Ten years after the devastating Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed more than 1,500 people, the city is finally experiencing real social, economic and cultural change and revitalization.
However, the question of for whom this so-called New Orleans renaissance is for has not been made clear.
The fact is, New Orleans is now a whiter and more affluent city than it was pre-Katrina.
According to an article published by the Associated Press, an influx of more than 40,000 residents flocked to New Orleans after the hurricane, most of them young, urban professionals with some degree of higher education, allowing the city to reach 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population and driving the cost of rent higher.
The arrival of this mass of mostly millennials allowed the city to rebound in a number of ways.
First, new businesses are opening 64 percent faster than the national average, which accompanies a 29-percent increase in sales tax revenue from pre-Katrina averages.
The flourishing of new businesses has done wonders for the New Orleans economy and has allowed the city to make other important changes. For example, an up-to-date University Medical Center has replaced what was formerly known as the Charity Hospital, which was vital in the immediate aftermath of the storm for destitute residents with nowhere else to turn.
While a burgeoning economy and the rejuvenation of outdated community necessities are great signs New Orleans is really going through a renaissance, the changes this renaissance is bringing to the city seem to be largely indifferent to Lower 9th Ward and African-American residents.
A majority of the residents of Lower 9th Ward are generational homeowners, meaning many of them owned their homes through inheritance.
Not having a mortgage on these houses, the residents were not required to have flood insurance, which prevented most residents from returning to the neighborhood and rebuilding their homes and thus left the neighborhood a virtual ghost town.
On top of that, all the money government renovation programs administered to residents in the Lower 9th was estimated at pre-Katrina market values, still leaving residents with too little money to rebuild, which has slowed the reconstruction of the neighborhood to a crawl.
The Lower 9th Ward is a predominantly poor, African-American neighborhood, and unfortunately it comes as no surprise that positive change has yet to reach it.
Another, and the most unbelievable, fact of a post-Katrina New Orleans is 39 percent of child residents live in poverty — a number that has remained stagnant, even before the hurricane.
Considering the reality that New Orleans has a bustling economy with a high increase of tax revenue, why is the city so focused on touting its rehabilitation as a renaissance when almost 40 percent of its children struggle to thrive?
If New Orleans were truly trying to rehabilitate not only the city, but also the residents who survived the storm, then many more changes are still needed.
Lower 9th Ward needs attention as a part of the city and not as a graveyard of what New Orleans once was.
A focus on helping the large poor, African-American population rise to the middle class needs to be implemented. New Orleans is on the right track though the city can never be what it once was.
However, in order to make the city truly flourish, attention and aid need to be given to pre-Katrina residents who are still struggling to thrive, even without recent updates to the city and its population.
cm2@indiana.edu
