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Thesis
New Orleans has always functioned as something of a sanctum for me. Over the last two years at Grinnell, I came to trust and enjoy it for the strenuous, often punishing work it provided, its utter dissimilarity to any other place that I'd ever known, and the promise of something as closely approximating spiritual rejuvenation. I can't specifically quote the words, but I distinctly remember choosing to center my personal statement for my application to the Grinnellcorps program around that promise of catharsis and transformation. This report has been a while in coming and difficult to write for some time because I've slowly been coming to grips with a full disillusionment of that promise, while at the same time learning to appreciate the potential for continued growth in spite of that loss.
Background
I first came down to New Orleans in the fall of 2006 as a part of a trip brokered between ReNew Orleans and Altbreak. That was a year after the storm, but the church in which we stayed was one of only two buildings on the block that I can remember having power or people living in them. We weren't allowed to stray very far from the confines of the church at night, but wandering was never a temptation because you literally could not see where you were going or what you were walking into. During that week, I took part in some of the most physically punishing and rewarding work I've ever experienced; I went back down the following winter and spring breaks, and I spent the next summer as fully-fledged crew chief in the rebuild program for which I initially worked. I believed that the work that I was doing was helping to contribute to a new and different New Orleans, and that the city was changing, being rebuilt better. This was easy when I replaced the rotted and moldy layers of wallpaper on plaster on
wallpaper on drywall on paint on lathe that I tore out of a home one break with new and clean drywall, studs, and fresh paint the next. I believed that the tenacity of the residents that I came to know and watch trickle back would propel the rebuild effort to reach not just the homes that we toiled on, but also the social, legal, and political institutions that had allowed pre-Katrina New Orleans to wane and fester. I held on to the hope that while I was committing myself physically was helping to rebuild the city, better, stronger, maybe not faster, but certainly cleaner than it had been built before.
Flash Forward
I feel like crap. I've been working diligently to with four homeowners in the Central City area for the past month and a half to ensure that everything in their applications to Rebuilding Together (RT from here on out; a national non-profit that specializes in rehabilitating houses occupied by low-income, disabled, or elderly homeowners) is up to date and ready to go. We've done the technical site evaluations; I've personally met with each of the homeowners between three and four times, and have been to twice as many meetings with RT staff. We've taken pictures and measurements of their houses and of the repairs that are needed; I've interviewed all of them for the biographies that will go on the materials RT sends to sponsors and donors; I've personally hounded them for physical copies of the most sensitive financial information they have on record. I've done my best to push this process, building up trust between myself, these homeowners, and hopefully RT staff, with the end goal of ensuring that our
candidates are consistently the first and most eligible for RT's rebuild efforts. We've even volunteered to take on an additional homeowner another non-profit in the area didn't feel they could devote the time or attention to.
Now, though, talking to the chief construction manager of the local RT office, I find out that the grants, donations, and company sponsored outreach opportunities that RT generally relies upon to fund and maintain its operations are all drying up, or being frozen completely in the wake of the economic downturn. Finishing our conversation, I walk back to the office, knowing full well that I now have to call up Ms. Caroline, Mr. Ross, Ms. Angela, and Ms. Burthe (names have been changed to respect residents' privacy) and explain to them that despite everything we've done, all of the questions they've answered and information they've released, the money that would have gone towards giving them full walls and heat this winter simply isn't there. There's a long pause between when I finish explaining to them the nature of the situation and when we slowly start talking about their plans for Thanksgiving, what meals they're going to be cooking, and who among their family is going to make it into town this year as I
talk to them on the phone. Two weeks later, I compose a letter to all of them explaining that no one can say when RT might have money again, and that the entire central city effort that my program's directors were integral in brokering last spring now is considered to be without funding. I give them my cell phone number and write that I'll call them as soon as I get word when the situation has changed.
