On the Fifth Anniversary of Katrina, Displacement Continues

Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans' most beloved
artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the
US, and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now to Def Poetry Jam.
When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the
words along with her. But, like many who grew up here, she was forced
to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of
displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day.
While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many
African Americans from New Orleanians, who no longer feel welcomed in
the city they were born in.

Patterson comes from New Orleans's Ninth Ward. Her family's house
was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished.
Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in
the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling
the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the
plight of New Orleans. But her income was not enough-her post-Katrina
rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also
putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the
birth of her son Jibril. "I wound up getting evicted from my apartment
because we were still working on the house," she said. "In the midst of
it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need
to sustain a living."

Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has
also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New
Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, forty-two percent of African
Americans -- versus just sixteen percent of whites -- said they still have
not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American
residents -- versus eight percent of white respondents -- said they had
trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in
New Orleans have gone up sixty-three percent just since 2009.

Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana's Road Home
program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this
program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the
primary source of federal aid.

Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in
different ways. US District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the
program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse
funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage
to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier -- often whiter --
neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law
obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98% of
applicants whose cases have been closed.

At approximately 355,000, the city's population remains more than
100,000 lower than it's pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the
current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here
post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at
well over 100,000 -- perhaps 150,000 or more. A survey by the Louisiana
Family Recovery Corps found that seventy-five percent of African
Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out.
Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them
from returning.

A Changed City

As New Orleans approaches the fifth
anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling
disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories
of the city's rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good
about New Orleans. The Saints' Superbowl victory was a turning point
for the city, and the HBO series Treme has gone a long way towards
helping the story of the city's trauma and search for recovery get out
to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest,
which are so central to the city's tourism-based economy, have brought
in some of their largest crowds in recent years.

But despite positive developments in the city's recovery, more than
100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still
have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of
most stories of the city. Many from this silenced population complain of
post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their path, such as the
firing of nearly 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their
union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly
5,000 public housing units -- two post-Katrina decisions that
disproportionately affected Black residents.

Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in
the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the
city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human
rights organizations call internally displaced. The guiding principles
of internal displacement, as recognized by the international community,
call for more than return. UN principles number 28 and 29 call for, in
part, "the full participation of internally displaced persons in the
planning and management of their return or resettlement and
reintegration." They also state that, "They shall have the right to
participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have
equal access to public services," as well as to have their property and
possessions replaced, or receive "appropriate compensation or another
form of just reparation."

In other words, these principles call for a return that includes
restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington
has said, "I'm still displaced, until the conditions that caused my
displacement have been alleviated. I'm still displaced as long as
Charity Hospital remains closed. I'm still displaced as long as rents
remain unaffordable. I'm still displaced as long as schools are in such
bad shape." In the US, Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford
Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that
international law guarantees.

Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are
members of the city's large homeless population. In a report this week,
UNITY for the Homeless estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living
in the city's abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these
undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable
housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a
disproportionate share are elderly.

Cultural Resistance

Sunni Patterson can't remember a
time when she wasn't a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly
effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence
speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room. Her
voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate
current events and history lessons -- her topics ranging from the Black
Panthers in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence.

You can hear Sunni Patterson's influence in the performances of many
young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear
the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras
Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and
friends. And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of
socially conscious culture workers. Since the late '90s, you could find
spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any
night of the week. And many of these poets are also teachers,
activists, and community organizers.

Although Patterson's house had been in her family for generations,
her relatives had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork for the
Road Home Program -- a problem shared by many New Orleanians. "We're
dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to
generation," says Patterson. "The paperwork is not always available. A
lot of elders are tired, they don't know what to do."

Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to
live in the city she loves. "I'm in Houston," she says, seemingly
stunned by her own words. "Houston. Houston. I can't say that and make
it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child's birth
certificate says Houston, Texas."

One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss
of her community. "In that same house that I grew up, my great
grandmother and grandfather lived," she says. "Everybody that lived
around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don't
know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities,
there's something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don't
know."

New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities,
spread across every US state. Although the vast majority of former New
Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta, many
are still living in further locales from Utah to Maine. While she is sad
to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the
loss. "The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now
dispersed all over the world," she says. "You can't kill it. Ain't that
something? That's what I love about it. So we still gotta give thanks,
even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created."

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