New Orleans getting younger and smarter

For a city whose very foundations were built on calculated risks, New Orleans never had much use for hard numbers. Precision — in the form of phrases like “10 feet below sea level” — never offered anyone a true understanding of the precarious positioning of the city.

Still, residents are finding reasons for encouragement in recent statistics showing signs of a strong recovery in New Orleans.

The Brookings Institution and Greater New Orleans Data Center reported this month that the city has recovered 72 percent of its pre-Katrina households, nearly 90 percent of sales tax revenues, 86 percent of jobs and 76 percent of all previous public and private school students.

One of the more heartening aspects of New Orleans’ recovery has been the “brain gain” of what city officials estimate to be more than 3,000 young, college-educated adults who flocked to the city in the wake of the storm.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the upwardly mobile crowd was not likely to put New Orleans — known for its cultural riches but lacking a wealth of professional opportunities — on its short list of desirable places to live. But now, three years after Katrina, the allure of being part of a large-scale recovery effort continues to attract young people looking to make their mark.

‘It's on people's radar’
“For the socially conscious crew in their formative work years, New Orleans definitely tops the list,” says 25-year-old Robert Fogarty, an AmeriCorps member who moved from New York to work as the city’s intern and volunteer coordinator. “I’m pretty sure that 10 years ago, the city didn’t have students from Yale interning here. But that’s one of the really great and fascinating things about New Orleans: It’s always been wonderful, but it’s on people's radar now.”

Before joining AmeriCorps, Fogarty worked for a year as a headhunter on Wall Street. “I was waking up from nightmares where I was in the same office, doing the same thing at 65,” he recalls.  He hoped that New Orleans, which was undergoing its own transformation, might help to facilitate his, and it did. “It was a love affair from the get-go,” he says.

As the coordinator for more than 50 out-of-state interns working in the city’s recovery office, Fogarty has had ample opportunity to examine what has motivated so many newcomers to join a torn community to which they had no prior connections. He writes about some of it on his Post-Katrina New Orleans blog. In one post, he cautioned his peers against treating the city as though it were just one stop on their urban migration.

"The upwardly mobile transplants must remember that New Orleans is different from NY, Seattle, SF or Chicago. … Many say the new New Orleanian is what this City needs to survive. I say, the City — its displaced and returned — have done more for us than we’ve done for them.”

“I think it's hugely important for us post-storm transplants to take time to reflect on how fortunate we are to be able to pack up and move from Eugene, Oregon, or New York or wherever and be down here two weeks later with enough money for a deposit and first month's rent,” Fogarty says. “I guess you have to have that make-a-difference mentality, but maybe it should be the kind of thing that burns within — not the way you introduce yourself to your new neighbors."

‘People would ask .... why are you here?'
For some locals, the new influx was perplexing, especially in a city that for decades had suffered a steadily dwindling population.

“People would ask me, ‘What's your connection to the city? Why are you here now?’ remembers 23-year-old Lindsay Robertson, a kindergarten teacher at Coghill Elementary in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood. “It was almost as though they were saying, 'You don't belong here, this is just for show.’ And in some cases, I think that was right; there were people here like that. ... I just came down here to throw myself into the work."

Robertson had been teaching in suburban Illinois when her older sister, then a resident of New Orleans, told her of the city’s desperate need for teachers. “She encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone,” she says, adding that she had no inkling then just how far outside that zone her teaching position at a public school post-Katrina would take her.

“I don't want to say anything bad about our school, because the administration was one of the best,” Robertson says. “We had really strong support from the principal and the vice principal, but we were just overloaded. I had no way of knowing the extent of the inequities we would be facing.”

Robertson soon discovered that the city’s infamous lack of infrastructure permeated every single aspect of “normal” life. School supplies rumored to be in a warehouse somewhere sat unused through her first semester, simply because there wasn’t anyone to deliver or distribute them. “I didn’t get my teacher’s manual until January,” she says. The school didn’t get a photo copier until the spring semester — “and even then we had to buy our own paper,” she adds.

MORE FROM LIFE

Life Section Front

Officer in Oswald photo can't escape history $1 billion network for green cars vowed Commuter, freight train collide; few injuries Dad drowns after saving sons in crash Calif. court takes up gay marriage ban Drought won't stop rebuilding after fires Age limit on Neb. safe haven near approval Septic tanks make Malibu special, smelly Mayor sorry for kids' anti-Obama chant Will oil tycoon's wife save wild horses? Life Section Front   Add Life headlines to your news reader: