New Orleans   

Two small problems emerged.  One is just about solved and that is finding a location for the rig, the collection tanks, and everything that goes with it.  The other was a surprise.  When the New Orleans Biodiesel Project started doorknocking businesses to arrange to collect their grease, we were surprised to find that many were under contract paying them a few dollars a month to come and pick the grease up.  In fact the companies were hauling the grease up to Baton Rouge to process.  Unbelievable!  Was it possible that we were in a competitive market for grease of all things?  Would our rap about “doing good,” “protecting the environment,” and “supporting the recovery,” just crash and burn?  How would we collect the volume of grease we needed to be sustainable.  Eeek!

Then I read the New York Times and discover that not only is biodiesel a hot commodity suddenly, but it is trading on a “booming commercial market” at 40 centers per pound, and, even more bizarrely, because it’s suddenly more valuable, at least in New York City, folks are pulling pickups up behind restaurants and stealing the stuff in the dark of nights.  The article in fact was about how lame prosecutors are about pursing grease crime.

This whole sustainability, self-sufficiency thing is an education every day it turns out, and damned if it isn’t the school of hard knocks!

I’m eating crow quietly to celebrate the nice piece on the 101^st house being finished by Project Home Again and the nice piece written about this event in The Times-Picayune by Rebecca Mowbray.   Not to make excuses, but part of the reason I had missed the boat on this great work because after the storm with a lot of fanfare and way too much nay saying about the rest of the rebuilding efforts, a big time MIT planner had trumpeted his connection with Riggio and the “blank check” he was claiming, and had gotten in the middle of the muddle between the contending arguments by planners and architects between “new urbanism” and “modernism.”  By 2007 when I did the first draft of The Battle this effort had still not gotten off the ground and looked like it would never happen, so I had forgotten about it mainly, though I don’t know how that happened since I drive through the Gentilly neighborhood down Franklin Avenue between my home in Bywater and my mother’s in Lake Oaks across from the UNO campus every Sunday to visit her when I’m in town.  We never fail to comment on the construction that we have seen rising in recent years with big smiles, but I had not been putting two and two together and coming up with Riggio.

He seems he made it work but sticking to the basics and remembering the New Orleans he knew and loved from his connection to his wife’s grandparents who had settled here when they came over from Italy.  Mowbray outlines the fundamentals well:

“Unlike the Make It Right project in the Lower 9th Ward, in which famous architects submitted designs that aimed to push the boundaries of environmental friendliness and energy efficiency, or Habitat for Humanity, which built scores of homes for musicians using largely volunteer labor, Project Home Again strived for designs that blend into the neighborhood and targeted people of modest incomes who had been homeowners before Katrina.

Although all the homes have been built, not all of them have been given away. To participate, people must earn less than 120 percent of the local median income, or less than $73,320 for a family of four; have a job; pass credit checks; go through homeownership training; and have no liens on their original property. Once accepted into the program, they give their original lot — with or without an unrepaired house — to Project Home Again, and Project Home Again gives them a brand new house in return and lets them pick out furniture to go with it.

All new homes are assigned a value of $150,000, and $30,000 of the mortgage is forgiven each year, so the participants own it free and clear after five years. If the lots that people turned in were well located, Project Home Again would build new homes on them for other people; otherwise, the group swapped the properties with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for other lots that were closer to each other or other Project Home Again houses to create density.”

No fuss, no bother.  No big headlines, just sound, solid homes clustered together to really zip the community back together.  I’ve driven by scores of them and other than the fact that they rise high above the ground to deal with the potential of future flooding, they look, well, like houses should look like in Gentilly.

Having lived in Gentilly from the time my dad was transferred into the city and made us into New Orleanians, until I got out of high school, I especially liked Riggio’s reasons for focusing on the neighborhood because it was not iconic or sexy or classic New Orleans, but in his words, because:

“The major objective was to protect the working class of New Orleans. Very clearly, they represent the culture of this great city,” Riggio said. “In effect, we’re helping these families to get to a point where they have financial stability for years to come, and generational wealth.”

This is one case where someone put their money where their mouth – and mind! – was, and made it happen.  It was a $20 million dollar gift to Gentilly, so it’s not like Riggio doesn’t have some money, but there’s obviously still something to this guy.

The story claims he comes back regularly to New Orleans to enjoy the Fair Grounds race track, catch a good meal, visit Jazz Fest, and whatever.

