Candidacy but havent release books. Next up a Panel Discussion on new orleans, ten years after hurricane katrina. Thank you all everyone for coming this evening. Its my pleasure to welcome you to this wonderful public launch of robertas new new book. It is how the people of new orleans rebuilt the city. On behalf of the new school and nation books, its my pleasure to welcome everyone. Before we get started i just wanted to say a couple things about some people would have helped helped make the series possible. They are mary watson and pamela tellis from the executive deans office and they are wonderful partners. I also want to think cspan. Its so great that you are here filming us and the cspan audience. Thank you. It is such a pleasure to get to publicly introduce roberta gratz, someone who has been a hero has been a hero of mine for a long time. She is an amazing writer and thinker. She is an acclaimed urbanist and has published for previous book including the battle for gotham. Her writing has also appeared in the Nation New YorkTime Magazine and the wall street journal. As many of of you know she previously served on new york citys Landmark Committee and advisory board. She also founded a center for city living. As many of you know she splits her time between new york and new orleans. Roberta thank you and enjoy the panel. [applause]. Thank you taylor and thank you to the Nation Institute for sponsoring this evening. Im going to introduce my friends and colleagues. Then jed is going to lead us in conversation. We lost one person for the evening having to do with a good reason in regard to his own book and we excused him and said we will manage to self organize. So we have and we expect it to be a lively conversation and that some port he will open up for questions from the audience and there will be cards passed around for you to put questions and post them to us. I will start on my right with jed who i thought wrote the best post katrina book called breach of faith. [applause]. Until now yes. He became a good friend and even an editorial critic of mine over the years. He was on the city editor at the times at the time of the pulitzerwinning coverage of katrina. And of course course you know breach of faith. Then we have to my right karen who, if and when you read the book is one of the herons of the book. I like to describe her as the civic activists who became a civic activist the usual way. She got angry. She started a blog right after katrina called squandered heritage tracking the houses that were demolished without the owners knowing. The contractors taking money for work they were not doing and leading what turned into a revealing corruption in the removal system and people actually went to jail. That led eventually to her and a colleague starting the lens which is an online investigative journal which i consider one of the best things that happen in new orleans after katrina and its just fabulous. She continues to write and make trouble in the way that i think works. To my left is lois eli and for those of you who followed the hbo story, she is the story writer and editor on that series. If you may have seen and, and if you havent its Available Online he produced a wonderful i guess its a video, called the unknown story of black new orleans and its wonderful. [applause]. Further to my left is randy who among many things runs the foundation devoted to education and new orleans and is an author of a recent wonderful book called taste for chaos which is basically about literary conversations and many other things. He also wrote wrote a book prior to that about his own crazy family story. His mother was and i wont even tell you, its a good good book. I have one little thing to tell you 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 real graffiti and the reality was such that we used it as the title because it really was capturing the feeling of so many new orleanians since the whole world was assuming it wont be rebuilt or recovered. Were still here. Were not going anywhere. Thats the overall spirit of the book. I wanted you to know thats where it comes from. At this point im going to turn it over to jed to sort of lead this little pack of talkers into some organized. Three items i want to start with, i havent heard a cell phone which is good so please turn them off if you havent done so. Secondly something roberta already said, if we Say Something totally of noxious or stupid, feel free to rise and quiz us here now but for the most part i think people will be better off if your questions can be held to the end. Youre asked to write down your questions and submit them somewhere. Thirdly you will hear us using katrina and federal flood and collapse interchangeably. We do so fully cognizant but katrina, as we speak of it in new orleans was a manmade disaster. It was an engineering failure. It is in fact the secondworst engineering failure in human history. Does anyone know what the worst engineering history was . Chernobyl. I was just over doing a documentary and its an ambiguous situation about bringing that to the ground. We hope that doesnt make it to the top. The question i think hans a lot of katrina discussion is whether it takes katrina to provoke the things youve dealt with so beautifully in the book. Does it take a katrina. Are there lessons here and broader themes that apply to cities everywhere or is this something that is just eccentric and peculiar itself . Can you make it a little louder. Is this better . There are two ways to answer that because i should preface it by saying this is my sixth book about urban change. I have been writing about how cities grow fall apart, recover , how they stray urban for a long time. 