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time on booktv. >> next up, roberta brandes gratz leads a panel discussion on new orleans ten years after hurricane katrina. [inaudible conversations] >> thank you all, everybody, so much for coming this evening. it's my pleasure to welcome you to this wonderful public launch of roberta gratz's new book, and it is "we're still hear, ya bastards." on behalf of the new school and nation book, it's my pleasure to welcome everyone. before we get started, i just wanted to say a couple of things about some people who have helped make this series possible. they are mary watson and pamela tillless from the executive dean's office at the new school, and they are wonderful partners in all the series of events we do throughout the year. and i also want to thank c-span, and it's so great that you're here tonight filming this and the c-span audience. so thank you. it is such a pleasure to get to publicly introduce roberta gratz, someone who has been a hero of mine for a long time, way before i came to the nation be institute. she is an amazing writer and thinker. she's an acclaimed urbanist, and she's published four previous books including most recently "the battle for gotham: new york in the shadow of robert moses and jane jacobs." her writing has also appeared in the nation, "the new york times" magazine and "the wall street journal." and as many of you know, she priestly served on new york city's land marks preservation committee and new york's sustainability advisory board with. and with jane jacobs, she founded the center for city living. and as many of you now know, she splits her time between new york and new orleans. so, roberta, thank you, and enjoy the panel. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you, taya, and thank you to the nation institute for sponsoring this evening. i'm going to introduce my friends and colleagues, and then jed is going to lead us in conversation. we lost john for the evening for a very good reason having to do with his own book, so we excused him, and we said we'll manage to self-organize. so we have, and we expect it to be a lively conversation, and at some point jed will open up for questions from the audience, and there will be cards passed around for you to put questions and pose them to us. so i'm going to start on my right with jed honor who i've -- horne who i've told everybody i felt after katrina he wrote possibly the best post-katrina book called "breach of faith." [applause] >> until now the best, yes. [laughter] >> and he became a good friend, source and even an editorial critic of mine over the years. he was on city editor and metro editor at the "times-picayune" at the time of the pulitzer-winning coverage of katrina. and then, of course, you know "breach of faith." then we have to my right karen who if and when you read the book you will see is one of the heroines of the book. karen, i like to describe, as the civic activist who became a civic activist the usual way. she got angry. and she started a blog right after katrina called swappedderred heritage -- squandered heritage: tracking the houses that were demolished without the owners' knowing. the contractors taking money for work they weren't doing and leading what turned into a revealing the corruption in the blight removal system and people actually went to jail, leading eventually to her and a colleague starting the lens which is an online investigative journal which i consider one of the best things that happened in new orleans after katrina. it is just fabulous. and she continues to write and make trouble in the way that i think is -- works. to my left is lois ely, and for those of you who followed the hbo series, she was story editor and writer on that series. and if you may have seen and if you haven't, it's available online, he produced a wonderful -- i guess it's a video -- called the hidden story -- the unknown story of black new orleans. and it's wonderful. [applause] and then further to hi left is randy -- to my left is randy who among many things runs the fund for new orleans and the author of a recent wonderful book called "the taste for chaos" which is basically about literary improvisation and many other things and also wrote a book prior to that about his own crazy family story. his mother was ruth chris restaurant, and his father was -- i won't even tell you -- [laughter] it's a good book. so i have one little thing to tell you just to answer the curiosity of some. the title of the book was a real graffiti after katrina. not the one on the cover of the book, the art department took it and redid it. but it was a real graffiti, and the reality was such that we used it as the title because it really was, captures the feeling of so many new orleanians since the whole world was really, you know, assuming either it shouldn't be rebuilt or won't be recover, all the experts saying all those things, and the people of new orleans have said we're still here, ya bastards, we ain't going anywhere. so that's the overall spirit of the book. but i wanted you to know that that's where it comes from. at this point i'm going to turn it over to jed to sort of lead this little pack of talkers into some organized -- >> tree items of -- three items of business to start with. i haven't heard a cell phone which suggests you all have turned them off. secondly, to reiterate something that i said roberta already said f we say something totally obnoxious or stupid, feel free to rise and quiz us here and now. but for the most part, i think we'll be better off if the questions can be held to the end. and i think you're asked to write down your answers and submit them somewhere. thirdly, close scholars of the disaster, you'll hear us using katrina and federal flood and levee collapse kind of interchangeably. we do so fully cognizant that katrina, as we speak of it in new orleans, was a manmade disaster. it was, in fact, an engineering failure. the levee system collapsed in the face of a relatively minor storm by the time it actually reached new orleans. it is, in fact, the second worst engineering failure in human history. does anybody know what the worst engineering failure in human history was? scholars in our midst? chernobyl. chernobyl was worse and maybe fukushima's going to get there. we have to hope not. i was just over there doing a documentary for nhk tv, the japanese pbs, and it's a rather horrifyingly still ambiguous situation as to whether they've reined that thing to the ground. enough business. roberta, extraordinary stories, beautifully told. the question that i think haunts a lot of katrina discussion is whether it takes a katrina to have provoked the kind of urbanist issues that you've dealt with so succinctly and beautifully in the book which everybody's about to go buy. does it take a katrina? are there lessons here, broader themes that apply to cities everywhere, or is this just new orleans being its eccentric and peculiar self? >> you make it a little louder? >> is this better? >> okay. >> we'll try. >> there's two ways to answer that because i should preface it by saying this is my fifth book about