Reason Magazine - Staff

Myths of Hurricane Katrina

drothsch@gmu.edu (Daniel Rothschild) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:50:00 EDT

In his opening column to the recent issue of Time devoted to New Orleans, managing editor Richard Stengel reports that his impressions of the city's recovery efforts are based on "conversations with everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin to jazz great Terence Blanchard."

That sounds impressive, but truth be told, "everyone from the mayor to a famous jazz musician" isn't a terribly wide range, and misses a good deal of the city. The tendency of journalists to look first to political leaders-who, to say the least, usually have other motives for pushing a narrative-and big names explains why so much of the media has gotten post-Katrina New Orleans so wrong. Turning first to the great and the good to get the story is an easy mistake to make in a society where everything from the foods we eat to the way we garden is subject to the whims of the ruling class.

But leadership isn't something you are elected into. There have been plenty of leaders on the Gulf Coast over the last two years. It's just that their names don't roll off the tongues of magazine editors, or appear in newspapers or campaign ads.

If there's any good news to come out of the recovery effort it's that people in the hurricane zone have learned to become less reliant on political saviors and more reliant on themselves. In May 2007, the highly-regarded University of New Orleans Survey Research Center released their annual survey on quality of life in Orleans Parish. For "the first time in twenty years," the survey reported, "something rivaled crime as the ‘biggest' problem facing New Orleans." That problem was dissatisfaction with the local political leadership-just one-third of New Orleanians approved of Mayor Nagin's performance in office.

This isn't terribly unsurprising. Political leaders simply don't have the knowledge or-thankfully-the power to conceive, plan, and execute the rebuilding of entire communities after a disaster. Every community, neighborhood, and street is unique. The most effective solutions are being found locally, mostly in spite of government efforts, not because of them. The real problem, as economists Sanford Ikeda and Peter Gordon suggest, is not that political leaders aren't doing enough, it's that they're doing too much, and doing it poorly. There's too much centralized control preventing people from finding the solutions that best fit their own communities.

The best leadership comes from the bottom up, not the top down. And it's the neighborhoods that have been able to forge community leaders-from volunteers, entrepreneurs, sometimes even compassionate bureaucrats willing to bend the rules-that have shown the most signs of progress.

In Waveland, Mississippi, for example, the manager of the local Wal-Mart worked with the company's corporate officials to open a store under a tent in the parking lot, then later opened a convenient, easily accessible "Wal-Mart Express"-the first-ever store of its type-designed especially for post-Katrina Mississippi. Such creativity and on-the-fly adaptation and innovation on-the-fly would have been inconceivable from FEMA, which kept physicians from treating wounded evacuees because they weren't registered with the federal government, and kept firefighters away from those in need until they completed sexual harassment training, and courses on FEMA's history.

Down the road in Bay St. Louis, I spoke with resident Alicia Cool, who told me she reopened her flower shop because "without business you can't have people wanting to come back and stay here." Despite the devastation all around her, her perseverance paid off. Her sales went through the roof. While flowers wouldn't at first blush seem to be something people of limited means in the process of rebuilding would want to purchase, they became, she explained, a symbol of beauty and normality in an environment devoid of both. Tim Williamson, the president of the Idea Village, an organization that helps would-be entrepreneurs get their footing, has seen many such stories. Entrepreneurs know that they're rebuilding more than their businesses, he says. "The story's going to be written, I think, that the entrepreneurs restarted New Orleans.... They did it on the back of their own spirit and on their own funds."

Even within the various bureaucracies leaders can flourish, though it's often those who break free of the red tape, and try to forge their own way. Even then, it isn't easy. One example is Doris Voitier, the superintendent of the St. Bernard Parish Schools. Voitier became something of a local hero when she realized that functional schools were critical to getting residents to move back to the parish. She decided she'd figure out a way to open them, bureaucracy be damned.

Enter FEMA. FEMA officials told Voitier she'd need to have a "kickoff meeting" before she could open the schools-where she'd meet not with parents, or students, or teachers, but with a federal environmental protection team, a historical preservation team, and the "404-" and "406-mitigation teams" (terms which refer to specific sections of the Stafford Act, the law that covers federal disaster response). And it wasn't a "meeting" so much as an introduction to the vast bureaucracy that was FEMA's "education task force," basically a list of barriers Voitier would have to clear before she could start classes. Voitier says she sat in the meeting thinking, "Can't somebody help me get a school started and clean my schools?"

Voitier decided to cut her losses and reopen the schools without FEMA's help. She says she adopted a "the heck with you guys" approach. "We can do it, we'll make it happen, and we'll send you the bill." Before Thanksgiving, Voitier opened her first school, and 334 students attended the first day of classes. By the last day of the year, there were 2,360, and over 3,000 on the first day of the next.

