Prometheus 6

Quote of note:

Sitting on his bicycle, draped with Mardi Gras beads, he told NEWSWEEK that he is already talking to Florida investors about building high-rises in the French Quarter that can withstand Category 5 hurricanes. And what about the Lower Ninth? "Give it to us, and we'll turn it into golf courses. I heard that in Gaelic, 'Katrina' means 'to purify'," said Shelnutt.[ P6: That is a truly fucked up thing to say.]

An even better quote of note:

A successful self-made businessman, McDonald, who is black, asks why the Lower Ninth should be treated differently from some vulnerable areas where whites live. "Does it make sense to build in Biloxi, Miss.? They have less protection than we do...Though McDonald is chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, he has not been invited to any of those dinners with local developers.

The Battle to Rebuild
In a fierce cultural storm, the future of the Lower Ninth is buffeted by race and politics.
By Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores

Oct. 3, 2005 issue - The Lower Ninth was going under, again. Floodwaters from Hurricane Rita had breached the levee along the Industrial Canal, inundating the poor New Orleans neighborhood that is, or was, home to 40,000 African-Americans. The levee had been patched after it failed in Hurricane Katrina, but not well enough. Cedric Richmond, the president of the Black Caucus in the Louisiana State Legislature, suggested that more than bad luck was at work. "For whatever reason," he told NEWSWEEK, "they didn't put the same effort into fixing the Industrial Canal as they did into the 17th Street Canal." The 17th Street Canal borders a largely white, middle-class area.

Richmond did not spell out what he meant by "for whatever reason," but the implication was clear enough. It is simply assumed by many residents of the Lower Ninth that the powers that be of the city of New Orleans would just as soon never rebuild the ward, and that the reasons have as much to do with race and class as they do with geography. The Lower Ninth is mostly below sea level; it is also 98 percent black, very poor and crime-ridden.

Conspiracy theories abound in the Lower Ninth. It is taken as a given that, during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the city blew up a levee and intentionally flooded the ward in order to save the mostly white and tourist-friendly French Quarter. This is an urban legend, but it indicates the depth of resentment felt by people who historically have been left behind. They have some reason to be suspicious. Finis Shelnutt, who owns a number of businesses near the French Quarter (including a bar named after his wife, former Bill Clinton paramour Gennifer Flowers), does not hide his feelings about the Lower Ninth. Sitting on his bicycle, draped with Mardi Gras beads, he told NEWSWEEK that he is already talking to Florida investors about building high-rises in the French Quarter that can withstand Category 5 hurricanes. And what about the Lower Ninth? "Give it to us, and we'll turn it into golf courses. I heard that in Gaelic, 'Katrina' means 'to purify'," said Shelnutt.

The Lower Ninth is only a part of New Orleans. The city is a patchwork of rich and poor, black and white, dry and wet areas. But it is generally true that the better-off, white-populated neighborhoods are on higher ground, while the poorer areas where many African-Americans live were underwater after Katrina. Many people want to build a smaller New Orleans less prone to flooding. But others see in these plans a plot to drive out blacks from their homes and sacrifice their cultural heritage. Some see the hurricane as a chance to rebuild inner-city neighborhoods without the crime and despair; others want to turn those blighted parts of the city into flood plains (or golf courses). For understandable reasons, the debate is somewhat tortured and, so far, mostly conducted in private or in code. But it has already started to burst out in the open over the future of the Lower Ninth.