Next to New Orleans, houses still abandoned

Washington Post:

Honie Bauer was the first to move back.

It was seven months after Hurricane Katrina, and she figured others would follow her return to the block of little brick houses they'd all abandoned during the flood. She plunked a FEMA trailer down in her front yard. She mucked out the house. She put up drywall. She laid tile.

The pull of her tightknit community in St. Bernard Parish, or at least her memory of it, was powerful.

"This is home, and I just had to be here," said Bauer, 35, a hospital office manager and a native of the area. "I was going to do whatever it takes."

But while Bauer was charging in, most of her neighbors on the city block bounded by Rowley Boulevard, Fawn Drive, Badger Drive and Fox Drive, were in the midst of a completely different maneuver: They were retreating.

Today, nearly two years after the storm, 11 of 14 properties on the block stand vacant, and in interviews, all but one of those who left indicated they have no intention of returning. Far from rising from the devastation of Katrina, this slice of St. Bernard Parish remains a desolate and depressing place.

It is a scene repeated in flood-ravaged neighborhoods elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, especially parts of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and New Orleans East. In St. Bernard, most of the 67,000 residents have not returned. The massive desertions are evidence that Katrina's destructive effects are no longer acute but chronic and that, as evacuees set down roots elsewhere, many close-knit communities blasted apart by the storm may never return.

House after house in Bauer's neighborhood sits abandoned, most boarded up, their darkened facades still bearing the spray-painted symbols that rescuers scrawled on each house to record the dead. Other structures have been demolished down to the concrete slab. In some yards, the grass grows shoulder-high.

Dingy white pump trucks regularly rumble through, stopping at manholes, dropping tubes down and sucking the sewage out of the parish's broken underground system. And in a neighborhood that once enjoyed backyard cookouts for New Orleans Saints football games, those few children who have returned are now forbidden from going barefoot -- there's too much broken glass out there -- and they complain of having no friends to play with.

"It's like the apocalypse over here now," said Phyllis Puglia, a 52-year-old lawyer and former resident of Fawn Drive. "People are afraid."

Exactly who is to blame for the persistent abandonment is a matter of argument here.

Some point to the FEMA-led rebuilding bureaucracy, which has proved unequal at times to the challenge of rapidly rebuilding the vast wreckage. Others cite paperwork delays plaguing the state-run "Road Home" program, which -- eventually -- is supposed to distribute federal funds to homeowners.

But the faltering recovery is also tied to the almost primal fear of another inundation. While the Army Corps of Engineers is making massive improvements to the earthen mounds that keep the floodwaters out, many who suffered their failure in Katrina are reluctant to trust the engineers again.

But whatever reasons people have chosen to stay away, their absences are having a staggering effect on St. Bernard Parish.

Neither the Sears, nor the Wal-Mart, nor the Kmart in the parish has reopened. The only hospital and movie theater are closed. So are the two skating rinks and seven of the eight Catholic churches. The neighborhood still lacks phone lines and cable connections.

...

It appears to me that people are making the logical choice not to live in a flood plain. If they are concerned about the bureaucracy and paper work they should think all the con artist who stole a billion or more dollars right after the storm when the "paperwork" was less strenuous. Those thefts make the paperwork make sense.

The fact is that if people wanted to move back they could have done what Honie Bauer did and they would be about where she is and the stores would have reopened too. Businesses are in business to do business and if there are no customers, there is no reason to be there.

I think the ones who did not move back are showing good judgment. I certainly would not move from my hilltop to that swamp even if it has been drained again. This is part of a very long story in the Post.

In a typical liberal rant about New Orleans, Douglas Brinkley blames the Bush administration for "abandoning" New Orleans. Like most liberals he is wrong. It is the people who have abandoned New Orleans and it is their good judgment that is the reason. At oe point he says "... The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine." No, it is the people who don't want to live below sea level that have made that decision. If they wanted to live there they would be there doing the work and not waiting for volunteers to do it for them or for the federal government. Grow up Brinkley and quit whining. You sound too much like a liberal when you are in that mode. It is just not an effective way to make your case.