One of my co-workers here at the American Life, Robin, was visiting New Orleans two years ago on a family vacation and they had never been to New Orleans before and they took one of those bus tours in the city. You know, it showed you the sites and the French Quarter and then there was some, you know, look at this telephone pole. You can see the mark for how high the water got during Hurricane Katrina. The tour guide was an older black man, a local.
She was really good. And there's just one moment during the tour that really stuck out. It was late in the tour. They're driving to the Lower Ninth Ward.
And as we're coming toward it, our tour bus guide says, so look, we used to go down into this area, the Lower Ninth Ward. It was really badly hit in the storm. You know that. But we stopped going down there because we learned that the people there just really, they didn't like the tours.
They don't like the tours. They don't want people to come in and look at them and stare at them and look at how bad it is. And so we're not going to go in there and it's stuck with me. I just believe that he was saying something that meant something to him.
It seemed like he was saying something sincere. Like, we don't do this and we're not doing it for the right reason. And so I'll show you some other stuff that this is off limits. The tour guide may have been sincere, but in addition, it's illegal for four buses to go to the Lower Ninth Ward.
City Council made it illegal starting in 2006 because buses were in the way of cleanup crews. But the rule was widely ignored until 2012 when Homeowners went to the City Council to finally get it enforced. It really made me angry. I felt as if you're looking at me through an eye that says, oh look, there's another little animal in the zoo.
When Adams was one of the Homeowners went to the City Council about the bus stores, came towards another Homeowner. I'm not saying that they were coming here to go out and get people. No, I don't think it's anything being spirited about it at all. I think they have a genuine interest to want to know how are the people doing what's going on with them.
I get that, but guess what? That's not the way you do that. It was just so impersonal, people say, that's part of what felt so weird. Back when I was in school, like every day I look outside, there's like a tour bus coming through and there's like 50, 60 people on the bus, you know, the big air condition, like super comfortable ones.
You would never see who's on the bus because they wouldn't get off. Just come through and then leave. This is Jamal Preston. He's 18, just graduated high school.
His family returned to the Lower Ninth two years after Katrina. Like they're coming through just for the sake of like, oh, look at how terrible sympathy, but your sympathy is because something bad happened to people. Your sympathy is not based on the people that you actually met in the neighborhood that had to deal with it. It's a whole different level.
The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is this month. I've probably heard that. There's been a ton of coverage. Remember what happened in stories about the rebuilding.
But the Lower Ninth, this place at the bus tour will not take you into. It's a special case because this is the part of the city that was not supposed to come back. Remember this? Right after the storm?
The city officials said forget it. Don't get anybody back there. The mayor's planning commission wanted to turn it into green space, basically a public park. Anyone that decided to not make it a green space.
I guess well, excuse my phrase, but enough hell was really to figure they better do something different. This is Henry Ervin, one of the Hellraisers, 79-year-old, who's been called the mayor of the Lower Ninth by New Orleans' actual mayor. And did a lot of people start coming back, and then the city put in a lot of stumbling blocks, too. So yeah.
investigative reporter Gary Rivlin did a nice summary of the stumbling blocks recently. The Lower Ninth was the last neighborhood in the city to get electricity and drinking water. Residents were allowed back months after they were allowed into other neighborhoods. FEMA trailers were slower to arrive here.
Only one school was reopened, and that only happened after teachers and parents cut the padlock on the building and marched on the superintendent's office. Meanwhile, money allocated for homeowners to rebuild their houses. 10 billion dollars of assistance for Katrina victims throughout Louisiana was distributed by the state in the way that discriminated against black homeowners. That's what federal judge ruled in 2010, and black homeowners who were in the Lower Ninth.
Because of all this, most people did not come back. The population of the word is a little less than half of what it was before the storm, so half the homes are back, and they're bunched up at the bottom end of the ward, high ground, in Mississippi. It would be patches of nothing in the top half, when Mr Ervin lies. They started working on that house.
This house has been totally repaired. This house hasn't done anything on it. Are they going to tear that down? Are they going to be able to fill?
That's in pictures of the Lower Ninth Ward, probably you have too. But they really didn't prepare me for what it's like to drive around the north half of the ward, part of North Clayburn Street. It's like wilderness, but it's a very orderly wilderness. A grid of streets laid out like a town waiting for developers who never showed up, which, you know, it is tall grass flowing space between lots.
See, there's a grocery store here on this corner one time. That was just a foundation there. That's a foundation, that's all. This used to be Joseph E.
Hall in school right here. It's just an empty piece of land. Outside the Lower Ninth, and the rest of the city, population is 90% back to what it was before the storm. You meet when you travel around the Lower Ninth are just some very willful people who dealt with some of the worst destruction in the city and were dealing with a lot of ghosts.