For her heroic efforts to reopen her schools, Voitier would later be investigated for misappropriation of federal property. When a local fire chief determined a FEMA trailer was unsafe for classroom use, Voitier made do, and used the facility to housewashing machines for her teachers, who were living in their own trailers in the school's parking lot. This change in use was sanctioned by the appropriate FEMA field official. But when that official rotated out, he failed to file the appropriate paperwork, leaving the next official under the impression that Voitier had changed use of a federal trailer without the government's permission. The horror.

There are other stories of local leaders stepping up. Neighborhood associations are a good example. LaToya Cantrell, who by day works for an education non-profit, turned the 75-year old Broadmoor Improvement Association into a leading example of how to organize a neighborhood to rebuild. She reached out to universities and corporations who offered expertise and volunteers for the effort. Broadmoor now has rebuilt 75 percent of its homes, and is constructing a community center. But the bureaucrats have gotten in the way here, too. The neighborhood association wants to open a charter school in an abandoned school building. The parish school board, fighting further the decay of its authority, is doing everything it can to prevent them.

Less than a mile to the north, the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization is trying to bring businesses into the community, matching prospective business owners up with retail space and working with commercial developers to ensure that they're attuned neighborhood concerns.

The commonly held notion that post-Katrina recovery effort has been hampered by a lack of leadership is true only if "leadership" refers only to political leadership. There, there's not only a lack of leadership, but a stifling bureaucracy that's smothering real progress. Across the Gulf Coast, there are real people taking real risks, trying to buck the obstacles thrown in their way, and many are seeing real results. Some are motivated by profit, others by love of their neighbors, or a sense of community. But they aren't posturing, or complaining, or speechifying. They're acting.

We've heard a great deal about the leadership problem in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast over previous month. Make no mistake, there is one. But the problem is not that city hall, the state house, or the U.S. Congress aren't doing enough. It's that they're doing too much, and preventing the real leaders-the organic leaders springing up in community centers, school halls, and business districts-from making their own decisions, informed by their own, localized wisdom and experience, about how to rebuild.

The Myths of Hurricane Katrina

drothsch@gmu.edu (Daniel Rothschild) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:18:00 EDT

Rather than deal with the nuances affecting communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the media like to cover New Orleans as if it is synonymous with the entire area affected by Hurricane Katrina. This is similar to the way the media often treats "Africa" as if it were one extremely large, monolithic country.

Many well-researched stories by dedicated reporters have come out of New Orleans in the past two years. But what's largely missing is any coverage of the Louisianan parishes near New Orleans, or of the many counties in Mississippi also hit by Katrina. In the aftermath of Katrina, the Red Cross provided assistance to some 4 million people, although only 450,000 people lived in New Orleans. President Bush's disaster declaration covered 90,000 square miles. New Orleans encompasses only 350 square miles, almost half of it water. Many parts of New Orleans did not flood, but over 99 percent of buildings in neighboring St. Bernard Parish did.

Why, then, does New Orleans receive the majority of the media coverage? Reporters disproportionately focus on New Orleans because it's more interesting, it fits more preconceived narratives, and it is, paradoxically, both a simpler and more complex story than other areas damaged by Katrina.

The complexity stems from the diversity of experiences across New Orleans' neighborhoods and communities. No single factor--be it financial resources, political power, geography, or demography--portends an area's post-Katrina experience. The wealthy Lakeview area, for example, took over a year to show any progress, while working-class Broadmoor began rebuilding within weeks. The previously apolitical, keep-to-themselves Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans East began rebuilding homes and packing their church for Mass before Entergy, the local power monopoly, would even turn their electricity back on. This complexity creates human interest stories, which reporters package into pre-imagined narratives of race, class, and power, even if the anecdotes don't fit what's actually happening.

But the New Orleans story is also simple, because it can be told through the lens of the same superficial, Disneyfied version of New Orleans that informed most Americans' conceptions of the city before Katrina. Few visitors to New Orleans ventured outside of the French Quarter, Business District, and Garden District. However, New Orleans as understood by the majority of its residents is more complex than an hour-long tour or weekend bender lets on. Since Katrina, reporters focus on telling stories through the tourism-and-jazz lens, despite the fact that before Katrina, shipping and related industries represented more income and more jobs than tourism. But the familiar stereotypes make for easy reporting.

New Orleans is still struggling, but it is not alone. For all the frustration people in New Orleans feel about warped or clichéd coverage, people in Mississippi and Louisiana locales outside New Orleans get almost no coverage at all. Across the Pearl River, Louisianans feel that Mississippians are getting more than their share of federal money. Key to making sense of this is understanding that Louisiana and Mississippi experienced very different storms.

