Post-Katrina, Every Day Is Still a Challenge
One year after Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents are still struggling to put lives back together, rebuild homes and schools, and find steady work, even as new issues and events have taken precedence over their plight in the public’s and the media’s eyes.
“A lot of people, you speak to them on the phone – when you’re speaking to the phone company, or someone – and asking them for maybe a little bit more time, ‘It’s, ‘Ma’am, that hurricane happened 10 months ago, 11 months ago.’ And down here, in some instances, it’s like it happened yesterday,” says New Orleans native Dawn Peterson.
Peterson, who is Miss Wheelchair Louisiana, lost the use of her legs when shot during a carjacking when she was 22. During a teleconference sponsored by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) on August 22, 2006, Peterson, now over 40, told of how housing prices have more than doubled and explained how she has spent all the savings she had accumulated to buy a home that would be wheelchair accessible.
Restarting their lives is very much on the radar of many Gulf area residents.
Todd Spriggins, a fourth generation New Orleans resident and ex-Marine, built his custom cabinet business one machine at a time. Katrina destroyed his machines, equipment, and lumber. “The first time I walked in here, this was really devastating,” said Spriggins, 37. “This was my meal ticket.”
Spriggins said that the Small Business Administration (SBA) had "no consideration for the disaster” when handling his application for a loan to rebuild, so he tapped into savings and borrowed from family to rebuild. Today, Crescent City Custom Cabinets is up and running. Spriggins said he couldn’t wait for federal assistance because “the business is here, it’s starting now.”
Local advocates say that housing and economic disparities remain the biggest struggles for those returning to the Gulf Coast region. “Blatant housing discrimination is on the rise,” said James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. “Already we’re seeing renters – and New Orleans was overwhelmingly a city of renters – being forced out of the market.”
These stories are not unique. More than 81,000 businesses were affected by the storm, costing the region nearly 450,000 jobs, according to an August 2006 paper by LCCREF. Moreover, the SBA has denied 11,500 loan applications and only 4,200 of the 11,400 that were approved have received any money.
LCCREF’s paper points out that the conditions of concentrated poverty that have drawn so much attention in the wake of the storms are the same conditions that afflict disadvantaged Americans in almost every major city in the country. Hallmarks of extreme and concentrated poverty – lack of economic opportunity, inadequate supply of affordable housing, and unequal access to quality health care – exposed by the hurricane, are, in fact, endemic to people living in impoverished communities throughout the United States.
The Connection between Poverty and Race
According to Professor Peter Edelman of Georgetown University Law Center, the “poverty that came as an apparent surprise to so many Americans by way of Katrina” is pervasive and, if unchecked, will continue to be widespread. In a paper Edelman prepared for LCCREF, “The World After Katrina: Eyes Wide Shut?”, he identified two primary frames for the problem of poverty in the United States: low-wage work and the concentrated poverty of the inner city.
Highlighting the connection between race and poverty, Edelman stated, “Poverty appears among all races and ethnic groups. But there can be no ignoring the fact that the intersection of race and poverty – among both long time and recent Americans – occupies an outsized place in the picture of poverty, and must be of special importance to anyone specially concerned with racial justice.”
According to Edelman, “the story of the two groups – those trapped in low-wage work, and those trapped in the inner city--are intertwined.” Good-paying jobs have moved to other countries or to automation and the jobs replacing them pay far less. The issue of low-wage work goes beyond those we would call “poor,” Edelman says; he estimated that those who have trouble making ends meet includes those with incomes up to twice the poverty line.
In addition to low-paying jobs, the inner cities face a host of other problems. Edelman writes that the civil rights movement and enactment of fair housing laws allowed many in the middle class to move out of racially segregated, but economically integrated, communities, leaving behind the poor with very few resources.
Edelman released the paper at a panel discussion convened by LCCREF on December 7, 2005, where panelists discussed it in the context of what Leadership Conference organizations should be doing to alleviate poverty in America. Panelists included Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania; William L. Taylor, chair of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights; and Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the Office of Research, Advocacy & Legislation for the National Council of La Raza.
Munoz said that feelings of isolation in many communities in the Gulf Coast were exacerbated by the ways aid was meted out.
Taylor said that mobilizing isolated communities living in poverty to push for policy change at all levels of government was critical, underscoring the need to find “ways of establishing human connections.”
While there are no simple solutions, “silver bullet [or] magic wand,” Edelman said, investing in the children and education, implementing “place-based” policies that focus on individual community needs, and raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, were just some of the ways to alleviate the burden on poor Americans.
Shining a Civil Rights Spotlight
These research and public education efforts are part of an ongoing LCCREF initiative designed to shine a civil rights spotlight on the inequities exposed in Katrina’s wake. At an October 28, 2005 LCCREF forum on the condition of people and communities affected by Hurricane Katrina, witnesses said strong public policies are needed to address poverty and racial isolation in the Gulf Coast.
LCCREF also co-sponsored, together with New America Media and the Center for American Progress, a national poll released November 17, 2005 that identified alleviating poverty in the country as the country’s number one priority.
Poverty emerged as a higher priority than fighting terrorism and establishing democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan for a majority of African Americans (58 percent), as well as pluralities of Hispanics (43 percent), Asian Americans (40 percent) and Non-Hispanic Whites (36 percent), according to poll results.
More than two-thirds of the respondents in each racial group believe that poverty is worse than they had “ever imagined.”
The poll, “Lessons of Katrina: America’s Major Racial and Ethnic Groups Find Common Ground After the Storm” was conducted among 1035 individuals, who were interviewed in Spanish, English, Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
“Americans seem genuinely to want something done about poverty in this nation. Dramatic images of tens of thousands of poor families ... may have had a major impact on the way many Americans look at poverty and what the nation should do about it,” said Wade Henderson, president & CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and counselor to LCCREF. “It remains to be seen whether this view will be fleeting and episodic.”
