The Families Who Could Decide New Orleans' Fate

NEW ORLEANS (Aug. 29) -- Michael Canedo remembers clearly the day his neighbors gathered at the local playground and vowed to rebuild. It was two months after Hurricane Katrina. The days were still warm. Ten feet of flood had turned Burbank Gardens, a neighborhood of tidy shotgun homes and "camelback" duplexes, into a dead zone. Everything below the water line was coated in moldering gray mud. All living creatures seemed to have vanished, even the bugs.

The playground itself stood barren and flat, stripped of all but three magnificent live oaks. Despite the bleakness, the group seemed undaunted by the magnitude of the endeavor. Theirs was a neighborhood worth saving. A diamond in the rough, said Michael's 43-year-old wife, Marisol, who had lived on Wildair Drive since she was 8.

"Everyone was talking about coming back," Canedo says. "We were all going to come together and help each other out."

Five years later, the Canedos sometimes wonder if they made the right choice. They live surrounded by blight that serves as a haven for rodents, squatters and thieves. Along with other residents, they are wrestling with whether to tough it out and stay, or trade up for normalcy in a new town. There is pride in their resilience and the tenacity it took to lead the resurrection. (A neighbor received a Christmas card saying, "New Orleans. Not for pussies anymore.") But they are also worn out.

"We've made a lot of progress in five years, but we're afraid we're hitting a wall," says Tina Marquardt, executive director of Beacon of Hope, a civic group that helps neighborhoods map their vacant houses. "Everyone who would and could build something has done it. Ten years from now, we may not be much further along. It's scary."

What families like the Canedos ultimately decide to do will shape New Orleans' future. Burbank Gardens does not lie along the posh lakefront, or in the impoverished and still desolate Lower Ninth Ward. This is Gentilly, the solidly middle-class, racially diverse backbone of the city. It is populated by regular folks of mixed ages and incomes. If Gentilly and its 22 subdivisions can't fully recover from Hurricane Katrina, how can New Orleans? That doesn't frame success as merely reconstituting neighborhoods to their pre-Katrina size. But it does mean eradicating blighted land and clearing the way for future purchasers.

"Recovery is not a quantitative measure, it's a qualitative one," said Clancy DuBos, co-owner and political columnist for the Gambit Weekly, an influential political journal published in New Orleans. "If the houses look terrible, what kind of recovery is that?"

Marquardt said she worries about losing the "pioneers" who rebuilt the city. "It's been such a hill climb that if we don't see more progress soon, we're not going to retain them."

They'll give their new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, barely on the job for three months, time to get things moving. But only so much. Although the city's growing population has reduced the number of decayed buildings, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, it still leads the nation with the highest rate of blighted structures, with more than 55,000.

Landrieu seems to have heard the plea. He plans to unveil a major blight program soon and has been making the rounds of community groups in an effort to keep the issue from unraveling into a more fraught dispute about race. At one community meeting in early August, he was surprisingly blunt, according to an account by The Times-Picayune. Talking about homeowners' property, he said, inevitably leads to comments such as "'Why don't you want the brothers and sisters to come home, Little Mr. Mitch, looking the way you do?'" Landrieu predicted that, as soon as he laid out his program for dealing with abandoned properties, "somebody's going to come in here and somebody's going to have a march and turn it into something's it's not."

He asked the crowd whether those who hadn't returned ought to have even longer to come back and repair their houses. "I just want to make sure I did hear right. Is there anybody who wants to have more time, like past January 1?"

Not in Burbank Gardens.

One in Three Parcels Unoccupied and Uninhabitable

Marisol Canedo's gem of a neighborhood itself is now a patchwork quilt of new houses (some on stilts of varying heights), empty lots (some overgrown with weeds) and abandoned wrecks of falling-down homes. Burglars sweep through regularly. It's not a place to go walking after dark.

Many of the people she knew growing up vowed to return, but did not. Nearly all of the elderly, who bought in when the neighborhood was developed after World War II, are gone. Families with young children stayed away. The next-door neighbor, who had long rented out his duplex, never repaired it.

Subtropical climates are not kind to unkempt land and the house has become an eyesore -- with broken windows, creeping vines, tall weeds and trash billowing about. The woman who lives on the other side, who did rebuild, has not moved back because she's afraid of rats and snakes.

"I've reached a point when I tell someone to come to the neighborhood, I tell them, 'Don't look to the right, and don't look to the left," Marisol says. "When you see the red brick house, turn into the driveway and come inside and everything will be fine.'"

Jump-starting a neighborhood that's been destroyed was tougher than anyone dreamed. Just doing the paperwork for the insurance adjuster, the FEMA flood claim, the building permit and the bank loan was like being sentenced to spend every day at the DMV, says Meg O'Connell, who moved back in the fall of 2006 and now heads the Burbank Gardens neighborhood association.