It's still not clear exactly how many people in Oregon died in Katrina, because your count is about a thousand, a third of those by drowning. More of those were in the Lower Ninth than in any other neighborhood. In our program, we're going to take you on a walking tour of the Lower Ninth. We're going to make six stops, and at each stop, we're going to do what the bus tour cannot do.
We're going to meet some people, and think about this for a second. This is the neighborhood that the city did not want to exist. This is the neighborhood that has come back the least from Katrina. So if all the extreme situations you could get into after the storm, these people have been in the most extreme.
So what's that thing like? Well, from W.B.E.C. Chicago, to this American life, from our glass, we find out. Stay with us.
Okay, so like I said, this is going to be a walking tour, and our first stop is going to be the northeast corner of St. Cod Avenue in Gordon Street. So face the street, just to orient you real fast, that Lower Ninth is basically a rectangle with water on three sides of the rectangle. So as you stand here facing the street, the Mississippi is a few blocks in front of you, the value is a little ways behind you, and the industrial canals to your right in a bunch of blocks.
It's all pretty close. Lower Ninth is just 20 blocks wide, which is a little over a mile. And if you turn around out and you face this building on the corner, what you see is a two-story building, and the first story is faded brick, and those bricks were damaged during Katrina by rescue boats and knocked into it. A lot of them fisheries that I told the current owner of this building, 50 people were rescued from the balcony on the second floor.
So back in the day, locals will tell you this was a medical clinic. These days, it's a cafe. Well, more than a cafe. You see the hangouts sign up on that list, red bean and rice special, ribs, computer service, VA benefits, seafood.
And the guy that we're here to talk to is one of those people who has thrown his whole life now. He's trying to push the Lower Ninth into the future. Kirk Washington. Everybody just calls him Washington.
Robin, spend a bunch of time with him. Washington is the least retired, retired person I've ever met, thanks to Katrina. He opened this cafe. Every day but Sunday when the cafes closed, he's here.
Washington is a retired postal worker. He didn't know anything about running a cafe. After Katrina, he just saw that there was no place to send a fax or photocopy anything. Her looks up up online.
What you need to deal with construction permits and home inspectors in FEMA and the city. So he thought, I'll build that. Then he kept going. With other things they needed.
Food, a game room with pool tables, a small clothing store, a recording studio. One day I watched him help a resident apply for a home loan, rack of pool table for some kids, cook burgers and sandwiches for six people and fax someone's proof of employment all in an hour. He also runs rooms to people for cheap. He owns two houses.
So folks can afford to get back on their feet. He does all this for one reason. Washington's lived in the Lower Ninth Ward since the late 70s. He bought his house in the 80s, bought the property next door to it too, fixed them both up.
He stayed during Katrina because he's one of those people who always stays during a hurricane. An estimated 2,000 people in the Lower Ninth Ward decided to stay. 10 years later, he thinks all the time about that decision to stay. You know, I've been all over the world.
I've been all through Vietnam everywhere. When that hurricane hit, I had never been that scared before my whole life. My whole life, I hadn't been through a whole lot of things. Scary, scary thing, but that was the scared that ever been my whole life.
Here's how Washington survived the storm. Sunday the 28th, the mayor orders the mandatory evacuation. That night, Washington is at home with three of his neighbors, the tailors from next door and Isaac from across the street. They plan on riding out the storm together.
Early morning on the 29th, the hurricane hits wins over 100 miles per hour. Washington calls the flying debris shrapnel because it would kill you. At his house, the group isn't sure what to do. I say this is going to be dangerous, man.
I say, y'all can stay if y'all want, but if y'all want to go, I think y'all should go and buckle down. Everyone goes home. The levees fail, the entire Lower Ninth Ward floods. All I could hear was this, when that water came.
I could hear little babies hollering and screaming. I could hear ladies hollering and screaming. I heard my neighbors hollering and screaming. The air was full of noise, people that was in dire need, but someone to help them.
I mean, people was really drowning. People were drowning. And you know, there was nothing you could do. That was the hardest part about things.
What can you do? I mean, you can't go out there. The wind is still, you still have strapping flying out through the air. The water is riding so fast that hey, you know, how are you going to negotiate the water?
Yeah, I could swim. But guess what? I mean, they don't want to take no chances getting into the water. It was one thing that nobody should want to experience when they hold that.
You know, we got to the point that our neighbors, we started coming out to survey what was going on. Well, one of my neighbors drowned. One of your friends who was in your house earlier that night? Yes.
