In the last issue of our magazine, we asked our readers to come up with a six-word motto for New Orleans. We collected the submissions and then invited the GOOD community to vote and chose a winner. The results are in. Congratulations to Isabelle Mitchell-Haenggi, whose winning motto appears above. You can see a slideshow of our eleven finalists here.

By Molly Reid.

Five years after Katrina, a former corporate event planner now runs a successful demolition service. A Mardi Gras Indian chief lives in Atlanta, but continues to perform with his tribe back home several times a year. A pair of first responders, neither of them from the city, found love, settled in New Orleans, and started a family.

There are countless stories of the life-altering impact that the storm continues to have on people from the Gulf Coast, and they give a human perspective to the massive, hard-to-quantify changes the storm brought to the city as a whole. How many people left after Katrina and never returned? How many rebuilt their homes and stayed? What portion of the current population is made up of people who never would have considered living in New Orleans until after the disaster?

We don’t have precise answers to these questions, and there likely never will be. But here is what we do know: By July, 2006, the city’s population had dropped to 46 percent of its pre-Katrina total and by December, 2009, it was back up to 78 percent. The Greater
New Orleans area, meanwhile, is already at 91 percent its pre-storm level. And as the city repopulates, it is changing.

While New Orleans is still a majority-black city, the proportion of African-Americans has dropped to 61 percent, down from almost 68 percent before Katrina. It also is a wealthier city, with fewer adults lacking a high school diploma, fewer households with children, fewer households lacking vehicles, and a larger share of the population that is foreign-born.

These glimpses of the big picture describe a New Orleans that has held onto much of its pre-storm population while attracting a better-educated, wealthier pool of newcomers. Sometimes, though, the most compelling evidence of Katrina's influence is in the individual stories of New Orleanians old and new. Here's a look at how the 2005 levee breaches changed the lives of nine people.

New Orleans Then, New Orleans Now

Timolynn Sams

Age:  36
Native of:  New Orleans
Lives in:  New Orleans

After settling in Charlotte for two years after Katrina to secure a good education for her son, Sams resolved to return to New Orleans while at a business conference. Having endured one too many "You’re not going back there, are you?" inquiries from colleagues, she decided to return—if for no other reason, she says, than to tell the story of people who know and love New Orleans.

In June, 2007, she bought a home in the city and signed on as executive director of a new nonprofit called the Neighborhoods Partnership Network, an umbrella group for 107 community organizations that effectively “fills the void that government wasn’t filling,” she says.

Denise Thornton

Age:  52
Native of:  Houma, LA
Lives in:  New Orleans

Before Katrina, Thornton was a housewife first and businesswoman second. She ran a small business that manufactured home fragrance diffusers, while her husband, Doug, worked as the general manager of the Louisiana Superdome.

After the floodwaters destroyed her business's warehouse and her home in a well-to-do neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain, she focused on bringing her community back to life. Seeing her neighbors' frustration as they struggled to rebuild—“They didn't know about mold remediation, how to handle contracting,” she says—Thornton began dispensing advice.

By February, 2006, she had finagled the only re-started internet connection in her neighborhood and had turned her house into a makeshift resource center. Her nonprofit organization, Beacon of Hope, continues to provide neighborhoods with capacity-building assistance.

Simone Bruni

Age:  38
Native of:  New Orleans
Lives in:  New Orleans

When New Orleans suddenly became a not-so-great destination for conferences and private events, Bruni saw her whole industry implode. But when neighbors began coming to her for rebuilding advice—“for whatever reason, they came to me,” she says—she found a new professional calling.

Bruni rented some demolition equipment and bought some Dumpsters and painted them pink. She earned the name Demo Diva, and gained instant access to an entire market of women managing the gutting of their flood-damaged homes. More than 2,000 jobs later, she has no plans to quit.  "I'm a big player now," Bruni says.

New Orleans Then, Elsewhere Now

Nelson Burke

Age:  38
Native of:  New Orleans
Lives in:  Atlanta

Burke, Big Chief for the Red Hawk Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, stayed in a hotel on Canal Street during the storm and was bused out of the city to Texas. He and his wife chose to settle in Atlanta to be close to his ailing mother-in-law, but Burke has continued to mask with his 26-person tribe at annual Mardi Gras Indians events in New Orleans.

