Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Were Still Here Ya Bastards 20150829

Host has the president done anything you disagree with . Guest the president has made a major contribution to our state of affairs in america because he is polarized us so much and been so aggressive that people are starting to look at what has happened in our corporate lives over the past 50 years, and their waking up to knew realities. I talk about this crossroad when Abraham Lincoln had to say we can do this anymore. I do havei have to make a decision. When you think about where we are today is a country, we are half and half. I think what the president has done is encouraged all americans to choose this day which side you are on. There are a few things i agree with him on, but i do agree weare going to have to decide which america we want to be. Host have you thought about running for office . Guest i thought about that once. I ran a successful policy institute right now in washington. The center for urban renewal and education. I think were still effective on the outside that you stay here and make my contributions. We also build a clergy center to earlier reaching those minority classes and helping them understand not just what is broken down but looking a new ideas on how to fix these problems and reverse this trend. Host from blind concede the Congressional Black Caucus isnt about ideas. Guest we have seen new ideas in the last 50 years, not one new idea. They have not just stayed stagnant, they have fallen apart. Every time we get a camera to show whats happening to my heart it anywhere in the country we are the same. Twentyfirst century. Surely they should buy and ideas. Personal lives. And you think about ownership. They want capitol. Capitol is an ownership. Markets are ownership. Personalize it so that people can have a stake in this great country. Stands in the way of every revolutionary idea today and they must be stopped. Host star parker blind concede is the name of the book. Moving forward to save america. There is the cover. And this is book tv on cspan2. Fortyeight hours of nonfiction books every weekend. The 10th anniversary of hurricane katrina. We will bring you a series of authors discussing there books. First up the rebuilding of new orleans. We arewe are still here, you bastards followed by haley barbour, former governor of mississippi. And 7 30 pm eastern time Ronnie Greene reports on the shooting of unarmed residents by police on the danziger bridge. That event occurred on september 42005. Finally, katrinaskatrinas immediate damage and the lasting effects on new orleans infrastructure and on his people. That all happens tonight on to 12 book tv. Here is roberta gratz. We are still here you bastards. Do you have a plan . No. You know im not a planner. Thank you all, everybody so much for coming. It itcoming. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this wonderful public lunch. Roberta gratzs new book, how the people of new orleans rebuilt their city. We are still here, you bastards. On behalf of the knew school and nation books is my pleasure to welcome everyone. I want to say a couple things about some people who help make this series possible. Mary watson and Pamela Tillis from the executive deans office of the knew school and they are wonderful partners in the series of events which are throughout the year. I also want to thank cspan, and it is so great you are here tonight filming this. It is such a pleasure to get to publicly introduce roberta gratz, someone who has been a hero of mine for a long time. She is an amazing writer, an acclaimed urbanist, and she has published fourfor previous books including most recently the battle for gotham. Her writing has appeared in the nation, New York Times magazine in the wall street journal. As manyas many of you know she previously served on new York City Landmark Preservation Committee and new york sustainability Advisory Board Emily Jane Jacobs she splits her time between new york and new orleans. Thank you for sponsoring this evening. Im going to introduce my friends and colleagues. Hes going to lead us in conversation. We lost john behrens to the evening for very good reason we will manage to self organize. We expected to be a lively conversation, and at some point we will open up for questions from the audience command there will be cards passed around for you to put questions and and post them to us. I am going to start on my right with jed, who i have told everybody i felt after katrina he wrote probably the best post katrina book called breach of faith. [applause] the best. Yes. And he became aa good friend, source, and even an editorial critic of my over the years. He was on city and metro editor at the times at the time of the pulitzerwinning coverage of katrina, and then, and then, of course, you know breach of faith. Then we have much in my right, karen get off to if and when you read the book you will see as one of the heroines of the book. Karen, i like to describe, as the civic activist who became a civic activist the usual way, she got angry and started a blog right after katrina called squandered heritage, tracking the houses that were demolished without the owners knowing. The contractors taking money for work they were not doing and leaving what turned into revealing the corruption in their removal system, and people actually went to jail leading eventually to her and a colleague starting the lens which is an online investigative journal, which i consider one of the best things that happened in new orleans after katrina. It is just fabulous. And she continues to write and make trouble in the way that i think works. Works. To my left is lois a lie. For those of you who follow the hbo true a series, she was story editor and writer on the series. And if you may have seen and if you havent available online, he produced a wonderful i gets its a video called the hidden story, the unknown story of black new orleans and its wonderful. [applause] and then further to my left, among many things runs the foundation devoted to education and new orleans and himself an author of a recent wonderful book called taste for chaos, which is basically about literary improvisation and many other things. Also wrote a book prior to that about his own crazy family story. His mother was ruth chris restaurant and his father was i wont even tell you. Its a good book. So i have one little thing to tell you just to add to the curiosity of some. The title of the book was a real graffiti after katrina, not the one on the cover of the book of the Art Department took it and read it but it was a real graffiti but the reality was such that we used it as the title because it really was capturing the feeling of so many new orleans since the whole world was really assuming either it should not be rebuilt or grumpy rebuilt, wont recover, all