Create a sense of citizenship and community in distressed communities, where they have responsivity and take responsibility, not just relying on politicians, not just relying on socalled leaders, but theres a sense of ownership, even in terms of how many problems they have. In the book of isaiah in the old testament, god says, i will do a new thing in you. We have to stop practicing insanity. Time to put the poor children, the elderly, the working class in the front of the line. Gwen we wanted to hear the voices of people who have lived here and have done this, but we also want to hear your voices. If you are not in the room, watching us via live stream or on cspan, feel free to tweak, facebook, use atlanticnola to let us hear your voice, so you dont feel excluded from this conversation. If you are in the room, you will find cards on your table written, new orleans is you can fill those out and put them on the wall outside of the ballroom. We will look at them as the day goes by. Please join me again in the thanking this amazing panel. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] more from this daylong program examining new orleans 10 years after katrina. New orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu sits down with Jeffrey Goldberg to talk about where Recovery Efforts stand today. Jeffrey i am Jeffrey Goldberg from the atlantic. And i want to welcome all of you again to this very important conference. At the atlantic, i cover two main subject areas to u. S. Foreignpolicy is one, and Mitch Landrieu is the other. Thats what it seems like, at least. We have the mayor with us. He obviously needs no introduction. I want to jump into this conversation. Since i have you on the couch, i thought i would ask kind of a shrink question. If you want to lie down, feel free to relax. Mary landrieu theres no time to lie down. Jeffrey i want to take you back 10 years, and talk about how you felt exactly 10 years ago. Im trying to imagine this, trying to picture this. You are a lieutenant governor, in helicopters, in boats. You come to your city, 80 of it underwater. People are dying at intolerable levels completely intolerable levels. Did you ever feel like maybe this was simply too big . That may be the city could come back from this level of devastation . Mayor landrieu no. I never for one second and i dont think most people in new orleans felt anything other than that we were 100 sure that somehow, someway our city was going to come back. Because all of us, which is weird about this whole tragedy, is that not only was it and if and institutional failure, we did not really see ourselves as being what we were at the time. Everybody in here got hurt. The First Responders were hurt, too. It was not like some of the else got hurt in the First Responders were coming in. We all lost pretty much everything in some form or fashion, and it literally never occurred to me that anything other than the city coming back would eventually be where we got. Jeffrey you heard National Politicians at the time. Mayor landrieu to be honest, that angered me more than anything at the time. It was a visceral, angry response, but the initial response was thats just insane. Who in their right mind would think new orleans is not coming back . We have had hurricanes since the beginning of time. This one was worse, terrible, but as a new orleanian, my sense of what everyone felt was, hell, no, we are coming back. Just the stupid comments people around the country made i think gave new orleans a much greater sense and purpose. We are coming back. Thats our home. No matter what it takes. Jeffrey thank you, denny hastert, for motivating you. Mayor landrieu he was not the only one. Jeffrey he was a big one. let me jump to today. If, god forbid, the same exact storm hit this city next week, what would new orleans look like after that storm . Mayor landrieu first of all, the country has a hard time understanding this, but we are the veterans of lots of storms. They come in, they go out. That was a big storm. Camille was a big storm. What the people of new orleans want america to know was that this was not a natural disaster. This was a manmade disaster. [applause] what happened to new orleans happened because the levees broke. This is really interesting. Mississippi got the wind. They got the normal, terrible storm. We got the water. It was an infrastructure failure. Which is why we say it is the canary in the coal mine. Things that happen in new orleans, like the discussion we had about income inequality, there are things in this nation that have been going on for a long period of time. And the people of new orleans want everyone to know that today we are stronger. We have 14. 6 Million Dollars of 14 6 billion of levy investments. Its only built to category three. We believe it should be built to category five. Be that as a way, just be that if the storm came in the same way and the levees did not breach, which we expect they would not this time, nobody in their right mind would say that anybody in any city has a 100 guaranteed you are not going to get hurt, thats what the resilience effort is about. Rebuilding the coast, not letting it deteriorate. Making sure the levees are strong. Making sure the buildings we built our build the right way. And then making sure our communities are resilient and strong so we can sustain bad things that we know are going to come our way. You know, if its a terrorist attack, a hurricane, and earthquake, a heat wave that comes in, communities have to find a way to get stronger, and katrina showed us we were not as ready as we think we should be, and we got a lot more work to do. Jeffrey you talk a lot about gratitude. In the weeks running up to this, and a lot this week. You want better levees. You want better storm protection. Tell me specifically why that has that happen. Mayor landrieu well, money. That is the specific answer, and the will on behalf of congress. One of the things, and im speaking to the choir in this room this city, the gulf coast, produces about 35 of this nations oil and gas, which is to say that we are the tip of the spear