IOCC's "Volunteer in the Gulf Coast"

Jim's personal journal from the week.

April 29 - May 5, 2007

Monday

Today we toured the destruction that still remains in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. We chanced upon a group of Presbyterians who were cleaning out a house in historic New Orleans. We began to compare notes on strategy. The Presbyterian relief agency made a conscious decision not to work with Habitat for Humanity. Many people own their own homes, and while those homes are essentially destroyed—they need to be completely gutted and then rebuilt from the frame up—they own both the property and house outright. Refurbishing homes not the sort of thing Habitat is tooled to do. They build houses from scratch and then sell the houses at a deeply discounted (and thus affordable) price to the family.

The Presbyterians recognized this different population of need—people who have a shell of a former home and need it rehabilitated. Since the hurricanes, the Presbyterians have gutted 900 houses and refurbished 300 of them. (The rebuilding takes longer than the clean-up.) It was a fortuitous meeting of the two different volunteer groups along St. Bernard Ave. There is no single solution to this disaster (or any disaster). Different people have different needs. In turn, different charitable agencies have different strengths and therefore target different groups. It’s a classically democratic and laissez-faire type of solution that Americans are so good at.

We also drove through the Lower Ninth Ward, formerly one of the poorest districts of New Orleans. It is junk land that is below sea level. When the swamp that used to be the Lower Ninth Ward was drained, no one was foolish enough to build there. Eventually those who could afford no other housing and were pushed out of other parts of New Orleans settled there. It became a slum of “affordable housing” for the poorest of the poor. The destruction in this area is so complete that I couldn’t even grasp that this used to be a huge neighborhood full of houses. Now it is empty. Only foundations and the occasional front step remain. There is a great deal of political pressure to rebuild this area of New Orleans and provide “affordable housing for the poor.” The detractors point out that rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward will simply perpetuate the disaster that already occurred. A new round of flooding in this area is all but inevitable. Wouldn’t it be better to give this land back to the sea rather than force the poor back into houses that are below sea level?

The IOCC claims to be completely non-partisan. It seemed to me that this was a good theory but impossible in every day life. How can a disaster relief agency provide needed relief without tacitly choosing side between the “to build” and “not to build” sides of the political debate. Pascalis said this is why the IOCC was working in St. Tammany Parish on the North Shore (that is, the communities on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, which is directly to the north of New Orleans). The needs up there were every bit as great as they were in Old New Orleans, but without all the political freight.

I am of two minds about rebuilding much of New Orleans. I don’t know enough to come down solidly on one side of the debate or the other. The U.S. has engineered the Mississippi Delta region in such a way that what we have now is completely unnatural. As a result some land is sinking; some is rising. The United States spends millions of dollars every year to force the Mississippi into its current channel in order to keep the port of New Orleans functioning. Is this good policy or bad? New Orleans is one of the oldest cities in North America. Is it worth spending the millions of dollars annually in order to save that history? It probably is, but my opinion is based purely on the emotional tug of the city. I simply do not know enough facts to have an opinion worth sharing.

Given my misgivings, I was very glad that the IOCC was working on the North Shore. It allowed me to help immediately without having to first sort out the ethical and political dilemmas that are inherent in the rebuilding of New Orleans.

Read Tuesday's Journal Entry

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