the experts saying those things. We are still here. We arent going anywhere. That is the overall spirit of the book. I wanted you to no that is where it comes from. Im going to turn it over to jed to sort of lead this little pack of talkers into some organized three items of business. I have not heard a cell phone which suggests that you are all accustomed to turning your cell phones often have already done so. Secondly, to reiterate something, if we Say Something totally obnoxious are stupid, feel free to rise in righteous indignation and quiz us here and now. For the most part i think we will be better off if the questions can be held until the end. Your asked to write down your answers and submit them thirdly, close scholars of the disaster, you will here us using katrina and federal flood and levee collapse kind of interchangeably. We do so fully cognizant as we speak of it was a manmade disaster, it was in fact an engineering failure. The levee system collapsed in the face of aa relatively minor storm by the time it actually reached new orleans it is, in fact, the 2nd worst engineering failure in human history. Anyone no what the worst was . Scholars in our midst . Chernobyl. Chernobyl. Chernobyl was worse and maybe fukushima will get there. We have to hope not. I was just over theyre doing a documentary for nhk tv a japanese pbs. It rather horrifyingly still an ambiguous situation is whether they have weeds at thing to the ground. Roberta, extraordinary stories beautifully told. The question that haunts a lot of katrina discussion is whether it takes a katrina to have provoked the kind of a urbanisturbanist issues that you have dealt with sosa safely and beautifully in the book, which everyone is about to go by. Does it take a katrina . Other lessons here that apply to cities everywhere, or is this just new orleans being its eccentric and peculiar self . Can you make it a little outer . Is this better . Yes. We will try. To waste answer that because i should preface it by saying, this is my 5th book about urban change. I have been writing about how cities grow, fall apart, recover, how they stay urban for a long time. And when i watched katrina on television i said to myself, how is this going to play out . There were two ways to go. Was this going to be another one of those post disaster attempts to reshape the city . In a sort of robert moses image from the top down, big project planning . Bigmoney . Always this going to emerge in the way that i have seen every success in every city in every neighborhood that has succeeded, they have succeeded from the ground up with citizen led, citizen initiatives. Which way was this going to go . So my immediate feeling was i havei have to get down theyre. I did three weeks after the storm, did my 1st story to the Lower 9th Ward with the gentleman who could only get in theyre with my press credentials because the Lower 9th Ward was not reopened. The last neighborhood allowed back in the city for months after a long after the water had receded. It could have been me i would have turned around and never look back. It was in bad shape when i bought it. I fixed it once. Ill do it again. I was so inspired. I continue to go, and that was the spirit i found. As far as other cities this story has a retail good and bad that every other city has, the tragedies, the disaster capitalism stories, the demolitions that should never have happened, the Charity Hospital story is as bad an urban destruction story as i have ever seen, and it has all the good stuff for local wisdom from distant expertise. So, yes, there are a lot of lessons. What i never expected even though i had been theyre and written a little bit about it, but new orleans is so much more urban than the world thinks. The housing that you see is mostly to her threestory story historic housing, urban in ways i will not go into here, but i do outlined in the book. The lesson, its urbanism is a lesson to the cities around the country that are struggling to get back there urbanism having been decimated by so many clearance and big topdown projects. The lesson of urbanism is definitely in new orleans. Yes, it is both. I think i hope that this book is read not just as a specific story but as one with lessons also on how to deal with the disaster. We can discuss some of those issues. It is both the story of where we are and why with our cities and where we should be going if we are going to recover from whether it was an urban renewal disaster or a mass control disaster or manmade disaster. Rubio into this conversation if i may. Remembering, this year is full of memories, the noise and agony in misery. 1500 people had died, but we had to look ahead and begin thinking about the rebuilding. In the early going theyre was anxiety about whether the city would lose its cultural panache, whether we would be dignified beyond recognition, become a toy version of what we had been which is a richly afro Caribbean Culture and majority black population basically has been ominously large onslaughts of gentrification, but how fair is the culture . At the time of the flood i was a newspaper columnist. And i tried to call the smart people i knew includingi knew including a man named David Kallick from the fiscal policy institute. He put me in touch with a bunch of experts who said after all these big disasters, going back to the earthquake of 1414 something or other. People always talk about having to do these things and making sense of the imperfection. In the end they pretty much go back to what it was before. In the context of new orleans little could be better than going back to the way it was before. What is striking is that i got kind of tired. It had gotten to be blase. I had lost interest in it. But you found people coming back to the city with a kind of feeling and the kind of dedication and termination that i had certainly never seen in any other context. There is the sense that we almost lost those things we hold most dear. And it seemed as if there had been an attempt to reclaim the culture. Sweet home new orleans did an informal survey of culture bearers after the flood and concluded that more people were working than ever before. But to understandbut to understand that you have to put it in the kind of historical context. We talk about the disasters that have hit new orleans, one of them in a way was the american purchase because the americans attempted to impose a kind of american racism onsort of creole detente that existed before which was not near as bad as alabama and mississippi in new york and pennsylvania. Then you had plessy versus ferguson, the civil rights case we tend to want to forget. In addition new orleans was at war with this culture for the entirety of its existence. Made it illegal for black people to mask his indians. Go back to the 17 hundreds and the disdain goes back to the 17 hundreds. He