Brother, you are stepping within blocks of Fair Grinds Coffeehouse when you make those rounds, and there’s a big cup of whatever great coffee waiting for you on the house, you just tell them, Wade said “he owed you one,” and it’s on the house!

Some of the discussion sounded more like battle reports from ongoing fights.  Brad Ott with the Save Charity coalition talked about almost 200 lawsuits still outstanding with individuals and others around the hospital construction and closing.  Vanessa Gueringer, a leader of A Community Voice in the Lower 9^th Ward, detailed a litany of promises still waiting fulfillment in her community and at one point commented that the only physical evidence of the city’s rebuilding effort to date “was a bicycle path.”  Rebecca Sloboda Theriot shared her challenging experiences on the front lines teaching in a charter school in the severely broken school system.  Perhaps these are old stories after six years, but each telling opens raw wounds and I could see tears in some eyes.

The report by Mark Moreau, director of New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation (NOLAC), was the most stunning and sobering to me though because the crises he raised are still ahead of many families and communities and would likely erect insurmountable barriers for some families not only to return to the city but to live securely in the future under any circumstances.  From earlier published reports by the states Road Home authorities there has seemed to be an effort to constructively work with families who were still trying to assemble the resources to rebuild, but might have missed some of the deadlines and technical requirements to do so because of loan issues, contractor scams, and the impact of the recession.

Mark and his legal staff though were already finding cases that indicated that FEMA was back in New Orleans again, but was back this time trying to collect monies they had given earlier to families where these families had failed to complete the rebuilding.  He gave a number of examples in this area that included efforts where people were still building, but also where FEMA was tracking down families is the diaspora to wrest back refunds of FEMA money, since they were not back home yet.  Mark predicted that within six months there might be a deluge of suits that NOLAC would be handling on FEMA related clawbacks.  He already had two lawyers working virtually full-time on the problem.

One of the lessons of disaster turns out to be that there is no real end to the disaster.  It is a tragedy that keeps reverberating into the future; even as the ripples become smaller they continue unremittingly to hit people over and over.  The Katrina Clawback Campaign will be painful, and in this mean spirited political and economic time, will be difficult to win where mercy collides with justice.

New Orleans

Recently there has started to be some discussion, it would be a stretch to call it a debate at this point, about the governance of the schools and whether to allow us sorry, no account New Orleans citizens to finally take our place again in a democracy where we might practice some accountability.  Even writing my 6-year update for the book, I was scratching my head at the preposterousness of some of the problems, particularly one by Leslie Jacobs, now the head of the rebranded Chamber of Commerce, but previously a member of the state education board.  She had proposed a Cerberus-headed monster which would ostensibly be under an elected board, but require the elected board to appoint a board underneath them just to administer the charters.  Like I said, bizarre!

Suddenly though it has all become clearer to me thanks to the new, young, fast talking head of the RSD from New York.  Reading the papers a quote jumped up to me, when John White, admitted that the “emperor had no clothes” and that “…the district will ultimately need new revenue sources to ensure the ‘long term sustainability of a system of independent charter schools.”  This “network” of so-called independent charters is referred to as a “portfolio” system, since there are so many operators with independent systems and of course budgets.   Independent budgets being the soft, exposed underbelly that they had all realized, but that I  hanging out there as “joe sausage head” had been missing.  The state reimburses each charter directly.  It does not go through a central system as it does for the Orleans School System but goes directly to the charter.  The charter kicks back a sliver to the RSD but that is capped at 1.75% by state law.  All of the insiders from White to Jacobs and on up and down the line, knew they were sitting high atop a house of cards, just waiting for the next scandal, and there have been many, where money was missing or teachers were being imported from Turkey or whatever.  The state minders don’t have the horses to ride herd on the portfolio of random charters, so they have trouble.

The code words about “other sources of revenue” means that they have to get their hands around the school millage money that goes to the Orleans system and they can’t get that legally since the state has usurped control of the schools.  They all know there has to be a centralized school system to handle admission, train and hire teachers, do the legal and accounting, and myriad other tasks, but all of that costs way more than 1.75%.

What is really going on is the preparation for another bait-and-switch.  The RSD will have to be subsumed under the elected Orleans Parish School System, but the so-called “reformers” want to try and figure out a way to bamboozle the situation so that we pay for their play, and they still escape all democratic accountability.  All of these city slickers understand that in our broke ass city there is no way that we are going to pay school taxes to two systems and in fact legally there is no way the RSD could become a separately constituted system.

