Disaster Relief

Michael Calabrese on Cyren Cell in Los Angeles Times

Communications — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:53:00 -0500

WASHINGTON — Morgan E. O'Brien is used to jolting the wireless industry. Now the Nextel co-founder is back in the start-up business and again aiming to shake up the airwaves...This time, the 62-year-old entrepreneur is pitching a controversial plan to transform public safety communications while also extending high-speed wireless Internet service to hard-to-reach rural areas. His attempt to gain federal approval for his idea may be his biggest challenge yet. Supporters laud him as a visionary. Detractors brand him a profiteer...

O'Brien wants Congress to turn over a large chunk of valuable public airwaves — a multibillion-dollar swath of spectrum coveted by wireless phone companies — to a nonprofit trust operated by public safety officials in partnership, he hopes, with his new McLean, Va.-based company, Cyren Call Communications Corp. Together, they would build a state-of-the-art, high-speed network covering more than 99% of the U.S. population...

[Some] say O'Brien's plan is nothing more than a boondoggle.

"Public safety is just a fig leaf to profiteering," said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank...

For the complete article, please visit the Los Angeles Times website.

From TV to Public Safety

Communications — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
10/26/2006 - 12:15pm

After watching first responder communications systems fail on 9/11 and after Hurricane Katrina, with tragic results, the vital importance of spectrum management for public safety communications has taken center stage in recent years. Congress recently passed legislation to reallocate 24 MHz of prime spectrum from TV to public safety in 2009, as part of America’s transition from analog to digital television. Currently, this new spectrum is set to be managed under the same assumptions and orthodoxies as current public safety… more

Volunteer on the Road

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:19:00 -0400

Generally speaking, you don’t want a crowbar or a wheelbarrow to feature prominently in your vacation photos. Or rubble. Or poverty (unless, perhaps, it is the exotic kind -- a shoeless boy with oil-black hair; a woman carrying vegetables to the market). But that is just the kind of experience Daniel Johnson sought out earlier this year when he organized a trip to coastal Mississippi with a few dozen officemates from Credit Suisse New York. "All along Route 10, from New Orleans, you could see the devastation," the 45-year-old managing director recalls. And then there was Biloxi: "It was run over by the hurricane," he says. "We were ready to work as soon as we stepped off the bus."

A generation ago, traveling to volunteer was something for idealistic Peace Corps kids who wanted to save the world and see it, too. But in the 1990’s, volunteering emerged as a kind of basic American value, and the falling cost of travel left been-there-done-that vacationers looking for more authentic ways to experience unfamiliar places.

Today, a growing number of nonprofit travel organizations offer everything from archaeological digs in Europe to home construction for low-income families in South Asia. Some trips are cheap and difficult -- short-term versions of the work-travel programs that young people pioneered in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Others come with guided tours, private chefs, and soft beds at the end of a short workday.

Johnson discovered volunteering six years ago, when his company organized a day of service at one of the poorest schools in Florida during a work retreat. After he returned to New York, Johnson started tutoring at area schools. He also spent a week in Phuket, Thailand, helping locals rebuild after the 2004 tsunami. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last August, he was eager to take his efforts back on the road.

Although Johnson could have just asked his friends and colleagues to write checks toward the rebuilding effort (which many people did -- big checks, too), traveling there would mean helping in a more tangible way. And it would give volunteers a chance to see firsthand what had really happened during the storm and what might become of this suddenly endangered corner of America. So he organized a volunteer vacation to the Gulf Coast: all travelers would pay their own way and go on their own time. Ultimately, more than two dozen friends and co- workers signed up.

Using Biloxi as a base, the Credit Suisse group met up with Hands On, a large relief organization that sends volunteers all around the Gulf Coast to clean neighborhoods, gut flooded buildings, and repair schools and playgrounds. Johnson’s group claimed cots in a field of drab canvas tents behind a local church and, in the evening, gathered with more than 150 other volunteers to sign up for work projects.

"We got up the next morning ready to conquer the world," Johnson says. He joined a team that was digging through the rubble of Biloxi’s Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library. "We recovered quite a few weapons, swords, rifles, and cannonballs," he recalls.

Museum staffers supervised, and when an artifact emerged, they told the volunteers stories about its place in Southern history. Other crews gutted houses and refurbished a women’s center. Johnson’s wife, Jackie, walked door-to-door with a street team asking residents about their struggles and needs. "It kind of changed her life, changed her perspective," Johnson says; she was overwhelmed to see so much poverty and tragedy and such resilience in the face of it all. And they both felt intimately welcomed by the community. "We talked about how many strangers came up to us and said, ‘God bless you,’ " he says.

When the group returned to New York, their stories spread throughout the office. Sensing wider interest, the company’s nonprofit arm got the idea to plan additional vacations to the Gulf Coast. Quickly, more than 300 employees signed up -- Johnson among them -- for a trip to New Orleans. The trips grew more comfortable: volunteers took to staying in hotels rather than the Hands On tents and became regulars at small, family-owned barbecue shacks that had survived the storm -- boisterous places like the Joint, with long tables, open kitchens, sweet pulled pork, and rich po’boys. But the workdays stayed long.

In a country as vast and varied as the United States, an unfamiliar city can be as slow to reveal itself as a village halfway around the world. Volunteer travelers, however, can penetrate local culture in a way traditional tourists seldom do, whether they are in New Orleans or New Delhi. Not all do-gooder tourism brings equal perks to a community, though. In the developing world especially, locals sometimes wonder why wealthy Americans who can barely drive a nail want to build houses or dig ditches in places where competent manual labor costs pennies.

The Gulf Coast, though, was desperate for able bodies after the hurricane. "People from outside the state have come in droves, rolled up their sleeves, and helped us get our lives back together," says Bill Stallworth, a Biloxi city council member who set up a command center to handle the influx of volunteers. According to recent research by Independent Sector, a nonprofit coalition of charities and foundations, each of those volunteers saved the region about $18 an hour. They also gave a direct boost to the local economy.

Johnson’s crew bought all of their supplies on-site, paying particular attention to independent stores and restaurants -- places that would benefit from a spike in business.

But these visitors have meant something more than cash and free labor. "When you go inside a moldy, wet house, all messed up, you pull that debris out and put it by the side of the road, you give something to that family that can’t be measured," Stallworth explains. "You pulled all the despair out and replaced it with hope."

Tourists are not going to rebuild the Gulf Coast, develop poor nations, or spread English to remote communities. But put to the right kind of work in the right place, they can help, and see the world -- even the United States -- from a rare perspective.

Katrina Aftermath Needs More Politics

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:47:00 -0400

If the Democrats and their allies in the media have their way, 8/29 will become another 9/11.

This left-leaning alliance isn’t there yet, in terms of making the sale to the country -- Hurricane Katrina as the domestic doppelganger of 9/11 -- but they are working on it.

And so Republicans have no choice, of course, but to play the Katrina blame game, too. Which is to say, Katrina is now "in play" as a political football. And on the whole, that’s a good thing, because just as 9/11 proved this is a dangerous world of terrorism, so Katrina, which hit a year ago today, proved the natural world also is deadly dangerous.

There’s no point in decrying such politicization, because, as Aristotle explained 2,500 years ago, men -- women, too -- are political animals. If it has to do with our human relationships, it’s political. The challenge is to turn politics into a useful exercise. In the case of disasters, that means paying decent respect to the dead, but, even more important, it means taking steps to minimize death and suffering in the future.

When Katrina hit, it was easy enough to place blame at the national level: The Federal Emergency Management Agency and, by extension, the White House, took it in the neck. Whenever the national media cover a story -- remember all those cable news anchors emoting for the camera? -- it becomes a federal case, literally.

This "nationalizing" or "federalizing" process might be inevitable in the era of instant communications, but it has the inadvertent effect of taking state and local officials out of the picture -- and thus mostly off the hook.

The images of Bush seeming Katrina-clueless -- looking out his Air Force One window, praising FEMA Director Michael Brown -- were burned into the public mind through repetition. And that media overshadowing was good news for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who were most responsible for the disaster-reaction effort -- and largely derelict in fulfilling their duties.

At the same time, that overshadowing unfairly obscured the real success of other state officials, such as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who were far more effective at providing relief.

A year later, the Democrats and many reporters have settled on a "talking point": Katrina proves everything we need to know about Bush. And for his part, W. has basically accepted the critique: He pledges to do "more" -- more than the $110 billion that the federal government has already committed.

But what’s really needed is less groveling and money-shoveling, and more politicking. All Americans should be asking, for example, "What is the proper role of state and local government in disasters?" And as a follow-up, what should the rest of us do if a foolish local official -- such as Nagin -- is re-elected in the wake of a disaster?