in this nation and protecting our National Security thats why we are important. Years before the storm, we would beg people to Pay Attention to us. Then katrina hit and they said oh, man, something really big , is happening. Which is to say, if you want the city to survive, you have to make sure you protect it. Because by protecting us, you are protecting america. Thats why the investment is necessary. The levee system is better than before, stronger than before. It was an engineering failure by the federal government. Be that as it may, there is still discussion going on that if you really want to get to a place where you can resist risk more, it would be category five storm protection, but that is a discussion that is ongoing, a big battle we continue to have about pursuing the coast and the levees. Its a battle we have halfwon, that you have to get to the other part. Jeffrey lets talk about the way the city has changed. You heard this on the first panel, and one of the things people talk about is that in many ways, it is a richer city. It is also a whiter city than it used to be. What are you going to do or what 80000 and hundred thousand black residents are gone. What do you want to do to bring back that population . Mayor landrieu first of all, i hope everybody comes home. Earlier this week i traveled to houston and atlanta. Those two cities are housing the most of our residents who decided to not come back. Quickly, to my brothers and sisters in new orleans, this week is designed really to do three things. One is to remember all of our family members that we lost. Terrible stories of personal tragedy that we continue to know about personally, that we participated in, that we read about in the paper. Fathers letting the hands of their daughters go. Its going to be hard to relive that, but we are here to remember. Secondly, to thank the rest of the world and our friends and neighbors for helping us to lift up, and expressing gratitude to the cities that took us in. 32 cities received our people, made sure our kids got in school, make sure we got dry before we had the chance to come home and in some is is is, kept instances, have kept them. Its important for us in new orleans to spend a moment. Instead of thinking about how far we have the go, just being thankful for being alive today and being able to have a second chance. The third is what i think is a miraculous thing that the people of new orleans have done. When you have a neardeath experience, personally or institutionally, all you want to do is get back to where you were the day before the bad thing happened. You just want it to go away. The people of new orleans spent a minute, and i think it is something that is amazing by being honest katrina and rita did not cause our problems. A lot of the discussions were having today we are having today were problems that were well before the storm. They are issues that are just kind of coarsening the president ial debate right now, evidenced by the tea party on the right, the folks showing up at ciccone park, etc. , and theres uneasiness around the country on the issues of income inequality. It is true that the city has changed somewhat, but the city is still 60 africanamerican. It is a majority minority city. We have had an influx of hispanic brothers and sisters that stormed into the city and to help us rebuild, and im thankful for them, too. The caucasian population is about 32 . And then other, which is hispanic, vietnamese, etc. This has always been a very diverse city. We have never seen ourselves in the racial terms of being white or black. People in new orleans are different in the sense that we always believe that diversity is a strength and not a weakness, but we still have the same fissures that every other community has. We want to make sure everybody is welcome, make sure that Everybody Knows they have a stake in the game, make sure we do not sweep anything under the rug about the difficulties going forward. Oliver thomas, who was here a little while ago, who was in the water with me 10 years ago, said 52 of africanamerican men are not working. That is an unacceptable number. But people in new orleans who do not get around much will know that if you ask the same questions in cities like baltimore, oakland, compton, the whole black lives Matter Movement is around the issue of what are we doing to help disadvantaged communities get to where they are going. What we are trying to do is take the time to rebuild institutions and make them strong so people can have the opportunities to do better. Thats why we reconstructed the Health Care Delivery system. Thats why we trying to restructure the Education System, which is a source of concern for some folks, so people can have the opportunities to rebuild generational wealth and have strong foundations. Jeffrey let me press you a little bit on this. First, our mutual friend lolis elie said one problem he judges is that we tend to judge the comeback of a city based on how rich the rich are getting. I want to know if you agree with that, if that is the metric people are applying to new orleans, and two, what specifically you are doing to make, for instance, housing affordable so that the mainly africanamerican populations in houston and atlanta have a way to get back here. Mary landrieu everyone on that panel mayor landrieu everyone on that panel have been great advocates. It was interesting to listen to. We are kind of getting back into what was normal before. The normal before was in patients impatience for what is. It takes time to rebuild institutions so human beings can take advantage of institutions and continue over generations to do better, and these things are crisscrossing now and creating dissension. I dont think anyone can argue that the physical School Buildings, the 1. 