This is the story no one around the country is really telling.  The charter system is “one off” and not a replicable system.  At its heart where the dollars flow, it is simply not sustainable!

New aOrleans

That’s the necessary background for you to understand that now the wheels are totally coming off of this pimpmobile!

Two months ago the New York Times ran a front page story raising a wide variety of disturbing questions about a Turkish-related company (Cosmos Foundation and Atlas Texas Construction and Trading) connected to a religious movement in that country running a vast network of charter schools in Texas and others states, including in Louisiana and specifically Abramson Science and Technology Charter, a local high school.  Nothing stirred in New Orleans at this news, not even a mouse.  Suddenly, a whistleblower report inside the state Department of Education came into the hands of the local paper, The Times-Picayune. Some pretty serious allegations involving potential bribes, possible rapes, cheating on science projects by teachers, teachers missing in action, and more all came out as grist for the mill.  Oh, and then the state and the city seemed to realize that this school was also linked to the Turkish movement and acted surprised.   The state and its puppet, the RSD, reversed course and suspended the charter, leaving parents and students scrambling with only weeks to go before the opening of the 2011-12 school year.

Today the state fired the whistleblower, who had raised questions about Abramson and its operator over a year ago, along with his boss.  What?!?  No explanation given of course, just a call for a “change in direction.”  Egads!

Critics, or frankly anyone who thinks about any of these no account and no accountability charters, have long questioned how in the world the state could effectively supervise thirty (30!) different school charter operators under either the RSD or the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) Board.  Now it is clear from the squirming that the DOE didn’t really bother to tell the BESE board or others about the problems they were finding here.  And, remember there is no elected school board control and the charters appoint their own, self-perpetuating boards who never face the citizens.

This is a prescription for disaster, so who should really be surprised when disaster unfolds?

Now everyone who should have known and should have acted is playing “he said, she said,” and I dunno nada!  The local RSD superintendent is now claiming Abramson will reopen in a month or so with some kind of new operator, but there still are no assurances that anyone is on first, and I’ll guarantee that no one is on second.  Meanwhile these are all taxpayer supported playgrounds for so-called reformers and play-pretend “experts” who know better than parents and citizens, while flaunting and making a farce of democratic standards and traditions.

Hasn’t New Orleans suffered enough already?

New Orleans

Reading the article it was hard to see any controversy.  Rapson and Kresge had backup on their heels in a face of wills on whether or not they knew what was best for Detroit and could impose their “vision” accordingly or whether or not the newly elected reform mayor and former NBA basketball player, Dave Bing, and the citizens should drive the process.  Clearly they were flat ass dead wrong and the article couldn’t have been clearer.

The foundation had put money into Detroit Works, a standard issue, consultant driven planning apparatus for looking at Detroit’s future similar to what virtually every city in the US has tried to unite business, labor, and other “stakeholders” to come together behind a plan.  Bing had put the operation together before he was elected as a transition vehicle for his emerging government.  Nothing much of a surprise here either.  It’s all standard issue in big time, big city politics.  The difference here is that Bing was elected and, appropriately, moved to integrate planning and other functions in city departments and, as mayor, make sure everyone got their fair say.

Rapson seems to have petulantly pulled Kresge’s money out of Detroit Works trying to insist that an outside planner from Harvard recruited earlier to run roughshod over the local players still got to push the program.  He also doesn’t like the way a rail plan is developing and the fact that the City of Detroit wants to drive the engine, not Kresge with him wearing an engineer’s cap, so he’s also suspended the foundation’s money there, arguing that without Kresge the project is DOA.  Whoa, doggie!  Kresge’s big bucks do give them a big stick and a loud voice because unfortunately that is the way things work in America, but didn’t he at least read a couple of the pages in the foundation executives’ handbook that says they should at least pretend they care about what others thing?  What country is Rapson from that he thinks this is the way the world works?

Minnesota it turns out, where he had his moment in moving a plan as deputy mayor, working inside city government (please note, Mr. Rapson, that you should remember having been one of them then!) and managing a development plan in Minneapolis that some salute.  He also had run for Mayor of Minneapolis and lost.  So, he’s not from Detroit and doesn’t live or work in Detroit, and all of that is OK, and hardly the problem, but why take it out on Detroit?  This is clearly a man who has decided that democracy is a bad idea though.  The voters didn’t understand his value in Minneapolis and now once again he knows better than the voters of Detroit.  It is impossible not to conclude that the problem seems to be Rapson and not the voters or the democratic process.