urban change. i have been writing about how cities grow, fall apart, recover, how they stay urban for a long time. and when i watched katrina on television, i said to myself how is this going to play out? there were two ways to go. was this going to be another one of those post-disaster attempts to reshape the city in a sort of robert moses image from the top down? big project planning, big money? or was this going to emerge in the way that i have seen every success in everyone city in every neighborhood that has succeeded, they have succeeded from the ground up with citizen-led, citizen initiatives. which way was this going to go? so my immediate feeling was i have to get down there. i did three weeks after the storm. did my first story going into the lower ninth ward with a gentleman who could only get in there with my press credentials because the lower ninth ward was not reopened. the last neighborhood allowed back in the city four months after and long after the water had receded. and he walked in, and he looked around. i have to tell you, if it had been me, i would have turned around and never looked back. it was everything you can imagine, and he looked and he said it was in bad shape when i bought it, i fixed it once, i'll do it again. i was so inspired, and i felt if this was the spirit, i was going to -- if this was the spirit i was going to see in new orleans, this was the story i had to tell. and i continued to go, and that was the spirit shah i did find in -- that i did find in new orleans. so as far as other cities, this story has every tale, good and bad, that every other city has. it has the tragedies, the disaster capitalism stories, the demolitions that should never have happened, the charity hospital story is as bad a urban destruction story as i have ever seen, and it has all the good stuff where local wisdom trumped distant can expertise -- distant expertise. so, yes, there are a lot of lessons. what i never expected in new orleans even though i had been there, i had written a little bit about it, but new orleans is so much more urban than the world thinks. they're deceived because the housing that you see is mostly two, three-story historic housing. it is you are wan in ways -- urban in ways which i won't go into here but i do outline in the book. and the lesson, its urbanism is a lesson to the cities around the country that are struggling to get back their urbanism having been decimated by so many clearance and big top-down projects. the lesson of urbanism is definitely in new orleans. so, yes, it is both. and i think -- i hope this book is read not just as a specific story, but as one with lessons also how to deal with disaster, and, you know, we can discuss some of those issues. but it's both the story of where we were and why with our cities and where we should be going if we're going to recover from whether it was an urban renewal disaster or a natural disaster or a manmade disaster. >> lois, i'm going to rope you into this conversation, if i may. i'm remembering and, of course, this tenth anniversary year is full of memories of some of the noise that we put ourselves through and the agony and the misery. after all, 1500 people had died, but we had to look ahead and begin thinking about the rebuilding. and in the early going, there was enormous anxiety about whether the city would lose its cultureal -- cultural cultural , whether we would become a toy version of what we had been which is a richly afro-caribbean culture, a majority black population. there certainly has been ominously large onslaughts of gentrification, but how fares the culture? how have we done? is it still a city with its own claim on cultural originally and vigor? -- originality and vigor? >> well, at the time of the flood i was a newspaper columnist being edited by one jed horne -- [laughter] and i tried to call the smart people i knew including a man from the fiscal policy institute who was here this morning. and he put me in touch with a bunch of experts who said after all these big disaster, and he'd gone back to the earthquake of 14 something or other. people always talk about how we're going to do all these things differently and make sense out of the imperfections that preceded the disaster, but in the end they pretty much go back to what it was before. in the context of new orleans culture, little could be better than going back to the way it was before. what's striking is that i had kind of tired of carnival, and i just had lost interest in it. but after the flood you found people coming back to the city with the kind of dedication and determination that i'd certainly never seen in carnival and probably hadn't seen in any other context either. there was a sense that we almost lost those things which we held most dear. and it seemed as if there's been an attempt to reclaim the culture with a vengeance of sorts. sweet home new orleans did an informal survey of culture bearers after the flood, and what they concluded was that more people were masking among the mardi gras indians, more people working the social and pleasure clubs than ever before. but, of course, to understand that, you have to put this in a kind of historical context. we'll talk about the disasters that have hit new orleans. one of them, certainly, in a way was the american purchase. because the americans attempted to impose a kind of american racism on a sort of creole detente that existed before which, while race is an imperfect, was nonetheless not nearly as bad as alabama, mississippi and, for that matter, new york and pennsylvania. then we had, of course, plessy v. ferguson, the civil rights case that we tend to want to forget. and in addition, new orleans has been at war with its culture for the entirety of its existence. the governor back in, the i believe, the 1780s made it illegal for black people to mask as indians on carnival day which is go back to the 170 to 0s and the official disdain of the mardi gras indians goes back to the 1700s. mayor nagin wants to charge about ten times the amount of people that the richest people in new orleans were charging -- let me repeat. he wants to charge the poorest people ten times as much as he wants to charge the richest people. moving forward to our current mayor who arrests young musicians playing on the streets of new orleans. he doesn't give them a citation, a warning, he arrests them and takes them to jail. which is to say that the culture of new orleans has been in a defensive war against the city of new orleans for the entirety of black presence in the city, and the war continues and sometimes we win. >> i don't, i don't agree with you that it was made to be illegal -- he made it illegal for black people to mask during carnival. the indians emerged in the 1880s after the, after the wile bill -- yeah. >> i think they go back further than wild bill's wild west show. >> for those of you -- >> mardi gras indians -- [inaudible] run away and go to -- >> the maroons, yeah. >> combined their cultures, african culture with -- [inaudible] >> well, i -- >> [inaudible] >> i think, certainly, the tradition that we speak of as mardi gras indian is an