While thousands of out-of-state contractors line-up for work, including hundreds of trash hauling trucks from around the US lined up near City Park, the people of New Orleans are still being excluded from opportunities to take part in the reconstruction of their city. In fact, it seems to many that out-of-state workers are more welcomed than the New Orleans diaspora.
Jenka Soderberg, an indymedia reporter and volunteer at the Common Ground Collective reports from her experience at a New Orleans FEMA compound, "I went to the FEMA base camp for the city of new orleans. It made me feel sick to my stomach. We walked around this absolutely surreal scene of hundreds of enormous air-conditioned tents, each one with the potential of housing 250 people -- whole city blocks of trailers with hot showers, huge banks of laundry machines, portajohns lined up 50 at a time, a big recreation tent, air-conditioned, with a big-screen tv, all of it for contractors and FEMA workers, none of it for the people of new orleans."
Inside the FEMA camp, she was told by contractors, "the tents are pretty empty, not many people staying here." However, "we don't combine with the evacuees -- we have our camp here, as workers, and they have their camps."
And with poor people out of the city, the developers and corporations are grabbing what they can - but there are no shoot-to-kill orders on these well-dressed looters. NPR and other media have portrayed developer Pres Kabacoff as a liberal visionary out to create a Paris on the Mississippi. The truth is that Kabacoff represents the worst of New Orleans' local disaster profiteers. It is Kabacoff who, in 2001, famously demolished affordable housing in the St Thomas projects in New Orleans' Lower Garden District and replaced it luxury condos and a Wal Mart. "New Orleans has never recovered from what Kabacoff did," one housing activist told me. "It was a classic bait and switch. He told the city he was going to revitalize the area, and ended up changing the rules in the middle of the game and holding the city for ransom. He made a ton of money, the rich got more housing, and the poor got dispersed around the city."
This year, Kabacoff has had his eyes on razing the Iberville housing projects, a site of low-income housing near the French Quarter. While Iberville residents were in their homes, they were able to fight Kabacoff's plans, and held numerous protests. Now that they are gone, their homes (which were not flooded) are in serious danger from Kabacoff and other developers seeking to take advantage of this tragedy to "remake the city."
The people of New Orleans need a voice in this reconstruction. But what would community-controlled reconstruction look like? Organizers are starting to grapple with these issues.
Dan Etheridge works with the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities. He is currently organizing to create collaborations and build partnerships between community organizations and planning professionals "not because its benevolent but because we will have a better city if the community has a say in its reconstruction."
He has organized an upcoming conference at Tulane University to bring together planners, architects, structural mitigation experts, geographers and other experts, along with grassroots community leaders from New Orleans, people such as "the social aid and pleasure clubs, Mardi Gras Indian representatives, ACORN, building unions, artists, teachers, public housing resident councils, Peoples Hurricane Fund representatives," and other community voices.
He hopes this will be "the starting point for an ongoing program, a networking and organizing opportunity for autonomous public projects. we want our vision to be part of the master plan for rebuilding the city, but we want community groups to have access to the skills and funding they need for smaller projects towards reestablishing the complicated fabric of the city. Instead of falling through the cracks, we want projects to grow up through the cracks."
In a press conference today outside Orleans Parish Prison Critical Resistance New Orleans organizer Tamika Middleton said "Katrina's aftermath reflects the way we as a nation increasingly deal with social ills: police and imprison primarily poor Black communities for 'crimes' that are reflections of poverty and desperation. Locking people up in this crisis is cruel mismanagement of city resources and counters the outpouring of the world's support and concern for all survivors of Hurricane Katrina."
Middleton is part of a coalition demanding an independent investigation into the evacuation of OPP and amnesty for those arrested for trying to feed and clothe themselves post-Katrina, while calling for real public safety in a rebuilt New Orleans. "Rising from the devastation of Katrina, we have an amazing opportunity to rebuild a truly new and genuine system of public safety for New Orleans," said Xochitl Bervera, Co-Director of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children.
Discussing FEMA and other official "relief" agencies, Jenka Soderberg says, "its so different from how we are working at the common ground collective, or at Mama Dee's in the city, or the other community places that people are starting up -- where neighbors are helping neighbors, people just helping each other. It's so different when we are all human together, instead of a militarized, razor-wired, fenced-in compound like the FEMA camp that keeps out the people in need and keeps the contractors and workers inside."
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