It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday and Bernice Horne is sweeping the front porch. Inside, her son fixes himself a quick lunch—he’s on the clock—while her granddaughter gets ready for a class at the local community college. “Erica,” she calls. “Grab me a dust pan. We don’t need any more mess around here.”

The view from Horne’s front porch is bleak: a weedy lot, the dark, gutted house of a dead neighbor, and beyond that, a derelict affordable-housing development  stretching as far as the eye can see. Occasionally, a bird swoops in or out of a broken window. A ripped chain-link fence borders the  development, which never reopened after Hurricane Katrina.

“One day my baby granddaughter was sitting out on the porch swing and she said, ‘Why that building have eyes? It look like it looking at us’,” Horne, a retired school custodian, says.  “I said, ‘Baby they supposed to be windows and doors to keep little girls like you safe.’”

A New Orleans entrepreneur has received $46,000 in Road Home grant money to rehab a single unit in the otherwise uninhabitable Press Park complex, across from Horne's ranch house. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

After Katrina, Horne used a state grant to rebuild her tidy ranch-style house from the ground up. For reasons both emotional and financial, she never seriously considered not doing so. “We don’t have any other place,” she says quietly. “This is where I raised my children. We can’t afford to go anywhere else.” But others with more options also continue to attract government grants to properties that are almost certain to be bulldozed eventually.

Upon her return, she installed a jungle gym in the backyard and inside, a plush sofa with plenty of room for chatting with the neighbors she expected would return.  They haven’t. The population of the Upper 9^th Ward’s Desire neighborhood has dropped 68 percent since 2000, falling from 3,791 to 1,213 in 2010, U.S. census data analyzed by GCR & Associates shows. Where there were once occupied homes, weeds grow. The only commercial establishment within miles is the Money and Honey One Stop, a concrete-fronted corner store with unpredictable hours and an inventory heavy on 99-cent soda and potato chips.

Though New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s recovery plan includes putting an $11 million community center and health clinic in the neighborhood, the only city project to be completed so far is a modestly outfitted park with a small swimming pool, a few sports fields and a donated Kaboom playground. On warm evenings, the sound of children playing football reverberates through otherwise quiet streets.

“No traffic. Nothing. It’s a ghost town other than the park,” a neighbor, Hardy Price, says. Price is one of four residents on his block.  One of the others is his adult son, who lives across the street in a vinyl-sided shotgun-style house sandwiched between two overgrown lots owned by families who never returned after Katrina. The remaining two are renters who moved in next door after the property’s prior owner moved to Texas after Katrina and converted his home into a Section 8 rental. Another half-dozen empty houses and lots line the block. “The neighbors,” Price says, “they moved on.”

The view from Price’s front stoop pretty well matches the bleak scenarios laid out shortly after Katrina by urban planners. In the months after the storm, experts from the Urban Land Institute — a Washington DC-based urban-planning think tank invited by then-mayor Ray Nagin to advise his Bring New Orleans Back Commission — warned that without a coordinated strategy for rebuilding neighborhoods in sync with repopulation trends, those areas that lost large numbers of households would fall victim to “the jack o’ lantern effect”: gap-toothed redevelopment in which occupied homes would be surrounded by swaths of blight and abandonment. Instead, the planners recommended transforming hard-hit areas into green space while concentrating rebuilding efforts in the city’s less-damaged core, but residents recoiled.

On a now infamous map rolled out at a commission hearing, Horne’s neighborhood, along with other parts of the Lower 9^th Ward and Eastern New Orleans showed up as a green dot.

The dots reflected depth of flooding, some of it in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods like Lakefront and Broadmoor, but with so much of it concentrated in largely black neighborhoods, cries arose that the redevelopment proposal was a plot to keep black homeowners from returning to New Orleans. Overnight, the notion that some neighborhoods wouldn’t be rebuilt became racially charged. Nagin, then facing a re-election fight, abandoned his pledge to respect the blue-ribbon commission’s recommendations and began encouraging everyone to rebuild, even in neighborhoods like Horne’s.

An arrow marks the Horne family residence. Their neighborhood, Desire, was one of several that post-Katrina planners recommended be turned into green space. (The Lens/Google) 

A year after the storm, Reed Kroloff, then the dean of Tulane University’s architecture school and one of two people who were to have overseen a recovery planning process for the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, told The Times-Picayune that rejecting the Urban Land Institute’s advice amounted to “a complete failure of leadership at almost every level.”