And what of populations in regions that either won’t -- or can’t -- take responsibility for minimizing the downside? Is it possible, in effect, to raise the premium of collective public "insurance" for future disaster relief? Or to lower the premium for those willing to take effective risk-reduction action?

And the biggest overall question about disasters: What to do about the reality that some geographical areas are more disaster-prone than others? Do we want to commit to endless streams of no-questions-asked subsidies directed toward, for example, the Gulf Coast? And how should we think about rare mega-events, such as a possible level-10 earthquake in Los Angeles?

The point here is not to be dispassionate in the face of liberal political footballing. We are all in this together, as a country, as we face the threats of Katrina-like disaster and 9/11-type foreign attack.

Precisely because the stakes are so high, we should have an argument in which we use our heads as well as our hearts. Compassion after the fact is great, but forethought is even better.

Katrina: A Year Later

Communications — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:35:00 -0400

Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, media attention remains riveted on the rebuilding of New Orleans. But what happened to the estimated 1.5 million people who fled their flooded and destroyed homes in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana?

The Katrina-spawned diaspora is arguably the largest in U.S. history. Federal statistics suggest that about 1 million evacuees from the hurricane-damaged areas have returned to their homes. That leaves a diaspora population of about half a million people.

Where did they go? What happened to them?

Surprisingly, there are few answers to these questions. Many Gulf Coast residents decamped to Baton Rouge, which is now Louisiana’s largest city. Others spread outward across the country, to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even to Alaska. Most Katrina evacuees appear to have settled in such Southern metropolises as Dallas; Little Rock, Ark.; Atlanta; and Houston. Of the initial quarter of a million hurricane victims who went to Houston, an estimated 110,000 still live in the city, according to the most recent Gallup survey. Texas overall harbors 250,000 evacuees.

Those who have settled in Houston and other cities are disproportionately from New Orleans and its immediate environs. The 2000 census put New Orleans' population at 484,674, down from a high of 630,000 in 1960. Estimates as of June 2006 set the city’s population at well below 200,000.

It remains uncertain how many of the evacuees will never go home. Many factors will affect their decision, among them the phaseout of federal assistance in their places of refuge or parents’ wishes to keep their children in schools in their new locations. Most crucial will be individual and family assessments of where the best opportunities lie.

Many evacuees in Houston told me that New Orleans is still a powerful magnet for them. In 2000, according to the census, about three of four New Orleans residents were Louisiana natives; the Crescent City roots of many of these families go back generations.

"New Orleans is in my soul," evacuee John Henry, a former journalism student at Loyola University in New Orleans, told me last month. "I dreaded leaving.... I am homesick every day."

Yet, like several evacuees I spoke to, Henry plans to stay in Houston because he believes the opportunities there for him and his family are better than in New Orleans. He doubts that a rebuilt New Orleans will have many places for working-class or even middle-class blacks like him.

He may be right. Most reconstruction plans for New Orleans re-imagine the city as a tourist center. One popular idea is to build a $716-million "Hyatt Jazz District" around the downtown area. By contrast, there has been less talk of reviving the Port of New Orleans, the former bulwark of the city’s blue-collar economy; recapturing corporate tenants, particularly the white-collar, job-rich oil industry; or rebuilding the industrial sector.

What seems to be happening is the boutiquing of New Orleans (think San Francisco), with its economy designed to service high-end clientele, tourists and a nomadic population of thrill-seeking young people. Lifestyle and culture would be its commodities.

This prospect may excite real-estate speculators, but it worries Sherby Guillory, a former Tulane University graduate student who counsels Katrina evacuees in Houston. "Seems that they all want to rebuild a shining city on the hill -- but without the people."

Many of those displaced people still suffer the aftereffects of Katrina. Not only homesick, they struggle to escape the poverty they brought with them. Household incomes of displaced families in Houston average $19,000 a year, half the per-capita income of a typical city resident. The fact that some from New Orleans’ criminal class have remained in diaspora cities hasn’t made things any easier for evacuees. In Houston, they are widely blamed for a recent upsurge in violent crime.

Yet headlines can be misleading. Old New Orleans is not being re-created in Space City. The southwest corner of Houston, home to many of the Katrina displaced, exhibits little evidence of the kind of destitution common in New Orleans. Mostly, Houstonians in that part of the city complain about raucous teenage crowds around clubs on weekends.

Nevertheless, Houstonians suffer from what one called "evacuee fatigue." Residents are proud of their generosity and competence in accommodating the Katrina diaspora, says Rice University demographer Stephen Klineberg, but a majority, according to his most recent poll, believe that their city is "worse off" because of the migration.

Of course, the presence in a city of large groups of displaced people often upsets longtime residents. The great migration to New York in the late 19th century, driven largely by czarist pogroms, led a former superintendent of the census to question why the nation was scooping up "every stagnant pool of European population, representing the utterest failures of civilization, the worst defeats in the struggle of existence, the lowest degradation of human nature."

Yet, over time, diasporas often strengthen the places they settle, inspiring original settlers to strive for more than they otherwise would have. New Orleans, for instance, epitomized a stagnant society in which even educated people felt boxed in by corrupt politics and an economy increasingly dependent on tourism. Ambitious New Orleanians were leaving long before Katrina.

The cities in which Katrina victims are settling have their problems, of course, but they all boast diverse, highly cosmopolitan economies. Houston, Atlanta and Dallas rank in the top five of the best cities for African Americans to live, according to a recent survey by Black Enterprise magazine. In Houston, one in five businesses is owned by an African American, the magazine says.

The prospect of upward mobility in a new location may be the strongest reason for evacuees not to go home. When I asked a group of University of Houston graduate students in social work what is the biggest difference between New Orleans and Houston, they almost all used one word -- opportunity.

"This is a place where people go to get ahead," said Crystal Walker, a native New Orleanian and former student at predominantly black Southern University at New Orleans. "You don’t have that cloud over you here. New Orleans will always be my first love, but there are better opportunities here for my kids."

Whether these opportunities can be realized will largely depend on how evacuees integrate into the Houston economy. About three-fifths of evacuees in Texas are jobless, according to the Gallup survey. This may be because they lack employable skills, or they have yet to make up their minds about returning home. Laziness, a trait that some Houstonians claim to see in New Orleanians, doesn’t seem to be a reason. About 8,500 people showed up last October at a government-sponsored job fair in Houston; 2,000 found work that day.

Breaking ties in Louisiana and setting down roots in a new home is the hardest thing for evacuees. But one sign that this is happening is that as many as 10 long-established New Orleans churches have moved to Houston. For 33-year-old New Orleans native John Taylor, the establishment of his church -- the New Home Ministry -- in Houston has solidified his plans to stay.

Taylor told me that he and his wife are buying a home and plan to open a day-care center in the next year. "For years, we considered moving to Houston. The church is the only thing that kept us in New Orleans," he said. "I don’t want to go back -- our future is here."

CRFB Criticizes Abuse of Emergency Spending Designation

Communications — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 06:00:00 -0400

Please see the attached PDF version below.

Storm Trooper

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

What words does one use to describe the story of a Christian lesbian Air Force pilot-turned-journalist-turned-Katrina-relief-activist -- a story with a distinctly faith-based "thousand points of light"-y voluntaristic orientation? Two words leap to mind: "Cholene Espinoza." I can say that after reading her fascinating and thought-provoking memoir, Through the Eye of the Storm: A Book Dedicated to Rebuilding What Katrina Washed Away

Espinoza grew up in New Mexico and graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1987. Becoming only the second woman to fly the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, she was awarded the Air Medal for combat missions over war-torn Iraq and the former Yugoslavia in the 90s. Since retiring from the Air Force, she has been a pilot for United Airlines, braving hardships ranging from the firm's corporate bankruptcy to her near-miss brush with 9/11 -- she was originally scheduled to be aboard United Flight 93

Such a life would be interesting enough, but there's more. She's an actively believing Christian and, at the same time, an "out" lesbian, in a life-partnership with the prominent liberal radio-talk-show host Ellen Ratner (who, full disclosure, is my sparring partner on a regularly scheduled Saturday-morning segment on the Fox News Channel, The Long and Short of It). To add a bit more spice to the mix, while Espinoza and Ratner are very much in love, and share a commitment to directly making a difference, their politics diverge somewhat; Espinoza is more conservative and more skeptical of government's ability to translate good intentions into good outcomes. Indeed, Espinoza's book raises important issues about government, and how it works -- or not -- in our time.

Espinoza wrestles with three big questions: The answers she offers take this work well beyond simple autobiography:

First, how does one serve one's country in a time of war and hardship? Serving in the military is one option -- unless, of course, one is an "out" homosexual. In which case, what other ways are available?

Second, what's the role of faith as a guide to action in the public square?

Third, does the government exist to help people -- or is it spinning, merely to help itself?

Let's take them in reverse order, the last question first.

On the issue of who the government helps -- itself or the rest of us -- I've been thinking about that, too. How do we remind our "public servants" that they are actually supposed to serve the public? How do we ensure that the system provides more than just a costly spin cycle? In one piece here at TCS I took note of a "crisis of process" in the federal government and cited Katrina as one obvious critical failure. In a second piece I quoted E.J. Dionne, quipping that President George W. Bush was behaving more like a "right-wing talk show host" than commander-in-chief, as he, Bush, criticized the federal government's Katrina response. Dionne is a Bush-bashing liberal, of course, but he had a point about the spin-doctoring efforts of the administration in the wake of the storm.

Of course, there's nothing new in presidents of both parties seeking to spin their way out of problems; we all remember Democrat Jimmy Carter, who was so eager to communicate his "down-home" image that he wore a cardigan sweater and carried his own bag -- as if such symbolisms have anything to do with being a good president. And Bill Clinton -- ‘nuff said. So the real point to be made is that all presidents are inclined to emphasize style over substance in the performance of their official duties. No doubt it's always been like this, although it seems that the slick art of presidential image-making is continuously improving, while the dull practice of good government is continuing to degrade.

Now Espinoza has raised the exact same point in her book. Reacting to Katrina, she writes:

I often wonder if the whole enterprise of government has warped into one giant public relations machine. Our government feels more like a dramatization of government where creative geniuses spin the special effects of language and message to create a perception that they are governing. Meanwhile, the reality is that our government is spending and spinning.

And as for poor governmental performance, Espinoza has seen that first hand. In the wake of Katrina, she felt a stirring of compassionate activism, although it was Ratner who provided the trigger. Espinoza writes, "I was skeptical when Ellen first suggested that we -- two gay women -- should drive down to the heart of the Bible Belt, to one of the reddest of the red states and camp out with two churches." Yes, it might be a little difficult, Ratner conceded: "We're the gay version of the movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." But off they went, just days after the storm, driving a U-Haul trailer full of supplies from Washington DC down to the stricken Gulf Coast. Their exact destination was the little town of DeLisle, Mississippi.

That's where Espinoza saw Uncle Sam in action -- and all too often, inaction. Having served in the Air Force for most of two decades, Espinoza was no stranger to bureaucracy, but even she was confounded by the bureaucratic hurdles that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration had set up between the needy and the aid they needed. She details how citizens couldn't get relief until they had a specially designated FEMA number, but they couldn't get a FEMA number without a bank account number. And if such paperwork had been washed away? Well, get in line. And if FEMA lost your file in the middle of the process? Well, get in another line.

The takeaway point here is not that FEMA should simply shovel money at people, no matter what. Instead, the lesson is that sometimes disaster strikes so thoroughly that people have nothing. And so as a solution, perhaps Social Security numbers might be the basis for emergency assistance. Does that smack of a national ID card, which many dread? Maybe. But maybe the danger of another Katrina -- or a natural or unnatural disaster ten or a hundred times worse -- should force us to revisit that question. Having seen plenty of devastation in Mississippi, Espinoza traveled to harder-hit New Orleans: "I could not believe that a city in my own country had so thoroughly collapsed under the weight of chaos." Surely no American -- including no American president -- wants to see another such chaotic situation.

But in the meantime, if the government is slow and halting, Espinoza and Ratner were immediate and giving. And so to the second issue raised by Through the Eye of the Storm: the role of faith.

By her own admission, Espinoza was searching, spiritually, before Katrina. Then came the storm. Suddenly, what seemed to be dry rituals of Christian observance became, in her mind, the vivid opportunity to make a huge difference in real people's lives. Arriving in Mississippi, the couple concentrated their attention on the parishioners of two churches, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in DeLisle and St. Paul's United Methodist Church in nearby Pass Christian. It was this experience, Espinoza writes, that "replenished" her. "Through the expression of love, the act of giving, I regained my soul." (The author, by the way, is donating all book proceeds to Mississippi's "children of the storm.")

Soon enough, the can-do spirit of the Air Force took charge -- Espinoza proved handy with a hammer and nails. And she approvingly cites the self-help of George Washington Carver: "Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses."

Espinoza's first-hand experience is, in effect, an update on other books that have emphasized the importance of faith in social problem-solving. Marvin Olasky's 1992 work, The Tragedy of American Compassion, offered a marvelously revisionist history of 19th-century uplift; Olasky encouraged readers to look past the statist propaganda, to the true history of enormously effective faith-based charity. Another important book, published earlier this year, is Douglas Brinkley and Julie Fenster's Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism, which provides an additional snapshot into private-sector problem solving -- in this case, the founding of the Knights of Columbus, which provided social-welfare benefits to many, a half-century before the New Deal.

Finally, to the third issue, the question of how gays and lesbians can serve American society, especially in times of crisis. Espinoza writes, "I knew that I was gay since I was a small child." But she hid it until she was 38, after she left the Air Force. And while she sometimes wished she could have rejoined the military after 9/11, it wasn't an option for her as an overt lesbian.

Which is a shame, because the military needs our best. As she writes, "Airplanes don't care about your race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. Either you have the skills to fly or you do not." But as they say, when one door closes, another opens: "Katrina was colorblind," she writes -- and oblivious, too, about gender issues.

Fortified by her re-reading of the New Testament -- "Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another" (Romans 14:13) -- she set off on her new mission. And so she and Ratner proved a point: helping others is not about race, or gender, or red state or blue state.

Still, she faced some painful moments. During her time in Mississippi, the United Methodist Church defrocked a Methodist minister in Pennsylvania for lesbianism, even as it reinstated a Virginia pastor who had been suspended from his church for denying a gay man membership in his congregation. "It was painful," she writes, "to see the United Methodist Church doors slammed shut to an entire community -- my community."

And what of the two churches she was helping? She never asked anyone at St. Paul's or Mt. Zion what they thought of gays and lesbians. The only thing that mattered, she believed, was her "commitment to serve them." And she quotes her own brother, Chip, who happens to be an evangelical minister: "If you have to believe like me in order for me to serve you, then I am not a servant." Inspiring stuff, intensely Christian.

Cholene Espinoza: High-tech warrior turned hands-on servant. Closeted homosexual turned out-and-proud lesbian. And, not least, veteran of government processes turned sharp-eyed critic of SNAFU-ridden systems.

And out of it all, out of all these paradoxes, out of the storm of Katrina, came a deeper and firmer commitment to her faith. A faith that is her true foundation, as she relates when she quotes Matthew 7:24 about the wise man building his house on solid rock: "The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock."

Espinoza has her foundation now. And in sharing her life with us, she offers us all a foundation of understanding, love, and, not least, effective compassion. Through the Eye of the Storm is not only an inspiring memoir about transcending categories and prejudices; it is also a valuable guide for those eager to establish a newer and better paradigm for disaster assistance.

Ideological Hurricane

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Last September's tragedy in New Orleans revealed, in the starkest manner, the soft underbelly of America's cities. After all the 1990s rhetoric insisting that "Cities are back!" we got a glimpse behind the facades of a major urban center and tourist mecca which revealed many utterly dependent and disorganized residents, looking more like Third Worlders than denizens of a modern metropolis. In the process, the urban liberalism that has dominated city administration for the last generation was unmasked.

New Orleans as paragon of a hollowed-out city

To be sure, New Orleans is a unique case. Built below sea level, it has one of the most heavily African-American populations in the nation. It has long been among America's poorest and most crime-ridden cities. Its economy has been in a not-so-genteel decline for generations. And New Orleans has a long history of inept and corrupt governance.

Despite having a huge port, the industrial, commercial, and professional base in New Orleans is far smaller than normal for a city of its size. The main local business is now tourism, which pays low wages -- historically almost 50 percent below the national average. Before Katrina ever whirled, roughly one in four New Orleanians was poor, and 100,000 locals lived in "high poverty zones" where more than 40 percent of residents were poor.

"We are the bottom for poverty" sums up Sonya Heisser, a graduate student in social work at Southern University, and herself a product of New Orleans's hardscrabble streets. "People work in low wage industries. We have a poor school system. And the politicians keep getting indicted." Approximately 10,000 of the 60,000 students in New Orleans public schools were suspended last year. Only half of high schoolers graduate in four years.