wants to charge clubs about ten times the amount of money that they were charging the richest people in new orleans to have the carnival parades. Let me repeat this. He wants wants to charge the poorest people ten times as much as the richest. Arresting Young Musicians playing in the streets of new orleans. Arrests them and takes them to jail which is to say that the culture of new orleans has been in a defensive war against the city for the entirety of the presence and it continues. I dont agree with you that nero made it illegal to mask his indians. He made illegal for black people to mask during carnival. The indians emerged after in the 1880s after. We need to go back further. To those who are not familiar. An audible. And combine their culture well, i think certainly the tradition that we speak of is mardi gras is and how much of that relationship, but but i do not think it is exactly the same thing for those who are not on a footnote here, the upshot of the indian suppression, the masking and all of that was a wonderfully satirical counterterrorist by black new orleans. They proceeded to put on blackface over black skin and where freight ways and skirts and basically make themselves a parody of the stereotypical image that the whites had a black people and in indians both. To this day they parade relative brilliantly through the streets of new orleans, sometimes with Louis Armstrong is the king back and 48. Come back to the indians and people are specified with them as i am. On another theme altogether new orleans has been called the northernmost banana republic. The southernmost part of the rust belt. You can liken us to detroit, the more immediate and current analogy. Thats right. We do have our share. One of my favorite jokes is that you have to go north of i tend to get south. Mississippi is deeply southern and new orleans is a caribbean hoard. All of which is by way of prologue to say that new orleans had been hugely blighted well before katrina and the levee collapse. That was certainly not alleviated by 230,000 Housing Units being destroyed in the flood. A very close scholar oblate in the particularities ablate. I just thought he could bring us up to speed on that whole part of the katrina recovery. I think its interesting that the architecture is often referenced apart from the culture of new orleans when actually the culture of new orleans is embodied in its housing which many of our craftsmen are also musicians etc. Even though they are well intertwined this seems to be general ignorance about the fact that it is a physical embodiment that endured for 100 years in a little little water was not going to wash them away. The broken levees did not accomplish boneheaded Public Policy and a few bucks from the federal government really pushed along. I did spend a lot of time documenting demolitions which were done against homeowner wishes and catalogued thousands of homes, people that had already disinvest in the city and the white flight era and had no Homeowners Insurance or intention and returning those properties to commerce had offered to take a few bucks from the federal government. I just started going through the catalog. Im finding about a 90 percent vacant lot results from that loss. I did spend a lot of time looking oblate, and blight is a fun word to play around with because you can use it as an excuse for just about anything. I know there is one person in the audience the kind of picked up where i left off and catalogued a lot of properties that had been slated for demolition. The route are taken out for hospitals which are still not functioning. But my interest in cataloging the demolition of new orleans was that at the beginning 80 80 percent of the city was destroyed and 80 percent was not destroyed , 80 of the city was damaged, some of it was horrific and resulted in homes being lost. Forlost. For the most part the houses are built with materials that could take the water. If we were educated about how to mitigate that water damage we would have seen a lot less loss than we have seen. It answers it nicely. That money that came from the federal government to demolish cannot be used to demolish pre katrina blight all the blood that had existed before the flood continued to flourish. They are delicious. I want you and you read the book to Pay Attention to the sudden advent as a scorch of the city and the journals because she was doing something quite different for that. A wonderful test to the power of citizens to rise up and make things happen in the aftermath of disaster. There were a lot of big ideas floating around quite after katrina. We were going to run a lot of highspeed rail public casinos all over the downtown area, Health Clinics in every neighborhood kind of incoordination with what we hoped would become a health reform. The one thing that certifiably did happen and was not a fully robust levee system was an enormous shake up of the School System in new orleans. We now have 95 percent of kids going to Charter Schools. In some respects strikingly successful, but i we will leave it at that and ask randy who knows much more about the rest of us to comment. What happened . Who one, who lost . It is a very complicated story. The Charter School movement in america is very controversial. In new orleans there are terrific Charter Schools. A emerged the school board was utterly can i say corrupt . And bankrupt right before katrina. And there are statistics that show that things were improving a bit as of 2,005. But after katrina theyre was this movement to start Charter Schools. I had been supporting a Charter School that emerged in the 90s. And right after katrina i was at a nation dinner and met alice waters. She told me this wonderful story about how she had met paul prude and wanted to do something for new orleans. I said, well, i supported schools. Would you like to bring that to new orleans . She jumped at it. That was in december, i guess. By april alice was in new orleans. By september we had a schoolyard, the Wonderful Program of berkeley where kids learned the garden sustainably and eat sustainably and understand where there food comes from. If they go it, they will eat it. New line daddy good food. Now we have five of these schools, firstline schools which is one of the better Charter School groups. One of the interesting things about this was that 1st linefirstline was one of the 1st schools that reopened after katrina in january. And they are focus on the edible schoolyard talk the rest of new orleans schools that by focusing on something that created a marketability because one of the things that happened was it was decided that students could go to any school in new orleans. Theyorleans. They did not have to be neighborhood bound. Busting from anywhere and to anywhere. And so schools start competing. One of the things they competed on his focus. One