homage to that relationship, but i don't think it's exactly the same thing as the -- [laughter] for those, let me just say for those who are not, who want a footnote here, the upshot of the indian suppression, if you will, the masking and all of that was a wonderfully satirical counterthrust by black new orleans. they proceeded to put on black face over black skin and wear wigs and grass skirts and basically make themselves a parody of the stereotypical image that the whites had of black people and of indians both. and to this day they parade rather brilliantly through the streets of new orleans, sometimes with louis armstrong as the king back in '48, something like that. anyway, we can come back to the indians if people are as fascinated with them as i am and lolis is. on another theme altogether, new orleans has been called the northernmost banana republic. it has also, and i think with equal relevance, been called the southernmost part of the rust belt. so you can liken us to detroit which is maybe the more immediate and/or current analogy -- >> and the westernmost mediterranean. >> uh-huh, that's right. we do have our share of -- >> and one of my favorite jokes about new orleans is that you have to go north of i-10 to get to the south. >> that's right. mississippi is deeply southern is, and new orleans is a caribbean port. it's very different. all of which is by way of prologue to say that new orleans had been hugely blighted in its detroit mode well before katrina and the levee perhaps. that was certainly not alleviated one bit by 230,000 housing units being destroyed in the flood. we have in our midst a very close scholar of blight and of the particularities of blight in new orleans, and i just thought karen could bring us up to speed on that whole part of the katrina recovery. >> well, i mean, i think it's interesting that the architecture of new orleans is often referenced apart from the culture of new orleans when, actually, the culture of new orleans is embodied in its housing which many of our craftsmen who were also musicians, etc., etc. so even though they're well intertwined, there seems to be general ignorance about the fact that this is the physical embodiment that endured for hundred-plus years, and a little water was not going to watch them away. but what -- to wash them away. but what the broken levees didn't accomplish, boneheaded public policy and a few bucks from the federal government really pushed along. i did spend a lot of time documenting demolitions which were done against homeowners' wishes, but i also cataloged thousands of homes that people who had already disinvested in the city in the sort of white flight era and had no homeowners' insurance and had no intention in returning those properties to commerce had opted to take a few bucks from the federal government to demolish. i just started, actually, going through that catalog of photos, and what i'm finding is about a 90% vacant lot result from that loss. so i did spend a lot of time looking at blight, and blight is a very fun word to play around with because you can use it as a an excuse for just about anything, and it often does get used. i know this is one person in the audience, brad vogel, who has kind of picked up where i left off, and he cataloged a lot of properties that had been slated for demolition in the footprint of these massive hospital complexes which were also the sort of disaster capitalism post-katrina where neighborhoods were taken out for hospitals which are still not functioning. but my interest in cataloging the demolition of new orleans was that we were at the beginning, and even you said, it gets said over and over again that 80% of the city was destroyed. 80% was not destroyed. 80% of the city was damaged. some of that damage was horrific and resulted in homes being lost, but for the most part the houses are built with materials that could take the water. and if we were educated about how to mitigate that water damage, we would have seen a lot less loss than we've seen -- [inaudible] >> it does. it answers it nicely. >> also one more thing is that money that came from the federal government to demolish could not be used to demolish pre-katrina blight. so all the blight that had existed before the flood continued to flourish. [laughter] >> i'm going to leave the details to roberta's book, because they are delicious. but i want you all when you read that book to pay attention to karen's sudden, shall we say, add vent as -- advent as a courage of the city and as a journalist because she was doing something quite different before that, and it's a wonderful testament to the power of citizens to rise up and make things happen in the aftermath of disaster. there were a lot of big ideas floating around right after katrina. you know, we were going to run a high-speed rail from biloxi to baton rouge, we were going to put casinos all over the downtown area, we were going to put health clinics in every neighborhood kind of in coordination with, you know, what we hoped would become a health reform. the one thing that certify my did happen, and it was not unfortunately a fully-robust levee system, was a enormous shake-up of the school system this new orleans. very controversial. we now have 95% of kids going to charter schools. many some respects -- in some respects, strikingly successful. but i'll leave it at that and ask randy who knows much more about it than the rest of us to comment on where we're at in new orleans. what happened, who won, who lost, and what's going on with the schools? >> well, it is a very, it is a very complicated story, and charter school movement in america is very controversial. in new orleans there's some terrific charter schools. the, they emerged -- the school board was utterly can i say corrupt? >> why not? >> and bankrupt right before katrina. and there are statistics show that things were improving a bit as 2005 came our way. but after katrina there was this movement to start charter schools. i had been supporting a charter school that i think emerged in the '90s, and right after katrina i was at a nation dinner and met alice waters, and she told me this wonderful story about how chef paul prude how many had saved her career, and she wanted to do something for new orleans. i said, well, i support a school with a garden, and she jumped at it. so that was in december, i guess, huh, taya? and by april alice was in new orleans, and by september we had an edible schoolyard. her wonderful program in berkeley where kids learn to garden sustainably and eat sustainably and understand where their food comes from x if they grow it, they'll eat it. so they learned how to eat good food. now we have five of these schools in first line schools which is one of better charter school groups. and one of the interesting things about this was that first line was one of the first schools that reopened after katrina in january, and their focus on the edible schoolyard taught the rest of new orleans schools that by focusing on something that created a marketability, because one of the things that happened was it was decided that students could go to any school