Mississippi suffered hurricane damage. In many areas, Katrina's storm surge penetrated a mile inland, to the raised CSX railroad tracks, which act as a levee and broke much of the surge's power, and washed away virtually everything in its path. Further inland, homes and businesses were flooded and damaged by 140-mph winds. The destruction was significant - but St. Bernard Parish and the New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward suffered more.

Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes in Louisiana were, by contrast, not victims of a traditional hurricane, but of poor government and central planning, which allowed massive but preventable flooding. In these areas, levees, floodwalls, and engineering projects designed to keep flooding out failed, and instead kept water in. For periods ranging from days to weeks, entire neighborhoods sat underwater, while antiquated city pumps slowly inched down the flooding. Mississippi was hit by a moderately sized hurricane, while Louisiana suffered from a flood of biblical proportions.

This crucial distinction is often lost in media coverage. That's unfortunate, because understanding it is vital to understanding the subsequent recovery efforts. Reporters and pundits sometimes distinguish Louisiana and Mississippi by noting the marked difference in the two states' recovery periods. Frequently, Mississippi's lower taxes, less generous welfare programs, and Republican leadership get credit for making the state less dependent on Washington, and therefore better able to pull itself up by the straps of its collective hip-waders. Many Mississippians that I and my colleagues have interviewed or spoken with have bought into this story - "we" are not like "them."

Truth be told, neither state is an exemplar of self-sufficiency or probity. According to the Tax Foundation, in 2004 Louisiana got back $1.45, while Mississippi received $1.77, for every dollar sent to Washington. Researchers Russell Sobel and Peter Leeson point out that while Louisiana does bear the ignominy of the highest rate of public corruption in the country, Mississippi isn't far behind. In other words, while differences exist, neither Mississippi nor Louisiana are paragons of virtuous - or limited - government.

The speed and quality of the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast have depended upon a number of factors: the type and amount of damage from the storm, insurance coverage on affected homes and businesses, whether governments made credible commitments about infrastructure and the "rules of the game" for rebuilding, and the inherent resilience of the communities affected. Indeed, community resilience is a perhaps the most critical factor in recovery, and one that researchers are just beginning to understand.

The most effective solutions to rebuilding are actually coming from people, not governments. So it's not really prudent to discuss recovery in conventional, red-blue political geography. While governance is important, it hasn't been the sole or even primary determinant of the recovery process. What's happened since Katrina is far too complex for neatly-packaged conclusions about party or ideological supremacy, or to draw broad inferences about the nature of people in Mississippi, New Orleans, or those Louisianans outside of New Orleans.

Scholars will undoubtedly debate the legacy of Katrina for decades, and we will hopefully learn a great deal about the role that politics and public policy played in the recovery process. But even today, two things are evident: Political geography is not the silver bullet for explaining the response to disasters, and Katrina's impact wasn't uniform across the Gulf Coast.

Tomorrow: Myth 3: The Gulf Coast is suffering from a crisis of leadership.

Daniel Rothschild is the associate director of the Global Prosperity Initiative at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Mercatus Center is conducting a five-year study of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

The Myths of Hurricane Katrina

drothsch@gmu.edu (Daniel Rothschild) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:00:00 EDT

I am currently in New Orleans on my nineteenth trip to the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina, as part of the Mercatus Center's research on Gulf Coast rebuilding. Earlier this month, I'd been asked several times what I thought about Time magazine's August 13th cover story. Thing is, I had a hard time finding it. The magazine was stocked on the newsstand at the New Orleans airport upside-down. When I pulled out the front copy, I noticed that the copy behind it had also been flipped. As had the copy behind that-and so on to the back of the news rack. It was a subtle form of protest you see often in the Crescent City.

The author of the story, Michael Grunwald, probably had no control over the cover, which carries the banner "Special Report: Why New Orleans Still Isn't Safe." But it angered many New Orleanians, who are tired of that kind of sensationalism and feel it does little to inform the public discussion about what's happening on the Gulf Coast two years after Katrina.

It's unfortunate, because Grunwald has done some excellent work covering post-Katrina reconstruction, especially untangling the web of cash, cronyism, and committee chairmanships that pollutes the US Army Corps of Engineers. But Grunwald's the exception to the rule. Much reporting on the Gulf Coast has been inadequate at best, applying a cookie-cutter template to a scenario that's far too unique and important for trite narratives.

Unfortunately, these stories are likely to continue. With today's second anniversary of Katrina, reporters and editors have again turned their attention to the Gulf Coast. And as expected, they're resurrecting the old saws that have ill-informed the public the last two years.

But forewarned is forearmed. Over the next three days I will discuss three myths about the rebuilding after Katrina—and explain why you should ignore them.

