Deep distrust over New Orleans rebuilding

‘Zero belief in the political system’
Even today, Davis says, poorer New Orleans blacks hold deep resentment for Mayor Ray Nagin, himself an African-American, seen by many as favoring elite business owners — and as likely to favor them again in the rebuilding.

“There’s zero belief in the political system,” Davis says. “The mayor is not a popular black figure.”

Delatte, the mechanic, figures the racial dynamics of the city will change drastically after a rebuilding led by Nagin.

“It’s going to be a whiter city. It’s 70 percent black and it’s going to change, probably flip over to 70 percent white,” he says. Blacks who evacuated to Houston, he says, are likely to stay: “They have money here. They have a job here.”

So what can be done to restore trust damaged so deeply?

Some evacuees say they would like ironclad assurances that the people who lived in the neighborhoods that bore the worst flooding, like the Ninth Ward, would have the first rights to live there after the massive piles of debris are cleared.

Still, “If a developer goes in there, who’s going to argue that it’s going to be affordable housing?” says Marta Tienda, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.

“They didn’t have a voice to get out of the city. How are they going to have a voice to get back in?”

No guarantees
President Bush has proposed that the New Orleans poor be given slices of federally owned land along the Gulf Coast in exchange for pledges that they will build homes on it. He has promised that flood protection will be made stronger.

And the acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has pledged that millions of dollars of government contracts initially awarded without bids will be reopened for bidding.

But there has been no guarantee those contract reconstruction jobs will go to New Orleanians who desperately need the work and money.

“People we talked to down there said jobs, jobs, jobs,” Davis says. “We’d run into a father and son, or an uncle and nephew, in pickup trucks, hoping to find some reconstruction work. They’re baffled that a month later, there are no real jobs.”

Davis also said a full-fledged government inquiry into the disaster, at all levels, might help restore trust. But such an inquiry appears to be far down the road, if it happens at all.

Lack of faith
“I have a funny feeling that after this we’re not going to have very much faith in any authority, all the way up to the White House,” says Charles Siler, curator of the Louisiana State Museum, who is black and made it out of New Orleans before Katrina struck. “Everybody’s passing blame. It’s going to take 100 years to sift out those things.”

Back at the disaster relief center in Houston, no investigation, no matter how thorough, is likely to win over Landis Tuckson, 31, who worked as a forklift operator in a New Orleans warehouse.

He believes the mandatory evacuation should have begun days earlier, and he believes the Ninth Ward was probably deliberately flooded to save the elegant neighborhoods of the city’s Uptown — “white and rich people,” as he puts it.

The government “can’t win my trust back,” he says. “Because this already happened.”

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