As Heisser suggests, New Orleans and the state of Louisiana have much to answer for in their inefficient and often dishonest governments. Rotten administration is why the city and state had no real plan to evacuate the huge poverty population, though 30 percent do not own cars. It may also turn out to have something to do with the failures of the levee system. A sense of fatalism, rare in America, overlays the entire state.

In retrospect, the chaos that followed Katrina should have taken no one by surprise. The city's police force has long been considered among the worst in the nation, with two former members sitting on death row, and a low rate of convictions for serious crime. At a time when urban America's overall crime rate has been dropping, homicides in New Orleans, after a period of relative calm, have been back on the upswing. Long before the flood, a person living in New Orleans had a ten times higher chance of being murdered than the average American.

Few other cities in America would have reached New Orleans-level chaos after a Katrina-like catastrophe. Nonetheless, the problems revealed in the Crescent City also exist (at a slightly lower level) in nearly every other large city today. And not only in this country, but also in Europe, as this winter's French riots have made plain.

Though we have tried to forget it in recent years, all of the liberal industrial nations continue to struggle with a serious underclass problem. From America's violent ghettos to the hopeless banlieues of Paris and the bleak council estates of Britain, an urban culture of economic and cultural detachment continues to spew forth a subpopulation of alienated, angry, and unproductive citizens.

America is different

In many important ways, the problems of America's urban underclass are radically different from those of their European counterparts. In this country, the deepest and most intractable problems are not in cities with heavy immigrant populations (as in Europe) but rather in places like New Orleans that are dominated by native-born African Americans. Most of the cities with the highest concentrations of poverty in America -- New Orleans, Louisville, Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia -- are predominantly black cities.

These are also cities that most immigrants skip over. Only 5 percent of New Orleans residents were born outside the country -- compared to 28 percent in Houston, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 36 percent in New York City. This decade, immigrants to the U.S. are headed to cities like Phoenix, Houston, and Orlando that have burgeoning economies. Immigrants who do settle in heavily black metro areas generally move outside city limits, to places like Northern Virginia, Baltimore County, or Kenner (outside of New Orleans).

More important, immigrant poverty -- in places from Fresno, California to Miami -- tends to be different in kind from that of our native born. Latino immigrants, who make up the vast majority of America's poor newcomers, have tended to have above average rates of labor participation. They are working poor, and many supplement their low official incomes with money earned "off the books." Our immigrants also tend to start businesses at a rapid rate -- the percentage of Latino self employment is twice the rate of native-born African Americans, and the ranks of Latino-owned businesses are growing faster than white-owned businesses. Many arrivals from Third World regions like the Middle East, south and east Asia, and the former Soviet bloc start businesses at high rates once in the U.S., in some cases passing those of native-born whites.

Clearly race is no longer a dominant force behind economic success. The per capita income of African immigrants ($20,100) sharply outranked that of Asian immigrants ($16,700) or Central-American immigrants ($9,400) by the late 1990s. African immigrants also earn much more than native-born Americans ($14,400 per capita).

Nothing illustrates the difference between the American and European underclass better than the position of Muslim immigrants. In the United States, Muslims are among the most entrepreneurial and well-educated groups, with roughly 60 percent college educated and two thirds earning over $50,000 per year.

Within one generation -- at most two -- the vast majority of all U.S. immigrants have moved solidly into the middle class. This is true for all races, religions, and groups. Most of our new arrivals already live in suburbs, the bastions of America's middle class.

A matter of attitude

The critical factor separating most U.S. immigrants from our underclass is this: Attitude matters. Most newcomers to America see this not as a land of oppressors (the sore exceptions tend to gravitate toward journalism, politics, or academia, so we sometimes get a skewed impression), but rather as a place of opportunity and fundamental fairness. This often contrasts mightily with conditions in the immigrants' home countries. In many of those places, connections and ethnic privilege are essential to getting anything done. In Nigeria, notes U.S. immigrant/entrepreneur Ibim Bobmanuel, the key issue is "who you know." Land is expensive and controlled by powerful families.

On the other hand, in Houston, where he immigrated in 1984, Bobmanuel was able to start a dry cleaning business in a strip mall with "about five minutes of training." In two years he sold that business and got a license to teach special education at a public school. On the side, he started a health care business. He now employs 15 home-assistance workers, and, from an office in suburban Fort Bend, runs a trucking operation back in Nigeria as well. "Africans come here because there are far fewer barriers," says the jet-black businessman.

Recent immigrants like Bobmanuel and their children now amount to almost 60 million Americans, the largest number in our nation's history, and roughly one fifth of our total population. Some of this large group will inevitably fall into our underclass, as will millions of whites. And certainly the persistence of Latino second- and third-generation gang members in places like Los Angeles confirms that the integration of immigrants into the productive part of American society has been far from perfect. But the overwhelming trend in this country is for new people and new races to be folded into an ever-shifting and ever-increasing American mainstream.

Enmeshed in a poverty culture

On the other side of the spectrum lies the problem of isolated, immobile African-American remnants mired in urban poverty. Along with Native Americans in some rural reservations, these pose today's greatest challenge to our nation's ability to make all citizens productive. On the surface, inner-city blacks should be easier to integrate than most immigrants, since they are native English speakers, long resident in the country, and familiar with American values. To be sure, most black Americans have long since escaped ghetto life. Increasingly, like immigrants, many now live in the suburbs, with middle-class incomes. Amidst the strong economic performance of the last 25 years, impressive numbers of black Americans have moved measurably up the socio-economic ladder.

Yet too many, in too many places, remain enmeshed in a culture of poverty and social dysfunction. History plays a role -- African Americans, like Native Americans, endured long mistreatment. Much of our current crisis, however, is of much more recent vintage than can be explained by the deforming influence of slavery and discrimination.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans developed remarkable institutions -- religious, educational, economic -- that helped them cope with the pains of segregation. They did not manage to achieve equality, but had a sense of self-sufficiency that made for slow, but steady, gains. Much has been made of black churches and schools, but less appreciated are the institutions of commerce (hotels, insurance companies, banks, cosmetic companies, etc.) that once allowed African Americans ownership, employment, and opportunities to hone their professional skills. These businesses grew up in the heart of black America, often just around the corner from established, larger, white counterpart businesses.

The onset of integration in the 1960s devastated many of these firms. White-owned institutions began to market directly to black neighborhoods. African Americans became, en masse, consumers and employees of other firms. A large and growing group managed to integrate into the mainstream economy. Many integrated socially into middle-class America as well.

Left behind, however, was an underclass of non-working or marginally employed blacks. The erosion of low-skilled manufacturing and warehousing jobs hurt, and places hit hardest by the restructuring of the economy -- industrial cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia -- soon developed the largest underclass populations. New Orleans, the long-term industrial and trade center of the Gulf, suffered much the same fate as these northern cities.

Like most cities, New Orleans sprang up for commercial reasons. French settlers founded the city in 1718 because it was situated at the mouth of the Mississippi, the most critical waterway in North America. Their new port created an industrial base that employed many working-class people, eventually including African Americans who migrated from the rural Mississippi delta after slave plantations and then sharecropping in that region faded. The development of this port complex, and the related energy industry, provided opportunities that raised poor Louisianians of both races from poverty.

But during the 1960s, the push for economic growth that created an upwardly mobile working class was replaced -- in New Orleans as well as most other cities -- by a new paradigm that emphasized politics. Political agitations promoted various forms of racial redress, and the rights of people to receive government welfare payments. By the late 1970s, African Americans in many American cities had gained more titular power than they'd ever dreamed of, including the mayoralty of New Orleans.

Urban liberalism fails the poor

The new political gains of black Americans were widely regarded as a major step toward an improved social status. This coincided with the rise of a new form of urban boosterism -- which showcased downtown renewal districts and insisted that the dramatic decline of city quality of life during the 1960s and 1970s had been reversed in the 1980s and 1990s. Urban elites, including in New Orleans, burbled about the vigor of their cities. Right through last year's Gallup poll, leaders and residents of the Crescent City had (along with San Francisco) one of the highest levels of municipal self-esteem in the country. That now appears sadly delusional.

The truth is that, rather than improving conditions for average residents of their cities, many urban politicians and interest groups have promoted policies that actually exacerbated a metastasizing underclass. Urban liberals tend to blame a shrivelling of Great Society programs for problems in cities. Observers such as former Houston mayor Bob Lanier have suggested, however, that the Great Society impulse itself is what most damaged many cities -- by stressing welfare payments and income redistribution, ethnic grievance, and lax policies on issues like crime and homelessness, instead of the creation of a stronger economy.

