Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina 9780822379195

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MARKETS OF SORROW, LABORS OF FAITH

MARKETS OF SORROW, LABORS OF FAITH New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

VINCANNE ADAMS

Duke University Press Durham & London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and typeset in Minion Pro and Franklin Gothic by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Figures 1–8 appear courtesy of Taslim van Hattum. Figures 9–11 appear courtesy of Vincanne Adams. Figure 12 appears courtesy of Tina C. Russell.

This book is dedicated to the people of New Orleans, Gay Becker & John Norby.

Contents

1 It’s Not about Katrina 1 2 The Making of a Disaster 22 3 “If This Could Happen to Us, It Could Happen to Anyone” 55 4 Navigating the Road Home 74 5 Getting to the Breaking Point 99 6 Faith in a Volunteer Recovery 126 7 Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy 153 8 Katrina as the Future 176 Acknowledgments 191 Notes 193 Bibliography 213 Index 225

One

​IT’S NOT ABOUT KATRINA Why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on [our] backs? . . . We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally. Our mental health is in crisis. The depression has shifted from the storm to the hope‑ lessness and stress of the Road Home. Yes, it is that bad. . . . A little girl came to volunteer with her mom from Boston. She was nine years old. And she asked her mother on the third day of working in [our community], “Mom, when are we going back to America?” You know . . . that really . . . [crying]. Sorry. I said I wasn’t going to do this. But it’s overwhelming. . . . [taking a deep breath]. . . . So I think I’m here to ask you all. . . . We are Americans. We are homeowners and we pay taxes and we are citizens. My question to you is: when can we rejoin the country?—Caroline Reeves, community organizer, testimony for the U.S. Senate, May 2007

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his book is not about Hurricane Katrina. It is about Americans who have managed to survive a second-­order disaster that was precipitated by the success of profit-­driven solutions to a crisis of need at the turn of the twenty-­first century. It is about the disaster of stalled and prolonged recovery, not the disaster that preceded it. It is about the price that is paid in human terms for the success of processes set in motion long before Hurricane Katrina, about the effects of privatizing our most public social services, and about the failure of these services to respond to Americans in need because they are tied to market forces guided by profit. It is also about the other face of privatization: the grass-­roots, community, and faith-­based responses that rose up in the wake of these failures and the new economy that

Figure 1. The destruction was widespread and pervasive (2006).

has emerged in the wake of such responses. This economy is based on the circulation of an affective surplus—the emotional responsiveness and ethical inducement to action generated by a recognition of ongoing need among Americans—and the unpaid labor force it mobilizes. Finally, this book is about the infringements of market logic that impinge on even the charity sector in ways that promise, once again, profits gained from the spoils of a disaster and its victims. New Orleanians are in a good position to tell us this story, and perhaps none are better qualified to do so than the Bradlieus.

The Bradlieus

In August 2005, Henry and Gladys Bradlieu lived comfortably in retirement in one of the oldest properties in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.1 Henry had served in Vietnam, had been shot several times, and was a three-­time Purple Heart recipient. He then became a civil servant for the U.S. Postal Service; after he retired he spent his free time golfing at the public course. Gladys had worked different clerical and assistant jobs her whole life and had last been a data entry clerk at City Hall. They owned their two-­bedroom home on a corner lot in what was, in 2005, a densely packed mixed-­race neighborhood. They were a success story of middle-­class comfort that surpassed many of their relatives who lived across town in Mid-­ City and the Upper Ninth Ward. The Bradlieus had no idea how quickly everything they had lived and saved for in order to retire in modest comfort could be taken away from them. On August 27, 2005, the Bradlieus evacuated to Texas and watched the storm on television; they didn’t know yet that their home would survive the hurricane but would be swallowed up by the floods resulting from the collapse of the levee system thereafter. Their home filled with ten feet of water, and it sat like that for three weeks. When they finally came back to the city a few months later, Gladys recalled it was so quiet. “No birds, no trees, no color. Nothing. Just gray, everywhere gray.” Furniture was covered in layers of lifeless mud. Silverware that had floated off of kitchen counters was strewn about in layers of smelly, gooey sludge. Family photographs were blackened and moldy. Clothing, linens, books, and shoes were indistinguishable from the walls, which had wallpaper peeling away in sheets from the stained brown-­gray sheetrock beneath. Worst of all, Gladys said, were

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Chapter One

the trees. Most of the trees had been uprooted, and the rest were covered in brownish-­gray mud. They were as lifeless as the neighborhood around them. Like a lot of returning residents, Henry and Gladys didn’t really know where to begin. They had received a check for $2,400 and a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema). The church folks in Texas who helped the Bradlieus while they were displaced sent them home with some $500 taken up in collection from parishioners, a few items of clothing, some dishware, glasses, and linens. In December 2005, they moved into their three-­hundred-­square-­foot trailer parked lengthwise on what was once their front lawn. As African Americans who had lived through the years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they were used to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, or at least with nothing if not the Lord’s help. Henry said, “We’ll rebuild.” Five years later, in January 2011, at the age of seventy, Henry Bradlieu died, having spent most of the last three years of his life in his cramped bed at one end of a fema trailer, paralyzed by a stroke that he suffered in 2008 on the day he learned that he would be denied, for the second time, federal assistance for rebuilding from the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Road Home Program. Gladys recalled her husband’s anger on that day in 2008. “He was beside himself,” she said. His two-­and-­a-­half-­year struggle to prove to Road Home that he owned his home, including getting an affidavit from the previous owner, months and months of lost paperwork, repeat visits to agency offices, being treated like a criminal, and the sheer discomfort of living in his little fema trailer, was too much. Gladys had tried to reason with people at the office of the Road Home Program, providing the paperwork and the bond-­for-­deed sale records showing that they owned their home. Bond-­for-­deed sales were common among those who had been denied opportunities for mortgages through conventional banks. Despite the fact that Gladys had retrieved documentation from City Hall that showed such transactions were legal and conferred ownership, she was unable to convince them. She was resigned, but “Henry was different,” she said. He wanted to cuss them out. One time we had one meeting and we went all the way to [Governor] Blanco’s office and he cussed them out and they had to get people to escort him out of there. . . . He was so mad. . . . They were trying to say that we hadn’t flooded in our It ’ s Not about Katrina

3

home. Can you imagine? Henry said, “I fought for my country. Look what my country did for me? They kicked me in the head.” By 2008, Henry and Gladys’s savings were gone. Their pensions were not enough to afford even the building materials for repairing their home. He was out of time, out of money, out of patience. In the same year that Henry was denied his request for a mere $50,000 to rebuild, the executives at icf International who ran the Road Home Program under a no-­bid federal subcontract awarded themselves $2 million in bonuses and posted record earnings for their stockholders. When Henry got the letter that denied him funds for a second time, he couldn’t believe it. That afternoon, he told Gladys he was going in to take a nap; within minutes of lying down in his tiny trailer bed, he suffered a massive stroke that left him nearly totally paralyzed. Gladys took care of Henry after that. She fed him, cleaned him, tended his bed sores, got his medications, and, in her spare time, tried to figure out what to do with her gutted, empty home that sat some fifteen feet from her trailer door. Even the tasks of keeping the weeds down and the rats out were challenges. When the Bradlieus finally moved back into their rebuilt home two years later in July 2010, it was only because a neighborhood volunteer group had championed their cause. It took two years, eight hundred volunteers, and a steady stream of donations from ordinary people—people who, upon hearing Henry’s story, would say things like “Screw the government! We’ll rebuild it ourselves!” The wait was too long for Henry. Only six months after moving in, he died. Gladys said she believed Henry had waited to die until she was settled back in their home. “You know,” she said, “it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that killed him. It was the recovery that killed him.” Remembering the day of his stroke, she said, “Look what they did for him. “Look what they did to him.”

Delayed Recovery and Market-­Driven Governance

There are specific reasons it took so long for people to recover in New Orleans. These reasons are largely tied to forces that were far beyond the control of any returning resident or any local official. They were mobilized in and through political and economic arrangements that allowed them. 4

Chapter One

These arrangements turned disaster recovery into a for-­profit endeavor that enabled private companies to obtain government relief funds while offering little accountability to the people for whom these funds were intended. They allowed banks to offer loans that drove up debt among victims while generating interest-­based returns for lenders. They allowed insurance companies to evade culpability when they refused to pay for damages but extract further insurance payments from people whose homes could no longer be inhabited. Finally, they ensured that real recovery would be left up to local volunteers, churches, and nonprofit charities. Recovery that should have taken a few years was turned into what locals called a “funeral that would not end.” For people like Henry Bradlieu, the funeral became all too real. Henry Bradlieu’s experience was not exceptional; it was exemplary. The testimonies and analyses of New Orleanians’ experiences of trying to rebuild and recover offer a glimpse of the inevitable outcome of what is often called neoliberal capitalism. In New Orleans, we can see in bold relief the contours of our political and social predicament created by neoliberal policies of governing, or what Margaret Somers has more descriptively called market-­driven governance.2 Emerging out of a half-­century commitment to neoliberal policies that favor and advance market-­based solutions for our most pressing economic and social problems, we see now a steady transformation of public-­sector institutions into market-­based consortia wherein fiscal, for-­profit transactions become the means by which access to federal resources, even for things like disaster relief, is determined. George Soros has called attention to the dangers of this trend—a form of market fundamentalism3—in which popular support prevails for ending “big government” alongside policies that allow the free market to determine how we allocate our national resources in order to solve not only our fiscal problems but also our social problems. What New Orleanians’ stories offer is a glimpse into how the trend toward letting the for-­profit market serve as the engine that drives public-­sector work is both much more complex and more pervasive than we have seen in the past, and also how it fails.4 Despite calls for ending big government, New Orleans offers evidence of an ongoing dependence upon big government to fund the work of things like disaster recovery in ways that help markets and companies but hurt people. To be sure, market-­driven governance has in no way ended government involvement in socioeconomic affairs. Market-­driven governance simply offers new ways to bring the market and its rationalities of profit into It ’ s Not about Katrina

5

governance. Somers notes that these trends have been successful at converting popular legislative agendas, which historically favored and protected an ethos of “shared fate, equal risk, and social justice” into a situation in which exclusions on the benefits of citizenship are determined by contractual opportunities governed by the market.5 Market-­driven governance is what happens, she writes, when “disproportionate market power disrupts the carefully constructed balance [of power among state, market, and citizens, adjudicated in the public sphere], as risks and costs of managing human frailties under capitalism once shouldered by government and corporations get displaced onto individual workers and vulnerable ­families.”6 The conscription of the profit sector to do the work that the public needs has in no way resulted in more efficient or effective recovery for those trying to return and rebuild after a disaster. New Orleans offers an example of how this happens. The costs of shouldering responsibility for recovery were shifted to families and individuals, while profits were generated for corporations that were given responsibility for managing what many people still think of as civil and social welfare needs. Companies that were hired to help New Orleanians rebuild developed high-­profile ipo offerings and upward trends in stock values, while homeowners were forced to go into debt, arbitration, and lawsuits to recover funds they were promised. The delayed recovery produced a second-­order disaster that had its own logic and rationales that were nearly as deadly as those that produced the floods in the first place. The disaster of market-­driven governance emerges today as an entrenched set of institutional arrangements in which government continues to play a key role in protecting the interests of market-­oriented businesses that, in turn, are increasingly authorized to make money not only on key government activities like defense contracting and infrastructure but also on key commitments to social welfare, including assistance for disaster and recovery aid—that is, on the business of social suffering. These arrangements define the contours and also the predicament of our current political economy; accounts from New Orleans in the five-­year aftermath of Katrina offer us insights about the uneven success of such policies when it comes to the social contract, demonstrating how well this arrangement is working for some and how poorly it works for others. In the chapters herein, we will see how market-­oriented policies deployed to effect and augment recovery instead enabled and encouraged private-­sector investment in public-­ 6

Chapter One

sector problems in ways that prioritized corporate financial rewards and fiscal growth over other measures of success that have, at different historical moments in the United States, held sway because they were protected by a strong public sector.

The Inefficiencies of Profit

When government funds allocated for relief are funneled through private for-­profit companies on their way to being distributed to victims of disaster, something happens to the money. The interference of competing demands of the market can impede operations, pulling resources in other directions than downward to the recipients who are in need. What we will see herein is an example of a privately organized, publicly funded bureaucratic failure. The market, which many believe provides an impartial engine for sustainable infrastructure and social welfare, actually got in the way of hoped-­for outcomes. The assumption that government bureaucracy was to blame for the disaster of delayed recovery was voiced, but it concealed a more pivotal truth: such delays were actually a result of the inefficiencies of profit. Commitment to neoliberal arrangements on the part of policymakers, planners, and citizens alike in the United States has been growing for more than fifty years even though it has never been universally supported. Today, the market penetrates more and more domains of the public sector, where one finds large-­scale commitment to the idea that profit motivation will create an equitable and efficient trickling down of resources to those in need who deserve it.7 This trickledown is believed to occur in two ways: first by the growth of businesses that find ways to solve problems of need while also making profits and, second, by the recognition on the part of large profit owners that charity will work better than public-­sector institutions to take care of those in need. Both of these processes are seen in post-­Katrina New Orleans. Businesses organized to help with relief arose at the intersection between government and citizen and seized opportunities to show that the private sector could succeed where government would fail. Subcontracted to the government to carry out redistribution activities, these businesses were nevertheless allowed to work with little regulatory oversight. In the end, they were able to profit from human tragedy, turning sorrows into opportunities for capital investment in what Naomi Klein calls a form of disaster It ’ s Not about Katrina

7

capitalism.8 In New Orleans, one can trace this dynamic in the actions of private-­sector businesses like Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and Blackwater, who were called in for rescue-­and-­relief operations, all the way to the recovery subcontractors like icf International and the banks who obtained Small Business Administration loan support and insurance companies who denied payments to their clients. Even more surprising, and frightening, is how the trail of profit making can also be followed all the way to the nonprofit sector, with creeping market penetration into the charities and faith-­based groups that stepped up in response to the failure of the for-­profit sector. Organizations like ­HandsOn and Points of Light Institute have emerged as part of a new national-­level corporate assemblage that makes use of federal funds in new ways, bringing charity into the mix of market-­oriented opportunities to take care of a needy public. As this assemblage grows, so, too, does the degree to which our economy turns need and the affective responses it generates into a new source of profit. Questions about how best to provide for people in need (and which of these people qualify for help) after a disaster are vividly brought to the forefront as the recovery industry becomes a new sector for market opportunism and growth.

Transforming Need into Profit

Understanding the trend toward increasing privatization of public-­sector resources, including social welfare services like those that emerge after a disaster, requires understanding a new set of commitments, as Somers notes—commitments to the subtle replacement of an ethics of public care with an ethics of private profit. Although the idea of subcontracting government work to the private sector is not new, what is new today is the particular way that for-­profit businesses have come to be involved in public-­sector activities in largely unregulated ways and in ways that put our most important safety-­net infrastructures at risk.9 Institutions that are designed to provide public care (from welfare services to education) have become places where profit making not only is deemed ethically tolerable as a mainstream political proposition but also is desired as a measure of success, and often the only measure of success. Naomi Klein notes that, under these arrangements, revolving doors between government agencies and private-­sector businesses have enabled large for-­profit corporations not only to deploy but 8

Chapter One

also to design public-­sector programs, including federal programs to stimulate long-­term recovery and the provision of rebuilding resources to postdisaster communities. Such arrangements have allowed for a blurring of investment potential with humanitarian need while also creating a slippery slope for those who would use public resources for private gain at the expense of those who are left to fend for themselves. Foucault noted that “the problem of neoliberalism was not to cut out or contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society . . . the problem of neoliberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy.”10 An exploration of recovery after Katrina offers a good lens through which to view the long-­term success of neoliberal approaches to problems of governance and the subtle ways in which they are changing things—that is, an exploration of what neoliberalism is today as a form of market-­driven governance. If, for example, neoliberal policies have always discouraged dependency on the part of the poor and needy on government “handouts” not only as failures of public policy but also as failures of personhood and citizenship, then new regimes of marketized governance both reinforce and reverse this logic. They enable the needy to become a site for the production of capital, generating profits for companies that spring into existence after a disaster. Who is authorized to care for those in need, who determines how much money a company should be able to make doing so, and what outcome indices are used to determine whether or not the company has done the job well are all forms of political power in which notions of fiscal enterprise should be measured against the persistence of need. But what we see today is that market-­driven governance turns the persistence of need into an engine of disaster capitalism. Measures of fiscal success are inversely tied to the job of eradicating need in part because need is itself a source for further subcontracting opportunities, as we will see.

The Affect Economy

New Orleans in the wake of Katrina shows how a new set of market transactions has grown around the role of the poor and needy as both products and producers in an economy that relies on specific kinds of suffering to generate new and quite large profits. Creating an affect economy, the probIt ’ s Not about Katrina

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lems of need after a catastrophe circulate as emotional calls for the witness of suffering and also as urgent ethical demands to intervene and help. In the wake of recurring disasters, whether caused by the disparities of a healthy economy, the ravages of a declining economy, or the decimation induced by so-­called natural disasters and failed recovery, the sectors of our society and economy that answer the call to help are on the rise. The job of taking care of the needy, whose numbers grow in the wake of tragedies, is now offered up as a new set of opportunities for profits, tethering market indices of success to the humanitarian work of private for-­profit companies and nonprofit charities alike. New transactional opportunities emerge in the space of suffering, even changing the role of charities in the process. Moving beyond those who would argue that the task of the social scientist is to provide witness to suffering after a tragedy, or that witnessing affect alone might disrupt the structural conditions that produce it,11 my hope is that the stories herein will help us to reconsider how the acts of witnessing and the affective surplus produced by disasters like Katrina have become themselves part of an economy in which affect circulates as a source of market opportunity for profit. This is more than a situation in which companies use people’s emotions to capitalize on them, as has been well documented in the service-­sector industries.12 The affect economy we live within today makes use of affective responses to suffering in ways that fuel structural relations of inequality, providing armies of free labor to do the work of recovery while simultaneously producing opportunities for new corporate capitalization on disasters. The growth of private for-­profit industries within the world of relief and recovery has had a significant effect on the way that nonprofits and charities do their work. It is particularly clear, for example, that nongovernmental and charity institutions, especially those that are faith-­based, have been called upon to provide support where for-­profit federal subcontractors have left gaps in the recovery landscape (or where the unregulated free market economy has itself produced the catastrophe). While it is clear that the churches have been largely successful in this work, it is also clear that the machinery of our current political economy not only depends on but also hopes to conscript this sector for new kinds of profit making. Tying together the affective surplus of suffering with an outpouring of charity-­based volunteering motivated by affective responsiveness, churches and charities offer ideal sites for new investments of profit capital. 10

Chapter One

New companies that blend public-­sector work with for-­profit private business have today emerged as a growth industry in postdisaster locations in the United States, and these firms continually seek new ways to grow by exploiting the resources of unpaid or low-­paid volunteers who are called to action by the affective surplus that arises in a disaster’s wake. This predicament extends far beyond disaster relief, as witnessed in the growing ranks of underpaid AmeriCorps, HealthCorps and Teach for America workers. As small charities and churches play a larger and larger role in filling in where other recovery processes fail, larger for-­profit corporations that are capable of inserting themselves into the mix of recovery assistance increasingly become monopoly intermediaries between nonprofit, faith-­based, charity safety-­net resources and the people who need help. The for-­profit corporation has become a preferred model for assembling together charity, government support, and people in need into what is sometimes called a virtuous circle, in which it is assumed that the work of providing charity can also be profitable. The assumption is that profits can be made on suffering produced by need even while trying to attend to its elimination. The business of charity has become a big business opportunity for those able to generate fiscal surplus out of the affective surplus aroused by human suffering. The idea of using churches and faith-­based labor to do this work is built into neoliberal prescriptions that see the private charity sector as more efficient than government-­run safety-­net programs. Using labor that is largely free because it is motivated by faith and moral conscience enables this structural arrangement to suture infrastructures of profit making to the problem of need. In this arrangement, the safety net becomes a kind of affective choice, rather than a civil right protected by regulations that are enforced by strong public sector policies and juridical protections. Helping others in need is seen as a moral virtue, while making profits on this work is seen as equally virtuous. In an insidious turn, however, this system reproduces need by paying low or no wages for the work volunteers contribute under the banner of moral certainty. The arrangements of an affect economy insert the engines of affect into the machinery of corporate survival. In the meantime, private-­sector solutions enable companies to funnel fiscal rewards upward toward executive and marketing portfolios as a systematic necessity of company operations and survival rather than downward to those doing the work or those in need. This arrangement involving volunteer labor alongside corporate profits is justified by the affective sense It ’ s Not about Katrina

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of purpose, sometimes tied to notions of Christian charity, that such work arouses. Thus, even though charity’s role in helping out where the government and the free market are not able to take care of everyone is not new, we are witnessing the flourishing of this arrangement today. Wealth owners are asked to help take care of needy Americans without passing through the systems of taxation and redistribution of the public sector. The involvement of wealth philanthropy in charity caregiving (Andrew Carnegie is a good example) is not new, but the support for this has grown in ways that have given rise to the notion that, even here, there are profits to be made, turning charity itself into not a residual but a primary site for investment capital. Venture philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism offer striking examples of this trend, and both have been important in nonprofit charity work that has helped New Orleans to recover. In the affect economy, the compulsion to help those in need and the regeneration of need itself in and through such things as prolonged recovery failure (and reliance on low or unpaid volunteer labor) now dance in tandem with one another because of the market’s penetration. This arrangement not only spawns new profit opportunities but also changes how humanitarian work gets done. Accounting for the actual work that gets done to help people recover and rebuild while also trying to track the upward flow of profits that are now available through this work are not just tasks that charities must undertake: they are also the goals of this book. Today, as nonprofit, charity, and church organizations are brought into relationships with corporations who hope to profit on the circulation of ongoing need and the affect it arouses, it is important to track how and when these arrangements work, as well as when and why they fail.

Federal Relief and the Free Market

Federal support for emergency relief, like support for those in need more generally, has a long history in the United States. It did not emerge in the Roosevelt years as a novel form of Keynesian government welfare against laissez-­faire regimes. Debates at the federal level over the effectiveness and legitimacy of providing federal funding to support disaster relief and other safety-­net programs (as opposed to leaving this job to private-­sector charities) are historically persistent within the United States and are fraught with 12

Chapter One

further debates over moral blame, Christian virtue, racial inequality, and concerns about the legitimacy of Congress versus the courts in deciding policy and federal action.13 Any history of the welfare state must include accounting for the role of nearly a century of federal disaster relief in paving the way for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Indeed, in the century prior to Roose­ velt—a century labeled as one in which “laissez-­faire” capitalism reigned— federal assistance programs were plentiful. Michele Dauber notes that these programs provided the rationale for their augmentation during the Great Depression. The historical and contemporary persistence of federal support for disaster relief is neither contested nor doubted here. A sympathetic state has always been a necessary counterpart to the free market. What is surprising, however, is how debates over federal disaster relief are not muted by larger concerns over the most efficient and effective ways to distribute such relief. That is, the state has not retreated, and it has not been minimized under neoliberalism, but neoliberalism has now provided a new and robust rationale for involving big business in the operations of the sympathetic state and few people are studying the outcomes of these shifts. The story of post-­Katrina New Orleans is thus not a story of the decline of the welfare state or the rise of crony capitalism. It is a story about how the two have become intertwined in new ways: crony capitalism now makes money on the welfare state.14 As legislative policies call on the free market to provide solutions to problems of poverty, dispossession, and postdisaster blight, the government creates opportunities for new kinds of market-­ driven networks that are designed to do many different things. Rebuilding basic infrastructures such as roads, electrical grids, and sewage systems as well as reconstructing schools, public housing, and neighborhoods are jobs that require federal and state support. When support is given, what matters is how it is routed and the relative weight placed on public- versus private-­ sector priorities in deciding how and where to spend it. Post-­Katrina New Orleans illustrates that public-­sector interests became blurred with private-­ sector opportunities. As a result, there were few to no real mechanisms in place to ensure that resources were used fairly. There were virtually no effective regulations placed on companies to ensure that profits were not sought at the expense of people in need. In fact, it appears that showing corporate profits counted for more than ensuring public recovery. Measures of fiscal reward and corporate growth were used to account for progress in ways that It ’ s Not about Katrina

13

displaced other measures of success such as seeing many people returning to rebuilt homes or gauging residents’ access to reconstruction funds without an increase in their personal debt. Henry Giroux, in his book Stormy Weather, noted that “market fundamentalism prevails when the values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the template for organizing the rest of society.”15 We saw this before, during, and after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, when the conditions that caused the disaster could be traced to cronyism between private companies and the Army Corps of Engineers. It was seen when rescue-­and-­relief operations were handed over to private-­sector firms that made money through Homeland Security operations that were putatively hired to provide humanitarian relief.16 It was visible in the recovery processes that were deployed and came into being in the five-­year aftermath, as we will see. Returning New Orleans residents were asked to participate in the circuits of capital that flowed from the government through corporations and, finally, to them in ways that were belabored and inefficient because such capital was used to show corporate profitability alongside recovery success. This process entailed not an erasure of government but an active converting of government effort into a process of “allowing” the market to do the job of reasoning for us or, as Foucault noted, in the passage above, when “the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy.”17 Post-­Katrina New Orleans in this sense offers an exemplary case of market-­driven governance, even if the situation there was in some sense historically and culturally unique.18 The consequences of these arrangements, more than of any natural disaster, figure visibly in the stories of the people of New Orleans, many of whom, more than five years after the actual hurricane and the weathering of a second crisis precipitated by the bp Gulf oil spill, were still searching for ways to rebuild and recover.

Disaster Stories

In some ways, the story of what happened between the initial hurricane and the five-­year mark as I began to write this book, when New Orleanians who did come back were in some cases still digging out of gutted homes, trying to avoid debilitating debt, and fighting deep depression, is a story that is familiar to other American communities that suffered catastrophes and 14

Chapter One

never recovered. Eric Klinenberg’s account of the devastating 1995 Chicago heat wave; Kai Erikson’s study of the Buffalo Creek Flood in West Virginia; Anthony Wallace’s study of a coal-­mining disaster in St. Clair, Pennsylvania; and a host of other sources on Hurricane Katrina’s effects have all offered insights about how tragedies should be conceptualized in terms of the social vulnerability they reveal and the ramifications of existing inequalities that explain not only patterns of morbidity and mortality but also adjustment, recovery, and well-­being or the lack thereof in a tragedy’s immediate aftermath.19 Following Klinenberg’s example, what we need is a way to read disasters in terms that provide a social autopsy of what went wrong before but also in the long-­term aftermath.20 Comparative cases show how, as Anthony Oliver-­Smith notes, disasters are events that reveal the existing crises of social vulnerability. Comparative analyses of disasters have noted that it is in part the sustained rhetoric of disasters as “natural” phenomena that enables their political causes and consequences to be overlooked. In Catastrophe in the Making, William Freudenberg and his coauthors make it clear that Hurricane Katrina’s devastation was not an unpredictable accident. The floods and displacements that followed could easily have been predicted given the existing structures of inequality and dispossession and the growth industries that governed the fragile relationship between wetlands, canals, levees, and human populations in this Louisiana landscape. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina didn’t “happen” accidentally; it was produced by the industries that shaped the Gulf region in and around New Orleans in the fifty years prior to the hurricane, about which we will hear more. Similarly, treating disasters as “natural events” can conceal the ways in which they reinforce and conceal political arrangements that enable violations of human and civil rights and a furthering of political agendas in the name of humanitarian aid.21 This, too, could be seen in New Orleans as federal proclamations of a state of emergency enabled private-­sector paramilitary groups like Blackwater to do the work of humanitarian relief.22 The racial and class contours of Hurricane Katrina’s impact made it possible for the relief to exacerbate preexisting inequalities along these lines.23 The storm’s impacts on poor and middle-­class African American families were much harsher than for middle- or upper-­ class Euro-­American families, often entailing infringements of both civil and human rights.24 Nandini Gunewardena and Mark Schuller, as well as Naomi Klein, note It ’ s Not about Katrina

15

that the same agents that produce disasters are often involved in capitalizing on spoils in the aftermath.25 The form of this profiteering is not just in fiscal rewards but also in renewed contracts and expanding protections from public scrutiny, since subcontractors usually answer to the same legislators who fund the programs involved in creating the disasters in the first place. In what follows, we will see how market forces of recovery augmented class and race disparities in the city and also articulated profits in large part in and through recovery strategies that were set up to fail for some people more than for others. However much we can learn from the similarities to comparative cases of other disasters, post-­Katrina New Orleans also presents us with new insights. Studying the disaster from the perspective of the five-­year aftermath offers us a slow-­motion lens through which to watch the unfolding of long-­ term recovery failure and the operations of everyday arrangements of our contemporary political economy that are implicated in this failure. In this sense, this story is not just a postdisaster story. It is a story of the effects of market-­driven public policies that have reached their apogee. Following the work of Adriana Petryna, I hope to show how conditions of postdisaster life are contoured and configured by the political economic landscape and the rhetoric of salvation and care that, as a new form of governance, is mobilized to deal with it. When it comes to understanding the impacts not only of the disaster but also of the lingering effects of recovery under conditions of market-­driven governance, New Orleans offers a glimpse into the future for those who will experience catastrophes like Katrina and perhaps for many other citizens in need, for many different reasons, in the years to come. Many of the insights here will be familiar to anyone who has read about or experienced the processes of long-­term recovery in post-­Katrina New Orleans. For New Orleanians, this is not a new subject. It is old, familiar, and frustrating. For others from outside the city for whom these stories may hold something new, they should also be frustrating. Much of what has been written about Hurricane Katrina has tended to focus on larger social analyses of the structural causes of the tragedy, on the social inequalities it revealed, or on personal experiences, but not on the linkages among them.26 There are numerous insightful accounts of the social dynamics of Hurricane Katrina.27 And there are very compelling firsthand accounts of the disaster and of residents’ return.28 Revisiting interviews and rereading the stories from those who decided to return and rebuild New Orleans, it was 16

Chapter One

clear to me that, despite having an ample supply of literature on Hurricane Katrina, there was still a part of the story that had not yet been told. This book fills that gap by illustrating how recovery experiences reflect a larger set of structural changes in the contemporary political economy of the United States. Hurricane Katrina did not come, destroy, and then give way to recovery. Katrina is an ongoing disaster; even for those who consider themselves physically recovered, it has permanently changed them and their understanding of an American way of life.

The Ethnographic Engagement

The ethnographic materials used herein are based on formal research undertaken in New Orleans that began in 2007 and continued through 2011. I was asked to take on this research project after the death of my colleague Gay Becker. Gay wrote an initial grant proposal to study age, race, and gender in relation to disaster, but she passed away before she learned that it would be funded. I was asked by our mutual colleague Sharon Kaufman, and then by the National Institutes of Health, to be the principal investigator. I took on this work in part as a way to honor her career and contributions. After deliberating for some time on the merits of turning my attention from a twenty-­ five-­year career of working in Asia, I finally began to see parallels between what I had seen in the international world of development aid, especially the effects of structural adjustment policies on those far afield, and the condition of recovery and the infrastructures of aid deployed within the United States. What I found was that, as one of my informants noted, New Orleans had become a target community; America had become a place where “development aid” was now needed. Looking at the new structural arrangements of U.S. poverty helped me understand the ways in which the problems of market-­driven governance operate on a global scale, and I also saw the inner workings of its logics and failures close to home. In taking on a project that was initially planned by Gay, I inherited an extraordinary research team to which I added a few new faces. I worked with two primary research assistants over a four-­year period in New Orleans, one of whom lived in New Orleans. Over the years, I also worked with two other research assistants who lived in New Orleans and two other part-­time researchers from the San Francisco Bay Area, all of whom helped collect information about community events, websites, rebuilding resources that It ’ s Not about Katrina

17

were available in the area, and people who were involved in activism around these efforts. Although our focus in the interviews was initially on age, race, and gender inequalities in relation to disaster recovery, and although we have published on these topics elsewhere, I found early on that the similarities in recovery experiences between these groups were both more and less than the differences. The larger story about recovery that needed to be told was about how market forces involved in recovery were exacerbating existing inequalities, delaying recovery, and creating a new type of economy in ways that were significant not just for those recovering from disaster but for all of those involved in helping them do so as well. In formal interviews, we met with 163 people, each at three to four different times. Roughly half of the participants were African American and half were Euro American; a small portion claimed they were Creole, biracial, or a mix of ethnic groups that some referred to as “gumbo.” All of our formal interviews were with people who were forty and older, although during extended stays in the region I came to know and experience people from younger age groups.29 In our formal interviews we focused on stories of evacuation, return, and struggles to rebuild homes and lives. In most cases, we got a very clear sense of how things were progressing or not, as was too often the case. The interviews took place in fema trailers, in gutted or partially repaired homes, on front steps, or in one of the few coffeeshops that had gotten up and running again. Each interview lasted from several hours to entire afternoons. We also gathered demographic and health information during each interview. Interviews were taped, transcribed, and coded. I read all of the transcripts and participated in numerous interviews during my time spent in New Orleans. As an anthropologist, my findings were also formed by insights gained from spending extended periods of time in the community. This included from two to three visits per year, most of which lasted from ten days to a month. On each of these visits, I interviewed and learned how people were writing about, talking about, and engaging in processes related to the attempt to recover. On one visit per year, I recruited family and friends to become active volunteers in cleaning-­up and rebuilding efforts. On these visits, we helped to pull nails, strip moldy wood, clean up debris and overgrown weeds from yards, plant and landscape, paint houses inside and out, glaze windows, and, invariably, listen to people tell their stories. 18

Chapter One

I was given the opportunity not only to see the recovery process in action but also to be a witness to the testimonies of betrayal, frustration, anger, and also hope that enabled people to deal with their frustrations. Every visit was marked by moments of enormous sadness and tears, and also by moments of extraordinary awe at the hopefulness and endurance, will, and can-­do spirit of the people I met who were, using what my friend Caroline called “boots on the ground,” recovering step by step, brick by brick, house by house. In addition to drawing from the firsthand experiences of the members of the team who lived in the city, I also attended community activities that emerged in the wake of the slowed recovery, including protests against the destruction of public housing as well as public hearings and talks about the changing racial profile of the city. I watched performances, from film festivals to poetry slams, where people creatively expressed their experiences of displacement, racial inequality, and struggle. I read newspapers and blogs, participated in Mardi Gras rituals, chased Mardi Gras “Indians” through the back streets of the Bywater, and lingered over coffee, music, meals, and second lines with the people of New Orleans who had become friends. Together, we saw movies, bought groceries, went to church, and sat in gutted and in new living rooms, and we sorted through our experiences of the past years as we helped ourselves to the first fresh boiled crawfish of the season.

Organization of the Book

This book is intended to take readers on a journey into two realms. First, I hope to illustrate how conditions of market-­driven governance are reshaping America. The five-­year trajectory of recovery efforts in post-­Katrina New Orleans offers an extraordinary vantage point from which to watch the long-­term reshaping process and to trace the specific institutional contours of our emerging social experiment among people who are in some sense the “canaries in the coal mine” for the rest of us. Second, by focusing on the lives of people in their prolonged effort to recover, my hope is to illustrate their individual experiences and emotional effects. I devote considerable space to people’s accounts of their experiences, beginning soon after the storm and floods and then onward through the five-­year period afterward. The case materials and stories were chosen because they provide useful It ’ s Not about Katrina

19

insights about both the mechanics of an affect economy and the arrangements of recovery assistance that were formed under the pressure of neoliberal priorities. In using what are in many cases highly charged emotional testimonials to tell a story about failed recovery and the reasons for it, however, I realize that I participate in the same affect economy that I write critically about. Here, the genre of disaster testimony is meant to suggest a mode of truth telling that is unavoidable but is inevitably tied to the very machinery of exploitation that is at play in recovering New Orleans. My goal is not to problematize the ambiguity of constructions of the past and of the self or to question the conditions of their production for this text in terms of their truth content. Rather, I see them as an instantiation of the contingent requirements of disaster testimony that are called forth by this economy. As Thomas Laqueur has noted, the case history is a key textual modality for humanitarian endeavors, and it justifies the notion of a factual basis for suffering. As the economy of recovery both responded to and drew on suffering in order to reproduce itself, we are equally drawn into the affective whirlpools and eddies that this economy creates. Chapter 2 offers a description of the setting for the recovery story by describing the contours of disaster capitalism in and around the hurricane and floods, the engines of profit that produced the catastrophe, and the responses that generated dispossession and exclusions based on class and race in the initial rescue period. In this chapter, the conditions of government subcontracting that were in place years before the hurricane explain not only the tragedy but also the abysmal relief effort in its immediate aftermath. These arrangements help us understand similar patterns of recovery assistance that followed after the floods receded and the long process of rebuilding began. Chapter 3 explores the production of vulnerability that cuts across race and class lines when market-­oriented solutions are offered to help people recover. Questions about who is vulnerable and who is able to benefit from the recovery resources are explored here in terms of two of the main recovery programs that were mobilized to help: private insurance companies and the federally supported Small Business Administration loan program. Chapter 4 offers a close look at the largest federal program designed to help people recover after Katrina, the federally funded Road Home Program, deployed under the Louisiana Recovery Authority and subcontracted to the private sector. Chapter 5 critically looks at the outcomes of these pro20

Chapter One

grams and at the production of morbidities, desperation, and a surfeit of affect that could not be contained by the fiscal reasoning used to design the program in relation to profits. I explore how experiences of recovery organized in this way have pushed people to their breaking points. Chapter 6 turns to the arrival and growth of faith-­based organizations that, as time went on, provided the most significant response. Faith-­based organizations were the most numerous and the most effective in organizing volunteers to help people with recovery and rebuilding. It is important to remember, however, that such organizations, along with secular nonprofit community-­based organizations, emerged and flourished as part of the neoliberal landscape by design. As a result, they, too, have been brought into the fold of market-­driven regimes. Chapter 7 explores the private charity and volunteer sector of the recovery economy in relation to the market forces that were unleashed to fund it. Philanthrocapitalism and venture philanthropy that have grown up alongside disaster capitalism seek new ways to anticipate market rewards from the nonprofit volunteer sector, which is devoted to helping people in need. We’ll see how some private-­sector subcontracting organizations, in some cases the very same that failed to provide help through federal subcontractors, have turned their attention to these grass-­roots faith-­based organizations as well, inserting themselves once again into the space between government and citizen in a new twist on neoliberal profit seeking. New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is not a story about a hurricane so much as it is a story about the inevitable outcomes of arrangements that allow subcontracting to the private sector and market rationalities to penetrate even the most important of government public-­sector activities and responsibilities. It is about how these arrangements have played out in the lives of people who were trying with every ounce of strength they had to rebuild and recover, and about the frustrations, the second-­order disaster, that these arrangements have produced. It is about how these same engines of recovery left large gaps that were ultimately filled by private-­ sector nonprofits, charities, and churches, and finally about how even these nongovernmental organizations have had to contend with market demands that potentially undermine their effectiveness in much the same way they did with government-­funded programs. Our story thus begins with the Army Corps of Engineers many years before Hurricane Katrina.

It ’ s Not about Katrina

21

T wo

THE MAKING OF A DISASTER

I

t is now well established that the impact of the storm when it hit New Orleans and the subsequent flooding were both man-­made catastrophes. The elaborate system of channels, canals, and levees that wound through Greater New Orleans (connecting Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico) was originally designed to augment what William Freudenburg and colleagues call the growth machine of the region, or the flow of river-­sea traffic and maritime commerce. By 2005 many of the waterways were no longer used and had created problems from the start.1 The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for building and maintaining the levees in New Orleans, but locals had been increasingly worried for years that signs of deterioration in the levee walls were being ignored. Local newspapers and engineers had previously warned about the potential damage that a hurricane like Katrina could cause. When Katrina hit, the problem was twofold: first, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (mrgo, also referred to as Mister go), a 1.8-­mile-­wide channel created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite shipping, had destroyed Greater New Orleans’s natural land barrier,2 and it created a funnel that would direct storm surges right into the city. The canals had become a known menace to the fragile wetlands stretching over the 8,176-­square-­mile coastal area that had served as a natural protective buffer zone for the Crescent City.3 Because the canals prevented the inflow of fresh water to feed the foliage and replenish sediment, the wetlands had been losing approximately thirteen square miles per year, or about one football field of marshland every

Figure 2. A resident protests the failed recovery in the Lower Ninth Ward (2008).

hour.4 By 2005, New Orleans had little protection against major storms. Previous Gulf storms of Katrina’s magnitude would have landed much farther from the city and were subsequently reduced in size before hitting Greater New Orleans itself. With the wetlands gone, storms moved directly inward from the Gulf and made landfall closer in. Moreover, the storm surge traveled with much greater intensity through a man-­made channel system, directing the worst effects of the hurricane into the city itself.5 Second, most locals knew that even though the Army Corps of Engineers had known about the problem for decades, just as it knew that the levees would not hold up against anything over a Category 2 storm, it did not repair them.6 In fact, as early as 1998, engineers and local environmentalists warned that levee walls were not sufficiently rigid, strong, or stable enough to withstand predicted storms. Despite political debate among city, regional, and state officials and the media about the severity of the situation and the possibility that the levees could be compromised by a large storm, no repairs or strengthening projects were done before it was too late.7 One reason for the deferred maintenance of the levees was that the Army Corps of Engineers had been undergoing internal changes for at least two decades prior to Hurricane Katrina. Private-­sector companies, including the Shaw Group, Bechtel, Halliburton, hntb, Titan, Blackwater, and kbr Associates, had developed relationships as legacy contractors with the federal government.8 The wall between the subcontractors and the federal Corps had become more like a revolving door between public and private sectors, with former Corps engineers working in key executive positions at these companies. Few saw or raised concerns over the conflict of interest in this situation; those who did were often fired.9 As a result, throughout the 1990s, the Corps became increasingly invested in helping subcontractors undertake waterway projects that had less to do with protecting the public (by repairing levees) and more to do with augmenting the oil industries in the Gulf region. By 2003, the war in Iraq paid subcontractors much more than they could earn in New Orleans, and most Corps work in the area dried up.10 The levees still went unrepaired. Without the protection from the wetlands that once stretched from city to ocean, the Greater New Orleans area was impacted harder than expected by the hurricane on August 29, 2005. In fact, the storm passed mostly to the south of the city, causing minor water damage in the city itself, but within the next twenty-­four hours the levees failed and the real damage took place. 24

Chapter Two

Breaches in the levees were seen in fifty different locations, with more than twenty occurring within the first twenty-­four hours after Katrina passed through, and with twenty of these levee breaches located in the mrgo canal alone.11 Eighty percent of the Greater New Orleans area was flooded, with whole neighborhoods submerged under more than ten feet of water, and some neighborhoods were nearly entirely washed away. With more than 350,000 people affected, the federal government declared a state of emergency. Because the Federal Emergency Management Authority ( fema) had merged with the Office of Homeland Security only two years before, many of the same firms that subcontracted to the Army Corps of Engineers (such as Blackwater and the Shaw Group) were called upon to provide disaster relief through noncompetitive contracts, despite the fact that they had no experience or training in humanitarian assistance operations.12

Rescue and Relief

The debacle of the lack of immediate relief after this catastrophe is by now a very familiar story. More than 455,000 people were evacuated, and for those unable to evacuate before the flood—upward of 50,000 people, with roughly 25,000 at the Superdome alone—survival was difficult.13 Rescue operations were late, disorganized, and misguided. Floodwaters remained in the city for up to three weeks. Within a month, Hurricane Rita followed, reflooding the already inundated Lower Ninth Ward and other low-­lying areas, tearing off roofs, and felling trees onto houses and cars in the few neighborhoods that were not previously flooded. This forced thousands of people into secondary evacuations to locations even farther away from their homes. No one escaped the storm’s impact. All told, more than a million people in the region were displaced; up to 600,000 people were still displaced a month afterward. Hurricane evacuee shelters housed 273,000 people, and fema eventually housed 114,000 households in their now-­infamous trailers.14 At the five-­year mark after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, more than 100,000 fewer people lived in the Greater New Orleans area, and an estimated 870 families were still living in fema trailers.15 The highest estimates of death from these 2005 events exceed the official numbers offered by the government. Hurricane and levee failures most The Making of a Disaster

25

likely were the cause of the officially documented deaths of at least 1,464 Louisiana residents, with major causes including drowning (40 percent), injury and trauma (25 percent), and heart failure (11 percent). Nearly half of all victims were over the age of seventy-­four.16 Most of these deaths occurred in homes, in attics, and from rooftops where people were stranded or swept away. Most of those who stayed behind did so because they could not evacuate, did not have transportation, or, despite their efforts to leave, had to return to the city with family members who were too sick or infirm to survive the long waits in traffic jams and the distances they had to travel to find hotels or shelters with vacancies.17 Some people didn’t know they were supposed to evacuate because they did not have televisions, radios, or enough contact with neighbors. A few refused to leave because they felt safer “weathering” the storm in their homes than leaving them, despite the mandatory evacuation, assuming things would “blow over” as they had in past hurricanes, like Betsy in 1965. Some stayed behind because they didn’t want to abandon their pets. No matter the reasons they stayed, the poor, the elderly, and the infirm were among the first to die. Many children died, too, some from the tragedy of slipping from their parents’ arms into the raging water. Some people perished while waiting for rescue in the city’s Superdome and at the convention center. With 50,000 people in these places, the disaster was worsened by the fact that there was not enough food, water, or medical assistance for evacuees. The majority of these people, though certainly not all, were African American and poor.18 Those who did not make it to the Superdome or the convention center were stranded in their homes or on freeway overpasses, bridges, and the tops of high-­rises. Hundreds awaited rescue on dry stretches of freeway for days. People from one such freeway location, informally known as “Causeway Camp,” described harrowing conditions filled with thousands who were forced to stand for hours or to sit in mud and trash under the watch of National Guard guns, reminiscent of African American relocation camps that were set up during the 1927 Mississippi River Flood.19 Although under guard by military and aid personnel, people in Causeway Camp reported poor organization and a total lack of communication. When buses came sporadically, people were herded on with no knowledge of destinations, and in many cases they were separated from both friends and nuclear family members.20 Sally, a fifty-­six-­year-­old Cau-

26

Chapter Two

casian woman from St. Bernard Parish, was still living in a fema trailer fifty miles from her original home when she told her story two and a half years after the storm. Prior to Katrina I worked as a housekeeper in [a] nursing home down at St. Bernard, Louisiana, and . . . we got all our people out of there Friday, but the staff stayed like me. . . . [After the storm began, we] heard a big boom, and we said, “What was that?” And we looked to the right. I don’t know if you have ever seen that movie The Poseidon Adventure, but there was this wall of water coming at us . . . the wall of water was maybe, I’d say, two city blocks away, but of course you could see it because it was so large. Well, we didn’t know it at the time, but the levee had just broke, so we had just two minutes to run up maybe. I would say two minutes because by the time we got to the second flight, the water was right here on us. . . . We stayed like eight hours [like that], and we realized we didn’t have any tv; everything was out then, you know. So, we didn’t actually know that the levee had broken in three places. We knew it broke here, you know, we saw everything floating and everything, so it was pretty bad. Our cars floated off, got washed out. Finally we saw flat boats . . . coming around. We didn’t see any police. . . . We didn’t see any of that, but finally . . . the little boys in the neighborhood, they came around. They had stolen the flat boats and all, and they came around and started rescuing people. . . . So when they did rescue us (I use the term loosely), they took us to St. Bernard High School. OK? Well, we stayed there three days and three nights, and we had like a pack of crackers one day, like this, and a bottle of water that had to last you all day ’til the next day. And, the next day, if they found something, then you got another pack of crackers. The third day we had to share a bottle of water with three people like that. No sewage, no water, no toilet, no nothing. OK. Well, by the third day the world finally caught on that there is something going on down here, so then they sent in the National Guard, whoever they sent in. So, that was after three days and three nights. . . . It was like something you read about, you know . . . it was real, real bad; I am going to tell you, real, real bad. So, when the National Guard came in on the third day, they decided they was going to take The Making of a Disaster

27

us out of St. Bernard High School, which is right over there to the left, and they were going to ship us somewhere. [Outside] it was flooded, everything, dead bodies tied to trees, you couldn’t see the tops of the houses, I mean, it was something like out of a war movie, but nobody my age saw it before, and it was real bad, I am telling you, when I say real bad, real bad. . . . [A]t that time everybody’s nerves were gone; they were more stressed out than you because they lost their homes, and they are trying to help you too, and they are worried about their own people. There were a lot of people dying and everything; they never found out what happened to them, or anything. So, they didn’t want to hear, you know, that you couldn’t do what you had to do at the time. So, then we hear bang, bang, bang. I said, “Oh, Jesus.” There was a sniper. He was shooting over us. So, everybody as much as they could, they hit the deck. . . . The National Guard made you get down on the ground. I went back to the same position. I was trying to tell them, “I cannot bend. I use a cane.” I said, “I can’t lay down.” So he puts an m-­16 to my head. I said, “Let me explain something to you.” I mean, he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. You know they called them in, and I said I hurt my leg. What I did, I just lay down as well as I could, and then they . . . they threw a tarp over all my group that was there. And then we had to get on the trucks . . . we drove all the way out from [St. Bernard] to the interstate with m-­16s in our heads, and all the guys looking out for snipers and all. So, finally we get to [the docks]; it’s 99 degrees and I am going to starve. I knew I was going to die right there in the truck. And so we get to Metairie [a suburb that was less damaged]. OK, praise the Lord, we get to Red Cross; get all the buses lined up. Well, thank God; I don’t know if it was Red Cross, or Salvation Army, but as soon as you got off the truck everybody got a bottle of cold water. And, let me tell you, that tastes like champagne after three days. So, everybody got a bottle of that because it was cold, you know. So, now, what did I see? I thought I’d lose my mind in Metairie. They had the mammas, the daddies, the children, OK, in, like, four buses at a time. What I didn’t understand, and to this day nobody will make me understand, is this: the mammas went on this bus, the daddies went on this bus, and the children went on this bus [i.e., they were 28

Chapter Two

put on separate buses]. I mean, these kids are screaming and howling. . . . And I thought I’d lose my mind right there. They actually pulled, pulled the children out of . . . I mean, I can’t understand that, and nobody is going to explain that to me. After I saw it on tv they said some of them children have never been reunited. That’s horrible, and seeing the dead bodies, and the dead animals, and I am sorry, but it was . . . disrespect for the dead, you know. So, we get on the bus. Nobody knows where they are going. You are just shuttled like cattle, you know. They just wanted to get us out for some reason. You couldn’t ask questions; they tell you to shut up. So, I said, OK. I am going to sit down, I am going to the Third World, you know. But, I said, OK. And now, in the midst of all of this you don’t know if any of your family is living or dead, or whatever, you know. . . . We go to Houston, and that’s a long ride. No food, no water, not while you’re on this bus, anything, except the bottle of water they gave you. After days of waiting in an abandoned evacuated city, the first official help to arrive on the ground in some parts of the Greater New Orleans area were the Canadian Mounties, who got to Chalmette and St. Bernard Parish first.21 When the U.S. National Guard finally arrived some three to five days after the hurricane left, they found desperate people who were suffering from dehydration and starvation. They were disoriented and scared. The situation brought out the best in some people. Victims tried to help each other, wading through water and using any sort of boat to get supplies of food and water from stores or homes and bring it back to where people waited. Locals with boats helped transport people from rooftops to freeways and city exits. Informal neighborhood groups like the “Soul Patrol,” a crew of working-­class African American men from the Seventh Ward, spent days patrolling their neighborhood by boat. They rescued residents and provided aid to neighbors. However, the situation also brought out the worst in some people. Elderly survivors talked about having their clothes, and even their shoes, stolen from them while they slept at the Superdome. A middle-­aged white woman told us that her sister was raped while stranded under the freeway at the edge of the floodwaters. Another asserted that she had been sexually assaulted by a local sheriff who had patrolled the shelter she was staying in. Whites were told they were refused on buses filled with black evacuees, and The Making of a Disaster

29

black residents were told that they would not be allowed on white buses. Rescue soldiers were told that there were snipers and criminals on the loose although some people suggest that “sniper fire” was probably Marines shooting stray dogs. Stranded survivors recall being more harassed than helped by law enforcement for their refusal to leave any of their neighbors behind before they themselves could be evacuated.22 Rescue crews hired by military and security companies began to see themselves as gunmen on the attack against an enemy force, although it was not always clear who the enemy really was.