8 billion that have been invested, are giving children better facilities to go into. Wilson elementary, everyone can name all of them. There used to be stories across the press about the bathrooms being not habitable in our public schools. That whole thing is much better and much different. What is going on in schools, based on numbers, producing high Graduation Rates and lower dropout rates. Lolis mentioned earlier, it was a very serious problem, who is teaching in this goals. There are all kinds of ramifications about that. If folks in the city can remember, in 1960, the city had 680,000 people in it. We were bigger than houston and bigger than atlanta. 1955 to 1960, the population went down. The night before the storm it was down to 465,000 people, and the storm hit. Now we are the Fastest Growing city in america. Cities have problems. Some problems are shrinking, a shrinking tax base, nobody making money, everybody stressed. Thats a problem to work through. Now we are growing and other people are moving in and people are getting displaced. Thats another common problem you have to work through. You can argue about which problem is better. I would rather have the growth problem than the shooting problem. In that regard, the city has 169 square miles in it, plenty of room to take care of a lot of people. One of the things were doing right now through government action, zoning codes, rules, regulations, if we get tax incentives if we give tax incentives or not, is making sure that there are incentives in place for people to make the right decisions. Inherent in that is some people move in, some people move out. The gentrification rate comes up, it goes down. What we are doing in the city is trying to find a way to manage conflict so that everybody has the opportunity to come into the city. Some neighborhoods come back faster than others. Jeffrey why is the lower ninth so slow to come back . Mayor landrieu that is an excellent question. The federal, state, and local governments have money coming in. We have 73 neighborhoods in the city. You will not be surprised that africanamericans that do not live in the ninth ward that want their neighborhood built or wealthy people are saying give to the ninth ward everything and give to us later everybody is saying, give me my stuff now. Everyone is saying, give me my stuff now and make sure it is fair. It is not a racial argument or an equity argument. It is i want stuff in my neighborhood tomorrow, mayor. From neighborhood to neighborhood, the one universal is get down blight fast. Because i dont like having this old nasty thing next to the house. We have taken down more blight than any city in america quicker. But tip oneill, all politics is local it does not matter if we have taken it down faster than anywhere. If the one next door to the house that complaining that is complaining is not down, you have not done anything yet. We have tried to manage the allocations of these resources by neighborhood and by need. When it gets hot, the poor get hotter, and when it gets cold, the poor get colder. The lower nine got hurt more. Before the storm happened, it was one of the poorest neighborhoods. We had spent 500 million in the lower ninth ward when you add it all up. The lower ninth ward will say that we did not give us much as everybody else. That is not true per capita. They did. But they had much further to go. The damage is so significant that its going to take a lot more money to do it. I will remind you because i feel like im on the side of begging here and demanding more. Just to give you a metric, we had about 150 billion of damages in the city of new orleans. Not talking the gulf coast, just us. We get about 71 billion in reimbursement. When you have that gap, not everybody gets everything all the time, and you cant do everything all at once. Im completely committed to the lower ninth ward, but im recommitted to every neighborhood in the city as well. Middle nine, upper nine, seventh ward, pension town, a lot of neighborhoods have to get up. When you dont have as much coming in as you need it takes , time to actually get it done, but the ninth ward will eventually get back. Mr. Goldberg let me turn to a topic we spend a lot of time talking about, which is violence. Homicide is down from historically high levels, but you are seeing and other cities are seeing it, to be fair a spike in homicides. You have made this cause the centerpiece of your administration. Why is homicide going back up right now, given all the resources you seem to be throwing at the issue of violence in your neighborhood . Mayor landrieu im apoplectic about the issue of violence in the neighborhood. This is an unacceptable state of affairs in the United States of america. Even though murder has gone down from 30,000 to 15,000, the overwhelming number of per capita victims are africanamerican men, and this is true all across america. This is something weve been working on a long time. You cannot police your way this is not you need more Police Officers so you can stop murder. This is much deeper, and it actually folds into the entire thing we are talking about, if its education, health care, jobs. It really is about if the lives of young africanamerican men matter in the United States of america because this is a symptom, in my view, of the fact that we have not really cared or focused, and we have lost our way in this country. We have tried to develop a way of approaching this on the Law Enforcement side. Take the bad guys out better shooting and killing people. The ride or die gang is being prosecuted in federal court. They are responsible for killing a lot of folks on the streets of new orleans. You have to stop them from hurting themselves and other people. You have to get on the front of it, too. You know a lot more about this than i do. You are walking the streets, living it all the time. When you see someone, losing people whose victims were not intended, and this is something the country cannot look away from. Mr. Goldberg what is your analysis . Mayor landrieu nobody knows. I think you saw. Why is it happening across the country at the same time . If it was happening in new orleans actually, shootings are down this year for the last first time in a long time here last year, murders were down and shootings were up. Last year, we had the lowest number of shootings since 1971. This year, the lowest number of shootings by the murder is up to where it