school is math science, one school is this one that. And the edible schoolyard kind of, i have heard, has helped shape that. Now, the busing thing i think is one of our ongoing problems because were spending a lot of money on busing and the students are spending a lot of time on buses command the neighborhoods are the losers because i think there are benefits and schools. One of our 5th edible schoolyard is at the Elementary School where i went half a block from where i live. So you know, im not a fan of all the Charter Schools. Its i think i am not sure it is comparable to the rest of america. I think it is working very well in new orleans. I dont think any city has made is completed commitment to Charter Schools with our 95 percent. I want to add something to this read i have a whole chapter in the book on the education. It is the one chapter in which i am equivocal. Those of you who no me, im not usually equipped because there is good news and bad news. The really you know, the old School System was decidedly corrupt. And one could one really has to fairly look at how that evolution occurred and get to the bottom of it starting when the schools turned from white to black in the 60s with white flight and budgets being cut and programs being cut and everything deteriorating to the point that there is no doubt when katrina came the schools were a joke,a joke, some of them did not even have toilet paper and bathrooms. However, what is happening now, and i have not looked totally into this yet, but i am seeing pieces of it, you have state money from the Recovery School district rebuilding some fabulous school buildings, all of which were allowed to deteriorate and never had anything done to them probably since the 60s and 70s. Public money is restoring the schools. They are then being sold or turned over to Charter Schools that are not fully public. There are all these little elements that are sometimes lost in the picture in the beginning a lot of the Charter Schools swept everything clean. Among the things they eliminated without understanding the culture was a lot of the schools eliminated band. The bands to find the neighborhoods, the schools. Coming back. Wewe are supportive of a program that is helping put music back. Underscore. Putting it back in the School System. What has happened because i started out more negative than i ended up was that at least the Charter Schools are listening to the criticism and making adjustments, some of them are. Some of them are failing and closing, and it is aa hard system to get a picture of because it is not centralized. It is not easy to get a full picture. So from a National Perspective i think it makes an interesting study of the evolution of what is happening in the charter system, and it is only because of katrina that they could sweep it clean the way that they have. So in that way it does not really compare with the systems, but it is being watched for reasons that are evolving. I will see your negative think of several negatives more. The 1st thing that these people did to remake the School System was fire all the teachers. I cannot understand how you can care about the kids and fire all of their mothers and the occasional uncle and father for teaching the schools. If you can convince me i might go. Many of them were incompetent, not all. After the knew School System and i use the word system in the loosest possible sense. Serving kids frozen sandwiches and the like and sometimes seems to be far more concerned about security and education. They then began to hire people back from they had fired. You have to be very careful. The politicians really want to pronounce post flood new orleans is success. Anytime they give us to test it is about how well they are doing that is confidence they study all these pronouncements that the Charter Schools make and found a lot of holes in the pronouncements. Without going into the detail is not clear if the Charter Schools have been nearly as good as they were supposed to be. One other interesting fact. There was a threshold when a school felt it would leave the threshold the state was allowed to take it over. After theafter the flood they decided to make it easier for the state to take over more schools. I begin to wonder. This is about public School System and about educating kids, the Public Resources about them using public money and then give it to a private organization i think we are rushing to pronounce success. The devil is in the details. So fascinating about the christina story and the ability to understand those nuances and friend. Exactly symptomatic of what was wrong with the old system. Hellbent to charter the whole world. Itit was the Orleans Parish school board which had lost 80 million his president was on her way to prison and which have developed a system in which a 30 percent illiteracy rate was noted a valedictorian and fill the exit exam five times in the same school board have proposed to shut down the entire system for a full year. The head of the lane of the time said if you do that we dont have a shot at recovery. There will be no recovery. And so the deadline was imposed to start schools again. And many of the results remain. The fact is the Graduation Rate has gone up nicely. 54 percent used to graduate. 73 percent is not bad. Two thirds of the schools or a failure before katrina. Now two thirds of them, there is some wiggle room and how you evaluate failure and success. The district has risen from being the 2nd worst to being 40 nights at a 68. These are big games over a decade, and it remains to be seen whether this is sustainable. The extras that were brought down, the burnout ratios will be so why that it can be kept up after new orleans loses its luster in the young and restless move on to whatever comes next. But i mentioned all of this not to refute what is being said that dad that level of complexity that makes the situation be so very fascinating. I want to turn back to roberta. I have that number somewhere here. 45,000. How many are white . It is about 90 percent black. It is a black city. The interesting thing is that the School System for all its gains or lack thereof is actually educating a challenging population because there are more kids who qualify for reduced lunch, free or reduced lunch which is a measure of poverty. In new orleans alas poverty is a big big factor. Also, it is not you cant look at the new orleans School System the way you would look at any other city. One of the things that new orleans has bigger than any other city is a parochial School System as well. A parallel. It is very complicated, which is why i say it was nuanced. But i also think it is important to put it in the larger perspective and understand what has been described here as having happened could not have without a disaster because politically it was an untenable situation. For