![]() The Louisiana state government offers up to $150,000 (£98,000) for people to reconstruct their homes, but applicants are not permitted to claim for more than the pre-hurricane value of their properties, no matter that the cost of repairing or replacing a house is similar city-wide. But earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the criteria for awarding grants to rebuild discriminated against black people. It's a common view in the Lower Ninth, though it has been dismissed by state and city leaders. Some big people in this town are trying to buy all that land and make it a green space with motels and gambling and casinos." "There are some who want to run us all out of here. ![]() We've been suffering from racism down here for many, many years," he said. Irvin, like many residents of the Lower Ninth, thinks the city does not want the residents back. ![]() Where housing plots are not empty many are filled with rotting wooden buildings, disintegrating and overgrown. Hundreds of businesses have been abandoned. Only one of the five schools in the Lower Ninth has reopened. They give the grants to the people with the big houses." There's a lot of people all the way to Texas that want to come back home but they can't because they can't afford to rebuild or bring their kids back here because we don't have the schools. Perhaps they can change it for the better, but they've got to give us a fair share of the pie. There's not the people, not the community. ![]() "There was a time when everybody around here knew everybody. Turn the corner and there's nothing there but grass and trees," he said. "I was just trying to hurry up and get home because there was nothing like living in that damn trailer. For the next three years he moved around, living with relatives and in a trailer provided by the authorities. Irvin, 74, fled the day before the storm. New insulation, new electrics, new everything." We had to air it out and then we had to rebuild. But my house did fill with water, covered with water. "The house next door had almost blown on top of mine but it didn't. One is Henry Irvin, whose house sits virtually alone on St Louis Avenue. More than one third of the population of St Bernard has still not returned.Īcross the administrative line in the neighbouring Lower Ninth, the predominantly working-class African American district that bore the worst of the disaster, just one in four residents has moved back. Today grass stretches right across the space where the houses stood close to an oil refinery at the water's edge, which poured fuel into the flood five years ago. The blocks to the left and right, in front and behind have been wiped of all sign of the homes that once stood there. There is a compulsory demolition notice taped to the window. Then there is Ventura Drive, a few blocks from Katrina's funeral in St Bernard parish. The money-spinning French Quarter is again busy with tourists, and white southern gentlemen in panama hats and bow ties populate the restaurants of the smarter ends of town as if nothing ever happened. Rest well."įive years on, the government has spent $143bn on the reconstruction of public buildings and private homes, roads and bridges, in one of the largest programmes of its kind in US history.īut the anger of the notes dropped into the coffin echoes across large areas of a city that has recovered so completely in parts that the only evidence of Katrina is how often it still comes up in conversation. He then looked on slightly astonished at the vigour of an evangelical preacher, Jesse Boyd, who put it another way: "We're here to say arrivederci, adios, goodbye to Katrina. The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans, Gregory Aymond, said the symbolic funeral would lay to rest "the hurt, the pain, the woundedness, the hopelessness". Many of those who did come back faced desolation, the destruction of their homes, the loss of their jobs. Tens of thousands are still living in trailers scattered across neighbouring Texas and beyond. About 1,800 died and more than a million fled, many never to return. The congregation had gathered to bury Hurricane Katrina five years after it smashed through New Orleans' inadequate levees, flooded most of the city and erased entire communities. You may have taken away my life as I know it but you'll never take away my spirit."Īnother said: "Thank God you are gone but unfortunately you will never be forgotten." "Since this is a church, I'm going to be nice," said one.
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