Love for New Orleans

So this past weekend I was lucky enough to catch a ride with some friends to one of my favorite cities, New Orleans Louisiana! I spent a few months living there in 2010 and having been dying to go back ever since. I know there are a lot of mixed opinions on the city. i hear people say some horrible things, as well as some very positive things. My take is that it's a beautiful city that is rich with culture, history, and joy, but that at the same time it is a place of duality. Besides the clear disparity of wealth (much of the city is in extreme poverty while a few live in luxury) as well as racial and class-based segregation, there is also the dichotomy of good and evil running throughout. One man's party is another man's disease. Tourism brings the city income, but pushes out it's native residents and authentic culture. It's a city that has a lot to offer the world, but so often offers little to it's residents.

(Photo from 2010 New Orleans trip, Bywater neighborhood)

 I was definitely interested in seeing how the city had changed in the past two years. When I was there in 2010, five entire years after Katrina hit, the city was still in a state of shocking disrepair. The land there is divided up into many small neighborhoods with dramatically different aesthetics and demographics. Two years ago I saw only one house in the Garden District (a cute, wealthy part of the city attractive to tourists) that was still being repaired from the storm. The rest of the neighborhood was pristine. However, this cleanliness was an illusion. Many parts of the rest of the city were still full of abandoned houses, empty lots, caving in roofs, and boarded up windows. What progress had been made in the two years since I'd last visited?

(Photo from 2010, Garden District)
The answer is some...in some places. My travel buddies and I stayed in a friends house on Tchoupitoulas street on the South West edge of the garden district in a little apartment by the docks. While we weren't in the nicest part of that area I still knew that my friends, who had never visited New Orleans, were getting a very limited perspective of the city. On the last day, as we were driving out of town, my friend Renee (who stayed with me in NOLA two years ago) and I convinced our buds to take a driving tour of the city to get a better idea of it's reality.
We drove up Canal street and into mid-city. We continued up, looped around city park, and then took St. Claude east and into Bywater and subsequent neighborhoods. We didn't go into the lower 9th, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city and one damaged most by the storm, but did drive just a few blocks below it. I was shocked and saddened by the state of the area. I don't know what I had expected, where would the money come from to repair these homes and businesses? The fact is that two years later, seven whole years after the storm, I would guess at least a quarter of store fronts along St.Claude are not repaired and unoccupied. So many houses are still abandoned and falling apart. But people live here. There are kids and families and people everywhere. It made me wonder what they must feel like. I would be so angry. These neighborhoods are in no condition for people to be living there. And in America! Where we supposedly have so much money and such a high quality of living. Families are living next to rotting, abandoned houses that are turning into squats for traveling homeless. I can only assume the residents living in this neighborhood likely grew up there. I's heart breaking to imaging growing up in a place and then living having to live amongst it's ruins.
I don't know what the answer to this problem is, but I do know that what is occurring in some New Orleans neighborhoods, still occurring after seven years, is unacceptable in a first world country. I heard this weekend that the city plans of spending some of the money made off of the multi-million dollar sale of the Superdome to Mercedez Benz (it is now officially called the Mercedez Benz Superdome!) to extend the streetcar line and make improvements to attract more tourists. Now, I don't know the full plan of how they will spend the money and what their plan is for urban development in the next few years, but I can't imagine how they could justify not repairing and renovating New Orleans residential neighborhoods. All of them. Here's hoping!