He’s not the only Red Hawk Hunter in exile. “I have a flag boy out there in Dallas, Texas,” he says. “One of my spy boys, he’s in Louisiana but he’s not in New Orleans. I’d love to come back home.”

Lumar LeBlanc

Age:  42
Native of:  New Orleans
Lives in:  Houston

As snare drummer for the popular Soul Rebels Brass Band, LeBlanc spends a lot of time on the road. Though displaced to Houston since the storm, LeBlanc drives to New Orleans every week for the band’s standing Thursday night gig, as well other monthly engagements and private events. Beyond New Orleans, the band tours Europe and plays shows across America.

Financially unable to return to his boarded-up home in eastern New Orleans, LeBlanc finds solace in his ambassador status. “I do feel an innate dedication to the city to always come back and perform,” he says. “We carry a badge on us that holds the city on it, that shines bright.”

Jeff Beninato

Age:  “50s”
Native of:  New Orleans
Lives in:  Bloomington, IL

The musician, producer, and Ninth Ward native Beninato and his wife, Karen, switched to small-town life after Katrina to be close to Jeff’s elderly father. After hearing dozens of stories about New Orleans musicians who had lost everything in the storm, the couple founded the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund, which has passed along a half-million dollars in grants and instruments.

“It’s been amazing how many people are still finding NOMRF and offering to help,” Jeff says. “There’s no place on earth like New Orleans for musicians. I know we’ll be back full time down the road.”

Elsewhere Then, New Orleans Now

Nicole Saulnier Timmons and Paul Timmons

Age:  40 and 41

Native of:  Los Angeles and Chile

Lives in:  New Orleans

Nicole and Paul met as first responders for the Red Cross at a shelter in Baytown, Texas, where she was a volunteer and he was a case manager. Nicole eventually returned to her home in Ohio, and Paul was redeployed to New Orleans, but they called or e-mailed each other every day—“as friends.”

On New Year’s Eve 2005, however, Paul texted Nicole an endearingly simple message: “Do you want to come share your life with me?”

Today, Nicole and Paul Timmons are married with two children, Connor, 3, and Austin, 9 months. Nicole is a disaster recovery director with United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area and Paul is the executive director of Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership.

“New Orleans is now our home” Nicole says. “We have lived in a lot of places in this country and abroad, and there is nowhere like New Orleans.”

Robert Fogarty

Age:  27
Native of:  Omaha, NE
Lives in:  New Orleans

Fogarty arrived in New Orleans in 2007, fresh-faced and ready to serve as an AmeriCorps-sponsored City Hall aide. Over his two years in the post, Fogarty found a mentor in Colonel Jerry Sneed, director of the city’s Office of Homeland Security. Soon he came up with the idea for Evacuteer.org, a network of volunteers to ferry carless residents out of New Orleans during emergencies.

His second brainchild is Dear New Orleans, a for-profit photography service that works an irresistible gimmick: Write a love note to New Orleans on your hand (or face or neck) and have your portrait taken. Since debuting in fall 2009, the company has scored portraits of Dr. John, Mos Def, Susan Sarandon, and hundreds of other New Orleans lovers.

“At the end of the day, I want to have this portfolio of everyone from the mayor to everyday New Orleans citizens, where we’re all in it together,” Fogarty says.

Dan Favre

Age:  28

Native of:  Joshua Tree, CA

Lives in:  New Orleans

One of hundreds of college graduates who found opportunity and purpose in post-Katrina New Orleans, Favre is putting down roots. Favre, who runs the Gulf Restoration Network’s campaign to stop deforestation of native cypress trees, is in the process of buying his first house and “plans to be here for the long run,” he says.

"From the joy of the long nights on the town drinking cocktails and listening to live music to the satisfaction of being a 20-something who can truly play a meaningful role in the rebuilding a great American city, there’s no place like New Orleans," Favre says.

Photos by Daymon Gardner.

This article originally appeared in GOOD Magazine Issue 020: The New Orleans Issue. Read more.

During the month of July, we received submissions that extracted and described the essence of the city, from its culture and food to its music and mentality. Unfortunately, we couldn't post all of the submissions. Our art team choose 11 entries and interpreted them visually. 