Your Regularly Scheduled Program
The most daunting things about working at Jericho Road (Episcopal Housing Initiative) are the scope and spectrum of work available for me to do and the ceaselessly chameleon nature of doing it. I might begin a day filing and scanning surveys that came in for the lots we just subdivided the day before, shift to researching credit scores and ways to disseminate information about improving them to prospective homebuyers (finding out my own for the first time in the process), take lunch with a coalition of other non-profits working in our area to push the school board into refurbishing another Central City high school, and then split the afternoon between transporting a donation of china and drawing up three different maps for the green building charette we're having in a month. Some days and projects are far sexier (coordinating and overseeing all of the volunteers, work, and materials for landscaping our three latest houses) while others are certainly more mundane and office-work oriented (scanning and filing
an electronic copy of all the information we have on every property we've ever owned), but the appeal of being able to watch the fruit of my efforts impacting the success of our organization is the most fulfilling aspect about working for Jericho. Moreover, the freedom I have to grow my skills in tandem with the growth of our organization - and in almost whichever direction I choose - allows me to pursue whatever knowledge, action, etc. that I might be interested in as long as I can justify its benefit to our work and to the betterment of Jericho's mission. For me personally that's taken the form of setting up a storage "server" within the architecture of the Episcopal Diocese's internal network, figuring out how to and then moving our mapping efforts to Google Earth and ArcGIS, forging into database software and census techniques, spearheading the relationship with Rebuilding Together, continuing to advocate for greater partnership with the volunteer-driven rebuild operations of the Office of Disaster
Response, and exploring ways to set up work-study opportunities for students from Loyola University and Mission Year.
In many ways the work we do feels very similar to the work I experienced under SGA in scale and cadence - save that at Jericho we have fewer checks on what we do, a constituency largely of our own making, and upper limits on our actions imposed only by our Board, ourselves, and the resources available to us. Context certainly helps with this inherent freedom; given the impoverished, dilapidated, nigh-forgotten state of the area in which we operate, the worst we could literally do would be to stay inactive and maintain the status quo. It's a virtual carte blanche to act on the betterment of the community around us, through the primary mechanism of affordable housing.
Of course, the luster of any carte blanche tends to hide the learning curve that acting upon that card carries - and the curve only gets steeper as the card gets whiter. Growing into my own at Jericho hasn't been an easy transition for me to make. Jericho's directors Brad, Chris, and Holly have been absolutely nothing but supportive of and encouraging with me, and I can't thank them enough for their patience in (tirelessly) bringing me up to speed and providing me with the opportunities they have. The nature of New Orleans, on the other hand, as a wholly fractured and faceted political, social, and geographical entity (to say nothing of the sheer diversity of people and opinion it encompasses) coupled with the stubborn hold people of its people on to the history and institutions that grew therein has diametrically made it a more difficult place into which to carve a niche. I've had to relearn and compromise almost everything I thought I knew about the city and the people which call it home - and it isn't
even Mardi Gras season yet.
Multiplicity
One of my best friends in college once explained to me that New Orleans reminded him most of cities in Europe whereas everything that he'd ever visited or experienced on this side of the pond felt was too comparatively predictable, impartial sprawl. I have to agree. Architecturally, culturally, and in general "feel", New Orleans is much more akin to a network of small townships than any formally planned or coordinated cityscape. Thus, the fractures, facets, and divisions the underpin New Orleans and the mindset those divisions breed are probably easiest to explain geographically. Place in New Orleans is emergent and opportunistic, improbably as fluid as it is significant in cultural shorthand.
I live in Uptown, but if pressed for more specifics, I'd say that I live in the university area (not to be confused with the University District) around Tulane or - if I didn't want to be associated directly with the college crowd - Audubon Park. Most of the houses around mine are a Victorian take on the traditional New Orleans shotgun, though if you have the money, you'll probably have the classical porch and columns of the imitation plantation-style homes from the garden district. Thrown into the mess are modernist houses and small apartment complexes - nothing necessarily out of place anywhere else in the country, but clearly indicative of wealth here. Nevertheless, I could just as easily tell a native New Orleanian that I lived a short hop from the Carrolton streetcar line and they'd know where I was talking about, yet I'd be called out for not really living in Leonidas if I told them that my house was on Broadway (and they'd be correct to reprimand me). I could conceivably claim four or five
different spatial allegiances, with as many or more distinct cultural underpinnings, depending on how receptive I think people are going to be to the place I claim.