Disaster Capitalism

Media coverage began to show the magnitude of the evacuation failure early on. Delays in responsiveness were blamed on the federal government and the Louisiana governor’s office, but less well documented were delays caused by the companies who were subcontracted by the government to help with rescue and relief. Buses and ships from surrounding areas, from local school bus drivers to cruise lines and even USS carriers, had arrived on their own to help transport the stranded out of the city. But they were turned away by government authorities because private companies had already been contracted by fema/Homeland Security to rescue people, even though these subcontractors had not yet arrived.23 Halliburton, for example, with its long history of subcontracting with the military in overseas operations, had been hired to provide buses, and this deterred the arrival of other volunteer bus services that were ready to help.24 The people of New Orleans became double victims, first of the hurricane, and then of crime that ensued as military and private business operations turned a bad situation into a worse one by treating innocent victims as if they were a potential enemy. Many of the troops identified as National Guard by locals were in fact hired security personnel working for the private-­sector subcontractors.25 Blackwater Security, or what is now called Xe Services, was one such company. Despite the fact that this private-­sector military company founded by Erik Prince and Al Clark had already been made infamous by its killing of innocent civilians while on duty in Fallujah, Iraq, it was hired, along with fifty other private security groups, including an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (isi), to help with rescue and relief.26 According to some sources, Blackwater was paid $250,000 a day to help 30

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with the recovery in New Orleans.27 A mere two days after the hurricane made landfall, even before it actually arrived in New Orleans, Blackwater advertised that it was helping with the Gulf Coast relief effort through airlift services, security, and crowd control. And what kind of help was it, actually? Armed men had hit the streets of New Orleans in armored cars, patrolling with machine guns and no official explanation as to who they were and why they were there. Innocent people wandering the streets and trying to find food, transport, or medical assistance were met with harassment, terror, and, in some cases, incarceration instead of help. Testimony from those who remained in the city suggests that humanitarian relief was actually slowed, if not undermined, by the government’s subcontracting, which gave for-­profit companies the responsibility for carrying out fema’s tasks. While people were stranded on rooftops waiting for help, military and “rescue” personnel were building makeshift prisons in empty parking lots in order to incarcerate suspected “terrorists,” a story captured vividly by Dave Eggers in Zeitoun, his biographical account of the New Orleans resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s arrest in the days following the hurricane.28 Even after the floodwaters receded, Blackwater continued to work under a federal contract through the Department of Homeland Security to provide armed guards to fema reconstruction projects in ways that resembled more of a military tactical operation in a war zone than a civilian recovery process in a beloved American city.29 The racial contours of this criminalization of stranded victims only augmented the degree to which rescue operations were transformed into a new sort of disaster discrimination, a story well documented by Eric Michael Dyson in his book Come Hell or High Water and in the documentary film co-­created by Kim Rivers-­Roberts, Trouble the Water. Today, it is abundantly clear that the merger of Homeland Security with fema led to government subcontracting processes that undermined the humanitarian capacities of the organization and enabled fema itself to become an instrument of profiteering.30 The failure of rescue operations was not simply a matter of fema having been “unprepared” for a disaster of this proportion, although this, too, was in some sense ultimately to blame.31 For every story of efficient and friendly rescue—and there were some of these— there were an equal number of stories of horror. A situation that called for humanitarian relief work was being confused with one of national defense and, more sadly, an opportunity for profit making.32 The existing infrastrucThe Making of a Disaster

31

ture of subcontractors, and particularly the close relationships between the Army Corps of Engineers and groups like Halliburton, Blackwater, and the Shaw Group, enabled companies to secure large contracts and funds up front, with virtually no check on their past performance history in the delivery of humanitarian relief. This same pattern of for-­profit subcontracting is one of the key reasons for not only the failed rescue and relief but also the slowed recovery, as we will see. Bechtel and Halliburton won lucrative contracts not just in the immediate aftermath but also in the years of recovery following Hurricane Katrina. In fact, some estimates say that Halliburton earned far more than the reported $124.9 million in assorted contracts with the Department of Defense, fema, the U.S. Navy, and the Army Corps of Engineers.33 Despite criticism over its handling of contracts in Iraq for poor performance, and its pending twenty investigations for wrongdoing, law violations, bribery, bid rigging, and overcharging, this company was given multiple Katrina contracts even after its initial fiasco of rescue. Hired to clean up Navy yards, pump water out of New Orleans, help the Army Corps of Engineers restore utilities, and perform other assorted jobs, Halliburton made good money on the disaster. Bechtel was hired to begin supplying temporary housing on the day the hurricane hit, even before damage had been assessed. The Department of Homeland Security, with fema, was given $3.6 billion, which it distributed over thirty-­six different subcontracts for the trailers used for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This amount was later questioned when the Defense Contract Audit Agency found that Bechtel had been billing double amounts for both corrective and preventative maintenance on the trailers it provided, leading to a $48 million error eventually paid for by taxpayers.34 This was just the beginning. When families still living in their trailers were told by fema in 2009 that they would have to either vacate their trailers or purchase them for $25,000 each, most didn’t know what to do.35 Few had $25,000 to spend on a trailer and those who had the money needed it for repairing their own homes rather than buying a trailer. Many were angry to learn that fema had paid its subcontractors, including Halliburton and Bechtel, roughly $229,000 for each trailer provided to New Orleanians.36 Most returning residents, including the Bradlieus, felt that if they had been given $229,000 at the outset, they would have been back in their homes well before 2009.

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Figure 3. A fema

trailer park in St. Roch/Eighth Ward (2007).

The Waiting Begins

It was not long before the hurricane crisis was transformed into a larger catastrophe signaled once again by forces much more powerful than any storm. After the water subsided and people began to return, Hurricane Katrina was simply called “Katrina”—an ongoing disaster marked by prolonged attempts to recover against huge odds. Accomplishing things like getting insurance payments or other funds for rebuilding; cleaning up the debris; repairing communication systems, roads, electricity, sewage systems, and plumbing; ramping up health care, schools, and mail services; and even getting road signs replaced felt permanently out of reach for residents who were just trying to dig their homes out of the mud and mold. Even three years later, these basic infrastructural systems were not in place for many neighborhoods.37 In the end, New Orleanians realized they would have to not only find ways to rebuild their homes by themselves but also, in some cases, fight to get their neighborhoods’ basic infrastructures rebuilt. People felt abandoned. It made sense that, for at least the first six months to a year, a sort of chaos ensued. But by year two after the floods, families

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33

began to wonder what was going wrong. Everything was taking forever. Well into the fourth year post-­Katrina, most returning residents still felt like they had a long way to go to reach recovery. Federal and state resources were promised but didn’t arrive. In fact, the government was spending money to help, but little of it ended up helping those trying to rebuild. New Orleanians waited and waited, trying to find ways to access what resources they had heard about, to get their life in fema trailers sorted out, undertaking the long and arduous process of rebuilding on their own or with volunteers. What should have taken a few years was lasting three, four, five, and even six years. Some never recovered; too many never returned. After the immediate assistance of roughly $2,500 from fema, which was distributed to each family to help during the initial displacement, the main resources people relied on for return, cleanup, and recovery were limited. What worked “well,” at least from a surface view, was that fema did provide trailers to many displaced residents or at least had paid for them to be distributed by subcontractors.38 The Army Corps of Engineers and local fema subcontractors also helped remove trash for the first two years—a greatly needed service, because New Orleans had 22 million tons of debris on its streets after Katrina.39 Private companies also made some repairs to the broken levees (but not enough so that they could withstand the next hurricane of Katrina-­like proportions).40 But when it came to rebuilding and getting residents back into homes and getting neighborhoods up and running, and when it came to accounting for the billions that were spent on the process, the picture of assistance looked much bleaker. To pay for rebuilding, everyone had to use and usually “use up” personal savings, if there were any. Those who had either renter or homeowner insurance could make requests for payouts, but most insurance companies demonstrated abysmal support and paid far lower than what was needed, as we will see. A second resource for returning residents was the Small Business Administration ( sba) loan program. The federal government authorized the sba to offer low-­interest federal disaster-­relief loans to local returning residents who could establish that they were good credit risks (that they had steady jobs or collateral in a home or business). Many returning residents took on these loans because it was their only source of finance for rebuilding but, as we’ll see, few residents were enthusiastic or really even capable of taking on debt, especially because many still had mortgages. Finally, the Road Home Program mobilized funds to help homeowners 34

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return and rebuild. This federal program provided funds to the Louisiana Recovery Authority to provide returning homeowners with funds to make up the difference between what insurance paid and what their homes were worth. As we will see in further chapters, by late 2008, nearly two-­thirds of the funds made available to the Road Home Program had not been dispersed.41 Even for those who had received awards, the funding was insufficient to rebuild without incurring further debt. This surprised residents, because the allocations from the federal government (quoted in the media) seemed more than adequate to compensate homeowners fully. One problem was that assessments of home values by Road Home were far below what homeowners calculated based on documented tax and sales rates—­ resulting in an abundance of arbitration cases. Adding insult to injury, some people who received Road Home funds had to return large portions of funding (sometimes up to half of what they got) to pay back taxes on properties they had not been able to live in for several years. For some, the Road Home funds had to be used to pay off mortgages on homes that could no longer be lived in. A citizens’ action group called chat (Citizens’ Road Home Action Team) was formed by a returning resident, a science professor from Tulane, to protest the slow pace of the Road Home Program and its flawed operations. A Senate hearing was held where citizens voiced their concerns, but the slow pace of the distribution of these resources was debilitating for those who were waiting. What we see in all of these cases is that the trail of government support for rebuilding New Orleans wound its way circuitously through the market of profit-­oriented companies that used strategies for rebuilding so that funneled resources would generate business gains, even when these strategies failed to provide adequate help and delayed efforts on the part of those trying to rebuild. The fact that the Road Home Program, a federally funded state-­run program, was actually subcontracted to a company called icf International was a good example of this. In fact, icf was invited to design the recovery program before it eventually won the no-­competition subcontractor bid for 2006. Then icf transformed its relief services into a source of market opportunism in record time and watched its stock rise even before it delivered any assistance to homeowners. As we will see in later chapters, icf used procedures for accounting and distribution that placed corporate interests above those of grant recipients, which, for some residents like Henry Bradlieu, precipitated a disaster worse than the hurricane. After its The Making of a Disaster

35

contract ended on the Road Home Program, icf moved on to more lucrative government contracts, even though they left nearly half of the applicants who applied for Road Home funding with absolutely nothing. However, icf was only one of the many subcontractors that made profits on the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and also on the delays to recovery that they caused.

The Human Price of Delayed Recovery

Between 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, and 2010, New Orleanians experienced a time of excruciating waiting, prolonged distress, and frustration. These years were marked by a rise in the mortality rate, which doubled in the first two years after the storm.42 While many of these deaths were largely for those who were unable to get medications or treatment for conditions that needed regular medical management,43 many residents were convinced that their relatives and neighbors simply died from the “heartache” of so much loss and from having to wait for so long. Family members were gone or dispersed around the country. Homes were gone. Heirlooms and photos, documents that showed titles to homes and cars, insurance papers, bank statements, jewelry, dishes, furniture, art: everything was destroyed. The suicide rate had tripled.44 It was not an exaggeration to say that everyone was depressed or close to it.45 Most people needed psychiatric help, but even four years after the storm few could find mental-­health services in the city.46 Websites directed distraught homeowners to contact “suicide.org” for help if they were considering that option. “It takes a good deal of endurance and strength,” one of the Bradlieus’ neighbors said. “But after three years with so little visible recovery, it wears down and erodes that strength. . . . Life as I knew it is gone.” Residents talked about being depressed and about developing disorders that they attributed to the chronic stress of failed recovery. One resident recalled: “I’d like to think that things are going to get better here, and I’m not sure about any of that stuff. There’s a lot of uncertainty, insecurity. I feel insecure. Maybe that’s how to put it. It’s a very big sense of insecurity here. I don’t—like—­ talking about my kids . . . a lot of that is feeling insecure. You don’t know what they’re gonna do.” Another New Orleanian said that trying to recover was like living in “a hamster’s wheel”: 36

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You keep spinning, but you are trying to reach the end of your destination in terms of a job, a home, resources, rebuilding, but you are not getting anywhere. You are in that spinning wheel, you know, but you keep trying. You get up and you go to this place, and you go to this place. The Road Home to me is like an imaginary tale, like Alice in Wonderland. Really, that’s what it is because you are still in the well, but you haven’t heard anything else, you know. You are still in the well, so that’s like a spinning wheel, and you can’t move forward until you absolutely know that you are not getting any help from this. . . . Life keeps going on, you see, it’s like it’s going on, but it’s not going on. Residents trying to recover in the months that stretched into years after the flood and storms recall that it was hard to tally up the number of injustices that had become visible and palpable, and many felt a deep sense of betrayal. Among the most visible of these injustices were those meted out along lines of race and class.

Racialization of Recovery and the Profile of Dispossession

Displacement affected New Orleanians of all social classes and all racial groups, but the degree to which both the hurricane and floods led to dispossession and impoverishment in the years afterward was racially uneven and exacerbated by the way that recovery was organized; specifically, the poor were disproportionately hurt more than those with financial resources. Others have shown that racism explains a good deal of the delay in rescue-­ and-­relief operations as well as the criminalization of victims of the disaster and the violence against them.47 What has been explored less is how racial disparities are seen in the recovery years as the disparities that already existed along lines of race and class were made more visible and more extreme in and through differential access to and use of recovery resources. Market-­oriented strategies for recovery that sought to use fiscal resources where they were most likely to bring profits, rather than using them where the need was greatest, fueled a situation in which African Americans would be offered less than others. Existing inequalities in socioeconomic starting points helped fuel a racialization of recovery that meant African American communities would be the least likely to return and the last to recover. The Making of a Disaster

37

In some cases, it became clear by 2010 that many of the largely African American neighborhoods simply had not recovered and likely never would. Racial tensions were heightened by the slow pace of recovery and at times were visible in higher rates of gang-­related street violence that returning residents said was tied to new kinds of desperation. Here, too, market-­ oriented solutions and the mechanics of disaster capitalism multiplied the problems of race-­based violence in a city already troubled by a large racial disparity. For instance, federally funded resources that were made available to help residents in New Orleans put African Americans at a disadvantage because they often had fewer financial resources or fiscal visibility to begin with. African Americans were less likely to have money in savings and were more likely not to have insurance. They constituted the largest group of renters. They were least likely to have, or to know how to access, assistance from federal or state agencies and the most likely to be turned away from these resources when they did apply for help. Even among homeowners, fewer African Americans than other groups had the paperwork evidence they needed to obtain Road Home funding, and this was because they often were excluded from traditional sources of funding for home mortgages on the basis of their race. African American families, for instance, were the most likely not to be in possession of title documents that federal relief services required. Even when they had them, homeowners found that such documents often had not been changed from deceased family members’ names from whom they had inherited their property. Those who bought their homes through “bond for deed” transactions, like the Bradlieus, were able to own their homes as “lease to buy” purchases; they took on the full load of responsibility for taxes and ownership but these transactions were not recognized by the Road Home Program, presumably because they were not transacted through banks and mortgage-­based deeds, thus denying many rightful owners the funds that were designated to help them rebuild. Worse still, even when Road Home provided rebuilding funds to African Americans, these recipients were more likely than others to have their homes undervalued in the assessment process.48 Using assumptions that African American neighborhoods had property values that were uniformly lower than white neighborhoods, insurance companies and recovery assistance programs like Road Home offered financial support that was far below 38

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what homeowners should have received.49 Reports that the Road Home Program unfairly discriminated against African American homeowners were verified by the courts in 2010, which reported that prejudice occurred specifically with the calculations of lower pre-­storm home values in neighborhoods that were predominantly African American than in neighborhoods that were predominantly white.50 The ways in which the market has always worked unequally for different racial groups was only made worse in a recovery that relied on strategies for rebuilding that favored fiscal measures of worthiness above other measures, such as humanitarian or human rights– based assumptions about need. Thus many people who were qualified for assistance were denied adequate funding because of race-­based assumptions about their fiscal worthiness. Recovery processes in New Orleans revealed in this sense the ways in which basic citizenship rights were filtered through a grid of market concerns and, as a result, based on race, rights were denied to some more than others. One of the main routes to dispossession among African Americans in the recovery period was that of the organization of recovery in ways that prioritized those who were already market-­visible—that is people who already had a foot in the game by owning a home that had a paper trail within the banking system. For people who could not show the specific paperwork of a title used within the mortgage industry (even if they could show that they had paid taxes on their property), there was little help. The African American community was more reliant on the informal economy to begin with, whether in the ways they bought homes (without bank mortgages), the ways they held titles to homes, or in the ways they made a living. These informal strategies for homeownership and income generation (whether in skilled construction or other part-­time labor) go a long way to explaining the degree to which a market-­driven recovery would exclude African Americans. More significantly, the large population of New Orleans renters (roughly 54 percent, with some 22 percent of whom were low income and living in publicly subsidized housing) were not offered Road Home funds or much other support that would help them return.51 Middle- and low-­income renters and people who lived in federally subsidized housing were the most impacted by dislocation. Renters were given fema trailers only if they had access to private property upon which to put the trailers, or if they had access to the few public spaces that were converted to trailer parks in the city The Making of a Disaster

39

and a means of justifying their return to the city by volunteering as a first responder or as a person whose rental home was being rebuilt or was inhabitable. Many renters who did not own property were initially housed in large trailer lots several hours outside the city in Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parish. Those in government-­subsidized housing were told that if they used their subsidies in other states (for example, during the recovery period), they could not transfer the housing vouchers back to use within Louisiana.52 Some of these fema trailer parks were the modern equivalent of relocation camps, with chain-­link fences and National Guardsmen posted at their entrances. Some were in locations where there were no public transportation services, schools, or jobs. Left to sort out how to make a living, many were forced to give up even the seasonal or itinerant labor they were able to do in New Orleans and simply lived off of federal welfare. When the last of these parks closed down in 2009, few of the people who had been living there were able to return to New Orleans, where rental prices had in most cases doubled from their pre-­storm rates.53 In fact, the storm and floods were used by local New Orleans government officials as an excuse to eliminate a large percentage of its working-­class and welfare-­class poor, many of whom were African American, and to welcome the arrival of less well-­paid immigrant laborers (largely Hispanic) to take their place.54 The fact that rental homes themselves were difficult to impossible to find after Hurricane Katrina could also be traced to the market-­ driven recovery plan. Public housing units that were not even flooded were closed down by the city and boarded up with steel plates within weeks of the storm, and inhabitants were never allowed to return to them (not even to retrieve belongings). All but one of the nine public housing units were torn down by the Housing Authority of New Orleans by the third year after Katrina, including what were collectively known as the “Big Four”: the B. W. Cooper, C. J. Peete, Lafitte, and St. Bernard Projects. Within five years after Katrina even the last one, the Iberville Project, was slated for redevelopment—a program of action that received mixed responses from former residents. All of these units were opened up for public bidding, and in most cases redevelopment plans to create mixed-­income neighborhoods were adopted. The majority of units in these projects were to become privately owned condominiums, severely limiting the city’s supply of rental housing.55 40

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In fact, the Housing Authority of New Orleans had called for a “large-­ scale comprehensive mixed-­finance, mixed-­income and mixed-­use revitalization plan” long before the hurricane and floods.56 Despite public protests and calls for more rental housing as well as rent controls in the aftermath, and despite the fact that the one remaining unit, Iberville, had been functioning successfully and had been murder-­free during its last year due to effective resident-­organized crime protection, the city went ahead with redevelopment.57 Of all groups who were not able to return after Katrina to New Orleans, the former inhabitants of these residences were the largest in number, and they were not able to gain access to the few low-­cost housing units that were built to replace the projects. The hurricane and floods, in essence, set in motion an eviction of the poor through the machinery of disaster capitalism. Although sentiments about the loss of these public housing units were not uniform, and few were overly romantic about the quality of these residences (or the crime within them), the fact is that there was by 2011 less low-­cost housing in the city than ever before. This was just one area where market-­driven recovery generated large profits for developers but created inefficiencies in relief and recovery support for those who needed it the most. Even among those who were able to return, the poor were the least likely to qualify for assistance or to have resources that would help them recover, and because poverty more greatly affected African Americans than whites, once again African Americans were the least likely to be given resources and were the least likely to recover quickly. In fact, poor African Americans were about one-­third as likely as wealthier residents and white residents to be able to return to live in New Orleans. The population of African Americans in New Orleans dropped from 73 percent to 60 percent by the fourth year following the hurricane.58 Racial inequalities were and remain pervasive in New Orleans, but a recovery organized in and through the market only made these inequalities worse.59 Wayne Bodrian’s story is typical. He was forty when Katrina hit. When we spoke in late 2008, he talked about the city’s growing homeless population that was one of the most visible consequences of the displacement of working-­class African American renters like him. When we first met Wayne in early 2007, he had been living in a fema trailer in an open lot on the University of New Orleans campus. Before the storm, he had a job working at the convention center. After the storm, he got a trailer because he was conThe Making of a Disaster

41

sidered a “first responder,” and he helped to clean up the same convention center that had housed stranded residents. Wayne knew it would be only a matter of time before fema would ask for the trailer back. Even though Wayne held two jobs, he still did not earn enough to afford the rising cost of rental housing. He feared that he would end up among the city’s growing ranks of those homeless since Katrina, camped out under the freeway overpass near Claiborne Street.60 I’m working, so I’m gonna try my best to do what I gotta do, but some people can’t work. You know what I’m saying? They got children. They got women, children, pregnant women under the Claiborne Bridge, sleeping in a tent. And some of them been there two years. And they’re just starting to help them people. I’m talking about children! I’m talking about three years old, four years old! The mayor, he say he wanna help, but he . . . I don’t know what to say about it. Also, the people that’s still out of town, that’s trying to get back home. . . . They tore the projects down. The people at home now, some of ’em that came home, they be in front of City Hall, picketing, talking about where they gonna live at? That’s what the big fight was about. They had a big fight in front of City Hall two weeks ago. There are people still had furniture in their homes. They still had their family pictures and memories, and they tore it down [the public housing units]. They just tore it down. They didn’t let them go back in. I mean, like, I know one thing: by them putting the rent that sky-­ high, black folk can’t handle it. Not Uptown. I’m gonna say middle— I can’t think of what I want to say—the less-­income people, they know we can’t handle that. So, I guess, where this gonna leave us at? Under the overpass in a tent. Wayne’s complaint that there was an open expression of relief on the part of government officials over the fact that large numbers of poor African Americans had been essentially “evicted” from the city by the hurricane, and the fact that some saw this as “a blessing,” was borne out by the statements heard in the first year following the storm. The notion that God had done what city administrators couldn’t do on their own to eradicate poverty was uttered by officials in New Orleans and by wealthy citizens alike,61 leading some to believe that the levees were deliberately “blown” to hit African American communities the hardest. 42

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Of course, African American New Orleanians had good reason to suspect that the levees were deliberately blown because many knew that it had taken place once before in the history of the city. In 1927, during the great flood of the Mississippi River, engineers and politicians from Louisiana deliberately “blew” the levee above Jefferson Parish in order to save the city of New Orleans, a story documented by John Barry in his book Rising Tide. Tens of thousands of black sharecroppers were warned that they would be flooded out by the dynamiting of the levees, and they were promised compensation for the loss of their property and lands. Displaced blacks were forced at gunpoint after those floods to help rebuild and clean up the city, but they were never actually given the money they had been promised. The tragedy of 1927 played significantly into the reshaping of the American political landscape in relation to social welfare policies, the onset of the Great Depression, and debates about how accountable the government should be in providing rescue and support in the case of natural disasters. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was as if history was repeating itself. Public statements, even those made by the African American mayor, Ray Nagin, at that time, affirmed Wayne’s sense of a conspiracy to get rid of the poorest families in the city, which, by default, meant mostly African American families. The demolition of public housing complexes and the re-­commissioning of these spaces as mixed-­income condominiums were seen as the beginning of this process. Federal policies that provided Section Eight housing support to evacuees in the states where they had been relocated also prevented them from receiving this support if they were to return to Louisiana: this put the nail in the coffin on most people’s return. All of these processes made it nearly impossible for families receiving federal housing support to move back to the city. Wayne read this as a sign of a future New Orleans that would look quite racially different than it had prior to Katrina.62 He felt that it was becoming more and more of a “white city” and this brought a sense of heightened racial tension along with it:63 “I feel like if another storm don’t come they gonna run a lot of blacks out. They gonna be a lot of homeless blacks, put it like that. There is going to be a war. The reason I say there is gonna be a war is because . . . we gonna be killed and that’s what they want.” As he predicted, in March 2009, Wayne received a notice from fema that he would have to vacate soon. fema was working with city officials to clear out all of the trailers. When we asked Wayne where he would go once he The Making of a Disaster

43

left his trailer, he explained that he didn’t know. Rents had nearly doubled. fema offered to help those in transition to pay rent for a limited amount of time. The problem was that a one-­bedroom apartment that rented for $450 per month before the storm was now $700 per month due to the rental shortage. The unresolved problem for him was where the rent money would come from once the assistance stopped, now that rents had doubled but jobs still paid around minimum wage. Wayne interpreted the creeping housing crisis in terms of the racial consequences he envisioned it producing: “they want a white city.” Wayne’s experiences were shared by many in recovering New Orleans, but his experience of recovery took an even more precipitous turn when in 2008 he lost his teenage son, Alden. Alden had been shot while walking home one night. Wayne wasn’t sure what the exact circumstances were, but he blamed it on the increased violence, drug use, and desperation that had grabbed the city along with increased poverty as a result of the slow pace of recovery. Rates of violent crime were on the rise, even while more and more of the so-­called sources of crime in the public housing units were being torn down. The police didn’t help, Wayne said. Although the police had a long history of corruption in New Orleans, they seemed now to be resigned to rising levels of new kinds of gun violence. They seldom pursued perpetrators, and they refused to try to track down potential criminals even after they got leads. This, too, to Wayne, seemed to be related to the fact that the city wanted to get rid of its black population. He said that he felt uncomfortable walking on some streets at night in the French Quarter, not because he was afraid of getting shot but because that was where policemen were harassing and arresting black men, just for being there, whether or not they were doing anything wrong. He thought that if the police were more interested in protecting the black communities, his son would not have been shot. “There’s just a lot of desperation out there now,” he said. “Lots of people who are desperate.” As he told us the story of his son’s death, Wayne began to get upset. He wiped his eyes and, stopping midway through his sentence, he looked out the window of his trailer and said that he wasn’t sure what to do. Too many losses made him feel as if recovery, even if he could work out his living situation, was still far out of reach. Wayne’s perceptions of the racial inequalities of dispossession in the years after Hurricane Katrina were validated in actual demographic patterns 44

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(which show declines in African American residents) and increased rates of violence in the urban African American communities of New Orleans. Adding insult to injury, the recovery period was also marked by augmented white racism toward African Americans. In the immediate aftermath of the floods, white families often expressed hostility toward African Americans regarding the inordinate amount of attention paid to the black racial profile of the disaster, noting that whole neighborhoods of white families had also been displaced. Not seeing their own relative advantages in the recovery process, white residents often talked about the benefits of Katrina in terms of this racial “cleansing,” a language that former residents in the Lower Ninth Ward said contributed to a form of “genocide.” It is important to remember that people of all race and class groups were affected by the hurricane and floods. At the same time, the arrangements of recovery, like the arrangements of inequality before the disaster, were such that they made these inequalities worse. Viewed from the perspective of time at the five-­year mark after the hurricane, it is clear that the structure of recovery assistance itself is partly to blame for exacerbating actual racial inequalities and for making the disaster one that further entrenched perceptions of race-­based disparity.64

Becoming Invisible After you’ve been here a while, you start feeling like you are living under water. . . . You can’t get out and you are drowning. The air is thick. It is below sea level. In the muck, everything is cloudy. — ​ Randall Batradille (2008)

Randall Batradille felt like life in New Orleans was suffocating him. Like a lot of people who had returned to rebuild, Randall was fed up with the slow pace of recovery. Like Wayne, Randall perceived that the delay was caused by the systematic exclusion of the poorest from the benefits of recovery assistance, which, in turn, fueled rates of race-­based violence and losses that were, for him, unrecoverable. For Randall, the problem was in the way subcontractors hired by the government to help clean up after the disaster were actually doing the job. Instead of helping, they seemed to be making people like him invisible. For this fifty-­three-­year-­old veterinarian, the problems all started with the chaos of a poorly organized recovery effort. This began on The Making of a Disaster

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his first visit back on September 18, 2005, less than a month after the hurricane, on the day that President George W. Bush gave his famous speech in New Orleans. Randall went to visit his rented home in Gentilly with his partner, Mike. We loved the speech. I didn’t love the speech but I loved the words that he said. I thought whoever wrote it did a beautiful job. The lights in the French Quarter were on for it and that was like an amazing thing because we were . . . we had a real problem getting down there to the Quarter because . . . something was going on and we didn’t know what it was but there was something that we thought was toxic down there. They had all the National Guard guys with these huge rolls of barbed wire, and they couldn’t let you into the area. [The next day] was when we went into Gentilly. I think we were probably some of the first civilians in Gentilly. So we went to the house and the living room had floated into the dining room and in the bedroom the mattress was up against the wall, and all the appliances in the kitchen were upside down. There was still steam coming off the mud. It was mud, it was still really wet and it was black: it was black goop. There was nothing alive. There was silence. There wasn’t a bird; there wasn’t a butterfly; there wasn’t nothing. Everything in the front yard was brown and dead. One of the striking things about it to me was that the cars were all still in people’s front yards. It was just surreal. There was not any sign of life whatsoever, not a person, not a National Guardsman, there was nothing. Somehow or other they had bulldozed the streets so you could go down the streets. That was the first thing they did. In the short time he was back in New Orleans from his displacement “home” in Utah, Randall tried to get to his veterinary clinic to see what kind of shape it was in. Police officers stopped him at the roadway. [They said,] “You cannot go down there, because the National Guard said you need to get a permit from City Hall.” I said, “Well, we live down there.” And they told us, “You just can’t go down there; we can’t let you go down there.” The other police officer was on the phone with a woman who had been raped. He said she had been raped in the Superdome. He hung up the phone and he says, “She’s 46

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telling me she’s been raped and it’s been, how many weeks has it been? Damn, why would you tell me you’ve been raped and it’s been . . .” I was like, “Oh my God, what in the hell?” I felt, OK, I’m going to try playing the veterinarian card. So I said, “You know I’m a veterinarian . . . and I got some cats and dogs and stuff down in there that I really need to get to.” He says, “You’re a veterinarian? I just lost my Rottweiler,” I think it was. He had pictures of it in his wallet. I told him, I said, “It’s like losing a child,” and stuff. “I’m so so sorry.” He just kind of broke apart and was crying. He said, “I’ll write you any certificate that you need.” He did, he gave us what we needed. I told him I’d talk to him sometime and we could sit down, but I never saw him again. The chaos of Katrina was like this, he said. Grown men crying, totally losing it over their lost dog, or over a misplaced sense of helplessness to protect a woman from rape, and then disbelieving her when she finally calls to report it. Randall told us that he realized that he would have to solve his problems on his own. He would have to figure out how to get what he needed “by hook or crook.” One had to develop a kind of endurance, he said, about how to work in this “chaotic” system. By the time Randall got to his clinic, he was able to see that it had lost its roof, but most of the things inside were salvageable. Eventually, he would return to run the clinic again, but in the intervening months, he had to drive back and forth from Utah to New Orleans trying to clean up and figure out what to do. My house [the house I was living in before the storm] . . . I lost basically everything. It’s the weirdest thing . . . you go into these places, you have on your suit and mask and stuff. . . . I would drink two Bloody Marys before I would even go out there. Then I would be there for a little while and I could not stand it anymore, I’d leave. That went on and on and on. I, finally, on a trip back down here—there were these trips back and you get all cleaned up and figured out in the high desert of Utah—and then you’d come back and just go in to attack that house. You’d think, “Everything will be sorted out, cleaned out, moved out. It will be done.” Then you go right back to the one

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hour there and you can’t stand it and leave. I just had a whole problem with it. . . . And people would come up to you and say, “Are you doing alright?” “Yes, I’m fine.” I’m surely not going to say I’m not doing alright. I was not alright. I was busily not alright. You would divert from the not alright part to something that was comfortable ground, whether it was doing this or that . . . but nothing was getting done. Eventually, Randall got help from a former client. In sorting out the house, I had a customer that saw a note that said, “Doctor Randall needs help with his house.” I don’t know who put that note up, because I didn’t. When I learned, I pretended that I remembered her but I had no idea who she was. She said, “I saw that you need help clearing out your house.” She lived in Algiers and didn’t take any damage at all, really. Well, part of her house took a little damage but she said, “I will meet you at the florist tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock,” and I had a truck and she says, “We’re just going to fill your truck up and do trips until we clear your house out,” and we did. This was somebody I did not know at all. She had a garage and we stored the stuff worth saving in her garage. She was just my savior with the house because I was not into it. It needed to be done and behind me. Randall’s story offers particularly useful insights about how official programs for cleanup and rebuilding were misguided. The months after the flood witnessed inordinate amounts of money spent and energy devoted to ferreting out crime and criminalizing the poor, instead of helping people who had been made poor by the disaster. By February 2006, Randall finally went back to his clinic to find that one of his clinic’s veterinarians had already returned and was, with the help of a vet tech and a receptionist, running the business by doing house calls. He was so pleased to see that, he said, but as the day continued, his luck turned again. He was met by four Drug Enforcement Agency (dea) officers wearing black suits and carrying guns. Apparently the clinic, like almost all vet clinics in the city, had been broken into by animal rights activists in the days following the flood. The activists had tried to release animals that were trapped. In the course of all this, investigators began to involve the dea over 48

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the possibility that these clinics had also experienced thefts of controlled drugs. When Randall returned to his clinic, the dea had arrived to do a “routine” inquiry. Randall was surprised and angry that this was happening. Spending money on this while so much needed to be done to rebuild was adding insult to injury. The fact that Homeland Security was in charge of the recovery made criminal investigations like this routine, producing a situation in which more was invested in the law-­enforcement activities, it seemed to Randall, than in helping people like him get back on their feet. Unbeknownst to Randall, however, his clinic partner confessed that he had problems at a prior job. He “had some substances that he had ordered through another veterinarian’s license and took for himself.” However, none of the substances that had been a problem for his coworker were used in his clinic now. But “the dea didn’t get that,” he said. Put into a situation in which he was guilty by association, Randall was forced to surrender his clinic’s drug license on the spot. So, then I had a clinic but no clinic staff at all. So we shut it down temporarily and reopened it with a new guy up front and a new vet tech. We had extremely loyal customers in the neighborhood. I spread the word around and I told people what happened because I think I didn’t do anything wrong. I trusted people and that’s what I did wrong. This went on and on and on, though. I met with the dea finally about a week ago [in October 2007]. That is, it’s been since February 14, 2006. They said they want to assess me a fine of $170,000! I took my bankruptcy lawyer with me so they can understand that there was no $170,000. I had been living on a couch in a basement in Salt Lake City and now on a little futon in a little room and doing relief work before coming back for this. I don’t know, I don’t know. It was hard for Randall to fathom how he could have incurred a fine for something he didn’t do, but that is what happened. He was being billed for his partner’s infraction. “You’d think they had more important things to do,” he said. He thought part of the bill was just late fines that had been layered upon the original fine, which was astonishing, Randall said, because there had not been any mail service and no way for him to know he had been

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fined in the first place. He kept wondering why he wasn’t getting $170,000 to replace his home and business instead of being fined money for something he didn’t do. In the end, the only federal assistance Randall ever received was a few thousand dollars from fema, which he got seven months after the hurricane. He used the money to help reopen the clinic. He had no renter’s insurance to cover flood damage. And he explained that despite applying six or seven times for an sba loan, he got no response because his clinic had that problem with the dea—and there was a record of unpaid fines, which gave him a “bad credit” record, even though he was innocent. Because he didn’t own a home, he was not eligible for Road Home funds. By 2008, Randall was still feeling that he had definitely not recovered. He eventually had to close down his clinic, and this started his decline into depression. Even here, where recovery processes could have spurred the growth of this small business, the engines of disaster capitalism failed people like Randall. Companies that were hired to help with, and were making large profits on, the disaster chaos remained deeply invested in criminalizing those whose struggles made them seem like they were failed citizens far into the postdisaster context. Randall’s efforts to rebuild were thwarted by the agencies that were ostensibly supposed to be helping people. For such agencies, the greater share of rewards came from penalizing those who were newly entering the ranks of the poor and disenfranchised. It is worth recalling how the dea, operating under the U.S. Department of Justice, is also a major source of subcontracting opportunities today, with increasing numbers of contracts going to companies that specialize in building and maintaining prisons. These associations, explored more thoroughly by Loïc Wacquant among others, need to be understood in relation to the ways that humanitarian work and those who live in poverty in the United States today are increasingly being managed through regimes of incarceration. The enormous investment of time and money in building makeshift jails in the immediate aftermath of Katrina remains one of the more serious examples of this.65 Randall slipped further and further into depression. He began to do volunteer work at another vet clinic, and this helped him somewhat to slow the pace of his downward spiral. A year later in 2009, four years after Katrina, he said:

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I think my emotional state is a lot better than it was the last time you talked with me. You know I don’t have a sense of grief that I had, and the funny thing about the sense of grief that you have, you don’t really know—everybody I think in New Orleans still does—you don’t know exactly what you’re grieving about. Because you can’t say you’re grieving about so many things at the same time, and so it brings a lot of it back up to you. And so I think that you have waves of that still after three years. You know, I went into a poverty level that I had never quite been to before. I haven’t gotten out of it yet. I’m essentially a fifty-­four-­year-­old, fifty-­four-­year-­old kept man now [living with his partner], which is difficult. I’m still working with this. We talk about mental health in New Orleans and seeing people in New Orleans and all that stuff. What I’m having the most trouble getting through is my self-­image, my self-­esteem. I’ve always had a real good self-­image and self-­esteem. But I’ve had problems with it since the storm. A lot of it is . . . well, you know, I’m fifty-­four years old and I’m going through some midlife crisis. But it isn’t a midlife crisis. I’m having a bit of an emotional crisis but I don’t think it’s because I’m at a certain age in my life. I think anyone would feel this way. I mean, how many knocks can you take? It’s just a hard life right now. It really, really is. Emotional trials had become for Randall a routine, a constant refrain in the postflood period. He felt helpless because he felt “outside of the economic system.” He was unable to support himself, and yet he knew this was not of his own making. He had been put into this place by the recovery machinery that was looking to help in all the wrong ways, spending money on solving petty crime and criminalizing people like him who were actually innocent. The problem is, I think for all of us, it’s getting the final resolution of it so that we can move on and it’s not just every damn day you have to re-­go through the emotional part of it. The storm was like this big sharp sword. It had really bad things that cut real fast. And it had really great things that would elevate you to the highest level of how good people are. There was both how bad people can be and how good people can be. It was the saddest thing and at exactly the same time it was the greatest thing. But now, it’s different. This isn’t

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a double-­edged sword anymore. This is just, to some extent, a quagmire that you don’t know how to escape and you don’t know how to address it. You hope it all just goes away and you don’t think about it, and just have it as your past. It keeps being your day-­to-­day-­to-­day thing. It wears you, it wears you down. Randall’s translation of social structural failures into a loss of self-­esteem and sense of self-­worth—almost an erasure of his identity and the construction of a subject who is “hollowed out”—provides a telling illustration of what many people go through when they attempt to rebuild under conditions where support is inadequate and blame is misguided. It would be wrong to read his situation as purely a consequence of Hurricane Katrina and bad luck with the dea. His experience illustrates, as did many in New Orleans, how easy it is for any American to find how porous the system of social support is under neoliberal governance. The prolonged and inadequate recovery was only another symptom of a political economy that was not working. Randall internalized his predicament, feeling that he, not the system, was inadequate. He couldn’t really figure out who to blame. Even though the Road Home Program had denied him assistance because he didn’t own a home, and the Small Business Administration wouldn’t loan to him because of a spurious debt imposed by the dea, and even though the flood that destroyed his life was caused by deliberate oversight by the Army Corps of Engineers, he felt like he was somehow responsible for his predicament. Expressing the sort of self-­responsibility that neoliberalism idealizes, Randall blamed himself for his predicament. In fact, Randall had been made invisible by a recovery process that disenfranchised others by its very organizational and ideological priorities. He wasn’t alone. People like Randall not only were left behind but in many ways were also unfairly punished by a poorly designed recovery infrastructure. In an economy that places the blame for poverty and need on the victims of these predicaments, it is not surprising that Randall internalized blame onto himself.