The fate of New Orleans' new motto rests in your hands. Please let us know which slide you feels best captures the city right now by sharing your thoughts in the comments section below. We will choose a winner by Thursday, August 12.

You can read more from the issue here.
 

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the United States. The “storm surge”--water rushing up the Mississippi River--caused New Orleans’s system of levees to fail, resulting in catastrophic flooding throughout the city. The lack of an effective government response to the flood was highlighted by constant news reports of New Orleans residents forced onto their roofs by the flood waters, waiting for help. The storm resulted in nearly 2,000 fatalities and $90 billion in damages.

For the past three months, oil has been pumping into the Gulf from the remains of the exploded Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig. As of press time, it appeared as if a dome installed by BP had stopped some, but not all, of the flow. The environmental and financial toll will certainly be enormous, another blow to the city as it tries to recover.

Top photo: NOAA; bottom photo: NASA.

Louis Armstrong jazz musician

Carl Weathers actor

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails

Truman Capote author

Fats Domino R&B/rock musician

Anne Rice author

Ellen DeGeneres TV host/actress

Lil Wayne rapper

Wynton Marsalis jazz musician

Richard Simmons fitness celebrity

Photos left to right: Library of Congress, RJ Shaughnessy,  Library of Congress Tulane Public Relations

Population  340,000
Area  350 square miles
Mayor  Mitch Landrieu, Democrat
Major Industries  Tourism, oil and gas, maritime activities
Median  Income $37,000
Home Ownership  67% (U.S. average: 67%)
Nicknames  The Crescent City, the Big Easy, the City that Care Forgot, NOLA
Racial Breakdown  55% white, 37% black, 4% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% other
Professional Sports Teams  Saints (football), Hornets (basketball)

GOOD's Guide to NOLA Basics originally appeared in GOOD Magazine's New Orleans Issue. Read more from the magazine here.

A. Algiers  One of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods, Algiers lies across the Mississippi from the rest of the city, connected by bridges and the Canal Street Ferry. Visitors often take the ferry, known for its spectacular views of the city, to Algiers Point, a historic district with a variety of houses, churches, and many other specimens of 19th-century architecture.

B. Bayou St. John  The waterway that runs through this community is rumored to have been the site of many a voodoo ritual by Marie Laveau, New Orleans’s best known practitioner of the dark art. It’s also home to the New Orleans Museum of Art and the sprawling 1,300-acre City Park.

C. Carrollton  Located near Tulane and Loyola universities, Carrollton was its own city until it was annexed by New Orleans in the 1800s. Built on higher ground than the rest of the area, this neighborhood of streetcars, boutiques, and Victorian architecture managed to emerged from Katrina with less damage than the rest of the city.

D. Central Business District  This mixed-use neighborhood may be all business during the day, but at night it melds the panache of the cabaret with the high-culture sounds of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

E. French Quarter  The lively French Quarter, home to Bourbon Street, has become synonymous with the city as a whole, a place where visitors mingle amid historic restaurants and tourist traps. Sometimes called the Vieux Carré, it’s the oldest part of the city, filled with architecture dating from the city’s Spanish period.

F. Garden District  True to its name, the Garden District is lush and green, but the dynamic community is also home to some of the first expressions of Greek Rival architecture in the city.

G. Marigny/Bywater  Just down the river from the French Quarter lies Faubourg Marigny, an artist’s community that was once the plantation of Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville. The Creole playboy developed the land in 1806, and today the neighborhood’s Marigny Triangle hosts some of NOLA’s best jazz.

H. Ninth Ward  The neighborhood that bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina was left with a displaced culture, but creative people are looking to restore the Ninth Ward as a premier cultural hub of New Orleans. Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians’ Village is doing its part by providing homes to many of the city’s celebrated artists.

I. Treme  One of America's oldest black neighborhoods, Treme wears its cultural heritage on its sleeve. Many credit Treme’s Congo Square—a plaza where slaves gathered on Sundays to eat, make music, and dance—as the birthplace of jazz. 

Gumbo, a native Louisianan stew, is usually prepared with meat or shellfish stock and the “holy trinity” of vegetables—celery, bell peppers, and onions.

