better off” wherever they are. The economics, John Edwards pointed out, now work against return. The quality of life in New Orleans anywhere outside the “Sliver by the River” is poor, but even for those who live in sections spared by the flood it is hard to ignore the depressing circumstances of the surrounding blocks, not to mention the difficulties faced by less fortunate family members and friends.
But how would you bring back the special cultural mix that has made New Orleans unique in the world? That would be hard, Edwards believes. To get the “culture” back, meaning targeting lots of talented people, would require a big decision-making entity with the insight to recognize the added value of preserving New Orleans’ legacy, and the money to “incent” people to do its will. That would require more imagination than the government should be given credit for. Yet isn’t that aspect of the New Orleans commons quite important?
People in New Orleans like to be noticed. We like a little bit of shine. A bright bit of color.
– Leah Chase, My New Orleans
Another committee of the Mayor’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission, co-chaired by jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, was charged with planning the overall recovery of “New Orleans culture.” It recommended investing spending hundreds of millions of dollars (wishful thinking in the face of what New Orleans writer Jason Berry calls “the face of social Darwinism leering at us from Washington”) to repair damaged cultural facilities, market the city as a cultural capital, and help musicians, artists and craftsmen regain their footing.
An interesting part of the report was its enumeration of the city’s pre-Katrina cultural resources. It found about 260 non-profit organizations, ranging from the multi-million dollar New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation to the low-budget Chakula cha jua Theater Company. It found that the city had 5,550 individual artists, including writers, painters, actors and designers. And New Orleans had vast strength in two categories no other city could match: seventy “social aid and pleasure clubs,” with names like the Black Men of Labor, the Divine Ladies, the Lady Buck Jumpers Social Club, the Original Mens Prince of Wales, and the famous Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club; and forty-seven Mardi Gras Indian Tribes, such as the Creole Osceola, Trouble Nation, the Guardians of Flames, the Blackfoot Hunters, the Young Magnolias, and the Wild Bogacheeta.
These institutions were driven not just by philanthropists and conventioneers, but by the working poor who provided the vibrant culture that many describe as the city?s strength. They used to be plentiful in New Orleans. They staffed the hotels and restaurants and drove the limousines; they were the mainstay of the “hospitality industry.” Because that low-paying industry drove the New Orleans economy, the city was number one among the largest 125 cities in American in terms of those who claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit on their IRS returns (68,000 families). In the 95% African American 7th and Lower 9th Wards of the city, forty percent were full-time workers, but the majority of those made less than $20,000 per year.
These maids and waiters were planted here. In the now-leveled Lower 9th ward, 60% of the people owned their homes, a higher average than the city as a whole and far above the national average. Although approximately 60% of the citizens of New Orleans were renters, about 84% of the whole population was born here. In other words, own or rent, these people spent their lives and raised their families in New Orleans regardless of the low pay. This mass of formerly rooted people comprises a substantial portion of the 210,000 to 230,000 residents still believed to be living out of town.
Their glory was not just that they made the wheels of commerce hum, but that they gave New Orleans its unparalleled street life. That life, one might suppose, is imperiled. Many of the neighborhoods that sustained the colorful institutions such as the social aid and pleasure clubs were scoured by Katrina’s waters. So is it true? Is that special charm and culture of New Orleans a thing of the past?
I think the memory of the flood will have a long lasting ripple-effect on the cultural consciousness of the city. There will not be the same wealth of parading clubs, the broad canvass of human expression, that we had before. Certainly, enough musicians will come back that tourism will function. Enough writers will come back so that for years we will read hard-wrestling accounts of living in a city with schizophrenia thrust upon it. But it will be a loss, and all who deal with words and music will be grappling with it for years to come.
– Jason Berry
The Bring New Orleans back Cultural Committee asked for nearly $600 million to rebuild the city’s cultural institutions. This was cut back by half in the final recommendations adopted by the mayor in March 2006, but the chance that the Federal government will pick up any of it (except perhaps piecemeal grants through the National Endowments) is pure pie in the sky.
The People’s Approach: Special Passion
I like this screwy town. That’s what you want back. Not Austin. Make this Austin, and I’m out of here. I’m going to the Caribbean.
– John Hankins, CFO, New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
“Nobody elected the Bring Back Commission to anything,” points out Jason Berry. “These plans are given to us as if from Olympus. As if Zeus came down from the mountain and said here is where houses will be; here is where neighborhoods will be. He declares their vision “antiseptic,” and wonders why the planners did not deal with interim housing for working people. “Why did they look just at the ideal metropolis, when there’s no money to pay for it?”
Plan or no plan, despite dire predictions and logic, and despite government inefficiency and bureaucratic obstacles, people have demonstrated their