Making Disasters and Making Them Worse

The combined disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed was produced by a situation in which basic priorities that ensured safe 52

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infrastructure prior to the storm and efficient humanitarian-­oriented relief programs after the storm were simply not in place. This is in part because federal and state resources that were allocated to help with recovery mixed priorities for rebuilding assistance with those that enabled for-­profit businesses both to sustain themselves and to profit on these activities and, in turn, blame the recovery’s failures on those who were bypassed or even undermined by the recovery processes. In the end, these arrangements not only slowed recovery but also augmented and reinforced race and class disparities that existed prior to the disasters. Understanding the dynamics in and through which these things happened in New Orleans asks that we look in two directions at once: to the situation on the ground, as people experienced delays and became more and more frustrated and even sickened by the process, and to the larger structures of recovery assistance that were mobilized by government, private-­ sector, and grass-­roots, church, and community organizations. I turn now to the cases that make those arrangements visible in greater detail.

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Three

​“IF THIS COULD HAPPEN TO US, ​IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE” Whether you are rich or poor, when you lose it all, you lose it all. — ​ Ruby Bridges (personal communication, April 22, 2010, New Orleans)

“I

lost eleven million dollars’ worth of stuff when Katrina hit,” Helen Lamarche told us one day after we helped paint her old barn that barely survived the storm. “I had only two things when I came back and started to rebuild: my work ethic and my sense of humor. Without these I would not have survived.” Helen and her husband were in Baton Rouge at their high school daughter’s volleyball tournament when the storm hit. The funny thing, she said, was that she thought she was prepared for it. She had insurance for her home and her business. She had moved her horses to a safe location inland. She had “battened down the hatches” on the barns and buildings. She had savings. She had family. But nothing, she said, could have prepared her for what was to come. Stuck in Baton Rouge with no way to communicate with her family in New Orleans, Helen didn’t know for a full week whether or not her thirteen-­ year-­old son was alive. He had evacuated with a family to a farm in Mississippi. It was one of the worst weeks in her life, she said, not knowing who had made it out alive and who had not. When she finally made her way to the farm, she began to understand that her “week of hell” was only the beginning of what would be years of hell as she tried to dig out of the mess she faced.

Figure 4. “Everything was brown and gray, covered with mud” (2006).

As she pulled up to the farm in Mississippi, Helen realized that even here there would be no refuge. The trees that once lined the drive into the property and spotted the acreage surrounding it, 150 hardwoods in all, had been uprooted and every one of them was on the ground. There was no electricity. They had three houses on the property, but there were twenty-­six people to take care of. There was only one generator, but the house that had the generator had no kitchen because it had been gutted for remodeling two months before. There were so many moments when Helen felt like giving up. The task just seemed too enormous. “How do you survive this kind of devastation?” she kept asking. “We called a meeting and sat everyone down. We had a pow-­wow. We had to figure out what to do. So, you know what we did?” she continued. “We went into the garbage and pulled out all of the appliances that had been removed from the kitchen. All by ourselves, we figured out how to reinstall them. We became plumbers, mechanics, electricians.” Sheer survival was the first order of business, but even after finding a way to feed and shelter everyone, the challenges continued. The hardest part of that phase, Helen said, was helping her father who had been in the hospital when Katrina hit. He had two knee replacement surgeries the day before the storm. They evacuated him to Baton Rouge but they had no pain medication for him. “Can you imagine?” she asked, “Two knee replacements and no pain medicine?” It wasn’t long before she realized two things. One was that whatever they had counted on before in the form of infrastructure or public services was entirely gone. The other was that her money—­something she had plenty of before the storm—would not go very far to replace what was lost, and in any case it was of no immediate use in Mississippi or New Orleans. She had to learn to barter. Taking care of her father, she said, set her “first barter” in motion. At the farm, we were running out of fuel for the generator and no one in Mississippi had any. But I have a brother who had a business partner in Texas who had fuel. He had them send some [fuel] to the farm so we could continue to use the generator. Then, I was trying to deal with my father. We had my uncle with us and he was also sick and needed medicines and he had a prescription for his meds. We went to the local hospital. I told my aunt [who came with me], “Just listen and don’t talk. Whatever I say just keep your mouth shut.” 56

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I went in and asked the nurse for the drugs my father needed, telling her they were for my uncle. But they were “schedule three” drugs and they never give these out without prescriptions. The nurse wouldn’t give them to me. But, you see, the hospitals were also in crisis. No one could get to the hospital for their shifts because no one had gasoline and they couldn’t drive their cars. They were stuck. I figured that the hospital needed fuel. I had fuel. So I told the nurse . . . I offered gasoline for the drugs my father needed. She was so happy to have her problem solved. She not only gave me the meds, she wrote a prescription for my father so that he could get more pain medications where he was. Helen and her family lived at the farm for two months, foraging and bartering for food where they could get it, trading gasoline for medicine, trying to get back to New Orleans to figure out what to do with their home and business. When she first made it back to the city, she recalled her feeling of having “lost everything”: We made it to the Lakeview area and it was totally dead. Everything was brown and gray, covered with mud. No birds, no sign of life whatsoever. We found a way to get to our house and kicked in the front door. We looked at each other and didn’t know where to begin. It was too painful to even look at all of the things that were gone. The house took on ten-­and-­a-­half feet of water. We just took one look and shut the door. Helen then visited her stables in City Park. She recalled feeling that somehow the fact that the stables were empty, even though they were as destroyed as her home, made her feel like they could start to clean up there. “This is fixable,” her husband said as they surveyed the damage. They made the decision then and there to rebuild the business first and deal with their home later. And so the uphill struggle began. She recalled the fear that grabbed her in the pit of her stomach as she realized how much was lost: “The most fearful thing for me was the realization that the businesses that we relied on to live were gone. Houses were gone, but how do you rationalize surviving that? It is an unfathomable thing . . . not just lost homes but lost livelihoods as well. You ask yourself, ‘How do you get up from here?’” Helen talked about confronting the reality of the fact that however much “ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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financial security she had before the storm and floods, she was now just like everyone else who had lost everything. It didn’t matter, she said, that she had eleven million dollars’ worth of assets before the storm. What she had now was “zero,” she said. She had no more than anyone else to work with and in some ways, she recalled, that was what really changed her life, realizing that she’d have to start over from scratch. Helen’s sense that after the storm everyone was in the same boat, no matter how much people had had before, was shared by many residents, despite the fact that those with a preexisting asset base recovered faster than those 58

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Figure 5. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed (2007).

without resources. Still, it took Helen and her family nearly five years to recover their livelihood and homes (and they would never get back to where they were before the storm). In Helen’s mind it was only because she realized that, like everyone else, she and her family would have to rebuild all by themselves. It was definitely a “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps situation,” she said. At first Helen and her husband drove back and forth from Mississippi each day, suiting up with coveralls, masks, and gloves as they began to dig out. They’d carry and pull away debris, sweep up mud and sewage, and “ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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figure out what could be salvaged. “I was lucky,” she said. “We came back to the city in December 2005, on my fiftieth birthday, four months after the storm. There I was: home destroyed, business destroyed. But at least I had insurance.” Her first thought was that they would start the process of cleaning up and then eventually their insurance would cover the cost of rebuilding and replacing what was lost. By the end of the first year and a half of cleanup and digging out, it became clear to Helen that insurance would not be enough. In fact, her insurance companies refused to pay for flood damage, she said, “even though the flooding was caused by the storm, and broken levees broke because of the storm. Can you imagine?” The fact that insurance companies did not pay for flood damage was a constant source of anger among returning residents. It was a sort of “bad faith” on the part of both insurance companies and the federal government, they recalled. When federal officials wanted to blame the catastrophe on “nature” (exempting the Army Corps of Engineers from responsibility), they invoked the hurricane as the cause of the disaster. When residents asked the government to put pressure on insurance companies to pay residents for their damages, they did nothing while insurance companies blamed the catastrophe on flooding from breached levees instead of the hurricane. Without flood insurance, few residents were able to collect for any damage that could not be blamed directly on the storms. This usually included only roof damage and damage to interiors resulting from that roof damage. The city suddenly began to experience a spate of fires, which many residents believed were acts of desperation on the part of homeowners to get insurance payouts for homes they could no longer live in. In fact, Helen’s insurance was better than most. They offered her $100,000 for the content that was lost at her stables and $250,000 for damages. “But,” she said, “we had $600,000 worth of damage.” She was far from able to rebuild with the resources she had been able to get. Helen talked about having always been proud of the fact that she had always lived debt-­free, but at this point she faced enormous debt just to be able to move back in and restart her business. She worried that she might never be able to recover. Like other residents, she applied for funding from the Road Home people, but they denied her application twice, both times claiming that her home was worth only half the amount that she had used to calculate her request. “My file on Road Home is about three inches thick,” she exclaimed. She even had actual appraisal documents for the home from before the storm and used these to 60

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make her requests, but they were “useless,” she said. Feeling like her only recourse was to “fight the system,” she went into arbitration with the Road Home Program and in the end, after a nearly three-­year wait, her settlement was only slightly above its initial offer and nowhere near what she needed to recover. Eventually Helen sold her gutted home and moved into a small shotgun-­ style house that was owned by her family in a nearby neighborhood that had not flooded. They were called “shotgun,” she said, because they are designed such that a bullet fired through the front door could pass through the whole home (usually two or three rooms in the front and a kitchen in the rear) and exit out the back door. The design was good for firing bullets, but hard for a family of five and three dogs. “Can you imagine? We had three to a room, plus the dogs.” Like many returning residents who had embraced the physical challenge of rebuilding, she added, “But, no matter how small, it was still a place to live.” It was, Helen added, “better than a fema trailer.” Eventually, Helen gained resolve through her commitment to the work of rebuilding. “We absorbed nearly a half-­million-­dollar loss in the house alone,” she said. But regaining a sense of purpose and meaning in her life was, for Helen, tied to getting her business back up and running, not focusing on her enormous loss. Helen’s father had started an industrial business on the outskirts of New Orleans and for years she helped her brothers run that as a family business. “It also lost large and expensive property and equipment,” she said. “We will never recover all that. We lost millions in damages there.” But again her family pulled together. They had a pow-­wow and together they made a decision. They would pool resources and try to rebuild the business. But Helen was on her own for the stables, and they, too, were going to take more resources than she had. “We got some insurance for wind damage, but nothing for flood damage or for the loss of all the equipment, the barns and supplies.” Helen talked about how wrong it seemed to her that there was no federal, state, or local effort on the part of government officials to require insurers to pay adequate damages to Katrina victims. Instead of responding to the call from New Orleans homeowners for a “Katrina Bill” that would enforce protections for returning residents with both insurance companies and Road Home practices,1 legislators dithered and retreated and did nothing to enforce insurance payouts.2 Helen’s sense of betrayal from both insurance companies and relief pro“ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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grams was tied to a narrative about her ability to take care of herself as an American, referring to a kind of “bootstrap” pride that enabled her to get through it all and keep working toward recovery even when it seemed futile. She felt that she’d worked hard to build her family’s wealth and resented that it could be taken away from her so quickly, with no accountability on the part of any of the agents who were clearly to blame for the floods: the Army Corps of Engineers as well as the city, state, and federal officials who let them get away with this. Like most residents, Helen knew there were man-­made causes for the floods; it was not a “conspiracy theory.” These were matters of fact. Her sense of betrayal was double in this sense. She had not only lost confidence in her government and its commitments to public infrastructure, but she also felt betrayed by her own belief that America was a place where hard work would be rewarded and protected. Despite her own commitments to neoliberal idealism, she wondered how her insurance company and the one running the Road Home Program were able to evade accountability, while she was left with hard work and losses from which she’d never recover. It was as if a bubble had burst. Things were not working as well as they seemed in the ideal world she’d come to believe in where bootstrap hard work alone would provide the reward of a secure future. As the days wore on, and weeks turned into months of hard labor and progress slowly began to be seen, Helen tried to keep a positive attitude. But there were so many setbacks. She learned in the second year after Katrina that the land she leased from the city for her stables would not be covered by her own business insurance. When she asked the city to cover the damage from the flood, because it owned the property, city officials turned her down. “fema got involved in the deliberations and sided with the city,” she said, leaving her with a huge mess and no resources to clean it up. The whole thing, she said, was “an exercise in coming to realize over and over again that we really would have to fix everything pretty much on our own.” “What was I supposed to do?” she asked. “Everything I assumed would be covered was not. My safety net just did not exist.” Again, Helen found ways to barter for what she needed. Rebuilding the stables gave Helen a chance for her “second big barter”: There were all these companies here helping with debris removal. I was approached by a man whose company had been contracted by fema to do this work. He came to me because he needed a place to 62

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park his trucks and equipment and to house his workers in trailers. The city was going to charge him $300 per vehicle per month to use the city property. At that rate, he said, he would go out of business. So he told me he would trade me. “I will remove your debris in evenings and will help you clean up the place in exchange for letting us park here—campers and vehicles.” He was there three months and got through the cleanup of debris from the place. We lost all the trees, fences, equipment, everything. The wind insurance on the barn . . . we used that for fixing the roof and the electrical. But we had nothing to pay for the debris removal or rebuilding. We had no coverage for the loss of all our equipment. Can you imagine? They hauled away fifty semi [trucks] of debris and trash. It was like this for the next four years, Helen explained. She just dug in and kept digging and digging, figuring out at every step of the way how to make it work. Eventually we got the barn up and running. But then I had to hustle Entergy [the local power company] to get power to the barn. I needed a trailer for my workers to live in because the horses were back. We had all ninety-­one horses back there. I had to buy a trailer [a fema-­type trailer] for the few workers I had because fema would not put one at a business. Then I traded everything. I had an electrician come in and he actually said he had so much business now and he never let me pay. He donated his work. He had a sentimental feeling about the park and his daughter rode at the barn. It was like that for a lot of people. He said he had a lot of work and didn’t need to be paid. This was hard for me to be the one on that side of things . . . to be the one receiving help. I had always been the one giving help. The one giving, not receiving. Using a language that expressed an overwhelming sense of anger and frustration that propelled her toward perseverance and action, Helen described how her emotions actually fueled her economic survival. She made sense of the whole ordeal in ways that made her a more emotional person, but one who understood more than ever how emotional sentiments became a translational resource that kept her going and fueled her exchanges with others. Her electrician donated his services because of how he felt about the “ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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stables. Helen’s own anger gave her the strength to hunker down and do things she’d never thought she would have to do—generating barter transactions that addressed both material and psychological needs. The rewards, she felt, were also counted in emotional and material gains. “Looking back,” she said, “the whole ordeal was cleansing, in some ways. It gave me a new kind of confidence in myself.” And always at the end, this ever-­recurring refrain: “But we’ll never get back to normal. There were too many losses. We lost so much. We just go from here forward and accept that with some things, you have to just let it go.” Helen was a tall slender woman who, in April 2010, was almost fifty-­five years old. She had curly hair and was dressed in her riding clothes on the day we met her. She’d been running the business as best she could for the last year or so by boarding horses and taking on a few students. The grounds were still a mess. The barns were not finished. Her loss was miles deep and wide, but the stables were a source of some income again. The small rewards sustained her psychologically. She’d already done a full day’s work training and teaching when she sat with the volunteers who had come to work for her that day. She had dirt on her pants, a little sweat on her forehead. Telling her story, one could see that, despite her plucky spirit and her self-­proclaimed sense of humor, her eyes started to well up as she spoke. The flood of emotions that comes with having triumphed over personal tragedy enabled Helen to confess that she had to keep looking on the positive side of things. She had been through so much. She brought out a poster that she had put together as a collage. It had an aerial photo of her property underwater, and one of the fema trailers on the property. She had photos of each stage of the cleanup, the rebuilding of the stables, the recovery of the metal barns that held her feed and equipment— the same ones the volunteers had finished painting with a metal base primer that day. She included photos of other volunteers in the collage, people who had come from all over the country to help her. Like many in New Orleans, Helen didn’t mind sharing her story. It was in part her way of thanking people, of enabling others to see how much it meant to her and where the cumulative efforts of all those who had helped over the past five years had brought her. She hoped it would encourage other New Orleanians to return home, to see things like the City Park up and running again. Mostly, she wanted others to know that this could happen to anyone. Those who believed they were immune from this kind of trauma 64

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and loss because they were wealthy or insured, healthy, and had good jobs were just like her. “If this could happen to us, it could happen to anyone,” Helen said. “At a moment’s notice, everything you have could be taken away. I was just like you,” she said, looking around the table of parents and teenagers who had come from a middle-­class community in California to help. “I was focused on my kid’s volleyball games, worried about getting them into college, and then . . . Wow . . . You never know what can hit you.” Helen’s eyes squinted more when she waved her hand toward the green grass near the stables. It was finally looking like a real business again, she said, but she still felt a need to account for the losses with every new volunteer, every new witness. I feel I am never going to recover from this. You never recover from something like this. We are on an even keel. We don’t owe anything now. But we don’t have reserves to cover another catastrophe. We are in a house. The barn is running. We are not in the condition we were in before the storm, and we’ll never be financially secure like that again. We lost everything that was our security. But we provide a service to the community here. Also, the camaraderie here was not here before—the spirit of community. Truthfully, I have a lot more faith in my ability to survive. I am impressed by what me and my family did. The water pooled in Helen’s eyes again despite her encouraging words. Her emotions touched the volunteers and was, at least for the moment, the reward they needed for having come to help. Some of them also wiped their eyes. Affirmation in gratitude spread a sense of purpose from Helen to those who had come to help her. When the volunteers who helped her that day arrived, they wondered why they were working on this project instead of rebuilding a home for someone still in a fema trailer. But as Helen spoke, the group listened and began to understand how her situation was as important as others who were less fortunate. Helen was a beacon calling to others with signs of hope and success. She was also the canary in the coal mine for the others who had come to help. No one was immune. Helen’s story was one of relative success in a sea of sorrow. She was doing pretty well now, and many others who started with less would never get to this point. But in many ways, Helen was not special in her loss, and having once been rich did not make her situation any different from many others in New Orleans, at least at the beginning. Many wealthy families lost every“ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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thing because of Katrina, right alongside those who were poor. Helen’s story reveals much about the vulnerability of even privileged citizens when it comes to recovering from disasters in the absence of a strong social safety net that can distribute recovery resources in a manner that is efficient, equitable, and timely. Helen had her own resources to fall back on. She was white. She was rich. Like others, Helen had always assumed that help would somehow be there. She assumed that since her taxes were paid, her insurance bills paid, her hard work invested, there was no way that she could end up with so much loss. And yet, here she was, still trying to build back the life she once had that she presumed would be protected against this sort of loss. Helen, at least, did not have to go into debt in order to recover. Helen’s story offers a different starting point for the recovery saga in New Orleans than that of Henry Bradlieu, Wayne Bodrian, or Randall Batradille. But what all of their experiences have in common is a shared vulnerability that was aroused not so much by the storm and floods but by the infrastructures of recovery that were mobilized in the aftermath. The social and fiscal infrastructures that all of them thought were there to help just did not exist, and what was deployed seemed more often than not to get in the way instead of to help with recovery. It is perhaps a curiously invisible fact that the aid institutions set up to help people after Katrina were not, in fact, designed to simply replace what had been lost. It turns out that, in some ways, the resources provided to victims of Katrina seemed to be designed to do the opposite—to create different kinds of opportunities for people who didn’t even live through the storm or flood and who lost nothing at all.

Using the Market to Help People Recover: The SBA Program

Helen’s experience with inadequate insurance payouts, which forced her into arbitration and lawsuits, was as frustrating to her as were her struggles with the Road Home Program, but the other institutional resources that were provided by the federal government to help people were equally troubling. For residents who did not own their homes and had no insurance, one of the only public-­sector resources available was the Small Business Administration ( sba) loan program. The sba program was set up in 1953 under Eisenhower as a federally sponsored resource that could stimulate the growth of entrepreneurial small businesses in the United States. Through the sba, loans were made available 66

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through banks, credit unions, and other lenders who partnered with the sba and who agreed to lend to qualified borrowers in exchange for federal insurance in the event of any loan default. Although the program has been widely contested over its history and has suffered numerous threats of closure under Republican administrations, during the years after Hurricane Katrina, it became an important resource for victims. Disaster assistance loans were and remain the only exception to the sba mandate to fund only small businesses, a perhaps ironic twist on the idea of humanitarian assistance in which the lines between disaster recovery and disaster profiteering are clearly blurred. Under federal guidelines, the sba made direct loans available to disaster victims who were trying to rebuild or repair if they could show that they qualified, even if they had no small businesses of their own. In New Orleans, many renters were offered sba loans. Loans to New Orleanians under the sba program were determined, like all loans, on the basis of qualifications that were tied to market visibility: was the borrower creditworthy and did he or she have collateral? Could the applicant secure credit in the commercial market? In New Orleans, people who had collateral in an owned home, business, or even simply a steady job often qualified for a loan through the sba disaster-­relief program.3 Because so many people were left with insufficient resources from insurance and from the Road Home Program, many of the remaining people who had no other collateral than a job also opted to take out new loans through the sba. For many returning residents, however, the idea that they should have to take a loan to rebuild and cover the cost of what insurance and the Road Home Program should have paid felt once again like insult on top of injury. It felt, as one homeowner said, like “a slap in the face!” That residents were forced not only to take on the burden of debt but also to prove they were qualified to lose even what little they had left was not even ironic; it was like adding another kind of tragedy to the existing disaster. Shandra Graveau, a forty-­five-­year-­old single African American woman who had rented, is a good example of someone who was doubly burdened by the sba program. She had a great job as a lab analyst for an oil company prior to the storm. She evacuated to her parents’ home in Lafayette, Louisiana, during the hurricane, and while she was there she stayed in close touch with her employer. The company, she said, moved her into one of their facilities in Baytown, Texas. Eventually, she was homesick and wanted to be closer to her family, so she tried to return to New Orleans. Like all returning resi“ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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dents, she began her story with a description of walking in to see her home for the first time, still captivated by the details of things she had never seen before: It was like seven or eight different colors of mold: orange, gray, black, beige, blue, green. . . . It was like black mold. One of them was like an orange color. The other one was like beige. They had a gray and it seemed like it was a blue and you know all of these different things. . . . I had a Coach purse on the chair, which pre-­Katrina was like beige. I couldn’t tell you post-­Katrina what color it was because I almost didn’t recognize it. I realized that’s my purse! It was just mold all over. It was just unbelievable. Shandra tried to get help to clean out her apartment, staying with her sister and brother-­in-­law in their unflooded house on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. During this time, she said, her company “begged and begged” her to return to Texas. Finally, she decided to go back because it would keep her employed. From Texas, she tried to find out whether or not she would get insurance for her lost belongings. I had more than enough renter’s insurance; I had my car insured too but I didn’t have flood [insurance]. So I got nothing. I had collision and liability on my car, so I was able to get some for my car. As a renter I didn’t know I needed flood. I thought that my renter’s insurance had the flood and it was covered. That’s the way the insurance company did it. I did not get paid nothing for my home. I went to see if fema could help me. They decided I had a pretty decent job, so they wasn’t going to give me a grant, they were going to give me a loan, which is another deal. . . . After losing everything else, now you have another “deal.” The sba approved Shandra for a $40,000 loan, an amount it determined would cover the cost of everything she lost and give her the ability to move into a new rental home. At that time in early 2006, however, she wasn’t sure she was going to return to New Orleans. Her job was in Texas, but she couldn’t use the loan in Texas. The only way she could recover some of the assets and equity she lost was to give up her job and move back to the devastated city. Shandra wasn’t sure what to do, so she put the loan on hold.

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In post-­Katrina New Orleans, the sba was turned into a federal resource for disaster recovery by forcing individuals to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, forcing victims to turn their need into an opportunity to in some way make money by forming businesses or at least making enough to pay not only the debt but also the interest on that debt. Disaster-­induced debt, in other words, became a resource for generating profit, although not for Shandra. The logic of providing business loans to victims required thinking that people would not only use this funding to rebuild and replace what was lost but also make enough to pay off the interest due on the use of those funds as a source of profit for someone else: namely, the banks. Even though the source of funding and the guarantees for this program were provided by the federal government, the sba program placed these transactions into private-­sector savings and loans, banks, and credit unions, which meant that the distribution chain put banks and other private lenders in the position of gaining access to new sources of debt equity on the backs of people who had lost everything. Because they were loans, it would be fair to say that the sba put the burden of responsibility on the victims and enabled banks to profit from the delivery of humanitarian aid. Even here, though, homeowners witnessed massive amounts of bureaucratic failure on the part of private-­sector banks. Homeowners or others who were trying to qualify under the sba requirements submitted the initial application to the sba office that handled disaster relief. Reports of difficulties in working with the sba banks were rampant. Paperwork was lost; demands for proof of collateral, or documentation of income and so on, were made erratically and on short notice. Many homeowners dropped their applications because it was so time-­consuming.4 But even with its abysmal record of operational failures, the sba was the only resource available for many returning renters and homeowners. In February 2007, Shandra’s situation changed overnight. Her company in Texas was letting go of workers it had brought in post-­Katrina and she was laid off. At that point, she had to find a place to live back in New Orleans, she said, because she had no job and no way to support herself in Texas. Her loan opportunity was her only financial asset. The problem was that she had no apartment to return to. She had requested a fema trailer but, because she was not a homeowner, fema initially told her it could not give her one. Through weeks of arguing, she was able to convince fema to

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put a trailer on her brother’s property and in April 2007 she began to work on reinstating her sba loan. The sba officer explained that she’d need to start paying on the loan right away. However, Shandra no longer had a job. I asked them if I could get an extension. They told me yes, but they will charge me an extra $300 per month. They kept it on hold, collecting the interest and then charged me. Isn’t that wonderful? After you lose everything? By getting the loan I have to pay an extra $300 just because I asked them to put it on hold because I didn’t have a job. I was going to have to pay the $300 from the money they gave me. I was like, “Isn’t that defeating the purpose? You’re borrowing more money to pay for having the money?” I don’t understand. People don’t understand why we’re so frustrated sometimes because we have to deal with things like this. So it was like $40,300 instead of $40,000 [that I owed]. Thank God I ended up getting the temporary job. If I wouldn’t have got that I wouldn’t have been able to pay them or even get the loan. If I continued asking [them] to hold [it], they would have charged me $300 each month. Shandra was like a lot of working New Orleanians who felt they had been cheated, not just by Hurricane Katrina and the floods but by the system that was in place to help them recover. She felt she was being treated like a criminal. In fact, she wasn’t being treated like a criminal but she was being treated like a commodity—a source of surplus value. Although her “qualification” for taking on the loan was that she still held a job, the fact that she had lost everything seemed to have been overlooked in the bank’s calculation of her profitability as a debtholder. Shandra felt like she’d had to fight to get anything, even to get the bare minimum of a loan that she would have to pay back with interest. Shandra felt, like Helen, that she was doing everything she was supposed to do as a good citizen. You know, I felt like I was trying to live the American dream. I got up, I went to work, and I paid my bills. And I got punished for that. You lost everything, you did the right thing in life, then bam, and here you got a bill. The only thing we can give you is $40,000 but it’s a $40,000 bill. We can’t help you in any other way. You get up, you go to work, you pay your bills, you have good credit [and insurance]. We are going to award you with a bill. That’s depressing. That’s de70

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pressing. I am being punished. . . . That’s depressing. I cried, I cried for months. I cried, cried, and cried. There is something wrong with this picture. Something is wrong. You want to do the right thing and you get punished. When I told that story to someone in fema they said to me, “Ma’am, I think you need a psychiatrist.” I’m looking at him . . . I’m talking to him going like, “Why you asking me this? I’m only speaking the truth.” I’m only speaking the truth, this is what the system is doing to us, and they’re punishing us for going to work, for doing the right thing, for living the American dream. That’s how I feel. If it wasn’t for God I would have cracked up by now. The sba program definitely made Shandra’s recovery worse before it made it better. Many renters experienced similar problems with sba loans in a recovery environment where jobs and housing were constantly in flux. For homeowners who relied on the sba, the situation was similarly burdensome. Many bank-­owned mortgages required, once again, that residents use their sba funds (processed through their banks) to pay off the remainder of their mortgages first, and only then would they release the remaining funds for rebuilding. This meant that people who were given funds to rebuild were in some sense denied these funds while the banks collected on the debt of original home mortgages. This left residents with even less money to rebuild when they finally received the grant or loan payouts. It was bad enough for residents that these loans added to the overall debt that they carried on top of their original mortgages. But when they had to use their rebuilding loans to pay off debt on a home they could no longer live in, it seemed patently unethical. The sba programs enabled banks to be predatory in their processing of the loans for people with whom they had preexisting mortgages. The impoverishment of the working middle class through debt mechanisms was a visible outcome of this recovery infrastructure. It carved its wounds into middle-­class homeowners and renters alike. As market-­oriented strategies for recovery were filtered through the private for-­profit sector, mechanisms for recovery aid were turned into opportunities for making money on the part of companies that were ostensibly being asked to help people out of a disastrous situation. Few of the profits that were generated by such mechanisms of aid ended up in the hands of returning residents who were trying to rebuild. While residents were forced to undertake major legal battles over amounts of aid and whether it should “ It Could Happen to Anyone ”

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be in the form of a loan or a grant, the fact that relief funds were being used to nourish private-­sector businesses went largely unscrutinized in terms of not only its ethics but also its effectiveness. For Helen, a wealthy white woman, and Shandra, a middle-­income African American woman, recovery was characterized for both of them by a dense network of frustrations over the fiscal structure and ideology of recovery aid. Responsibility for recovery was shifted onto people in a way that was both obvious and obviously unfair. While Helen felt that the burden of this responsibility was in part what made her both a victim and a virtuous person in the face of a failed system, Shandra felt that it made her a double victim and a failure because she had to pay for her own recovery and in the process become a source of profit for the banks that were supposed to be helping her. A vulnerability that cross-­cut race and class but also reinforced disparities between them shows up here again as an outcome of market-­driven infrastructures of recovery assistance. In New Orleans, we saw the outcomes of many years of policies that favored and created instruments of market-­driven recovery. Along the way, regimes of dispossession, exclusion, and erasure have been reinforced alongside new kinds of inclusions in which basic human rights are displaced by economic and fiscal strategies that wed human need to the engines of profit.

A Pervasive Fragility

Larger structural trends in the political economy of the nation have created a pervasive vulnerability and fragility among more and more people. One does not need a disaster to see how the dynamics of market-­based infrastructures work to make people vulnerable: those who were poor to begin with got less and recovered more slowly, or not at all, but even those who had much more to begin with were cast into debt and vulnerability because of the failure in how recovery assistance was deployed through market-­ driven infrastructures of assistance. The experience of prolonged and delayed recovery in New Orleans illustrates how victims of disaster were made to bear the burdens of loss while taking on debt in order to ensure that relief industries mobilized to help were allowed to profit on the disaster. Those who were excluded from becoming involved in the markets of recovery aid were given nothing, but even those who did get something were forced to 72

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bear the fiscal burden of generating profits for others. “Natural” disasters are only one reason people are brought face to face with this infrastructure, and they offer one way to see its operations in full relief. But the everyday crises of a failed economy produce similar results. Ananya Roy uses the phrase poverty capital to describe the process whereby lending institutions are allowed to prey upon the poorest in the world of development aid.5 Similar processes could be seen in the case of New Orleans after Katrina. There, a catastrophe that was created by inherent risks in the system (from unrepaired infrastructure to poorly organized relief because of market practices) in turn created vulnerable people who were then made more vulnerable by the recovery machinery deployed to help them, generating new kinds of poverty within the United States.6 These arrangements organize markets of sorrow in which the production of profits, like the production of indebtedness among the already poor, are integral to the survival of the market itself.

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Four

​NAVIGATING THE ROAD HOME It helps to have Katrina savvy. ​— Gerald Davis, a Gentilly resident (2009)

A

f​ull four years after Katrina, many residents were “fed up” with the difficulties of rebuilding. Recovery remained out of their grasp. Some were still living in fema trailers or half-­rebuilt homes, in neighborhoods where stoplights, street signs, and mail delivery were still not yet in place. People were depressed, but mental-­health resources were still nearly nonexistent. Therapists, social workers, and doctors were all still trying to dig out and recover their own lives. The volunteer medical services and clinics were not enough to take care of everyone who needed support. And a lot of residents simply didn’t think to ask for help, placing their need for material assistance far above their need for psychological or social assistance.1 By late 2009, large swaths of the city still had few visible signs of recovery progress. Some neighborhoods had makeshift street signs again, and mail was starting to be delivered on repaired roads, although most roads were so broken and bumpy that they damaged cars that drove on them. In the heavily hit neighborhoods, a gas station here and there was up and running again, as were the occasional corner store, restaurant, and school but these were few and far between and interspersed among largely devastated blocks. Downtown, the French Quarter and the wealthy areas along St. Charles Avenue (dubbed the “Isle of Denial” by harder-­hit residents) were looking normal again. Outside of these gains, however, rebuilding was sparse, and many

Figure 6. An acorn Housing sign advertises free assistance with the Road Home Program (2007).

people were still either angered or defeated by the length of time it had taken to get this far. “If they can build community centers in Iraq and prisons in Afghanistan,” Caroline Reeves, the community organizer who helped the Bradlieus, told me, “you’d think they could rebuild our neighborhoods in New Orleans.” Even for many of the “successful” returning residents—those lucky few who, for example, were awarded Road Home funds relatively quickly2— actual recovery still felt far away. A third of the homes on their streets were rebuilt, but many more remained gutted and derelict, or torn down entirely, affecting all residents’ sense of safety and community. Property values were plummeting because of Road Home and insurance devaluations, accompanied by skyrocketing rental prices because of the housing shortage. Families could not put their gutted houses up for sale and they couldn’t start rebuilding without knowing if they would have the funding to do so. The long-­term wear and tear from not knowing how to move forward, and from being thwarted in their efforts to do so, resulted in declining health for many people. Figuring out how to survive the seemingly endless struggle with the system took what Gerald Davis—a sixty-­five-­year-­old retired, disabled Marine—called Katrina savvy. Gerald’s story provides a good cutaway glimpse of the enormity of the problems experienced by many with the recovery, even in programs that were well funded by the federal government. Under the Road Home Program, returning homeowners were encouraged to apply for grants to make up for the difference between what insurance would pay and the cost for rebuilding at the previously assessed values of their homes.3 The program was funded by federal disaster-­relief funds and administered by the Louisiana Recovery Authority (lra). The program was promising. Here was the help returning residents needed after insurance had left them high and “dry” and when they were unable to take on more debt to rebuild. Homeowners were allowed to submit applications for Road Home funding, a process that appeared simple in theory. The program asked homeowners to provide proof of title ownership and, if they had it, evidence of the assessed value of the home prior to Katrina along with information about what insurance funds, if any, had been collected. Residents who were rebuilding were told they could apply for 100 percent funding, up to $150,000, in order to close the gap between insurance and assessment-­

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based home value. For those who were planning to sell or move elsewhere, the program even offered two-­thirds of the award that the homeowners were eligible for, a plan that was intended to get people back into homes even if they moved away. To returning residents, however, it soon became clear that the apparent simplicity of the program belied a much more complicated picture. Residents soon learned that the Byzantine set of transactions that homeowners were forced to undertake would set them back months and even years from recovery. Living in fema trailers without computers, mail, or legal assistance, homeowners were submitted to a paperwork scrutiny that some compared to the process that they imagined foreigners had to go through to get citizenship in the United States if they had moved from a Third World country. The application procedures alone required multiple copies of documents, from birth certificates to property records, affidavits of support, letters of explanation, interviews, and documents that simply no longer existed because not only the paperwork but also the computers that backed up the paperwork were washed away in the flood. Nearly everyone who applied found that their application entailed making multiple visits to Road Home offices even though they often still had no cars, no public transportation, and no phones. Gerald found himself facing these problems as early as 2006. In August 2005, floodwater sat in Gerald’s home “up to his ceiling” for three weeks. He had evacuated but returned soon after the water abated and had lived out of his car when he first returned for several weeks because the shelters would not take his pets. He eventually got a fema trailer and from there he began his multiyear battle to clean out and rebuild his home. At first, Gerald thought it would be a simple matter of collecting on insurance because, after all, Gerald had flood insurance. He was wrong. His insurance company “low-­balled him,” he said, appraising his home at $115,000 (meaning his replacement payment would be about $30,000), even though homes in his neighborhood had been worth double that price before Katrina and even though costs of rebuilding had doubled since the storm. Even if you accounted for some decline in property, Gerald said, the house down the street had been appraised at $140,000 after Katrina even though it had the exact same floor plan and lot footage, with the same level of damage, as his home. Gerald felt he had to contest the payment the insurance offered be-

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cause it did not reflect the worth of his home or what he thought his policy should pay based on the paperwork they gave him.4 More than that, the money just simply wasn’t enough to rebuild. The first year was mostly traumatic, just sorting through the remains of his belongings and finding out how to get his Social Security checks, to put his insurance papers in order, and, after realizing that insurance was not going to pay enough, to submit his application for Road Home funds. Getting over the extent of the devastation and finding a way to have confidence that he could rebuild took a lot of work. By the second or third year after Katrina, he said, he felt like he was “on and off ” with the battle. Sometimes it would defeat him, and other times he felt that he could beat the odds against him. “Just look at my neighborhood,” he said. “I’m really one of maybe three people that are actually coming back on the block.” By 2008, Gerald was laying most of the blame for his situation on the Road Home Program. In March of 2006 when they said we could apply for Road Home, they provided—well, they provided everybody with a huge application. I’d say it was ten to twelve pages. I sent that to them via certified mail, return receipt requested. They received that information several days after I’d put it into the mail system. Never heard anything. One month passed, two months passed, three months passed. I called the radio talk shows when some of the representatives of the Road Home were there to answer questions. And it was so obvious that these guys were collecting humongous salaries and blowing smoke on everybody. They were playing on the ignorance of most of the people. Thank God I am not ignorant. I’ve been around the block a few times. I know how the game is played. I called this one guy, Sam Jones, the former mayor of Franklin, Louisiana. He was on, I think, wwr radio, called him up, and said, “You-­all received my application three months ago.” He says, “Oh, oh, we have a whole packet of mail going out to let people know that you’re going to get some money. You’re probably in that mail.” I’m thinking this guy is blowing some serious smoke. So he comes back the next week. I called him again. “Hey, I didn’t receive anything out of these thousands of applications you said you were sending the people with the Road Home information.” He says, “Oh, you know what it is? They had a little mix-­up in the mail and they’re sending two thousand of 78

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these yellow sheets (they called it, to give you a choice of which way you would go). I’ll bet it’s in that mail.” He was yanking my chain, and I knew it from the get-­go. I knew it from the very beginning. I listened to the bs that these representatives of the Road Home, representatives of Governor Blanco, that they were just playing a game with these people. They could care less because they’re going to get their $100,000–$200,000 from it. You’d call the Road Home number: “I need some information.” “Okay. Let me get your number. We’ll call you right back.” Nothing. And that’s not just me—it’s not just me, Gerald Davis. It’s thousands of people that have been jerked around from day one. Eventually Road Home offered Gerald $30,000. He had become angrier than ever. He went on websites, wrote letters, cut articles from newspapers, and confiscated paperwork from the Road Home offices. He calculated the amount he should get using their formulas and taking into account that his insurance had not paid anything yet and said that he should have received at least $62,000. Gerald showed us a letter he had written in February 2008. He had already spent all of his savings and, with no resolution from either insurance or Road Home, things were getting difficult. He was in a desperate situation. His monthly $950 check from Social Security was not enough for him to live on and rebuild. It might have seemed that in the scheme of things what he was asking for was a small amount to argue about, but it was all he had. He couldn’t understand why all these agencies were “nickel and diming” him over these small amounts when they had so much more. His future financial security depended on every little bit that he could recover. His logic was that Road Home funds were owed to him as a reimbursement for what the failed Katrina recovery had actually cost him up to that point. Gerald’s first letter was addressed to Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the lra (many said he probably should have been denied the job on the basis of his name alone). Gerald sent it registered mail, so that he could be sure it would arrive and he would have a paper trail for it, complete with a Xerox copy of the post stamp and date.

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Dear Mr. Rainwater, I am a 65 year old disabled former United States Marine (1961–1967). I suffer from severe heart disease and hypertension. My home of 58+ years was flooded because of the levee failure at the London Avenue Canal. My house was 6 blocks from the breach. My fixed income of approximately $950.00 per month is a disability payment from Social Security. Since the flood of 2005, I’ve had to spend my life savings just to survive. I mailed the enclosed data to the appeals department on 11/20/07. Today’s date is 2/25/08. More than three months have passed and I have yet to receive a response from them. I’m living on borrowed time. My father was only 52 years when he died from heart disease. Heart disease is the primary cause of death in my family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.). Mr. Rainwater, I don’t know what else to do to resolve this problem. Would you please help me? I don’t know who else to appeal to for help before I run out of time. Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. Respectfully yours, Gerald Davis

I met Gerald soon after he wrote this letter, and he was about to give up: “I don’t know what else to do. I have a roof over my head, but I cannot both eat and pay my bills.” He was at one of those “low points” in the struggle. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked as if he might not have showered in a few days. His eyelids filled with water as he told the story of his losses, not just of property, but of his neighborhood, his friends, his cats. His resolve was being tested. Leaving the interview, I worried that Gerald might 80

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not make it. He cried repeatedly. His hands were shaking as he shared the letter. His health was declining and his spirits were low. He offered a smile as I left, cigarette butts surrounding the front porch ashtray where he often sat on sunny days, but the smile was not reassuring. When I saw Gerald again in 2009, he seemed like a changed man. He had decided to “fight back.” Gerald’s problem, but also his salvation in the end, was in taking the process very seriously, like he had done in the war as a Marine. Here is where Katrina savvy helped. He knew better than to believe what he was told. He had learned to question and even to challenge the system like it was the enemy. Still smoking, Gerald said that having Katrina savvy was “what kept me going even when I was really at the bottom. It’s knowing all the tricks and how to see through their bullshit.” With his head lowered, he turned it at an angle and, looking up through his spectacles, smiled to say, “We can fight back. We have to fight back to survive.” Katrina savvy helped Gerald to unravel the litany of his concerns about what he called “corruption.” To Gerald, it seemed like the Road Home Program was the worst offender. It appeared to him that they looked for every opportunity to deny or limit grants, to make sure that the funds did not cover the full amount of loss. Gerald emphasized that he didn’t expect “handouts.” He talked about not being “one of those welfare people.” He felt, though, that he deserved a fair shot at recovery. He had served as a Marine in one of the country’s most brutal wars. He had paid his taxes, and he had worked most of his life until he retired. He had flood insurance! Still, he was getting “shafted” on all fronts, and although the recovery process had initially made him depressed—and it took him a long time to get over that—he now wanted to “win the war.” The thing that really made him angry was that there didn’t seem to be a way to hold people like Paul Rainwater accountable for the delays, miscalculations, or lack of responsiveness to people on the ground in New Orleans. He wrote letters and they were ignored. He filed complaints and showed paperwork. He jumped through the hoops. It was all to no avail. Like many returning residents, Gerald first thought that the Road Home Program was a typical example of government bureaucracy. Over time, he began to understand that people like Paul Rainwater, who was the second state-­appointed official to run the lra, didn’t really have the authority to change how things were being done. Using media and local political reports, Gerald started tracking the record of the Road Home Program. Navigating the Road Home

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Gerald reminded us that two-­thirds of the funds made available to the Road Home Program had not yet been dispersed as of late 2008.5 While thousands of people were complaining about difficulty in getting Road Home aid, some $800 million in surplus Road Home funds was still waiting to be distributed.6 The few who received funds within the first year or so received amounts that made no sense to them, and for most people who were offered funds, like himself, they were woefully inadequate for rebuilding. The federal government resources allocated to the Road Home Program seemed clearly more than adequate to compensate all of the homeowners fully for their losses, especially with figures like $800 million floating about. But somehow these funds were not making it to people like Gerald. He noted that what made the situation worse was that people who received Road Home funding sometimes had to use large portions of it to pay back taxes on properties they could no longer live in, just as those who received sba funding had found. Some recipients found that they had to use all of their Road Home funds to pay off mortgages on homes in order to qualify for new loans that would then give them enough to rebuild but only by doubling their debt. In most cases, homeowners ended up in arbitration with the program on grounds that their assessed values were incorrect.7 Because of these shortfalls, many returning residents had to abandon their homes altogether.8 Gerald showed us the news reports he had gathered to contest the settlement he got from Road Home. He told us about a citizens’ action group called chat (Citizens’ Road Home Action Team), which had formed to protest the Road Home Program’s slow pace, its undervaluing of homes, and its bureaucratic problems. Gerald began supporting chat and following its reports. What few people realized, Gerald said, was that even though the Road Home Program was deployed to deliver federal relief funding through the lra to homeowners, it was a private company called icf International that needed to be called to task. Gerald tried to find out who ran icf or if the leadership at icf even cared about how well or poorly the organization was handling Road Home cases. icf had hired two thousand people to administer the Road Home Program. It set up customer service centers throughout Louisiana and Texas, and it handled all applications for and disbursements of grants. The key to understanding the slow pace of recovery, he noted, was in figuring out how icf was running the Road Home Program. Gerald told 82

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us, “If you look there, you will see how we got into this situation.” That kind of “seeing behind the wool they pull over your eyes” was for him an example of having Katrina savvy.