The numbers underscore her point. Burbank Gardens has 862 parcels. Of them, more than a third -- 299 in all -- are unoccupied and uninhabitable. A recent informal survey gets at why the momentum has slowed. Beacon of Hope volunteers tracked down 32 of the owners of uninhabitable houses and learned the following:

• Six had been victims of contractor fraud.
• 16 lacked the money to rebuild.
• 14 had been forced by lenders to pay off their pre-Katrina mortgages, leaving them broke.
• 24 said they wanted to rebuild, but had been unable for various reasons.
• Four did not intend to rebuild and wanted to sell their property.
• Perhaps most telling: Only four have renovations under way.

If life in Burbank Gardens seems unsettled now, it was even more so in the fall of 2006, when O'Connell and her husband Martin came back to their house, rebuilt 12 feet off the ground.

They originally chose the neighborhood in 2000 for its proximity to the University of New Orleans, where Martin, 45, is a fish scientist and director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, and Meg, 41, works as a research associate. They could walk to work and come home for lunch.

After Katrina, they were among the first to return. PETA volunteers were still leaving dog food on street corners for strays. Martin once found himself sprinting toward home, pursued by a pit bull that had taken up residence with two other feral dogs in an abandoned house.

The neighborhood became a target of what became known as "rebuilding crime." Thieves heisted air conditioning units and copper pipe, which they stripped off the studs of new construction. There were so many nails on the road, the tires on their cars were always going flat.

Burbank Gardens was chosen as a stop on the disaster tour that Gray Line buses added to its sightseeing offerings. Once, a tour bus pulled up as Martin, working on his house, was having an especially trying day. He came down the ladder, hammer in hand, "like a crazy man." He unloaded on the curiosity seekers:

"You're a bunch of ghouls!"

Reflecting on the moment, Martin allows that he's become "more socially prickly" since the storm. "When relatives come into town and you hear the silence in the back of the car, you realize your life is not like theirs."

'Where We End Up Is an Open Question'

Still, life in Burbank Gardens improves with each new house that goes up. Every new family means one less blighted lot. Becky Retz's new house, which borders the London Avenue Canal not far from where the levee wall gave way, is a metaphor for her new life. She painted it Creamsicle orange, a shade representing hope and joy. It's also 12 feet in the air. She's looking into solar energy.

"I'm not saying we're going off the grid," she says. "But at this point, we trust ourselves more than the government to supply us with the things we need."

Meg and Paul Rosefeldt returned in the spring of 2008 after 2½ years in her own 154-square-foot trailer parked at the city fairgrounds. The city building department ordered their new house to be elevated 4 feet. They knew 4 feet wouldn't save them if it happens again, and built at 10. Both now in their 60s, the Rosefeldts also installed a wraparound wheelchair ramp in anticipation of the infirmities of old age. "This is it for us," she says. "We're not moving again."

The shared struggle has bound the homesteaders of Burbank Gardens together. It has turned them into activists as well. They scour city tax rolls for the names of owners who haven't cleaned up their property, so that they can urge them to do so. On parcels they can't trace they post signs asking anyone who can identify the owner to contact them. Peggy Rosefeldt, missing the grand, leafy sentinels that shaded streets and kept the Burbank Gardens cool, has overseen the planting of 60 donated trees.

They are vigilant about strangers.

"When you're the only house on the street and you see a car coming," says Meg O'Connell, "you say, 'What's that doing here?' "

O'Connell, Retz and other neighbors spent three years designing and finding financing for a new playground, with new equipment, landscaping and walking trails. They hope it will become a magnet for new families with children. And in a huge bit of good fortune, Burbank Gardens is getting 25 of 100 new homes built by a charitable group set up by Leonard Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble. Project Home Again is building the houses in Gentilly and giving them to low- and middle-income homeowners willing to swap them for their own damaged houses or lots.

In another good sign, Burbank Gardens is also attracting newcomers who build on their own, which has helped ease the trauma of losing so many old-timers. Among them are Tina and David Payton, who married after the storm. David, 45, the former chief of staff to a city councilman who represented the area, chose Burbank Gardens for the quality of life he knew it had before the storm.

As is true for other residents, the Paytons' rebuilt house is their refuge against the bleaker side of the neighborhood that Tina, 47, says depresses her. (She owns a beauty shop and sometimes drives to work along a longer, more scenic route, just so as to not look at more blight.) She put in a new garden in her back yard to create a little oasis of greenery. Inside is all stylish ceramic tile and soothing earth tones. David did a lot of the work himself.

"I don't know how many man-hours I have lost just trying to reach parity with what my life was like before the storm," he says. On the other hand, things could be worse. The guy across the street had to give up his plan of coming home after his house fell as it was being jacked up to a safer height. It was painful, Payton says, "to see a grown man cry."

When Katrina hit, Tina and her son, Gregory DeGruy, then 12, evacuated to Chicago and lived near relatives for a year. It was the first time she had ever lived away from New Orleans. She discovered that she could do it.

"Sometimes I wish we could have stayed in Chicago," she said. "We've talked about it. Where we end up is an open question."

It bubbles back up at odd moments, forcing them to confront the conflict between their optimism about their hometown's ability to recover and their own ability to endure what it will take to get all the way there. One of those moments occurred earlier this year on a visit to Fort Lauderdale.

"People do live that way. It was so pretty," she said. "Why can't we look like a normal city? How long is it going to take?"