A year later, reports probe Katrina rebuilding delay
Rukmini Callimachi
NEW ORLEANS — No less than a half-dozen reports on the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort are being released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the storm — and nearly all criticize the sluggish pace of the response.
The reports document a host of problems, from the still-unfinished levees to the plight of small businesses and the continuing racial divide.
“It’s a pretty bleak picture,” said Minor Sinclair, who heads the U.S. regional office of Oxfam America, a charitable organization.
Many of the reports focus on the failure of federal dollars to reach their intended targets. Oxfam’s report points out that although $17 billion has been approved by Congress to rebuild homes in Louisiana and Mississippi, not one house has been rebuilt with that money in either state.
A report from the Democratic members of the House Small Business Committee found that 80 percent of small businesses on the Gulf Coast have not yet received loans promised by the federal government. The Small Business Administration has approved loans in excess of $10 billion, but only $2 billion has found its way to business owners.
The report also cited massive delays at the federal agency, forcing some business owners to wait as long as 100 days for a decision on loan applications.
“These long delays have not only caused many viable small businesses to fail that would have otherwise survived, but has contributed to the slow recovery of the local economy,” the report said.
A call to the SBA for comment was not returned.
Three reports found that the lack of federal aid disproportionately affects black residents and the poor.
In Louisiana and Mississippi, blacks are more likely to be renters than whites, two reports noted, citing census data. Though a large proportion of the dwellings destroyed by Katrina were occupied by renters, only a fraction of the federal housing assistance has been earmarked for rental units, according to several of the studies.
A report by the Mississippi conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said the lack of rental aid will have long-term impacts on places like Biloxi, Miss., where 70 percent of renters were black, and Pascagoula, where 75 percent were black. A report by the Brookings Institution in Washington argued that with rents having risen 39 percent in New Orleans, the need to repair affordable rental units is crucial.
Compounding the problem is the degradation of such services as public transit, which are typically used by low-income residents. A policy paper by the Washington-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights found that only 49 percent of the New Orleans area bus routes have resumed. Only 17 percent of the buses are operational.
“Many of the poor in New Orleans do not own cars ... so they are dependent on public transportation in order to work,” the paper said.
(Associated Press)
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Reflections
To explore the racial and economic dimensions of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, The Associated Press asked notable Americans who know the stricken region well to share their thoughts on a broad set of questions:
“Katrina exposed a deep divide of race and poverty along the Gulf Coast and in America. Has that divide narrowed at all in the past year? And do you find reason to hope that it will narrow in the future?’’
Here are their words:
Andrei Codrescu, author of “New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City,’’ is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University. A regular commentator on NPR, he divides his time between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
“‘Race has become a code for poverty and crime that is used by conservative politicians to vote against social change. Black leaders have also soft-pedaled the issue of race because they were afraid of losing what social programs were left. Katrina revealed that there are people in America much poorer than it is publicly acknowledged.”
John Hope Franklin, 91, a professor emeritus at Duke University, assisted Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education and, half a century later, chaired President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.
“... The New Orleans tragedy speaks in a loud but eloquent voice that racial inequities in the United States persist. One need only to visit Uptown, in the neighborhood of Tulane University, and the Ninth Ward, a remarkable concentration of African Americans, to conclude that in the pre-Katrina days it was racial disparities as usual. There were low wages for blacks, as well as poor housing, a false romanticism surrounding Mardi Gras and a lack of general support for education and social well being.
“As far as race in America is concerned, Katrina was just another example of the failure of the people of the United States to come to terms with a centuries-old problem ... and make a forthright effort to solve it. Thus, it ranks with the failure of our schools to serve the needs of blacks and whites alike. ... It is a bed-mate with the disparities in housing, not only in New Orleans but across the nation. ...
“There are many lessons to be learned from Katrina. Perhaps the most important one is ... an appreciation for the common threads that bind all mankind together (and that) the best way to achieve a better world is to treat all mankind as decent human beings.
“The nation didn’t know just how segregated we are. Now they know.
“The nation didn’t know just how bad our segregated schools are. Now they know.
Katrina also taught us that the government does not care much about the black and the poor unless they are embarrassed by the media in front of the whole world.”
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