The New Orleans Index Anniversary Edition: Three Years after Katrina
Greater New Orleans approaches the end of its third year of recovery from a position of strength, with the vast majority of its pre-storm population and jobs. But many recovery trends have slowed or stagnated in the past year as tens of thousands of blighted properties, lack of affordable housing for essential service and construction workers, and thin public services continue to plague the city and region. A strong federal-state-local partnership must continue to further the hard work of recovery, which is now well underway.
… The city may be confronting fully 65,000 blighted properties or empty lots. Rising rents, now 46 percent higher than before the storm, threaten the ability of many essential service workers to afford housing, as wages are not keeping pace. The labor market remains tight as the service and construction industries seek workers. The public service infrastructure in the city remains thin, especially public transit, which saw ridership grow by 45 percent in the past year. And, the latest maps from the Army Corps of Engineers suggest that a number of neighborhoods in the city remain at risk of six to eight feet of flooding from a 1 percent storm, signaling the need to commit to a coastal restoration plan that goes well beyond levees.
65,000 blighted properties sit unremoved, while affordable housing is impossible to find and recovered neighborhoods are still at risk from flooding. People are coming back, however, which makes real recovery that much more urgent.
Note that the report uses the correct technical term “1 percent storm,” i.e. a storm that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year. Not a “100-year storm,” which I heard an Army Corps of Engineers representative use on TV just last night when describing flood protection in surrounding coastal parishes. Read John Barry’s latest in which he explains why it is critical that we use proper, descriptive flood protection terminology, especially when a lot more Americans are only beginning to deal with the legal and financial, leave alone the physical and emotional, tolls of flooding.
