'A decade on and Hurricane Katrina is still with us in New Orleans’

[Geee]

UK Telegraph:

More than 25 per cent of those that fled the city – some 100,000 – never returned. Many are still waiting for homes under the government’s Road Home programme, but one in five are yet to be rebuilt.

Mrs Roberts, who works at a local women’s shelter as well as raising her seven-year-old daughter, says the regeneration is a tale of two cities. While the more affluent areas and the businesses down town have bounced back with the help of federal money, she said its poorest are worse off than they were before.

“The rest of the city doesn’t have potholes and squats like us. In America, where you live and the colour of your skin determines whether you live or die, whether you sink or prosper,” she tells the Telegraph.

In response to the floundering recovery effort, actor Brad Pitt set up his own charity, the Make it Right foundation in 2007, pledging to build 150 new sustainable, flood-proof houses for those displaced from the Lower Ninth Ward.

Pitt’s scheme allowed residents, many of whom had little or no insurance, to pay what they could and take out zero-interest loans to cover the rest.

But his well-meaning scheme has seemingly fallen foul of its own grandiose ambitions.

Nearly a decade on, the foundation has spent $26.8 million (£17.3 million) on construction and only managed to complete 109 of the homes. And despite high-profile celebrity backing and Hollywood fundraising galas, it is struggling to finance the remainder and in a further setback many of the homes already built have already begun rotting.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

A Couple Of Thoughts

warning There May Be Trigger Words.

 

 

Many are still waiting for homes under the government’s Road Home programme, but one in five are yet to be rebuilt.

Mrs Roberts, who works at a local women’s shelter as well as raising her seven-year-old daughter, says the regeneration is a tale of two cities.

 

For God Sake woman after waiting ten years ya think it might be time to stop waiting for the government to do something and do it yourself!

 

 

 

While the more affluent areas and the businesses down town have bounced back with the help of federal money, she said its poorest are worse off than they were before.

 

Ok, Why is anyone with an IQ 4 points higher than a flatworm surprised at this. So lets not really do anything but sit around whine and play the race card.

 

What I find...interesting is I don't see similar stories from (say) Mobile Al. Maybe it is like this along the Gulf coast, but I haven't seen it.

 

Point being (and this is going to sound harsh) its been TEN YEARS....why are people still waiting for someone to come help them?

[nickydog]

It's all they know, @Valin, it's all they know. Meaning, they don't know how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

 

What's interesting to me is how liberals like Brad Pitt have found it more difficult than just raising a bunch of money in Hollywood.

Edited August 17, 2015 by nickydog

[Valin]

It's all they know, @Valin, it's all they know. Meaning, they don't know how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

 

What's interesting to me is how liberals like Brad Pitt have found it more difficult than just raising a bunch of money in Hollywood.

 

Its more than just money. You have to be there everyday, dealing with mentoring (teaching) people. Actually this may present a golden opportunity for people on the Right (think Koch Bros.) to go in and (I hate to use the word) Fix this.

[Geee]

It's all they know, @Valin, it's all they know. Meaning, they don't know how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

 

What's interesting to me is how liberals like Brad Pitt have found it more difficult than just raising a bunch of money in Hollywood.

What can I say - Brad pit hates Black People

[nickydog]

 

It's all they know, @Valin, it's all they know. Meaning, they don't know how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

 

What's interesting to me is how liberals like Brad Pitt have found it more difficult than just raising a bunch of money in Hollywood.

 

Its more than just money. You have to be there everyday, dealing with mentoring (teaching) people. Actually this may present a golden opportunity for people on the Right (think Koch Bros.) to go in and (I hate to use the word) Fix this.

 

 

Yeah, but you need to show a little sympathy for poor Brad. He has movies to do, Angelina to keep happy, and Red Carpet events to show up at. How much can one man fit in in a day?

[Draggingtree]

Dept. of Social Studies AUGUST 24, 2015 ISSUE

 

Starting Over

 

Many Katrina victims left New Orleans for good. What can we learn from them?

 

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

The first time that David Kirk visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was at the end of 2005. His in-laws were from the city. Kirk and his wife visited them at Christmas, just four months after the storm hit, and then went back again on several more occasions throughout 2006. New Orleans was devastated. Thousands had fled. “I’ll admit I’d drive around the Lower Ninth, taking it all in, feeling a little guilty about being the gawking tourist,” Kirk said not long ago. “It made an impression on me. These neighborhoods were gone.”