I have a special feeling for Detroit.  I count it as a city in the process of rebuilding and recovery just like New Orleans, except that our disaster had a name, Katrina, and theirs had a concept, “deindustrialization,” which is less catchy.  Detroit is right next to New Orleans in population loss over the last decade having dropped 25% of its people since 2000.  All of this reminds me of the same hard fisted way in which Joe Canizaro and other developer, business, and philanthropic interests after Katrina tried to impose their will, take over the planning process, and remake the city in their interests.  They had the same problem with race, democracy, and people, but the fight goes on.

Detroit is at least fortunate that Rapson and Kresge’s arrogance is so over the top that even a business paper like the Journal can’t seem to disguise the fact that this kind of naked big money power grab is just plain stupid.  Money seems to believe that it is only accountable to interest rates and bank service charges.

We are celebrating Independence Day now and that includes victory over the royalists and autocrats still living on our proud soil in America today.  Light a loud firecracker to celebrate that too!

New Orleans

I loved David Simon’s The Wire, set in Baltimore.  I was never confused that it was “real” or some kind of docudrama about Baltimore.  It was good drama in an urban setting that was filled with straight talk, bent angles, and people from unions, politics, crime, and throughout the city that were multi-dimensional, complex, and felt real.  ACORN organizers and some other commentators in Baltimore felt slighted by the show because it didn’t depict the part of the world that included community organizing.  I got that, but I was a fan.

I’m having a harder time with Treme. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the show is on the air, and I’m delighted to see it set in New Orleans.  When they film in front of my house at Fredrick Douglass High School or elsewhere in the Bywater neighborhood where I live, I’m happy to move my truck out of the way.  I’m friendly to the caterers, truck drivers, security and duty cops.   I shake hands and give the thumbs up at local bars and restaurants featured as background for the action.  On that score it’s all good and thanks, Mr. Simon.

With The Wire I knew it was all just made up stuff, but I liked the gritty slices of the Baltimore we knew being part of the action.   Simon doesn’t know New Orleans, but in Treme he tries to compensate with more “historical” and “contemporary” references to substitute for the real New Orleans, the city he seems to like, but can’t quite grip, except from a tourist perspective, which just grates on me.  Even as great as New Orleans music is and as much as I like the exposure given to some of the local players as a stalwart citizen of the hometown, I often have trouble with the one-dimensional minstrel show aspects of all of this, which sometimes are just painful to watch.

One of the things that worked in The Wire was the nuanced and complex way that Simon, a former police and beat reporter up there, handled the bad guys.  They were real people.  He drew you in.  You rooted for some of the guys and against other guys.  There is no day in the streets of any city where I wouldn’t want to make sure that Omar had my back and was a block or two behind me.

New Orleans is a violent city, even more so that Baltimore, but after a year a half it is amateurish how Treme deals with this intrinsic part of the patter n of the city.  One of the main characters is the Indian chief whose struggle and cultural rectitude is supposed to attract some of our sympathy despite the fact that he is invariably a cranky son-of-a-bitch.  In the first season we watched him lay in wait and then beat up a young fellow within an inch of his life, and possibly to his death, who had stolen his tools.  Nothing more on that…it was all just left hanging and random.  In Treme the cops are plastic, tinny, and nothing more than crooks with a badge, save for one hero, who seems largely our hero because he gets along with the sniveling, heart on her sleeve lawyer, who is so committed to the truth that she can’t tell her teenage daughter about her father’s suicide.

The violence this season was a grisly rape and general beatdown of one of the main characters, a woman bartender, as she moved to close up.  Where was Simon on this story?  None of this was real.  Watching the “tourist” Treme, we’re supposed to believe that there is a bar in the hood in our fair city that doesn’t have a shotgun or some kind of firearm behind the counter.  We’re supposed to believe that our woman bartender wasn’t packing heat, mace and more.  We’re supposed to believe that there’s a woman or man barkeep in the City of New Orleans that blithely packs the day’s money in their purse or pocket and stands in the dark to lock the door.  Maybe all of that happens in Disneyland, some college town or Toronto or perhaps even Baltimore, but that’s not New Orleans, friend!