To elaborate on this point: while from my perspective I work in Central City, its residents by and large claim that they too live in Uptown, even though the houses here are predominantly shotguns and the residents and renters are black, whereas almost everyone I encounter in my version of Uptown is white. Of course, two blocks riverside and across the streetcar tracks from my office lies the Lower Garden District, though if you go too far towards the river you'll end up in the Irish Channel, and if you follow the roads with the river, you'll run into the CBD and Coliseum Square almost all at once. If I tell anyone I work on lakeside of St. Charles on seventh street I'll get a very different reaction than if I simply told them I worked a block from St. Charles. Finally, if you hail from directly 2 miles due north of my house, you're probably from Mid-City, though you could just as easily be in Hollygrove. You still yet might prefer to claim to live near City Park, though that throws things off a bit
because depending on the side you're talking about you could very well be in Tremé. I haven't even touched on the Marigny, Bywater, the infamous Quarter, Braodmoor, Gentilly, Algiers, New Orleans East, Lakeview, Lakefront, or the Ninth Ward. Learning all of it feels like you're memorizing states and countries again, though those have the benefit of borders. And while all these terms denote very distinct, separate architectural and cultural niches in the patchwork amalgam that is New Orleans proper, yet I've yet to find two native New Orleanians who can conclusively agree where each niche/district/sect/ward starts and ends.
Place in New Orleans also overwhelmingly encapsulates where you'll likely spend the majority of your life if you're a native. Neighborhoods themselves consist of a mélange of families, linked and intertwined by physical proximity. Your mother might live in the house across from you, while your sister lives next door and your uncle on the next block. If you've been born and raised here, you've probably known every person on the block since you were old enough to register their names, and it's not unusual if your entire living family resides within the confines of the City of New Orleans, if not one of the geographical proximities I named above. My director Brad recently had a meeting with a city planner who described New Orleans as "the only major urban center in America where children can ride their bike to both of their grandparents' houses". To put it slightly differently, I've found that when you're asked where you went to school, people aren't asking for the name of your college; they're asking for
the name of your high school.
This inbred geographical proximity perpetuates a tightly kept, if not explicitly stated, series of socioeconomic and racial expectations and standards. To put it bluntly; if you're wealthy, you're probably white, and at the least you live along the edges of the river or the lake in the least flood-prone areas of the city. If you're poor, you're probably black, living towards the center of the bowl in the lower nine, Central City, Gert Town, and other most flood-prone areas of the city. If you're a native bohemian, I'd put money on any odds that you live in the Marigny. If you're young, white, and well-off, you're probably either someone's wealthy child, or you're a Tulane or Loyola student. Being poor and black generally limits you to living anywhere that there isn't predominantly white people. The old money generally gravitates towards uptown and the river; new money towards Lakeview and the causeway. If you're new money and black you probably migrated towards New Orleans East in the past decade,
though Katrina has all but sounded the East's death knell. And while I'm personally uncomfortable with confining my descriptions of geography along the lines of race and wealth, the cold reality is that that's the easiest way to do it.
Fallout
It's my position that the social, economic, and geographical divisions of New Orleans inform the pervasive defensiveness and politicization of relationships in the city's public (and oftentimes the private) sectors that in turn fuel New Orleans's seemingly rampant corruption, graft, and ineptitude. I strongly doubt that this characteristic is unique to New Orleans and I highly suspect that this is true about the nature of large cities anywhere in America. Yet witnessing this politicization and corruption manifest itself at nearly every turn we make at Jericho and in all levels of the city government I've personally dealt with has shocked me out of the hope that the city, its leadership, and its people would be thoroughly united against the setbacks of Katrina. It was easy for me as a rebuild and gutting crew chief to believe that as hard as I was working to rebuild the city physically wall by wall better than it was before, surely the rest of the city's institutions must be doing the same at an
organizational level. Hadn't Katrina wiped the slate clean enough and done enough devastation physically and emotionally to cause New Orleanians to take stock of what was truly important? Wasn't it evident that the ineptitude, corruption, incompetence, and social disharmonies of the past were things that could be put aside longer than just the period of time it took to rebuild the city?