in new orleans. they didn't have to be neighborhood-bound. there would butsing from anywhere -- busing from anywhere to anywhere. and so schools started competing. and one of the things they competed on is focus. one school was math/sciences, one school is this or that. and the edible schoolyard kind of -- i've been, i've heard it's helped shape that. now, the busing thing, i think, is one of our ongoing problems, because they're spending a lot of money on busing, and the students are spending a lot of time on buses. and the neighborhoods, i think, are the losers because i think there's benefits in schools. you know, one of -- the fifth edible schoolyard is at the elementary school where i went, and it was half a block from where i lived. so i feel strongly about that. so, you know, i'm not a fan of all the charter schools, but i'm a fan of many and supporting them, and it's been -- i think, i'm not sure it's comparable to the rest of america and the charter school movement. i think it's working very well in new orleans in general. >> yeah. i don't think any city has made as complete a commitment to charter schools as elsewhere with our 95% -- did you want to say something? >> i want to add something to this, and i have a whole chapter in the book on education. it's the one chapter in which i'm equivocal, and those of you who know me, i'm not usually equivocal. because there's good news and there's bad news. really there's, you know, the old school system was decidedly corrupt. and one could, one really has to fairly look at the -- how that evolution occurred. and let's get to the bottom of it starting when the schools turn from while to black. from white to black in the '60s. and budgets were cut and programs were cut, and everything deteriorated to the point that there's no doubt when katrina came, the schools were a joke. some of them didn't even have toilet paper in the bathroomings. however, what's happening -- bathroomings. however, what's happening now and i haven't looked totally into this yet, but i'm seeing pieces of it. you have state money from the recovery school district rebuilding some fabulous school buildings. all of which never had anything done to them probably since the '60s or '70s. so public money is restoring these schools. they are then being sold or turned over to charter schools that are not fully public. there are all these little elements that are sometimes lost in the picture. in the beginning, a lot of the charter schools, they swept everything clean. and among the things they eliminated without understanding the culture was a lot of the schools eliminated bands. the bands define the neighborhoods and the schools, and it's coming back. and randy is supportive of a program that's helping put music back in the -- >> artist corps. >> artist corps, putting it back in the school system. but what's happened over the ten years because i started out more negative than i ended up was that at least the charter schools are listening to the criticism and making adjustments, some of them are. and some of them are failing and close canning. and it's a very hard -- closing. it's a very hard system to get a picture of because it's not centralized. it's not easy to get a really full picture. so from a national perspective, i think it makes an interesting study of the evolution of what's happening in the charter system. and it's only because of katrina that they could sweep it clean the way they have. so i, in that way it doesn't really compare with other systems, but it is being watched for reasons that, you know, are evolving. >> i will see your negative and go several negatives more. [laughter] the first thing that these people did to remake the school system was fire all the teachers. i cannot be understand how you can care about the kids and fire all of their mothers, aunts and the occasional uncle and father who are teaching the schools? [applause] now, if you can convince me that you then replaced these with competent, experienced teachers, i might go for that. because without a doubt, many of the teachers were incompetent. not all of them. to prove that they weren't all incompetent after this new school system -- and i use the word system in the loosest possible sense -- after this new system was serving kids frozen sandwiches and the like and sometimes seemed to be far more concerned about security than they were about education, they then begin to hire some of the people back whom they had fired. you've got to be very careful about in terms of this, everyone wants -- well, what the politicians really want to do is pronounce post-flood new orleans a success. and so anytime the charter schools give out some statistics about how well they're doing, that's trumpeted. there's a group called research on reforms with robert ferguson, and they study all these pronouncements that the charter schools make. and they found a whole lot of holes in these proannouncements. and without going -- pronouncements. without going into details, it's not clear whether the charter schools have been nearly as good as they're supposed to have been. one other interesting fact, before the flood there was a threshold. when a school fell beneath that threshold, the state was allowed to take it over. after the flood, they decided to make it easier for the state to take over more schools. i began to wonder whether any of this was about a public school system and educating kiss and whether -- kids and whether it was about the prioritization of resources, not unlike what you're saying. using public money and then give it to a private organization to run the school system. i'm just not -- i think we're rushing to pronounce success. yeah. >> i have to jump in. the devil is always in the details, and the nuances are what is so fascinating about the katrina story and roberta's ability to understand those nuances and frame them in ways that are communicable and analytically shrewd. it's worth remembering, and i'll just make this observation, that the schoolteachers were fired, a horrible event. that is exactly symptomatic of what was wrong with the old to system. the people who fired the teachers in new orleans were not the takeover guys coming down from baton rouge hell bent to charter the whole world, it was the orleans parish school board which had lost $80 million, whose president was on her way to prison and on which had developed a system in which a 30% illiteracy rate was noted among graduating seniors, in which a valedictorian at one of the schools had failed the exit exam five times. and this same school board had proposed to shut down the entire system for a full year at which point the charter crowd, the people up in baton rouge came rushing in and said -- and the head of tulane at the time and very active in the school and recovery movement generally -- said if you do that, we don't have a shot at recovery. there will be no recovery. nobody can come back if there are no schools for their kids. and so a deadline was imposed on the orleans parish school board to start schools again. and, yes, many of the results remain, you know, the fact is the graduation rate has