That was Isaac. His full name was Isaac Castle. He was 58. You feel like you fail.
You fail. You know what I'm saying? Because you could help, but you didn't. But it's the thing inside you say, well, man, I could have did more than what I did.
You know, and it just kind of gets to you a little bit because this person is gone, you know, and I didn't do anything about it. But I thought he was going to be safe. He couldn't swim. He couldn't swim.
Washington got picked up by a wildlife and fisheries boat and made his way to Baton Rouge. Two days after Katrina, he got himself to a Dodge dealership, figuring no matter what, he's going to need a car. And that's where, standing alone in a used car lot exhausted, he started to feel something for the first time in days. All the destruction and all the debt and all the violence screaming.
It just hit me. I mean, it was just like a whole like three-store building just questioned me, you know, just like a tornado going around in my head, you know. It was just like, you know, all these things and happening. I'm just blanking my eye and just seeing all of them at one time.
It was just like a nightmare, you know. I came to reality like, man, man, look, you know, did I go through all this, you know, I'm really alive and this really did happen, you know, all this, all this, everything that happened, everything that happened. It's real, it's real, you know. It just hit me, you know.
It's just hit me. What happened? You started crying. Yeah, that was it.
You know, people, they was there watching, they couldn't deal with it. So they went in the room, they're talking, talking, talking, one of the guys came up after he saw me. I didn't quiet down something, but, you know, he said, man, he said, man, I have a car for you, you know, he said, you could get it right now. We're not going to charge you too much, so I pay cash for the car, and I got on the highway.
It was just one thing after another. He bought a white truck, drove it to Corpus Christi, Texas, and back home three weeks after the storm. During a time when most people weren't allowed back into the lower ninth ward, Washington says his veterans ID card worked as a pass, and he rebuilt both his houses, one piece of sheetrock and one birchwood panel at a time. I spent a lot of time talking with Washington on three different days, and he never bragged or complained about anything, but I wanted to know what he lost in the storm, which is how I learned about the cars.
I lost Mercedes-Benz. I lost a Jaguar. I lost a BMW. I lost a Ford.
That's 150. He told me he got them right after he retired. He took his savings and bought them at auction. A car a year for four years.
He got the last one just a year before the storm. He loved driving around in those cars. It was indulgent after a life of saving money and working at the post office. You know, I won't talk about it that much, but when I get my come sick as a dog, because I don't have these cars, you know, I really don't want another one of those cars, because it's going to remind me, and I feel like I'm going to be more sick than what I am.
We're more upset. Sick. Sick of my stomach like this thing, and your stomach would be nervous, probably, you know? Your stomach hurts a lot?
I just have that little funny feeling. And when I get that funny feeling, I know it's something that's triggering and it's coming from my mind. You know, it's coming from my head. Here's the tangle for Washington.
He's throwing all this energy into rebuilding and making everything new again, but all the new stuff that he has now, like his new bathroom, his new house, his new business. Everything new reminds him of what was old, daily. Frushing his teeth with running water reminds him of when after the storm, he couldn't do that. Turning on a light reminds him how for a while after the storm, he didn't have electricity.
It doesn't stop, no matter how he tries to keep busy. I need things to do so that I won't get caught up in this mind thing, you know what I'm saying? So in order for me not to have to occupy my mind with something. I have to because if I don't have my mind is going to play tricks on me, you know?
Do you daydream? Sometimes. Okay. I hate daydream.
Do you have nightmares? Sometimes. See that? Sometimes.
It's constant. Do you have illusions of things while you're driving? Like you driving your car and you think that you're driving just some savings bin or this jaguar or this? You see what I'm saying?
I mean, I can't hide from it. It's real. I know it's death. You know, I know what the symptoms are.
I know it's impossible for me to treat it. It's impossible because daily things going to bring me to it. But talking to you right now is bringing me to it. You know, I walk out the front of my house and I look over at that door.
I see my friend. I see either. Then I have to let it go, you know? Let it go.
I'll come down this street. But I'm looking from the bridge up there. I'm seeing nothing but the top of the house is all water. And I'm riding down the same street.
I mean, what? It's constant. It's something that, you know, you heard came just five years ago. Ten years.
Ten years ago. Look at that. It's that. It's still that.
It's just that. Washington points to people in his cafe. They're mostly storm survivors. He says, talk to them.
They're suffering, too. He tells me about a customer, a woman, who lost her home in the storm, has completely rebuilt it, but won't move back in. Washington doesn't think she ever will. She's afraid, he says.
You can see it in her eyes when she talks about the house. I tell him I think I know what he means. I can see fear in his eyes, too. He laughs and says, nope, you can't see it.