This modern liberalism veered far from the traditional progressive visions of politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia. Those leaders believed in the basics: building up the economic infrastructure that government has long been responsible for (like ports and transportation), efficient and honest provision of services like education and policing, and mainstream, even conservative, social policies. Today, only a handful of mayors like Chicago's Richard Daley, Jr., Charleston's Joseph Riley, and Houston's Bill White still stick to this "back to basics" focus. Most other urban leaders have turned to more ephemeral issues, less mainstream values, and economic policies that largely surrender to public worker unions, spiced with an emphasis on cultivating arts, entertainment and pro sports, tourism, and show-projects.

Certainly New Orleans was following a very conventional program of urban liberalism. Local leaders had become convinced that becoming a "port of cool" was the ticket to success. Never mind the grubby fiscal and regulatory basics of encouraging business activity. Instead, city and state leaders adopted Richard Florida's trendy "creative class" theory, and held a conference just a month before Katrina promoting the idea that a cultural strategy of fostering edgy arts and boutique entertainment districts was a promising way to bring in high-end industry. Over the previous decade, city leaders had already transformed the once-bustling warehouse district into a tourist zone. Before the hurricane hit, state and city officials were looking to expand the now-infamous convention center at a price tag of some $450 million.

Amidst the focus on les bons temps, high-paying core industries like the port and energy production were left to decamp to places like the less lovely but far more business-friendly and efficient city of Houston. (See sidebar on page 26.) This is a tragic story which played out in similar ways in many city halls.

The result of these unfortunate political decisions was to leave many urban cores with nothing but some often largely vacant office towers, Potemkin tourist districts, lousy public schools, ineffective police departments, and blocks of decrepit neighborhoods where residents are more dependent on government checks or jobs, or criminal activity, than on paid employment. The results of this decoupling of cities from the global economy has been all too evident. Wealthy elites who own or patronize restaurants, high-end hotels, loft developments, and cultural institutions have done fine. Younger, single, and gay residents of cities have enjoyed themselves. But for working- and middle-class families with children, cities have become hostile environments.

Lower-income blacks have been particularly hard hit. The best local job option may be a low-wage position in a restaurant or hotel with few prospects for advancement. For many, it has become easier to retreat to the underground or mailbox economy, to explain away failure than to accept responsibility.

Saddest of all, these attitudes are now transmitted intergenerationally. Nationwide, seven out of ten black children are now born to an unmarried mother. In inner cities like New Orleans, nearly all black births now come out of wedlock. "There is a lack of parent involvement," says Chrystal Walker, a former New Orleans teacher I interviewed in Houston. "I had a lot of students who didn't do any assignments. Their parents never showed up except when they were suspended. They didn't want them."

Real reform, or averted eyes?

Social workers like New Orleanian Sonya Heisser point out that even the poorest individuals still have control of their own lives. She tells her clients, "I don't have to go the fast way. I don't have to sell drugs. I make my own changes. Most of this is about choices -- we all make choices."

But while underclass behaviors eventually boil down to personal decisions, society and government set the table with the ground rules they establish in cities. Today, most central cities feature horrific educational deficiences, crumbling infrastructure, and stultifying regulations that drive commerce ever more into the suburban periphery. Yet most city leaders -- not to mention productive citizens in the rest of the nation -- avert their eyes from these problems until a trauma like Katrina forces the products of our urban maladministration into view. Rather than re-examine their bankrupt social and economic premises, urban elites prefer to channel money into sports stadia and convention centers, hip lofts and restaurants, hoping somehow this will suck talent and wealth into their cities. As if today's urban underclass will just fade away, and leave the cool hipsters unbothered to enjoy their entertainment districts.

This collapse of responsibility and discipline goes against the entire grain of urban history. From republican Rome to the golden ages of Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York, cities have flourished most when they have served as places of aspiration and upward mobility, of hard work and individual accountability. By becoming mass dispensers of welfare for the unskilled, playpens for the well-heeled and fashionable, easy marks for special interests, and bunglers at maintaining public safety and dispensing efficient services to residents and businesses, many cities have become useless to the middle class, and toxic for the disorganized poor. Today's liberal urban leadership across America needs to see the New Orleans storm not as just a tragedy, but also as a dispeller of illusions, a revealer of awful truths, and a potential harbinger of things to come in their own backyards.

Look beyond the tourist districts. Few contemporary cities are actually healthy in terms of job growth or middle-class amenities. Most are in the grips of moral and economic crisis.

If we are lucky, the flood waters of Katrina will wash away some of the '60s-era illusions that fed today's dysfunction. Honest observers will recognize that this natural disaster, which hit the nation so hard, was set up by the man-made disaster of a counterproductive welfare state.

More likely, many metro elites will continue to resist dramatic reforms like reining in civil service bloat, providing tax and regulatory relief for small businesses, or promoting family and moral revival. Even as they invoke the great mayors of the past, they will eschew a renewed focus on true progressive values of better and more accountable schools, good roads, and jobs that provide upward mobility.

Instead, our urban leaders and their enablers -- from rich developers to social agitators -- will insist their old strategies are working. The media will likely echo their press releases. This will work only until our cities crumble under pressure, as in New Orleans, explode from within, like Paris, or simply become irrelevant anachronisms at the margins of modern society.

A Tale of Two Cities

Houston and New Orleans are places united by geography, climate, and history -- and divided on virtually everything else. The two cities represent contrasting ways of coping with the urban experience.

New Orleans was for much of its history the Queen City of the Gulf of Mexico, the cultural, economic, and commercial center of the Caribbean basin. Until well into the twentieth century, the city was an entrepreneurial cauldron, for blacks as well as whites, providing a greater degree of freedom and opportunity than virtually anywhere in the South.

Houston, in comparison, is a newcomer. In 1920, its population was barely a third of New Orleans's, and its role in U.S. commerce was insubstantial. Since that time, the two cities have been heading in opposite directions. New Orleans has been living off its history, while Houston tore earnestly into relentless self-improvement. Its leaders dredged its harbor, improved drainage, and constructed state of the art industrial facilities that made it the great Gulf Coast port. Houston grabbed leadership of the world's energy industry, and quietly built the most impressive medical complex in the world. With a gritty efficiency, the city transformed itself into a major global center.

Attention to the economic fundamentals has been critical to the city's rise. Houston's government has been seen as favoring the business community over all other interests, including its poor and minority populations. Over time, however, that has allowed the city to dramatically raise the wealth and quality of life of all its citizens.

In backscratching New Orleans, on the other hand, chronic political "favor-asking" and corruption turned off entrepreneurs and anesthetized the local economy. David Wolff, who runs a real estate business in Houston, recalls that his attempts to do business in New Orleans tended to end in shakedowns. "In New Orleans they say it's all about the thin hogs trying to push out the fat hogs. That's the whole attitude down there. I didn't want any part of it," says Wolff, now one of Houston's largest landowners.

Houston was fortunate to have one of America's best mayors -- Bob Lanier -- for much of the 1990s. A former developer and lifelong Democrat, Lanier attended to all the business-like details that New Orleans's politicians eshewed, such as improving levees, filling potholes, and streamlining regulations. Houston has had its own ample experience with natural disasters, but has coped much more efficiently.

Under very different management, Houston long ago surpassed New Orleans, and now boasts a population more than three times larger, and a vastly more dynamic economy. During the 1990s, the Texas city grew almost six times faster than greater New Orleans. It flourished as a major destination for immigrants, particularly from Latin America.

One clear area of success has been race. Like New Orleans, Houston was a Southern city with a history of racial discrimination. But in the early 1960s the city decided to desegregate. It did so not as much for moral reasons as because it was perceived to be bad for business.

That phrase, "bad for business," is close to a curse in Houston. Business drive and the search for a better economic future has sustained this city through boom times and crashes, notably the disastrous energy bust of the 1980s. Because of the economic flexibility of the locals, even that disaster was turned into a boon. Collapsed property prices and lots of available space lured hundreds of thousands of new immigrants to the city, sparking a durable new revival, recalls Houston architect Tim Cisnero, whose clients include Mexican, African, Chinese, and Indian entrepreneurs.

"We're becoming a new city with new opportunities," he states, "all changed by capitalism." Houston's opportunism is sometimes portrayed as callous and uncaring. Indeed as Katrina refugees flooded into Houston from Louisiana, the New York Times published a withering story about how some of the Texas city's entrepreneurs were profiting from the New Orleans tragedy. What the national media missed, however, may well be Houston's finest hour -- and evidence of what a great civic culture can accomplish. In the days after the inundation of New Orleans, Houston's politicians, businessmen, and numerous non-profits prepared to accommodate a flood of their own: around 200,000 displaced people from southern Louisiana.