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 had seen every success in every city in every neighborhood that has succeeded, they have succeeded from the ground up with citizen lead citizen initiatives. Which way was way was this going to go . My immediate feeling was i had to get down there. I did three weeks after the storm, get 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 for months after an long after the water had receded. We walked in and he looked around, i have to tell you if it was me i wouldve turned around and never looked back. It was everything you can imagine and he said it was in dad shape when i bought it i fixed it once and ill do it again. I was so inspired and i felt if this was the spirit, i was gonna stay in new orleans this was a story i had to tell. I continued to go and that was the spirit that i did find in new orleans. As far as other cities this story has every tale, good and bad, that every other city has peers it has the tragedy, the disaster capitalism stories, the demolitions which have should have never happened. Its as bad of an urban destruction story as i have ever seen and it has all the wisdom where local wisdom trumped distant expertise. So yes there are a lot of lessons. What i never expected in new orleans even though i had been there and written a little bit about it, but new orleans is so much more urban than the world thinks. Its deceiving because the housing you see is mostly two or three story historic housing. It is urban in ways which i wont 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 there urbanism after being devastated by topdown projects. The lesson lesson of urbanism is definitely in new orleans. I hope this book is read not just as a specific story, but as one with lessons also how to deal with the disaster and we can discuss some of those issues. Its both the story of where we are and why with our city and where we should be going from when it was an urban renewal disaster or a manmade disaster or natural disaster. Im remembering, and of of course its the tenth anniversary this year and im remembering the agony and the misery and the people had died but we had to look ahead and think about rebuilding. In the early time there was anxiety about the city losing its cultural pizzazz. Whether we we become a toy version of what we had been witches and afro caribbean culture. There certainly have been an onslaught but how have we done . Is it still full of cultural originality . At the time of the flood, i tried to call the smart people i knew and he put me in touch with a bunch of experts and said after all these big disasters, and hes going back to the earthquake and people always talk about how can you do things differently, but in the end it will pretty much go back to what it was before. In in the context of new orleans culture, going back to what it was before dash people are coming back to the city with the kind of determination i had not seen any other time almost lost those things and it seems as if there has been an attempt to reclaim that. They did an informal survey and what they concluded is that more people were than ever before. You you have to put it in a historical context. We talk about the disasters that have hit new orleans. Americans have tried to impose american racism and while its imperfect it isnt as bad and many other areas. In addition, new orleans has been at war with its culture for a long time. They made it illegal on carnival day and there are old laws going back to the 1700s. They want to charge them ten times the amount of money that they were charging the richest people. 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 arrest Young Musicians playing on the streets of new orleans. That is to say that the culture of new orleans has been at war against the city of new orleans and the war continues much today. Sometimes they they win. I dont agree with you that they made it illegal to mask. The indians emerged in the 1880s after the wild bill. I think you need to go back further than wild bill. For those [inaudible] i think certainly, the tradition that we speak of relates to that but its not exactly saying dash for those who want a footnote here, the upshot of the indian suppression, if you will, the will, the masking and all of that was a wonderfully statistical counter thrust by black new orleans. They proceeded to put on blackface over black skin and where we exhume grass skirts and make themselves a parity of the image that whites had of black people and of indians. To this day, the parade runs through the street of new orleans sometimes and you can go back to the indians if you are is fascinated with them as i am. They have been called the northernmost banana republic. It has also been called the southernmost part of rusk belt. It links us to detroit which is similar dash and mediterranean one of my favorite jokes is you have to go north to get to the south. Thats true. Its very different. All of which is a way to say that they had been struggling well before katrina and the collapse. That was certainly not one bit on 200 30,000 Housing Units being destroyed in the flood. We have in our midst a very close scholar of the particular entities in new orleans and i thought they could bring us up to speed on that whole part of the recovery. I think its interesting that its often referenced apart from the culture of new orleans when actually the culture is embodied in the housing which many of our craftsmen were also musicians et cetera, et cetera. Even though there and client on intertwined, a little water was not going to wash them away, but broken levees didnt accomplish what we had a Public Policy and a few dollars from the federal government really pushed along. I did spend a lot of time documenting demolitions which were done against homeowner wishes