Myth Number One: The main impediment to rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a lack of federal money.

Talk with people on the Gulf Coast area and you'll soon learn the primary problem they face is not a lack of funding, but the mass confusion created by federal, state, and local governments about the rules of the game when it comes to rebuilding. Confusing and contradictory regulations, showboating by politicians, and stunningly complex bureaucracy have only exacerbated the problems of people who've already been through hell and have kept people from making the decisions they need to make to get on with their lives. This creates what economist Emily Chamlee-Wright calls "signal noise"—the persistent uncertainty created by uncoordinated government at every step of the recovery process.

All levels of government deserve blame for this. On the federal level, Congress and the US Army Corps of Engineers have failed to articulate a clear, credible plan for what types of flood protections will be built and when they'll be completed. And of course, based on the Corps' recent track record, no one could fault Gulf Coast residents for questioning whether those protections will perform as advertised once (and if) they are completed.

On the state level, Louisiana's Road Home Program is currently suffering from a $3 billion shortfall, and the program only recently began settling existing claims at a rate faster than new claims were coming in. So it may be another two years before many people receive their check—and that's if there's any money left by the time their claims crawl to the front of the queue. Local governments haven't done much better. New Orleans is already on its fifth rebuilding plan since Katrina. Meanwhile, Mississippi residents have been subjected to one urban planning charrette after another, with few actual plans adopted. Mississippians have become to the New Urbanist movement what The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi once joked that Iraqis are to the neoconservatives: human guinea pigs for testing their latest theories.

The federal government has already allocated a substantial amount of money to Gulf Coast reconstruction. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), as of July 2007 the federal government had appropriated $94.8 billion for Katrina recovery. Congress has allowed the National Flood Insurance Program to borrow another $17 billion from the government to cover the deficit it racked up paying out Katrina claims. The federal government has also created $16 billion in targeted tax breaks through Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone credits and other programs.

So it's not a lack of funding that's the problem. It's spending the money. Under existing laws, FEMA can't simply write checks to Katrina victims. Some recipients would undoubtedly squander their funds, and there would be widespread fraud. This isn't idle speculation. According to the Government Accountability Office, immediately after Katrina hit, about a billion dollars of emergency aid—16 percent of the total—was lost to fraudulent claims. Even legitimately obtained pre-paid debit cards given to aid Katrina's victims were used to buy champagne, guns, tattoos, and porn.

Unfortunately, the other option—the one currently in place—isn't any better: government micromanagement of payouts. This is where you get the Road Home program's Byzantine policies, which includes dozens of dizzying, intermediate steps between filing a claim and the receipt of funds and, consequently, the plodding pace of recovery we've seen over the last two years. Because of legitimate fears that money will be squandered, mismanaged, or lost to fraud, the money sits unused.

Two years after Katrina, the CBO reports that FEMA had spent only about 66 percent of its supplemental appropriations for Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Only 28 percent of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding had been spent. A billion dollars in approved Small Business Administration loans have yet to be dispersed. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has yet to even allocate 15 percent of its Katrina-specific budget, much less disperse it.

Things are probably going to get worse before they get better. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana's Road Home Corporation—the state corporation that purchases properties sold to the state by Road Home grant recipients—is an absentee landlord, leaving its forfeited properties to decay in disrepair. Such absentee government ownership of homes is only likely to increase: an unpublished Small Business Administration report estimates that up to a quarter of Louisianans who took out SBA loans after Katrina may default on them within the next two years. Which means the federal government will take control of their property.

It's also unlikely that Washington will pony up much more cash. Soon after Katrina, Louisiana senators Mary Landrieu (a Democrat) and David Vitter (a Republican) proposed a $250 billion recovery package. Unfortunately, it was chock full of earmarks and special favors that would have done little to actually help the victims of Katrina. Many of the earmarks had been rejected in prior legislation as wasteful boondoggles. Republican Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, for example, attached a $700 million earmark—the largest in history, according to the Christian Science Monitor—to another bill to move the CSX railroad line that hugs Mississippi's coast several miles north from its current location. The Louisiana and Mississippi senatorial delegations squandered much of the goodwill their fellow legislators had shortly after Katrina. Many in Congress are likely to see additional requests as little more than grabs for more pork.

Even so, there's little evidence to support the idea that the primary obstacle to rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a lack of federal funding. The problems go much deeper than that. So far, the federal bureaucracy hasn't been able to spend the piles of money that have already been allocated, much less spend them wisely. Governments at all levels have failed to clearly articulate the rules of the game for rebuilding. And the state and federal governments are getting into the business of absentee slumlordship. More funding will only bring more of the same.

Tomorrow: Myth number two: New Orleans and "the Gulf Coast" are the same thing.