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. Its my pleasure to welcome you to this wonderful public launch of roberta gratzs new book, and it is were still hear, ya bastards. On behalf of the new school and nation book, its 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 deans 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 cspan, and its so great that youre here tonight filming this and the cspan 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. Shes an acclaimed urbanist, and shes 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 citys land marks Preservation Committee and new yorks 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. Im 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 well manage to selforganize. 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 im going to start on my right with jed honor who ive horne who ive told everybody i felt after katrina he wrote possibly the best postkatrina 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 timespicayune at the time of the pulitzerwinning 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 werent 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 havent, its available online, he produced a wonderful i guess its a video called the hidden story the unknown story of black new orleans. And its 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 wont even tell you [laughter] its 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 shouldnt be rebuilt or wont be recover, all the experts saying all those things, and the people of new orleans have said were still here, ya bastards, we aint going anywhere. So thats the overall spirit of the book. But i wanted you to know that 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 tree items of three items of business to start with. I havent 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 well be better off if the questions can be held to the end. And i think youre asked to write down your answers and submit them somewhere. Thirdly, close scholars of the disaster, youll 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 fukushimas going to get there. We have to hope not. I was just over there doing a documentary for nhk tv, the japanese pbs, and its a rather horrifyingly still ambiguous situation as to whether theyve 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 youve dealt with so succinctly and beautifully in the book which everybodys 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. Well try. Theres 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 postdisaster 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 citizenled, 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, ill 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. Theyre deceived because the housing that you see is mostly two, threestory historic housing. It is you are wan in ways 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 their urbanism having been decimated by so many clearance and big topdown 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 its both the story of where we were and why with our cities and where we should be going if were going to recover from whether it was an urban renewal disaster or a Natural Disaster or a manmade disaster. Lois, im going to rope you into this conversation, if i may. Im 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 afrocaribbean 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 hed gone back to the earthquake of 14 something or other. People always talk about how were 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. Whats 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 id certainly never seen in carnival and probably hadnt 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 theres 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. Well 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 doesnt 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 dont, i dont 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 bills 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 dont think its 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. Uhhuh, thats right. We do have our share of and one of my favorite jokes about new orleans is that you have to go north of i10 to get to the south. Thats right. Mississippi is deeply southern is, and new orleans is a caribbean port. Its 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 its 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 theyre well intertwined, there seems to be general ignorance about the fact that this is the physical embodiment that endured for hundredplus years, and a little water was not going to watch them away. But what to wash them away. But what the broken levees didnt 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 im 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 postkatrina 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 weve 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 prekatrina blight. So all the blight that had existed before the flood continued to flourish. [laughter] im going to leave the details to robertas book, because they are delicious. But i want you all when you read that book to Pay Attention to karens sudden, shall we say, add vent as advent as a courage of the city and as a journalist because she w