I came into this year with an understanding of the city that was predominantly informed by my time in the Episcopal Diocese's local gutting and rebuild program. I was so intently fixated upon our work and the good that I saw coming out of it that I never learned to truly appreciate the overall sociopolitical schematic of New Orleans, even as I helped it repair itself. Doing good street by street was enough for me. Watching neighbors pitch in for each other never made me ask what those people would have thought of pitching in for the people the next neighborhood over. I wrapped myself so tightly in my work that I refused to examine the city through any other lens. Maybe I felt I had to at a certain level, in order to justify the work being done, but either way, I allowed myself to build up a naïve, foundationless hope for a city on a hill somewhere in my head.
My time at Jericho and genuinely living in New Orleans this past summer, fall, and now winter has been without a doubt a watershed experience, and the primary catalyst for what I'd term my deep disillusionment with New Orleans as a city. The engine behind this is the catalogue of vignettes and anecdotal experiences I've accumulated living, working, and talking to my friends and colleagues to date, to say nothing of my observations recounted above. It's in the case of the policewoman pulling her gun on another woman for loitering while waiting in line to pick up her child from school; it's the copy of a letter in my desk, signed by mayor Nagin a year and a half ago now, authorizing Jericho to receive a grant of $800,000 from the city's finance authority to put towards the construction of four houses - and the letter dated September 2008 describing our application as ineligible sitting on top of it; it's the school board's accusatory defense of their construction and renovation master plan which was compiled
based on the survey data of a grand total of 843 respondents; it's the experience of my friend who, as a mandatory reporter, contacted child services on behalf of a child under their care and then was outed (against state law) by the child service worker to the child in question along with several of the child's peers; it's the case of the city's coordinator for trash contractors accusing a city councilwoman of racism for opposing her request for a budget raise - and the city government's immediate backing of that accusation without any inquiry into the councilwoman's objection; it's my newfound expectation that for the majority of the restaurants I visit, either all of the wait staff will be black with a white manager, or conversely, all of the wait staff and the manager will be white, and the black people who work in the restaurant will be well out of sight in the kitchen or dish room.
I appreciate the tenacity of New Orleanians more now than I have ever before. The city has fought and back to life more quickly than I anticipated it would, and continues to demonstrate surprising economic and social resiliency, even if neither the population or the economy has fully recovered to pre-storm levels. Unfortunately, New Orleans' progress since Katrina has been framed entirely around the structure of "the way things used to be". As progressive as some of the cultural institutions down here are, the city government and polity have been highly resistant to taking concrete steps beyond pre-storm norms in government, education, housing and overall civic planning. New Orleanians have returned not necessarily to build a better city, but largely to reconstruct the one they had and were comfortable with before. To be completely fair though, I can't blame anyone for wanting to return to the relative stability of life pre-Katrina, especially after being displaced for months if not years after the
storm. No matter the quality of life and history of New Orleans before the storm, that history is as comfortable as it is pervasive. For better or worse, that history looks like it's also in the fight to stay.
Parting Shots
As potent as my jadedness has been over the past couple of months, coming to terms with it has been easier than I thought it would be, and has helped me clarify the direction of my efforts moving into the next six months. I credit my work at Jericho for that. I've had to reframe my expectations of the city and of the host of people with whom I come into contact through my work at Jericho, but once I've accomplished that, I've found that work here is in effect easier. My interactions with people at work are more direct, more frank, less shrouded in baseless optimism and more focused toward deliverable results. I've learned not to get as hung up on my shortcomings or those of others as I have in the past, and I've grown to respect the talents and experience of Brad, Chris, and Holly all the more. I've learned to appreciate and glean more from the lengthy stories New Orleanians are so fond of telling, even as I've learned to count on those stories lasting hours. I've learned to appreciate the value of
taking personal initiative and backing your word more so here than anywhere else, as well as the high price of trust. I'm still working on my tact in carrying and directing business conversation and learning to negotiate the city's broader political landscape, but each of these efforts are far easier to do with tempered expectations. One of the greatest upshots I see in all of this is that being disillusioned carries with it the knowledge that the sad status quo needs to be subtly, slowly, yet simply changed. Jericho's ethic and our dogged forward motion helps ensure that I'm not jaded enough to stop. The greatest upshot then is applying the ghost of my hope to our efforts from here on out and appreciating it for what it was; after all, I strongly doubt I'd be here without it.
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