Jambalaya is a Creole dish combining meat (usually chicken and sausage), rice, and broth. The dish has several varieties—Creole, Cajun, or the rare “white” jambalaya—and a rather murky etymological history.

Po’boys, unlike most sub sandwiches, are made on Louisiana French bread—flaky on the outside, fluffy on the inside. The subs are usually served piping hot and stuffed with meat or fried seafood.

Beignets, a French-Creole take on doughnuts, are pastries made with deep-fried dough and sprinkled (or, more often, piled) with powdered sugar or frosting. The beignet was designated Louisiana’s official state doughnut in 1986.

Born in 1951 at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans and named for then Crime Commission chairman Richard Foster, bananas Foster is a dessert made with bananas, vanilla ice cream, brown sugar, and rum. The dish is well known for its sensational preparation—a flaming pan of bananas, butter, sugar, and rum is poured over a bowl of ice cream, often tableside.

Photography of Lester Carey's sign painting by Anthony Turducken DelRosario.

1718  Founded as La Nouvelle-Orléans by members of the French Mississippi Company, the city becomes a major hub for traders in the U.S. interior. 

1763  The Seven Years War ends. The Treaty of Paris gives New Orleans to Spain.

1803  The Spanish return the city to the French. Meanwhile, Napoleon sells the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States, which takes control of the city on December 20. 

1812  Louisiana enters the Union as the 18th state. 

1815  The Battle of New Orleans pits an outnumbered Andrew Jackson against 10,000 British troops. He wins, even though the War of 1812 was already ended by truce before the battle begins. 

1817  The Washington becomes the first steamboat to sail up the Mississippi as far as Louisville, Kentucky ushering in the golden age of steamboat travel. 

1836  The port of New Orleans is the busiest in the country. 

1830s  The Sazerac, quite possibly the first cocktail invented in America, is born in New Orleans. 

1856  The Mystick Krewe of Comus begins Mardi Gras celebrations in the city. 

1862  Taken by Union troops early in the Civil War, New Orleans avoids the destruction visited upon most Southern cities. 

1863  The city’s famous streetcars begin running. 

1892  Harold Plessy is removed from a whites-only New Orleans street car. The Supreme Court case resulting from the removal codifies the idea of “separate but equal.” 

1900  New Orleans native Buddy Bolden begins playing what many claim to be the original jazz music. He is never recorded. 

1927  The Great Mississippi Flood displaces 700,000 residents. The flood is made worse when officials dynamite a levee, flooding much of St. Bernard Parish. 

1978  New Orleans’s first black mayor, Ernest Morial, is sworn into office. 

2005  Hurricane Katrina

2009  The New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl.

2010  BP Oil Spill

Local dialect combined with the historical French and Spanish names has resulted in some non-intuitive regional pronunciations. Opinions will vary on the authenticity of these versions, but they should get you around without sounding like a complete yokel.

What follows are selections from the book’s stunning visual treatment of New Orleans’s iconography.

We asked three local design firms to rethink the floodwalls and levee of New Orleans in a way that maximizes community living, creativity, and safety.

Living in a city bisected by the Mississippi River and abutting Lake Ponchartrain, New Orleanians have a complicated relationship with water. Where other cities might take advantage of these shorelines for recreation and community activities, prizing a natural access to water in a sweltering urban center, New Orleans is, instead, walled in—its residents’ interactions with nature is mediated by 104.8 miles of levees and floodwalls. These structures are, of course, necessary for the safety of the city (even if they have been far from perfect), but they create a visually forceful divide between the city and its surrounding wetlands. With pumping stations behind walls, even the infrastructure hides itself. It’s as if there is no water at all.

With that in mind, GOOD asked a few of New Orleans’s finest designers to re-imagine, improve upon, or replace these floodwalls and levee spaces. What we got were ideas that are at once community-enhancing, dynamic, and effective—a testament to the power of thoughtful design and public art, especially in blighted areas.