those of you who no naomi klein, this is the next chapter. It happened in the School System, with the hospital. A terrible story, the worst urban renewal demolition story as i mentioned earlier in the country that i have seen. Still a disaster. They cant open because there is not enough money. You have schools, the hospital, the Public Housing , big story in my book. What has happened with the Public Housing whether you agree or not could not have happened without katrina. Now run the public transit. Cities across the country are improving their transit system. New orleans is going backwards. More interested in the transit then there is a neighborhood. Highly quoted. He was head of the Regional Transit authority and said help me remember. We have a wonderful opportunity to clean up the city. We just need the right of the poor people. And we have to change geographically demographically and every which way, otherwise we are not going back. He had some Israeli Commando landed their helicopter because he lived across the street in one of his house protected. I try to put this in perspective. These differences, its a constant conversation. You can imagine it made me dizzy. Someone else in the afternoon i get opposite stories and they both seem valid. Very hard to sort out the details. This is the National Story that really bugs me because this is disaster capitalism. Were story of katrina this was about contracts. It was all about contracts. The money coming from washington was going to the political cronies then of the bush administration, a few cronies of the democratic governor not from even louisiana. I will give you one description. You have the other one. You had to explain at lunch. Everyone saw the blue tarps going on rooftops to protect from the rain a square of tarp. Hundred and 75 to charge the company hundred and 75 a square. They had no expertise in doing anything with groups. They subcontracted to the next people fry dont even remember. 50, no expertise. 75. Fourth contract of a guy on the ground to put the tarp on the roof, 2. Okay . Thats where the money went. Thats where the money went. I make a projection in the book, and i am open for anybody to challenge me. They just have to do the study. I argue that if they were lucky 20 percent of the money from the federal government that allegedly went to the recovery of new orleans, 20 percent is a generous maybe it new orleans. It is analogous. In thein the case of the debris removal which was of course a gigantic problem because the whole city have been brought to its knees. The Halliburton Dick cheney was Vice President at the time and halliburton was landing these huge contracts jv halliburton base set of baton rouge. Right. Very similar. They were collecting 23 bucks23 bucks per cubic larder to 5 cubic yard of debris. The jobs through various bodies and someone had absolutely no handson ability or even any contact with debris. It was hitting the streets with the local guys with bobcats. Ever getting 3 a cubic yard essentially 20 bucks out of 23 just going to being scammed effectively. And this is also happening statewide. The governor, gentle, i mean, words cannot describe. It keeps giving out contracts. For those of us who follow the Charity Hospital disaster, he kept giving out and has in terms of the medical system in the state, keeps giving out contracts all over the country because he is basically putting money where he is looking for National Support as he runs for office. So this is the kind of thing that really its like an alert. I dont know what the comparables are in New York Post sandy, but the thing that nobody realizes his fema is not a Government Agency. Its a Government Agency contracted out. There is no such thing as public the government does not exist. Government isexist. Government is all contract. I often wonder if the republicans in congress are talk about cutting the port are ready to cut the contracts. When ed snowden was discovered to have done what he did and everybody was appalled he worked for a private contractor. The nations highest secrets were in the hands of a private contractor. So we have to be careful when we look at what we call government incompetence because it is more often than not the incompetence of the private contractor that was supposed to improve on the public process and supposedly save money, and it does the opposite. What you are talking about is not the problem of government but a government that has not believed in governing since reagan. The problem is government. John pope, your former colleague at the times was interviewing jimmy carter. He threw them aloft. What do you think about the fema work after katrina . And carter kind of smiled and said, no one realizes it, but i created fema when i came in the office. Twentythree agencies not working together and we studied it and decided one agency, theyre would be three rules, wellfunded. We know how that worked out. The head of fema would be an expert in emergency management. We know how that worked out, browning. And three, that ceo of fema would report directly to the president , and we know how that worked out because now he reports to homeland security. So we said, i dont think they did very well. It is not about government. You know, we need to get back to trusting the government has a role to perform even if we believe all the good stuff comes up from the bottom. Are we ever going to trust the government . I have to ask you. Another thing that i think we should touch on Climate Change and all of that stuff new orleans is enormously vulnerable. Wewe have been cognizant at least in the little responsive to the threat posed by the destruction of our wetlands by the oil industry which you know, lets call him a friend rather than a prostitute before the oil industry, but that is kind of the reality. The flag of texaco flies over the state of louisiana. Tell us a bit. We learn from holland, traveled to learn from the dutch do this better. Tell us about the environmental frontier katrina obliged us to face. Well, 2. 