gone up nicely, 54% used to ambiguity, now it's up 73%. that's not bad. getting into college, in fact, many of them. two-thirds of the schools were in failure before katrina, now i think two-thirds of them by, perhaps, you know, there's some wiggle room in how you evaluate failure and success, but now two-thirds of them meet minimum state standards. the district has risen from being the second worst in the state to being, i think it's like 49th out of 68. these are big gainings over a decade. and it remains to be seen whether this is sustainable, whether the youngsters that were brought down teach for america and so forth, whether the burnout ratios will be so high that this just can't be kept up after new orleans loses its luster and the young and the restless move on to whatever comes next. but i mention all of this not to refute what lolis is saying, but to add that level of complexity that makes the new orleans situation, to me, so very fascinating. i want to turn back to roberta who has -- i've got that number somewhere here, it's 45,000 kids. >> [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> how many are white? it's about 90 black, i think. it's a black city. the interesting thing is that the school system, for all its gains or lack thereof, is actually educating a more challenging population because there's more kids who qualify for, what do they call it, reduced lunch -- >> [inaudible] >> free or reduced lunch which is a measure of poverty. and in new orleans, alas, poverty is a big, big factor. >> also it's not an easy -- you can't look at the new orleans school system the way you would look at any other city because one of the things that new orleans has bigger than any other city is a parochial school system as well. so it's got parallel things. and it's very complicated which is why i say, you know, it was nuanced even for me in the book, but i also think it's important to put it in the largest perspective is to understand that what has been described here as having happened could not have happened without a disaster, because politically it was an untenable situation. so for those of you who know naomi klein's disaster capitalism, this is the next chapter. it happened in the school system, it happened with the hospital. a terrible story, the worst urban renewal demolition story, as i mentioned earlier, in the country that i have seen. still a disaster. ten years later, this overexpensive, new system can't even open because there's not enough money. and the neighborhood was destroyed, etc., etc. so you've got schools, you've got the hospital. the public housing, big story in my book. what has happened with the public housing whether you agree or not could not have happened without katrina. the transit system was turned over to a private company, french company now runs the public transit system in new orleans, and it's not better. where cities across the country are improving their transit system, new orleans is going backwards because they're more interested in the transit for the tourists than for the resident neighborhoods -- >> maybe we should bring back jimmy reeves. >>, jimmy reese is the one -- >> notorious figure. >> -- can highly quoted as saying, let's see if -- >> [inaudible] >> he was head of the regional transit authority and said, help me remember the good -- >> well, you know, we have a wonderful opportunity here to clean up this city, we just need to get rid of the poor people. >> right. and then he also said and we have to change geographically, demographically and every which way, otherwise we're not coming back. >> he had some israeli commandos land their helicopter in audubon park because he lived across the street, and he wanted his house protected. >> right. so the point -- i try to put this in perspective. one, these differences on separate issues is a constant conversation in new orleans. and for those of you in the audience who might be writers, you can imagine it made me dizzy at times, you know? i'd interview one one morning and someone else in the afternoon, and i'd get opposite stories, and they both seemed valid. so it's very hard to sort out the details. but the largest picture, and this is the national story that really bugs me because this is disaster capitalism, the worst story of katrina -- and i go into this in the book as much as i could find -- this was about contracts. it was all about contracts. the money coming from washington was going to the political cronies then of the bush administration, a few cronies of the democratic governor, blanco. not from new orleans -- not from even louisiana, from all over the country. and i'll give you one description and then, jed, you had the other one. you had to explain at lunch. everybody saw the blue tarps going on rooftops to protect from the rain. a square of tarp, $175 charged by a company, shaw group, $175 a square. they had no expertise in putting, doing anything with roofs. so they subcontracted to the next people for i don't even remember, $150. no expertise. contracted to the next people, $75. fourth contract to the guy on the ground who put the tarp on the roof, $2. okay? >> that's where your money went. >> that's where the money went. i make a projection in the book, and i'm hope for anybody to challenge me. they just have to do the study. i argue that if they were lucky, 20% of the money from the federal government that allegedly went to the recovery of new orleans, 20% is a generous maybe hit new orleans. jed, what was the -- what you had -- >> oh, it's analogous to what roberta just said. in the case of the debris removal which is, of course, a gigantic problem as the whole city had been brought to its knees, the halliburton -- let's think now, dick cheney was vice president at the time, and halliburton was landing these huge contracts, shaw was a jv halliburton based out of bass on the rouge. -- baton rouge, very similar, they were collecting $23 per cubic yard of debris, subbing it just as roberta has described with the blue roof tarp jobs through various buddies and cronies and so on who had absolutely no hands-on ability or even any, you know, contact with the debris. .. charity hospital disaster, he kept giving out and has these days in terms of the medical system in the state, he keeps giving up contracts all over the country because he's basically putting money where he's looking for national support as he runs for office. this is the kind of thing that really -- it's like an alert, alert. i don't know what the comparables prosandy. fema is not a government agency. it's a government agency contracted out. there's no such thing -- government sunt -- doesn't exist. government is all contract. when edsnowden had discovered with nsa, he worked for a private contractor, the nations highest secrets were in hands of a private contractor. we have to be careful for what we call government incompetence. it's of a contractor that's supposed to improve on the public and supposed to save up money but it's the opposite. >> the problem is since it's believed in governing -- >> good point. >> for problem is government. and john pope, your former colleague was