Inefficiencies of Profit: ICF International

icf International, a large private-­sector corporation with a long history of government subcontracting for social, infrastructural, economic, and other programs, was, as mentioned, actually invited to design the Road Home Program before it won the contract during a no-­competition government subcontractor bid in 2006. This was much like the subcontract that the Shaw Group won in order to help with the immediate aftermath of the storm and floods. Right from the start, this subcontracting arrangement made use of neoliberal logics to “help” disaster victims by way of the for-­profit private sector. One of the interesting dynamics of icf, for example, is how it managed to keep its profile as a publicly traded company strong, while presumably doing humanitarian work that arguably should not have generated profits. Residents like Gerald suspected that one way it did so was by shortchanging the returning residents of the funds they needed to rebuild. Evidence was available early on that suggested icf’s commitment to sustaining itself as a profitable corporation may have interfered with its ability to do the best job possible for disaster relief and recovery. A local journalist, Jeremy Alford, for example, revealed how icf designed Road Home in a way in which icf would not have to show a record of successful or effective running of the program before obtaining the contract. The fact that their stock soared even before it delivered any aid was another clue that its operations would have divergent, if not conflicting, aims: In May [of 2006, icf] informed the Securities and Exchange Commission of its intent to issue an ipo and go public. About a month later, icf signed on to become the official administrator of the Road Home program and interest peaked nationwide. But because it waited to go public until after the contract was complete, icf did not have to disclose . . . ownership and shareholder information to the state before bidding on the job, and so those connections . . . could always remain a mystery. When the company finally went public in October, roughly 4.3 million shares were issued at an offering price Navigating the Road Home

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of $12. After icf reported a $98 million increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2007, the same shares more than doubled to a high of $25.58. . . . About 64% of that first-­quarter tally [came] directly from the Road Home contract.9 Over the roughly three years of its contract, icf did not disclose or account for what it received in direct compensation for work done on the Road Home Program. It reported that of the $10.3 billion provided in government funds, the Road Home Program used $8.63 billion to help homeowners get back into their homes.10 But, when Governor Kathleen Blanco increased the size of the Road Home management contract from $756 million to $912 million, a 25 percent compensation increase, the news was met with skepticism by homeowners.11 At the end of the icf contract three years later, with more than $554 million in Louisiana funds for backlogged housing programs, the majority of applicants were still waiting for funds and even responses from the agency over whether or not they would get funds. Fraud watchers calculated that by 2009 icf had used some $6.4 billion in order to distribute only $1.5 billion in actual relief awards to recipients.12 It was not clear, for example, exactly how icf accounted for the fact that in 2009 it “revealed in public filings that over $2 million in bonuses had been awarded to its leadership team” the year before.13 In January 2009, the Road Home Program claimed it had closed (given out) more than 121,000 grants valued at over $7.6 billion, a figure that differs markedly from the figures used by critics, suggesting that calculations for the amounts given out to homeowners included operational costs within the organization itself—that is, what it paid its executives and employees to deliver these funds along with the amount that actually ended up with homeowners.14 The ways that icf was accounting for its successes gave people in New Orleans a lot to be suspicious over. Few could make the reported numbers add up to what homeowners actually seemed to be receiving. The typical award from the Road Home Program for a family who owned a home worth $190,000 and was awarded $49,000 from insurance should have been around $51,000. If insurance paid less, then, technically, homeowners would be eligible for a larger grant up to the maximum of $150,000. But in most cases, the total amount most people got for rebuilding from Road Home was not only far below these assessment calculation amounts but also far below what it cost them to rebuild. 84

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Many of the families who were still waiting for funding three and four years after the hurricane were already living in other cities: this option seemed, not surprisingly, better than living in a fema trailer for that amount of time. Many of these applicants never received any Road Home funding despite applying for it. But even for those who did, by the time they received the money, it was often no longer desirable or possible to move back; the amount received was usually not enough to rebuild and dig out of the debt of back taxes, so they just gave up. In theory, the Road Home Program allowed nonreturning residents to take two-­thirds of the funding it offered in order to buy a home in another city. For most, this was seen as hardly compensating for the losses and debts they had by that time incurred, but for some who actually got Road Home funds, it was the best option. With all the frustration, complaints against Road Home were beginning to be heard by Congress. chat called for action and, with the help of Mary Landrieu, a Senate hearing was set up to investigate whether or not the program was meeting its obligations. The hearing was held on May 24, 2007.15 Caroline Reeves was one of the residents invited to testify, as we saw at the opening of this book. Here is more of her testimony: I have been a resident of [a New Orleans] neighborhood for twenty years, which flooded from a levee breach. I am not a politician or civic leader. I am just an ordinary resident who has stepped up to the plate, become passionate about the recovery of my city and my neighborhood. I didn’t even know what disaster response was twenty-­one months ago and here I am today. Before I tell you about the specific problems we are facing with the Road Home Program and offer some solutions, I would like to briefly give you some background on our neighborhood. [Ours] is a community of about 7,100 households, all of which were flooded for over twenty days as a result of the levee breach. We are a middle-­income neighborhood; not rich but not poor. We are a close-­knit community. We are members of the oldest and largest neighborhood association in Louisiana and have developed a model program of block captains that enable us to collect needed data about our neighborhood to closely monitor our progress and our problems. We are considered the model of recovery in New Orleans because we have a resiNavigating the Road Home

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dent population that is trying to move forward as best as they can, on their own. But many of our residents cannot do it on their own. . . . [N]early two years after Katrina, only about 17 percent of our residents have returned to their rebuilt or repaired homes while another 24 percent are moving ahead with rebuilding or repairs. Nearly 60 percent have not moved forward because they are waiting for the Road Home Program to let them know if they will have sufficient resources to rebuild or repair, or will they simply have to sell their property and move on. The difficulties of this program are so severe that faith-­based organizations, such as the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, are now offering homeowners money for rebuilding with the hope that when the homeowner gets their Road Home money, the Diocese will be paid back. . . . [We] are beginning to question why the government cannot more quickly and efficiently provide the resources that have been committed by Congress to speed our recovery. Why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on [our] backs? . . . We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally.16 Complaints continued long after the Senate hearing, and residents wondered what benefit, if any, came from the very public affair. Long-­drawn-­out arbitration cases were rampant all the way into 2010, and for many residents this process just took too long and they gave up. One of the interesting characteristics of the Road Home Program was the way in which its status as a public-­private partnership created the possibility for loopholes in accountability. The fact that the program was being run by a for-­profit corporation meant that the Senate had little incentive to interfere with its ways of doing business, even if senators felt that its performance was lacking. Although, as a result of the hearings, the state of Louisiana withheld more than $14 million from icf International on grounds that it failed to meet performance measures set by the state by the end of its contract period, icf was also given a large compensation raise (of $156 million) before the contract was complete. The mixed intentions of this program, which combined the distribution of federal funds with opportunities to earn corporate profits, appear to seep out beyond the walls of the company itself. The fact that the federal and state provision of funds went from withhold86

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ing to excessive resourcing (appearing as a bonus) reveals this dual agenda that market-­driven governance allows. In many ways, the government’s strategy for intervening and regulating icf seems to have been overdetermined by the market principles that the company itself used to run the program. Giving out minimal funding affirmed an ethical commitment to help people help themselves, and to avoid the problem of moral hazard and the appearance of creating dependency on welfare, but it also enabled the company to retain large amounts of the funding for itself in ways that remain unaccounted for (and it suggests internal use in the form of bonuses, large salaries, and bloated operating expense accounts). Withholding funding from the company as a regulatory measure on the part of the Senate probably only hurt homeowners more, because these cuts would have been passed on to recipients rather than being absorbed by the company. At the same time, compensation increases offered to the company were justified on the grounds that the problems of delivering aid were not tied to any inefficiencies of profit but to other problems imposed by government regulations themselves (the need for lots of documentation and proof of eligibility). In fact, icf seems to have used the idea of government-­imposed bureaucracy to do things that benefited the company’s bottom line more than homeowners. Thus regardless of its poor performance, icf managed to evade increased regulation in its operations while increasing its internal profitability. The degree to which federal funding mechanisms have control over the actual distribution of resources in instances like this raises all sorts of questions about whether or not for-­profit companies, which are publicly traded, should even be allowed to obtain contracts for basic social welfare and recovery services. Local residents who watched the outcome of civil action in the Senate felt that although a few residents saw speedier resolution to their cases, it was not clear that it had much impact at all on the way Road Home functioned or the degree to which it improved outcomes for the majority of those who were still waiting. It was not apparent until February 2009, when the Road Home Program’s $10.3 billion program came to the end of its icf contract. The program was quickly subcontracted to a new Virginia firm named Hammerman and Gainer, but this contract transfer was not a punitive action against icf, and to the surprise of many, the new subcontracting company had actually been a subcontractor with icf International before it took over running the Road Home Program. Hammerman and Gainer had Navigating the Road Home

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an equally poor track record of delivering contracted services, including questionably lucrative appraisals and title work and long delays in executing programs.17 Moreover, icf’s poor performance with recovery aid did not stop it from parlaying its government contract gains into more than $500 million in new “contracts involving such agencies and programs as the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Head Start.”18 chat gave a voice to the thousands of residents who saw no end to their situation with the Road Home Program, but the companies running the Road Home Program were largely unresponsive to chat. In 2010, as the Road Home Program received more funds that were supposed to help people elevate their homes above the ground (a new requirement of the city’s planning commission), even after they had gone ahead and rebuilt homes, chat again reported that homeowners were being faced with new loan defaults because of the slow pace of aid delivery, alleging that much of the federal funding was being absorbed by the subcontracting company itself. “Lies, promises, lies,” [one homeowner named Ms. Banks] laments. “‘Oh, Ms. Banks, just get that one last piece of paperwork, you and your husband, and that’s it. Y’all will be able to finish your house and move on in it.’” . . . chat says the contractors getting paid to administer the program are stretching out the process so they can make as much [money] as possible. “This is intentional. This is not just not enough competency, this is the contractor earning huge amounts of money,” said [the] chat founder. She calls the lack of transparency in Road Home Program a “Don’t ask. Won’t tell” policy.19 In November 2010, the Road Home Program reported that it had received 229,470 applications but had awarded funds to only 127,980 of those applicants. This means that Road Home disqualified or denied support (or that the applicants just gave up on their requests) for nearly one hundred thousand people who needed funds to return and rebuild (roughly 45 percent of those who needed and requested funds).20 Even if icf’s claims that many of the requests came from people who did not qualify or could not be taken seriously were true, one would still have to question the means used by icf 88

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to determine eligibility, because so many residents were denied qualification on grounds that were disputable. At the same time that nearly half of returning residents were being denied funds, icf and Hammerman and Gainer were doing a good job for their shareholders. The quarterly income for icf rose by 33 percent despite the company’s claim of funding shortages less than a year into its thirty-­six-­ month contract.21 This pattern of increases in income continued throughout icf’s tenure as the subcontracting agent for the program and even after its contract came to a close and a new company was brought on.22 icf International and Hammerman and Gainer have also had no trouble being transparent about the fact that their stock portfolios have both held strong despite a shaky economy. In 2010, icf stock was trading at around $33 per share, having been at roughly $12 per share before its initial contract with Road Home. Even more disturbing is the fact that the subcontracting company for both icf and Hammerman and Gainer was later the Shaw Group, one of the subcontractors for the Army Corps of Engineers and the group that caused many of the initial failed rescue operations in New Orleans. Despite the promising public goals of the Road Home Program, the actual requirements of the private-­sector company hired to run this program as a business were often at odds with these goals. Exactly who are recovery agencies really accountable to? Are they accountable to stockholders who invest in the profitability of the contracting company? Are they accountable to the people who are supposed to be served by the company? The question is important because these two constituencies apparently compete for both resources and performance measures. Under conditions of market governance, wherein not just private but for-­profit companies are put in charge of doing the work of the public distribution of state resources, this conflict is brought into stark relief but transformed by the logic of neoliberalism into a no-­conflict situation. The idea that residents will be helped by a company that does financially profitable business is in the neoliberal imagination a win-­win scenario. But what “win-­win” language conceals is the ways in which there are actually losers in this arrangement. In order to show profits to stockholders, companies like icf must orchestrate a type of bureaucratic failure in order to allow profits to stay within the company long enough to raise quarterly and year-­end fiscal calculations rather than being distributed downward to recipients who bring essentially no profit to the company. Residents in New Orleans offer testimony to this failure; they are Navigating the Road Home

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living evidence of the emotional toll that such strategies take. New Orleanians’ experiences of having to compete with standard market operations for producing profit, even at the expense of efficiencies in delivering aid, make it clear that we should be asking questions about the inefficiencies of profit as much as we should be asking about the inefficiencies of so-­called government bureaucracy. The Road Home Program was not a complete failure. Some grant recipients were satisfied with the funds they received, especially the few who received large grants within the first few months of their return. But these cases were the minority, and few could explain why some got large funds while others got nothing. Most of the returning residents who received support to return and rebuild were quick to note that the program as a whole probably caused more problems than it solved for them. It delayed their decision making on whether or not to rebuild. It forced them to hold on to properties and continue to pay taxes for uninhabitable homes. It reduced the property values of their homes. Homeowners likened the inept handling of the Road Home Program to the criminal activity of the “fly-­by-­night” contractors who came in and ripped off those who were trying to rebuild, taking large down payments and then leaving town. Homeowners noted, perhaps naively but with a growing sense of logical rationality, that if the total funding had simply been divided up among all homeowners of New Orleans, there would likely have been enough for everyone. Few actually connected the dots between the government’s failed allocation of resources and the fact that it had contracted this job to private-­ sector businesses that very successfully generated profits from this disaster.23 Gerald, though, connected the dots and found out something that stuck in his “craw”: That unknown company from Virginia called icf has been granted 900 and some odd million dollars for them to handle this debacle. They had never, ever in their entire history had as big a deal as this was. One of their representatives, the one who closed the deal, picked up about a million and a half as a gratuity. OK? Word has gotten out that the person that designed this program was the husband of Governor Blanco and he set it up so that there was only one company that could meet these requirements. It just happened to be this unknown little operation up in Virginia. Three weeks before Blanco left 90

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office, she sent this organization another $150 million for the wonderful work that they’re doing for the citizens of Louisiana. Pardon my French but that’s bullshit. And anybody with any degree of common sense can see that they’d been playing the people from the get-­ go, for the last three years. For Gerald, the dots were easily connected. His life circumstances and the larger structural conditions that led to these circumstances were connected by a trail of greed and corporate profits, a government that enabled these things to happen, and a public that couldn’t see how they were being “screwed.” Gerald recognized the revolving door between government and private-­sector profit-­seeking companies. Gerald attributed his own return to his partially completed home not to the Road Home Program or his insurance but to the volunteers. In fact, he said, volunteers had been coming to help him on and off since 2006. After three years of living in a fema trailer, he was able to move back into his single-­level, one-­bedroom home because volunteer groups had gutted and redone the wiring and plumbing. They had done almost all of the work on his house, he said. He bought building materials and supplies, but he owed “it all to the volunteers,” he said. “Without them, I’d have nothing.” Gerald had lived in his home for fifty-­eight years. When we met him, there was new sheetrock on all the interior walls. He described how this was accomplished: It was a step at a time. One group would come in and gut the house and then a month or so would pass and then another one would come in and treat the wood for mold and mold spores and then another group might come. It was a period of over a year, a little bit at a time. Another group would come in and spray it with this termiticide for termites and stuff and then there was another group that came in that were professional electricians and they rewired the house. And another group came in and—now this is something—none of these houses have ever had wall insulation. When you remove that wall, there are studs period, and on the outside walls, you can see what they called felt tape. That was your vapor barrier. Another group came in and put all that insulation in every wall. It blew me away. I didn’t know—I’d just come here every day and my jaw would hit the ground watching these people. That sidewall where the winNavigating the Road Home

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dow is? It was blown out. Some guys from Wisconsin, professional contractors-­carpenters, came in and rebuilt the wall. Every day I’d come here, I’d be in awe. And there was an article in one of the newspapers [about the volunteers who helped]. They were presenting me with the keys—that placard right up there [pointing to a framed set of keys]. What else? A loaf of bread, a bible. And there was like 150 people out in front of my house. Man, I broke down like a baby. I went and hugged everybody. I’m getting a rush right now thinking about it. I just broke down. “What do I have to pay you all? I have no money.” They said, “We don’t want money. Pay it forward.” So that’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half. Whenever I find somebody needs help—like this lady next door, she’s got a horrible asthma condition. She’s died a couple of times on the table when they’ve taken her from here in ambulance to the hospital. I got a whole group of volunteers to spread all kind of dirt for her. I help my neighbor with his house, the guy with the paraplegic wife. Whenever I saw somebody that needed help, I’d get them hooked up with the local volunteer coordinators or some of the other charitable groups and bring them over here and they’d do the work for people, spreading dirt or whatever. The image Gerald paints of helpers “spreading dirt” is a visual metaphor for the predicament people faced. Dirt here was a kind of remainder. It was all that was left and all that he had to live on. Dirt was the problem. Everything was covered in dirt. He mentioned that people were being buried alive by the stress of programs like the Road Home, like his neighbor who had to be brought back to life several times from heart attacks. For Gerald, this was like having people who had been remaindered like the dirt, rising from the ashes, rising from the dirt of corrupt government subcontractors and failed insurance policies. But dirt was also the ground from which they had to rebuild. Spreading dirt now meant providing the fertile soil for replanting, for gardens, grass, and the greenery that he and his neighbors hoped would one day be visible again. Gerald talked about his losses in 2010, describing how he had used up all of his savings and insurance money to pay for the building materials, the sheetrock, the nails, the wood, the wiring. The list went on. There was no landscaping, so his house sat on a lot that looked, four years after Katrina, 92

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like it was a home in a subdivision that had been partially built and then abandoned by its contractors. It had no plants, lots of weeds, and no trees. It was a dirt yard. The cement walkway to his front door was broken and so uneven that it was easier to walk on the ground. He had no money left to pay for repairing it. Gerald’s living room flowed into his small kitchen to actually form one room. But when we came to talk to him, there was nowhere to sit because his entire living space was filled with boxes. They were everywhere—on top of his sofa, the floors, the tables. In between the boxes were stacks of printed material and notepads. I thought the boxes might be full of possessions, but they were filled with more paperwork. Gerald explained that his multiyear battle with both his insurance company and the Road Home Program had led to this state, waving his hand in a sweeping gesture toward the sea of boxes and paper. He was, at this point, being buried alive not by the dirt but by the paperwork that had accumulated in his battle to get help. In 2010, Gerald still had not heard back from Mr. Rainwater but he had settled with Road Home. He was still involved in litigation with his insurance company, and his house was so cluttered with accumulated arbitration and litigation paperwork that we were forced to sit and talk on the front porch overlooking his vacant yard and empty neighborhood. He said he felt like he could write a book on all that he had learned—a book to teach others how to have Katrina savvy. He said it would contain a chapter on how to avoid contractor fraud; one on how to get access to funds and fight corrupt insurers; one on navigating through government agencies and the companies they hired; one on how to access volunteer help; one for how to voice your concerns; and one for dealing with the stress and anxiety of recovery. The point is, he said, “there is a way to connect all the dots and figure out how to fight back.” In the end, despite the fact that Gerald was still waiting for an insurance settlement, Katrina savvy was something he could use to counteract the experience of emotional devastation. The boxes he sat among were testimony to what his life had been for five years and what gave it some sense of worth. Gerald was inspired by the fact that, in 2010, the Louisiana Recovery Authority had put a new fellow in charge, a former Marine like him. He hoped that the new director would be more no-­nonsense and “do the job right.” What inspired Gerald the most, he said, was realizing he had a history of

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fighting this sort of injustice. “I was feeling a year ago that I was so tired of it all and I was ready to give up. Then, I went through some of my paperwork and found some of my old documents that I collected when I protested new taxes [while he was still in the trailer]. This was years before now.” Seeing that, he said, made him feel as if he could come back. “I can do anything. I can do this again.” The act of standing up for a fair payment for his lost property was something that was not only about taking responsibility for his life but also in some sense about retrieving his civil rights—about feeling like he had rights at all. The situation he was in was an injustice, and he would fight to make it right. We talked to Gerald for a long time on his front porch. He was not someone I’d call eccentric, crazy, or lazy. He was not a hoarder (despite the fact that his home was so full of boxes of paperwork that we couldn’t sit down inside). But to an outsider who was unfamiliar with how common Gerald’s situation was, it might have looked like he was any or all of the above. He had become obsessed with the process of documenting the injustice in order to fight back. Others had given up, but Gerald could not. His engagement with the layers of what he considered corruption and greed was infuriating, making him feel betrayed. What would a Marine do in this situation? he asked. Fight back, and in his case, this meant leaving no piece of evidence unearthed, no document that could prove them wrong behind. Recovery organized through the mechanisms of private-­sector profit had produced him, turned him into the person he was now, full of anger and resentment and willing to fight, but had displaced him from his own home in the process. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes documented the emotional toll that poverty takes on those who are disenfranchised from the rewards of both privateand public-­sector welfare.24 In post-­Katrina New Orleans, one could witness a new kind of subjectivity borne out of the emotional treadmill of prolonged and largely failed recovery processes that were not accidental but deliberately designed so as to work through market forces. The needy subject/citizen who remained in poverty through a process of involution— making his home unlivable because of the endless proliferation of injustices that he had to tackle—had in its own way become a source of profit for these companies. Even though funds were available, those in need didn’t get the kind of help they needed to recover, and the companies charged with pro-

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viding this support were still able to make large profits and protect their investments in future subcontracting opportunities. In the end, it was the production of people like Gerald—people floating at the poverty line and persistently in need—that was the result of these public-­private arrangements. Welfare wasn’t the cause of persistent poverty but it was a result of profit making on the way to the delivery of aid. Returning residents like Gerald found themselves persistently trying to resist the injustice of the failed system and using their anger to create a stable resting place in a life that was radically compromised. For many others, the experience was less positive. Even five years later, some people still felt like they were just “hanging on,” learning to live with the grief that Katrina had brought and adjusting to a life of new challenges and sorrows that were now insurmountable. For people like Henry Bradlieu, the grief was too much. Those who could not get the upper hand on their sense of loss or betrayal were the ultimate product of these arrangements. They were the kinds of citizens that were generated by and cultivated by market-­driven governance.

Subjected to Disaster Capitalism

In April 2009 I was on a flight from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and I struck up a conversation with the man seated next to me. It turned out he was a physician named Dr. Arie Zelinsky and was from a New Orleans university. He was on his way home, he said, from Los Angeles, where he and his lawyer, who was seated on the other side of him, had been in meetings all week with various companies he was suing. The lawsuits, he explained, were for getting payment to cover the damage to several New Orleans high-­ rise apartment buildings that he owned that were severely damaged during the storm and flooding. His insurance company refused to pay him for the needed repairs. He was able to show that most of the damage was from the storm, but the insurance company claimed that it would not pay for the damage to rooms and windows because that damage, it said, must have resulted from a flaw in the windows he had installed. He spent five or six months just arguing with the company over whether Hurricane Katrina was actually a Category 4 or Category 3 storm, because, as it turns out, that mattered.

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He produced his overstuffed valise and began to pull out manila envelopes with photos of the windows, photos of the damaged rooms, close-­up shots of the windowsills and the torn-­open metal frames where the water came through. He showed me insurance company letters that explained that they were not responsible for the damage and that the window manufacturer was. The manufacturer had either installed the windows improperly or had made them with flaws. Dr. Zelinsky spent months trying to figure out if he could sue the window manufacturer for the failed windows. He retained a lawyer but did a lot of the work himself. The window manufacturer won the case before it went to trial. They showed in published advertisements that neither the quality of the windows nor the manufacturing or installation of them was the problem. The fine print explained just how big a storm the windows were designed to withstand: Category 3. Dr. Zelinsky went back to the insurance company, arguing that Hurricane Katrina was of greater force than the windows were designed to withstand. Thus, the insurance company would have to pay. Devious and unscrupulous, he said, the insurance company then claimed that Hurricane Katrina was actually technically only a Category 3 hurricane. Dr. Zelinsky pulled out another file. Papers began to spill onto the floor and into our seats. He had printouts of aerial photos of the storm and reports from the weather tracking stations from the days leading up to and through the storm. He had newspaper articles that showed the national weather system’s classification of Katrina. His last hope, he said, was to use this evidence to force them to pay up and make good on his policy claims. It had been four long years of his life, he explained, and the end was not yet in sight. “It’s broken me,” he said. “My investments, my retirement—all gone,” he said, looking frail, as if he might cry. Dr. Zelinsky pointed to his gray hair and receding hairline, which, he said, were both a direct result of the past four years of stress. He was trapped. He could not walk away from the buildings. He could not repair them. He could not sell them without losing millions. Like Gerald, Dr. Zelinsky was drowning in the struggle to fix the problems that Katrina brought and by the prolonged and exacerbated inhumanity of the companies that refused to help him. The documents he shared with me were strewn around our seats now— photos, letters, and frustrations. He pulled them together and stuffed them back into his briefcase, but they still flowed out in uneven flaps over the

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edges of his already oversized bag. It was all too much, it seemed. The sense that things had just bubbled over, flowed out beyond their containers, was pervasive. The storm itself set the pace for the years that followed in its wake, with everything about recovery feeling as overwhelming as the flood itself.

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Five

​GETTING TO THE BREAKING POINT Some days I just want to scream. I just want to scream. I am just angry. I am angry at the world. I am just angry. . . . Why is this happening? Then I just settle down and pray. I pray, asking, “God thy will be done. Please help me.” It’s a lot of days in this little bitty old trailer. All I do is boo-­hoo. All I do is put my hands in my face and just cry and cry and cry uncontrollable . . . uncontrollable. It’s depressing, I mean, I’m forty-­five and I had accomplished so much . . . I had accomplished so much to have it all taken away from me, which is nobody’s fault and then have to start . . . I mean . . . you go in the kitchen thinking you have one and you don’t. It’s all gone. You have to start all over again. But it’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK. That’s how I look at it. It’s OK, I say today, and tomorrow I cry. . . . I’m still having blood pressure problems and I know its behind [because of] stress, I know it’s behind stress. You get all these little different aches and pains and headaches you don’t really understand what it is. But it’s stress. It’s too much sometimes, not knowing what’s going to happen. You lay in bed thinking, “What’s going to happen in two months? What’s going to happen in three months? How long will I be able to live in this trailer without dying?” And I’m awake. ​—Shalina, in her fema trailer in St. Bernard Parish (2009)

P

eople who live through a traumatic life disruption seldom feel they can go back to normal. Rather, they can get angry and fight against the trauma, and sometimes they can adjust and reconfigure their lives.1 Other times, they break. The protracted recovery that extended well into four and five years after the hurricane and its floods gave many New Orleanians the feeling that, in fact, there was no longer a “normal” to return to. They lived through, and some continue to live through, a trauma that resulted in large part from the shifting of responsibility for recovery onto the victims them-

Figure 7. Recovery took too long for some residents (2009).

selves and from the sense of betrayal they felt at being blamed for a disaster they did not cause. In this process, they learned that they could not take anything for granted—whether it was their wealth, their family, their Social Security earnings, their insurance companies, or the reliable presence of a caring and effective government. The situation toyed with their sense of normalcy and their sense of how a society should work. The prolonged state of being “in recovery” rather than being “recovered” made trauma feel normal, and it made the “normal” that people once knew feel like an imagined dream. As we have seen already, people who were in stable life situations prior to Hurricane Katrina were brought to the brink of collapse by the ongoing chaos of protracted recovery. “Normal” and “healthy” people were transformed into emotional wrecks. For people who were in already precarious situations before the storm—fiscally, physically, or psychologically—the prolonging of the disaster had worse effects. These people were left without the structures of support that could keep them going in their fragile state. Their worlds really collapsed around them. Those who were financially secure became insecure and indebted, sometimes for the first time in their lives. And the financially borderline slipped into deep poverty. The psychologically stable became unstable, and the unstable became crazy, with some plummeting on a steep emotional decline toward suicide. Many returning residents developed physical ailments resulting from stress; they ended up with chronic disorders that included hypertension, alcoholism and drug abuse, insomnia, depression, rashes, and pulmonary diseases. Increases in these problems were seen well into the fifth year following the hurricanes and floods.2 Psychological stress was pervasive. People were forced to deal with challenges that made them recalculate in some fundamental way what it meant to be alive and what it meant to have “a life.” “Normal” in post-­Katrina New Orleans became a relative category, set in constant comparison to the challenges of survival on a daily basis. The sense that some people were not going to make it grew as time went on and the recovery was prolonged. By 2009, the returning residents who were still in trailers or who were living in homes that were only partially repaired were sometimes characterized in official reports as “falling through the cracks” in an otherwise arduous but successful recovery process. The cumulative record of prolonged

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recovery suggests, however, that these remaining cases should not be seen as the exceptions or as the minority; they should rather be seen as built-­in outcomes of a poorly designed recovery process that affected nearly everyone. Recovery experiences pushed nearly everyone to a “breaking point”: in far too many cases some were pushed to a point beyond which they would not and could not recover.

Living Temporarily

A good example of someone who seemed to be at her breaking point was Sharon Feldson, a sixty-­seven-­year-­old grandmother who lived with her husband in a home at the edge of Mid-­City. She had been a staff photographer for a social services resource center but was retired. When we first talked with her in 2007, she lived in a home that was in shambles. It had been one of the city’s historic homes, with tall ceilings, beautiful plasterwork, fireplaces in every room—a classic New Orleans Victorian. The entire first floor of Sharon’s home had been underwater. When we met her, plaster was falling down from all the walls and ceilings, although portions of the foot-­wide floral molding could still be seen on the top edges of the fifteen-­ foot walls. Some rooms had large holes in the plaster, with laths showing through. The first-­floor back door was nailed shut because it was no longer true, and she couldn’t open it anyway. The sweeping staircase that rose up along the edge of the entrance hallway to the second story did not have a banister. The home resembled a haunted house that was ready to collapse, with cobwebs and dust layered on every surface. The home should have been condemned, and in any other city, it would have been deemed unsafe and uninhabitable. Old furniture with plastic over it was pushed up against the walls to make space for the construction equipment and supplies, boxes of nails and tools, plastic tarps, and a band saw, suggesting a hoped-­for completion to the reconstruction—a time when the furniture would be put back in its rightful place. Dust and dirt covered all this as well. The entire lower level of the home was unusable, with lumber and portions of windows, vents, ducts, furniture, and newspapers filling every inch of the once spacious living room all the way to the back door of what was once a grand kitchen. Sharon lived in one of the upstairs rooms, the only room that had been

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repainted and replastered at that point in time. She had to climb the precarious, fifteen-­foot-­high, one-­sided curving banisterless staircase in order to get to it. Her forty-­two-­year-­old son was a contractor and was trying to help her rebuild, but this was between doing paid jobs and rebuilding his own home that had been equally destroyed. He was at his own limits in terms of being able to help her, and he had only managed to set her up in the small livable space on the second floor. Sharon had been remodeling her home when Hurricane Katrina hit, but it was still livable then. Now, she said, it was “a wreck.” Sharon cooked all her food in a microwave oven that was in what would be a remodeled upstairs kitchen next door to the room she lived in, but it was not yet finished either. Her bathroom was in partial repair. The plumbing worked, but the walls were covered from ceiling to floor in thick black sheets of soft plastic tarp. The plastic sheets were stapled up to the walls, roughly conforming to the space of the shower and bathtub. Her recently used bar of soap was on a ledge, next to the hole that had been made to allow the spigot through, and another two holes for the turn knobs. She showered there, in that flimsy, plastic-­sheet mess. An unframed mirror rested on the unfinished counter where the sink was, all of it covered in black plastic as well. You can’t really clean a shower, tub, or sink that are made out of thick sheets of plastic, so the residue from soap lined up along all the surfaces and thickened in the creases of the tarp. It turned my stomach to realize that Sharon lived there and had been living like that for nearly two years already. When I went back to meet her in early 2009, her house was in exactly the same level of disrepair. She had been waiting four years to get help in order to rebuild her home, help that had been promised by both insurance companies and the Road Home Program but had yet to arrive. In between these visits, much had happened, although none of it helped her to repair her home. In 2007 she told me what it felt like to live in this condition: I still can’t sleep very good. I don’t know if that’s been a result of the storm, upsetting everything. I’ve just been in turmoil. The worst turmoil I’ve ever been in, in my life. . . . Everything was a wreck when we got back. I wasn’t prepared for the damage that we had here. . . . The roof goin’ off, and ruinin’ all my ceilings and the water comin’ through made it more than I could realize. I could not realize that 102

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when you haven’t been through a war, you haven’t been through anything in your life that you can compare this to. You don’t have a reference. Even when you read about things, you don’t have a reference for it. It’s just like if you read in a book that somebody came back to their house and it was all torn up, then you would have some reference. But I had no reference for this. It’s just like being born again. And all of a sudden you see all this stuff, and it’s just like a wreck. Sharon’s sense that she would be able to recover was being whittled away by frustration after frustration. She talked about being depressed. I’ve gotten depressed. It’s made me depressed . . . and when you say you’re depressed . . . I didn’t realize that I had depression, until I realized that I didn’t want to do anything. And then I associated it with the forms of depression, the way depression is. But my husband was affected by it a lot, and he has diabetes, and he’s disabled anyway. And this affected—the effect that it had on him is that he hasn’t been able to face the fact of all this either, and he’s had a lot of problems. And his problems have been physical problems, with his diabetes and not being able to adjust, and that’s affected me. But he’s had a terrible time tryin’ to get his diabetes back in—on an even scale. And we just haven’t been right since. It’s hard to realize that so much time has passed, and you still haven’t been right. It’s hard now to realize when everything wasn’t—when things were all right. ’Cause in a way, when you live in an old house like this, there’s always something that has to be done. . . . But now I have just a wreck. I don’t know how to face that, don’t know what to do about it, I have to wait and rely on other people. And it’s definitely difficult to rely on other people. I never realized how bad it would be, to have to depend on other people to help us. The house is a wreck, and so it’s made me a wreck inside. So all the work that we had put in, trying to get this house to a place where we could just be comfortable, just for a little bit, never has been really fixed. It was just gone. It was like everything that we had done was just not there anymore. And it’s just miserable. It’s too much to do. You don’t know where to start. There’s just a million things that need to be done, that . . . you can’t . . . that’s what caused, I think, my depression [laughs]. I think I’ve curled up in a little ball inside of me. And [I] try to . . . I don’t know. Getting to the Breaking Point

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Initially, Sharon and her husband were offered only $24,000 from their insurance company because the insurance company said it would not pay for flood damage, only for storm damage. Sharon complained and the insurance company came back to them with a slightly higher offer. When they hired a lawyer to ask the insurance company a third time, it offered $40,000 to repair their home, an amount that was still nowhere near what it would take to make the house livable or what they thought they had been insured for. They took the money, but it hardly covered the cost of structural repairs that had been caused by so many days of wood sitting underwater and so many years after that of waiting to repair the damage. This left the entire interior unfinished, because they had to pay the lawyers too. Replastering, carpentry work, new furniture, new fixtures, new paint, repaired moldings, and just about everything else they would need to get the home repaired could not be done with that amount of money. No, it wasn’t nearly enough. This would take more than that to do the stuff—the ceilings and everything on the inside. . . . You have a—just a wreck. An absolute wreck. . . . So we may have to give our house up eventually, I don’t know. Somebody else might have to come in here and do all this work. We don’t have energy to do it anymore. Most of the work we did was—they call it sweat equity, you put your own work into the house and do a lot of the work yourself. But we’ve gotten to the age where—my husband’s disabled and can’t—he’s getting feeble. And when he can’t do anything, I don’t really feel like doing much. Sharon had lived in the home for thirty years. She and her husband were on a fixed income. She talked about how she had retired, but up until the storm she had been very involved in ongoing photography projects. After her job ended, she volunteered for local organizations and had her own darkroom. She was an avid reader and liked to spend time shopping for classics in old bookshops around the city. She had lost much of her photography equipment in the storm and had pretty much focused solely on day-­ to-­day recovery since returning in 2006. I have my Social Security, and my husband has his Social Security, and that’s all—that’s our fixed income. Pathetic little amount that I can live on, if I could ever get to the point of living. . . . Up until 104

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last . . . two weeks ago, I didn’t have any hot water, and we had to boil water . . . boil water on the stove to wash the dishes every day. And my son finally got the hot water heater in. And there’s so many things that are disconnected. The upstairs bathroom’s not working, and the . . . things just don’t work, are not working around here like they used to work. And he’s disconnected things that worked—­ working on the house, he’s disconnected things. And I don’t have enough electricity—electrical outlets and things like that. It’s an inconvenience, trying to live in a place that’s only—it’s like we’re living in a—like a basement—not a basement, I don’t know what I feel like I’m living in. [Interviewer: A cave? How about a cave?] Well, a cave could be a good—yeah, because it’s so dark in here, we have to use flashlights in the house. ’Cause I don’t have enough lights. That’s why we have so many. It’s dark in this house. This house is dark. That’s because of the house next door. If I could just get rid of that [laughs]—I would have plenty of light in my house. Sharon was taking care of her diabetic husband. In the first year after the hurricane, he started to drink. His health declined, and his mood swings became more dramatic. He plummeted into a state of depression, too, a depression that was caused by their stagnated recovery. I’m taking care of him. I’ve been taking care of him. And something happened, that I’ll have to tell you about that I think is a result of the storm, that affected him, is that he has these diabetic lows. And they manifest themselves where he is—he doesn’t remember what happens, and he gets . . . he just gets low. Have you ever seen a diabetic low? Well, it’s like a seizure. And he gets low, and you can’t do anything for him. He falls on the floor. I used to have ems [the emergency medical services] here all the time, and he doesn’t want you to do that anymore, he just wants you to leave him alone and let him come out of it. Well, we were up there, after we got back from the storm, and—this was a year and a half ago, before August—it must have been in June, July, a year ago. And he hit me with a pillow, and it stung my face, and I said, “What’s going on?” And he was having a low. And so I got up and as I’m going down to call the ems, because I can’t deal with him. I told him, “You’re not acting right.” He said, Getting to the Breaking Point

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“Is this all there is?” And he had a funny low tone in his voice. It was a strange one. And when I went back in the room, he had a gun. And he had it aimed at me and he shot it three times. Click click click. The gun did not go off. So I closed the door real quick and ran out of the bedroom, and then I stopped outside the door and I said to myself, there’s something wrong with this picture. Because it didn’t dawn on me right away what was going on. So I went back. I opened the door and looked, and he wasn’t this far from me, and he was holding the gun, and he was looking at it, like, why didn’t it go off? So I closed the door and ran. I went down the street and got my son. And my son came and went up there and couldn’t get him to come out. And we had to call the police, and they came—the swat team came. And then—he told them to shoot—to shoot him. He wanted to die. And when I think back on this, I think a lot of that came out of that storm. I think he was having . . . it was a strange low. But that’s. . . . We went to counseling after that. That’s what prompted the counseling. And then I went to the psychiatrist, and I left New Orleans for two months and went to Nashville, to help my brother: right after that happened, I needed to get out of town. It worried me half to death. I’ve never been able to get over that. I’ll never get over that. That’s when that doctor gave me more depression pills, and I said, well, I don’t want [them]. . . . She increased it, doubled it, and I don’t think it helped. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Depression is not cured by a pill. Just all of a sudden it lifts and you don’t have it anymore, and everything seems bright and wonderful. But for me, it’s like a big . . . it’s like a gray. Everything’s gray, hopeless. A year later, Sharon’s husband passed away, and soon after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had been through chemotherapy and was in remission when I saw her again in 2009. She had applied for Road Home money in order to keep fixing her home, because some of the money she got from insurance had to be spent on medical treatment, the funeral, and basic living expenses. Road Home had not yet given her any money although she had sent numerous appeals. I’m living temporarily. Everything’s temporary. And I would like to have a permanent situation, but I’m fully aware that that’s almost im106

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possible, because things happen. You have to—you can’t count on things staying the same. You have to be prepared for the worst and be mentally prepared that things aren’t always gonna work out the way that you want them to be and that you have to accept what you have and make the best of it. My heart’s still beating. As long as I’m able to move and get around, I’ll feel that way. It is difficult to say exactly when and how people reach a breaking point. In late 2009, Sharon was still living in her dilapidated home, still waiting for a Road Home settlement, and still using her tarp-­lined bathroom. Although her son was still trying to help her rebuild, he, too, had stalled with his own home rebuilding. Between the two of them, there was not enough time or money and they were not in a community that received a lot of volunteers. They had been pretty much overlooked by them. Her home repairs would likely have been beyond the skill set of most volunteers in any case. Sharon had seen her husband break from the experience. “Katrina took him from me,” she said. Her living situation was already broken, but she was hanging on to some thread of optimism. I wondered, though, when Sharon herself might break. She talked a lot about wanting to spend time volunteering to help others. Helping other people made her feel better. She went to the Salvation Army frequently, volunteering in the book section because it gave her access to books, which had become an obsession. She had stacks of them lined up in front of the baseboards in her one “refinished” bedroom. Sharon told us that her books were her best friends now. Again, it is important to remember that mental-­health services were still hard to find in New Orleans up to four and five years after the hurricane. Patients continued to be moved and outsourced to the suburbs,3 and with no real transitional services and the closing of the only public hospital (Charity Hospital) that took care of the mentally ill, the community itself reached its own breaking point in relation to caring for those who needed psychiatric support. This collapse, while institutional, trickled down quickly to the people who relied on these services the most. The tragic and well-­ publicized case of Willie Lewis is a perfect example. He sought medical care and was left without being evaluated by a psychiatrist or a doctor at a small private hospital in an unflooded area of the city that, although functioning, was understaffed and underserviced for years following the storm. When he Getting to the Breaking Point

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returned home, he repeatedly stabbed his seventy-­seven-­year-­old mother, nearly killing her. Stories like this became commonplace in the years following Katrina.4 People with preexisting mental-­health problems struggled after disasters because they could not get the care they knew they needed, but those who may or may not have needed mental-­health services before Katrina because of the stable social relations around them were now in a situation where they needed help, but little was available for them. More than others, Sharon’s situation made it clear that it was not the storm so much as the extraordinary struggle people had to undertake in order to rebuild their lives—and the feeling that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t make progress—that brought them to the breaking point. Although all returning residents hit multiple low points and although many found ways to get out of them, some people just couldn’t seem to get on with things or find the stable moorings to be able to do so. Without a safety net that could help people deal with stress and psychological trauma, some people just spiraled downward until it was too late.

A Second Line for Our Home

Nettie Stewart, a seventy-­one-­year-­old grandmother from Gentilly, told us that one of the most difficult aspects of her recovery was dealing with the grief and how it was not only tied to what she lost in the hurricane but also connected to the ongoing struggles with agencies that were supposed to help her. In early 2007, she still had vivid memories of returning to her home for the first time in October 2005. Two of our children, two of our six children went. It was really devastating. We just kinda . . . I can remember walkin’ through the house, like . . . over piles of water-­soaked, broken things, and I opened a cabinet in the kitchen, and a dish fell out, and all the water, all the gooky water fell out and. . . . Well, we had prepared ourselves psychologically a little bit, but also physically, with the masks and the gloves and flashlight. And so we went to—just the first time, just looked through, and we couldn’t stay there more than ten minutes, ’cause of the toxic stuff. It was too much. The next hallmark event for Nettie was when the volunteers gutted her home. She watched the masked and gloved crew bringing piles of things 108

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out. She was so grateful to have them help her, but it was overwhelming to see her whole life, all her worldly possessions, coming out in heaps of mud and mold, so much ruined. And it happened so quickly, she said. I still have some flashbacks of the day that they—the volunteers, bless their souls, bless their hearts—came and put everything from the house out on the curb. Every room . . . five bedrooms, every room in the house. . . . Just quickly, in one day, all my fifty years of accumulation of my stuff, my seven children’s stuff and my mother’s stuff. And then the next day, when I went back to see if I could go through anything, it was all gone. It had been picked up. And I still get really sad when I think about it, so I try not to think about it. I think that’s probably something that—at the time, while it was happening, it was kind of surreal, and I was in a mode of thinking, “Well, this is a good thing. It’s gonna get us to move forward and to get some certain things settled.” But I still . . . oh, God, jeez . . . there was so much to look through. And we had already gone. . . . It was over a year . . . was it over a year? I think it was over a year. Yeah, it was over a year’s time that we had already gone through a lot of it. So I don’t know . . . I get kind of hung up on that. Nettie had been a grief counselor for much of her professional life. She knew how to help other people get through traumatic events. She had a strong intellectual approach to it, telling herself that she would be able to get through something so big but that it would take time. She knew this because she had lived through another personal trauma twenty years before, when her daughter had died in a tragic accident. The problem for her now, though, was that the time needed to heal was not simply calculated in terms of an emotional acceptance of losses and moving on. She had to stay engaged in a real-­life battle with insurance and relief agencies. Even though she and her husband were relatively lucky in that they had flood insurance and were able to collect some insurance money, it took an enormous effort to do so and the whole process dragged on for years in ways that proved to be as traumatic as the storm. In 2008, she told us, “People will say, ‘Oh, man, you’re still trying to . . . you’re still . . . ?’ ‘Yeah, we’re still . . .’. Three years is nothing compared to what happened and what’s happening now. How do you rebuild a city that’s been 80 percent destroyed?” Nettie talked about having to wind her way through a system that was Getting to the Breaking Point

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deeply flawed and that actually slowed things down.5 Like others, she and her husband were forced to fight with the banks and insurance companies at every step of the way. After two years of fighting with the Road Home Program, they were forced into arbitration. In fact, more than half of the people we spoke with who got funding from one of these sources had to enter into a lawsuit or arbitration in order to get enough to begin to rebuild.6 Nettie referenced an article that said that “state financial audits grant miscalculations by the program to have been as high as 27 percent and this is not even considering the problems of systematic undervaluing of homes in African American neighborhoods.”7 “It was systematic,” she said. “They tried to deny almost everyone of the amount they needed.” It was nearly four years after Katrina that Nettie and her husband were finally able to say they were done with getting the only help they would get. The negotiations Nettie and her husband went through in order to get money that was, in the end, still insufficient for rebuilding, were, in her words, a type of oppression. I feel for people who are stuck here and don’t have that opportunity to get away from the devastated area ’cause I feel when we stay here for a long period of time, even in this nice neighborhood, you still can feel sort of an oppression—that’s a good word for it. People who have had so many serious and traumatic—that’s it, traumatic—crises in their lives. . . . And stemming from so many sources . . . I still get aggravated . . . talk about the anger and the resentment. . . . And all these things. . . . It’s too closely related, not only close in time but closely related to the feelings that you have, so the feelings are just magnified and multiplied. And I see it in the grief process. If you’re grieving over one thing and then something else happens, another crisis or another loss, then they’re just overlapping each other, and you don’t know which to . . . it’s just so confusing. And it can immobilize people big time and give them a sense of despair, a sense of purposelessness, and “What am I doing here? Why? What’s the point of living?” I see people who are suicidal. But I think for the most . . . I don’t know. You tell me from what you’re hearing, too. . . . But, for the most part, people just deal with it. After the long battle to get reimbursed for her lost property, Nettie and her family figured out they did not have enough money to rebuild their 110

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home while also continuing to pay the mortgage. Their loss and lack of sufficient reimbursement put them far below where they had been financially before the storm. They decided the only affordable thing to do was to demolish their home. It wasn’t sellable, and they couldn’t afford to fix it. For Nettie, this, too, was a low point filled with grief. She talked about how hard it was to say goodbye to the home she raised her family in, to say goodbye to the community she loved, and to realize that they in some sense had lost the battle with this second-­order disaster now known simply as “the funeral that would not end.” In the throes of mourning, Nettie decided that they should hold a second line for her home: “Yeah. Three of my sons play musical instruments, and so we just . . . before the demolition crew came, we went down and . . . we went on the street and they played the jazz, the second-­line music, and we all processed. We had a jazz funeral for the house [laughs]. That’s what we did.” Like a traditional New Orleans second line—the group of funeral mourners who form a second line behind the hearse and brass band in order to commemorate and celebrate the deceased’s life and death—Nettie’s funeral procession for her home helped her actualize and process emotions in a familiar and comforting ritual. Sadness had come to define her life. Moments like these punctuated Nettie’s long climb out of the disaster. I guess, emotionally, I have my moments of sadness and some regrets. . . . I think I’m dealing with it in a healthy way, rationalizing when that needs to be done, and looking at and counting my blessings, as they say. But at the same time, I still have some anger. It’s a grief process. I always say this, that with the grief process . . . it’s not . . . you can’t say it takes a day or a week or a year. It’s like it has a different time. It doesn’t have a calendar. It depends on so many other factors. There’s so many other factors involved in how long it takes to recover from a particular loss. It may take me two years, three years, four years, and it may take somebody else ten years, and it could still be in the realm, in the spectrum of normal. . . . There are so many survival issues, nitty-­grittys to take care of. I think the example of a homicide is something that comes to mind, where they’re trying to get the person or apprehend the person who is responsible and they’re not really focusing on their grief of that particular loss. It can be two years, three years, four years. Getting to the Breaking Point

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Figure 8. On the walls and door of

a house, a resident comments on the recovery process: “Keep out, broken dreams inside, bring the bulldozer, future greenspace” (2008).