-Zach Youngerman

Living with Water

“Living with the water” has become a corollary principle of Dutch policy. Southern Louisiana, like the Netherlands, must adapt to the threats inherent to living in a subsiding delta. This is not an either/or proposition, it is an ordering principle. History repeatedly shows the folly of living in a delta; disasters are common there. To ignore, however, the water’s magic, the unique, abundant opportunities that can and should be exploited for economic, societal, and cultural gain, is equally foolhardy. New Orleans has turned its back on its water and thus its nature, viewing it as a menace or nuisance to be hidden, walled, and drained, yet historical connections to water still exist within the city.

During the Dutch Dialogue 3 planning charrette held in New Orleans in April, 2010, a vision of a circulating water system was developed. Providing space for water storage by strategically widening the outfall canals and lowering the water level would allow removal of the menacing and divisive flood walls. Bayou St. John, currently stagnant, would again communicate with Lake Ponchartrain and provide a constant source of water to charge the system. A water-retention network would reduce demand on the pumping system, replenish and balance groundwater, clean surface runoff, and lower the ambient air temperature. This vision not only increases safety and environmental quality, but it embraces water as an opportunity.

-Waggonner & Ball

Waggonner & Ball Architects is an award-winning architecture-and-planning firm committed to sustainable building practices. Its plan, “Living with Water,” redesigns New Orleans’s hydrology management and transforms the current drainage canals into recreational amenities.

Levee Housing

As we saw after hurricane Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969, and Katrina in 2005, there is a perennial desire to return and restore low lying-communities throughout the Gulf Coast, despite the lack of storm and flood protection and general future risk. Coupled with this condition is the resistance of communities on higher ground to accept higher-density housing and lower income populations. This dilemma could possibly be addressed by creating higher-density development adjacent to levees and floodwalls. Sites could be selected based on availability of sufficient land between levees and floodwalls and existing urban infrastructure.

In some cases, mixed use development and air-rights development might be built over existing commercial uses. It may also be possible to use this concept as part of an “armoring” or levee-improvement process. Such development would have the added urban design benefit of increased open space access to both the levees and the waterfront.

-Robert Tannen

Robert Tannen is an urban planner, activist, and conceptual artist who moved to the Gulf Coast to do recovery planning after Hurricane Camille in 1969. His redesign features higher-density living and mixed-use development on high ground, along the levee, providing both safer housing and additional armoring.

RiverWheel

RiverWheel is conceived as a kind of Millennium Wheel for New Orleans, but fully powered by the current of the Mississippi River. Rising high along the city’s riverfront, the constantly turning structure will serve as a visual reminder of the steady flow that is the city’s raison d’etre. It’s a contemporary symbol that brings together the carnival aspect of the city’s personality with the legacy of the paddlewheeler to connect locals and tourists to the water. The structure would be a functioning ferris/observation wheel designed and engineered to be raised and lowered with the level of the river. A pivoting “paddle” attached to each passenger car controls the speed of the wheel’s overall rotation.

-Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness is the director of content development at Trumpet, which connects brands with communities through product development, social and digital media, advertising, and public relations. His project uses the flow of the Mississippi River to power a Ferris wheel—a new tourist icon and visual reminder of the water flowing through the city.
 

That’s not to say artists haven’t had a powerful and lasting effect on the Gulf Coast over the past five years. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right and its LEED Platinum homes have helped transform the Lower Ninth Ward, U2 guitarist The Edge’s Music Rising foundation has donated thousands of instruments to local musicians, and the financial and housing resources provided by Sweet Home New Orleans, a nonprofit organization designed to help keep New Orleans musical traditions alive, have all made measurable impacts. They have helped people in need while keeping the media’s glare on the recovery efforts when the million-dollar checks have stopped making headlines (or headway).

There’s also no denying that in this era of perma-catastrophe, you can drop a roster of “charitainers” into a hot zone for a Live Aid–>

“Let’s be honest, not many creatives are willing to get a boat and look for survivors to fish out of the water like Sean Penn. Nor should they be expected to.”

“The problems we’re trying to tackle here are billion-dollar problems, and if we get a $300,000 infusion we’re thrilled,” says Sweet Home New Orleans’s director, Jordan Hirsch. However, he notes, “the most beneficial actions I’ve seen have come from artists who physically came to the city, really took some time to absorb what was going on, and then crafted a response that made sense for them and the work that they do.”