interviewing jimmy carter at the crisis of 2007 and he said what do you think about fema's work after katrina. no one realizes but i created fema. when i came into office there were 23 agencies that were not working together and we studied it and we decided to have one agencies. one they would be well funded, we know how that worked out. the head of fema would be an expert in emergency management. we know how that worked out. and three, that ceo of fema would report directly to the president. and we how that worked out because he now reports to homeland security. so -- so we said, well, i don't think they did really well after katrina. >> so it's not about government, you know, we need to get back in trusting that government has a role to perform even when we believe that good stuff comes up from the bottom. when government is doing its business, it's doing its business. >> i have to ask you -- [laughs] >> another fema that we should touch on because it's an agent arising, climate change and new who orleans and parts of new york vulnerable. [laughs] >> a kind of reality there. >> the flag of texaco flies over the state of louisiana. >> we travel to holland. tell us what katrina obliged us to face? >> well, 2.5 miles of wetlands lowers the storm serge by one foot. we used to have the state of delaware, a land mass the size of delaware below new orleans. so the threat of hurricanes is not that they are getting bigger, is that which protected us naturally after ions of building up of natural levies and wetlands is being destroyed. we lose a football field every hour they say. different statistics. and my family is from the mouth of the river and i grew up there. when i went back in the '80s i think and saw this water, it used to take 25 minutes to get on boat, now it's right there at the dock. it's really frightening, and we -- we need to address it. we need big bucks to address. new orleans is a very important port, and we aren't taking care of it. >> it's also not often recognized, and this was pointed out by a number of people. this is not a local story. >> yeah. there's a leading businessman in new orleans whose involved in one of these save the wetland organizations. he said to me in an earlier interview, the worst thing that happened about katrina is it become about new whors -- orleans because the port services the country and the statistics of how much fuel, fish import, it's enormous. in fact, that organization as he said is taking the story up the mississippi to st. louis and all the way up because it's not the mouth of the river -- doesn't just belong to louisiana, and in congress, i mean, well, you know, historic, whatever, however you pronounce it. >> any interested in the state of coast to louisiana, i encourage you to go to the land, project which maps -- you can find it on our site. >> what you expect to lose -- >> it's frightening. you have the people in congress when the money issue comes up from the wetlands and the gulf coast, it's like it's not their backyard, but it is. even congressmen -- someone pointed out to me from colorado where they had the mud slides, you know, after the slides and things slid, he was one that reverted against -- it wasn't his territory. this is everybody's problem. it's not a local story. so that's one of the postkatrina stories that doesn't get heard enough, is the national implications of this story. [inaudible conversations] >> well, the dutch dialogues i hope sponsor, they brought dutch water management to new orleans to develop plans, and they dwobbed -- developed plans. they develop it had screw pump and made new orleans possible as we know it, the ditch came over and said, we need you in holland, would you come over? no my work is here. >> the jest of the lessons, you let the water in, you build your lakes and interior, retention areas, and then you have so-called leaky levies. st. john is reconnected to the lake that it feeds off and so forth. we are still in the keep it away and hope for the best. >> when the dutch came over and were shown around new orleans, at the end of the day they said, we have three questions. why do you hide the water? everyone wants to live around water, and you say the army is in charge of this. [laughs] >> what was the third, i don't remember. >> it's enough. >> the thing about living in water, i'm sure a will the of you have seen different plans because it's going across the country as well it should, it's one of those solutions for which there is no downsize because you come up with recreational areas, new orleans is a perfect laboratory. we have canals that are cemented. you have what the dutch have, are beautiful landscape areas that wind upholding the water in the flood and keeping ip -- minimizing in surrounding neighborhoods. it's like a double-edge sword in the best way. the real issue and it's classic in a lot of different things, it's very hard to turn around the ship, and you have a paradigm, the paradigm of highway building was very hard to turn around in terms of getting people to understand that it wasn't more highways or congestion traffic problems. a whole new slew of solutions with streets and neighborhoods, all of that -- mass transit, all of the things that are now mainstreamed but that paradigm took decades to turn around. i'll never forget having a conversation with jacobs about this. 20 some odd years ago, it's not going to happen until the professors who teach transportation technique in colleges retire and a new generation comes in because they were teaching and even to this day still teach some of the same things. the paradigm in new orleans is still heavily an engineering paradigm, which means -- and they have doing it in the major streets, they're like boulevard-like streets. they could be redesigned to absorb the water in a really landscape way, and so this is the real challenge even in the next decade, because the money that's going into the old-engineering methods could be die -- diverted, but then you are dealing with contracts, agencies, unions and all those kinds of things, and that's a hard nut to crack. >> the same people that are doing it the wrong way. the kind of conservatism that society is clinged to. you want to go back to what we had before or perhaps improve that without rethinking the paradigm. but it was -- >> part of the problem was fema would not fund anything unless it was putting it back the way it was. they would not fund anything that was done better, and this is the dumbest government policy i ever heard of and it maybe a private contractor that's doing it but that's a government policy. only put back what you had. >> there was some wiggle room finally and there was incremental improvements were allowed. the stafford act prohibits improvement. it's supposed to be replacement possible. our levy system, which collapsed, has been fortified to some extent, they spent 14 and a half billion dollars for that. we have four to five levy system for 100--year-old storm. it's not something that can't happen several times in a decade. katrina was, in fact, a 300-year-old storm. by contrast, the dutch with their sophisticated way of managing water, have fortified their coast against 10,000-year events. 