You have to have gone through it to understand. Robin Samian. We're in a walking tour of the Lower Ninth this hour. Kirk Washington's house is all the way on the bottom of the Lower Ninth, right near the Mississippi.
That's higher ground. That's a part of the Lower Ninth. That's revived the most. Houses are jammed together here, and most of them are occupied.
It's just a two minute walk from Washington's house, five blocks away. There's a bar that came forward, who you heard at the top of the show, brought one of our producers, Zoe Chase, too. She's like, go to this bar. It's the best.
Call out the street and tell America. America. This is Lazardi and Burgundy. And this place is a staple in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Mercedes bar, everybody in the Lower Ninth Ward knows this place. Mercedes bar, it's one of the few bars they have here now. One uncle told us it was nine bars before Katrina. It's just two now.
This is the second stop on our tour. As you face the building, you can see that it is neatly painted white with green trim around the windows, little New Orleans, Fort Lee, and gold and black. Looks well taken care of, which is not true of the street in front of it. You'll notice if you turn that way, so many streets in the Lower Ninth are just awful, and this is one of them.
Lots of potholes and they're big potholes. And if you pull in there, you're going down in the hole. The streets are horrible. A little bit of rain, and it's water everywhere.
You can't even park here. The owner of the bar Mercedes gives and says that the holes in the street are costing her customers and they're costing her money, and it's hard to pay the light bill at this point. So he spends some time with her and her customers. The holes in the streets are a real problem for Mercedes, because neither she nor her customers are young.
What I describe it as a friendly bar and sell aged people. I don't fool with youngsters. Settle aged people. Like the bartender, Mercedes daughter Sharon.
She pulls the bar for me real quick to prove how dire the Lazardi Street parking situation really is. How far did you all have the park to get here? So I sit with the settle aged at a long table in the middle of the bar. I ask about the storm and it's like it just happened.
The switch clicks right off the potholes and onto scenes from 10 years ago. Jean Gibson is nursing crown boil and water. She's a young looking 60 year old. During the storm, she was with her first husband and two grandkids.
They evacuated to Houston first and stayed in a hotel for a while. I was in one, but they put me out. Why? Because I money ran out.
Their credit card hit the limit. When she went to the ATM, she found out that her bank back in New Orleans was out. The ATMs couldn't connect. She was stuck in Texas with no money.
So she did something she never thought she'd have to do. Keep this in mind, Jean was a middle-class lady, a homeowner, living comfortably. Before Katrina, she says one paycheck paid all her bills for the month. She worked for the city.
She ran the benefits department for all the city workers. I had coach pocketbooks and my husband was an extremely short dresser. Oh, he was a short dresser. Good looking short dresser man.
He was 75 dollar belts. There was nothing for us. This is the person who found herself begging for help in a parking lot, saying things like, just if you could just give me some pamphlets, just some pamphlets and fool for the children. You don't have to give me nothing, just some fool for the children and a white guy in a black pickup truck.
He said, mission from New Orleans and I said, yes, I'll say my children are home. I say, and they still in the same diapers for three days. I would take the diaper and scrape the diaper and put it back on them because I had no choice. And the man he took me in came out and bought me a box of pamphlets and some of them little Macaroni's, but I had no way to lose the noodles, but I didn't have no way to cook them.
So I opened them and I put that little sauce in them and they ate dried noodles. And you know, they were kids, you know, that's a trick for them. I don't know about the girls, but I'm trying to taste good. Then we stayed there, overnight in the car, kids hollering, they hungry.
I just kept washing my underwear in the gas station bathroom and putting them back on wet. The man at the ex-on station told me, missed me from New Orleans. I'm gonna let you keep coming in every day and wash your underwear. That's the least you could do, you know?
You know, I'm trying to sneak in there, you know, because I want the people to know I'm going to wash my troubles. Think about what that must be like, to have your life changed so abruptly, no transition. And I wanted to know, did she feel like she was suddenly a different person? No, she says that's not what happens.
She says, you get very practical. It's just how do you solve the next problem? All you think about is what am I going to do? What I'm just going to be?
Had you ever begged before? Oh God, no. Did you go up to people's cars? Yes.
Yes. I had one, the one-year-old in my arm, and the other one I was holding his hand. And as people passed, I would even bang on their window. Yes.
And ask them, can you please help me? Please help me and my babies. So they must have thought out because of the way I looked. You know, they must have thought I was a crackade or something, you know, using the babies.
Because, and let me tell you, the reason I thought that was because I used to think that. Gene moved around Texas for a month. Then she got a call, five weeks after she left. Come back to your job in the city of New Orleans.