but i also catalogued thousands of homes that people who had already disinvest it in the city in the white flight era and had no Homeowners Insurance and no intention in returning those properties to commerce had opted to take a few bucks from the federal governments to demolish. I just started going through the catalogue of photos and what im finding is about 90 have results from that loss. I did spend a lot of time looking at blight and that is a very fun word to play around with because you can use it as an excuse for just about anything and it often does get used. I know there is one person in the audit audience who picked up where i left off and he catalogued a lot of properties that had been slated for demolition where neighborhoods were taken out for things that are still not functioning. My interest in cataloguing the demolition of new orleans was we were at the beginning, and even you said, get said over and over again that 80 of the city was destroyed. 80 was not destroyed, 80 was damaged and some was horrific and resulted in homes being lost. For the most part the houses are built with materials that could take the water. If we were educated about how to mitigate that water damage we would have seen a lot less lost than weve seen. One more thing, that that money that came from the federal government for demolish could not be used to demolish prekatrina blight. So all of the stuff that existed before katrina continued to flourish. [laughter] be sure to Pay Attention when you read the book to karens advance as a journalist because she was doing something quite different before that. Its a wonderful testament of the power of citizens to rise up and make things happen in the aftermath of disaster. There were a lot of big ideas sitting around after katrina there was highspeed rail, they were going to put casinos all over the downtown area the one thing that certifiably did happen was an enormous shakeup of the School System in new orleans. It was very controversial and you had 5 of kids going to Charter Schools so ill leave it to randy to comment on where were at in new orleans. Who one who lost and whats going on with the schools . It is a very complicated story and Charter School in america is very controversial. In new orleans theres some very triplex schools. They emerged where the school board was utterly corrupt and bankrupt right before katrina there are statistics that show that things were improving a bit in 2005 but after katrina there was this movement to start Charter Schools. I had been supporting a Charter School school that emerged in the 90s and right after katrina i met alice water and she told me a wonderful story and she wanted to do something for new orleans. There was a Wonderful Program where kids learn to garden sustainably and eat sustainably and understand where their food comes from and if they grow at the eat it so they learned how to eat good food. Now we have five of these schools and one of the interesting things about this was that first line was one of the first schools we opened after katrina in january and their focus on the edible schoolyard was taught that by focusing on something that created a marketability. One of the things that happened was that it was decided that students could go to any school in new orleans. It didnt have to be neighborhood bound. It would it would be busing from anywhere to anywhere. So schools started competing and one of the thing they competed on was focus. One school is Math Sciences in one school is this or that. The edible schoolyard has help shape that. Now the busing thing i think is one of our ongoing problems because we spend a lot of problems on busing and the students are spending a lot of time on buses. The neighborhoods are the losers because i think theres benefits in schools. That was half a block from where i live. I feel strongly about that. Im not a fan of all the Charter Schools but im supporting them. Im not sure its comparable to the rest of america, i think its working very well in new orleans in general. I dont think any city has made a complete commitment to charter i have not looked totally into this yet but i am seeing pieces of it. You have state money from the Recovery School district rebuilding some fabulous School Buildings all of which were allowed to deteriorate and never had anything done to them. So public money is restoring these schools. They are then being sold were turned over to schools that are not fully public. There are all these little sometimes lost in the picture. The beginning of a lot of the Charter Schools swept everything clean and among the things they eliminated without understanding the culture was a lot of schools eliminated the bands. The bands defined the neighborhoods in the schools. Its coming back and randy is supportive of a program that has helped bring it back. Putting it back in the School System but what has happened over the 10 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 closing and its a very hard system to get a picture of access its not centralized. Its not easy to get a full picture so from a National Perspective i think it makes an interesting study of the evolution of whats happening in the charter system and its only because katrina that they could sweep the clean the way they have so in that way it doesnt really compare with others but its being watched for reasons that 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 teachers. I cannot understand how you can care about the kids in fire all their others mothers and an occasional fathers to teach in the schools. And even replace these with competent and experienced teachers i might go with that but without a doubt many of the teachers werent competent. To prove that they werent all incompetent after