For Nettie, the analogy of the homicide is a telling reminder of the way that the prolonged processes of recovery put her grief front and center as if it were an open and festering wound. Like a homicide that was unsolved, Katrina, for Nettie, was not just about the loss of property and homes but about the fact that the recovery itself was a kind of slow torture. The struggle to figure out who could be held accountable for helping them, and then trying to get the help, was a nightmarish unsolved murder. Nettie was tearful when she told us her story, as if the events of 2005 were just yesterday and couldn’t be shaken because they had been drawn out and made to persist over the years. She still compared her loss from Katrina to the death of her daughter, and even though losing her daughter had made her stronger, it felt like the opposite was true for Katrina. Her post-­Katrina experience rekindled her feelings of being helpless. Nettie’s experiences reveal much about what life was like under conditions of not just disaster capitalism but a kind of recovery capitalism that

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was allowed to grow up around it. Residents had to find their way through the fiscal gridlock created by a recovery infrastructure that seemed to be always trying to shortchange them. This is because, in fact, victims were being turned into the targets of opportunity not for aid but for a sort of future profitability by companies that seemed to be invested in giving out as little as possible on principle. For almost everyone, this struggle became a sort of madness in which recovery meant stepping onto an endless spinning wheel where one walked harder and harder but seemed to stand still. For many people, the struggle was too much.

Destitution

One middle-­aged couple we spoke with, Richard and Mary Ponchartres, had lost their teenage daughter, Cara, in the flood. Her body was never found. Their lives after Katrina seemed to be, in their words, “the opposite of recovery.” In 2007, they were living in a fema trailer in Richard’s ailing parents’ front yard while simultaneously trying to rebuild both his parents’ home and their own. Richard and Mary were attempting to sort through their own options for rebuilding, including negotiation over insurance claims, Road Home applications, and loan programs, but their preoccupation was still with trying to get closure over the loss of their daughter. “That’s the thing,” Richard said. “It’d be one thing to just be dealing with the loss of our daughter or the loss of our home. But to be dealing with both of them. . . . It’s like we can’t finish one because of the other. It’s too much.” In 2009 Richard and Mary were not back into their own home yet, though they were then living inside Richard’s parents’ now semicompleted home. The furniture was sparse, and the inside walls needed paint. Despite being out of the trailer that was still parked in the front yard, it was clear that they were not yet feeling more at home. They were both drinking heavily and chain smoking, and Mary’s health was rapidly disintegrating. She had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Richard had begun to suffer from hernias as his weight plummeted. Richard had not been able to go to work since Hurricane Katrina. Mary was worried about him. Very emotionally, she explained that the city had erected a memorial and held a ceremony for the unclaimed bodies of those who died during the hurricane. They went to the ceremony, she said. It

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helped a little. But the fact that they never found Cara’s body held them both back. It was a weight that pulled them down and you could see this in the way they sat, the way they walked, and how they talked. Their feeling of heaviness revealed a deep tragic sorrow that only others who had lost a child could probably understand. They relived the scenario they had constructed to make sense of her disappearance. They weren’t at home when the floods began and didn’t know how she was swept away, and they couldn’t stop thinking about their child being pulled out into the floods and then “who knows what?” On the third interview with Richard and Mary in late 2009, things seemed worse still. They had moved into a small apartment up the street from Richard’s father; Richard’s mother had died before she was able to see her home completed. Meanwhile, Richard and Mary’s own pre-­Katrina home still remained untouched, in its postflood state. Both Richard and Mary continued to lose weight and were dangerously thin. They weren’t sleeping, and their marriage felt like it was falling apart. Mary had begun to spend time at a friend’s home and was in some sense living there now—a move, she said, that was prompted by Richard becoming more and more depressed and angry. She talked about the fact that she’d probably have to split from him, and he also said that the years after the hurricane were destroying their twenty-­year marriage. They were both sinking into a more severe depression. Richard stooped into a crouch at the edge of a table while he spoke, refusing to take a seat and barely able to straighten his back. He smoked continuously. He spent a long time talking about the fact that his extended family had fallen apart. None of his siblings would talk to one another anymore, and there was conflict over the inheritance of family property. He belabored the fact that he “didn’t really care” about the material things, and in any case, it was not much, he said: “No property or homes or nothin’ as if they’d be worth anything now.” But there were possessions he cared about, like their library and books he’d felt attached to. He said, “There should be a sense of justice, you know.” He felt as if Katrina had taken away not only Cara and their home but also their family cohesion. “Things just aren’t the same,” he said over and over.8 He looked out over the edge of the coffee table and ended our meeting with “There’s nothing that will fix this. But I’ll get by.” I wasn’t at all sure he would.

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Salvaging Life

Mark Tatum lived in an old home that he had been gradually refurbishing before Katrina had hit. The floors of the home were built from wood taken from the Louisiana bayou: “Good Louisiana cypress,” he said, “can withstand floods because it grows in the water.” Two years after the hurricane, his house was only marginally livable. Opened boxes of nails and rolled-­up carpeting, tools, sawhorses, paint cans, sandpaper, and brushes lined all the floors. He had no real furniture, save an easy chair, a television, and a small twin bed that he had stuffed into a downstairs basement room, where he was living while trying to get the upstairs into livable condition. His plan was to have a renter live with him upstairs to cover the cost of rebuilding and maintenance. Mark was the kind of person who had trouble staying focused on a single task, and so completing any one job in particular was nearly impossible. Evidence of half-­completed reconstruction projects was everywhere. The kitchen cabinets had been partially put up but the kitchen appliances had not been installed. A portion of the ceiling had been painted. Carpet had been laid in only one part of the room. The toilet in one bathroom worked, but not in the other. Mark was also highly distracted by the stories he could tell about all of the “unfinished” reconstruction projects in his house and by lengthy diatribes about the Army Corps of Engineers, fema, and Road Home. He had a lot to say about all of them, and none of it was good. When I first met Mark, he insisted that I watch the video he shot when he returned to his house right after the flood in 2005. The footage showed mud everywhere; long unedited panning shots documented the world he had come back to. It took an hour to get through the first third of the video, which included shots of walking to and from the front door to the neighbors, walking up the stairs while the camera was aimed at the ceiling; gasps and exasperated epithets like “oh Jesus” and “oh my God” were the background narration. It was a visual and acoustic prelude to the ongoing and unfinished project of recovery for him, a kind of testimony that was needed to explain why he was still living in a house in that state of disrepair. Mark’s situation became clearer over the course of several visits beginning in 2007 and continuing into the spring of 2009. His wife had left him. She’d moved to her home state in the Midwest to be with her mother. His

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kids had gone with her. They weren’t divorced, he said, but “she just couldn’t stay here anymore.” It was not hard to imagine the difficulty of living in such a home. Mark thought he’d be further along on the fixing by now, but he said he didn’t have enough money. His children and wife sent letters and called regularly, but he was really lonely. Mark talked for a long time about Jesus. He had found Jesus and he provided evidence that the Lord spoke to him regularly, helping him with everything. “I know he’s with me,” Mark said. “He’s always by my side. That’s how I know I am gonna get through this.” He explained that it was providence (and the wisdom of the Lord) that gave him a sign to go to the Home Depot (in neighboring Metairie) on the exact day that the ceiling tiles he’d been hoping to buy were put on sale. “The whole lot of tiles had been put outside and remaindered,” he said, “and then the salesman rung up a price that was even lower.” He bought the whole lot of it because Jesus had shown him the way. He’d figure out what to do with all the tiles later. Mark often ended the longer episodes of his storytelling about the disaster either with an angry rant against fema, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Road Home Program, or his insurance company or with a tearful drifting-­off to his narrative. He’d then turn his attention back to the job at hand: painting the wall, installing the carpet, sealing the windows, or any number of projects that were still left unfinished. He had a plan to restore both the upstairs and downstairs portions of his house but he wanted to finish the upstairs first, he repeated, so he could rent out some rooms and help pay for rebuilding. In fact, he was so distracted and unable to stay on or finish a single task that both levels of the home were in disrepair, despite some quasi-­finished rooms on both. Even with the support he got from Jesus, Mark was not doing well. He was lost without his family. His loneliness made his lack of focus more apparent. He might have had a diagnosable condition, but it was hard to say. People who were just surviving before the hurricane because they had built-­ in social and financial infrastructures that kept them stable were often made to feel like leaves blowing in the wind once the entire social infrastructure of their lives was taken away. Their inability to weather the ongoing demands of an inefficient system of recovery made these problems more visible. Whatever his condition was before the storm, Mark was definitely struggling in the aftermath. It would have taken little to help Mark rebuild. In

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fact, a quick check from the Road Home Program would have enabled him to at least hire some professionals to put his home in enough order to keep his family with him. Instead, Mark watched his house, his family, and his world disappear, even while he was doing everything that he was humanly capable of doing to hold on to his life.

Becoming a Gutted House

It is clear that one of the most deleterious effects of a delayed recovery was how it created problems of chronic debility among people who might have been on the edge or just barely holding it together before the tragedy. More unfortunate was how this could be seen among people who had most likely had otherwise normal and healthy lives. We saw this in the large numbers of people who, even after getting help from volunteer groups or other resources, still just could not put their lives back together. Something had “broken” in them, making it impossible for them to make good choices or to move forward even with support. Doug Donahue, for example, was a structural engineer who had worked for a contracting firm in New Orleans before Katrina. He had built bridges. He had owned a three-­bedroom home that, he said, was “pretty much destroyed.” Like others, Doug had returned and found an apartment to rent while he rebuilt. He had insurance. He heard that the Road Home Program was helping people. A case worker from a local nonprofit volunteer recovery group told us his story in 2010: When we heard about Doug in late 2009, he was living in a pretty good neighborhood in New Orleans. His neighbors called us to see if we could help. His is a really sad case. He was an engineer and owned a nice home because he had a good job. He hadn’t owned the home for long before Katrina hit, but after the storm, his home had water up to the roof. He got a good insurance settlement. He got $120,000. I don’t think he got any Road Home money. So he started rebuilding and the first contractor started to wire his house. That contractor then ran off with the $20,000 that Doug had given as a down payment. Then he hired a second contractor. That contractor gave him a list of materials that he Getting to the Breaking Point

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needed to start the work and charged him $60,000. Doug paid him the money, and that contractor also ran off with the money. The case worker stopped to remind me that residents called upon lawmakers to go after these unscrupulous contractors or to create a registry of reliable and trustworthy contractors through the Road Home Program. But nothing was done to prevent these crimes and people just fell into the trap of trusting people who were no more than profiteers. As one resident said, “I’m not sure who was worse, really, the Road Home Program or the fraudulent contractors.” It seemed to me that in terms of their flaws in accountability, they both were cut from the same cloth. The case worker then went on with Doug’s story: At that point, Doug started to get sick. He was having heart problems. Things just got worse and worse. He had to have open heart surgery. He lost his job. He had been renting an apartment but had run out of money, so he moved back into his home, his gutted home. When we found him, he was in a desperate situation. He was living in his gutted empty home with no electricity, no running water. The neighbors were upset because he had no bathroom facilities and was using the outside. The local coffee house that had reopened the year before complained because he was washing up in their bathroom. He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t taking care of himself physically. We decided we had to help him try to put his life back together. First, we knew we had to get him out of the house. We found him a place to live. We found a camper that was owned by another couple that had been helped by us and were now back in their home. They said, “Sure. Of course he can stay there.” So they let him move in there. That got him into a more stable living situation. But, you know, by this time, the city started to fine him because his house sat derelict. They had charged like $500 in fines already and if he didn’t clean up he was going to start getting fined $100 per day. So we went in and painted his home and paid for new windows. We addressed the roof and generally helped clean up the yard and made it look better. Then we approached [a local volunteer] rebuild program and asked them to consider rebuilding his home. By this time, 2009, their program was running out of money, so the only way they could

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rebuild was to rely on the lhfa grant from the state [lhfa is the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, which had taken over the remaining Louisiana Recovery Authority funds to provide loans to those building rental homes and homeowners who were still trying to rebuild]. The rebuild program agreed to do his house if lhfa gave the funds. It took them a year and a half to get approval and to get the funds. The whole time, Doug is in the trailer. Finally, he gets the approval. They call and tell him the great news: they are ready to rebuild! We’d like to get started. But then, you won’t believe it, but Doug tells them he thinks he doesn’t need them to do that now. The program thought he had found other resources, so he was just taken off the list of recipients. When I heard the news about three weeks later, I went over to Doug’s camper and banged on the door. I couldn’t believe it. We had worked so long and so hard to get him into this program and he had turned it down. So I went to his trailer and I banged on the door. He wasn’t answering. Finally I yelled long enough that he answered. The smell was so bad at the door, I couldn’t even go in. He came out and I was angry. I asked him, “Why did you turn this down? What were you thinking? Do you have a resource I didn’t know about?” He said, “No, I just thought I could do it myself.” I said, “How are you gonna do it yourself? You have no money, no help.” He just looked with a blank stare: “I don’t know.” He was just lost. I knew he was in a very depressed, bad mental way. Finally I got over my anger. I apologized and told him we’d talk in a few days. Two days later, he came to our office and we started to talk. I thought about it and realized maybe he is right. Maybe he should not be in the house. Maybe he couldn’t keep up with a house like that. Maybe without a job it was too much for him. I said, “I am concerned about your mental health. You are very depressed. You don’t have clarity of thought anymore.” He looked at me and said, “You really think so?” I said, “Doug, you have become a gutted house.” He started to cry. I cried, too. But I said, “You know, there are still other ways. We need to restrategize and think this through. Maybe you made the right decision.” You know, I told him, “Maybe if you sell your house, you’ll be able to take the money and use it to

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rent an apartment and figure out how to get back on your feet.” He agreed. We got to a place where he was open to restrategizing. But you know he is not doing well. I really don’t know if he’ll make it. I am not sure he’ll survive.

Falling through the Cracks or Widening the Gaps

The collapse of infrastructures within families was in some sense a mirror to and also augmented by the larger infrastructural collapse of institutions of public assistance in post-­Katrina New Orleans. Imagine being in a city where the police department, the health-­care infrastructure, the educational system, and the fiscal institutions for social welfare were all gone and were being reconstituted at the same slow pace of recovery as that experienced by individual homeowners because the arrangements that were put in place to help victims also allowed for large profiteering by people and agencies that were supposed to be helping. By 2009, tourists would come to the city, would never leave the French Quarter or the Garden District, and would think that things were back to normal. But locals knew better, and many had to pass through or leave from decimated neighborhoods each day as they went to work in the recovered parts of town. Without effective recovery resources, people had to find ways to help themselves and to keep themselves from giving up or going insane. With such a protracted recovery process, even some people who received help simply couldn’t make it work. They had become in some sense permanently damaged. For people like Mark, Sharon, the Ponchartres, and Doug, “survival” was a complex notion. In many ways they were living beyond their breaking points even though they were still functioning in one way or another. There was no sense of “normal” for them, and there were few resources available for them to rebuild their lives. It is not surprising that the suicide rate in New Orleans tripled in the long months and even years following Katrina. According to the city coroner’s office, the rate climbed from 9 per 100,000 residents to nearly 27 per 100,000 residents in the aftermath of the disaster.9 Personal traumas and preexisting psychiatric conditions that went uncared for in the recovery period could account for some of the increased rates. However, the situation of protracted and delayed recovery made everyone a

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little crazy, depressed, and bereft of options. The battles that had to be fought with insurance, loan programs, or Road Home bureaucrats made people suffer in ways that were avoidable. When people could not see an endpoint to their suffering, some simply collapsed. They just skidded along in their broken homes with broken hearts and broken souls until they could not take it anymore. The emotional toll of prolonged recovery took many forms. Even for those who started out with no mental-­health problems prior to Katrina, their lives became a living hell and produced symptoms of emotional stress that eventually turned into chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, and a wide spectrum of physical disorders. In almost all of the cases we learned about of people who appeared to be “broken” by the process of recovery, the causes of their problems were always a combination of fiscal and economic woes that played into their sense of failure and ultimately to a kind of “giving up.”10 Investing more support in public-­sector institutions of safety-­ net caregiving—in the widest sense possible so that it included oversight on rebuilding support—would have prevented the outright theft and the more insidious but invisible theft from delayed and inadequate support. Investing more in public-­sector regulations might have helped most of the people of New Orleans generally and would possibly have reached people like the ones who were incorrectly identified as “falling through the cracks” so far that they had become chronically impaired. The notion that some people “fall through the cracks” of the social infrastructures that should be in place to ensure a healthy society is commonly invoked to explain people like Sharon, Richard, Mary, Mark, and Doug. People who just can’t seem to get ahead or bounce back are identified as the exceptions to the rule. Some resources didn’t reach them, and they could not recover even with the resources they did receive. But the notion that some people “fall through the cracks” is misleading. It is a handy way of making it seem as if the system works for almost everyone and that those whom it did not work for are either the minority who found the cracks in the system or were themselves to blame because they fell through the cracks instead of avoiding them. In fact, “the system” for recovery in New Orleans—such as it was—did not work for most. A minority of those who came back were able to say that their situation had been handled well and that they were happy with the

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support they got. Many people would say now that they are “recovered,” but few would say they are back to “normal” or are not in some way permanently changed by the trauma of it taking so long. Many of those who felt recovered by 2010 said that it was largely in spite of rather than because of the institutional resources that they thought they could count on to help them. Some would say this in a positive sense—that it had made them stronger (like Helen or Gerald)—but many would say that it changed them in a more negative way as well, in the sense that they had lost too much: too many loved ones, too much of their wealth or security, too much of their faith in “the system.” The system of recovery deployed in post-­Katrina New Orleans created the gaps into which most people fell. The cracks were a built-­in and ever-­ expanding feature of the overall infrastructure of the political economy of recovery. Recovery did not make for a uniformly successful, even if slow, rebuilding that inadvertently left behind a few stragglers; it made for a situation in which people uniformly had to deal with the struggle of recovery either over a protracted period of time or, for some, indefinitely. If looked at from the perspective of the long-­term trend toward the gutting of public-­ sector institutions of caregiving (and the market-­driven privatization of these tasks), one could say that the entire city of New Orleans fell through the cracks. Many cities in the United States could follow it there or are one major disaster away from the same fate.

Affect as Surfeit I wake up each day and inventory whether or not I have eaten my mushrooms for the week. Each week since Katrina, I make sure to eat a large helping of mushrooms. In the aftermath of the flood, my home was literally overrun by the growth of fungus and mold. This is my way of getting back at Katrina. ​—Story shared by Harry, a returned New Orleans resident (2010)

In his early work analyzing the spoils of a political economy based on the machinery of industrial capitalism, Karl Marx offered the insight that, under conditions of exploitative labor relations, workers can experience a sense of alienation. In an economic system that separated workers from the fruits of their labor—the products and their profits—workers would start to feel disengaged from their work, their communities, and eventually even 122

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themselves. Marx described this alienation as a type of affective reservoir that would expand enough to eventually unravel the conditions of workers’ oppression. It is this affective space of recognition—alienation—that I sense New Orleanians are also able to feel, on an emotional level: that what has happened to them has forever changed them from the inside out. The experience of inefficient and failed recovery has in some sense bared the “soul” of our contemporary political economic predicament, producing a surfeit of affect in the emotions of betrayal, anger, depression, and a frenetic madness that keep some people working harder and harder to recover but only slipping farther and farther behind. Affect is here both a symptom of conditions of oppression and an overproduction of emotion that exceeds the conditions of its production and spills out over its edges like a pot too full. Instead of the working or laboring classes bearing the brunt of exploitation today, it is now ordinary citizens from all social classes who are made vulnerable by an economy that generates surplus wealth by inserting everything into the profit market, including social services of caregiving, relief, and humanitarian aid. It is no longer working conditions that generate an affective surplus, in the Marxist sense, but the conditions of inclusion in the market and the very circumstances of need that are generated by it that create a surfeit of affect that fuels a new kind of economy. Patricia Clough, in her book The Affective Turn, has suggested that affect may be thought of in terms of “registering a change in the cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural,”11 which operates as a kind of cognitive leap connecting action to emotion. Michael Hardt has also written that “each time we consider the mind’s power to think, we must try to recognize how the body’s power to act corresponds to it. . . . An affect straddles this relationship insofar as it indicates at once the current state of the mind and body. . . . The greater our power to be affected, he [Spinoza] posits, the greater our power to act.”12 Affect offers the opportunity to think about the conditions of structural oppression in its emotional registers as well as the possibility of transcending them. It is in the gap between the body’s power to act and the mind’s grasp of experience (in thought)—between what is perceived as actionable and what is experienced as a condition of being—where we find affect, both as an analytical space and as a phenomenon of experience. Theorizing affect has spawned critical anthropological engagement with problems of structural violence, even creating a discursive Getting to the Breaking Point

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space that in some ways transcends the structural conditions that produce it, in a wide variety of works.13 What New Orleans prompts one to ask about this turn, however, is how does a surfeit of emotion generated by the inefficiencies of profit in recovery capitalism become itself drawn back into the economy as a new resource for profit—from being surfeit in the emotional sense to being surplus in the fiscal sense? In the case of New Orleans, thinking about affect becomes a way of thinking about the problem of excessive emotional responses to the promise of a market-­driven recovery that has not been fulfilled. These responses point to a late modern condition that was created long before and has continued long after the storm and floods called “Katrina.” It is a condition that produces a kind of chronic trauma but also responds to it. It calls people to action, to try to help one another, and to fill up the gaps left open by a structure that fails to take care of them. Following the work of Jackie Orr, who studied panic disorder as an outcome of late capitalism, we might thus ask who profits from this affective overspill? Who profits from the affective surplus of failed recovery?14 Affect, as an analytical rubric, goes beyond individual experience and informs our insights about what people are up against in life, in ways that reach far beyond the circumstances that produced them. Market-­driven governance deploys strategies for helping people who are tied to the market, but it is the insertion of human frailty and conditions of postdisaster crises in the form of affect into market-­oriented infrastructures of recovery that leads to a second-­order disaster, in which that same affect circulates in ways that generate profits for others. These profits originally went to agencies like icf and the insurance companies, along with Halliburton and Blackwater. In the next chapters I trace these effects to the other sites of a privatized recovery infrastructure. Certainly, the case of post-­Katrina New Orleans should give us pause to consider how we take care of vulnerable communities and to recognize that a system that further marketizes recovery does not work to take care of those communities, even while it generates ample profits in other ways. What is more interesting is how even the responses to these failures become inserted into market infrastructures. Affect, in the context of post-­Katrina New Orleans, is both the residue and the product of failed market arrangements but it is also what remains and cannot be contained by that market. Affect has fueled another kind of private-­sector economy that hopes to respond where the market has failed: 124

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the charity sector. But can the charity sector do what the market cannot or will it also be eventually swallowed up by the engines of disaster capitalism? Perhaps in these stories of emotional surfeit produced by life in postdisaster New Orleans, we will be able to see through or at least study affect’s path as it winds through the market all over again in and through the charity and nonprofit sectors that organized, in many regards more effectively, to help people rebuild and recover.

Getting to the Breaking Point

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Six

​FAITH IN A VOLUNTEER RECOVERY The story not told of Katrina is this: Everybody has their Waterloo. And what matters is how you look at it and how you persevere. Those who came back are together. We’ve been through hell and back. The ones who left, well, good riddance. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. — ​ Helen Lamarche, Lakeview (2010) And let me tell you, too. They’re organized. If the faith-­based was running fema, we would have been done three years ago. . . . And I had a fema guy tell me that. That’s why I say it now. I have a friend . . . he worked for fema and used to walk my neighborhood and he said, “Honey, if the Baptists were running fema, we’d be done by now.” — ​ Shavawn Davis, Upper Ninth Ward (2010)

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he hell that some New Orleanians felt they had to pull themselves out of was not just the chaos of the hurricane and floods but, as we have seen, the large and sprawling combination of relationships, priorities, and procedures that made recovery both less, and more, than it should have been. People who felt like they had made it through the years of struggle and had finally reached a sense of having accomplished “recovery” felt that they had mostly done so by their own hard work and by the help of volunteers. They often invoked religious themes that described God, faith, and the work of a religious community, attesting to a spiritual as well as material recovery process. This was in part because of the kind of help they got. The large response of charities, nongovernmental grass-­roots, and faith-­based organizations was overwhelming in the case of post-­Katrina New Orleans. It was also both a critique of the failure of federal subcontracting companies—the

Figure 9. Out-­of-­town volunteers (2010).

inefficient work of fema, Road Home, the Small Business Administration ( sba), and insurance companies—and an endorsement of the neoliberal policies that set these failed programs in motion. The fact is, the federal government had for some years been calling on the charity sector to do just this, to fill in where their own programs had failed. The intertwining of volunteer organizations and faith-­based initiatives has a long history in the United States, but it reached a zenith in the 1990s under George Bush Sr.’s famous call for “a thousand points of light” to rise up and take care of those in need as part and parcel of neoliberal policy reforms. Since that time, people in the United States have relied increasingly on nongovernmental charity institutions to survive, not just in times of crisis precipitated by disasters, but in their “normal” everyday lives, which have been plundered by a failed economy or by what some would say is a successful neoliberal economy. Poor communities, more than others, have always had to rely on the church and nonprofit charities to survive under conditions in which the market sector has excluded them from its profits, particularly in African American communities.1 The recent rise in the number of nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations, service groups, and humanitarian and charity-­ based aid organizations in the United States now, however, must be seen at least in part as a direct outcome of policy commitments to the basic philosophical assumption that the government should not be responsible for taking care of its needy citizens when the private sector can and should do this job better. What post-­Katrina New Orleans shows us is how the two have, in fact, remained intertwined but in a relationship that remains, de facto and increasingly on the whole, governed by market rules. That is, the government still pays for this work, but it does so today by way of a private-­ sector market more than ever before. The U.S. government has directly and indirectly supported private-­sector charity for many years. Moreover, the role of federal support for disaster relief is long-­standing and, although debated at times, has seldom been seriously challenged for over the past hundred years.2 Today, numerous public-­ private partnerships between the government and disaster charities and companies exist in the United States. An example is the national Emergency Food and Shelter Program (efsp), which was created in 1983 and is governed by a consortium of social service agencies from the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, and United Way. It is now chaired by a fema repre128

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sentative.3 While these private-­sector charity groups have assisted families in need alongside government programs and with some government funding for decades, a pattern that was particularly robust during the Great Depression, what is new today is how efforts to reduce expenditures on federal welfare have eroded some of these charities’ abilities to work independently of the for-­profit market. Relative reductions in already fairly small amounts of federal funding to the nonprofit charity sector have had an impact. efsp, for example, has only received $3.7 billion since its founding in 1983 (over a nearly thirty-­year period), with lesser amounts of funding always being debated by conservative administrations and declines in relative funding over the past decade, even as the need for such support has increased. This amount is less, for example, than was used to fund the Road Home Program. The trend of underfunding charity is accompanied by a growth of grass-­roots and small charities that operate without federal support. At the same time, federal support for disaster relief is still high, and higher when considered as part of the overall cost of relief efforts in the contemporary economy. What is important to ask, then, is where is this money going? As new federal subcontracting opportunities are increasingly shifted to for-­profit companies, organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army are faced with increasing competition for federal funds allocated for disaster relief from companies like Halliburton, icf, and subsidiaries of the Shaw Group. Federal money does still flow to the charity sector, but today, efforts to distribute federal funds to the nonprofit charity sector are organized through a new type of market assemblage—the intermediary public-­ private corporations, like the Points of Light Institute, and the more recently created Corporation for National and Community Service—that uses federal and private-­sector funds to in some sense “manage” the charity sector alongside and sometimes in competition with for-­profit companies that are subcontracted for specific relief projects. I explore this assemblage more in the next chapter. Here, I discuss the contours of the recovery effort in Katrina that was largely successful, when it was, because of the work of charity groups, particularly those that were religious or faith-­based. The rise of nongovernmental charity and volunteer organizations was celebrated by many returning residents in part because, on the ground, this aid looked and felt like real assistance in contrast to the bureaucratic nightmare of programs like Road Home and the sba loan program or to the imFaith in a Volunteer Recovery

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personal nature of insurance companies. At the same time, the trend toward increasing reliance on charity to fill in the gaps left open by inadequate or inefficient federal support also poses interesting new civil society problems. Navigating the territory between the public and private sector requires tackling interesting challenges over when nonprofit versus for-­profit measures of accountability and effectiveness are used. Navigating recovery under the banner of largely faith-­based volunteer efforts also poses challenges with regard to the churches’ ability to both counter the ravages of free-­market profiteering and sustain it by filling in where corporations leave off in coverage. These challenges were specifically visible in the recovery process in post-­Katrina New Orleans. I look first at the issue of “faith” and then, in the next chapter, at the issue of the big business of charity.

A Test of Faith

Community organizers who brought in volunteers from all over the world were vital not only to the rebuilding of homes and lives in New Orleans but also to the restoring of residents’ overall sense of faith in society and humanity. On the surface it appears that the mixing of political, religious, and social-­justice agendas with service work for recovery was a huge success. On closer inspection, the large presence of volunteer-­based charities in New Orleans raises many questions about who is ultimately responsible for taking care of those in need, along with questions about what forms of assistance really work and how these forms of assistance are changing basic understandings of what it means to be a citizen and to have rights, and who should pay for costs incurred by these rights. One thing that was clear in New Orleans was that, of all the organizations that came in to rebuild from the charity sector, the churches played the largest role. As a result, people’s stories of recovery were filled with lots of talk about faith and about the changed role of religion in their lives.4 Although only 23 percent of American adults thought Hurricane Katrina and the other hurricanes that followed were “a deliberate act of God,”5 it is no surprise that nearly everything about Katrina was imbued with talk of God from the beginning. Right at the start, Governor Kathleen Blanco called for a statewide day of prayer after the storms, saying, “As we face the devastation wrought by Katrina, as we search for those in need, as we comfort those in pain and as we begin the long task of rebuilding, we turn to 130

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God for strength, hope, and comfort.” George W. Bush’s speech invoked similar sentiments from New Orleans’s Jackson Square, stating that Katrina “reminds us of a hope beyond all pain and death, a God who welcomes the lost to a house not made with his hands.”6 In many ways, the years of struggle toward recovery following Hurricane Katrina made up, for nearly all returning residents, a “test of faith.” This test called for a sort of explicit belief that some higher spiritual power would provide for residents and guide them to do the right thing. Most residents said that faith helped them get through the trauma of displacement, loss, and the prolonged recovery. Although religious commitments in New Orleans were already robust, with 58.2 percent of the population considering themselves to be “Christian Church adherents,” defined as members or regular participants in Christian faith worship and activities, with some 30 percent of these identifying as Catholic, the commitments to “faith” were augmented in the wake of the floods.7 This test of faith was, similarly, shaped by the form of recovery itself. In the stories people told about their return and struggle to rebuild, we can see how what was considered a betrayal by the government was transformed into a spiritual sense of purpose through faith-­based volunteers. When Gerald told us about coming home three months after the hurricane and finding the corpses of his cats, he said he nearly “lost it.” He was living out of his car at the time because the shelters would not let him in with his pet dog, a small Scottish terrier named Angus. He was tired. He’d been living off the $2,400 that fema had given him, but he had nearly run through that money. His bank was also flooded. He had no mail delivery, didn’t own a computer, and wasn’t sure where his Social Security checks were going or how to even access his savings. What really got him, Gerald said, were his pets. Angus evacuated with him but his cats were left behind. When he drove up to his house for the first time, he looked everywhere for his cats. He called for them, somehow hoping they’d found a place that was high enough to survive. He dug through the muddy layers covering everything in his house and finally found them in the crawl space below. When he found their bodies, covered and hardened stiff by the gray sludge, that just “sent him over the edge.” Gerald stayed there in his car for several days, weeping and trying to figure out what to do. He felt destitute. Everything around him was dead. The neighborhood was dead. His cats were dead. Everything was gray. It was as Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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if he were in a black and white movie that was no longer his actual life. He didn’t know where to turn, so he just started walking toward the river. He wanted to end his life. “I was really gone,” he said. He kept walking. Before long, Gerald found himself all the way in Metairie, miles from his home, in a daze. He’d walked far enough to be out of the flood zone, and then he saw something strange. He saw a Home Depot, and coming out of the parking lot were two women dressed all in white clothes, pushing a grocery cart filled with bleach. “It was so strange,” he said. He thought it was a dream. They saw him and came over. He found out they were Christian volunteers from Canada. They talked to Gerald long enough to figure out he needed help, and they convinced him to go with them back to the Good News Camp. He described his first sight of the camp: “There were thousands of volunteers from all over the world there, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I just started to cry.” The camp took up a small section of City Park. People had rigged up a kitchen area and a few people had taken on the job of preparing food for everyone. Gerald talked about how “all of these people had come to help people like [him], he said, “to help rebuild New Orleans.” Tears were flowing from his eyes again as he spoke. “They saved my life. If it weren’t for those women, for those volunteers, I would have gone . . . [crying now]. Well, who knows?” His voice trailed off and he looked past us, looking at the deadly future from which he had been saved. The Good News Camp was formed by the Disaster Pastor Network (also known as Jerry Davis Ministries/Christian World Embassy) as a collective grass-­roots effort to provide relief to those in crisis. It had the feeling of being spontaneously organized despite the overarching impetus and organizational underpinnings of the Christian charity. The Good News Camp ultimately hosted some 17,000 volunteers and was praised by the White House, the state government, and the city of New Orleans.8 Gerald’s experience of what he called hitting “rock bottom” and “being saved” by the volunteers is a familiar narrative to anyone who has talked to survivors of Katrina and the floods. Nearly everyone had these types of experiences, both in terms of the depth of destitution and the enormity of gratitude each felt toward the volunteers. In fact, amidst all the accounts of blame, critique, and failure in the volumes of publications about this American tragedy, it is the story of the way the people of the city pitched in and helped each other rebuild from scratch—and the story about the volunteers 132

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who came from all over the world to help them—that seems to have been the most overlooked and forgotten. Again, this story is mostly about faith and the role faith plays in our contemporary political economy.

Grass-­Roots and Faith-­Based Recovery

There were so many groups doing volunteer work in post-­Katrina New Orleans, both secular and faith-­based, that they could not all be accounted for. They ranged in size and shape from Habitat for Humanity, which created the Musicians Village for traditional local jazz musicians (with Branford Marsalis and Baptist Crossroads), to the rebuilding programs sponsored by celebrities like Wendell Pierce (in Pontchartrain Park) and Brad Pitt (the Make It Right Foundation) and by the Mennonites, who rebuilt homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. There were Project Home Again, funded by the private philanthropists Leonard and Louise Riggio, and groups like Common Ground and acorn, who provided volunteer-­based medical assistance, legal advice, and housing resources on the basis of social-­justice reform. Spontaneous grass-­roots organizations were formed in the years after recovery as neighborhoods realized that they were not going to get the help they needed from federal or state sources. They named themselves things like the Beacon of Hope and the Broadmoor Improvement Association. One estimate states that five hundred new charities were formed to funnel money, goods, services, and volunteers, and by 2009 some 1.5 million volunteers had come to the region.9 Among these, by far the most prevalent were the many church-­sponsored programs, from Catholic Charities and the Episcopal Diocese to the Baptists, Evangelicals, Mennonites, and a large number of nondenominational Christian groups who came bit by bit and stayed the longest, sometimes setting up ministries out of their homes (collecting clothing and furniture for distribution, supplying meals to victims, and holding prayer meetings in their garages). Members of Jewish synagogues, Buddhist centers, and Muslim congregations arrived to help as well. Rates of church involvement in the recovery were unparalleled, with reported numbers that were beyond expectations. Within two years, 28,000 volunteers served under the recovery programs of the United Methodist Storm Recovery Center alone, which served more than 32,500 clients and brought in almost $30 million in in-­kind donations. The United Methodist Committee on Relief raised a record $66.5 million in gifts and created an Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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unprecedented consortium of volunteer groups called Katrina Aid Today. It also received funds that were managed by or funneled through fema, and which were originally donated by religious groups across the country. By the end of 2006, Katrina Aid Today had provided assistance to approximately 90,000 people. The more locally based Louisiana United Methodist Disaster Recovery Ministry stated that more than 40,000 volunteers had been hosted by 2010 and that over half of their volunteers had come back more than once.10 The Southern Baptists reposted almost 17,000 volunteers, gutted 600 homes, and provided reconstruction work for churches: it had cleaned out three, rebuilt another five, had fifteen under construction, and had eighteen still on its list waiting for assistance. Southern Baptists estimated that 30,000 Baptists had volunteered in the New Orleans area.11 Presbyterian Disaster Assistance ( pda) raised more than $20 million in donations and sponsored 31,350 volunteers who gave over a million hours of service; long-­ term volunteers gave another 70,520 hours of service. The pda volunteers worked on 3,380 homes and completely rebuilt 565 homes.12 Although their churches were possibly the most damaged, Catholics responded quickly to Katrina with at least $7 million in direct survival assistance to more than 700,000 people. It also established community centers to provide emergency assistance and set up a clinic in a downtown hotel to immunize, treat, and counsel first responders. Its 11,500 volunteers gutted 1,800 homes and organized a coalition of faith-­based groups called Providence Community Housing with the goal of bringing back 20,000 displaced victims and by restoring and developing 7,000 homes over a five-­ year period.13 Of what was reported from the top ten private charities involved in Katrina relief, six were faith-­based, with the Salvation Army raising $336.0 million; Catholic Charities USA, $142.2 million; United Methodist Committee on Relief, $69.6 million; International Aid (a Christian Relief/Mission organization), $50.5 million; Feed the Children (a Christian, nonprofit relief organization headquartered in Oklahoma City), $47.1 million; and Habitat for Humanity (with Baptist Crossroads), $82.0 million.14 As we will see, the Episcopal Diocese also played a huge role in the recovery of multiple neighborhoods. For nearly three years after the storm, the Good News Camp in City Park served as the first major and most important rebuilding resource for 134

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homeowners. Other camps emerged in the years following, such as Camp Hope (funded in part by Habitat for Humanity) and Rebuild New Orleans, to house volunteers and help coordinate the cleanup and rebuilding in St. Bernard Parish. Over a five-­year period and beyond, church groups and nonsectarian volunteer groups continually made their way to New Orleans for a week at a time, a month at a time, in small groups and large, mostly at their own expense. Volunteers working through these organizations had a hand in everything: gutting homes, tearing out weeds, putting up sheetrock, painting walls, and caring for the ill and infirm. They also helped people access and process insurance claims and Road Home applications, and they found ways to replace documents that had been destroyed, such as title papers to homes, bank notes, and birth certificates. Faith-­based rebuilding efforts enabled some groups to see Hurricane Katrina as the ultimate missionary tool—an opportunity to “win souls for Christ,” in many cases through funding support provided by the federal government. The National Convention on Evangelism was hosted in New Orleans in January 2010, and attendees looked for ways to both spiritually and literally “restore, rebuild, and renew Christ’s Church in the world.”15 Many church groups asserted that their work had little to do with just rebuilding. It was, for them, more of “a spiritual venture”: “It really has very little to do with repairing buildings; it’s repairing lives. The goal in New Orleans is not to return lives ‘back to normal.’ Rather, the goal is to reshape people spiritually so they have a strengthened new capacity for life.”16 For many, the work of volunteering in New Orleans was done for purposes of expressing devotion through carrying out the work of the lord. Calling themselves Kingdom Laborers in some denominations, and “servants of the lord” in others, church volunteers in cities all over the United States organized trips via buses, airplanes, and even cars to get to New Orleans. Caroline Reeves summed up what many others told us: It was hands and feet to the Gospel every day. . . . You just, you did put it into action and you put the hands and the feet. . . . The groups [of volunteers] would be like, “This is what Jesus meant.” . . . This is what Christ meant. It was just like, “Get out there. Get out of your museums and your church walls and do this work and I’m going to give you the tools and the power to do it,” and that’s really, I think what it’s all about, is putting that faith into action. Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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Supriya Jindal, the wife of Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal (who succeeded Kathleen Blanco), said of the volunteer recovery effort that “a lot of people are just coming to see how they can help to rebuild, not only a school system and a health system, but a faith system—to help from a grassroots level. You see churches being rebuilt, you see homes, and just an incredible, incredible community effort that’s going on from the grassroots level.”17 As predicted by the Bush administration, recovery assistance would be the largest ever seen in the United States. In his speech in New Orleans, President George W. Bush even said of the effort, “We want to fund programs that save Americans one soul at a time.” But what form this assistance took, how effective it was, and where all the money actually went raised interesting questions about the changing infrastructure of the social safety net in America. We have seen, for example, that despite the allocations of large sums of recovery money from the federal government to for-­ profit subcontracting companies, people still needed more help. Turning to the churches and other nonprofit charities that sprang up in the wake of Katrina, people finally were able to get the support they needed to rebuild. Churches and volunteer groups did what the government partnerships with private-­sector for-­profit companies had, in large part, failed to do but in ways that articulated citizenship rights with commitments to faith. The consequences of these structural shifts toward both the for-­profit and the charity private sector are only now becoming visible.18 Recovery in post-­ Katrina New Orleans brought them into sharp relief.

The Spirit of Volunteerism

Faith-­based support was visible at every stage of the disaster and recovery. New Orleanians told many stories about the help they got during the first weeks of their displacement from people in Texas, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, and other states where people landed (from New York and Georgia all the way to California).19 The Red Cross worked effectively to set up shelters in churches all across the main evacuation routes. At these sites, churches, civic organizations, friends, and relatives worked together to pray and to collect clothes, food, and money for evacuees. They took up collections to help pay for evacuees’ return and later volunteered to go down and help rebuild. Many secular organizations came to New Orleans to help people re136

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build, but even secular efforts were often called “acts of faith” by those who received them. Arthur Beecher, for example, was sixty-­five when Hurricane Katrina hit. His home in the Lower Ninth Ward was ruined when the Industrial Canal broke. He was evacuated by a rescue crew in a boat that set him on the St. Claude overpass for a few days. He was finally displaced to Houston and then to Baton Rouge. Four months later, he made it back to his largely destroyed home when fema set up a trailer for him in January 2006. At that point, he began a long struggle to find resources to rebuild. He didn’t have home or flood insurance. He had inherited the property from his father, and so he didn’t have a mortgage. His only income was his disability check from the Merchant Marines and his monthly Social Security check. By 2007, he was getting very tired of living in his trailer and even though he had gutted his home himself, it was not being rebuilt. Like a lot of residents, Arthur blamed this on the government: I’ve seen a lot of things—a lot of help was done to people overseas way better than it was—did over here. And the thing about it, though, I was fortunate enough that by me goin’ to sea and travelin’, I seen a lot of things. And the people overseas, the third world countries was gettin’ along way better than over here. And that’s not supposed to happen here, because we got our people who work to pay taxes, try to do this and do that. But a lotta people still don’t get nothin’, and that is really sad. So I believe that the system is really broken, you see. Arthur’s solution to a failed government was the church, or at least spreading the values of the church: “The people who been comin’ here to help us . . . a lotta them were from churches and, you know, that kinda restored my faith. They was doin’ the work that the government shoulda’ done. They was doin’ the work that the church preaches . . . helping people.” Often church groups would leave behind a Bible for a homeowner, and as we talked with homeowners, they each would pull it out as evidence that a volunteer group had been there to help. The Bibles helped “comfort” them when they were really down. One elderly man told us that he wasn’t religious, but the Bible reminded him that were it not for that group he’d probably be living “who knows where?” or “maybe not living at all.” For Arthur, the arrival of the many different church groups was a good thing, despite the fact that it was changing the landscape of his traditionFaith in a Volunteer Recovery

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ally Catholic city. There were a number of nondenominational “Christian” homes on his block, small neighborhood ministries run by self-­appointed ministers to spread Christian values. This didn’t bother him at all. “I’m still a Catholic,” he said. “But they are good people. They are doing God’s work.” For Sherrie Williamson, a fifty-­nine-­year-­old who lost her home, the experience of recovery brought her a new sense of the role of God in her life: I thought I knew God before Katrina because I went to Sunday School. I went to church and I read this and that. I didn’t know God. I didn’t have a clue who He was—not a clue. I knew what was written on the paper but I never had a personal experience with Him. I just knew that’s what Christians do. They pray to Him and that’s who you talk to. But after Katrina, I had a personal experience with Him and that changed my whole outlook on religion and on Jesus Christ. Grayson Batiste, a fifty-­one-­year-­old African American deputy sheriff, spoke about his newfound focus from his trailer in 2008: In other words, my spirit helped me get through this. . . . I’m blessed to have the opportunity to see that. Everything is really spiritual. . . . Anything could happen because [of the] creator. The world is at its very end. I really believe that because what’s happening now is, things are coming to pass. Because of my spiritual understanding I’m confident saying, hey, the world is in God’s will. It’s His will. Everything is His will. You know what I’m saying? . . . I view myself as handling to the best as my creator allowed me to. He kept me going, to the point where I didn’t look down on it negatively. He kept me . . . focused on, “You know what? This is the way it’s got to be right now.” The world is in chaos. The world is going through what it’s going through because this is the way it’s supposed to be so therefore I’ll cope with it through all of it.