He cites efforts by the Indigo Girls, Jon Langford, and the Moldy Peaches’s Kimya Dawson as great successes because those artists have a solid grasp on web outreach and fan participation. The Indigo Girls auctioned off opportunities to perform with them in New Orleans and took their time investigating which organizations would be best served by their donations. For his part, Langford created visual art for the charities he worked with, while Dawson peppered her website with blogs and links about her efforts. Let’s be honest, not many creatives are willing to get a boat and look for survivors to fish out of the water like Sean Penn. Nor should they be expected to.

“The biggest thing to consider is return on investment,” adds Hirsch. One of the best returns on investment in his mind has been the work of the HBO drama Treme—a show about the eponymous New Orleans neighborhood, which is considered the heart of the city’s musical culture. In this case, the show’s producers have employed a revolving cast of local jazz musicians as actors and helped to license and sell their music through its website. It also put a lot of sympathetic faces in place of the abused, most notably with the compelling turn by Clarke Peters as a displaced Mardi Gras Indian battling against the criminal insurance industry and equally criminal federal government’s refusal to reopen the housing projects. (Today, there are still 60,000 blighted homes in the city, the most in America.)

Despite all that, the Treme co-creator and part-time New Orleans resident Eric Overmyer admits, “I don’t know that television shows have social or political impact.” He may be right. Despite being picked up for a second season and fawned over by critics, the show has seen a steady decline in ratings since its premiere, which garnered a respectable 1.1 million viewers. At the end of the day, it’s a show about New Orleans culture, not public policy, but poignantly plucked heartstrings can lead politics.

“I think what’s remarkable about the recovery—both in a good and bad sense—is that it’s largely been generated by individuals, volunteer groups, church groups, and some celebrities,” says Overmyer. “The government response on all levels has been remarkably slow, and one of the big questions we’re going to be dealing with in the second season is: Where did all the money go?”

Hey, somebody’s got to do the due diligence. With oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, any misuse of Katrina funds doesn’t seem to be a priority with the current administration. But unless the feds plug the leak and hold BP accountable for every penny of damage, don’t be surprised if another A-lister—or maybe Kanye himself—delivers Obama his own verbal haymaker. Should Treme make it that far, it’ll have its say, too.

Illustrations by Rebecca Rebouche.

This article originally appeared in GOOD Issue 020: The New Orleans Issue, on newsstands now. Read more from The New Orleans Issue here.

With geography and climate change working against it, New Orleans prepares for the future. GOOD assesses its resiliency plan.

This article originally appeared in GOOD Issue 020: The New Orleans Issue, on newsstands now. Read more from The New Orleans Issue here.

There has been a lot of admirable progress in New Orleans in the last five years, but what happens during the next big storm? Could all this progress be washed away? After all, the physical geography of the city hasn’t changed: It still sits vulnerably surrounded by water, tucked between (and in many places, below) two massive lakes, the continent’s biggest river, and an ever-warming Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, dealing with water is nothing new for New Orleans; flood prevention shaped the city. But the city’s new Master Plan—approved in January—is the first initiative to have “anticipated rapidly sinking land (predicted to subside another three feet in many parts of the city by 2100) or globally rising sea levels.”

The new plan is an opportunity to correct the course. It is the result of an unprecedented public participation and worldwide consultation, and its top priorities, according to lead organizer David Dixon, are “to protect the city and the region from the impacts of rising seas and global weather change.”

So what is the city actually doing? And what more could it be doing, to anticipate hazards and lessen vulnerability? Here’s a look.

Bigger, better levees There were 50 levee breaches in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish during Hurricane Katrina. Some levees had water flood over them, some were eroded by the force of the water, and four failed entirely at their foundations. The obvious and immediate fix: Make them bigger and better. The Army Corps of Engineers has set out to do just that, with locals expressing tentative confidence that they won’t screw it up it again. Some levees are being raised, some are being armored with metal, and the major foundational failures have been rebuilt as stronger “T-wall” structures.

Status  Essential levees have been repaired; nearly all should be beefed up by 2011, though delays continue to plague the project.