5 miles of wetland lowers the storm surge by 1 foot. We used to have the state of delaware more. A landmass, a wetlands mass the size of delaware below new orleans is now gone. So the threat of hurricanes is not just that they are getting bigger. It is that that which protected us naturally after eons of building up natural levees and wetlands is being destroyed. We lose a football field every hour. You here different statistics. My family is from down south of the river. I grew up there. When i went back in the 80s, and across the empire bridge and saw this expensive water. It used to take us 25 minutes by boat to get to bay adams, a big expensive water. Now its right there at the dock. It is really frightening. And we need to address it. We need big bucks to address it. New orleans is a very important port. And we are not taking care of it. It is also not often recognized and this was pointed out to me by a number of people, this is not a local story. And there is a leading businessman in new orleans who is involved in one of these save the wetlands organizations. He said organizations. He said to me in an early interview, the worst thing that happened is it became about new orleans because the Port Services the country. The statistics of how much fuel, fish, imports, all, imports, all the stuff that comes through the port, its enormous. In that organization, as he said, is taking the story of the mississippi to memphis and st. Louis and all the way up because it is not the mouth of the river does not just belong to louisiana. In congress well, the comeuppance, of course. Dennis hester. If any of you are interested in the state of the coast of louisiana, go to the lens which i cofounded, our investigative news site and do projects with republican. You can see a historical slider of how much loss theyre has been. You can find it on our site. And what you expect to lose by 2045. It is frightening, but you have these people in congress than the money issue comes up for the wetlands in the gulf coast it is like, it is not there backyard, but it is. There was a congressman from colorado with a heavy mudslides after the floods and things slid right into the whole town disappearing. He was the one who voted that it was not his territory. This is everyones problem. It is not a local story. So that is one of the post katrina stories that just does not get hurt enough, the National Implications of the story. Well, the dutch dialogue, i help sponsor. They brought dutch Water Management experts new orleans to develop plans. And then you have the socalled wiki collaborative dutch approach that we are beginning to pick up on. Our bayou st. John has been reconnected to the link that it feeds off of and so forth but we are still fundamentally in the bar it, keep it away and hope for the best. When the dutch came over and were shown around new orleans at the end of the day they said we have three questions. Why do you hide the water . Everyone wants to live around the water and you say the army is in charge of this . And what was the third, i dont remember. Also the thing about living with water i am sure a lot of you have seen different plans because its now really going across the country as well it should. Its one of those solutions for which there is no downside because you come up with Recreational Areas. New orleans is a Perfect Laboratory for this. We have canals. They are cemented. All you need to do is move the cement, dig them a little deeper, make a Recreational Area on either side of the canal and you have with the dutch have, but beautiful landscaped areas that wind up holding the water in a flooding keeping it minimizing how did you know injures the surrounding neighborhoods. So its like a doubleedged sword in the best way. The real issue is classic in a lot of different things. Its very hard to turn around a ship and you have a paradigm. I used the parallel in the book. The paradigm of highway building its very hard to turn around in terms of getting people to understand that it wasnt more highways that were ever going to solve our transportation or our congested traffic problems. A whole new slew of solutions that started with streets and neighborhoods and all those things that are now complete streets, mass transit, all the things that are now mainstream but that paradigm took decades to turn around. I will never forget having a conversation with jane jacobs about this 20 some odd years ago and she said its not going to happen until the professors who teach transportation technique in colleges retire and a new generation comes in. They still teach some of the same things so that paradigm in new orleans is still heavily and engineering paradigm which means, and they are doing this now in some of the major streets are sort of pull apart like streets. They are putting in bigger pipes to pump more water out on the very neutral grounds that could be redesigned to absorb the water in a really landscaped way and so this is the real challenge even in the next decade because the money thats going into the old engineering methods could be diverted if they wanted, but then you are dealing with contracts and agencies and jobs and unions and all those kinds of things and thats a hard nut to crack. I believe the contracts do things work the right way in the same people were doing it the wrong way. I think theres a kind of conservatism that societies cling to. The sense that you want to go back to what we have before or perhaps rethink in the paradigm. If ever you are going to rethink a paradigm that would be the time. The part of the problem with fema would not find anything unless it was putting it back the way it was. They would not find anything that was done better and this is the dumbest government policy i have ever heard of and it may be a private contractor is was doing it but thats a government policy. Only put back what you had. There were some incremental improvements that were allowed but the stafford act for bids improvement. Its meant to be really placement only and although the Funding Sources are different our levee system which collapsed has been fortified to some extent. They spent 14. 5 billion on the so there something to show for that but it has only been brought up to the standards that were not met in 1965 after betsy we have a fortified levee system against the socalled 100 year storms which are the storms that have a 1 chance of happening in any year. Its not something that can happen several times in a decade katrina was in fact a 300 year storm so we arent even prepared to do a enough with katrina. By contrast the dutch with their genius and sophisticated way of managing water have fortified their coast against 10,000 year events which is to say a flood event 100 times more robust than the one that is being worked on in new orleans. The present at the time we wonder why his successor hasnt intervened and said he would do whatever it takes to bring back the price of city of new orleans and then gives us this gerryrigged levee system that causes to collapse. The good news is that new yorkers new york and connecticut are stealing the dutch water experts. They are working up here and i wish them well. We should invite questions in a formal way from anybody wants to ask them. Who has got a question . Thank you. I will ask the question because i have got a microphone. This is a challenge. Postkatrina new orleans the best thing not cost, worst loss. Who wants to explain that question . All right we will move on. This is an interesting one that i can at least understand. The people who left new orleans and never came back, who are they, where are they, are they still of new orleans and how do you