Katrina coverage nice, but not good enough

As a resident news consumer in New Orleans during the weeks-long festival of Katrina 10th anniversary coverage, just mercifully ended, I was impressed with our mayor’s success in selling the city as both triumphantly recovered and still needing help from outsiders.  Come prosper with us was the message he pushed through the nation’s media.

As a journalist who first wrote about the city 43 years ago, I noted the sheer quantity of coverage Mitch Landrieu’s administration orchestrated, plying multitudes of visiting reporters with speeches, briefings, tours, databases, a week’s schedule of panel discussions and three presidents.  City Hall and the business community seized the opportunity in the same skillful way they used for the 2013 Super Bowl to market the wounded city as a great place for entrepreneurs, tourists and foundations to spend money.

They were saying this year:  New Orleans is a recovery miracle; our people and businesses are “masters of disaster” who can teach resilience and sustainability to the world.  Look at the long list of endorsements from magazines and organizations: testimonials cited by Greater New Orleans Inc. include “#2 Boomtown in America” (Bloomberg), “#1 Brainpower City in the U.S.A.” (Forbes), “#2 in the USA for Women in Technology” (U.S. Census).

But the flood of self-congratulation that characterized the official story during most of the last several years did make room in the weeks before Katrina for greater candor.  The visiting media prompted the boosters to acknowledge problems – unequal distribution of post-Katrina wealth, racial injustice, not enough population to redeem empty blighted expanses that most visitors don’t see, schools that may be better managed than before but that are still segregated by class and race.

This dual message produced stories that – depending on the politics of the medium — picked up either the successes or the weaknesses or, in some longer pieces, followed a “tale of two cities” pattern.   Some of it was quite skillful, like a mostly unnoticed 68-page section from ESPN’s magazine consisting of a single stream-of-consciousness article by Wright Thompson that popped out from among the ad inserts in my Sunday Times-Picayune.  Some of it was admirably careful, like the delicately oblique blog on the national coverage by a resident, “music person” Karin Dalton-Beninato, for Huffington Post on Katrina Day.

And then the media left town.

On Sept. 1, three days after Katrina’s anniversary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released national data that showed the New Orleans metro area lost more jobs than any other in the country in the year ending July 31.   As the brief business-page articles in the two local papers explained, this was probably the result of wrapping up major construction projects that had been repairing Katrina damage.

This might be the lead story about the Katrina recovery:  The New Orleans economy may be a bubble, and it may burst.

I could have missed it in the tidal wave of blogs and special reports, but I don’t recall any reporter asking if New Orleans’ seeming prosperity is actually based on one-time recovery handouts.   A pertinent question would have been: Are these photogenic new restaurants, historic home renovations, rising property values and increased sales-tax receipts dependent on FEMA spending billions on flood-damaged schools and hospitals, on the Army Corps of Engineers building its mighty new flood barriers, on BP pouring tens of billions of dollars into almost every segment of the coastal economy to help us recover from its 2010 oil spill?

These are all projects that end, aren’t they?

I wish I had heard one reporter ask, “Aren’t you afraid what happens when that recovery money spigot gets turned off in two or five years?”

That might have lead in turn to questions about the new economic segments that boosters say have been growing under the umbrella of the federal and BP largesse.

• This influx of entrepreneurs you keep talking about.   Exactly how many of them are there, and what businesses are they starting?   If metro New Orleans has a nation-leading 471 individuals per 100,000 of population per year starting new businesses, as our local Data Center tells us, where exactly is the most recent one-year crop of 1,800 new businesses, and how many of them are not coffee shops?
• This new biomedical sector.  Now that you’ve proudly built the two new hospitals to replace the heroic old Charity and the VA, shut down after the flood, do you have more beds and doctors than before Katrina, or less?
• The shrinkage of the South Louisiana oil exploration industry.  How bad does that hurt?
• Hollywood South.   Will the movie companies disappear as soon as another state offers better bribes, in the form of tax credits?
• The dependability of tourism.  If we have to fall back more and more on happy visitors as the mainstay of the economy, how worried are you that the perception of increased crime – muggings on French Quarter streets, carjackings moving into “safe” neighborhoods, diners in a pricey Uptown restaurant forced by three armed robbers to go face-down on the floor during dessert – will keep the visitors away?
• Tourist attractions.   If people travel to New Orleans to see America’s most singular urban history, then why doesn’t City Hall push preservation as a main economic development strategy?  Why didn’t you mention preservation much during the anniversary build-up? And why does City Hall want to tear down so many historic buildings?

Those questions might have profitably tested some of our conventional wisdom.

Another convention accepted by many members of the media this past memorial season is that many black New Orleanians were discouraged from coming home – by neglect of their neighborhoods in the official recovery plans, or by “gentrification” of their old blocks, among other reasons.

But one big task yet to be undertaken is a comprehensive study of who no longer lives in New Orleans, and why.   Certainly universities, news organizations and generous foundations have sufficient resources to collaborate on an answer long before Katrina’s 20th anniversary.   They could select an intellectually respectable large sample of people and then ask lots of questions:  For starters, “Why did you stay in Houston?”

Hints about the answers were contained in a provocative but little discussed article by Malcolm Gladwell in the August 24 New Yorker.  “Starting Over” describes research about benefits experienced by disadvantaged people forced out of a dysfunctional present environment.  Much of it is about New Orleanians displaced from poor neighborhoods and bad schools.  One sociologist found the new addresses of 700 women, mostly lower-income and black, displaced by Katrina.  She contacted them, and concluded they felt better off away from New Orleans:

“I think that what’s happening is that a whole new world is opening up to them.   If these people hadn’t moved out of the metro area, they would have done the regular move – cycling from one disadvantaged area to another.   The fact that they were all of a sudden thrown out of that whirlpool gives them a chance to rethink what they do.  It gives them a new option – a new metro area has more neighborhoods in better shape.”

Reporters need to extend this research.

While they’re at it, they can team up again with academia and the foundations and compile an authoritative portrait of the tens of thousands – we don’t know exactly how many there are – who have moved here after the storm.  I’d like to know definitively, not anecdotally, if they are really here to launch tech companies, work in hospitals, launch a music career (making the old timers nervous about jazz wage dilution), teach in schools — or just to hang out for a while in an easy place that’s still relatively cheap and has new bike lanes going everywhere.

And, one more thing: Will the new people stick around in these neighborhoods they are supposedly gentrifying if there is a bubble and if the bubble breaks?

 

 

Jack Davis, a resident of New Orleans, worked at three New Orleans newspapers before he left to be an editor at the Chicago Tribune and publisher of the Newport News, Virginia, Daily Press and the Hartford Courant.