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    <title>Don’t Repeat the Mistakes of the Katrina Recovery - The New York Times</title>
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<p class="byline-dateline"><span class="byline" itemprop="author creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" >By <span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="ANDY HOROWITZ" itemprop="name">ANDY HOROWITZ</span></span><time class="dateline" datetime="2017-10-24T04:00:04-04:00" itemprop="dateModified" content="2017-10-24T04:00:04-04:00">SEPT. 14, 2017</time>
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="278" data-total-count="278">NEW ORLEANS — The wind isn’t racist, and the rain doesn’t target the poor. But when hurricanes strike and cities flood, people who were already disadvantaged tend to suffer the most. That’s because the wind and rain alone do not define the shape of our modern disasters.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="323" data-total-count="601">As legislators in Texas, Florida and Washington, D.C., begin to set the course for the recoveries from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, they should avoid the allure of easy fixes that maintain inequality or policies that make it worse. Instead, they should use federal and state recovery aid to encourage more equal communities.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="341" data-total-count="942">New Orleanians know too well that recovery policies matter at least as much as the storm itself in determining a city’s fate. When I ask people to tell me their Katrina stories for a book I’m writing about the disaster, their answers are never confined to the day the storm made landfall. Many people barely mention the hurricane at all.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="360" data-total-count="1302">My neighbors tell me about the city before the storm and the difficulty of evacuating. They speak with rage about the shoddy levee system: It was the Army Corps’s failure, not the 2005 hurricane, that flooded the city. They talk about feeling abandoned, left to drown in the world’s most powerful country. They mourn the loss of family members and friends.</p><div id="story-ad-1" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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        <p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2108" id="story-continues-3">They talk about a recovery program, subcontracted to a for-profit company for the sake of efficiency, that took three years to distribute many recovery grants. They tell me of their anguish over debates about whether New Orleanians had a so-called right of return to their homes or whether some places were too vulnerable to rebuild. They talk about the struggle over who should decide. A lot of people talk about Feb. 7, 2010, when the Saints won the Super Bowl.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="259" data-total-count="2367">Their answers teach me that when historians write about Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the wind and rain are likely to be a comparatively small part of the story. Instead, what “Harvey” or “Irma” comes to mean will be defined by decisions that lie ahead.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="219" data-total-count="2586">Damaged homes will have to be rebuilt with insurance and federal aid. How much money will people get? Will renters be eligible? What about people who were homeless before the storm? Will recovery work pay a living wage?</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="150" data-total-count="2736">The answers to questions like these will determine the future of Texas and Florida, starting with the fundamental fact of who will be able to go home.</p><div class="newsletter-signup variant-1-hidden " id="newsletter-promo" data-newsletter-productCode="TY" data-newsletter-productTitle="Opinion Today" aria-labeledby="newsletter-promo-heading">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="398" data-total-count="3134">That certainly was the case in New Orleans. Today, while the city’s white population has largely recovered since 2005, approximately 100,000 fewer African-Americans live here than did before Katrina. This stark racial disparity cannot be explained by the flood alone, which discriminated less than many people realize. Rather, political power and policy decisions account for the dramatic change.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="232" data-total-count="3366">Some of those decisions were bold and public. As protesters were tear-gassed and stun-gunned outside of City Hall, for example, the legislators voted to demolish 4,500 public housing apartments, nearly all home to African-Americans.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="444" data-total-count="3810">“Our residents deserve better, much better than what we offered before,” said the City Council president, Arnie Fielkow, which may have been true. But a housing official’s claim that “Katrina has come in and washed it away” was certainly not. The brick buildings still stood and could easily have been reopened. Five years after the storm, fewer than half of the families who once called those places home had returned to New Orleans.</p><div id="story-ad-2" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="77" data-total-count="3887" id="story-continues-4">Other decisions were more opaque, though their effects were just as profound.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="701" data-total-count="4588">Take a detail buried within what stands as America’s largest housing recovery program, which Louisiana called Road Home. The government paid out grants to flooded homeowners according to the so-called fair market value of their houses, rather than the replacement value. Because of historically racist practices of underdevelopment and discrimination, this seemingly race-neutral policy meant that for comparable damage, homeowners in white neighborhoods were paid more than homeowners in African-American neighborhoods. African-American homeowners sued and forced changes in the program, but the resolution did not come until six years after the storm. For many families, it was too late to matter.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="458" data-total-count="5046">In fact, few people got enough from Road Home to replace the homes they lost, but the racial disparity in resources available to rebuild was vast. In the predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood of Lakeview, the average gap between the cost of repairs and the amount homeowners received in private insurance and Road Home funds was $44,000. But in the mostly African-American, middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans East, the average gap was $69,000.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="69" data-total-count="5115">In this way, Katrina cost African-Americans more than it cost whites.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="5486">Some scholars argue that disasters replicate social inequality, but that’s not it, exactly. When cities flood, our actions often create and re-create inequality. But the same is true even when there is no flood. Even though inequality can sometimes seem like the natural order of things, acts of God, as some call them, are deeply embedded in the acts of women and men.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="431" data-total-count="5917">There have been calls not to “politicize” the recent storms. We heard the same thing after Hurricane Katrina. But rather than closing our eyes to the political decisions that shape our communities, we should open them wide. A disaster without politics would be an event without a history, a catastrophe without a cause. It would have nothing to teach us about how to rebuild this time, or how to prevent the disaster next time.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="198" data-total-count="6115">In the days after Hurricane Katrina, many people in positions of power asserted that New Orleans should not be rebuilt, as if abandoning this city would somehow solve the problems Katrina had posed.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="287" data-total-count="6402">Those barbs still sting here, especially as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and other frighteningly similar events across the country have made clear what many New Orleanians always understood: that New Orleans’s history is America’s history, and that Katrina is America’s possible future.</p><button class="button comments-button  theme-speech-bubble-large" data-skip-to-para-id="">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="537" data-total-count="6939">The metropolitan sprawl that made single-family homes affordable and vulnerable, the National Flood Insurance Program that has perversely subsidized construction in flood-prone areas, the infrastructure that is not up to the challenge of a warming world, the racist fear that rends our communities, the crushing inequality and the sometimes reckless, sometimes revolutionary, hope that the future might be better than the past — none of these is unique to Louisiana or the Gulf Coast. They define the United States in the 21st century.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="7310">The “we” who get to decide these things is rarely the “we” who are most affected by the decisions. The suffering that our collective actions impose upon some people, followed often by the blinding insistence that their vulnerability was somehow fair, or natural, or inevitable, is not the cause or consequence of some external disaster. It is the disaster itself.</p><footer class="story-footer story-content">
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