 

Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, for Sampson and the small army of his former graduate students who now populate sociology departments around the world, neighborhoods are the great obsession: What effect does where you live have on how you turn out? It’s a difficult question to answer because the characteristics of place and the characteristics of the people who happen to live in that place are hard to untangle. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/starting-over-dept-of-social-studies-malcolm-gladwell

[Valin]

@WestVirginaRebel

 

 

 

Moved

 

10 years after Katrina, New Orleans renaissance leaves Lower 9th Ward in the wilderness

 

NEW ORLEANS – Talking about New Orleans a decade after Hurricane Katrina, people here often reach for the Biblical, describing an economic and cultural resurrection.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Mississippi's often forgotten Katrina resurrection: Kathleen Koch

August 24, 2015

 

For the past 10 years, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder, or to be more precise, a brick. It’s all I have left of my childhood home on the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Katrina’s relentless winds and raging storm surge devoured our entire community. When I mention that, most people invariably respond, “It was awful what the hurricane did to New Orleans.”

 

And therein lies the problem. I didn’t grow up in New Orleans. My family didn’t even live in Louisiana. The home we had owned for more than 30 years was one of the 65,000 destroyed in Mississippi, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless.

 

Few realize that the massive hurricane veered east at the last minute and roared onshore at the Louisiana-Mississippi state line, making the Magnolia State ground zero. The sustained 125-mph winds, 30-foot storm surge and hopscotching tornadoes reduced virtually every structure within a half-mile of the water to kindling. Because Katrina was so vast, the destruction stretched the entire length of the more than 75-mile-long Mississippi Gulf Coast all the way into Alabama.

 

(Snip)

 

The citizens of my once-picturesque hometown of Bay St. Louis and the other battered cities along the Mississippi shoreline climbed out of the rubble and got to work. Survivors shared what little they had left with those around them. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers poured south to help put the region back together house by house. Billions of dollars in federal aid over the past decade has funded the reconstruction of roads, bridges, schools, public buildings and vital infrastructure.

 

(Snip)

[Geee]

Here’s How Hurricane Katrina Changed Schools in New Orleans

 

NEW ORLEANS—For all its devastation, Hurricane Katrina swept into this city an opportunity to embark on one of the greatest education experiments in America.

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, instead of rebuilding a public school system where roughly two in every three schools were deemed “failing,” the city transformed almost all of its traditionally run public schools into independently operated charter schools.

Charter schools changed the city’s approach to education, eliminating attendance zones, removing unions and giving parents a real say where they send their kids to school.

http://dailysignal.com/2015/08/25/heres-how-hurricane-katrina-changed-schools-in-new-orleans/

[Geee]

THINGS LOUISIANA PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU ABOUT KATRINA, PART ONE

 

http://spectator.org/articles/63886/things-louisiana-people-will-tell-you-about-katrina-part-one

[Geee]

THINGS LOUISIANA PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU ABOUT KATRINA, PART TWO

 

Earlier this week, the first installment of our 10-year Hurricane Katrina retrospective focused on the fact that Louisianans weren’t quite so much enamored of the “Bush’s fault” narrative the national media established to describe the poor response to the devastating storm and held the responsibility a bit closer to home.

 

But there is a good deal more to what you might have heard about Katrina that the people who lived through it and have spent the past 10 years trying to get beyond its effects simply don’t agree with.

 

First, as we discussed in the first installment, George W. Bush is not seen by the majority of Louisianans as the villain of the storm. That is not meant to say that the federal government is highly regarded for its performance where New Orleans is concerned.

 

For example, remember the meme about how global warming caused Katrina? That one doesn’t impress too many people in Louisiana.

 

For one thing, while the state did have Hurricanes Gustav and Ike coming through and causing some inconvenience in the years after Katrina, it’s been some time since there was much of a threat from big storms in the Gulf to Louisiana. The global warming crowd assured us of the inevitable barrage of storms coming through, and thankfully they’ve not delivered.

 

And it isn’t the rising sea levels putting New Orleans more and more at risk. The Big Easy is closer and closer to the Gulf of Mexico, it’s true, but the problem is a bit simpler than the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

 

http://spectator.org/articles/63907/things-louisiana-people-will-tell-you-about-katrina-part-two

[Valin]

Brad Pitt Foundation Reaches $20.5 Settlement Over Louisiana Homes

The settlement represents a major milestone in the long-running saga of homes beleaguered by leaks, rot and other defects.

AP

Aug 18, 2022,

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation and homeowners of the houses built by the program, in an area of New Orleans among the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, have reached a $20.5 million settlement.

The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported Wednesday that, pending approval by a judge, each of the program’s 107 homeowners will be eligible to receive $25,000 as reimbursement for previous repairs of the shoddy homes.

Under the settlement reached Tuesday evening, the remaining money is to be divided up according to the condition of each of the structures.

The settlement represents a major milestone in the long-running saga of homes beleaguered by leaks, rot and other defects.

(Snip)