Floating homes  Some people—especially the elderly or less mobile New Orleanians—would prefer not to climb 10 feet of stairs to get to the first floors of their houses. Architects have come up with a solution: Make the base of the house like a raft that can rise with flood waters. The first such house in the United States was built by the Make It Right Foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward, but this technology has been put to work in the Netherlands for a decade.

Status  There’s one of them.

Elevated homes  The city is actually mandating that flood-damaged homes near the levees be elevated to safe levels. The definition of “safe” is changing: Current city standards protect against a one-in-100-year storm, but the new master plan adopts the stringent one-in-500-year storm standard. To foot the bill for the renovation, a Louisiana State program offers up to $100,000 per house, and local construction and design firms have mastered the art of making elevated homes blend in.

Status  Under way and ongoing.

Blueways  Over time, the city’s countless navigation canals, drainage canals, and bayous have been penned in by concrete works. But with thoughtful design and landscaping, canals and rain gardens can absorb rainwater, relieving the potential for flooding while also creating attractive outdoor spaces for pleasure and recreation (with the occasional alligator). The master plan highlights Bayou St. John as one such “cherished feature” in its neighborhood, and says that “if risk is properly managed, water can become a great asset to neighborhoods and their quality of life.”

Status  Lots of discussion. 

A surge barrier  To block storm surges coming from the Gulf and to better protect vulnerable neighborhoods, a massive barrier is being built in the wetlands east of the city that will take the brunt of any wall of water forced up the river by an oncoming storm. The Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Surge Barrier project is said to be the biggest design-build civil-works project in Army Corps of Engineers history, running nearly two miles long and standing more than 20 feet above the water.

Status  Under way, to be completed in 2011.

Gates and pumps  None of the city’s three outfall canals, which are intended to drain water north into Lake Pontchartrain during major storms, worked properly during Katrina—and two failed entirely. One big reason was the surge coming from the lake, which reversed the water’s flow and pushed even more back up into the canals and over the levees. The Army Corps has since built steel gates at the lake entrances of the canals, which can be shut when a surge prohibits drainage. Newly installed pumps will then push rainwater out of the canals and into the lake.

Status  Completed.

Forced relocation   Shortly after Katrina, there were many calls—mostly from outside of the city—to abandon the lowest-lying neighborhoods that had seen the worst of the floods. From still-waterlogged stoops, proud citizens cried back, “We will rebuild, and we will rebuild here.” Some in the city do lament the fact that there’s still no incentive to build in higher areas, but these complaints are rarely heard from the most vulnerable neighborhoods, where family roots on a block can go back 12 generations.

Status  Unlikely.

Wetlands restoration  The coastal wetlands that have historically protected New Orleans and southern Louisiana from dangerous storm surges have rapidly disappeared over the past few decades as land developers have dried out the region. It’s clear to anyone paying attention that a comprehensive plan to restore these crucial wetlands is essential for the city’s long-term resilience. Yet, according to Samuel Steinmetz, assistant director of the Loyola Center for Environmental Law and Land Use, “The political will to do what really needs to be done in restoring the wetlands simply isn’t here.” The good news is that the master plan does recognize the need, and promises a few near-term actions—prohibiting drainage of wetlands for building without a special permit and creating a special land-use zoning category for coastal wetlands—that could start to reverse the draining trend.

Status  Long-term hopes; short-term frustration.

---

Special thanks to Samuel T. Steinmetz, Assistant Director of the Loyola Center for Environmental Law and Land Use at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law; and to Sandy Rosenthal, founder and director of Levees.org.

Header photo by Frank Relle. All other photos by Flickr user infrogmation, used with permission.

Drawing the largest crime scene in America

This article originally appeared in GOOD Issue 020: The New Orleans Issue, on newsstands now. Read more from The New Orleans Issue here.

Since the summer of 2005, New Orleans has been predominantly known for two ongoing events—the devastation, governmental buffoonery, and human catastrophe that was Katrina, and the city’s unending culture of crime. It wasn’t long after residents returned from their evacuations to Houston, Atlanta, and beyond that the city’s crime rates reached their pre-storm levels. They have since remained the highest in the country. Violent assaults and damage to property are everyday occurrences in a place that has become accustomed to tragedy. Poverty, corruption, and lack of education set off a murderous cycle decades ago; Katrina only made it worse.

