Enjoy the Silence

Hurricane Katrina is the great, forgotten example of the massive racial reality in our midsts that, in our private actions, almost all sane people understand and take into consideration when buying property and planning for the future. 

Conversely, in our public actions, the exact opposite holds true. 

You know about Hurricane Katrina... do you know about the Road Home program?

Few people dare speak on the reality of racial differences, though Hurricane Katrina blew away years of a carefully crafted marketing strategy to create a false image of the black population in America, exposing something once widely-accepted (which helped influence our laws) by all sane people. 

The image of the Huxtable family conditioned into the mind of white America was flooded with the reality of a population completely incapable of taking care of themselves only one day removed from the majority of their fellow citizens evacuating the city and the storm touching ground. 

Civilization collapsed that quickly in New Orleans back in 2005. 

Watching Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina recently, I was floored by the videos of completely helpless black people who remained behind in the city (failing to evacuate) and the equally helpless black elected/appointed/hired public officials tasked with governing the city. 

After finishing the documentary, I came up with a few conclusions:

1.  If the levees were blown, who cares (causing the flooding of the 9th Ward)?

2. If Blackwater/XE was used to restore order, who cares (just as is the case with Chicago, a natural/unnatural disaster requires extraordinary solutions to overcome: the black population in both New Orleans and Chicago require the XE/Blackwater solution... right Bobby Rush)?

3. Katrina shows five things: 

1. In a natural disaster, black citizens of a city revert to their natural state
2. Black elected officials are utterly incompetent and incapable of not only dealing with the aftermath of a major disaster, but accepting any responsibility for their decisions
3. Both black citizens and black elected/appointed government officials will rely on outside help – demand outside help as the only way to salvation to the situation. 
4. The white minority in this city will ban together to defend their families and property, relying on each other (in the absence of law and order) to survive. 
5. Once order has been restored, the government of Black-Run America (BRA) will confiscate the weapons from the white minority that they used to protect their property and families.  

The great tragedy of our time is that World Star Hip Hop (WSHH) didn't exist yet, and Obama Phones or iPhones weren't wildly available in the black community - the iPhone wasn't out yet, nor was the Flip Cam or other cheap filming devices - or else the primary source video we would have from the Convention Center and SuperDome would be... priceless. 

But there is something... priceless that happened after Katrina in New Orleans, which needs addressing. 

 

Elisa Joy White, writing in the book “Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris,” had this to say about the allocation of federal money to help homeowners rebuild: 

During interviews in the Lower Ninth Ward, I was told of instances in which individuals who were residing in homes that had been unofficially passed down from deceased relatives before Katrina could not receive aid or compensation after Katrina because they did not have documents to prove ownership of their homes. While such circumstances obviously prohibit a return to a property and rebuilding, individuals who are able to produce papers and qualify for assistance also have had difficulty reconstructing their American Dreams. As a real estate lender who serves African American communities noted in a Times-Picayune interview, “This is discrimination based on the pre-storm value of a house… Someone in Pontchartrain Park can’t rebuild, but you take the same property in Lakeview and you’d get a lot more money” (Hammer 2008). Though individuals in low-income communities, which are predominantly African American, qualify for Road Home grants, the full utilization of the grant does not facilitate return.

 The difficulties are primarily a result of the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA0 and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) classification of the grants as compensation based on the lower amount of either one’s pre-Katrina home value or replacement costs at $130 per square foot for homes more than 51 damaged, with a cap of total compensation at $150,000 (Hammer 2008). Aware of the potential problem that some individuals would have raising capital in spite of receiving a Road Home grant, HUD also provided up to $50,000 in additional compensation for families making less than 80% of the median income. In a hypothetical comparison between a home in the predominantly white area of the Lakeview and a home in the predominantly black area, the Lower Ninth Ward, the following example by Times-Picayune reporter David Hammer offers a useful indication of the way prior economic disparities in housing options and home value placed homeowners in predominantly black areas at a greater disadvantage in comparison to homeowners in similarly damaged areas that are predominantly white:
        

A 1,500-square-foot house totaled by storm waters in Lakeview, for example, might have been worth $250,000 before Katrina. In the Lower 9^th Ward, a home of the same size may have been worth $70,000. But while the Lakeview owner’s grant would be calculated on the basis of a $195,000 replacement cost, the 9^th Ward owner’s would be based on the much lower pre-storm property value. 

If both homes had been covered by $40,000 in insurance, the Lakeview home would have qualified for the full $150,000 Road Home grant and the 9^th Ward applicant would have been left with $30,000. The 9^th Ward homeowner would have been fully compensated for the pre-storm value of the property, while the Lakeview resident would be short $60,000.      

Both likely would need more money to rebuild, but the fully compensated 9^th Ward homeowner would need more. Lower-income families can apply for loans to close the gap, but they typically face more difficulty qualifying. (Hammer 2008) p. 199- 200

Guess what? The courts got involved over the Road Home grant calculations, based on the pre-Katrina values of both black and white homeowners:

It's been nearly two years since the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and the national Fair Housing Alliance alleged that the Road Home's use of pre-storm home values to calculate rebuilding grants was discriminatory against African-Americans.

This was in 2010.

   

Guess what happened in 2011?[HUD Settles Racial Discrimination Lawsuit With Another $62 Million for Post-Katrina Rebuilding, CNSnews.com, 7-7-2011]:

The Road Home program, described as the largest home rebuilding effort in American history, has paid around $8.8 billion to 128,278 Louisianans whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but apparently it's not enough.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration announced that 1,300 homeowners in four parishes will receive $62 million in additional compensation as the result of a racial discrimination lawsuit.

Civil rights groups, including the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, National Fair Housing Alliance and several African-American homeowners, sued HUD and the State of Louisiana, arguing that African-Americans were more likely than whites to have their Road Home grants based on the lower pre-storm value of their homes, rather than on the estimated cost to repair their homes.

The National Fair Housing Alliance offered the example of one African-American plaintiff whose rebuilding grant was based on the pre-storm value of her home. She received a $1,400 grant to rebuild; but the Alliance says she would have received a grant of $150,000 if her rebuilding grant had been based on the estimated cost of damage to the home.

What can we learn from this?

Hurricane Katrina exposed the reality of race for all the world to see. For a brief moment in time, the image of Cliff Huxtable and the Cosby Show washed away...


In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the federal government came in to remind those paying attention to the reality of Black-Run America (BRA). How dare grant money be awarded on the basis of pre-Katrina home value appraisals?

Still, it's such a shame World Star Hip Hop (WSHH) wasn't around in 2005....