Rising from the Waters

Rebecca Solnit has documented some of the ways in which people have found “faith” in the aftermath of disasters. She describes faith sentiments emerging from a sense of collective belonging among those who were displaced—forming “beloved communities” in the words of Martin Luther 138

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King Jr.—in response to the abject chaos created by the catastrophe of storms and floods. Solnit astutely describes how humanitarian organizations that formed in and through the relief effort created a residual sense of hope and prevailing faith in society, like that seen in the words of Sherrie, Arthur, and Grayson. “After the flood” had both a literal and a biblical sense in this context. Caroline was a good example of someone who had become more religious in and through the recovery process. She and her family initially evacuated to Texas, where they moved from home to home during four months. Caroline found temporary schools for her children and they lived like that in a state of “half-­paralysis.” She described her time in Texas as a time of feeling vulnerable in ways that spiritually tested her. Caroline found herself unable to sleep, because she worried about her kids and about whether they’d ever get home. Things were getting worse and worse for her kids. And so I remember being in this little ihop in Texas, and my husband calling me, saying, “Honey, I’m just thinking about it. . . .” He found an apartment on the North Shore [of Lake Pontchartrain]. “I found this apartment, I think you should—I’m gonna get it—it’s reasonable, blah blah blah.” And I remember just breaking down in the restaurant. And just losing it. And these two precious women came over, and they were ministers from a little Baptist church in Texas, and they just sat down and started talking to us, and ministering . . . the word of God. And just then the guy at another table heard the whole thing, and he ended up buyin’ me breakfast, you know? Caroline ended up moving her family one more time before they finally made it back to the upstairs portion of their home in New Orleans in the first year after the hurricane. “We were very blessed in many ways. We had a house, it was mostly spared, he [my husband] had a job, my kids’ schools were opening [in Uptown]. You know, I think the first thing for every parent . . . their kids were the priority, stabilizing these kids, getting them back into a groove again.” Caroline wasn’t sure they could live in the home at first. She told her kids it was “really bad. It’s toxic. There’s nobody there.” She worried most about her son. He had posttraumatic stress, she said. When they first went home, they just sat in the driveway and cried. Her son said, “You know what, it’s so depressing here.” And her daughter said, “Mom, we’re gonna

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be depressed wherever we are. I’d rather be depressed in my own bed in my own home. I don’t care. I want to go home.” Caroline talked about how she went in and out of depression herself in those first months back. I remember just feeling like, okay, I’m a fighter, and I’m a competitive person, and I’m strong, and I’m this, and I’m that. We can do this. We’re gonna come back! Of course it’s gonna come back! But the neighborhood was in such bad shape. Flooded cars were still everywhere. Utility poles were down; trees were dead. Nobody else seemed to be coming back. [In March, she said, she] hit the bottom. You know what? I can’t do it. I can’t do it. You can’t . . . and now you have fear on top of all this. I’m not a fearful person. But I was . . . I found myself getting up every hour, two hours, looking out of my window for a semi. ’Cause people were still being looted. I mean, this was open door to any amateur criminal in the United States. It was like we had a megaphone going, “Come into New Orleans.” It was open-­door policy! Nobody’s around. The flooded houses are wide open, upstairs that were still intact, people were comin’ in, just ripping all the electronics out. I had a friend who got looted seven times, including a car break. And I just hit the bottom. I couldn’t get out of bed. I was just crying constantly. I was just . . . I really had a breakdown, which I never had before. I had never suffered from depression or anything. I was always the cheerleader, the fighter. And then I just snapped. My husband was very concerned, and people would say, just go to your doctor and get on antidepressants. I’m like, “I don’t know where my doctor is. I don’t have the energy to pick up the phone. I don’t have the energy to get myself to a doctor.” Finally Caroline’s husband called her sister on the North Shore and asked if she could come help. “She’s had a breakdown,” he said. At her sister’s home, Caroline said, she found that faith would get her through it. I was really lost. So at her house . . . I go to a Christian church, nondenominational Christian church. And I have this beautiful devotional that I read every morning. There’s a lot of scripture in it, and I just started praying, ’cause I didn’t know what else to do. And I just said, “You know?” I told my sister, “I just need to really seek God 140

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and pray, asking what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to live there?” Before I’d come [here] I had raw sewage running out of my garage for two solid weeks. I would have to push human feces out of my garage every week, every day. I couldn’t get anybody to fix it. It was just . . . it was always one step forward, ten back. One forward, ten back. The obstacles were just . . . every day, on top of your exhaustion, on top of . . . walking out of your door and seeing all your good friends gone . . . their kids’ bikes were in trees still, and things like that. So it was really hitting me. And I opened up my devotional one morning, and this scripture was Second Chronicles, and it just jumped out at me and it said, “Be strong and courageous. Don’t be afraid or discouraged because of your adversities. Know that there is a greater power within you, and I am here to help you.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh! You don’t really want me to stay there?” [laughs]. Okay. So I wrote it down, took ownership of it. I told my sister, “Something just jumped out today.” And she’s like, “Wow, that’s . . . you seek and there’s an answer.” She said, “Okay. All right.” I’m like, “Do you want me to stay?” So, I put this scripture everywhere— on my steering wheel, on my mirror, in my wallet, and I just took ownership and I just stood on it. But I was like, “Show me how. You have a will in my life. Show me how. I don’t know how to survive here, and in my own flesh I can’t do it. I’m done. I’m just over it.” So that’s when I met . . . shortly after that, I started . . . I found this camp, called the Good News Camp, at City Park, and they had a big tent, and it said, “The Good News Camp. Jesus loves you, blah blah blah,” and I said, “Oh, that’s obviously Christian . . . something going on over there.” And I went over, and I met the guy, and he said, “I have thousands of volunteers wanting to help. What do you need?” Caroline started with volunteers. She just started helping other people who were in the neighborhood on her own, getting volunteers and bringing them to homes nearby. Eventually, Caroline found another woman in the community who was rebuilding and helping to organize rebuilding teams. She called herself a “Beacon of Hope.” When she met Caroline, she told her, “You should be a satellite Beacon.” She said to Caroline, “Let me tell you, this can work, this concept can work. Why don’t you be my first satellite? You’re already doing it.” She showed Caroline her whole database, with inFaith in a Volunteer Recovery

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formation about homeowners, website addresses for fema, and for legal assistance, for the Road Home Program. “I was like . . . wow! You know . . . and I’d just gotten my computer, my Internet going, and I said, I have a computer now, and I can do it, I can do it.” She told her husband, “We’ll make our house Command Central. We’ll become a hub for volunteer coordination.” Caroline’s husband was skeptical. He told her she’d gone crazy. “‘Oh, so you wanna stand on the street corner with a welcome sign, inviting the whole city into our house! You really have gone crazy. You are crazy! There’s people living with us, there’s our kids.’” And so Caroline showed him the scripture that she’d turned to while at her sister’s. She said, “He understands how God works sometimes, and speaks to you, and I said, ‘Okay, look at this. This is why, and this is why I’m sticking it out. And if you don’t want me crying every day, I’ve gotta do it.’” She continued, Walkin’ out of my door every day, look at what we live in! And I can’t live like this and not do something about it. And obviously, the government, I said, the government is not gonna help us. They’re not gonna come in. We’re fortunate we have the Corps of Engineers from them, to pick up our belongings [gutted debris and furniture] off the street. But they’re not gonna come in and rebuild and set up tents and send crews and information things. If it hasn’t happened now. . . . I mean, this was May [2006]. So he said, “Okay.” And I showed him the scripture, and he goes, “Okay, I understand. I’m in.” The Good News Camp gave Caroline forty volunteers every day. The woman who started the Beacon of Hope gave her a thousand dollars to go buy equipment—shovels, hammers, crowbars, gloves, three lawnmowers, two weed eaters. They cleaned 140 yards in seven weeks. By word of mouth, more and more residents in her neighborhood learned that she could help them. “We’d go and take a whole block. We didn’t have rights of entry on properties. It just didn’t matter. We’d go in and we’d say, ‘You know what? We’re wearin’ boots on the ground, and we’re takin’ it.’” She described trying to figure out how to get rid of abandoned cars that were left crashed up against front porches and on front lawns in homes where the owners had not yet returned. “City Hall wasn’t up and running. There was no way to get permits or permission. So, we just did it ourselves. We got rid of them. And we’d do a whole block of houses with front yards, because we just knew that 142

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landscape was very important. It sends a lot of messages to looters that, you know what? There’s presence here. Somebody’s cleaning up. Don’t come around.” It also encouraged other residents to return. Caroline talked about working in one-­hundred-­degree heat and humidity all through the summer, feeling exhausted by the enormity of the task, but knowing that the hard work would save her. “Instead of bein’ ten feet under, I was ten feet up every day, at the end of the day, because you had these groups that would just come, and then they would pray with you after, and there were all these Christian groups, and nonprofits and they just knocked themselves out every day. . . . It just turned me around, and it began to really change my life, where I was becoming totally transformed by this.” She kept running the Beacon of Hope satellite and was eventually approached by Father Mercy from the Episcopal Church. The former minister of a church in her neighborhood had suffered a nervous breakdown and had to leave. Father Mercy agreed to take the job soon after he returned from the Iraq War. He offered to partner with Caroline to establish a homecoming center that would continue to help people from the community to return and rebuild. The church provided her with space in a renovated church building, and from there she continued to run her volunteer-­based center for four years. She talked about his support and how much it meant to her. He goes, “I know we can do it, I know we can.” And he had that military kind of proactive approach but is incredibly compassionate, too. And I remember . . . I think that many of us can benchmark our real low points. Like I know the heartbreak of returning is a low point, but I can remember talkin’ to him one day, and I was kinda kidding and laughing, and I said, “I guess after Baghdad, we don’t look so bad.” And he looked me steady in the eye and he said, “Are you kidding? You look so much worse.” And you, he says, “This is nuclear proportions. This is a disaster of nuclear proportions.” And I can remember, the blood left my face, just—feeling queasy—and going, “You’re kidding! I really do live in a place that looks worse than Iraq?” And he goes, “Yeah.” Caroline’s support from the church eventually became the support that made it possible for her to help rebuild her neighborhood during the next five years and beyond. The experience made her more religious than she had ever been, and it also changed her sense of what religion was. Beyond proFaith in a Volunteer Recovery

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viding a way for her to place belief in a spiritual guide, Katrina had allowed her to put her faith into practice. She recalled her favorite phrase: I think that the hands and feet have been put to the gospel. It’s in the everyday. It hasn’t just stayed in the church, in the confines of the church. You go to church on Sunday, and you’re religious and you do your thing. And this has shown people that really, what Christianity is about, or religion—whether you’re Jewish or another religion—what God, or this whole thing, is about is really getting out there, truly loving your neighbor, truly helping your neighbor, showing people that God is sovereign. He hasn’t forgotten you. Look what he’s sending you! He’s sending people to you every day, to help you pick up your pieces. I think that’s what has really hit people, touched people, that . . . wow, this . . . yeah. . . . You’ve seen the largest grass-­ roots effort that I think this country has ever seen. It has come out of New Orleans. Rebuilding has been shouldered, totally, by that grass-­roots effort. It’s shouldered by the faith-­based and the nonprofit. And not only do they come themselves. . . . The money that was brought in by the faith-­based . . . I can tell you, through the Episcopals alone—I could show you their numbers. Four million dollars just from Episcopal Regional Diocese is our budget for the last year. Six million the first year, four million last year, now it just got cut to under two. It’s much more than what the government is doing. It’s so much more. I mean, it’s in the billions. I bet it’s close to a billion dollars. Seriously! The Baptists . . . they come in, they bring you donations when they come. They spend here. Starbucks has a lineup of twenty-­five volunteers; they’re all down there every day. They support the economy. They purposely go shop, they purposely go eat, so when you take all that into account. It is astounding, the amount of hours and volunteers that they’ve tracked, have been putting—they figured it at $8 an hour, and it came out to like $2.5 million, we would have had to pay, if we’d paid. And these volunteers have talked to the homeowners and with them . . . about their experience, their relationship with God. I think a lot of people know that there’s . . . it’s not just about, are you Episcopal, Catholic, do you go to church on Sunday, it’s truly that relationship. Once you develop this relationship with God, you’re gonna 144

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see his hand on your life, no matter what you’re going through, even through this tragedy. And I think that’s what’s been shown to them. Many people think “look at the help I’ve gotten, and it keeps coming, and we are so fortunate to have the faith-­based” . . . and I think it’s been good for the church to get out of the church! You know, many groups come in and say, “This is our first youth group, mission group, that we’ve ever done in the United States.” Many of them go to Mexico, whatever. But to be in your own country is really kind of impacting, too, on the other side, for them. But I can tell you, many people have come to Christ and just come to know the Lord through this. They have developed a relationship. You don’t have to go to church every Sunday. It’s not about that. That’s a support for you to build off of. But I think they have definitely been impacted by that, and so many people—they’ll tell you— you wouldn’t wish this on anybody, but the experience has been life-­ changing, and many good things have come out of this experience for people. I think they’ve had to dig really deep, like me—we had to dig really deep, to survive and to live here. And still do, because the city’s so challenging. But, when you have that, not as a crutch—it’s not a crutch, it’s really your source—we’re three components, we’re mind, body, and spirit, and you gotta tap into that as well. But when you know that that spirit is there, to guide you and help you and see you through this and provide and . . . there’s a sovereign hand on us, I know, I’ve seen so many miracles here. One of these miracles was that of the Bradlieus, whose story we heard in chapter 1. Caroline found Henry and Gladys in their fema trailer after Gladys called her office, wondering if she might be able to come paint her home. Caroline realized that the Bradlieus would need much more than paint. Their home was still sitting empty, having been gutted and stripped but little else had been done. Gladys spent all her time taking care of Henry, whose stroke had paralyzed him the year before. Caroline talked about the atrocity of the Road Home Program and their treatment of the Bradlieus. “Can you imagine?” she said. “A three-­time Purple Heart recipient? Can you i­ magine?” Caroline directed her steady stream of out-­of-­town volunteers to their Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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home. These visitors replaced studs and floors, laid electrical lines, hung sheetrock. Caroline pulled the permits for the reconstruction herself. She got the Episcopal Church to purchase sinks and toilets, countertops, and flooring. She recovered windows from the old house and got volunteers to refinish them. She assigned volunteers, a week here, a few days there, to put on the primer and paint the home inside and out. She started traveling a few times a year to different Episcopal churches in other cities to raise funds for the rebuilding. She held a special fund-­raiser through a church in Seattle for the Bradlieus; one prospective donor at the event offered $4,000 to pay for the roof. Caroline was furious over what happened to Henry. She also blamed his stroke and subsequent paralysis on the fact that the Road Home Program had refused his appeal. She had helped him prepare the appeal, getting the affidavit from the previous owner and walking to the Road Home office with Gladys. It was a colossal failure, she said, that a man who had fought and was a decorated soldier could be treated so badly. It was outrageous. In the end, her perseverance paid off. “Eight hundred volunteers and two years later,” Caroline said, “we were able to get the Bradlieus back into their home.” It was 2010, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Despite her sense of accomplishment and gratitude to the volunteers, by Gladys and Caroline’s calculation the time waiting, the heartache, and the sense of betrayal that had caused Henry’s stroke were too high a cost, no matter how good the outcome now. Caroline held a homecoming party for the Bradlieus. Since they still only owned the two forks and a few plates that their Texan church friends had given them back in 2005, she got a local football player from the Saints to donate his old furniture for their new home. The only thing that remained, Caroline said when I saw her in November, was the yard. Gladys loved her trees. That was the thing that she described missing the most when she first came back. “But you know,” Caroline said, the Lord works in strange ways. I got a call about a month ago from a mother of one of our repeat volunteers. His name was Tim. He was a great kid, only in his twenties. He was really committed, really sweet. You know, I got a call from his mother, and it was so tragic. Tim died in an accident back in his hometown in April. She [his mother] was still having a hard time with it, trying to figure out what to do. She 146

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was thinking of starting a foundation in his name. He always loved trees, she said. She thought a foundation called Tim’s Trees—you know, to plant trees, would be a way to honor his life. Anyway, we talked for a long time and she was trying to retrace his steps. . . . Then she told me that there was one family he helped and he talked about them a lot. She said, “It was a woman and her husband had a stroke.” Caroline knew it was the Bradlieus. “That’s our project,” Caroline said to the woman. “You won’t believe it but we just moved them back into their home a few weeks ago. Their home is finished, and all that’s left is the landscaping.” “So, do you know what she did?” Caroline said with tears in her eyes and a tremble in her voice. “She said, ‘We’ll do it. We’ll come and finish the yard.’ She did it. She brought her whole family and all of Tim’s friends here this weekend and they planted trees and bushes and sod. It was a kind of memorial for Tim, you know.” Caroline’s experience of recovery in and through volunteer work reflects much more than a personal sense of spiritual uplift and religious devotion. Her experience reflects the consequences of larger transformations in American life; it reflects priorities that came into being before Hurricane Katrina and became more and more visible as government funds to the private sector played out in uneven ways and spawned more efforts on the part of the faith-­based communities to respond in a sustained and effective manner.

Faith and the Safety Net

Faith-­based initiatives provided opportunities for what appeared to be direct and unimpeded aid to those in need by going outside channels of both government and the market. That is, church organizations were not mandated to follow government policies on how to distribute aid or how to use market indices to account for the output of their services. They were not required to pay taxes on the money they raised as charitable income or to file paperwork accounting for the scope of work they did. Church aid in New Orleans was, in this sense, able to do both more and less than corporations subcontracted both to provide relief and to show corporate profits. They did more because they were less hampered by bureaucratic rules governing corporate mandates for profit. But they did less because they were usually Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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working with much smaller sources of funding than that which could have been provided by federal sources. Aid was local and targeted, but contingent on steady streams of funding raised mostly through congregations and always in limited supply. Many returning residents argued that, in view of the failure of programs like the Road Home, it would have been better if the federal funds had all gone through the churches instead. The work of churches, however, although in part motivated by the problems of waste, delay, and profiteering in government-­funded recovery programs, also helped conceal the fact that these problems were not a consequence of government per se but of government subcontracting to private for-­profit firms. Calls for allowing the private sector, and particularly churches, to do more of the work of recovery were premised on the idea that less government involvement would be better than more. However, what was needed instead was perhaps more government regulation of the ways in which funds were being delivered and spent overall. Improving public-­ sector programs, rather than turning them over to private for-­profit companies or to churches in unregulated ways, might have streamlined the delivery of federal and state resources for the people who really needed them. The fact that charity groups stepped in and did a better job of helping people recover than government did fueled another set of assumptions about who is ultimately responsible for taking care of people after a disaster. The large shift toward allowing charity groups to do the work of recovery only reinforces political assumptions that taking care of postdisaster victims is a moral choice orchestrated by faith-­based commitments and is not a civic duty that falls in large part to the infrastructural obligations of a publicly funded safety net. When safety-­net relief for victims becomes a matter of mobilizing the right combination of volunteer spirit and private donations rather than a matter of governmental protections of universal civil rights, then the idea that the relief and recovery should be shielded from the competing demand of profitability becomes moot. The private sector is left to figure out how to make the project of relief and recovery profitable in order to pay for itself. The role of faith in recovery was in this sense thus doubly meaningful. People had to have faith that enough other people would donate and volunteer in great numbers and that people would participate in new regimes of church-­based faith—that is, specific commitments to and involvement with religious activities and churches as a new kind of civil commitment. Out 148

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of the ashes and mud and sludge that covered New Orleans in the wake of Katrina came new kinds of commitments to community, faith, and a flourishing private-­sector recovery infrastructure. It is also important to note that this infrastructure relied, more than ever, on the circulation of affect.

Affective Surplus

With about 76 percent of the most recovered parts of the city rebuilt in 2010, most residents continued to say that it was not just the volunteers but the faith-­based volunteers who made it all possible. The most successful recovery process was built on and sustained by motivations that exceeded the expectations of not only the recipients but also the volunteers themselves. These motivations were, in essence, emotional and even spiritual, in which volunteers and victims alike were made to feel that their situation and their work of recovery formed a virtuous circle fueled by faith and spiritual rewards. The recovery process was in this sense in some major way made possible by the production and circulation of affect. In the shift to privatizing the safety net of recovery assistance to charity organizations, the production of affect is in fact critical. Affect here is both produced by the disaster and multiplied by a slow and obstacle-­ridden recovery, but it has also become a site of productivity in the new political economy in which the work of charity plays a huge role. The affective surplus aroused by disaster commands a sense of purpose and ethical goodness among those who volunteer and a sense of not only gratitude but also restored faith in society on the part of those who receive help. More often than not, this faith was and is articulated today in and through Christian organizations and a sense of ecumenical virtue defined first and foremost by the values of Christianity. Sustaining an active profit-­seeking sector of the recovery industry by doing the work that could have been done but wasn’t by government sources, the arrangements of charity now support the partnership between government and the private sector by way of the production of free labor aroused by affect. Andrea Muehlebach offers an interesting analysis of the rise of volunteerism and the emotional hold that both compels people to volunteer and generates a sense of gratification from it. Using the case of post-­Fordist Italy, where a “culture of volunteerism” is emerging as the provision of social services is privatized by the government, she notes that “affective labor is Faith in a Volunteer Recovery

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a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies—that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work.”20 In Italy, Muehlebach recognizes that a culture of volunteerism produces emotional certainty; also a rhetoric of compassion through volunteering becomes a mechanism not only for social cohesion but also for giving people a sense of purpose in life. Similar motivations could be seen in the posthurricane rebuilding of New Orleans among the hordes of volunteers who were still, even six years afterward, coming to help recover and rebuild the city. It is important to remember in this arrangement that affective labor, however successful in the rebuilding effort, also generates new sorts of assumptions about civic responsibility and a new level of affirmation for churches and faith-­based initiatives as key to the survival of our own civil and, in the case of postdisaster communities, material infrastructures. The idea that citizens should have the right to recovery assistance just because they are citizens (and have paid insurance or taxes for this sort of recovery help) becomes easily replaced by the notion that disaster recovery is not itself a civil right but a moral choice, or even a measure of one’s commitment to one’s faith. When the responsibility for recovery is taken on by a volunteer labor force that is aroused by emotional vulnerabilities tied to morality or faith, it is no longer a problem for the state. Muehlebach writes, “The unwaged labor regime relies on good feeling—trust, reciprocity, magnanimity—which are considered ‘essential to the social contract’ in a ‘disarticulated’ society. . . . But a public thus produced is at best a partial one. It unites citizens through the particularities of cosuffering and dutiful response, rather than the universality of rights; through the passions ignited by inequality, rather than presumptions of equality; and through emotions, rather than politics.”21 In the United States, where a volunteer workforce has become an increasingly commonplace response to disasters, such as the outpouring of support in New York City after 9/11 and ever since then in repeated environmental catastrophes, volunteering to help people creates opportunities for the creation of large social networks and for people to connect with others through a shared sense of purpose that in the end displaces claims about rights and expectations from the state. Volunteering provides people with 150

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an empowered sense that, by caring for others, they can enact and restore their faith that they live in a sympathetic society, even when the state fails them. More important, such outcomes fuel and are fueled by the circulation of affect, which, in turn, also fuels new kinds of economic opportunities that, as we will see, wed faith-­based charity to large businesses who see social service work as a growth industry. Volunteering calls upon people to donate not once but two and three times and sometimes for months on end in order to care for those in need. The volunteer sector generates surplus value here, through what is essentially unpaid labor, and it works in and through the generation and circulation of affect, which, in many postdisaster settings, has deep connections to the church. The notion that people had to have faith to survive was, in the context of post-­Katrina New Orleans, literal. Even those who claimed to be uninterested in religion often felt, after years of waiting for help and getting it from churches and other volunteers, that they had a new commitment to faith and a new tolerance and appreciation for organized religion. It is easy to see how the merits of church and charity arrangements can fuel antipathy toward government programs and can heap praise on private-­ sector initiatives. Before lingering on the merits of such arrangements for too long, however, it is worth remembering that had federal relief funding gone directly to returning residents, it would probably have cost less for everyone and taken much less time for them to recover, whether or not the volunteer economy had arrived. It is thus worth exploring along these lines how the new charity sector of the economy functions alongside, sometimes in step with and other times at odds with, the for-­profit market, the secular charity sector, and especially those companies that have now formed in order to capitalize on secular and faith-­based volunteer programs that have arisen in the wake of growing disaster-­induced need in America.

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Seven

​CHARITY, PHILANTHROCAPITALISM, AND THE AFFECT ECONOMY Your millions are not worth more than our humanity. “Your millions” are how we got here to begin with. —St. Bernard Project orientation leader, speaking to a Fortune 500 ceo volunteer who had come to work in New Orleans for a day in March 2011; the orientation leader was telling the CEO to stop answering emails on his Black-Berry in order to hear the story of the family whose home he would be working on

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n 2010, New Orleans civic leaders boasted a conference in which they would host the “largest gathering of service and volunteer community leaders ever in the United States.” The conference scheduled for the summer of 2011 was sponsored by the HandsOn Network. The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, had this to say about it: Perhaps no other city in America understands and appreciates the power of community service and the value of voluntourism1 to a community. . . . Our city, indeed our entire region, would not be as far along in our post-­Katrina recovery without the time, talent and treasure of all those who were so generous in helping us in our time of great need. It is a distinct privilege to welcome this gathering to our city, where we have created a new roadmap for community service, and where the good work continues to this day, and will continue well into the future.2

Figure 10. A home, filled with visiting volunteers, that was rebuilt by the Make It Right Foundation in the otherwise fairly empty Lower Ninth Ward (2010).

Recognizing that a second major disaster had struck the Louisiana coastline with the 2010 bp oil spill, HandsOn New Orleans (a local branch of the national HandsOn Network) described its conference this way: With the Gulf Coast reeling from its second economic blow in five years, Patrick Corvington, ceo of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and Michelle Nunn, ceo of Points of Light Institute and Co-­Founder of the HandsOn Network, declared that the region’s largest city was not just the natural choice to host the 2011 gathering—it was the only choice. Not only is the Gulf Coast once again front-­and-­center for America’s volunteer and service community because of the bp oil spill, but both conference conveners already have a strong presence there due to recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina. Large amounts of funding were being poured into the marketing for the 2011 conference as early as 2010, with glossy advertising campaigns showcasing examples of people who exemplified success in an economy in which volunteering was able to replace the state in order to take care of people in need. The conference invited people who were previously poor and needy who had now parlayed their causes into sustainable charities of their own. The first conference, held in 2010 in New York City, had taken up large advertising space at Times Square, with led posters containing logos that read “It’s Up To you!” HandsOn New Orleans is a good example of the kind of corporate-­run public-­private partnership that has grown under market-­driven governance in the United States as more and more of the responsibility for taking care of those in need is shifted back onto a willing and sympathetic public. ­HandsOn leverages federal resources to respond to growing levels of poverty and need nationwide by, in some sense, capitalizing on the surplus labor that has emerged in and through volunteering. It also works as a private corporation. It is a good example of the ways that the private sector for-­ profit market, charity organizations, and the federal government are now entering into new arrangements that should raise questions about not just the benefits or disadvantages of shifting safety-­net responsibilities to the private sector but also the role played by “those in need” in our economy. The hopeful possibility that the work of volunteering will cross en-

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trenched lines of inequality between rich and poor and redistribute the burdens of recovery and responses to poverty onto a wide group of differently privileged citizens holds an enormous amount of political promise in the United States. Post-­Katrina New Orleans offers evidence that such promises might be fulfilled. At the same time, New Orleans offers much less salubrious indications that even in a world where wealthy Fortune 500 ceos might get their hands dirty by helping disaster-­stricken families on the road to recovery, the work of volunteering and the economic infrastructures that are now in place to support it are by no means eliminating social inequalities. In some ways, they are only making it worse. Of course, the idea of local grass-­roots social service groups has a long history in New Orleans, and this history shaped the recovery economy as well as its grass-­roots contours. Before turning to the contemporary arrangements of affective labor after Katrina, it is worth briefly exploring the larger context of grass-­roots social aid in the city.

Social Aid and Grass-­Roots Movements

New Orleans, even before Katrina, offered an amazing example of social aid organizations that emerged from grass-­roots community efforts to care for those in need. For over a hundred years the many social aid and pleasure clubs, some of which were formed by free people of color who intermarried with Native American Indian tribes who took them in, have long served as welfare institutions for poor African Americans in the city. These clubs were formed initially to ensure that their members could receive proper funerals. Resources were pooled and used to honor and bury the dead and also to celebrate their lives in second-­line events. Beyond that and over time, social aid and pleasure clubs grew to be more than social welfare organizations. They became social clubs that sponsored other celebrations, community activities, insurance funds, labor organizing, and even small businesses.3 Not surprisingly, New Orleans witnessed an unprecedented spontaneous rise in locally organized social movements in the aftermath of Katrina, some of which were supported by national organizations and others of which are entirely homegrown. The growth of these is well chronicled by Jordan Flaherty, Rachel Luft, and Ronald Lewis (in the case of social and pleasure clubs). These groups, many of which constituted new social movements,

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spawned the birth of numerous nonprofit nongovernmental organizations (ngos), which became important conduits for volunteer labor, legal support, and financial aid. Many organizations targeted their interventions not just to help people recover but also to revisit the past contexts of structural inequality and social justice issues in New Orleans. They focused not just on rebuilding but on a socially “just” rebuilding. Some of these ngos emerged from the ground up, like the Common Ground Relief Collective started by the former Black Panther and well-­known community activist Malik Rahim. Common Ground was a grass-­roots community center with the slogan “solidarity, not charity” that expanded its mission, from running a volunteer-­based community health clinic; to gutting homes; to providing legal resources, job training, and home-­building assistance; to conducting programs on soil quality and environmental toxicology; and to generally supporting those trying to rebuild. Other organizations emerged as community groups, like the one Caroline (see chapter 6) started, with the explicit goal and purpose of rebuilding neighborhoods with volunteer support and donations from churches, volunteers, or individual donors in order to do the job that the government and its subcontractors, insurance companies, and fema did not do. As Luft found, organizations that were tied to social justice created a groundswell of political activism by addressing long-­standing social injustice issues that were made even more visible in Katrina’s aftermath.4 Some of these groups were associated with, or spawned by, churches, not surprisingly. Although nearly all of these organizations focused to some extent on providing practical help for returning residents focusing on survival and rebuilding, some emerged to fill a vacuum created by other preexisting gaps in infrastructure in various public sectors, from health care to education. It is impossible to catalogue all of the nonprofit ngos that came into existence in post-­Katrina New Orleans, but a representative sample would include organizations like Emergency Communities, which provided a communal space—a kitchen, laundry, computer systems—for members of a community to use as they returned and rebuilt; the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund (phrf), an African American–led coalition for a just reconstruction; and Community Labor United Coalition. The latter group’s mission statement included the following: “The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattered across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuild156

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ing casinos, hotels, chemical plants, and the wealthy white districts of New Orleans.”5 Some of the social justice–oriented groups even helped spearhead local community tribunals and truth and reconciliation commission–style hearings to “try” the Bush administration for what the community perceived as crimes committed against them. The U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than one hundred U.S.-­based organizations working on human rights issues, including the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (defending human rights and promoting African American self-­determination) in coalition with phrf, actively documented abuses and worked with the United Nations in investigating and reviewing Katrina-­related offenses by the police, including the Danziger Bridge incident (which occurred in 2005 but only received national media attention in 2010). These groups were joined by other grass-­roots organizations such as the now-­defunct acorn, which had provided homeownership and antidemolition advocacy, and the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, a private, nonprofit civil rights organization established in the summer of 1995 but that had grown larger in scale after Hurricane Katrina. All of these organizations worked to eradicate housing discrimination throughout the greater New Orleans area through education, investigation, and enforcement activities, particularly on behalf of previous renters in New Orleans. Groups like Survivors Village created temporary tent cities that still existed five years after the floods so that displaced public-­housing residents who were struggling for justice after the majority of public housing was destroyed would have a place to stay. unity of Greater New Orleans, a collaborative of sixty agencies that worked with homeless people, continues working tirelessly on behalf of the one in four people who remain homeless in the city. New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice was started up to build worker power, advance racial justice, and organize to build a just social labor movement in the post-­Katrina city. Groups like this remained committed to eradicating the increased abuses surrounding workers (both those who were native to New Orleans, as well as migrant laborers) and eliminating policies that allowed outside contracting companies to use imported labor. Other groups focused on finding people in what is locally often referred to as “the Katrina diaspora”: one such group was Finding Our Folk, a large-­scale grass-­roots initiative that spent time after the storm speaking Charity and the Affect Economy

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directly to survivors throughout the diaspora, listening to their issues, and giving form and voice to their outrage. Some organizations, such as the Broadmoor Improvement Association, formed as a reaction to news that their neighborhoods had been turned into “green dot” areas (that is, neighborhoods that New Orleans city planners identified as ones they would not rebuild after the storm and floods). Initial and successive planning efforts on the part of city officials, done largely behind closed doors with little public input according to the Louisiana Justice Institute, were organized around recovery models that would eradicate neighborhoods with high crime and low incomes in order to create investment opportunities for developers and commercial interests. In response to the news of these plans, some neighborhoods organized to fight back.

The Limits of the Private Sector

On an optimistic note, Luft argues that the growth of nonprofit grass-­roots organizations in post-­Katrina New Orleans offers a good example of a shift in American neoliberal politics. These organizations have fueled the growth of political movements that are committed to local sociopolitical and structural action aimed at rectifying previous inequalities and injustices. They have, she notes, created a new “playing field” in the world of disaster responsiveness and preparedness and have, in many cases, given voice to local political concerns and effective social activism. Organizations like the Broadmoor Improvement Association have been extraordinarily successful in garnering public recognition and private-­ sector funding from foundations, charities, and philanthropies. They have protected and rebuilt communities that were essentially slated for abandonment. These groups reveal a sense of an ongoing antagonism and mistrust of local and regional government, and they embrace the private sector as a radical and plentiful alternative to what they see as the social, governmental neglect of the poor and underresourced sectors of the city. In other words, these types of organizations are a response to what are seen as governmental failures to protect citizens. Rather than calling for better government policies, these groups are turning to the private sector to solve their problems. Many other social justice groups that emerged in the aftermath of Katrina have also embraced private-­sector opportunities for growth, recognition, and fiscal support.6 The celebration of grass-­roots social movements should 158

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not be overlooked or underestimated, but it is important to remember that such movements often adopt the same views as those who may be responsible for creating problems of disenfranchisement to begin with. In other words, unregulated private-­sector opportunism created the problem of the green dot areas, which would have eliminated poor neighborhoods and replaced them with higher-­income property. By turning to the private sector, however, these groups now find themselves in competition with for-­profit businesses, government subcontractors, and a growing number of competing ngos that vie for available resources. The belief that the private sector will do what government has failed to do is accompanied by an unfortunate new set of dependencies on not just the for-­profit market but also a growing intermediary infrastructure that is profiting from the partnership between government and grass-­roots groups. As we will see, this growing intermediary sector has also nurtured dependency on corporate donations, philanthrocapitalism, and venture philanthropy as mechanisms for capitalization. The seductive notion that private-­sector movements will rectify or redress and respond to the larger problem of disenfranchisement of the poor and the underrepresented in America is powerful, especially for those who see their participation in such movements as a radical alternative to conventional infrastructures of social inequality and who reap the rewards of such action. The allure of independence from government and public sources of funding, however, can soon fade when organizations are faced with competition over available donor resources and also when new forms of accountability to fiscal priorities and sustainability through the adoption of business models begin to overshadow commitments to local problems. In fact, many of the small grass-­roots organizations that were formed after Katrina found themselves having to merge with much larger institutions in order to stay in business. Small organizations operating as private ngos found they had to reconstitute as partners with larger umbrella organizations that could fund them, even when they had slightly different priorities and practices of distribution.7 The Beacon of Hope, for example, started as a neighborhood organization. Caroline Reeves worked hand in hand with the original founder to support rebuilding efforts in the Lakeview area. The Beacon used volunteers and ran on a shoestring budget with help from anyone and anything it could get. When volunteers arrived and offered money, it would be used to buy Charity and the Affect Economy

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cleaning and construction materials for homes. When they arrived with carpentry skills, they were put to work using those skills, whether it was with plumbing, sheetrock, drywall, painting, or weeding and gardening. Eventually, the Beacon of Hope tried to get funding to support its growing caseload and finally got larger donors, such as United Way, to support it. After four years of operation, the Beacon of Hope found itself having to scale up many of its operations in order to sustain its funding stream from larger donors. In particular, it found that it had to hire fund-­raisers and think about business models and ways of accounting that would enable it to “show” its donors that it was using the money well and developing self-­sustaining fiscal practices. At the Beacon, this meant changing how it counted outcomes. Rather than helping communities one house at a time, the Beacon found that it had to count each house or homeowner it helped for one day as a “credit.” It was not long before the Beacon of Hope figured out that in order to meet target goals set by its largest funder, United Way, it would have to scale back on its commitment to each homeowner. Because the Beacon got one credit per house or homeowner it made more sense to take on small and time-­limited jobs for each household rather than a long-­ term commitment to any one household. That is, because landscaping the front yard of a home conferred the same “credit” as getting someone back into a home from beginning to end (starting with gutting a flooded house and eventually turning it into a livable home complete with landscaping), it made no sense for the Beacon to do long-­term volunteer work for any single resident. The scaling up to meet donor demands entailed a scaling back on commitments to residents in need. Caroline eventually broke off from the Beacon for this reason. She felt that commitments to families like the Bradlieus, whom she took from living in a fema trailer a full five years after the hurricane to moving back into a completed home, were her primary concern. She did not have time to scale up her operation in order to meet the Beacon’s or United Way’s accounting demands, and she did not have the moral fortitude one would need to leave these families behind. The more time the Beacon had to spend on fund-­ raising, the less time and money it could commit to the projects of rebuilding it was involved with. The transformations within the Beacon looked and felt to Caroline too much like a for-­profit business. “Their way of doing things changed dramatically,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t help people this way.” Donors’ demands to match their funds with returns on investment 160

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in quantitative reports about what were essentially inefficient distributions left people like Caroline feeling as if it was counterproductive to the goals of the people who needed it the most, people like the Bradlieus. In a word, it reminded her of the Road Home Program. The problem wasn’t with the Beacon, however, but with the infrastructures of funding that had begun to govern this sector of the volunteer charity world, in which accounting methods that were focused on raising funds to sustain the business overshadowed accounting methods that simply suggested a net outflow of resources to homeowners in need. Organizations like United Way, HandsOn Network, and Points of Light Institute are good examples of large monopoly organizations in the humanitarian disaster enterprise sector. They offer a double-­edged sword for local grass-­roots movements. On the one hand, they offer funding and recognition and a way to work one step removed from what gets called cumbersome government bureaucracy. On the other hand, moving into the private sector has not guaranteed that they are sheltered from the more serious burdens of market accountability. In the worst cases, the move to work in and with the private sector creates conflicts over how time and money are spent for the organization, with increased time and money spent on fund-­raising efforts and developing business models for income streams, and sometimes these conflicts threaten to undermine the commitment and ability for these organizations to do locally effective work. As the private sector takes on more responsibility for funding this sector of the economy, accountability is increasingly calibrated to meet for-­profit standards of success, and the question might be raised of how much better the nonprofit world might fare under the banner of a strong public sector that refuses neoliberal accounting and ethical agendas. Caroline’s experience with HandsOn is exemplary of these challenges.

The Big Business of Charity

New Orleans offers numerous examples of the way in which neoliberal policies allowed market forces to leverage profits from the recovery process. The most striking examples were with companies like Halliburton, Blackwater, or icf. What is more surprising is how a whole new set of promissory capitalizations and profits emerged in the nonprofit charity sector in a strikingly similar way. The HandsOn Network offers a good case study. Charity and the Affect Economy

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HandsOn describes itself as a locally focused, nationally supported volunteer networking organization whose purpose has been to provide network services and organizational and infrastructural support for grass-­ roots, volunteer-­based efforts across the country. It grew out of another set of social service–oriented programs that were designed to operate in and through an “insider-­outsider” relationship with government; it functions as a public-­private partnership, meaning it acts like a private corporation but with a stream of federal funding, thus somewhat like a government agency without the regulations that usually accompany public-­sector work and with more freedom to use free-­market fiscal strategies with government funds. In 2010 HandsOn boasted that in New Orleans it was “assisting 16 community organizations and neighborhood associations to address community issues through its retooled Volunteer Leader Program. Volunteer Leaders make a weekly or monthly commitment to help manage volunteer projects for community partners that tackle issues including homelessness, hunger, animal rescue, disaster recovery, environmental protection and more.”8 HandsOn New Orleans is considered a model of a nationally based, federally funded, public-­private partnership that uses federal support, corporate philanthropy, and partnerships with multiple local, grass-­roots, volunteer-­ based organizations to help communities in need. Its largest funder is the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent agency of the U.S. government founded under the direction of Stephen Goldsmith during the term of George Bush Sr. in his mission to create a thousand points of light through charity. HandsOn’s ability to advocate for and provide solutions to local communities seems, at first glance, promising. A quick look through its website suggests a well-­organized effort in which people wanting to volunteer, and make donations, can do so and in which needy organizations at the local level can get manpower and visibility. In September 2010, Caroline was asked to be part of the 2011 HandsOn conference as a representative local New Orleans community leader. Caroline was eager to see what sort of benefit participating in this national-­level organization might bring. She couldn’t tell yet how it would translate into being able to help the Bradlieus or the hundreds of others who had been left behind who were still hoping for help and still trying to get out of their trailers. HandsOn had not offered 162

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her any real money or material support, only the chance to be part of the movement. She’d gotten a call from a woman in HandsOn who said she had sixty volunteers who wanted to come to New Orleans, and could Caroline find work for them? She did, but it ended up being more work for her because she didn’t need more volunteers per se. She had plenty of volunteers who had found her through word of mouth or through her website. What she needed were funds to pay for rebuilding materials. Still, HandsOn New Orleans wanted to showcase her center as a model for community-­ organized, volunteer, faith-­based recovery. She would be a featured community leader at the 2011 conference. The conference was sponsored in part by the University of Phoenix, a for-­profit online university, which posted its name on all available wall and brochure space. At the conference, Caroline presented the story of her organization and told about rebuilding efforts along with a few dozen others. She never received funding for her participation at the workshop, but she did get brought into HandsOn’s organizational network. As a result of the conference, she worked alongside and received small amounts of funding to help in the restoration and replanting of three public parks in New Orleans. The effort involved a partnership between Rebuilding New Orleans (another local grass-­roots nonprofit), HandsOn, Red Cross, and her group. She received $15,000 from HandsOn for the project, and HandsOn provided a team of volunteers. Afterward, Caroline continued to work with HandsOn in other ways. One of the most promising, she said, was the opportunity to gain access to a team of permanent AmeriCorps “volunteers” who could provide sustained work. In this arrangement, volunteers did not receive payment but did receive a stipend for their living expenses. Caroline was asked to pay roughly $10,000 to each worker, and to this amount HandsOn offered a matching sum that was paid to each “volunteer.” The model, she noted, was “more corporate” in its orientation, but it was useful to have workers who were not only long-­term but also skilled at the work itself. The only drawback, she said, was having to train a new crop of volunteers each year. She also noted that HandsOn set up a “tool-­lending library” in the city and this worked well for her because, for a small monthly fee, she was able to borrow tools for her volunteers that her organization didn’t own but needed. HandsOn operates as a nonprofit organization but it looks and feels like a company that is in the big business of charity. It is not clear whether or not Charity and the Affect Economy

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it is a publicly traded corporation, but it uses a language of investment portfolios and return risk rewards to describe its work in part because it partners with large for-­profit corporations. Some of its large corporate sponsors include Target, Disney, ups, jp Morgan, and Fidelity Investments.9 Large volunteer organizations, like AmeriCorps, operate under and alongside the umbrella of HandsOn, and HandsOn partners with numerous volunteer ngos, such as the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster and al!ve (the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement). In fact, HandsOn Network merged with Points of Light Institute in 2007, the private-­sector foundation that was initiated with federal support under Bush Sr.’s administration to grow charity and the church’s role in public service. In fact, HandsOn seems to operate in name only under the auspices of its headquarter organization, Points of Light Institute. The juggernaut of a free market in volunteer charity businesses is one that apparently requires companies like this to remain incredibly active in absorbing and catalyzing the reach of its networks. A positive spin on this would be that such activity helps stimulate and capitalize on innovation in this growing sector of the economy. A less positive spin would note that because this sector is not regulated, companies like this must continually absorb competitors in order to achieve a prominent position, and they must frequently rename themselves in order to stay ahead of the investment opportunities that seek to fund only the most innovative and new framings of this type of business. That this is happening in the world of relief and recovery work is both exciting and promising but also terrifying. Since its merger with the Points of Light Institute, HandsOn Network has become one of the largest businesses in the world involved in redistributing resources from the government and for-­profit companies, and putting those resources to work for humanitarian causes in communities of need. It claims to have mobilized more than 30,000,000 volunteer hours, which it calculates as $626 million “in human capital toward our nation’s critical problems” (although the figures change regularly). Of course, “volunteer” is a somewhat ambiguous term to use for this work that is unpaid but still makes money for the parent organization. Most of the volunteers with HandsOn do not get paid, and those committed service workers called “interns” who do, such as with AmeriCorps, HealthCorps, or Teach for America, are paid far below minimum wage,

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a­ lthough this varies depending on the payment structure (and who is paying) for the “volunteer/intern.” Considering that one of HandsOn’s big campaigns is in advocating corporate philanthropy, offering a streamlined way of enabling corporations to “give” online, this arrangement sheds light on the notion that the private sector might be able to generate support for those in need largely outside of the government while still using government funds. For the time being, merging government resources with those of corporate giving has enabled HandsOn to sustain itself as a rather large corporate, public-­private entity that operates in and through the redistribution of surplus wealth that is generated in part by the volunteer and underpaid workforce. On the positive side, organizations like HandsOn may actually be more suited to helping people in need than government subcontractors like the Shaw Group or Halliburton, whose performances in the postdisaster period were nothing short of abysmal. At the same time, the shift toward more private-­sector oversight of public-­sector activities, following the lead of former military subcontractors, opens up the space for a new sort of capitalization on the problems of need in America. Organizations like HandsOn Network and the Points of Light Institute are, in one sense at least, in the business of making capitalist sense of charity, even while they fill in the gaps left open by capitalist and market-­oriented forms of governance. They offer a new kind of public-­private model of social service infrastructure—one that runs obliquely across the market but not in step with it. The fact that they must be fully operational within a for-­profit market means that they must at some point organize themselves as businesses that must be sustained, even while keeping an eye on the nonprofitable problem of humanitarian relief and rebuilding efforts they attend to. Sometimes organizations hover uncomfortably in the zone between being private nonprofit and corporate-­ like for-­profit, because to stay in business as a nonprofit they must compete for increasingly stretched resources from both private and public sources.10 Surely, stock portfolios and publicly traded ipos are just around the corner, just as they were with icf International. Evidence that charity (and particularly disaster-­relief charity) is now itself profitable is nowhere more visible than in the return of icf International, which, as you may recall, was given the contract to run the Road Home Program during the first three years of post-­Katrina recovery.