To assume that New Orleans crime begins and ends on the streets and in the emergency rooms would be misguided. As numerous local government and civic leaders have argued ever since the levees broke, the systemic negligence that led up to the breaches and the response following them could be considered criminal in both deed and intent (with blame mostly resting upon the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA). The ongoing city and state corruption and corporate irresponsibility might be seen as transgressions of the highest order (as exemplified most recently by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill). It is this idea—New Orleans as both crime-ridden and as a crime scene itself—that takes center stage in a couple of current graphic novels depicting Katrina-era New Orleans.

The recently published NYPD Blue-meets-Seven crime drama Sweets—created by Louisiana native Kody Chamberlain—attempts to use New Orleans’s staggering murder rate for its fictive advantage. Set in late August, 2005, as the hurricane looms, Sweets follows Detective Curt Delatte as he chases down a serial killer who leaves pralines as his calling cards. Adding somber insult to fatal injury, Delatte’s wife has just left him after their daughter was killed in a brazen hit-and-run. Murder and civic chaos abound, and the surrounding violence only heightens the sense of impending doom as the storm swirls towards the city. “Like it or not, the murder rate gives the city a sharp edge,” Chamberlain says, “which adds weight to any story set in New Orleans."

Of course, complicating the case is the encroaching hurricane and the uncertainty of the evacuation—a facet of Sweets that may hit New Orleanians a bit too close to home. But hurricanes, like crime, are a fact of life for those who live in the city. “Every time a major storm enters the Gulf, everyone feels the stress, and that can have a major impact on a character, which, in turn, makes for good stories,” says Chamberlain. As for Delatte, his stress is channeled into hunting a killer. “What if the killer evacuates?” Chamberlain asks, assuming the voice of his protagonist. “What if evidence is destroyed? What if Delatte can’t handle the real-world pressure? Surely New Orleanians would root for Delatte...”

In the world of Sweets, catching a killer would be the last victory New Orleans would see for a very long time. In Mat Johnson’s graphic novel Dark Rain, the storm is just the beginning.

Dark Rain focuses on the schemes of private security companies, local governments, and small-time crooks all trying to make big scores immediately following the storm. Dark Rain (published by Vertigo, written by Johnson, and drawn by the British artist Simon Gane) goes macro, attempting to explore racial, economic, and environmental themes all within the restrictive structure of a bank-heist drama. When asked whether setting a genre-specific crime story in post-Katrina New Orleans made his job more difficult, Johnson says his book was trying to focus on the characters and not on the world they inhabit.

“What Katrina came down to might have been a failure of bureaucracy or culture or national or local government—it’s really difficult to say,” Johnson says. “You can’t really answer all those questions in a narrative. A narrative ends up being about the people you know—you might set out thinking you are going to write about New Orleans, New York, or Alaska, but you ultimately just write about the people and their experiences.”

And the personal experiences are as varied as they are tragic. In Dark Rain, accounts from the storm’s aftermath are retold and reimagined in an illustrative yet sometimes hyperbolic manner. However, many of the book’s details are ripped from the headlines: The “Black Rain” security company runs amok throughout the city; desperate survivors are turned away when trying to cross to safety over the Mississippi bridge; and thousands are left behind while governments and private agencies trip over their own bureaucratic shoelaces.

“I chose a bank heist and the reason I did was because to me, there were two things going on after the hurricane,” Johnson says. “All the stuff that Blackwater did and, also, the failures of the levees were caused by opportunism and greed—in this way, this type of story makes sense.”

The fifth anniversary of Katrina was set to be a  commemoration of the progress and improvements throughout the Gulf Coast since 2005, while also remembering those lost during the storm and in the harrowing days that followed. The torrent of oil that is flowing into the same waters Katrina traversed has dampened that anticipation, but new tragedies don’t lessen the need to tell stories about those that happened in the past. Neither Dark Rain nor Sweets celebrates the time of Katrina, but both stories are attempts to garner attention for a region that desperately needs it—and a region whose most difficult task still remains the struggle to weather the dulling forgetfulness of time.

This article originally appeared in GOOD Issue 020: The New Orleans Issue, on newsstands now. Read more from The New Orleans Issue here.