And she thought maybe things are finally going to be okay. I never really thought I lost my life. That sounds crazy. I mean, I thought I was going to come sweep my house out.
With a broom. With a broom. You know, I know the streets would probably have some dirt on it. Driving into New Orleans early October.
It was pitch black, no lights, just a few big military spotlights like a movie set. A movie set of a war zone, soldiers everywhere, the hotels with the windows blown out, the streets coated in mud and white dirt and so empty. And I said, Lord, have mercy. Look at my city.
And it hit me. Yeah, it did hit me. But when I came across this canal, I knew there was no humanly way possible that this ninth ward could ever come back. The people that you knew, I don't see nobody that I know.
People who know you, you know them, know your mom, know your dad, know your brothers, know where you live, know y'all had a black dog one time. I'm talking about those people. I'm talking about people you did your first communion with and the people that would tell your mom if you did something wrong, you would never see them. So who am I?
I don't know. Here is the identity crisis, not in the parking lot begging for food. She just didn't know until she got home to New Orleans that there is no chance of being who she was before. Jean's house is completely rebuilt.
Like other houses here I've seen, it kind of looks like a pottery barn showroom not lived in for very long, new matching furniture, nice, though spacious. She's still working for the city. She has a new husband now, the husband she made it through the storm with. He died in 2007.
Now she's married to the son of Mercy V, Mercedes, the bar owner. And she has this new big, big family to go with him that gathered at Mercedes bar almost every day. And so it's like, yeah, you have a new life, but it looks like a good life. Is it a good life?
Looks like deceiving. You may do with what you have, and you try every day to get that other life back. Every day. But it's not coming back.
But that's okay tomorrow coming. I ought to be able to get some little piece of it. And tomorrow coming, it doesn't come back. Sorry, Chase.
I just wanted to introduce you to our show. Coming up, drive your Chevy to the levee to where the levee was not dry. That's a minute. When our tour of Lower Nine continues, W.B.E.C.
Chicago, when our program continues. It's American Life, my other class. Today in our program, we have a tour of the Lower Nineth Ward, the part of New Orleans that has come back the least since Hurricane Katrina hit 10 years ago this week. We arrived at the Third Stop at our tour, the corner of Jordan Avenue and North Prius Street, right across from one of the levees that collapsed a decade ago.
If you stand here facing south with the levee to your right, well, first of all, this is the part of town where Brad Pitt built a bunch of houses with the Make a Right Foundation after the storm. And you see some of those right in front of you. They're boxy and mauveren. Lots of them have solar panels.
There are a couple of regular houses on the street, some overgrown yards. The levee itself across from those houses is Grassy and Bankman, with a 14-foot concrete wall at the top. And most people you chuck to down here will tell you the same thing about what happened right here at the spot on the levee on August 29th, 2005. It was dynamited in six places on the industrial canal.
They got people that live on this street will go to their grid and tell you that they heard dynamite. And they started to hear the explosion and then the water start coming up the streets. That's just to keep the water from going downtown Berber Street. No, I didn't get in the water.
It just blew down things and sent it this way. Lots of people heard an explosion. And lots of people say it was the government. The government blew up the levees to get black people out of the Lower Nineth, who creased Phillips lived on the other side of the canal.
She said flooding had started that morning, but it wasn't much. Like as high as your car tires. Then all of a sudden we all boom, the windows were sucked out. Now we haven't taken all, so they just they wanted to blast, but they couldn't.
After the boom, the water went from the tire of the car to the second floor so fast. I think they blew the levees, you know, and they redirected the water from downtown. In the last decade, there's been a ton of investigation into what caused the boom and what blew up the levees. The big official investigations did not find evidence of dynamite of anybody blowing up the levees on purpose, so the question is, what made the boom?
Well, the consensus is that it was not one boom. There were lots of booms, coming from a few different sources, like, for instance, on the levee on the north side of the Lower Ninth Ward, cracked and toppled over at four or five in the morning of the storm. That would have made a huge boom, like a thick branch snapping in half, and then water would have rushed in. Other booms came from electrical transformers blowing up and from a massive barge that banged against the industrial canal levee later that morning, like somebody beating on a huge empty steel trash can, one expert tolling.
They came over the levee and landed in the Lower Ninth. But it's also clear that people aren't crazy to believe that the levees were dynamited by the government. They believed that for some very good reasons. For starters, government's done it before.
That is very real. It very much happened, and you combine that with the sound of the boom, and it's not surprising that that theory has life. John Berry has served on the levee board responsible for protecting New Orleans, the southeast Louisiana flood protection authority east. He's a journalist, and before that, he wrote a great book called Rising Tide about the 1927 flood that caused more devastation than Katrina did, and that led city officials to decide that they were going to save downtown New Orleans by blowing up the levees in an area where poor people lived.
