Gulf Coast Recovery Three Years After Katrina

It's hard to believe three years have passed since Hurricane Katrina delivered widespread devastation to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region -- or that another hurricane, Gustav, now a category 4 storm, has drawn a bead on southeastern Louisiana and could make landfall as early as Monday.

Still, anniversaries are a good time to look back and ask, How are we doing? In the case of Katrina, the answer depends on whom you ask.

(Chart: New York Times; click for larger image)

According to the third anniversary edition of the New Orleans Index, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, "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." At the same time

...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....

Compiled by MPP deputy director Amy Liu and colleagues, the third edition examines more than fifty indicators of recovery, with an emphasis on changes in the past year. Interestingly, it also examines recovery indicators across the thirteen planning districts that make up greater New Orleans to reveal trends -- in population, job creation, new residential construction, vacant residential addresses, and risk of future flooding -- by neighborhood that might otherwise be masked by citywide figures.

On balance, it's a pretty upbeat assessment which suggests that the recovery of the city, while far from complete, is on track.

That's quite a different picture than the one provided by New Orleans Three Years After the Storm (78 pages, PDF), the second of at least three planned surveys of the New Orleans area commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Conducted earlier this spring, the survey, which focused on Orleans Parish, found that four out of ten residents of the city who lived through the storm said their lives were or still are very or somewhat disrupted -- only marginally better than the share who reported that level of disruption in the fall of 2006 at the time of the first survey.

Other findings:

• A narrow majority of New Orleans residents (56 percent) say that the rebuilding and recovery process is going in the right direction, but fully half of those living in the parish say they are either dissatisfied (41 percent) or angry (11 percent) with the amount of progress that has been made.
• More than half of New Orleans residents (56 percent) say it's a bad time for children to be growing up in New Orleans, while almost two in three (61 percent) rate the city as "not so good" or "poor" when it comes to career opportunities for young people.
• Six in ten (60 percent) say they do not think the rebuilding of New Orleans is a priority for Congress and the president, and even more (65 percent) say they think "most Americans have forgotten about the challenges facing New Orleans."
• On a more upbeat note, three in four (74 percent) say they are optimistic about the area's future, a level of confidence that has remained more or less constant over the past eighteen months.

The bleakest assessment of the region's recovery is offered by Oxfam America, the U.S. affiliate of the well-known international relief and development organization. Its report, Mirror on America: How the State of Gulf Coast Recovery Reflects on Us All (28 pages, 1.1 MB, PDF), is sharply critical of the slow pace of "getting back to normal" in the region and declares the recovery effort a "national embarrassment."

In particular, the report deplores the "double injustice" of workers in the region not being able to afford the rising cost of rents, housing, insurance, and utilities that followed in the storm's wake or workers being able to find the kinds of jobs they need to offset those expenses. According to the report, only 12 percent of African Americans who returned to New Orleans after the hurricanes were able to find work, compared with 45 percent of whites. "It was," said Tracie L. Washington, president and CEO of the Louisiana Justice Institute, "the perfect storm of worker exploitation and wage suppression."

"Although the force of the storms [Katrina and Rita] was an act of nature," said Oxfam America president Raymond C. Offenheiser, "the failures of the recovery are an act of our government. If we refuse to address this as a nation, it will go down in history not only as a failure of leadership, but also as a failure to hold our government accountable."

A lot to chew on, but we'd like to hear from you. Is the region's recovery on track? If not, who is responsible? And what role can philanthropy play at this point to ensure that the educational, economic, and health inequities exposed by Katrina are ameliorated? Use the comments to share your thoughts....

-- Mitch Nauffts