Most of these evacuees were non-white, many were poor. All instantly needed housing, jobs, school slots, and accomodations of various sorts. And these New Orleanians were greeted by Houstonians not with hostility, but with support and compassion. According to Davis Henderson, CEO of the Greater Houston Area Chapter of the American Red Cross, the response -- including 13,000 spontaneous volunteers -- was unprecedented.

"Who else could have adopted another city like we adopted New Orleans?" he asks. Henderson credits the response largely to the fundamental optimism and openness of Houston's business and religious communities. Other cities would have seen the newcomers as a threat. Most Houstonians felt they could absorb them -- and were willing to be "changed forever" in the process, "and be better for it."

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Houston's response was its ecumenical effort. The emergency feeding of refugees was spearheaded largely from the religious grassroots by people like Ed Young, pastor of Houston's 41,000-member Second Baptist Church. Coordinating with other faith congregations, Young helped feed some 30,000 impoverished refugees.

"We sent out a clarion call and people responded," Young reports. "We were organized. We're geared to respond easily. Baptists worked with Muslims and Catholics in that first week after Katrina -- we had a pretty ecumenical group," he recalls in an interview at his vast church on the outskirts of the city. "It was maybe not a miracle, but it was supernatural." Houston churches, businesses, and non-profits are now transitioning to the long-term task of accommodating the Louisiana evacuees -- finding permanent homes, jobs, schools, and a restored sense of community for perhaps 150,000 outsiders.

New Orleans evacuees have been plainly surprised by their welcome in the Texas city, which is why so many are expected to stay. A group of New Orleans social work students now finishing their graduate degrees at the University of Houston told me that the key attraction to Houston can be summed up in one word: opportunity.

"This is a place where people go to get ahead," notes Chrystal Walker, a native New Orleanian and former student at predominately black Southern University. "New Orleans will always be my first love. But there are better opportunities here for my kids."

Shelter and the Storm

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:00:00 -0500

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to beat back the sun, give way to communities screened by oak and cypress trees. One of the loveliest neighborhoods is Bayou Black. There are thoroughbreds on lawns there, and an alligator farm. The week's sole rush hour begins Saturday before dawn, when fathers and sons leave home to fish and hunt. Later that morning, the shell-pink great house of a nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation opens for tours. The gift shop, in what the docents call "the servants' quarters," sells books with such titles as "Myths of American Slavery" and "Slaves by Choice." Hurricane Katrina only grazed this house and its environs, pulling shingles off roofs and whipping the moss from the trees. After the levees of New Orleans broke and poor blacks fled, Bayou Black was only sixty miles down one of the few open highways from the city.

When an emergency shelter in Houma, the parish seat, filled quickly, several members of a Catholic church in Bayou Black asked local officials if they could open the basketball court of their recreation center to refugees. Earlier in the summer, the pressing social issue at the gym had involved the casings of sunflower seeds: a sign at the entrance read "What Goes in Your Mouth You Must Swallow Not Spit Back Out on the Bleachers." On the evening of September 3rd, though, a gunshot victim, a four-hundred-pound woman, and a man with a broken spine arrived at the gym simultaneously, joining two hundred other evacuees. The only medical expertise on hand belonged to an eighteen-year-old lawn cutter who had once passed a lifeguard course. "He could have told me his back was broken before I moved him," the teen-ager later complained. A Cajun woman named Roxie Bergeron had put aside her duties as a Catholic youth-group leader to organize the volunteers. "None of us knows what we are doing," she said. "This is Shelter 101." Other white residents were more conflicted than Bergeron about giving refuge to former New Orleanians. Shrimpers, boat captains, offshore oil workers, and the personal-injury lawyers attendant on these trades wanted the gym available for themselves and their families, should another hurricane hit.

A thirty-year-old black businessman named Gary Harrell managed the night shift at the shelter. He had a shaved head, Pentecostal leanings, and subscriptions to The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist; he'd grown up down the street. "There are a hundred thousand people in this parish, but we think we're Magnolia, Mississippi," he said. "The whole identity and appeal of this place is as a not-New Orleans. So what's happening now is something that never crossed people's minds, except in nightmares: that New Orleans would be coming to them."

Still, the Bayou Black volunteers, like many other Americans, were eager to play a role in what followed the evacuation. Popular sympathy, at least outside Terrebonne Parish, was with the displaced people, now known collectively as victims; and with that concern came the opportunity ("should they choose to take it" was the standard qualifier) to turn tragedy into renewal. Former residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and other segregated neighborhoods of New Orleans might now be supported in their attempts to advance into the cultural and economic mainstream -- "to ascend to normalcy," as Gary Harrell put it. It was a romance of transformation, and for some of the adults unpacking trash bags of possessions on the basketball court this idea of fresh starts had a basis in fact: lost in the flood was evidence of schooling that had stopped at ninth grade, misadventures in the work world, pending appointments in court. Even the children of the Bayou Black gym -- among them a dark-skinned thirteen-year-old girl in a donated tie-dyed T-shirt -- sensed possibilities in the wake of disaster.

The girl's name was Jasmine Williams, and she understood that she was unwelcome in Terrebonne Parish. She had been reared by an unstable and uncaring mother, so this feeling was nothing new. Nor was her shelter life much different, emotionally speaking, from the one that she'd left behind: her mother's boyfriend had just taken seventy-five dollars from her in order, Jasmine suspected, to buy drugs. "Then my mom thrashed all over me for being mad about it," Jasmine said. But, as Gary Harrell gently insisted, this was a time to look ahead, not to sulk about familiar injustices. And late one night in the second week of September she removed from her mouth a pacifier that she had swiped from an infant-supply drawer and articulated her understanding of the work at hand: "You know that song by Mike Jones? 'They used to love to dis me, now they run to hug and kiss me -- now?' The rest of the song is pimps and Escalades, but the dis-and-kiss part is what goes through my head since I been coming here. Like maybe before the storm they treated you not so good, said you were stupid or something, but after, it might be -- like, if you change from here on out and don't get put out of school and be working and all, people might be noticing you, knowing your name."

Jasmine was curious about Gary Harrell. "Beaucoup smart," she said, adding hopefully, "A person I can rock with." Her sense of the community where she now lived came largely from him. "When I was growing up," Gary liked to say, "they allowed one of us colored kids in every class at Mulberry Elementary." Returning home after graduating from college, in Birmingham, Alabama, he discovered that his studies in international business and Japanese qualified him only to sell Toyotas. Recently, though, he had started a management-consulting business. Now he hoped to help Jasmine and the other evacuees make their own adjustments and advancements.

*****

Mattress-to-mattress living turns private lives into public theatre, and Jasmine, after settling in, began hovering in corners and doorways to observe her neighbors. She was particularly interested in a middle-aged couple, Carolyn Tompkins and Gus Davis, who, despite long residency in New Orleans East, had what others in the shelter called "country-ass ways." After a lifetime with a volatile mother, Jasmine is skittish; Carolyn and Gus mesmerized her with their placidity. He is illiterate, with failing eyesight, and had worked as an oysterman before Katrina and its accompanying oil spills. Carolyn has a mellow laugh and, in Jasmine's estimation, a woeful fashion sense: she wore a faded house dress, pink flip-flops, and a black polyester do-rag every day. The couple's great interest was their sons, aged one and almost three, whom Carolyn rocked for hours in a donated chair to which someone had affixed stickers that said "Wassup?"

Carolyn had worked in the kitchen of a New Orleans nursing home, and had taken Gus and the toddlers there to weather the storm. In the days that followed, twenty-two elderly patients died after the electric power went out, floodwaters poured in, and medicine washed away. The police and other officials failed to organize a rescue, but eventually the brother of a co-worker arrived from Georgia with a boat and a big red truck. Most of the employees and survivors ended up in Terrebonne Parish. Now Carolyn's older boy asked anxious questions about dead people, and shook when he was taken to the bathroom. His parents could only guess what he'd seen while they had been moving patients to the top floor and taking bodies downstairs. "The main thing is to be with these little guys," Carolyn said, handing a stuffed Elmo to her one-year-old. "So if the government and the folks here want to take a bit of our lives out of our hands for a minute, help us get some work and all, we'll be coming back strong to do the rest."

Others at the shelter, among them Jasmine's mother, sought a different kind of aid. Experience had made them skeptical of government notions of opportunity and the longevity of public concern, so they were placing their bets on an immediate redistribution of wealth. Reports on CNN served as tutorials in which they learned that the traumas of cute young children had more cash value than those of adolescents like Jasmine, and that to elicit maximum sympathy from potential donors one should have, or might now invent, a lost pet.