The spot that's just 20 minute drive from the Lower Ninth, all this with the consent of the governor, the federal government, and the president. They had to promise to pay full reparations to everyone who was damaged. 95% of the people who ended up being flooded out by this dynamite didn't were white, but they had no political power. Many of them didn't speak English.
They spoke of an 18th century Spanish referred to as Langio as Muslim came from the Canary Islands, and it was dynamited. And it was kind of hard to do, right? It was very difficult to do. That was a very good levee.
They had to keep going back and blowing it up again and again. That's correct. How many people were displaced? Roughly 10,000.
And did the government pay reparations? Well, it was the city in Orleans that was supposed to pay the reparations, and the city pretty much sift everyone who they had made promises to. There's another good reason that people leave the government one of them out and will have the levees to do it. Gwen Adams, who you heard at the beginning of the show, talk to me about this.
It's more immediate reason, more personal reason. It's so believable because when people were interested in coming back to see what they needed to do in order to rebuild, they said you can't do that because we're going to green space this area. We wanted to come back and see what our property looked like. They held us all at gunpoint.
When you attempted to get permits to rebuild, they fought you tooth and nail at city hall with permitting for every little thing. FEMA Housing Money was distributed with a formula that made it harder for families in the lower ninth to rebuild. City services running water schools arrived so much later in the lower ninth. In other words, it's the things that the city and state did after the flood.
They made the idea that the government just wanted everybody out, and it might have blown up the levees to achieve that. Seems so very credible. But we arrived at the fourth stop on our tour, a little block called El Dorado, just as a handful of houses on it. North on this block, and you see an empty lot that is overgrown and smelly.
And if you turn it face south, you see two nicely rebuilt, bright blue houses. Good. How you doing? And Zoe from our program happened on the street.
This guy, Roy Bradley, called our tour from his porch, said he was the first house back on the block. And now they were trying to take his house. Come on up, you said. I'm a radio reporter, so I have a microphone.
That's fine. When I'm going to know I need all this, something. No, I can tell. I can tell.
I'm just saying. You're like, bring that microphone over there. Please. Right.
It was just for football season though, it was still summer. And we're only in Saint's shirt, Saint's hat, Saint's slippers. Saint's socks. He's always stuck around and gets numb a little bit.
Roy's 46. And he's lived in the lower ninth for 46 years. Right away, he takes me around the corner to his mom's house. Which, there's no house.
It's an empty green lawn with a square of sidewalk in front. 23 years ago, Roy's family all came outside and wrote their names in what cement. This is, uh, my sister Veronica. My sister Casey.
That's my wife Danielle. Right there. They call me boo-boom. They call me boo.
So this is me here. Man, this is still here. Big man, that's my daddy. Oh, I bet it is my other sister.
It's a man who we call it better. How many of these people still live in New Orleans? Um, me. Casey's in Slidell, Veronica's in Mobile, and on and on.
Roy is the only one back. He has two houses here in the lower nine. Right blue, right next to each other. It was a big deal when he and his wife fought them.
2001, not long before Katrina. This was Roy's life plan. A classic life plan. He'd own the mortgage on both houses by renting out one of them.
He worked two jobs. Still does. He cooks at Mazzados at night and at TDI Fridays during the day. Once the mortgage was paid off, he and his wife Danielle would buy another place and rent out the starter homes to pay off that one.
These houses would help us pay for the next house or the next step. And then actually pay it off. They would be into something else. And maybe I can open me a restaurant and we have to work so much my own place.
We have a wife open hub, beautiful salon. Danielle jumps in here. You see, we crawl before we walk. So we don't have to come back to crawl.
That was the plan before the storm. When the storm did hit, Roy left town. On the advice of his favorite weatherman, Bob Breck. I'd be looking for Bob Breck's house and child.
On Channel 8 weather. Bob Breck. He was on it, man. He was on it, man.
He was just saying, please go. Please, please. That's what I just said. You know what?
I'm going to go. Did you say some of your neighbors drive when you were driving out and you were like, yo. Oh, let's go. Couple of them.
My neighbor just called me on Gordon and El Dorado. He was washing the car. And he was washing the car. He was cleaning out the drains at the corner.
And because he used to do that before the storm. Man, I ain't going to like worry about no stalling. I ain't, you know, having to do right here. And that actually was the last time I'd seen him.
And wind up, he didn't make it through. Wind up, his wife told me that he drowned. That he was on top of the roof. And he had drowned before he got to the roof.