define that loss . Lolis went into speak about the diaspora as we call it. One of the things i have heard most of people that left the city after the flood have returned at least to the state. There are still isolated people who have gone hither and yonder and theres an interesting reason for that in implications for it. Harry shira a parttime new orleans resident artist make the point saying they didnt ask whether or not you were a katrina evacuate unable to get back home which is to say the government didnt particularly care what happened to them. Of course there are broad click locations that most of the books are thrown out were black and voting democratic and by not being there turned purple and perhaps even read. The implication in the early questions about closure. The city would have lost its culture but the truth is that he came to new orleans now there are a whole lot of things you would have gone to see and hear 15 or 20 years ago so in many ways even in the time we were exporting people all over central and south america to come and rebuild the city at the time of new orleans were not allowed to come back. There were Public Housing complexes were done in partisan means i think in minimizing the chance of people coming back. The assumption was that they were coming back and therefore planned for a School System made on the assumption that most new orleanians would come back. Sometimes parentless because they were for preferred new orleans. We are at 80 of our preflood population but roughly 20 of those people are people who did not live in new orleans before katrina. We are busy trying to convert those people to come new orleanians and if we fail we will send them back to brooklyn. [laughter] i think one also, i spend a lot of time in the book explaining the many, many Different Reasons that people didnt come back. Many of those reasons started out with inequities from day one you could get more money from the government and not come back then to rebuild and the money you could get back from every government was never enough unless you had a bank account sufficient to begin with. Plus there is something that i think is not unique, unusual for new orleans that is not true in most cities. So many of the homes lived in by black low, middle, moderate income people were built by the families themselves, their father, their grandfather, never created a deed, no line of secession so comes katrina 13 siblings all have an interest in a property not willing to turn it over to the last sibling who lived in it. No way to reclaim. Nor did they have the paperwork. And didnt have the paperwork or as one person points out in the book it costs 6000 just to hire somebody to try to find and create the paperwork so under those circumstances they found shelter elsewhere. They depended on their Public Hospitals if they were elderly or not. Public hospital was the rock with so many people that so many people depended on and their church which it do wasnt reopened they were coming back. So there are so many factors including the Public Housing one and one of the things that really blew my mind is while they werent allowing back the very workers who would have been the workforce and as one expert pointed out, he had suggested tent cities could have easily accommodated people quickly like they do in disasters on foreign shores but it had to be a contract for all those formaldehyde fema trailers, but they distributed flyers on the border of texas, looking for immigrants to come to new orleans that they wouldnt do for their own distant diaspora, so a lot of this is ugly but there are a lot of Different Reasons that people didnt come back. Four have not or have not come back and also in the black middle class a lot of them were welcomed in other places at other hospitals and other law firms and places where they have trouble in new orleans. So they found better places to be. Its not an easy answer to why people still have not come back and some of them are still coming. I would make one other point. The state administered program for helping people rebuild their homes had provisions to help homeowners, provisions to help rental properties the application being that they had nothing worth replacing. If you could provide a little context, the hispanic population in new orleans the people that came in response to these recruitment drafts under less well oiled kinds of machinery has increased its katrina by 80 and its a marvelous infusion into our population but its a tough story behind it. [inaudible] i have these numbers here. I have tried to do my homework. The black population which was at 67 before katrina is now at about 56 so it remains majority black fortunately. [inaudible] the hispanics are a big part of it. A lot of the people that i speak of cavalierly these people coming into new orleans to save us from ourselves and teach our kids and all of that has brought Tremendous Energy to the city. There are middleclass blacks in large numbers in that group. There are whites. The hispanic influx tend to think to be workingclass. We have as you may know the big vietnamese population with resettlement after the war and its a remains a marvelously complex mix of ethnicities and races and so forth. [inaudible] the question is, the housing projects were under the clinton administration. There was an elaborate mechanism set in motion to take Public Housing which in many instances had fallen into disrepair or was troubling for whatever reason, tear down, rebuild socalled mixed income communities where you had fully subsidized Housing Units, semisubsidized housing and you had have market rate houses and this was all to be done with robertas deeper analysis through publicprivate partnerships. Some of these new projects are terrific and residents lucky enough to live in them are singing hallelujah but the fact is a great many people were excluded from them because they began to impose rules having to do with if there is a felon and your family the whole family got kicked out and that kind of thing. So the numbers are very elusive and im not going to be able to pull one off of my crib sheet here. They dont keep track purposely. There were also no numbers in the hope project prior to the floods. They were holding off. They were keeping apartments empty. In fact im sort of on the alert waiting for the same kind of thing to happen to new york that happened down there because what happened in new orleans is part part since nixon there has been a federal policy to get rid of and replace Public Housing with publicprivate partnerships which is private development with public funds integrated economically but the percentage of Public Housing tenants that returned to those mixed income projects varies from 7 to 50 or they get section 8 vouchers to go elsewhere, many of whom find themselves trying to rent apartments with landlords