In fact, weeds had been growing high in Horne’s neighborhood long before the hurricane hit. For more than a decade prior to Katrina, a quieter disaster had been unfolding. In another, spectacularly bad policy decision, low-income housing, both public and private,  a community center and an Orleans Parish School Board elementary school had been built atop a 95-acre municipal dump so toxic that it was eventually declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Shrinking cities, big worries

Welcome to the new normal–where swaths of once bustling city neighborhoods deteriorate behind fences. The circumstances that brought New Orleans’ neighborhoods into their current limbo are a combination of singular events and larger national trends. Many communities around the country currently confront similar fates. For evidence, look to the urban prairies of Detroit; Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. In New Orleans, abandonment was brought on by Katrina. In the other cities, it was the slower winds of economic and political change, deindustrialization, the overseas emigration of American manufacturing, the foreclosure crisis, decades of population loss, spending cuts and federal policy changes.  Now cities must decide how to proceed: continue to maintain city infrastructure and services in communities too hollowed out to qualify as urban, or simply disinvest and mothball these neighborhoods.

Press Park was built on top of a landfill. Since Katrina, it has been empty, awaiting demolition. (photo by Ariella Cohen)

“We are paying a big price for decades of bad decisions at local, state and federal levels,” says Dan Kildee, president and co-founder of the Center for American Progress, a national nonprofit that focuses on urban revitalization. “We are paying the price of decades without a vision.”

President Obama is the first president to bluntly assert that new strategies must be found for communities like Desire where abandoned housing is rife and no one seems interested in repairing or occupying it. Unlike prior administrations that have changed individual programs and hinted at a broader need to reshape the way the federal government supports urban development, Obama’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has said from day one that the agency’s entire approach must be transformed to take into account changing economic and environmental considerations as well as a new geography of poverty that has low-income populations,  once concentrated in cities, now dispersed across sprawling suburbs.

“For generations in America, we have measured success by the number of housing units we are able to construct,” says Kildee, in arguing for a different approach.

Kildee has a point. When politicians want to claim an economy is robust they cite the number of housing starts. To demonstrate a community is financially healthy, they cite rising home values. The implicit assumption is that populations will keep pace with the market and that the new housing will be absorbed. It is that assumption that Desire and hundreds of other similarly abandoned communities are now proving catastrophically wrong.

In response, HUD has come up with a  Sustainable Communities initiative and the Choice Neighborhoods program. Sustainable Communities takes a cross-agency approach to build more cohesive, connected regions in which funding for transit is better coordinated with housing development and job growth. Choice Neighborhoods seeks to transform isolated public housing developments into integrated, mixed-income neighborhoods.

But those changes are taking place in a context of drastically reduced federal support for cities and housing. Despite Obama’s commitment to rethinking cities, HUD’s budget was slashed 9 percent to $37 billion, the largest reduction in funding of any major federal agency. Adjusted for inflation, the total is  lower than any HUD budget since 2003, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The spending package includes an 8 percent cut to the capital fund for public housing—a reduction that could have grave implications for already overburdened housing agencies. In the Upper 9^th Ward alone, the Housing Authority of New Orleans manages at least a half-dozen abandoned or partially abandoned complexes, including the Press Park subdivision visible from Bernice Horne’s porch.

Adding to the challenge: a nearly 40 percent cut to HUD’s  largest affordable-housing block grant program, the HOME program, which provides municipalities with grants for affordable housing or direct rental assistance. A smaller but still sizable 6 percent reduction hit the agency’s most flexible community redevelopment tool, the Community Development Block Grant program. CDBG grants provide funding for the sort of neighborhood-level intervention needed to clean up the messy blocks surrounding Horne’s home.

“Every local housing authority is going to be picking up the pieces and absolutely funding only its highest priority communities,” says Linda Couch, a senior policy analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But as budget cuts and political pressures force triage,  what happens to those neighborhoods that wind up on the wrong side of the red line?

Home ownership in harm’s way

If New Orleans is “the city care forgot,” Desire is the neighborhood care ignored.  Built on drained swampland west of the Industrial Canal, the neighborhood grew up alongside a dump where refuse was burned in open pits from 1909 until 1948, when neighbors’ complaints about thick, putrid smoke forced legislation barring dumps inside the city. Instead of abandoning the dump altogether, city officials circumvented the legislation by converting it into a landfill. Burying the refuse underground was seen as more sanitary, an argument that ignored leaching and other forms of chemical pollution.  The Agriculture Street Landfill persisted until 1965 when it was last used an emergency dump for debris from Hurricane Betsy.

