NEW ORLEANS — Almost 20 years after Hurricane Katrina hit the city, a drive through New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward takes you past boarded homes, empty, overgrown lots and block after block where there are few people or houses. In 2005, 15,000 people — mostly African Americans lived in this neighborhood. Today, the population is a third of that.
For many of the people who returned to rebuild their homes and lives after the storm, it's been difficult. Neighbors are gone, there are still few stores or schools and for some, Burnell Cotlon says, it's still a daily struggle.
"This is not a third-world country. This is New Orleans. Now, we're only 10 minutes from the French Quarter," Cotlon says, "And the people that's here in the Lower Ninth Ward, they're still suffering."
August 29 marks the anniversary of one of the worst urban disasters in U.S. history — when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Twenty years later, parts of the city still haven't fully recovered. Today, it has about three-quarters of the population it had before the storm.
Some neighborhoods have come back and are thriving. But in others, like New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, recovery still seems elusive.
Cotlon's little market on Fats Domino Avenue is one of the handful of stores that has opened in the Lower Ninth Ward in the twenty years since the storm. It's just several blocks from the place where floodwalls toppled over on the Industrial Canal, unleashing a flood that washed away homes, including Cotlon says, the one he'd bought after retiring from the Army.
"I lost everything. I had to start life all over. I had, like, 30 plus some neighbors. Today I have four. There's nothing back here, you know?" says Cotlon with a tinge of exasperation.
Born and raised in the Lower Ninth, Cotlon says he'd never heard the term "food desert" until after Katrina, when he found there was nowhere in his neighborhood to buy food. He purchased a concrete block building that survived the flood, rehabbed it and opened his shop, "Burnell's Lower 9th Ward Market."
Inside the store, he shows visitors where he first began serving customers.
"This was the grocery store window," he says, "everything went out this window. I sold milk, eggs, bread, cheese, you name it, it went out of this window. I did this for about three years."
Today, there are a few other businesses in the Lower Ninth Ward now — some gas stations, a Dollar store, but nothing like it was before Katrina, when there was a movie theater, hair salons, dry cleaners, he says.
But for years, Cotlon's store was one of the few signs of commercial activity in his part of the Lower Ninth ward — and it drew celebrities.
"This right here is my wall of fame," Cotlon says proudly pointing to a wall with pictures from famous visitors. "President Obama. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg. We had T.I., the founder of Wu-Tang Clan, Latoya Cantrell, Alicia Keys, [NFL] Commissioner Roger Goodell, Wesley Snipes, Mitch Landrieu."
Among his favorites is Ellen DeGeneres who donated washing machines and dryers, allowing him to set up a laundry room for people in the neighborhood.
And after running the store for more than a decade, Cotlon's is no longer open every day. Now, he says, it's clear few additional former residents are coming back. Any growth and rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward will have to be from newcomers. And he hasn't seen many folks coming in.
"A lot of people don't like to see what they call gentrification. This is not gentrification. This is repopulation. I welcome anything that comes back here," Cotlon laments.
"People forgot about the Lower Ninth Ward. I got to stay strong, positive. But sometimes it hurts. It hurts because when I drive from my house to come here, I remember, they had a store here, they had a school here, we had a hospital here. We had everything back here," Cotlon says.
The Lower Ninth was once a vibrant, prosperous African American community
New Orleans City Council member Oliver Thomas says people who visit the Lower Ninth today may not realize what it was like when he was growing up here in the early 1960s.
"At one point, we were a booming population of over 20,000 people, one of the largest African American communities, where 61% of us owned our own homes," Councilman Thomas says. "And it was a working-class community. We may not have lived in mansions, palaces, but the people in the Lower Ninth Ward owned their property. It was ours."
Cynthia Guillemet has fond memories of growing up in the Lower Ninth Ward.
"Everyone knew everyone. You either knew each other from church or from school," says the 81-year-old Guillemet. "We had a great childhood."
She recalls an earlier flood from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In that storm, levees on the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal breached, flooding the neighborhood. The difference, she says, is that after Betsy, the neighborhood bounced back.
"After Betsy in '65, everyone returned because the water went away quickly," she says, "and everyone started rebuilding. The residents at that time, the parents were younger. So that made a difference between then and coming back with Katrina."
Guillemet is a client service specialist with the Lower Ninth Homeownership and the president of the Lower Ninth Neighborhood Association. She laments that many residents didn't return after Katrina. She says people who've moved away tell her, "I don't see anybody in my neighborhood. And by that they meant [on] their block. You know, if I had some of my neighbors coming back, I'd come back."
Councilman Thomas says the distribution of money after Katrina discriminated against residents in the Lower Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods by basing grants on their homes' value before the storm, not on the cost of rebuilding. Now, two decades on, he says many who couldn't return have left their properties to their children.
"A lot of it was tied up in red tape with families and heirs, liens, taxes on properties. That's one of the things that probably would have helped if the state and the city would have helped cut the red tape," he says. "So who had a right to property? And then a lot of the speculators bought up hoards of blighted property or vacant property, and many of them are still holding onto it now."
Glimmers of hope in the midst of despair
Here and there in the Lower Ninth there are some good things happening. The old Holy Cross High School, shuttered since Katrina, has been redeveloped as an apartment building, with the promise that it will attract new residents to the community.
And as you drive from the French Quarter, over the St. Claude bridge into the Lower Ninth, one of the first businesses you see is a new produce market. It was opened by Sankofa, a local non-profit. Rashida Ferdinand is its director.
"Sankofa is a word from Ghana in West Africa, and it's a concept that means go back to the past to build for the future," says Ferdinand proudly.
In the market, there are tomatoes, greens, eggplants, okra, sweet potatoes — much of it locally grown. It's the only place in the neighborhood to find fresh produce. Ferdinand grew up in the Lower Ninth and she's a trained ceramic artist. She evacuated to Atlanta before Katrina hit.
"I think as soon as I came home, I wanted to be involved in that energy to really support rebuilding this area," she recalls. "And folks were getting together and trying to do some good things and I wanted to be a part of it."
She founded Sankofa more than a decade ago to help rebuild the place where she grew up. The market, she says, is one of several projects in the works.
"All of our spaces are intended to be hubs. Hubs of fun and recreation, of education, of vitality. And so this market is one of those spaces centered around healthy food," Ferdinand says.
Several blocks away, Sankofa has transformed empty lots into a vegetable farm. Marlin Ford, an urban agriculture specialist from Southern University, works with volunteers and members of the community. Among other things, he shows them how to raise and harvest okra.
"Look at the beautiful flower," says Ford, pointing to the okra flower, a yellow bloom with a purple center — it resembles a hibiscus flower. "And see the key to it — you don't want it to get too large, three inches, and then you cut with a slant because if you cut it wrong, you open it up for disease," Ford's referring to pruning okra.
Sankofa is working on a plan to transform some 40 acres of vacant lots in the Lower Ninth into vegetable gardens. The group has also helped build a park and nature trail in a wetlands area that had been a site for illegal dumping. The idea, Ferdinand says, is to create events and spaces that help build community.
City officials support Sankofa's work. But, after languishing for two decades, Rashida Ferdinand says what the Lower Ninth really needs is a systematic governmental plan to rebuild the neighborhood.
"The investment is not here. There's consistent blight, pervasive blight," she says. "There's not even planning data that's been created and assessed. So, having an intentional plan to build, redevelop a space is the first step."
As of now, the main government agency with a plan for the Lower Ninth is the Port of New Orleans — it's approved a new grain terminal with rail lines running through the neighborhood. Homeowners worry it will undercut their efforts to attract new people to a neighborhood that too often has been neglected.
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