Roy estimates the number of neighbors he lost in the storm around 14. As we walk, he points out their houses or where their houses were. There was a guy across the street who died right after the storm. He was running a generator and his house burned up.
The son of Daniel's pastor died, Roy says, when his house was dragged a few blocks away. The roof's here were filled with people during the storm. One of his neighbors even swam to Roy's house to look for him. It took months before he was even allowed back onto this block.
He had to show ID at the bridge and then the National Guard gave him 30 minutes. You already know that the house was totaled. Everything they had was gone. Oh, I cried.
She cried the whole time he was in the house. I thought it was going to flood all over again. In the house. I think he got stuck.
You didn't cry? Well, seeing her cry, I might have dropped a tear too, but I, you know, went with you. He'll cry though. He cried for an hour to make the scene to win the Super Bowl.
Next for Roy, the familiar beats of Katrina keep going. 13-hour car rides to Baton Rouge, a year in Atlanta, then back to New Orleans, and a FEMA trailer. No stores, no lights, nobody, no one around. They got a little FEMA money, a little insurance money, and a whole bunch of free help from this nonprofit who set up shop right next to Roy's broken down home, Lower9.org.
Two years after the storm, the family moved back in. So picture, right at this point in the story, it was like Roy was back where he was when he first bought his houses. He was a reset, started the bottom, and climbed back up. And this is the moment when Roy makes this totally fateful decision.
He decides to take out a loan. To borrow some money, fix up the other little house, which was a shell after Katrina. It was dry riding. So we could start renting it again.
I put it on Facebook. That's what I did. What did you say? I put it on Facebook.
I'm trying to get a loan. Anyone knows someone who they can suggest me to go to to get a loan. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's when I went on to the loan partners and took out the loan.
Loan Partners. Loan Partners, the kind of company that made a lot of loans after Katrina, to help with construction and rebuilding. And they lent Roy money for exactly that to rebuild his rental property, $60,000. But this was nothing like a typical mortgage loan.
It had a very short deadline, one year, less actually 11 months. And it worked like this. For a year, you just pay interest every month. At the end, you pay off the whole thing, the original $60,000 all at once.
It has to see a copy. The rate seems high, 12 and a half percent. And there are all sorts of hikes and fees that kick in if you're delinquent. I didn't read all that.
These are really hard terms. And I signed it. Without really reading it? I didn't.
So... That's why you kind of trusted your friend and they were like, this is a good company. Right. And just to get my house fixed.
That was my main goal is to get myself back on track to where I was before the storm hit. The only reason Roy was able to get this loan in the first place was because after Katrina, the government was handing out checks to homeowners to rebuild their houses. Loan Partners knew Roy would qualify for a bunch of this money as soon as he fixed up his rental property. And Roy did qualify, and the money did come.
But instead of paying off the loan all at once, he just kept sending those monthly payments. He thought it was like a mortgage, like a mortgage as he'd been paying for years before the storm. Roy found out how big a mistake he made when he came home and he found this sign on his house. Can you read what it says?
Oh, five days notice of vacated premises. First civil court of New Orleans State. If I read it for 12, 2015, occupants. I don't know when I became an occupant in my house.
Owner wants possession. Wouldn't have you became the owner. That's from the loan partners. Here's the thing.
Loan Partners does own Roy's house now. Both his houses. Roy didn't pay off his loan. The houses went into foreclosure.
And loan partners got them. Roy and Danielle can't really believe this. They're challenging it in court and appealing the sale. I talked to one of the guys at Loan Partners, Bob Bergron.
He said no, their business isn't built on squeezing people through tough terms and then taking their property. Most of the people they've lent money to haven't defaulted, he says. And that seems to check out. It's not such an unusual loan for a professional real estate investor.
But it is for Roy, who is so far from where he thought he'd be at this moment. Close to losing his home for the second time in 10 years. To say that has been 10 years, it should be better. You know, it's like trying to get it back together.
And I'm back like I'm going back down this road that 10 years later, I shouldn't be there. I should be stepping to another step in life. There are so many lots for sale in the Lower Ninth Ward since the storm. And in Roy's neighborhood, people are buying them up, building new houses, then turning them around, and selling them for a couple hundred thousand dollars just down the street from him.
It's a fortune compared to what Roy paid 15 years ago. I think the neighborhood will be like in 10 years. 10 more years? Well, all of us will be gone.
We'll be out of here. 10 more years. This is just my theory of it. I think I've been on kick all of us out of here.
And I have these nice big pretty houses back here. I had the street car come down to the middle. I'm going to have the jacket thing in the back on the levee. And then we'll be gone for good.