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The Return of ICF International

icf recognized the growing investment in volunteer and faith-­based movements as a growth sector in the global economy. Thus, in 2009, icf decided to get in on the action. It acquired a company called Macro International and began to invest in faith-­based community initiatives by creating faith-­based community organizations (fbcos), which, as icf leadership had noted, had recently received greater attention from policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels.11 Here, the direct link between federal funding of local faith-­based organizations and the for-­profit sector that offers up its management services is yet another example of market-­driven governance,12 and therefore it is not surprising to find icf resurfacing. Founded in 1966, Macro provided research and evaluation, management consulting, marketing communications, and information services to key agencies of the federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and the Departments of State, Education, and Veterans Affairs. It is headquartered in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.13 The chairman and ceo of icf, Sudhakar Kesayan, said of the merger with Macro, “This transaction illustrates an important element of icf’s growth strategy—to acquire profitable, high-­quality firms that provide significant growth potential and cross-­sell opportunities in our key markets. . . . Macro is an excellent strategic fit for icf, adding capabilities and clients in one of the largest of our market segments—health, human services and social programs—which is among the most important areas of the Obama Administration’s focus.”14 In its presidential transition mission statement of 2010, spokespersons for icf noted that among its acquisition strategies, like with Macro, it hoped to take advantage of the growth of faith-­based initiatives in the social services sector, stating that although faith-­based and neighborhood partnerships are not new in America, what is relatively new is the direction taken by federal, state and local governments over the past 15 years in creating partnerships between government and private programs to deliver public services. From the passage of welfare reform in the mid-­1990s to the creation of the first federal Faith-­Based and Community Initiative by the Bush Administration to the announcement by President Obama of an Office 166

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for Faith-­Based and Neighborhood Partnership . . . , the federal government has been fashioning a new relationship between the programs it funds to benefit needy Americans and the grassroots organizations that are often on the front line of service delivery. . . . Currently, icf is working with a wide range of faith-­based and neighborhood partnerships throughout the country, providing expert training and technical assistance in an effort to help these programs improve their programming, build their capacity, and enhance their ability to promote self-­sufficiency for individuals, families, and communities.15 The specific configuration of the public-­private partnership initiated by icf with faith-­based volunteer organizations is interestingly positioned within the market. icf makes a good business of helping those in need, while reconfiguring the needy as the new workforce at the same time: “These fbcos are recognized as valuable partners, based primarily on their local networks and relationships, especially among cultural and linguistic minorities and other hard-­to-­reach populations. icf Macro has been involved in helping government programs, such as local workforce development agencies and other anti-­poverty programs, to develop effective linkages with local fbcos.”16 One of the mechanisms for fbcos is the “workforce board.” Workforce boards consist of public-­sector and private-­sector members who are providing workforce development leadership in their communities. Workforce efforts essentially mobilize volunteers in order to turn needy people into entrepreneurs who can turn their need into a visible target for the charity market. But this charity goes to work! Workforce boards are seen as instruments for instilling in communities a work ethic that will bring market solutions to their community problems. The National Association of Workforce Boards says, “Services are designed to help Board volunteers advance the public-­private model among key policy makers, secure the role of the business sector in workforce development, enhance members’ capacity and effectiveness, and learn from networking opportunities with the nationwide job training community.”17 In hopes that the market will serve as a model for even the nonprofit, volunteer sector, advocates of market-­driven governance are turning even the neediest of communities into sites for entrepreneurial growth and profit Charity and the Affect Economy

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making, even though we know that such practices exclude large numbers of potentially worthy recipients. We should not miss the irony here in the fact that icf International, formerly in charge of the Road Home Program, had repurposed itself as an agency devoted to faith-­based community organization partnerships nationally and internationally. The business of “staying in business” sometimes merely requires a rebranding of the mission statement, with little transformation of one’s corporate infrastructure, leadership, or even stock portfolio goals. If icf’s performance with the Road Home Program is any indication of the inefficiencies of profit and poor performance that are possible in this new public-­private arrangement, it is worth questioning what its involvement in faith-­based neighborhood volunteer projects will produce. Inserting itself into the interface between government and citizen once again, icf got itself into a position to generate large corporate fiscal rewards from the government for what was essentially already being done at the grass-­roots level. It is what Caroline called, when I told her about this arrangement, “enough to make [her] sick.” As the private sector is asked to take on more and more of the social services work that people in need in America have come to depend on, something happens to the public sector. The government, and the political process that is waged to ensure care for the most vulnerable, becomes a partisan bystander—a sort of sleeping partner—to a set of institutions that functions with federal support but by a logic that is governed almost entirely by private-­sector business and corporate principles, where competition for resources and market accountability reign and where hoards of unpaid or poorly paid laborers are now asked to do the work of providing a safety net essentially for “free” or at rates far below minimum wage. Here is where questions about the benefits and limits of neoliberal policies and the turn to private-­sector solutions begin to haunt those who work in this sector. Those who are in need and those who are trying to help the needy undertake a mission that gets awkwardly tangled up in problems of marketing, resourcing need, mobilizing unpaid labor, becoming self-­sustaining, and marketing charity by foregrounding its affective entailments. As extraordinary as grass-­roots movements and organizations have been in rebuilding New Orleans, they have inevitably been faced with complicated questions about their own survival in an environment where it appears that they must be accountable both to a corporately structured 168

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for-­profit market and to those whom they hope to serve. The ability of organizations like HandsOn Network and Macro International (icf) to remain focused on caregiving while simultaneously developing investment models for survival is a challenge at best, a contradiction at worst, and, in between these outcomes, a slippery slope in which needy populations are themselves the commodity that keeps the market going. This becomes more visible in the story of icf International’s return. Large companies like icf are able to jump into the mix alongside Hands­ On as infrastructural clearinghouses that corral federal and corporate funds to further these grass-­roots volunteer activities. Questions about who is responsible for oversight and for ensuring that the public benefits from such resource allocations more than its corporate executives need to be raised, along with a host of other questions about accountability. The new infusions of private and corporate sponsorship to charity nonprofits, often called a form of philanthrocapitalism, pose even more compelling questions about accountability and goals as the safety net is shifted over to the private ­sector.

Philanthrocapitalism

Philanthrocapitalism inspires book titles like Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green) and websites like The Capitalist Manifesto. Philanthrocapitalists note that “corporations now realize that they can do well by doing good.”18 Indeed, the merging of charity and business philanthropy offers new financial opportunities for the corporate sector as well as for those who run social service and volunteer aid organizations. “Philanthrocapitalism” and “venture philanthropy” both hail a glorious future in which corporations will recognize how much profit can be made by doing good. Corporate giving is no longer structured around opportunities for tax shelters. Now, corporate philanthropy is being organized as a new type of profit-­investment opportunity. This means several things. First, in the venture capitalist world, venture philanthropy posits that investing in social capital (people) can be parlayed into actual capital, augmenting market share while conscripting even the poorest to become profit makers in a network of market-­based formulations of personal success. It also means that the new sorts of accountabilities and obligations that dependency on philanthrocapitalism arouses have to be factored into Charity and the Affect Economy

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the machinery of charitable work. Through organizations like HandsOn, Points of Light Institute, and Macro International, we are just beginning to see how this process works. One of the mechanisms of philanthrocapitalism is that of jumping on the bandwagon of public-­private partnerships in which federal and state resources are used to leverage private investments. Like with HandsOn, using a combination of corporate philanthropy, government funding, and nongovernmental infrastructures to put funding into public areas of need is an ideology and a practice that cuts across political party lines in the United States. In 2010, the Obama administration invested $50 million of public funds in the Social Innovation Fund (sif), which philanthropic organizations then matched with $74 million: “Although the sif accounts for a tiny fraction of the federal budget, the fund embodies an approach that the administration plans to spread throughout government. The fund is one of several efforts to promote new partnerships of government, private capital, social entrepreneurs and the public, pushed by the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.”19 Presented as an exciting new solution to some very old problems, this infrastructural shift in essence gives responsibility for social services, from recovery to welfare, back to the private sector and potentially to those companies that benefit most from the for-­profit market already. This innovation, again, was inspired by Stephen Goldsmith, the advisor who helped devise George Bush Sr.’s plan to “hand provision of some services to faith-­based groups” in the Points of Light Institute.20 He was also the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, set up at the same time to oversee the distribution of sif. Goldsmith, a former Harvard professor who became a Republican mayor of Indianapolis, is also known for having fired 40 percent of the city’s nonuniform workers and for providing contracts to private-­sector firms to take over these jobs. sif has a lot of targets of opportunity. It funded a public-­private partnership with the Center for Economic Opportunity and the mayor’s office in New York City in order to “help lift people out of poverty.” In this arrangement, small organizations competed for sif funding and the winners were those who ostensibly showed their merit by having proven they were capable of, not surprisingly, earning money. One reporter described the process this way:

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[sif has] backed a controversial set of experiments to encourage the poor to be vaccinated or to pass exams by rewarding them with cash. The ceo [of one organization], with the Mayor’s fund to Advance New York City, received one of the first grants awarded by the sif: $5.7 million to replicate five anti-­poverty programmes in seven other cities. . . . Indeed, the ceo inspired the sif, says Mr. Goldsmith, who influenced the sif’s design. There is however a difference. New York’s scheme emphasizes taking risks, with the expectation of the high failure-­rate typical in a venture-­capital fund.21 Despite the overt gesture toward putting capital to socially worthy purposes, money has become the instrument of governance in this arrangement. It rewards those who behave like fiscally responsible citizens and punishes those who do not. (Remember that this was the fundamental problem faced by many returning residents of New Orleans who could not make themselves visible as fiscal opportunities; these people were overlooked in the slow march toward recovery.) Less perceptibly, but perhaps more important, organizations like sif, which dole out fiscal rewards for companies to solve social problems through financial incentives, have a way of transforming public money into private business. The recruitment of philanthrocapital in this arrangement is one in which the investors from the private market end up having a lot of power to set the agenda in ways that reward their companies for what should be public goods. Here is where things get tricky. Public service–­ oriented nonprofit groups must show that their businesses can be managed like good businesses; they can become risk takers in the search for self-­ sustainability and even profit. They must operate like any recipient of venture capital and thereby show that they can eventually pay for themselves. The people they serve, or the services they provide, become not only the index for profit making but also the concealing mask for it. The participants in this system who cannot become successful entrepreneurs (whether they are ngos or victims of disaster) become excluded from participating in the rewards even while their need circulates as a productive resource in the ­system. Bryn Jones notes that the trend toward corporate giving is not unprecedented in the history of Euro-­American civil society: “In the United States and Britain, a new set of institutional relationships is emerging to fill a vacCharity and the Affect Economy

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uum in tackling social and environmental problems. In this new institutional field, large corporations are taking on the role of patrons to a variety of clients among public and civil society organizations. This social relationship parallels similar episodes of patronage when systems of community and public welfare disintegrated during the rise of capitalism.”22 Jones cautions, however, that corporate philanthropy often involves new regimes of patronage in which those groups that cannot calibrate their charitable acts to the audit needs of the market (or the sponsoring business) are left behind. Even the neediest recipients of aid must learn how to become entrepreneurs and potential business clients (e.g., customers) for the corporation that donated. Jones notes that recipients who depend on philanthropy become wedded to a system in which donor philanthropists “may still donate wealth gratuitously, but in which many super-­rich patrons of the ‘new philanthropy’ using strategic csr [corporate social responsibility] demand calculable returns on their ‘investments.’ Under these constraints, corporate social contributions, in particular, entail an inherent risk of dependency for re­cipients.”23 In his critical book Small Change: Why Business Can’t Save the World, Michael Edwards notes that philanthrocapitalism requires a specific type of accounting, a rigorous commitment to the notion that investments in future market opportunities will generate profits alongside social good, even in disaster situations where public need seems to defy the logic of for-­ profit economies. Sometimes the marriage of profit with social service can work. Other times, it can’t. Auditing and accounting practices that place self-­sustainability and fiscal bottom lines above those that are used by the communities in need ensure that some goals, and some people, will drop off the aid map, like they did with the Beacon of Hope and like they did in icf’s management of the Road Home Program. Aid recipients must continually refigure their aims and goals to funders’ priorities, as funders become task masters of accountability. In the end, Jones says, “Corporate support for nonprofits has a tendency to evolve into corporate dominance over them.”24 In most cases, organizations are forced to use accounting practices that make sense in the business world but not in the world of humanitarian relief. In some cases, the philanthrocapitalism investment is explicitly justified

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by the notion that corporate giving can result in the production of more consumers for the donor’s corporate products. Christina Gold, the ceo of Western Union, suggested in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that corporate giving should be aligned with the business interests of the company. In other words, worthy causes are those that will provide opportunities for the needy to become customers, or that will, in the end, help the fiscal bottom line of the donor company.25 In the end, the growth of a nonprofit ngo industrial complex that is sustained not just by government but also by high-­net-­worth individuals offers opportunities for things like recovery and rebuilding to occur without the overt participation of government interference when it comes to public accountability, even while the groups often benefit from government subsidies alongside corporate philanthropy. This structural arrangement creates a type of streamlined patronage capitalism,26 in which large patrons play the dominant role in determining not only the types of opportunities available and the types of needs that will be met with the capital generated by this privatized system but also the outcome measures that are used to determine success. Using philanthrocapitalism and venture philanthropy to care for the needy, just like disaster capitalism, reveals what can happen when we turn the business of caring for those in need over to the private sector. Sometimes, private-­sector solutions seem to work well. For many advocates of neoliberal policy, this is a win-­win scenario. The for-­profit private sector pays for the charity sector. For others, however, it is a scenario that creates further divides between rich and poor, and it creates silos of opportunity in which money continually flows up into fewer (usually corporate) hands while more and more go without. A privately organized recovery infrastructure fails to account for the possibility that for-­profit governance creates opportunities for bureaucratic failure, as was seen with the Road Home Program, and for the fact that some people cannot meet corporate measures of success or fiscal responsibility. Some situations, like recovering from disaster, simply require unfettered, unrestrained giving and streams of funding that favor the victim over the company that distributes funding. What is clear is that even where the volunteer sector has grown the most—with faith-­based groups—the simultaneous growth of organizations like HandsOn and icf/Macro, which are now in the business of finding

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ways to profit by way of the largely unpaid labor sector, reveals how the pull of the private sector is simultaneously a gravitational pull toward the for-­ profit market and the widening of poverty in the United States. The move returns us, like a snake eating its own tail, to the root source of the problems of inequality and profit-­driven inefficiency that caused the disaster of Katrina in the first place.

The Affect Economy

The experiences of New Orleanians reveal a coalescing of interests and institutional arrangements in which charity, faith, patronage, and for-­profit capitalism are knitted together in an affect economy. Humanitarian “networks” that form in this coalescence are called on to fill the material, social, and political gaps created by both disaster and disastrous policies that, in the case of New Orleans, had ironically created the problems of ongoing need from failed recovery in the first place. Affect calls for emotional responsiveness and generates an inducement to action, and as such it generates new business investments and free labor for a struggling socio-­economy. Ongoing need becomes a marketing tool and the circulating site for value in the ever-­growing infrastructure of the charity ngo market.27 Affect that is generated by the people who lived through Hurricane Katrina and lost so much from it becomes in some sense unmoored from its sites of origin in people as it circulates among the agencies that hope to profit from it. Charity and philanthrocapitalism appear as new mechanisms of redistribution for taking care of those in need: sometimes they do just that. Along the way, however, companies like icf International are able to capitalize not once but twice on the disaster, first from their own failed interventions through Road Home and subsequently by becoming a clearinghouse redistributor for faith-­based volunteer ngos. The hopelessness experienced by the people of New Orleans circulates in this economy as a new product and as a producer of the recovery industry’s growth. For those residents who were still hoping to get back into their homes in 2010 (100,000 were unable to return, and 860 families were still living in fema trailers at the time),28 the process of recovery through these arrangements of capital, public-­private partnerships, and neoliberal policy

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has produced an emotional surplus in which need has become a circulating resource defined by its affective registers. Needs are not necessarily being met or eliminated faster, but participation in this market has enabled quite a few profits to be made. We are all asked to participate in this affect economy in new ways, with new demands on our time—both paid and unpaid—in the effort to take care of those who are in need.

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Eight

​KATRINA AS THE FUTURE

M

y colleague Martha Ward told me on my first visit to New Orleans that Katrina was not about the past. “Katrina,” she said, “is about the future.” Katrina, the ongoing disaster, tells us a lot about what the future holds for U.S. citizens. Nearly six years after Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, and the breach of the levee system, the most recovered of the once-­ flooded neighborhoods, such as Lakeview, were at best 70 to 76 percent rebuilt and reinhabited. Gentilly, New Orleans East, large sections of Mid-­ City, and the much larger St. Bernard Parish have been less rebuilt.1 Some blocks here and there had a full row of refurbished or newly built homes, but most streets had only a few rebuilt homes and the rest remained gutted or gone. Despite the large and robust unflooded strip of the crescent skirting the Mississippi River (from the Marigny all the way to Riverbend), vast swaths of open space and empty lots were seen all over the rest of the city. Denuded and filled in with weeds and grass, these spaces were the visible mark of a city that had not yet completely recovered and in all likelihood never would be the same. In the poorest neighborhoods, too many people were unable to secure resources to rebuild, and in some cases, the loss of community in these neighborhoods made it undesirable to return. A smattering of newly constructed homes in the Lower Ninth Ward (brought about by the Make It Right Foundation and the Mennonites) made this area look good in contrast with the still-­derelict blocks of ungutted homes across the river in the

Figure 11. A memorial at the home of Robert Green Sr. for a mother and granddaughter who drowned in floods from the broken levee (2009).

Upper Ninth Ward. But the Lower Ninth was a shadow of what it used to be. It is hard for a newcomer to imagine a time when all of the streets of New Orleans were solid chock-­a-­block with homes and trees, from Lakeview all the way through Mid-­City down to the Lower Ninth Ward and miles further into St. Bernard Parish. Martha also said she thought we were witnessing something called Katrina fatigue. At first, I thought she was referring to the sentiment often shared with me by other New Orleanians who were still trying to recover and rebuild. “Katrina is like the funeral that won’t end,” one resident said in 2009. “That’s nearly four years of dying. ‘When’s it going to end?’ I ask myself all the time. ‘When will it end?’” I worried for a moment that perhaps the resident was actually talking about life rather than just living conditions. While reports started to circulate in 2010 that the Greater New Orleans area was experiencing a healthy period of economic growth in the context of a national recession, there were many indices of recovery that were less positive.2 According to unity of Greater New Orleans (a housing-­focused ngo),3 there were three thousand to six thousand persons living in abandoned buildings in New Orleans in 2010, and 75 percent of these people were survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and most of those people had been stably housed before the storm. Among these newly “homeless,” some 87 percent were disabled and 42 percent met national research criteria for having medical conditions of such severity that they were likely to die within seven years if left homeless. A disproportionate percentage of the new homeless in New Orleans were over the age of sixty-­two (11.3 percent, compared with only 3 percent of the New Orleans homeless population before Katrina).4 A stunning testament to the expansion of poverty during the years of disastrous recovery is the fact that, despite the overwhelmingly successful effort to remove many of the city’s poorest renters, particularly those who were African American, in 2011 New Orleans had more people applying for and receiving Section Eight housing support than they had done prior to Hurricane Katrina. Because many of those who left New Orleans permanently were those who formerly received subsidized housing support, the increase in recipients of this federal support was due to new cases. Charity groups working in some of the mixed-­income recovering neighborhoods, such as Gentilly, reported that in fact many of the new poor are people who were formerly self-­supporting. These include the elderly and

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families who hovered at the lower edge of the middle class and were now having to seek federal assistance to survive. Katrina fatigue, I thought, was a type of exhaustion that can only come with feelings of sheer hopelessness over the loss of a life one will never get back. Fatigue was caused by accepting the fact that one was never going to get the insurance company to pay up or that the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Road Home funds that were promised would never show up. No one was ever going to find that shady contractor who absconded with a $30,000 down payment before lifting a single hammer to rebuild your home. The fatigue was, I thought, over the fact that a once-­thriving business that employed three hundred people was now gone for good or that one’s neighborhood was no longer filled with lively porch-­sitting grandparents watching over kids playing in the streets. That, too, felt gone for good. Fatigue, I thought, was almost too faint a word to encompass the sense of loss and sinking depression some people still described well into the fifth year following the hurricane. According to Martha, that was not what Katrina fatigue actually meant. Katrina fatigue emerged in popular media reports in 2010 alongside the notion of “compassion fatigue” right after the earthquake in Haiti. By comparison, Haiti seemed like a much worse and more urgent disaster than failed recovery in New Orleans. For many people inside and outside of New Orleans, although “recovery” had not been achieved by everyone, the disaster was in some sense “over.” People were tired of giving. They had given all they could. The disaster was over in the popular imagination, in the media, and even in the hearts and minds of many of those who returned. Then, in April 2010, oil began spilling from bp’s Deepwater Horizon drilling site right off Louisiana’s coast. Before bp could stem the flow in late July, millions of gallons of oil had leaked into the Gulf waters and had begun to wash ashore and destroy the wetlands that Louisiana’s fishermen and shrimp and oyster farmers had relied on for generations. Suddenly attention was back on New Orleans and Louisiana, and this, even more than Haiti and the earthquake, seemed to put an end to concern about Katrina. Katrina’s effects were simply no longer visible. The media returned, but the people still living in trailers and trying to dig out of the debt they fell into because of Katrina were no longer of interest. There were other reasons that Katrina recovery was no longer discussed.

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In many ways, 2010 was a landmark year for the people of New Orleans. On the up side, the New Orleans Saints had risen to newfound glory by winning the Super Bowl—promoting the largest impromptu cross-­dressing parade the city had ever seen in order to honor “Buddy D’s” promise. Bernard Dilberto had been a famous sportscaster from New Orleans who had vowed to dress up in a blond wig and a woman’s dress and then parade down Canal Street if the Saints ever actually made it to the Super Bowl. He died just before Katrina and wasn’t able to witness the victory, but the parade in his honor was nearly as big as the one for the Saints’ return from their winning event. A new mayor (Mitch Landrieu) was elected the week before the winning game, bringing a kind of hope and fervent sense that things would finally change for the better (a hope that tapped into the Landrieu family’s history in city and state politics). Out with the old, in with the new, but it also felt like typical New Orleans: le plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose. The city looked better than ever for Mardi Gras in 2010, and for the first time since Katrina, despite record cold temperatures, everyone from New Orleans and beyond came to celebrate without having to deal with the immediate sense of urgency about recovery. Drew Brees, the Mardi Gras King for the Krewe of Bacchus and the quarterback for the Saints, threw beads from his royal perch, and I caught them, and so much seemed “back to normal” for a few weeks. New Orleans was no longer below sea level, I was told. It was now “way above sea level,” people said, in the spirit of optimism and a long-­hoped-­for sense of recovery. In 2010, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (mrgo) waterway was finally closed. Triumph was in the air. Katrina fatigue, it turns out, was an accurate description of something that was happening in the city. It was what happened when people stopped paying attention to the disaster and its effects. Katrina fatigue was what gave people a sense of it being over—of it no longer being a problem. People in the rest of the world were tired of hearing about it and tired of paying attention to it. No one was publishing more books about Katrina—it had all been said already. Funds for local charities were tapering off, as were volunteers who came to help “rebuild”; other places with more urgent disasters seemed to need them more. Were it not for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, New Orleans might not have received any more media attention at all. In an odd way, I realized, this was where my own misconception and that of the outside world about the meaning of Katrina fatigue began to blur. 180

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Locals also were tired of it. It was as if their ability to let Katrina get them down had been itself exhausted—used up, spent. Outsiders were tired of hearing about it. Insiders were tired of fighting it. But one didn’t have to walk far from the Mardi Gras parade routes to see that Katrina was, in fact, far from over. Her wounds were inflicted deep into the skin and the soul of New Orleans. Like bad tattoos, the tell-­tale crisscross spray-­paint signs in broken neighborhoods and the partially rebuilt homes and streets were visible reminders that were still haunting and dragging down the optimism of the present. People didn’t want to talk about the fact that they were not yet recovered. They were just tired of dealing with it. “I can’t talk about it before Jazz Fest,” we were told by a middle-­aged woman who lived in one of these neighborhoods in March 2010, “because it will just bring me down.” Katrina fatigue, Martha said, was not necessarily a bad thing. It may fade from memory for now, but it won’t go away. It was like what happened with the Holocaust, she said. In the years immediately afterward, it was sort of forgotten, almost as if it was too painful to keep visible. But eventually it made its way into the history books, and now there are books, movies, documentaries, whole courses of study devoted to the Holocaust. Katrina was of that proportion, she said. It will resurface as one of America’s most significant tragedies. It will be written about in the history books, and it will define and redefine fields of study, whole theories of society. I think Martha is right. Katrina was not just “another” disaster. It was an indictment of the restructuring of America’s political economy as well as a visible window into the effects of this restructuring over the long haul. It was also a foreshadowing of a future that could belong to anyone, a catastrophic revelation of vulnerability not just of a few Americans but of an American way of life. Katrina was historic and epic. “Imagine a nuclear bomb,” as Caroline’s pastor said in his description of New Orleans, comparing what he had seen on his tour of duty in Iraq favorably to what he saw after Katrina. Never had it become so clear that the forces of nature behind Katrina were hardly insignificant in comparison with the larger forces of politics and economics that had created a storm of epic proportions. For returned residents who were still trying to dig out of their debt and rebuild as of 2011, the trauma of recovery continued as if it had never abated. New waves of struggle crashed in upon the old. Katrina as the Future

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It was, in fact, remarkable to find that even as late as 2011 there were still people trying to get back into their homes. Even more surprising was that some of the same subcontractor companies that had failed in the years before 2010 were still being given opportunities to distribute federal relief funds into and beyond 2011. For example, from late 2009 the Road Home Program had morphed into the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (hmgp), which offered funds to families in flood-­zone areas to elevate their homes. In fact, insurance agencies now required elevation of all New Orleans homes, and for some people who were still in deliberation for Road Home funds, elevation was now also being given as a requirement for receipt of funds. Like the initial Road Home Program, hmgp was subcontracted to a private company but operated under the oversight of state officers from the Louisiana Recovery Authority. As we have seen, the group given the subcontract was a now-­familiar military subcontractor, the Shaw Group, and the director was the same person who had previously worked for icf International. As if watching a rerun of a bad movie, the Shaw Group was not doing a very good job, just as icf had not done a good job. According to chat’s founder and most ardent reporter, Melanie Ehrlich, Shaw Group was being paid “tens of millions of dollars” to run hmgp. The goal of the program was to provide grants to 37,000 homeowners to do things like install window shutters and braces or to elevate homes in flood-­ prone areas. But to date hmgp had only disbursed $81 million of the $750 million in its budget. Only 8 percent of the approved 37,000 home mitigation projects had been paid.5 Official executives for the Shaw Group maintained publicly that they were following the state’s direction and processes and that their work was in some sense transparent: two hundred caseworkers were hired in 2009, at $53 per hour, including overhead. Their steady income in fees paid by the state, however, was woefully large in comparison with the rate of grants delivered to homeowners. Local critics who left the agency complained that the processing of cases was deliberately slow because “Shaw was getting paid on an hourly basis, . . . not on the basis of how many grants it paid out.” chat also noted that one of the Shaw executives would be leaving the program in order to be the new state-­level coleader of the hazard mitigation effort. This was the type of revolving door between the government and the private sector that, as you may recall, put New Orleans underwater in the first place. 182

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By mid-­2010, stories about the failure of hmgp began to circulate widely and, once again, chat reported on the mounting evidence that the program was suffering from the same problems of inefficiency as had been seen in the years prior, when it was supposed to deliver funds for rebuilding. First there were rampant problems with contractor fraud, which appeared to be not only tolerated by the hmgp but also actually endorsed by it. Families would contract companies to elevate, and companies that had no experience with elevation of homes were being paid by hmgp, even after homeowners complained about the resulting large structural cracks and other damage to their homes from the elevation process. When families revealed a contractor’s poor performance, hmgp officials often required an unqualified company to return for more funds to fix the flawed repairs. It was as if, homeowners suspected, they had been given kickbacks for the contracts. Meanwhile, legitimate contractors were unable to get paid for elevations they did, and homeowners who paid for elevation on their own were having to wait for more than a year to get reimbursed. In 2011, chat issued a report on the internal workings of the Road Home Program’s work in relation to hazard mitigation relief. In a long list of inefficiencies that were reported by people working within the company, the following were identified: (1) repetitively lost paperwork; (2) mazelike frequent changing of rules (for increasing contractor costs for paperwork, delays, and negation processes for processing grants to homeowners); (3) extremely slow payout of grant money; and (4) unusually lucrative arrangements for contractors despite their poor quality control and inconsistency of grant calculations.6 chat reported that two people working within the reconstituted program were involved in lawsuits against the company for being fired over whistleblowing activities. One went on to write a book about the problems.7 The limited or total lack of responsiveness from hmgp officers in dealing with these problems left homeowners deeply frustrated. The fact that the federal government had released new funds to help homeowners with this elevation requirement only made residents feel worse, because they had in some sense paid for this funding through their taxes already, and now they were being asked to pay in another way. One such recipient was Grant ­Morgan. Grant was a general contractor. He had been able to rebuild by 2008; in 2009 he undertook the elevation project on his own in order to obtain homeowners’ insurance, which he did with the consent of hmgp, at cost to Katrina as the Future

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his company. He spent roughly $100,000 to do the elevation work. When he finally received payment for the work nearly a year later, he was paid only $20,000. He sent in letters, made phone calls, and sent in a petition for the remainder of the funds, for which he had receipts for materials and labor. Instead of being given the missing portion of the reimbursement, to his surprise he got a phone call telling him that in fact, upon looking at the maps again, the program deemed that his home did not actually qualify for elevation funds and that he would have to return the $20,000 he had already received! Grant’s wife, Rita, called the agency over and over, asking them for a reason for the changed status of their home. How could it be that they had been told only a year and a half before that they had to elevate and were now being told they were not in a flood zone and therefore didn’t qualify? Instead of resolving her problem, hmgp dithered and retreated, even as she insisted that the program send her a letter, explaining in writing why they were no longer qualified for the funds. Grant and Rita waited and waited for the full reimbursement or even for a letter explaining why they should return the $20,000. Months passed and they heard nothing. Grant grew more and more impatient and more and more despondent. Rita continued her phone-­call campaign to get answers. She knew that with three small children and all of the debt they had taken on in rebuilding the house to begin with, they could not shoulder the cost of elevation as well. Grant had begun to sink into a depression based on the debt he was now being asked to carry and the lack of clarity on what the outcome of his case would be. When the family decided to take a vacation to Florida, a plan Rita thought would help him put the whole ordeal behind him, she could tell that he was not well. Rita tried to talk with him and told him they’d “get through this.” She said to him, “If we got through Katrina, we can make it through this.” But she asked him to visit the doctor when they returned. He did. Grant told his doctor he was having trouble focusing, and he received a prescription for Adderall. Within a few weeks, things deteriorated faster and faster. Grant became manic about little things. He started mowing the lawn obsessively. He was in a constant state of agitation. He kept talking about how angry he was about the hmgp settlement. One afternoon, as his wife was taking their youngest child to the doctor and while their oldest child was upstairs watching her sister, Grant went into his basement and shot himself. 184

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Friends and family of Grant held a memorial for him in July 2011. He was praised for being a great dad, a loving husband, a guy who would do anything to help a friend, and a very hard worker. It wasn’t mentioned, but what everyone at the memorial was really thinking was that the process of recovery, and his entanglement with hmgp, had killed Grant.

From Public Money to Private Profit

To the extent that this ethnography is about Katrina, it is not about the Katrina of the storm or the floods that came soon after. Katrina is the story of slowed and delayed recovery, which made life harder before it made life better for many who were trying hard not only to rebuild but also to make sense of the enormously difficult process. If the hurricane and floods are a story about the consequence of an environmental disaster resulting from policies that favored fiscal growth and corporate profits over ecological balance and human risk, then the disastrous aftermath is the story of how some of these same processes and priorities produced a disaster far worse than Katrina itself. The nexus of private-­sector corporations that acted irresponsibly, the federal and state subcontracting policies that allowed for-­ profit companies to do relief work, and the lack of government oversight in restricting profiteering created a disastrous recovery. These arrangements, and the policies that endorsed them, resulted in a situation in which efforts to recover were organized around profit making at the same time that they were intended to help people in need. These are some of the inefficiencies of profit that in the end caused not only long-­term frustration and delay but also the loss of additional human lives. The structure of public-­private recovery assistance created opportunities that were in some sense far beyond what many anticipated. On the down side, these arrangements allowed disaster capitalism to flourish. On the up side, some would say that these arrangements have also allowed a proliferation of nonprofit and faith-­based charity organizations that have stepped in to do the work that government programs failed to do. Nonprofit and charity groups have spent the last six years, and are continuing to do so, rebuilding homes, parks, schools, and programs of urban justice in New Orleans, and they should be applauded. But the nonprofit sector has been successful in part because it has relied, and continues to rely, on unpaid or volunteer labor, labor that could Katrina as the Future

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have been paid for out of recovery funds had the money been managed and distributed more efficiently. This arrangement worked, to some extent, and was certainly better than the alternatives in place. However, the long-­term effects of relying on volunteers to do work that was already paid for in some sense by government and taxpayer funds at best has raised questions about the distribution of not only risk but also cost, as the double dip of payment was made on the backs of victims and volunteers. These effects also raise serious concerns about the limits to charity and about the continued production of enormous amounts of unmet need in the nation. The largest volunteer-­based rebuilding group, St. Bernard Project, had been able to rebuild around four hundred homes by 2012, but this was nowhere close to the number that were gone or still in disrepair. There are other outcomes of a safety net based on charity: the charity economy functions in and through the persistence and circulation of a kind of affect that is at once visible in those whose lives are disrupted and forestalled at the same time that it is visible in the inducement to action on the part of the volunteers who help those in need. Weaving the emotional surfeit that comes from human suffering into economies of profit put this very fundamental moral and human capacity in the operations of capital. Suddenly, it is no longer a civic right or duty to take care of those in need but a moral choice based on conscience and more often than not on a commitment to faith. While affect circulates in this system to keep the volunteers coming, it also leaves open the opportunity for profiteering by companies that have seen this as a growth sector. In the end, need circulates in this system as an ever-­expanding problem and also as an ever-­expanding source of corporate investment as ngos like Points of Light and companies like icf/ Macro swoop in to organize relief as a profitable proposition. What is perverse in these arrangements is the penetration of for-­profit corporate interests into this sector of the humanitarian economy. This results in an awkward situation in which nonprofits find themselves uneasily managing the slippage between fiscal and humanitarian outcomes. As philanthrocapitalism and the solicitations of venture philanthropy help to pay for charity, the demands on nonprofits to act like for-­profits are escalated. Such arrangements also allow public-­private corporations to become for-­ profit partners in the new charity economy. The privatization and marketization of charity disaster and recovery efforts, all the way from rescue

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operations to rebuilding communities, allow for all sorts of new circulations of capital from disaster and human suffering. The larger story of post-­Katrina New Orleans is indeed at least in part about the outcomes of a steady rise of engagement of for-­profit corporate opportunities and a new kind of sociality that transforms affect into a source and resource of fiscal profit in new ways.8 While some people rail against the impediments to allowing more private-­sector involvement in the public sector, particularly in areas like social welfare, few, save those who study and celebrate the churches, are actually studying the outcomes of the involvement we have already witnessed. What is clear is that these arrangements ensure that public money is turned into private profits that benefit some more than others, and often at the expense of those who need it the most.

The Aftermath

In many ways, this book may not look or feel like it is about New Orleans at all. There are no long chapters on the history of free people of color, the arrival of Afro-­Caribbean spiritualism, or the birth of American jazz. There are no stories of romantic intrigues based on public rumors about the wealthy entrepreneur who left his upper-­crust Southern wife for the young voodoo priestess from the North—the one some say was under a magical spell. And there are no lengthy stories about tourism, Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, or the French Quarter. I have not repeated what the people of New Orleans already know: they have rebuilt their city more than once, and their love affair with their city will not be put to rest because of a tragedy, whether man-­made or not, or because of political economic profiteering. In fact, many would point out that such profiteering is itself a part of the cultural landscape and heritage of New Orleans. The oversight is deliberate on my part. The story here is not about how the city is unique and different from other places in America or about how this culture somehow could be either blamed or credited for the disaster or recovery. It is rather about how much like other cities in America New Orleans is or could be under the conditions of recovery capitalism we have witnessed there. “We’re Americans,” Caroline said in her congressional testimony at the start of this book. And that is my point.

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New Orleanians offer all of us a privileged insight on the future that is in store for others who think they are out of harm’s reach. The processes taking place and the structures that are in formation in the recovery of New Orleans are connected to transformations and assemblages that are being created across the country. When we hear local New Orleanians call out for answers, we should listen carefully and learn from what replies are received. Leslie Cardé captured some of these calls in her documentary America Betrayed. At a public hearing with the Army Corps of Engineers about the closing of the mrgo in 2007, Greg Miller, Coastal Projects Manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, had been explaining the “economics” of whether or not to close the canal. Henry “Junior” Rodriguez (a former St. Bernard Parish president) offered testimony: Rodriguez: There were 67,500 people in my parish that don’t have a home, don’t have a job. They got 127 died, and I still sit here listening to this bullshit, about the economics of it? Miller: We ask that people try to be. . . . Rodriguez (interrupts): How many people do you know that got . . . Miller (interrupts): To reach out with some kind of respect. Please try to watch the language. Rodriguez: It’s a joke. Those of you that are still tryin’ to keep it open, you know what? You ought to be prosecuted for attempted murder. A whole parish gone. Eighty percent of the city of New Orleans. And I still sit here and I still gotta listen to this crap about you folks and your nickels and dimes. But let me tell you something. That thing [mrgo] never was what it was supposed to be . . . as far as the barge traffic, it can always go out the gw [George Washington] the way it always did. You can laugh all you want, my friend [referring to a Corps representative who smirked]. I wish I’d a had your ass with me when I was on the top of a goddamned building, and I couldn’t get nothin’ to eat, and I couldn’t get no sleep, and I had to look at the water all around. I wished that I’d a had your fat ass there with me. In the end, the lasting story that will be told about Katrina is the one in which the people of New Orleans are not seen as victims but as people who demonstrated some of the most dramatic displays of perseverance and en-

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Chapter eight

Figure 12. Gladys Bradlieu arrives for the funeral

of her husband, Henry (2011).

durance of the human spirit ever seen in our country. “Katrina,” in a long-­ term sense, will be remembered as a turning point for many and as a restoration of faith in the goodwill of humanity. It will be told by many as a story of success—of how people pitched in and helped each other and rebuilt their city, a demonstration of the best of Americans’ “can-­do” spirit. This is a true version of the story. This is what people did. This is what happened. But this version also reveals the most nefarious and insidious side of our current policies and practices that wed government to free-­market capitalism in the effort to recover. The celebration of private perseverance and “can-­do-­ism” conceals the sad reality of profit arrangements and who pays the price for them.

Katrina as the Future

189

Lagniappe

I learned of Henry Bradlieu’s death when I sat with Gladys in a New Orleans coffeeshop in March 2011. Over the weeks that followed his death, Gladys called upon friends and family to help her celebrate his life. At his funeral, she did exactly what Henry had asked her to do. She dressed in the color he loved to see her in: creamy white. Her friends and family rented a white vintage Cadillac for her to ride in. She had a fine white hat and matching gloves, high heels, and a short jacket with three-­quarter sleeves. She told me that this was exactly how Henry would have wanted her to look. He wanted a funeral that celebrated his life, not one that mourned his death. And he wanted her to be happy. To me, Gladys offered a glimpse of a kind of defiance, not only against the darkness of death but also against the engines of industry that would capitalize on its emotional toll. Gladys is why this book is not about Katrina or simply about the heroism of people like her who offer a glimpse into a kind of rugged survivorship in the face of amazing inefficiency. It is an attempt to see behind these acts in order to reflect on how these people had gotten to the place of needing to be heroes in the first place.

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Chapter eight

Ack n o w l e d g m e n t s

The funding for research upon which this book is inspired was provided for a study about the impact of Hurricane Katrina and long-­term recovery on the basis of age, race, class, and gender. That funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging (Grant #nia 5r01ag28621). I am indebted to the late Gay Becker, who is responsible for writing the initial proposal for this award. Additionally, I want to thank the research support staff and directors at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California San Francisco, and most specifically, I wish to thank my two main research assistants, Edwina Newsom and Taslim van Hattum, for their many contributions to the project and for letting me sit in on and listen to the many interviews that they conducted over the years. Taslim is also the photographer for most of the images found herein. Edwina was not only an excellent interviewer and intellectual copartner for the project, but she is also a superb project manager who managed not only the data, transcription, and coding but also the people working on the project, for which I am eternally grateful. I also thank my colleagues Sharon Kaufman, Ian Whitmarsh, Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, and Kelly Knight for careful reading and comments on drafts of the manuscript and Anitra Grisales for her even more careful editing eye, as well as two extremely helpful anonymous reviewers. Taslim van Hattum, who lived full-­time in New Orleans, was a primary interviewer. She was a constant support for fact finding, editing, and critique, in addition to being a wonderful guide to the community. Early interviews were done among African American participants by Diana English and Edwina Newsom; later we were joined by two other researchers from New Orleans, Shelina Foderingham and Harpreet Samra, and one from San Francisco, Andrena Morris. I want to extend special thanks also to Sandra Moody, M.D., our coinvestigator, for her generous insights on re-

search methods and her careful analysis of the quantitative interpretations of our material. Other special thanks go to Cara Frigand, who joined our project during her study in a master’s program; she undertook additional interviews on the faith dimensions of recovery in New Orleans and helped with literature searches on this topic. Additional help with coding, literature searches, and organization of materials was provided by two extraordinary interns: Carmen Buchner and Amaya Perez. Although I have relied on the steady support of the team of researchers with whom I have worked in New Orleans, and although I have discussed many of the themes in these pages with my friends and acquaintances in New Orleans, a few people deserve special mention: Connie Uddo and Gail Thompson. I want to extend special thanks to local or former residents; to our colleague Martha Ward, whose insights have helped make our research experience and analysis more rich, reflexive, and nurtured; and to Suzanne Heurtin-­Roberts for guiding insights for the initial phase of the project. I alone take responsibility for the analysis and interpretation of materials presented here. I want to stress that, although the analysis is generated from the empirical ground of events and phenomena witnessed in the recovering city, not all the members of my team or even all people who live in New Orleans will agree with my diagnosis in all or, for some, in part. Nor are these insights in any way attributable to, or necessarily shared by, the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, or my university.

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Acknowledgments

Notes

One IT’S NOT ABOUT KATRINA

1 With a few exceptions, the names used in this book are pseudonyms. Portions of this story are also found in a separately published article (Adams, “The Other Road to Serfdom”). 2 Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship. Somers explains her preference for the use of Soros’s term over that of “neoliberalism” on the grounds that neoliberalism is often ambiguously affixed misleadingly to notions of liberalism but more importantly on grounds that it conjures images of small government antistatism when, as she notes, what market fundamentalism has actually produced is market-­driven large government, a point I agree with. It is not surprising that the events leading up to and shortly after Hurricane Katrina were the case in point that spawned Somers’s original theorizing about this issue. 3 George Soros offers a global perspective on the notion that unfettered, or laissez-­faire, capitalism is problematic, writing, “If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them” (Open Society, xii). Carol Greenhouse’s edited volume Ethnographies of Neoliberalism provides a series of essays on the ethnographic effects of neoliberal policies and great comparative cases for this book. 4 David Harvey writes about these failures as being predictable in A Brief History of Neoliberalism. I have written elsewhere about the empirical case to be made against market fundamentalists, using the upsurge in sales of Friedrich Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom as a case in point. See Adams, “The Other Road to Serfdom.” 5 See also Somers and Roberts, “Toward a New Sociology of Rights.” 6 Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 2. 7 A useful analysis of this ideology as a global phenomenon, in addition to Soros’s work, is found in Gillian Hart’s “Development Critiques in the 1990s.”