who want to take section or from landlords who dont really care about up keeping the property. Its an elusive number. They claim privacy is why they dont keep the numbers, very convenient claim and some of us say to just keep a record of the zip codes, where are they . What zip code . They claim to have some numbers and who knows how many and what is true in what they are saying. The projects that have been rebuilt in new orleans, many of my friends say they look great because first of all they think that the socalled neglected projects were hopeless which they werent. I go into great detail. They are fabulous, more fabulous and are the model for Garden Apartments suburbia when they were built in the 1940s and they were solid. Built to last 300 years. [inaudible] if you did i do remember it, but they are fabulous with tile roofs and wood floors and all sorts of things. Its one of those sorry tales, but its a cautionary tale. You know what really bothers me. A lot of things bother me about Public Housing. My mother lived three blocks from a project which was a gorgeous project but soon after katrina they took the roof fence off. These triangular things that would allow air circulation in the attic, they took them off because they werent biting water in so they would have more reason to tear it down. They were filled with cypress. They were gorgeous. This is a parallel to the Charity Hospital story. Its sabotage is what it really was. The Charity Hospital story which is a devastating story but charity, the second oldest and considered one best Public Hospitals in the entire country, great teaching hospital, everything about it was great. We are neglecting our audience questions here. Im sorry but its the same story where they actually after was restored three weeks later they sabotaged it making the faucets were on and clogging them up with sheets and bringing everything to bring the water in. Seek out the movie big charity. Or read my book. You will like it. [inaudible] i think we answered that. I think we answered that one. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] in not. [inaudible] now im glad you did. We now have the answer to one person who left after part of the diaspora. And roberta can tell you as she is done so brilliantly in the book. A good question here and i will preface it by telling the audience if you are not aware of it at but the School Board President likely to follow in his wake and i should say we are about to read jail a congressman. We have jailed mayor nagin and the question is has katrina help to improve local Government Transparency and the particular reference is whether the Landrieu Administration included here in parentheses, the current mayor the Landrieu Administration. Do you want to take it . We have the lens which our editor publishes in the audience and a couple of board members. We have filed suit against the city of new orleans recently for lack of fulfillment of Public Records civically Public Records to deal with city budget, budgeting bill payment issues and the czech press sort of a check register if you will. I did ask for Public Records under the naked administration and those were for filled more out of laziness than any sense of duty. Under the Landrieu Administration its very difficult for us to access public information. It runs an retentive type of ship so i dont see a tremendous amount of improvement in transparency although the word has been adopted. I dont think the deed follows. He is imitating our president and using the word and not delivering it. Montabaur reporting relies on Public Record so our lifes work at the lens. Let me wrap up here with regard to the panel and we are always open to further questions from the floor. I happen to love the title of robertas book. Were still here ya bastards. It gets at the grassroots were zillions of all of this. Also enormous challenges that we face. A lot of pros and cons about new orleans this evening, glass half full, glass half halfempty. I want to put roberta on the spot and ask are okay how were they doing . Are we better off, are we worse off and i will ask others as well to chime in. Its interesting in my last book which was published five years ago i had a conclusion in which i said those who want to think that the world is now all jane jacobs and no more moses has to look twice. We still have robert moses projects, atlantic yard among them, citi field among them and we have a lot of changes. I found myself writing a similar conclusion to this book. We have a lot of positive things that have come out of katrina. The lens being one of them and a lot of the grassroots, the neighborhoods and the stories are quite wonderful and certain projects like edible schoolyard and all sorts of things around the cities even markets that werent there before katrina. And an engaged public in many ways, certainly more than katrina. And yet we still have the robert moses urban renewal destroying neighborhood, destroyer project, closed to the Public Hospitals, destroy the Public Housing, you know all the things that i related so you still have both but there is backsliding. There is a particular story in the holy cross neighborhood of the lower ninth ward that is where the very engaged community opposed and totally inappropriate over scaled badly designed wrong minded project and they were over they were ignored by his city council that really made the deals in the backroom again so there is backsliding, backroom dealing. Not that there isnt in new york and a million other cities but the process had evolved after katrina that was much more respectful of public engagement. There is some backsliding and there is some, going forward, there was a tax issue defeated that would have enriched some of the organizations that didnt need enrichment and it was due to social media and the social Media Opportunity in new orleans is totally new since katrina. So its not a linear direction. Both things are happening. I think its an open question as to which direction will take the stronger row. Anyone else want to weigh in . How are we doing . One of the difficulties in answering that question is the National Trends economically and culturally so after the flood with getting a lot of federal money and that kind of thing. This point the National Economy is improving and are improvements in new orleans based on our administration so i would like to state firmly that i dont know. If anybody wants an argument for stimulus spending and its validity in new orleans is it. We did not have in the 2008 crashed, somebody elses problem because we were being effectively funded by coincidence by happenstance. A question here. [inaudible] [inaudible] got up there at the very end of that but im really worried about the success of our program rebuilding it well to the point where it becomes to others and im really want to find out