Soon after the landfill closed, the local housing authority began eyeing the unused city  land for affordable housing. In 1969, the first of two federally financed developments,  Press Park and Gordon Plaza, rose on above the landfill. Though project engineers    worried about subsidence, politics quickly trumped environmental concerns.

Throughout the 20th century, new neighborhoods were built over the Agriculture Street landfill with no thought to the toxins under the ground.

In a  desegregating city where much of the housing available to black families was  substandard, the idea of building a modern housing development from the ground up—  even if that ground were  contaminated—appealed to the city’s leadership. No   remediation of the contaminated soils was attempted.

HANO began to aggressively market Press Park’s new,  affordable townhouses to striving black families, instituting programs that allowed low-income public housing residents to become homeowners. Gordon Plaza sprang up on the former landfill’s eastern edge in the late 1970s. Containing homes for senior citizens, rentals and affordable single-family homes, the development was, like Press Park, paid for with federal grants and loans.

The strategy reflected the modus operandi of the city at the time: build more and build cheap. Over several decades, the strategy transformed previously undeveloped, drained swampland in the 9^th Ward and farther east — areas now synonymous with Katrina’s devastation —into an area dense with federally subsidized affordable housing, populated overwhelmingly by black families.

New Orleans officials built the Shirley Jefferson Community Center within the Agriculture Street landfill, on the edge of a housing development, near a public school. Neighbors want the abandoned center to be demolished. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

Following the families into new neighborhoods, the Orleans Parish School Board went on a construction spree.  Even before Moton Elementary opened in 1985 on the edge of the landfill, elevated lead levels in playground soils led school officials to contemplate abandoning it.  Again, pressure for a ribbon cutting won out. The school opened. By the time of the 1990 census, about 1,000 people lived on the landfill or along its immediate periphery.

“We moved there because the schools were down the street,” said Horne, who bought her privately developed home on the eastern flank of the landfill in 1983. “The children didn’t have to cross a lot of traffic. They could walk to school.”

But while the population continued to grow so did concerns about the area’s environmental safety. People were finding stray landfill debris in their yards.  The Environmental Protection Agency, which according to legal documents had found evidence of contamination as early as 1986, came down again in 1993 to do testing that found higher-than-allowed levels of lead, arsenic and polychlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons. In 1994, Moton, located across the street from Press Park was closed, and Horne’s granddaughter Erica, then a Moton first- grader, tested positive for lead poisoning.

“Around that time, we stopped growing vegetables in our garden because we were worried about what was in the soil,” Gordon Plaza homeowner Ruth Parker says.

Legal limbo

That same year, the EPA recognized the 95-acre Agriculture Street Landfill site as a Superfund hazardous waste site. Though many homeowners urged EPA officials to buy their homes and clear the land, the EPA decided on a cheaper fix: removing contaminated soil and replacing it with clean clay atop a fabric liner. The soil remediation cost $42.8 million and took nine years, wrapping in 2003, but the site remains on the Superfund list.

Still bouncing through the federal appeals system is a class-action lawsuit filed in 1993 on behalf of residents, homeowners and students who unknowingly bought homes, rented apartments or attended school on top of the landfill. After more than a decade in the courts, only a portion of residents included in the class of certified plaintiffs have received settlements, despite a 2006 ruling by Civil District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey who declared the neighborhood “uninhabitable” and “dangerous.”

“If this was another kind of neighborhood we wouldn’t have to fight so hard,” Horne, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said. “It’s like we don’t exist, like we keep having to tell the courts and the city and everyone that we are still here. That’s what it feels like.”

Bernice Horne says her neighborhood has been left behind in the city's post-Katrina rebuilding. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

In November, an inspection of the landfill site done by EPA officials mentioned a  resurgence in illegal dumping at the site. Plaintiffs in the class-action suit say they hope for an eventual settlement that will allow them to move elsewhere. Parker bought her Gordon Plaza home in 1981 for $40,000. Thirty years later, its assessed value is $45,000. She and her husband are retired. Both have cancer.  “The settlement was our only hope,” Parker says. “No one is going to buy these houses, knowing what is back here.”