The so-­called Washington consensus is built on the idea that the market can provide the best solutions to social problems and that the market functions best when it has little to no interference from government (in the form of regulatory measures or taxation), a view that Hart notes is already misleading in its suggestion that successful markets do not already have state provisions. This market-­solution view is an important feature of neoliberalism’s structural adjustment programs advanced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for instance. 8 Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 9 I am aware of the fact, for example, that research for this project was funded by the National Institutes of Health, making me something of a government subcontractor. However, the difference between institutions like the nih and those that turn over decision making about the allocation of resources to private-­sector companies, and the entailments of for-­profit demands, is precisely the focus of this book. 10 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, 131. 11 There is a large literature on this in medical anthropology, by many excellent scholars from Nancy Scheper-­Hughes to Arthur Kleinman and Paul Farmer, and they have explored the ways emotions and suffering are produced by conditions of political and economic disparity. Similarly, the powerful works of Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schoenberg as well as Angela Garcia demonstrate that neoliberalism cannot be entirely disrupted by the liberal humanism of materialist or poststructuralist social theory. The notion that aesthetics in one case, and affect in the other, transcend the relations of production and the discursive apparatuses that produce suffering provide a powerful antidote to contemporary reductionistic thinking about markets, power, and structural violence. 12 As described by Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart. 13 Dauber, “The Sympathetic State.” 14 See Gunewardena and Schuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe, for more on disaster capitalism globally and in New Orleans. I focus here on the specific example of relief assistance for home rebuilding as well as the role of charity nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in this new arrangement of disaster capitalism. 15 Henry Giroux’s Stormy Weather offers a riveting exploration of the failed rescue in light of a critique of politics, marketization, and the production of people who are treated as disposable. 16 See also Conniff, “Drowning the Beast.” 17 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, 13.

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notes to chapter one

18 Some might read New Orleans after Katrina as an example of a contingent assemblage that included a terrorism-­obsessed federal administration, incompetent urban and regional governance, and opportunistic ngos, as one helpful reviewer for this book noted. I would suggest, however, that there was nothing contingent or exceptional about this assemblage and that these conditions were themselves a byproduct of neoliberal demands that have been placed on administrations and institutions all the way from the federal level to the city and the ngos that sprang into existence to help. 19 Klinenberg, Heat Wave; Erikson, Everything in Its Path; Wallace, St. Clair; Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; Button and Oliver Smith, “Disaster, Displacement and Employment”; and Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making. 20 See also Erikson, Everything in Its Path; Oliver-­Smith, “Post-­Disaster Housing” and “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters”; and Klinenberg, Heat Wave and “Denaturalizing Disaster.” 21 Fassin and Vasquez, “Humanitarian Exception as the Rule.” 22 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; the film by Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke; Flaherty, Floodlines; and Fjord, “Disasters, Race, and Disability.” 23 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; and Lubiano, “Race, Class, and the Politics of Death.” 24 See Flaherty, Floodlines. For comparative works about the sociology of disaster and disruption, which more generally inform this work, see Becker, Disrupted Lives and Meanings of Place and Displacement; Erikson, Everything in Its Path and A New Species of Trouble; Klinenberg, Heat Wave and “Denaturalizing Disaster”; Oliver-­Smith, “Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters,” “Post-­Disaster Consensus,” and The Martyred City; Wallace, St. Clair; Phillips, “Cultural Diversity in Disasters”; Stallings, “Causality and ‘Natural’ Disasters”; Steinberg, Acts of God; Tierney, “Social Inequality, Hazards, and Disasters”; Fjord and Manderson, “Anthropological Perspectives on Disasters and Disability”; Bolin, “Family Recovery from Natural Disaster”; Bolin and Klenow, “Response of the Elderly to Disaster” and “Older People in Disaster”; Bolin and Stanford, “The Northridge Earthquake”; and Cazdyn, “Disastrous Consequences.” 25 Gunewardena and Schuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe; Klein, The Shock Doctrine; Flaherty, “Fears of Cultural Distinction on the Gulf Coast”; and Luft, “Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism.” There are many excellent accounts and publications on the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans which I am not able to include here. notes to chapter one

195

26 See Paredes, “Introduction”; Petterson et al., “A Preliminary Assessment”; Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; Horne, Breach of Faith; Brinkley, The Great Deluge; Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Igoe, “Reflections on Distance and Katrina”; Iverson and Armstrong, “Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans”; Jackson, “Declaration of Taking Twice”; Gabe et al., “Hurricane Katrina”; Flaherty, Floodlines; Congleton, “The Story of Katrina”; Daniels et al., On Risk and Disaster; DeSalvo et al., “Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a New Orleans Workforce” and “Health Care Infrastructure in Post-­Katrina New Orleans”; Bergal et al., City Adrift; and Breunlin and Regis, “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map.” 27 See Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans”; Button and Oliver-­Smith, “Disaster, Displacement, and Employment”; Browne, “From the Filmmaker ‘Still Waiting: Life after Katrina’”; Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint; Tierney, “Foreshadowing Katrina” and “Social Inequality, Hazards and Disasters.” 28 Harris, A Diary from the Dome; Montana-­LeBlanc, Not Just the Levees Broke; C. Rose, One Dead in Attic; Reed, The House on First Street; Baum, Nine Lives. 29 Although we interviewed a handful of residents who had decided not to return and who were living permanently in Baton Rouge or the San Francisco Bay Area, we focused primarily on meeting and talking to New Orleanians who had returned to the city.

T wo THE MAKING OF A DISASTER

1 Freudenburg et al., Catastrophe in the Making. See also O’Neill, “Who Sank New Orleans?” 2 See Cardé, American Betrayed. 3 Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, “Land and Water Interface of Louisiana from 2002.” See also MacGillivray Freeman Productions, Hurricane on the Bayou. 4 Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making; MacGillivray Freeman Productions, Hurricane on the Bayou. 5 Goodman, “Introduction.” 6 The Army Corps of Engineers has variously, and with different levels of agreement, contested the critical accounts of its responsibility for the levee failure, according to Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making, chapter 6. See also Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans,” 452. 7 See Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making; and McQuaid et al., “Human Error Blamed.”

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notes to chapter two

8 Cardé, America Betrayed. 9 Ibid. 10 Today, even though lawsuits waged against the Army Corps of Engineers over the flood damage had implicated that the Corps was responsible, few homeowners have been able to benefit from the “too little, too late” gains. See Hayes, “Court: Army Corps of Engineers Liable for Katrina Flooding”; “Judge Holds Army Corps Responsible for Katrina Damage,” updated November 19, 2009, http://www.wdsu.com/news/21658334/detail.html; and Robertson, “In New Orleans, Elation over Katrina Liability Ruling.” 11 “Timeline: Who Knew When the Levees Broke?” February 10, 2006, http:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5200940. 12 “All the News . . . Except Blackwater,” Future News Today, November 25, 2009, accessed July 2010, http://futurenewstoday.blogspot.com/2009/11/all-­news -­except-­blackwater.html. See also Blackwater USA, “Blackwater Joins Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort.” 13 Katz et al., “Housing Families Displaced by Katrina.” 14 Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (gnocdc), Hurricane Katrina impact index, accessed July 12, 2010, http://www.gnocdc.org/Factsforfeatures /HurricaneKatrinaImpact/index.html. See also Sturgis, “fema Tests Trailers for Toxins.” 15 Louisiana natives who have not returned are now located in more than 5,500 cities across the nation, with the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio. For those still living in fema trailers, see Quigley et al., “Katrina Pain Index 2010,” as well as Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, “Reports of Missing and Deceased,” August 2, 2006, accessed January 15, 2008, http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/page.asp?ID=192& Detail=5248. 16 See also gnocdc, “News Release: Facts for Features Hurricane Katrina Impact,” accessed July 15, 2010, http://www.gnocdc.org/Factsforfeatures /HurricaneKatrinaImpact/index.html. For the failure of nursing homes, see Michelle Norris, “Assessing Nursing Homes’ Responses to Katrina,” September 19, 2005, accessed January 17, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story /story.php?storyId=4854893&ps=rs. 17 For a city that had the highest rate of multigenerational families living in it in the United States, this should not be surprising (Flaherty, Floodlines). 18 For good analyses of the racial dynamics of rescue and the immediate aftermath, see Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; and Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint. notes to chapter two

197

19 Flaherty, Floodlines, and Barry, Rising Tide. 20 Michael Homan, “Refugee or Concentration Camp at I-­10 and Causeway?” December 6, 2005, accessed January 2009, http://michaelhoman.blogspot .com/2005/12/refugee-­or-­concentration-­camp-­at-­i-­10.html. 21 Cecilia Vega, “The Parish That Feds Overlooked: Canadian Mounties Reached St. Bernard Before Troops Did,” September 15, 2005, accessed July 15, 2009, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-­bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/15/STBERNARD .TMP. 22 Flaherty, Floodlines, 35. 23 Landstar was the company contracted to do the rescue. See Tim Shorrok, “Why Didn’t the Buses Come?” accessed June 2010, http://www.soros.org /resources/multimedia/katrina/projects/RebuildingInc/story_Buses_print .php. Reference to the constraints placed on volunteer buses by federal agents who had already subcontracted this job to other companies is also, I believe, found in Giroux, Stormy Weather; Cooper and Block, Disaster; and Freudenberg et al., Catastrophe in the Making. See, again, Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans.” 24 See Cooper and Block, Disaster, and Eckholm, “Halliburton’s Unit Work in Iraq.” 25 On Blackwater, see Scahill, “Blackwater Down.” On contracting by Bechtel Corporation as well, see Bechtel Corporation, “Hurricane Katrina Relief: Mississippi, U.S.A. (2005–2006),” accessed August 15, 2008, http://www.bechtel .com/hurricane_relief.html. 26 Scahill, “Blackwater Down.” 27 See Cardé, America Betrayed, for an example. 28 See also Fjord, “Disasters, Race, and Disability.” 29 Beeston, “US Congress to Quiz Blackwater Boss,” and Scahill, “Blackwater Down.” 30 Giroux, Stormy Weather, and Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Somers also points to the fact that the government agencies were “successfully starved of the necessary resources for its citizenship functions and reoccupied instead for market-­ driven aims” (Genealogies of Citizenship, 95–96). 31 See Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster; Henderson et al., “Older Adults’ Responses”; and Bergal et al., City Adrift. 32 Again, Klein, The Shock Doctrine, and Gunewardena and Schuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe are excellent examples here, and both offer insights about New Orleans. 33 Halliburton Watch, http://halliburtonwatch.org. 34 Waxman, “A Memo”; U.S. House of Representatives, “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

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notes to chapter two

35

36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

in Hurricane Katrina Contracts”; Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Response to OIG’s Report on fema’s Award of 36 Trailer Maintenance and Deactivation of Travel Trailers and Manufactured Housing Contracts,” April 24, 2007, accessed February 20, 2008, http://www.fema.gov/media/fact sheets/oigresponse.shtm. “fema Trailer Residents Unite as Housing Crisis Looms,” San Francisco Bay View, June 1, 2008, accessed August 15, 2008, http://news.newamericamedia .org/news/view_article.html?article_id=d70ccbf7c1e13e7d8949e73d9f004a37. On the plans to provide housing, which never materialized, see Rhonda Nabonne, “Trailer Residents to Be Moved into Apartments and Hotels,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, February 14, 2008, accessed August 19, 2008, http:// www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/fema_to_move_trailer_residents .html; and Nigg et al., Hurricane Katrina. Although fema stated that each trailer cost approximately $14,000 to $20,000 to manufacture, the Government Accountability Office (gao) estimates that the costs incurred for each trailer could be as high as $229,000. Halliburton was among the subcontractors for trailer construction. The gao found that fema profited from a total of $30 million in fraudulent payments for trailer maintenance and that it had cited examples of rigged bids and excessive payments on its trailers. See Lisa Myers and Richard Gardella, “$229,000 fema Trailers: Agency Spent More on Trailers Than It Would Have Cost to Buy New Houses,” November 15, 2007, accessed August 15, 2008, http://www.msnbc .msn.com/id/21824609/; Halliburton Watch, “Halliburton Gets Another $33 Million for Hurricane Katrina Clean-­up,” October 12, 2005, accessed September 1, 2008, http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/katrina2.html; Halliburton Watch, “Investigations,” accessed January 2009, http://www .halliburtonwatch.org/shareholder2004.html. See Russell, “NO Blight Ranks Worst in the Nation.” See Katz et al., “Housing Families Displaced by Katrina.” Flaherty, Floodlines, 58. Freudenburg et al., Catastrophe in the Making. David Hammer, “Outgoing Director Says lra Needs New Direction,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, January 14, 2008, accessed June 20, 2009, http:// www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01/outgoing_director_says_lra_nee.htm. Stephens et al., “Excess Mortality in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” For a survey of illness and injury just after Katrina, see Centers for Disease Control, “Surveillance for Illness and Injury after Hurricane Katrina.” For a discussion of mortality, see Wailoo, “A Slow, Toxic Decline,” and Kaiser Family Foundation, “Giving Voice to the People of New Orleans.” notes to chapter two

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4 4 See Saulny, “A Legacy of the Storm,” and Thomas, “It’s Not Over Yet.” 45 Wiesler et al., “Mental Health and Recovery in the Gulf Coast”; Sastry and Van Landingham, “Prevalence of Disparities in Mental Illness among Pre-­Katrina Residents” and “One Year Later”; and Saulny, “A Legacy of the Storm.” 46 See Lovell, “Debating Life after Disaster.” 47 Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint; O’Neill and Dowd, “Introduction”; Powell et al., “Toward a Transformative View of Race”; and Fjord, “Disasters, Race, and Disability.” 48 See also David Hammer, “Road Home’s Grant Calculations Discriminate against Black Homeowners, Federal Judge Rules,” New Orleans Times-­ Picayune, January 14, 2008, accessed August 16, 2010, http://www.nola.com /news/index.ssf/2008/01/outgoing_director_says_lra_nee.html. 49 See Hunter, “Property/Casualty Insurance in 2008,” for a report on this problem more generally. 50 Ibid. See also Peacock and Girard, “Ethnic and Racial Inequalities.” 51 See http://www.gcrconsulting.com/katrina5year/housingAfford.html. 52 Katy Reckdahl, “Section 8 Loophole Thwarts Evacuees Hoping to Return,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, accessed August 2, 2009, http://www.nola .com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/section_8_loophole_thwarts_eva.html; also see gnocdc, “Lakeview Neighborhood: People & Household Characteris‑ tics,” January 8, 2007, accessed August 19, 2008, http://www.gnocdc.org /orleans/5/37/people.html; gnocdc, “New Data Reveals 16 New Orleans Neighborhoods Have Less Than Half Their Pre-­Katrina Households: Postal Records Give Solid Estimates, Provide Innovative Approach to Measuring Recovery,” August 24, 2008, accessed August 29, 2008, http://gnocdc.s3 .amazonaws.com/media/GNOCDCAug21-­08.pdf. 53 Kromm, “Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch.” See also fema, “fema Trailer Park Closure Plan Moves into Final Phase: fema Continues to Provide Resources and Support Services to Help Families Transition to Permanent Housing,” May 2, 2008, accessed August 15, 2008, http://www.fema.gov/news /newsrelease.fema?id=43447; fema, “Myths & Facts: Travel Trailers,” November 8, 2007, accessed August 19, 2008, http://www.fema.gov/newsrelease.fema ?id=41647; fema, “Response to OIG’s Report.” 54 Many of the jobs previously held by local African American skilled and unskilled craftsmen and construction workers were lost to newly arrived immigrant laborers from elsewhere. This accounted for up to 54 percent of the rebuilding labor market (Donato et al., “Reconstructing New Orleans after Katrina”). Largely without work permits or citizenship, these new laborers do not qualify for federal subsidies of any sort despite their rampant poverty.

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notes to chapter two

55

56

57

58 59

60

61

In fact, policies were immediately put into effect that would create optimal conditions of profitable rebuilding, whether or not this served the displaced communities who wanted to return. The Department of Homeland Security suspended large labor regulations for a forty-­five-­day period, which allowed employers not to have to confirm employee identity and eligibility documents with federal authorities. The Department of Labor also lifted wage restrictions for a period of two months, which allowed contractors working on all federally funded construction projects to pay their employees below prevailing federal wage standards. In most cases, with the majority of African American laborers still displaced, the main workforce that immediately emerged was Latino migrant workers, both legal and illegal. Even after black laborers returned, companies continued to show preferential treatment in the hiring of migrant laborers, because their labor costs were lower. In this instance, certain safety and labor standards could be easily abused and exploitation was tolerated by a logic of labor-­based chauvinism (Fletcher et al., “Rebuilding after Katrina”). Ariella Cohen, “Iberville Redevelopment Quietly Gets Underway,” August 27, 2010, http://thelensnola.org/2010/08/27/iberville-­redevelopment-­quietly-­gets -­underway/. “Fewer Homes for Katrina’s Poorest Victims: An Analysis of Subsidized Homes in Post-­Katrina New Orleans,” PolicyLink, accessed March 18, 2009, http://www.policylink.org/documents/nola_fewerhomes.pdf. Mike Howells, “Iberville: No Murders No News,” August 25, 2010, accessed August 29, 2010, http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2010/08/15314.php. See also Quigley, “hud Sends New Orleans Bulldozers” and “New Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again!” Reckdahl, “Section 8 Loophole.” See also Frey and Singer, Katrina and Rita Impacts on Gulf Coast Populations regarding population changes after Katrina. Race-­based structural inequalities during Katrina and recovery are both real (in Nancy Fraser’s sense of a politics of redistribution) and perceptual (in her sense of a politics of recognition). See Fraser, Justice Interruptus, specifically, chapter 1, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” For more on the homeless in post-­Katrina New Orleans, see Rick Jervis, “New Orleans’ Homeless Rate Swells to 1 in 25,” USA Today, March 17, 2008, accessed August 30, 2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-­03-­16 -­neworleans-­homeless-­rate_N.htm. See Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans,” which offers this quote from the Republican congressman Richard Baker from Baton Rouge: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did” (453). notes to chapter two

201

62 Adams et al., “Chronic Disaster Syndrome.” 63 At the five-­year mark, it was estimated that roughly 100,000 people had not been able to return to New Orleans (Quigley et al., “Katrina Pain Index 2010”) and most of these were African American families (see Adams et al., “Chronic Disaster Syndrome”). For different views of the racial history of Creole populations in New Orleans, see Ward, Voodoo Queen. 64 For more excellent work on race and Hurricane Katrina, see Dyson, Come Hell or High Water; Giroux, Stormy Weather; Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint, introduction; Powell et al., “Toward a Transformative View of Race”; and Fjord, “Disasters, Race, and Disability.” 65 See Eggers, Zeitoun.

Three ​“IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE”

1 U.S. Senate, Road Home hearing, May 24, 2007, held by the U.S. Committee on Homeland Security and the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery, accessed April 12, 2010, http://hsgac.senate.gov. 2 In “The Ship of State,” Anglin argues that it is likely that the rise of “federalism” led to the abandonment of so many and to the failure of rescue-­and-­ recovery operations in New Orleans. Specifically, he argues that “the hallmarks of American federalism [are] (1) multiple jurisdictions with overlapping authority and control and (2) incremental policymaking” (defined by “limited information, scarce resources, and self-­interest on the part of organizations and individuals inside and outside the government who are pressing for or against policy change”) are to blame. I agree with the last part of his analysis. 3 “About sba,” accessed September 27, 2010, http://www.sba.gov/aboutsba /index.html. 4 “ap Impact: Katrina a Tale of sba Failure,” accessed September 30, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com. 5 Roy, Poverty Capital. 6 Ibid.

Four NAVIGATING THE ROAD HOME

1 On the closing of Charity Hospital, the most important resource for mental-­ health care in the city, see Lovell, “Debating Life after Disaster.” 2 One heard stories of people like this on occasion: the Lakeview white resident

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notes to chapters three and four

3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10

11

12

who got a grant for $150,000 to rebuild her $400,000 home, the Mid-­City elderly African American couple who got a $60,000 settlement for repairs on their home that was only partially flooded, and the like. Most stories were much less positive. The Road Home, “Eligibility,” 2007, accessed August 19, 2008, http://www .road2la.org/homeowner/eligibility-­info.htm; The Road Home, “Homeowner Program Stats as of August 15th 2008,” 2008, accessed August 19, 2008, http:// www.road2la.org/default.htm. Some homeowners felt that the problem with Road Home was that it only considered the pre-­Katrina home value, and this was inadequate to cover the rising cost of rebuilding homes in the postflood economy. See Kathy Chu, “Homeowners Lose Katrina Insurance Flood Case,” USA Today, August 8, 2008, accessed August 27, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries /insurance/2006-­08-­15-­katrina-­legal_x.htm. David Hammer, “Outgoing Director Says lra Needs New Direction,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, January 14, 2008, accessed June 20, 2010, http://www .nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01/outgoing_director_says_lra_nee.htm. The $150,000 per-­home funding maximum was far below what was needed for many homes. See “Road Home Program Falls Short of Expectations,” August 18, 2010, http://www.wdsu.com/mostpopular/24677818/detail.html. See also Rose et al., “A Long Way Home.” U.S. House of Representatives, “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Hurricane Katrina Contracts.” Finger, “Stranded and Squandered.” Jeremy Alford, “ICF’s Mess,” May 22, 2007, accessed August 27, 2009, http:// www.businessreport.com. For statistics on how much the Road Home Program has either spent in awarding grants or awarded in grants (and it is not clear which is the case), see http://www.road2la.org/newsroom/stats.htm. (However, note that the figures and the website change regularly.) David Hammer, “Blanco Administration Quietly Gave Raise to Road Home Operator,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, March 13, 2008, accessed August 10, 2010, http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/03/road_home_operator _got_25_perc.htm. For a favorable reading of the initial lra director, but little reference to icf, see Hammer, “Outgoing Director.” Ed Ward, “Louisiana Road Home—3 Years, 6.4 billion to Disperse 1.5 Billion of Relief,” July 13, 2009, http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2009/07 /14096.php.

notes to chapter four

203

13 “The Old Man and the Storm,” Frontline, accessed August 10, 2010, http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/katrina/view/. 14 This would mean that the average reward was around $68,000. This figure comes from icf International, “Overview of the Road Home Program,” http:// www.icfi.com/Markets/Community_Development/road-­home-­faqs.asp. 15 See U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “The Road Home? An Examination of the Goals, Cost, Management and Impediments Facing Louisiana’s Road Home Program,” Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery, May 24, 2007, accessed January 10, 2009, http://hsgac.senate .gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_id=cfd84b39 -­7bc4-­4332-­87ab-­0eab2b812077. See also Waxman, “A Memo.” 16 U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “The Road Home?” 17 Desiree Evans, “New Contractor Selected for New Orleans Infamous Road Home Program,” The Institute for Southern Studies, February 27, 2009, http:// www.southernstudies.org/2009/02/new-­contractor-­selected-­for-­new-­orleans -­infamous-­road-­home-­program.html. 18 David Hammer, “ICF’s Oversight of Road Home Program Comes to an End,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, June 11, 2009, http://www.nola.com/news/index .ssf/2009/06/icfs_oversight_of_road_home_pr.html. 19 Jennifer Hale, “Homeowners Still Battling Red Tape over Grant Money,” Fox8tv.net; personal communication from Melanie Erlich, chat, December 14, 2010. 20 http://www.icfi.com/Markets/Community_Development/road-­home-­faqs .asp. 21 Alford, “ICF’s Mess.” 22 Ibid. 23 A good parallel discussion about how people fail to see both that the private sector cannot solve their problems and that the government is actually quite visible in their world is found in Wailoo et al., Katrina’s Imprint. For another good example of this trend, see Hartman and Squires, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster, and in particular, the essay by John Taylor and Josh Silver titled “From Poverty to Prosperity: The Critical Role of Financial Institutions” (pp. 233–254), which calls for more private-­sector solutions to the infrastructural problems created by man-­made storms and floods. Similar explorations are offered in the section titled “Part Three: Private Sector Strategies for Managing Risk,” in Daniels et al., On Risk and Disaster. 24 Scheper-­Hughes, Death without Weeping.

204

notes to chapter four

Five GETTING TO THE BREAKING POINT

1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

9

See Becker, Disrupted Lives. See Adams et al., “Aging Disaster.” See Lovell, “Debating Life after Disaster.” Richard A. Webster, “Mental Health Duty Falls on West Jefferson,” New Orleans CityBusiness, July 16, 2007, accessed July 20, 2010, http://findarticles .com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/is_20070716/ai_n19369756/. As this manuscript was being finalized, another book written by a former Road Home employee came out, and it offers insider testimony about the ways in which this program was mismanaged. See Williams, Why Can’t I Get over Katrina? See Kathy Chu, “Homeowners Lose Katrina Insurance Flood Case,” USA Today, August 8, 2008. See also the citizens’ action letter of complaint: “Re: Louisiana Road Home Program for Homeowner Assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with Federally Financed ($10.4 Billion) Grants of Up to $150,000 Per Homeowner as Part of hud’s cdbg Program,” accessed August 27, 2010, http://chatushome.com/chatusfiles/HUD_OIG_Complaint_For PublicRelease_final__2_2_09.pdf. See also Robert J. Hunter, “Property/Casualty Insurance in 2008: Overpriced Insurance and Underpaid Claims Result in Unjustified Profits, Padded Reserves, and Excessive Capitalization” (Washington, D.C.: Consumer Federation of America), January 10, 2008, accessed August 15, 2009, http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/2008Insurance_White _Paper.pdf. See the critical reviews of icf and the Road Home Program in “Road Home Contractor Receives $99 Million Raise,” Sunshine Review, accessed July 15, 2010, http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Road_Home_contractor_receives _$99_million_raise. As part of our interviews, we offered postinterview psychological counseling services with a local therapist. Few to none of our participants made use of these services, a phenomenon we learned was probably associated with the sense that people felt that they were dealing with so many other fiscal, physical, and social problems on a daily basis that their own mental health was not considered a priority. Interestingly, it was also difficult to find any local therapists who could participate in the first year, as all of them were still dealing with their own recovery. See also Bergeren and Curial, “After the Storm”; Birch and Wachter, Rebuilding Urban Places after Disaster; and Brodie et al., “Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters.” Saulny, “A Legacy of the Storm.” notes to chapter five

205

10 The idea that people and institutions were pushed to their breaking points spread far beyond the health-­care sector. One-­third of New Orleans police officers deserted the city in the days before and during the storm, stretching law enforcement thin and resulting in officer suicide and attrition. Multiple officers from the New Orleans Police Department (nopd) were arrested weeks after Katrina for suspicion of vehicle theft and other illegal or unbecoming actions, and the department had begun to spiral downward, being unable to police the community with any form of competency and resulting in multiple unarmed shootings of suspects, inappropriate behavior, and, perhaps most important, coverups of major crimes. The nopd is another clear example of an institution on the brink of or finally at a breaking point. The trials surrounding the Danziger Bridge incident that finally came to light, showing the depth to which the nopd had collapsed and imploded during and since Katrina, prompted a federal takeover of the nopd. See Jim Litke, “New Orleans’ Thin Blue Line Stretched Taut,” September 4, 2005, updated January 12, 2011, http:// www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-­112818394.html; and ProPublica and Frontline investigations of the Danziger Bridge shootings and similar killings, http:// www.propublica.org/nola/. 11 Clough also refers to Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia while noting this definition of affect. 12 Hardt, “Foreword,” 2. 13 See the compelling work of Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect, or the work of Angela Garcia, for example, in The Pastoral Clinic. 14 Jackie Orr, in Panic Diaries, described the exchange between affect and political economy in her work on panic disorder—a condition she attributes to the crisis of the market and the marketing and profiteering of pharmaceutical companies that make “panic” drugs. In this case, affect is a material thing. It becomes embedded in the conditions of life, struggle, and recovery and in the bodies of those who are prescribed drugs because their bodies are prone to panic. Affect, in panic, is directly opposed to the market while simultaneously being produced by it. Pharmaceutical companies have responded to panic as a new site for not only therapeutic intervention but also for the production of large profits among legions of (mostly) women whose panic is itself generated from living in a free-­market world where the commodity form defines them.

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notes to chapter five

Six FAITH IN A VOLUNTEER RECOVERY

1 See Cnaan, The Invisible Caring Hand, and Wuthnow, Saving America? Wuthnow points out that a precursor to Bush’s initiatives was Clinton’s Charitable Choice provisions, which allowed churches to receive government funds more easily during the period of welfare reform that began in 1996. 2 See Dauber, “The Sympathetic State.” 3 See Heather Knight, “SF Food Banks Starving for Funds,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2011. 4 See also van Hattum et al., “Recovery as an All-­Consuming Fire.” 5 Mark Dolliver, “The Divine and Profane as Hurricane Factors,” Adweek, October 10, 2005, 46. 6 Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker, “Bush Pledges Historic Effort to Help Gulf Coast Recover,” Washington Post, September 16, 2005, http://www.washington post.com/wp-­dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502417.html. 7 Jones, “Citizens, Partners or Patrons?” See also van Hattum et al., “Recovery as an All-­Consuming Fire.” 8 Disaster Pastor Network, “About Jerry Davis,” accessed July 20, 2010, http:// www.anoint.com/about_jerry.html. For photos of the camp, see http://www .photographersdirect.com/buyers/search.asp?search=good+news+camp+new +orleans&sz=0&maximages=40&l=on&p=on&s=on&w=on. 9 Sparks, “‘An Anchor to the People,’” 17. 10 Ibid. Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, “Miracles of Connection,” accessed December 3, 2009, http://www.la-­umc.org/katrina07 and http://www.la-­umc.org/. 11 Sparks, “‘An Anchor to the People.’” 12 “pda and Hurricane Katrina: In It for the Long Run: 1.2 Million Volunteer Hours in, Presbyterians Still Going to Gulf Region,” http://www.pcusa.org /news/2009/4/17/pda-­and-­hurricane-­katrina-­it-­long-­run/; Churchwork, Jericho Road website, September 2006, http://www.jerichohousing.org. 13 Sparks, “‘An Anchor to the People.’” 14 Jacqueline L. Salmon and Leef Smith, “Two-­Thirds of Katrina Donations Exhausted,” Washington Post, February 27, 2006. 15 Evangelism Connections, accessed August 15, 2010, http://evangelismconnec tions.org/index.php?Itemid=42&catid=14&id=54%3Aa-­spiritual-­recovery -­two-­years-­after-­hurricane-­katrina&option=com_content&view=article. 16 Ibid. 17 Cited in Melissa Charbonneau, “Faith Based Teams Rebuilding New Orleans,”

notes to chapter six

207

18 19

20 21

Christian World News, 2008, cbn News Network, accessed October 25, 2011, http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/409724.aspx. See Chandra and Acosta, The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations. Former Louisiana residents are located in more than 5,500 cities across the nation, with the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio. A majority of displaced residents are women: 59 percent compared to 41 percent of men. One-­third of former residents each earn less than $20,000 a year. See Quigley et al., “Katrina Pain Index 2010.” Muehlebach, “On Affective Labor,” 76. Ibid., 62.

Seven CHARITY AND THE AFFECT ECONOMY

1 Voluntourism is volunteering among tourists. They usually pay for their trip and often for the cost of lodging and food, although this varies from organization to organization. Once in the location, they work for a volunteer agency, spending some of their time doing tourist activities and the rest of their time on volunteer work. 2 See http://www.handsonneworleans.org, accessed August 10, 2010. 3 See Lewis, The House of Dance and Feathers. 4 See Luft, “Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism.” In Floodlines, Flaherty points out that sometimes the relief aid exacerbated racial tensions as well, as seen in the case of largely white St. Bernard Parish, which used relief and rebuilding efforts that excluded African Americans (129–132). 5 See Flaherty, Floodlines. 6 New Orleans public schools, for example, are gradually being turned into charter organizations, with sponsorships from banks, businesses, foundations, and large corporations in exchange for managers’ majority positions on school and admissions boards. 7 James Igoe, in “The Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania,” offers a telling discussion of the difference between ngos and grass-­roots social movements in the case of Tanzania land-­rights movements. 8 http://www.handsonneworleans.org, accessed August 10, 2010. 9 http://www.handsonnetwork.org, accessed July 21, 2010. 10 For some organizations, the difficulty of obtaining government funds is an obstacle, including the filling out of forms and procedures for qualification. These are seen as “layers of bureaucracy” and “red tape” that they must overcome in order to get funds but which deter them from even asking. See http://

208

notes to chapter seven

11

12

13 14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21

www.nola.com/religion/index.ssf/2010/03/two_religious_denominations _closing_hurricane_katrina_chapters.html. “icf International Completes Acquisition of Macro International Inc,” April 1, 2009, accessed September 25, 2010, https://www.icfi.com/~/media/Files/ICFi /White%20Papers/faith%20based%20partnerships.ashx. For info on the faith -­based initiatives, see https://www.icfi.com/~/media/Files/ICFi/White%20 Papers/faith%20based%20partnerships.ashx. Macro International has a broad base of work in health services and information technology health-­related services. Originally, the acquisition of Macro appeared to be linked to icf’s desire to expand into faith-­based community organizations. It is not clear how much of their work through the acquisition of Macro International is focused on faith-­based initiatives today (http://www.icfi.com/news/2009/icf-­to-­acquire -­macro-­international-­inc). “Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives,” accessed September 25, 2010, http:// www.icfi.com/insights/white-­papers/2009/faith-­based-­and-­neighborhood -­partnerships-­learning-­from-­the-­past-­building-­on-­the-­promise. Ibid. For 2008, Macro had unaudited revenues and an ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) margin of approximately $150 million and 12 percent, respectively. The cash purchase price was approximately $155 million, prior to what been a value of a tax benefit of approximately $26 million. The fiscal transaction is itself interesting. See http://www .icfi.com/news/2009/icf-­to-­acquire-­macro-­international-­inc, accessed September 30, 2010. Josh Good, Brent Orrell, and Jeannette M. Hercik, “Faith-­Based and Neighborhood Partnerships—Learning from the Past, Building on the Promise,” accessed June 12, 2012, https://www.icfi.com/~/media/Files/ICFi/White%20 Papers/faith%20based%20partnerships.ashx. “Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives,” accessed October 1, 2010, http:// www.icfi.com/insights/white-­papers/2009/faith-­based-­and-­neighborhood -­partnerships-­learning-­from-­the-­past-­building-­on-­the-­promise. Emphasis added: see “About nawb,” page 1, accessed October 1, 2010, http:// www.nawb.org/about_us.asp. From The Philanthrocapitalism Manifest website, accessed June 12, 2012, http:// www.philanthrocapitalism.net/?s=corporations+can+do+well+by+doing +good. “Let’s Hear Those Ideas,” Newsweek, August 12, 2010, pp. 55–57. Ibid., 56. Ibid. notes to chapter seven

209

22 23 24 25

Jones, “Citizens, Partners or Patrons?” Eikenberry and Kluver, “The Marketization of the Nonprofit Sector.” Jones, “Citizens, Partners or Patrons?” 159. Preston, “Rethinking Corporate Giving,” June 3, 2010, accessed July 2011, http://philanthropy.com/article/Rethinking-­Corporate-­Giving/65794/. The article appears to have been edited since the first version I read, and so I have paraphrased from the version seen in the first article here. Also, I note that an error was made in the article “The Other Road to Serfdom” appearing in Public Culture that used this material, in which I mistakenly identified Caroline Preston, the author of the article, as the ceo for Western Union, who is Christina Gold. 26 Salvatore Cardoni, “A Call to Donate: Gates, Buffet Urge Fellow Billionaires to Leave Their Fortunes to Charity,” Take Part, accessed October 12, 2010, http:// www.takepart.com. 27 See Moodie, “Microfinance and the Gender of Risk,” for a good example of this in the international development aid through microfinance world, and the ways this unfairly penalizes women through risk discourse. 28 An Overview of New Orleans Index at Five: From Recovery to Transformation, January 2011, http://www.frbatlanta.org/commdev/highlight_neworl.cfm.

Eight KATRINA AS THE FUTURE

1 Liu and Plyer, “The New Orleans Index.” 2 “Prosperity reports” are found in the Brookings Institute, “The New Orleans Index at Five: Measuring Greater New Orleans Progress toward Prosperity,” 2010, http://www.coweninstitute.com/our-­work/applied-­research/education -­archive/education-­transformation-­archive/the-­new-­orleans-­index-­at-­five -­measuring-­greater-­new-­orleans-­progress-­toward-­prosperity/. 3 “unity Releases Report on People Still Trapped in Katrina’s Ruins,” December 28, 2010, accessed February 2, 2010, http://unitygno.org/2010/12/unity -­releases-­report-­on-­people-­still-­trapped-­in-­katrinas-­ruins/. 4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Fast Facts of Areas Affected by Hurricane Katrina,” September 6 2005, accessed November 12, 2005, http://www.census.gov/Press Release/www/releases/archives/hurricanes_tropical_storms/005672.html; Brookings Institute, “The New Orleans Index at Five.” 5 “Make Shaw Group Deliver on Hazard Mitigation Grant Program: An Editorial,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, November 13, 2010, accessed March 5,

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2011, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2010/11/make_shaw_group _deliver_on_haz.html. 6 chat News, “Lost Paperwork in rhp, hmgp, and Now hmgp Accused of Graft,” email communication with chat list-­serv, accessed August 11, 2011. 7 See Williams, Why Can’t I Get over Katrina? 8 Arlie Hochschild, in The Managed Heart, writes about the capitalization of human emotion in service-­oriented jobs such as airline attendants and waiters and waitresses. Here, we see a similar capitalization but on the sorrows induced by disaster and failed recovery.

notes to chapter eight

211

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index

acorn, 133, 157 affect: and the economy, 9–12, 123–25, 174–75; and labor, 149; and political

Charity Hospital, 107 chat (Citizens’ Road Home Action Team), 35, 82–88, 182–83

economy, 206n14; and social theory, 194, 122–24; surplus, 1, 122–25, 149–51 African American experiences, post-­ Katrina, 15, 26, 37–39, 42 Army Corps of Engineers, 14, 22–23,

civil rights, 11, 15, 94, 148, 150 Clough, Patricia, 123 Cnaan, Ram, 207 corruption, 81, 92–93, 179; police, 44 crime, post-­Katrina, 30, 44, 206n10

60, 188–89, 196n6; debris removal by, 34, 63; loss of wetlands caused by, 22, 197n10; subcontractors from, 8, 24–25, 31–32, 165 Barry, John, 43 Beacon of Hope, 133, 141–42, 143, 159–61, 172

Dauber, Michele, 13 deaths, caused by Katrina, 25–26; rate increase, post-­Katrina, 120, 184–85, 190 debt, 60–61 depression, 50–51, 100, 103–6, 111, 121

Bechtel, 24, 32 Becker, Gay, 17 Bishop, Matthew, 169

destitution, 113–22 devaluation of homes, post-­Katrina, 35, 39, 76, 82, 90, 184, 203n4 disaster: capitalism, 7–9, 30–33, 185–87;

Blackwater, 5, 8, 15, 24, 25, 30–31, 32 Blanco, Kathleen, 3, 84, 90–91, 130 BP oil spill, 14, 154, 179 bureaucratic failure, 7–8, 69, 89, 121, 129–30, 173

literature, 14–16, 195–96; second-­order, 1, 21, 33–37, 52–53, 122 Disaster Pastor Network, 132 documentation, New Orleanians’ difficulties with providing, 3–4, 39, 208n10

Bush, George W., 46, 131, 136

Dyson, Eric Michael, 31

Canadian Mounties, 29 Cardé, Leslie, 188 Carnegie, Andrew, 12 “Causeway Camp,” 26 charity, 10–11, 153–75, 161

emotional trauma, 46–52, 65–66, 78–81, 95–97, 99–125 Edwards, Michael, 172 Eggers, Dave, 31 Erikson, Kai, 15

ethnographic method, 17–18 evacuation, 25–26, 30, 55–56 faith: in relation to: God, 130–31, 138–46; and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 21, 129–36; and neoliberalism, 128–30, 148–49, 186; response to disaster, 1–2, 11–12, 21, 92, 126–51; safety net, 147–51, 154 Federal Emergency Management Agency. See fema federal relief, 12–14, 128–29 fema, 3, 25–32, 77, 128; and homeland security, 28–30; trailers, 25, 32, 61, 199n36 flooding, experiences of, 2–3, 46, 68, 108, 131–32 Foucault, Michel, 9, 14 Freudenberg, William, 15; and the growth machine, 22 Giroux, Henry, 14 Good News Camp, 132, 142 government “handouts,” 9, 81 grass-­roots recovery, 1–2, 126–28, 133–35, 155–58; and the private sector, 158–62; and social justice, 157–58 Green, Michael, 169 Gunewardena, Nandini, 15–16 Halliburton, 8, 24, 30, 32, 124, 129, 161, 165, 199n36 Hammerman and Gainer, 87–88, 89 HandsOn New Orleans, 162–64 HandsOn network, 8, 154–55 Hochschild, Arlie, 211 Homeland Security, Department of, 14, 30, 31–32, 49, 200–201n54 homelessness, 41–42, 178 Housing Authority of New Orleans, 40, 41 Hurricane Betsy, 26 Hurricane Rita, 25, 32 226

index

icf international, 8, 35–36, 82–89, 129, 166–69, 174 illnesses, 100–101; mental-­health, 107–8, 121, 205n8 insurance companies, 34–35, 60, 77, 95– 97, 104 Jindal, Supriya, 136 Katrina: bill, 61; category of storm, 95–97; fatigue, 178–80; narratives about (see narratives from New Orleanians about Katrina); savvy, 76 kbr Associates, 24 Klein, Naomi, 7, 15–16 Klinenberg, Eric, 15 Lake Pontchartrain, 22, 68, 139 Landrieu, Mary, 85 Landrieu, Mitch, 153, 180 Laqueur, Thomas, 20 levees: breached, 22, 25, 27; unrepaired, 24–25, 188 loss of jobs, 42, 51, 62 Louisiana Recovery Authority (lra), 20, 79, 81, 93 Lower Ninth Ward, 25, 45, 133, 137, 176–78 Luft, Rachel, 156 Macro International, 166–67, 169, 170, 173, 186, 209n11, 209n14 market-­driven governance, 4–7, 14, 15; Keynesian policies, 12; market fundamentalism, 5; neoliberalism, 5, 9 Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (mrgo), 22, 188 Muehlebach, Andrea, 149–50 National Guard, 26, 28, 30 narratives from New Orleanians: about faith, 138, 139–41, 143–45, 146–47; about Katrina, 27–29, 36–37, 42, 46– 48, 56–57, 102–7, 108–11, 117–20

neoliberalism, 9, 13, 89, 158, 173, 193n2, 194n7; failed policies of, 128; ideals of, 52, 62 Oliver-­Smith, Anthony, 15 Orr, Jackie, 124, 206n14 Petryna, Adriana, 16 philanthrocapitalism, 12, 21, 159, 169–74 Points of Light Institute, 8, 128, 164–65, 170 postdisaster recovery for New Orleanians, 14–17, 33–37, 59–66, 74–83, 91–92, 120–22, 183–85 poverty capital, 73 public-­private partnerships, 5–6, 31–32, 154–55, 185–86 publicly subsidized housing, 40–41, 178 race, 15, 18; loss of housing, 42–45; publicly subsidized housing, 38–41; and poverty, 40–41; in relation to dispossession, 37–45 Red Cross, 129, 136, 163 rescue-­and-­relief operations, 7–8, 14, 25–30, 32, 37, 186–87 Rivers-­Roberts, Kim, 31 Road Home (the Road Home Program), 1, 20, 34–36, 60, 74–97, 128; and Hammerman and Gainer, 89; and icf, 8, 83–91, 165–68; and the Louisiana Recovery Authority, 20, 81, 93, 179; mitigation program, 182–85; and neoliberalism, 87; in relation to arbitration, 1, 60, 86, 110; statistics about, 84–88

safety-­net programs, 8, 11–12, 121, 147–49, 154 St. Bernard Parish, 27, 29, 40, 99, 135, 176 St. Bernard Project, 186 Salvation Army, 107, 128, 129, 134 Scheper-­Hughes, Nancy, 94, 194n11 Schuller, Mark, 15–16 Senate hearings about Road Home, 85–86 Shaw Group, the, 8, 24, 25, 32, 83, 89, 129, 165, 182 Small Business Administration (sba), 8, 20, 34, 66–72, 128 social contract, the, 6, 150 Social Innovation Fund (sif), 170–71 Solnit, Rebecca, 138 Somers, Margaret, 5 Soros, George, 5, 193n3 Stormy Weather (Giroux), 14, 194n15 suicide, 106, 131–32, 184 Superdome, the, 25, 29 Titan, 24 trailers. See fema: trailers trauma, during recovery. See emotional trauma volunteers, 1, 11, 21, 64–65, 91–93, 118, 126–51, 136–38, 208n1 vulnerability, 15, 55–60, 72–73, 120–22 Ward, Martha, 176, 181, 192 Wuthnow, Robert, 207 Xe Services. See Blackwater

Roy, Ananya, 73

index

227

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas, Doctors for Democracy: Health Professionals in the Nepal Revolution, and a coeditor of Sex and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective and Medicine between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Ground.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Adams, Vincanne, 1959– Markets of sorrow, labors of faith : New Orleans in the wake of Katrina / Vincanne Adams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5434-­5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5449-­9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hurricane Katrina, 2005. 2. Disaster relief— Government policy—Louisiana—New Orleans— History—21st century. 3. Social justice—Louisiana— New Orleans. 4. Emergency management— Government policy—United States. 5. Privatization— Government policy—United States. I. Title. hv6362005.l8 a33 2013 976.3′35064—dc23 2012033717