New Orleans whiter and smaller in year ahead

With bittersweet emotion, New Orleans tried on its party face once more in the early hours of Jan. 1, cheering in the new year with live jazz and thronging through the streets of the French Quarter. Mayor Ray Nagin, shouting to be heard above the ruckus on Jackson Square, said it all: "I'm so ready for 2006." No one will mourn the passing of last year and the devastation that came to the city on Aug. 29, when Hurricane Katrina deluged 80 percent of its neighborhoods and left roughly 1,300 people dead. But everyone also knows that the months ahead for the Crescent City will be fraught with uncertainty. Four months on, three out of four of its pre-storm residents are still gone. Of those who clung on or who have returned, about a quarter are still without gas or water. The Red Cross continues to feed about 37,000 people daily. In large areas of town, such as the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, brown tide marks on homes and abandoned cars still proclaim the desolation. You need not visit the French Quarter tarot card readers to know this much: New Orleans will emerge a far smaller city than before. Pre-Katrina, about 480,000 people called the Big Easy their home. Some predict that a miracle will be needed to get its rolls back even to 150,000 by the end of this year. "What has caused civilizations to wane or to crumble... is mostly because they had traumatic climatic changes like hurricanes and earthquakes," said Professor Terrence Fitzmorris of Tulane University. "I'm not sure that the city will come back as it was." Smaller is one thing, but what about whiter as well? US Secretary of Housing Alphonso Jackson said it first back in September: "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." All these weeks later, no one disagrees. The old demography–two-thirds black to one- third white–may be more or less reversed, but this is a future that has many in the black community fuming, even murmuring of a Republican conspiracy. The storm, in some people's minds, too conveniently drove black residents, most of them poor, out of town. Listen to conversations away from the tourist haunts of Bourbon Street and you will even hear it said that the government of President Bush dynamited the holes in the levees that sent the water pouring in, completely wrecking the Lower Ninth, an area that was 98 percent black. Several black leaders on the national stage have fueled the rumors, including Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who asserted that in one of the levees "there was a 25 foot hole, which suggested that it may have been blown up, so that the water would destroy the black part of town." The real debate now, however, is over which neighborhoods can be rebuilt. Nagin had to shelve a study by the Urban Land Institute in Washington because it bluntly insisted he concentrate first on repairing neighborhoods closest to being viable again. That would leave areas such as the Lower Ninth and the overwhelmingly white Lakeview untouched for years–or razed. Among those who cried foul over the Urban Land Institute study was Cynthia Willard-Lewis, a city council member who represents the Lower Ninth. "To have a one-time cataclysmic occurrence that brings water over 80 percent of the city and then just redline certain neighborhoods is extremely troubling," she said. A revised, less politically explosive, blueprint for recovery will be released next month. What happens to New Orleans–whether it becomes a virtual museum city or returns to its roots as a cradle of black culture–depends, in the final analysis, on all those individuals and families who fled. If they do not return in significant numbers, the city's tax rolls, its workforce and therefore its whole economy will be changed for good. If they do, it could perhaps be reborn almost as it was. A promise, whether rash or wise, to rebuild every neighborhood may help sway those who are still uncertain. The African-Americans who used to live in New Orleans are famously loyal to their city and have a reputation as one of the most rooted black populations in the United States. Plans for reinforced levees may prove critical in the decision. Last month, Congress and the White House moved to rebuild with a federal contribution of $3.1 billion. But the longer the uncertainties about rebuilding persist, the more evacuees may be inclined never to return.