KENYON FARROW [email]
Communications director of the Praxis Project and a New Orleans resident, Farrow said today: “While the country may see hope in the new levees and drainage systems built for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the levees aren’t the only thing in need of repair. Most of the funds allocated for rebuilding the city did not go to black neighborhoods. Furthermore, there are over 40,000 abandoned buildings in the city since Katrina. Is it any surprise that New Orleans now ranks number two in the nation’s homeless rates? Without government policies to rebuild the affordable housing stock, many people will still be left in the rains of Isaac, and many storms to come.”

JORDAN FLAHERTY [email]
Based in New Orleans and reporting from Florida this week, Flaherty is the author of Floodlines. He said today: “Seven years after Hurricane Katrina revealed systemic racism and injustice, New Orleans has become a national laboratory for government reforms. Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning, even our media; vast changes have touched every aspect life in New Orleans, often creating a template now used in other cities. But the process through which those experiments have been carried out has generally not been transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white against black.”

See: “Report Places New Orleans’ Homeless Rate at Second in the Nation”