"Trixie -- that a dog's name or a cat's?" a woman asked Jasmine's mother as they sat one afternoon on the recreation center's front porch. "I'm looking for something that fits one of them weenie dogs." Jasmine's mother wasn't sure about pet names, but she agreed that strategy was in order. She said, "The way people helped during the Chinaman thing" -- someone proffered the word "tsunami" -- "I best be getting a house!"

Also sitting on the porch was a mother of four who was in the throes of heroin withdrawal. She had, in fact, lost a cat she loved. However, the woman's teen-age daughter, who had left home with only a handbag and three negligee sets, was probably right in saying that its name, Hootchie-Mamma Kitty, was "too ghetto" for middle-class sympathy.

*****

In an affluent society, a deficit of things can swiftly be remedied. Within a week, surplus food was rotting in Louisiana shelters; bags of secondhand clothing filled back rooms and hallways, then spilled outdoors, much of it never to be unpacked. It was easy to forget that, before Katrina, even in the worst recesses of the Melpomene or Calliope projects of New Orleans, people had clothes on their backs, and no one starved, and almost every family had a television. What they often lacked were passable educations, regular medical care, jobs with benefits, or firsthand knowledge of how most other Americans live -- New Orleans's low-income population being one of the least mobile and most isolated in the country. This poverty of opportunity was harder to redress and, at least at first, impolitic to discuss.

One evening, on a television in the gym, President Bush articulated his version of the romance of transformation, in which suffering made victims stronger, and compassion bridged divides of race and class. "In the journey ahead you're not alone," he told the displaced, promising an influx of public and private aid to help them and their communities "not just to survive, but to thrive." Outside the shelter, where federal aid had not materialized, Gary Harrell's romanticism was being tested. Throwing up his arms, he said, "I don't have a clue what to do about Pookie!" Pookie, Jasmine's cousin, was a disturbed seven-year-old boy whose grandmother operated on the theory "A baby's old enough to sock you, he's old enough to be socked back." He had crept past the recreation center's outdoor swimming pool (unavailable to the "out-of-town guests") and had set off for the road that linked Bayou Black to the rest of the parish. Meanwhile, police officers arrived at the gym; they were returning a middle-aged woman who had pulled a knife on her daughter for "opening her legs when she's not fixed."

In the gym office, Jasmine dialed a series of phone numbers of male acquaintances, her pacifier clenched like a cigarette at the side of her mouth. Though she was a little afraid of growing up -- not just the sex thing, but the distinct possibility of competitive reprisals from her mother -- she often felt odd, unlovely, in the shelter. Someone outside it, she hoped, might tell her otherwise. "Do you remember me?" she asked these men again and again.

As Bush's speech concluded, with a call for armies of compassion, a telephone rang next to Jasmine. The caller was a Midwestern businessman with the sort of offer that the volunteers had prayed for: a big house on a farm an hour north of Wichita which some of Bayou Black's evacuees were welcome to use. Gary grabbed a legal pad to write down the details. Many of the adults were eager to work, and the volunteers had been finding jobs for them on pipelines, in laundries, and at a waste-treatment company. But the new workers had nowhere to live. Although local churches had raised enough money to cover security deposits and a month's rent, FEMA representatives and oil-platform repairmen had taken almost every available room in the parish.

While Gary talked with the Midwestern businessman, Carolyn wandered in to get a towel for the shower. Soon she was perched behind Gary. "A farm?" she asked. "I'll milk 'em, I'll rake up after 'em, I'll even cut 'em up if need be -- if it's a private place to stay." Carolyn and Gus had lived in an apartment just off Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East -- a strip of pawnshops and motels where junkies sold sex for the price of a catfish platter. Yet the couple had made a stable home there, and it had been lost in the levee break. Now Gus had taken a grass-cutting job. It didn't pay as well as his oystering had, but, after a week and a half at the shelter, he was worried less about the money than about his sons. "They're changing here -- too much distraction and too many thug babies," he said. "These kids starting to walk the walk and talk the talk, and still in diapers." He wanted to get them out fast.

Gary's telephone voice had grown strained, and he'd dropped his legal pad on the table. "Well, sir, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for your offer," he told the businessman, "but we have to do this right for our people. And we certainly don't want to be sending them into indentured servitude!" There were apparently opportunists outside the gym, too. Carolyn went, dejected, to the shower.

*****

By the middle of September, the evacuees had realized that federal aid was not imminent, and that the help they needed to re-start their lives might come more quickly from local residents. Qualifying for such donations required conforming to the Terrebonne definition of "deserving poor." To be deserving, one had to be willing to work, of course, but there were other expectations: to attend church on Sunday; to wear the donated clothes that exposed the least flesh; to be quiet when laughing and talking among themselves, and loud and clear when expressing their gratitude. "Everyone's got their mask on now," Gary Harrell's mother, who was tutoring the shelter children, said. Some evacuees saw a liability in what had been their lives' great expenditure -- glittering gold-capped teeth -- and began to cover their mouths when they smiled.

Gary believed that, as Terrebonne residents got to know Carolyn, Gus, and the rest of the evacuees, they'd see a common ground, or at least a situation that served their own interest. "Their energy and eagerness to work are going to help us compete economically," he said. Terrebonne community leaders also sensed that Katrina's destruction had created an economic opportunity. The parish president and his aides were trying to persuade displaced New Orleans businesses to relocate in the parish.

The officials had had enough of the displaced people, however. Two weeks after the arrival of the first evacuees, the Houma Courier ran a one-sentence story: "The Terrebonne Consolidated Government announced this morning that local shelters are full and are no longer able to accept evacuees." The assertion was false; the shelters had space for at least a thousand more people. But it reflected the sensibility of a community in which the word "comfortable" had become a term of art. "We don't want people to get too comfortable here," the director of the major shelter in Houma liked to say. Local unease increased when one of its residents was charged with intent to distribute prescription pills -- despite the fact that, before Katrina, Houma's own drug dealers sold crack, methamphetamine, and the steroids ubiquitous in a community that took high-school football to heart. Terrebonne's predicament was an intensified version of a classic American dilemma: the belief that ghettoizing a disadvantaged population is morally wrong, joined to the conviction that the disadvantaged population might be a lot happier in the next county. At a public meeting after the drug bust, a city official said, to general approval, "We don't want to be the people who turned away the refugees, but we don't want a Superdome situation."

*****

The recreation center looked out on the bayou, which most of the evacuees avoided -- there were alligators there. So it was considered daring when Carolyn and Gus began taking their toddlers to the water's edge each afternoon, when the light made everything around them glimmer gold and red. "I want their eyes to be steady full of something beautiful," Carolyn said, "enough beautiful to push the ugly things they've seen out of their brains."

One afternoon, Jasmine went to the bayou, too. It was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. Like many neglected children, she'd grown used to her lot in life, and barely paid attention when her mother asked the volunteers, "You got kids? I been trying to get rid of mine for some time." Jasmine had an eleven-year-old brother, and neither of them expected their mother to do "regular stuff," like helping with homework. Their mother said, "My kids don't even ask me anymore -- my nerves is bad, so they gets beat up after one problem. Other thing they know is when I put that forty dollars' worth of food on the counter every month and they eat it too fast, they be going hungry until next month comes around."

One kind of poverty is that of the imagination -- the inability to envision a future truly different from the present. Jasmine had long judged people based on whether or not they gave her food and clothing, but, as she watched Carolyn and Gus and other families, she found herself mulling different gauges of worth. She'd been working lately on a definition of love. "Maybe it's that, like, you honor somebody and they honor you back," she said carefully. "If you do for them without being all, like, See, I did this for you, now you best do something for me -- like, you just do it for the kind of your heart."

Jasmine had seen her father only once since she was five. She knew that he had been in prison for selling drugs and attempted murder, and that he now put siding on houses. He was six feet two, had a place in suburban Minneapolis, and had sponsored the three best days of her life: "It was February and he was in a car, and he came by his cousin's house. I was playing in the parking lot then, so I caught a look of him. I knew right away -- I said, 'That my daddy,' but because I'd grown big he didn't know me. But then he did know, and he took me eating at Manhattan's in New Orleans and bowling and to a movie, then he took me by my other cousin's, then we ate doughnuts, then he brought me to Avondale, too." Jasmine's furious dialing now had direction: she would ask her father to take her in.