100 times more robust than the one that's being finished up in new orleans, this thanks again to the president at the time and we wonder why his successor hasn't intervene and then give us this levy something that can't handle the storm that just collapsed. >> they're working up here and i wish them well, but send them back when they are done. >> questions in a formal way from anybody that wants to ask them. we're yakking ourselves for quite a while. who has a question? thank you. okay. i'll ask the question because i have a microphone. this is a challenge. wait a minute. postkatrina new orleans, best thing not caused, worst loss. who wants to explain that question? all right, we'll move on. [laughs] >> okay, this is an interesting one that i can at least understand. the people who left new orleans and never came back, who are they, where are they, are they still of new orleans and do you -- how do you define that loss? >> one of the things i've heard that most of the people that left the city after the flood have returned at least to the state. fema flew who still have not been able to make it back. it's interesting reasons for that. always makes a point to say that are unable to go back home. they flew them anywhere and didn't care what happened to them. most of the folks that were flown out, were african american democrattics. it gets back to your question about culture t -- the great fare -- fear that the city would lose its culture. so in many ways the loss of these people even in the time after important people from all over central and indeed south america to rebuild the city at the time that new they weren't allowed to come back. another aspect of educational thing was that the assumption was that these people weren't coming back and plans for the schools were made on the assumption that most would not come back, of course, you had kids drifting back sometimes parentless. i would say that we're a much city now. 20%, we're at 80% of preflood population. we're busy trying to convert those people. [laughs] >> i think one also -- i spend a lot of time explaining the many, many different reasons that people didn't come back, many of those reasons started out and the government you could get from the government to rebuild was never enough unless you have a bank account sufficient to begin with. plus, there's something that, i think, unusual, not true in many cities, so many of the homes lived by black lone middle income people were built by the families themselves. their father, their grandfather. never created a deed, no line of succession, so comes katrina, 13 siblings all have an interest in a property not willing to turn it over to the last sibling that lived in it to reclaim -- >> nor did they have the paperwork. >> didn't have the paperwork or as one person points out in the book, it caused $6,000 just to hire somebody to try to find and create the paperwork. so under those circumstances, they found shelter elsewhere, they depended on their public hospital if they were elderly or not, public hospital was the rock that so many people, the rock that so many people depended on and their church, which if it wasn't reopened, they weren't coming back. so there are so many factors including the public housing one and one of the things that really blew my mind was they weren't allowing the very workers who would have been the workforce and as one expert pointed out, he had suggested ten cities could accommodated people quickly like they do in disasters in foreign shores but it had to be a contract from fema trailers, but they sent -- they describe -- distributed flyers from the border of texas that they wouldn't do for their own, you know, so a lot of this is uglying but -- ugly but a lot of different reasons people did not come back or also in the black middle class, the professionals were welcomed in other places, at other hospitals, law firms and places where they had trouble in new orleans. they found better places to be. it's not an easy answer to why people still have not come back, and some of them are still coming. >> i made one other point, the state admin -- had provisions to help renters, they had not worth replacing. >> the hispanic population in new orleans, the people that came in response to the recruitment drives in the border and sometimes under less will concept machinery has increased by 80%. it's a mindless infusion to our population, but there's a tough story behind it. let me ask it -- [inaudible conversations] >> well, the black population, i have the numbers here. i tried to do my homework here. black population at 67% before katrina is now at about 56%, so remains majority black fortunately. [inaudible conversations] >> hispanics are a big part of it. a lot of people that i speak of is the young and the restless the people that come in and teach our kids and all of that and have brought tremendous energy, don't let me cynicism hold here, there are black middle-class blacks in large numbers in that group that are whites, you know, the hispanic influx tends to be working class. we have many big vietnamese groups. a great mix of races and so forth. [inaudible conversations] >> repeat the question. >> yeah, the question is the housing projects were hoping under the clinton administration there was an elaborate mechanism to take public housing, which many instances had fallen to tear it down, rebuild so called mixed income communities where you had semi sub -- sub >> some of these new projects are terrific, but the fact is the great many people were excluded from them because they began to impose rules having to do with -- a felon in your family and the whole family would get kicked out. i wouldn't be able to pull one off here. >> they don't keep track purposely. >> also there were no numbers in the project that was completed prior to the flood. >> right. they were keeping apartments empty. i'm sort of an the alert waiting for the same thing to happened in new york that happened down there. what happened in new orleans is part of -- there's been a federal policy to get rid of and replace public housing with public-private partnerships, which is public development with private funds integrated economically, but the percentage of public housing tenants that return, varies from 70% or they get section 8 vouchers, many find themselves to rent apartments with landlords who don't take section 8 or landlords that don't care about keeping up the property. very convenient claim. some of us just say, just keep a record of the zip codes. where is it, what zip codes? they claim to have some numbers and who knows how many -- [inaudible] >> and what's true in what they are saying. the projects that have been rebuilt in new orleans, well, they look great, because first of all they think that the -- the so-called neglected brick projects were hopeless, which they weren't. i go into great detail. they are fabulous and model of modern apartments when they were built in 1940's. >> last 300 years. >> that i don't know. [inaudible] >> i thought i got that from you. >> if you did, i don't remember it. but