I hope not because I hope to still be here. Roy's original plan was to buy properties in the Lower Ninth and rent them out to pay for his home. With the neighborhood booming, that's exactly what's happening. For other people.
So we chase. Okay, we were at the fifth stop in our tour of the Lower Ninth. Royal Street. So we get on Royal Street and go as far East as it goes.
Stop where it did ends by that six-foot-high chain-link fence. And if you stand here facing East, you can look through the fence and do that now. You see the remains of the Holy Cross School. And you can see it was once a beautiful, old southern school.
Three stories with columns and balconies and curved brickwork. Now left here. Basically to rot. Look, the windows are whitted up and there's a bright blue tarp on the roof that's dripping into shreds.
It's been up there so long. There's some kind of scary looking black mold. I think I see peeking through the bricks. What you're looking at right now, believe it or not, is the site of one of the big gentrification fights in the Lower Ninth.
This last year a developer has been trying to build an upscale high-rise here. Condos. Seven stories tall, hundreds of apartments and offices. A huge parking lot.
In a neighborhood. Again, look around. It's almost entirely family houses. Just one or two stories tall.
Whether or not this gets built. Newcomers are moving into this area. Especially this part of the board. You remember Kirk Washington?
Remember him from the beginning of the show? He goes just a couple bucks from here and across the street from him, a white couple moved in. And his friend Isaac's old house. And he likes him.
He likes him a lot. Says hello. Hey, what's up? Hey, what's up?
How you doing? Alright. That's the house that Isaac could be drowned right there in that house right there. The couple going into the house are Simon Hand and his wife Sarah DeBacher.
She's active in the local neighborhood association. And popular enough that they elected her vice president and then they elected her president. But it's complicated. Being, you know, sort of the face of the changing lower ninth.
When our producer, Sean Cole, top to Sarah. Even though she thinks about her race all the time, Sarah DeBacher is still figuring out how to talk about it. She can have a hard time getting through a sentence without stopping to comment on what she's saying. Like when I asked her why she moved to the lower ninth ward after the storm.
Maybe some of it had to do with guilt and wanting, God, this is sounding gross. Wanting to be part like wanting to be part of helping in a meaningful way to rebuild. Which on the one hand is noble, of course. But on the other hand, in helping to rebuild a neighborhood that was 88% black before the hurricane, Sarah's worried she'll come across as some white savior asshole.
My role as, I don't even want to say my role. Who I am as a white newcomer to the lower ninth ward. That identity has been an uncomfortable one for me. Newcomers should probably be in quotes.
Sarah's lived in the lower ninth ward since 2008. So about three years after the hurricane. Before that, Sarah and Simon were living upriver from the lower ninth in the Marin neighborhood next to the French Quarter. But when they decided to buy a house, the Marin wasn't an option.
Because after Katrina, it was suddenly totally unaffordable for them. Katrina had a gentrifying effect on a lot of the city. First came the yurps, or young urban rebuilding professionals. And after they helped put the city back together, another wave of entrepreneurs and tech workers and creative economy types came in.
Sarah and Simon are both teachers. And the lower ninth ward was more in their price range. Besides which, they liked it there. I don't want to romanticize some of the like, oh, because neighbors talk to each other.
But I mean, that's part of it. They actually started going to community meetings even before they moved to the lower ninth ward. And ultimately, they bought a $50,000 double shotgun house. Financed by an FHA loan for some home buyers and knocked out the middle wall that separated the two apartments.
As you're more than aware by now, people in the lower ninth ward are friendly. And they were friendly to Sarah and her husband. But there was definitely a what are you doing here type vibe in the beginning. And even a few years in.
She remembers this one night after her first son was born. It was late, maybe 11 o'clock. And these kids down the way started setting off fireworks. And my son had colic.
And so like I was in the trenches with this baby who never stopped crying. And he was asleep. And then these fireworks started going off. And I went out and first talked to the kids and just said, Hey, can you maybe do that another time?
And then there was a voice from the porch. And she was like, if you have a problem, you can talk to me, you don't talk to my kids. And, you know, too. That's fair.
It's fair. So Sarah says to her, look, you're a mom. I'm a mom. I've got this colicky baby.
I'm going nuts. Can you please tell your kids to knock it off? And she came off the porch and got in my face and said, you know, we didn't have any problems before you people moved in. We all minded our own business.
And, you know, I was like, whoa, you know, I really just need to sleep. I just need my baby to sleep. That's what this is about. And she just wasn't hearing it.
I mean, she was not hearing it. That conversation was about the changes in her neighborhood and anger about that. And at that moment, I was trying to make it about me, you know, like, can we be neighbors? And I don't know.