9 Ways Race Is Still Playing a Dominant Role in the Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina Victims 10 Years Later

Katrina Was Not An Equal Opportunity Disaster Although current New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and others have labeled Katrina an equal-opportunity storm, a Black homeowner in the city was four times more likely to live in a flooded area than a white homeowner, according to the book Katrina by Gary Rivlin. Additionally, 51 percent of Louisiana residents who were killed by Katrina were Black while in Orleans parish, 68 percent of deaths (459 out of 680 total) were African-Americans, according to a 2008 article in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, entitled, "Hurricane Katrina Deaths, Louisiana, 2005." The Government's Disastrously Slow Response To Katrina Was Racist It was five days before sufficient federal or state help arrived for the tens of thousands of Blacks who were marooned in the city, according to a 2010 PBS timeline. A number of African-American political leaders charged that the response would have been far quicker had the victims been in the predominantly white cities of Palm Beach or Boca Raton. New Orleans Lost A Significant Portion Of It's Black Population New Orleans is still majority Black but it's much whiter than before. According to a government report on the 1.5 million evacuees of the Gulf Coast, African-American residents were less likely to return to their homes than whites—54 percent of African-American evacuees returned compared to 82 percent of white evacuees. The Black population has fallen from roughly 67 percent before the storm to about 59 percent today. Mayor Mitch Landrieu Storm Forced Blacks Out and Whites Seized Political Power A recent New York Times article reported the city had a population of 455,000 before the storm, two-thirds of whom were Black. By 2010, there were 118,000 fewer Blacks. During that year, the city elected its first white mayor in 32 years, and a 5-2 white supermajority controlled the city council, which had been majority Black before the storm. Orleans Parish elected a white district attorney and chief of police. Additionally, white-majority boards ran most of the city’s schools and the housing authority. ‘‘The perception among most African-Americans is that they are living politically as a defeated group in their own city,’’ said Lance Hill, executive director of Tulane University’s Southern Institute for Education and Research, in 2012. Today, the New Orleans City Council is again majority Black and there's a Black police chief. Blacks Are Poorer Since Katrina African-Americans in New Orleans still suffer unequally from poverty and unemployment. Black households earn half the income of white households, and while the share of white households considered middle or upper class is growing— the city’s Black middle and upper class has shrunk. Forty-four percent of Black households in New Orleans earn less than $21,000. Blacks Were Displaced By Higher Housing Prices The "new" New Orleans is also more expensive to live in. Rents have skyrocketed by 43 percent, home prices in some historically Black neighborhoods have doubled, because of gentrification and also because of lack of supply and the high cost of building. Black families who still harbored hopes of returning home have been priced out, especially since property taxes have doubled, and flood-insurance rates have tripled. The city also demolished public housing projects where thousands had lived, replacing them with updated but lower-density homes. Thousands of families remain on a waiting list for subsidized housing. Black New Orleans Residents Received Less Recovery Money Mayor Landrieu has declared the city's recovery is complete. However, African-American neighborhoods across the city still struggle, especially the chronically neglected Lower Ninth Ward, where many Blacks in the community owned a home before the floodwalls failed. A 2010 Amnesty International report found that of the billions of dollars paid out to Katrina victims, residents in non-white areas were paid less than those living in mostly white communities. This lead to a complete lack of redevelopment in Black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, where only 30 percent of the evacuated residents returned, compared to 90 percent in the rest of the city. Hurricane Katrina Had A Devastating Effect On African-American Education As a result of the devastation caused by the hurricane, 20,000 African-American college students in New Orleans suddenly had nowhere to attend classes. About half of these Black students were enrolled at the three historically Black universities in the city, which according to the The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE), needed $850 million in repairs after the storm. The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina produced "long-lasting damage to African-American higher education, not only in New Orleans, but in the nation as a whole," reported the JBHE article. For example, the large drop in enrollments at Xavier, the largest feeder of African-American undergraduates to U.S. medical schools, is a severe blow to efforts in increasing the number of practicing African-American physicians in this country. The Federally Funded Recovery Program, Road Home, Was Racially Biased Publicized as the largest housing-recovery program in the country’s history, the $15 billion Road Home initiative promised to pay out as much as $150,000 to homeowners who had flood damage, depending on the size of their losses. The inherent racial bias in the program came because compensation was not based on the actual cost of rebuilding, but on the pre-Katrina appraised property value, according to a July 2011 article in The Louisiana Weekly. The cost of restoring a 2,000-square-foot house in mostly white Lakeview, just west of City Park, or Gentilly, a Black middle-class neighborhood to its east, would be the same — but the Road Home payment would pay a Lakeview homeowner $150,000, while in Gentilly, the homeowner of a similarly sized and damaged home would receive only $10,000.

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