they're fabulous with tile roofs and wood floors, all sorts of things. it's one of those sorry tales but it's a questionary tale. >> my mother lived from the project, a gorgeous project. soon after katrina, they took the roof off. it's like the things that would allow air circulation in the attic, they took them off. >> this is a parallels in the charity hospital story. it's sabotage. >> yeah. >> it's what it really was. a devastating story, but charity , the second oldest, everything habit it was great. >> negligenting -- neglecting the audience here. >> i'm sorry. >> it was the same story, three weeks later they sabotaged it and clogging them up with sheets, doing everything to bring the water in -- >> you'll like this. >> something asked what happened -- [inaudible] >> yeah. i think we answered that. >> we worked on that when -- [inaudible] >> where i live, their landlords, they put them on the sidewalk. we did not leave for these people to turn to. the people have not returned is the city of new who arelance is -- olens is being rebuilt for people with money. that's the truth. i'm sorry. [inaudible] >> i'm sorry, i'm glad you did. now we know what happened to one person. roberta can tell you about many more. good question here. if you're not aware of it, that we have jailed, let me think, a school board president, with another to follow and we are about to rejail a congressmen. we have jailed mayor negan. [inaudible] >> the particular reference is whether the administration here -- [laughs] >> the current mayor -- you want to take it? >> well, we have the lands which are editor publishes and the audience, so a couple of board members. we have filed a suit against the city of new orleans recently for lack of fulfillment of public records, specifically public records we seek deal with city budget, budgeting bill payment issues, sort of check register if you will. the city -- i did ask for public records under the megan administration, those were fulfilled under laziness than duty. so i don't -- i don't see a tremendous amount of improvement. although the word has been adopted, i don't think the deed follows. >> well, he's imitating our president. >> perhaps in using the word and not delivering. >> much of our reporting relies on public records so that's our live's work. >> let me wrap up here. at least as regards to the panel. of course, it's open to further questions on the floor. i happened to love the title of roberta's books. we're still here, ya bastards. also enormous challenge that is -- challenges that we face. we heard a lot of pros and cons, glass half full and glass half empty. i want to put roberta an the spot. okay, how are we doing? are we better off? >> well, it's interesting. in my last book which was published years ago, i had a conclusion in which i said those who want to think that the world is now all changed jacob and moses. we still have city fields among them, and we have a lot of change shakers. i found myself writing a similar conclusion to this book. we have a lot of positive things that have come out of katrina, the lens being one of them and a lot of the local grassroots, the neighborhoods that have been rebill. the stories are quite wonderful and certain projects whether it's the schoolyard and all sorts around the city, even markets that weren't there before katrina and engaged public in many ways, certainly more than katrina, and yet we still have the robert moses, close the public hospitals, destroy the public housing, you know, all the things that i related. so you still have both, but there's backsliding, and i -- and i talk a particular story in the neighborhood of the lower ward where the very engaged community oppose a totally inappropriate overscaled, badly designed, wrong kind of project. they were ignored by a city cowbl -- council that made the deals in the back room again. there's backsliding on book-room dealing, not that there isn't in new york and a million other cities, but a process had evolved after katrina that was much more respectful, there's backsliding and there's some going forward. there was a tax issue that would have been rich, some organizations that didn't need enrich meant -- enrichment and the social media in new orleans is totally new since katrina. so it's not a linear direction, both things are happening. i don't -- i think it's an open question as to which direction we'll take the stronger route. >> anyone wants to weigh in? >> a difficult way to answer that way is trying to differentiate. at this point, the national economy is improving and our improvement in new orleans based on current administration are based on economic times, so i'd like to stay firm with that. i don't know. [laughs] >> if anybody wants an argument for stimulus spending, new orleans is it. we did not have the 2008 crash, like it was somebody else's problem. we have funded by the fed. a question here. [inaudible] >> a couple of weeks ago about the rebuilding, and one of the leaders in the lower east side that was engaged -- improved a great deal the focus of new orleans. what i'm worried about is that the success of our program may drive neighbors out of the community. rebuilding and rebuilding it well to the point where it becomes attracted to others. they drive out the renters, they drive out the low-income population and i really want to find out whether it's becoming a trend in new orleans and what you really do to protect the fact that there's a lot of things that really -- [inaudible] >> when we revisit the successes they become fail use because the people who rebuild the successes are being pushed out. >> your answer is very certainly, yes. urban upgrades. it moves on. the neighborhoods become increasingly expensive as the sort of jack boot of fashion walks over them. we've seen that definitely in new orleans. there's a long way to go. there's a lot of neighborhoods that would benefit from an infusion of money and new ideas and -- and that it would remain to be seen whether it's an effective protection and place for the original population that is being forced out. there is not, you know, there are nonprofits, groups that certainly address those issues big time, these community groups that spend energy protecting but it's not formally a policy that i know. >> let me quickly add, i did -- i make a distinction. detrification has many positive sides to it. it's the replacement that's a problem. there are solutions in varying forms. the real missing almost -- element is public. but not comparable advantages to the individual property owner whether it be a renter or a residence/owner. this is a challenge. there are solutions, but the funding only goes to the top. >> those who want to hear more about roberta, you will have to buy the book and sign the book and there's time for that to happen. thank you for being here. [applause] >> thanks to the panel for being patient with their moderator and have a good evening. [inaudible conversations] >> book tv is on facebook. like us to get publishing news, behind-the-scene videos. facebook.com/bokk -- book tv o. indiana >> welcome.
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