I don’t want to seem unkind about Treme, but the tourism tinge of everything also pulls everything about race out of kilter from the real city.  In a service industry where more than 50,000 people were employed in the hospitality industry before the storm and restaurants were unable to open for years because public housing was closed and affordable housing was out of reach for the largely African-American service workers trying to return to their jobs.  Despite the fact that this is the New Orleans industry, it is a afterthought seen through a story of white woman chef whose  black sous-chef has a French accent?   I don’t even want to touch the character that is a white former DJ, trying to be a rapper in our city which is famous for our hip hop and rappers.  One of the truest notes in the show slipped out this season when he admitted he had gone to Newman, an exclusive, uptown prep school, which to hometown folks just about said everything about this dude!  It also says yet more about Treme’s losing struggle to come to grips with the reality of race in the real city which can only be ignored in the tourist’s ghetto of New Orleans, where Simon and his team seem lost.

Using Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native from Press Park, the first African-American suburban development in the city, as perhaps the key character doesn’t give Treme the cover it needs in Treme. He’s a trombone playing, good times, skirt chasing scamp, and he plays it to the hilt, but that’s simply a caricature.  For some reason Simon chose a cartoon figure rather than a someone who felt like a real working musician from the city.  You want to be a serious musician in tourist-Treme, then you need to be based in New York, speak Dutch, play the violin, or something.  Phyllis Montana, the real daughter of a former Indian chief, is one of the few touches of reality anywhere near all of this, and her line about Pierce getting a “job job” rather than all of these gigs was a lightening shot of reality in the show.  I can still remember having organized carriage drivers in the French Quarter and their endless arguments about whether there work was a “job” or a “hustle,” and all that went with that including unionization, benefits, respect and dignity.  This is real!

Speaking of caricatures, all New Orleans politicians are corrupt and incompetent.  Yawn.  This is the rap, not the reality.  It’s the uptown club view and the outsider’s assumption.  The Simon of The Wire knew better.  It’s time for that Simon to come back to work on Treme.

The references to Katrina are too painful in a tourist-Treme. I know someone who couldn’t watch a show the first season without crying.  The show does pull some heartstrings for locals, although in my view Katrina is just a docudrama reference and little more.  The real life drama in every family of return, rebuilding, rejection, or recovery just doesn’t make it into Treme. In real life the resilience of the city and its population to come back and remake the city is one of the great and lasting dramas of heroism of low and moderate income working people of all races and backgrounds.  It hurts me and is painful for me to have to watch every show and think about how much is missed.

Working with ACORN in New Orleans, we had a front row, frontline seat in that struggle, but like everything that has to do with real people in the city, working and lower income people that have been and will be the majority of the city, those fights and victories that prevented the hijacking of New Orleans, its neighborhoods, and people will simply stay another story for the real citizens rather than tourist-Treme.

I was driving to the gym yesterday in my truck.  I still have a “Call ACORN – Hurricane Recovery” sign on the back.  I will always ride for the brand.  A car came up Rampart as I drove up the Treme neighborhood boundary line and started honking.  The passenger window was down, so that when he caught up to me, I looked over.  A guy was grinning with his thumb up, and I could see him mouthing the words, “Yeah, ACORN!” as he signaled and turned right on Esplanade.

Treme is better than nothing about New Orleans, but there’s a great show about the real city and its people that is still waiting to be made.   Sadly, Treme is not that show.  At least not yet.

New Orleans

All of which makes the scenes from the one-two punch caused by the 8.9 level earthquake and tsunami in the prefectures of northern Japan, even more disturbing to me. In Kobe the Japanese government had responded with billions for relief within a month of the earthquake and the priorities were first the poor and elderly and their return, all of which was opposite the USA response to Katrina, always too late, and usually too little, and never the poor first, regardless of the images embedded forever in our minds from scores of camera angles. Even with such rapid response, Kobe officials were frank with us that once the elderly and poor were relocated, even though population had returned in absolute terms to the city, a huge percentage of those populations had not been able to come back.

As always, we fool ourselves it seems. The early CNN reports mentioned the rapid response, the preparation, and the improved building standards post-Kobe, which would keep the death toll and damage estimates down. Now only days later the speculation on deaths dwarfs Kobe and is estimated between 10,000 and 20,000, which we can only pray is an exaggeration. And, though building standards may have been improved, there is no way to read about the nuclear plant generations being set at ground level on the assumption that the seawalls were adequate protection, and not feel that our hubris continually tempts fate and returns disaster.

The government in Japan still seems to be doing the right thing time after time, but the Cassandra warning here once again is that we have to have vital and robust governments willing and citizens willing to pay the prices to support adequate infrastructure protection if any of us can ever really feel safe for our families and future.