*****

In August, before the levees broke, the Associated Press began a story on New Orleans violence by citing a study: "Last year, university researchers conducted an experiment in which police fired seven hundred blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire." Afterward, the experiment was mentioned in newspapers, magazines, and on television to illustrate the morally deadening effects of the inner city. The report, like that of Terrebonne's "full" shelters, was incorrect, yet it agreed with the thinking of policymakers as Katrina stories grew less frequent on cable TV: though New Orleans could be rebuilt, its former inhabitants might be beyond saving.

Historically, considerations of poverty range between extremes: sentimentality and sensationalism, structural causes and individual volition. In this case, the moment of attention to structural causes passed quickly. On September 15th, the President spoke of aggressive action against "deep, persistent poverty" with "roots in a history of racial discrimination." Two weeks later, members of the Republican Party were using the deficiencies of the evacuees as evidence that contemporary anti-poverty approaches were ineffectual. Congressional debate did not then turn to more hopeful approaches; it centered instead on how many billions of dollars to cut from Medicaid and other social programs in order to offset the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast. The politicians perhaps understood their constituencies: a public that desires to help the poor without paying a price, or even particular attention.

One day, a family in the Bayou Black gym got a real opportunity to transform their lives. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, some Catholics had been thinking about how to direct their charitable instincts, and a housewife there called a nun in Terrebonne in search of a large family. Within a matter of days, the largest family at the gym -- a middle-aged laundress from the Ninth Ward, a seventeen-year-old girl who spent her shelter days writing in her journal ("My story is basically ghetto, ghetto, ghetto," she said), and seven others -- had got a furnished five-bedroom house, rent-free, for two years, down the street from the home of Kalamazoo's former mayor. They also got a minivan; a line on good jobs; medical and dental care; and parochial-school tuition for the seventeen-year-old and three younger children -- "but only if the family is inclined that way," the Kalamazoo housewife said, noting that the local public schools were excellent, too. This turn of events raised expectations throughout the shelter, though nothing like it happened again.

The children in the gym with whom Jasmine felt most kinship were the unaccountably cheerful teen-age sons of the woman who was withdrawing from heroin. The boys, whose names were Christopher and Crishad Riley, dated their mother's addiction to the night, five years before, when their father, having finished his shift in the kitchen at Applebee's, was robbed, shot, and killed by a fifteen-year-old girl. "After that, Katrina is nothing," their mother said. She was forthcoming about the misery in which she'd let her children live -- "like Christopher finding me passed out for five hours, my drawers off and the handkerchief still tied on my arm." But the state's shrinking child-protection system hadn't intervened to help the Riley kids, and the public schools had contributed further to their misfortunes. Three-quarters of the students in the New Orleans school system were impoverished, and, by Louisiana's own standards, most of them were getting an "academically unacceptable" education -- intellectual losses, endemic to inner cities, that don't engage the nonurban imagination in the way that crime stories do. Christopher, a high-school junior who hoped to attend Florida State, could recall reading only one book. "I liked it," he said. "It was about a king that was unhappy and he did everything to be happy and he never found a way to be happy." This achievement put him well ahead of fourteen-year-old Crishad, who considered himself more of a soldier than a scholar -- "though my padres be dead, God bless they graves." Crishad, an eighth grader, could not read a word.

Jasmine had been in special education at one of the Ninth Ward's worst middle schools, a placement that pained her and mystified a retired teacher who now volunteered at the Bayou Black gym. Jasmine, too, had managed to finish a book. "I forgot its name," she said, "but it was about this boy, and his daddy taught him to grow up, like, do you follow the passion or the pay?" Now Jasmine and her friends were putting on white and khaki uniforms and attending school in Terrebonne Parish. By national standards, these institutions were mediocre; for the new students, they were astonishing. "Still can't read yet," Crishad reported excitedly in the third week of September. "But I think I might be coming along." The question, though, was how many new students would be staying. When another storm began to move toward Louisiana, the parish president ordered the gym cleared by the following week.

*****

In the final days, residents who were about to be evicted unearthed a box of T-shirts imprinted with the words "Leadership Breakthrough Mastery." The residents wore them when they prayed for one of the thousands of trailers that the federal government was sending to Louisiana. However, Terrebonne officials, like the leaders of other Louisiana communities, had decided not to make space for those trailers. Even some of Bayou Black's staunch volunteers were reconsidering their hospitable impulses. One night, while the evacuees slept, Gary Harrell mentioned to the daughter of a sugarcane farmer his fear of a Disneyfied reconstruction of New Orleans, with no place for poor blacks to live. "Sounds great," the farmer's daughter replied with unexpected heat. "We can all go to New Orleans, and leave this parish to them."

It was left to Roxie Bergeron, Gary's counterpart on the day shift, to find homes for all the shelter families. "Three thousand dollars a month?" she said into the phone, sounding incredulous. She called again. "Goodness, I know you have a business to run there, but these children -- of course I haven't known them for long but they're extremely well mannered, and if you could waive that extra fee?" By the end of the week, she'd found homes in Terrebonne for seven families. The rest would be moving away. Carolyn and Gus's best offer had come from the American Red Cross: fourteen to twenty-eight days in an extended-stay motel on the industrial outskirts of Rochester, Minnesota.

For Carolyn and Gus, the President's promise to help the evacuees now translated into something specific -- a six-hundred-and-twenty-one-dollar voucher for rent. This was welcome, though not perhaps the stuff of transformation. Gus gamely taught his elder son to say "snowmobile," but the idea of moving to a cold, remote area where they had no friends, work, or transportation left him sleepless. Late one night, he paced the porch of the recreation center, holding the younger boy in his arms. "Carolyn and me, we worked and made do on nothing before," he said, "and I expect we can do it again. It's just these boys," he added almost inaudibly. "These are my dreams." Carolyn, for her part, began repeating an idea she'd picked up from the volunteers. "The more help you get in life," she said, "the less successful you'll be."

Just before the shelter closed, Jasmine went into the gym office and asked to use a computer. Her father had agreed to take her in, and the next morning an elderly white couple was going to drive her and Carolyn's family to Minnesota. Jasmine didn't know if Minnesota was north or south of Bayou Black, just as she didn't exactly know when to use words like "thank you" or "goodbye." But she thought that she could learn. A lawyer who had volunteered at the shelter drew up custody papers, which her mother, who was returning to her apartment, readily signed. Before Jasmine left, though, she wanted to draw up a paper of her own.

First, she typed into the computer a fact she thought might impress her mother: that the Mall of America was way bigger than anything that New Orleans had to offer. And then, forehead furrowed, she pecked out what she called her "last commemoration":

I have a mother and a lil brother that's down here in Bayou Black Gym and that's why I am writing this to dedicate to them that I will always have them in mimory and I will try to keep in touch with them the best way that I can. But I also hope in pray that they never forget about me. I would want my lilbrother to always knoww that I will always be his big sister, and I will want my mother to know I was her baby girl.

Then, using the largest font she could find, she typed the word "love." A few minutes later, she watched as her mother peered into the computer screen, mouth tight, and then looked over the screen to a box of walkie-talkies behind the computer. "Oh, I've been wanting one of these," Jasmine's mother said, pulling one out and examining it intently. "Might be fixing to take it," she said, as she walked out the door.

*****

By mid-November, Carolyn had taken a job in the cafeteria of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, while Gus had embarked on an effort to learn to read. From time to time, they wondered how Jasmine was faring in her part of Minnesota. "Hard on that child, her mother sinning her that way," Carolyn said. "But she's a good little girl, mainly, and time can bring a person up, I seen it happen. I don't know. She might grow straight in the end."

"I don't know," Jasmine's father said one day after a meeting with Jasmine's teachers. "She's been living with them ways for fourteen years, and all she knows is a place where dudes gets killed every day and the teachers don't care and the worst racism is just daily life. So she comes to school up here, and she likes it, but people don't understand her because she speaks so backward, and she thinks she has to fight everyone for the littlest things. I try to explain to her what I had to learn myself, that it ain't like that here. It's safe and I'm watching her back and not going to fight her, either -- when she gets into it at school, I put her cell phone in the drawer. But it's going to take a while for her to get it, you know, that America's not all hard and mean as what she thinks."

Paying for Katrina: Closing the Fiscal Gap

Communications — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/14/2005 - 12:11pm

The New America Foundation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and the Committee for Economic Development convened a forum on the budget deficit in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Entitled "Paying for Katrina: Specifics for Closing the Fiscal Gap," and covered live by C-SPAN 2 on Monday, November 14, 2005, the forum featured experts from a diversity of ideological perspectives.

Despite this diversity, there was a surprising degree of consensus among the panelists, who expressed universal alarm with our… more