Last year, a non-practicing attorney in Houston named Robert Spencer bought the largest vacant Gordon Plaza tract for $1 from HUD. The property’s previous owner, Desire Community Housing, had defaulted on a HUD loan, leaving the federal agency to foreclose on the 2.6-acre property and auction it off. Spencer, who has said that redeveloping the complex would be his largest project to date, was the only bidder.  He has made little progress on the site since buying it in May, neighbors say. Despite loud complaints from these nearby residents, Spencer has filed no permits for the demolition of the blighted housing, a fire hazard.

Meanwhile, HANO maintains that it can’t demolish Press Park until it buys out 67 private townhouse owners within its 237-unit development. It can’t do that until the courts resolve the class-action suit, officials say.

Neighbors impatiently wait for the wrecking ball. It’s not hard to see why. Walk in through breaches in Press Park’s chain-link border and you will find apartments with moldy, water-damaged pictures on the wall and toys on the floor, crusted in six years worth of dirt.  Water from leaking sewerage and water pipes pools in the overgrowth, leaving a faint aroma. At community meetings, residents blame HANO for failing to take cleanup action that could inspire private owners like Spencer to get moving.

Still investing in disaster

Further complicating matters, the federal government continues to invest in Press Park and the struggling blocks that surround it. Since Katrina, HUD has sent about $9.3 million in Road Home hurricane recovery grants to remaining owners of the 1,137 housing units included in the census tract that includes Press Park’s 237 apartments, Louisiana Office of Community Development records show.

On a warm Tuesday in October, one of those grant recipients, John Spears, climbed through an opening he cut in the development’s fence and showed a reporter the townhouse-style condo he restored using a $70,000 Road Home Small Rental Program grant from the state community development office. Buckets of white paint and Spackle litter the otherwise empty, three-bedroom unit. In an upstairs room, a brand-new plastic-framed window looks out over the development’s deserted, trash-strewn inner-courtyard. If you forget about Katrina, it looks like the set for a dystopian horror movie about a low-end suburb depopulated by a deadly pathogen.

John Spears received $46,000 from the state Road Home small rental recovery program to renovate a unit within Press Park. Now he can't find a tenant willing to live in the bombed-out complex. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

In order to receive the $46,000 in grant money the state awarded Spears for completing the affordable housing rehab, he had to show the unit to an inspector, he said.  “The inspector said, ‘I don’t see anything else around here. Why would you redo it,’” Spears recalled, tapping his foot on a glossy, adobe-colored floor tile.  The question, however on-point, didn’t stop the landlord from receiving his grant money or a certificate of occupancy from the city.  Now he is waiting for a tenant to agree to move in so he can receive the final $24,000 installment of the grant allocation. He’s shown the place to a few Section 8 voucher holders but no one has taken up the lease, he said.

“I’m hoping HANO will fix the rest of this mess up so someone will actually want to live here,” he said. “Otherwise, they can buy me out and tear it down. I’ll give them this and they can give me a new unit, somewhere else.”

In a recent interview, the HUD-appointed administrative receiver who runs HANO, David Gilmore, acknowledged that he has met with Spears but declined to talk about his specific situation.  “We’re trying to buy everyone out,” Gilmore said.

While Spears is the only recipient of Road Home money that has actually completed a renovation within Press Park, there could be dozens more who received grant money to fix storm-damaged units that are now slated to be demolished.  This means that taxpayer money will be spent twice on the same housing units, first to repair it, then to tear it down.

Gilmore said that while FEMA will eventually pay for the demolition of the Katrina-battered complex, redevelopment is years off.

“I don’t have any plans at the moment. That doesn’t mean there won’t be,” said Gilmore, who was sent from HUD’s Washington office to clean up and modernize the long-troubled housing authority put under federal receivership in 2002.

A new model for housing

Developing Press Park into anything other than an open field will be tricky. Federal regulations prohibit using HUD housing grants on Superfund sites, meaning that HANO would have to transfer the property to a private owner if it wanted to see housing developed there. Beyond that, the notion of rebuilding a neighborhood on a landfill in a far-off section of the city with few public services contradicts the essence of Obama’s holistic, cross-agency Sustainable Communities agenda.

“That was developed in a different time,” Gilmore said of Press Park. “I am not sure if I would’ve ever built there in the first place.”

For HANO, the rethinking of federal housing policy coincided with its own controversial transformation. After Katrina, the agency never reopened its four largest, traditional public housing complexes, instead implementing HOPE VI programs that turn traditional public housing into smaller, mixed-income communities operated by private developers. The projects, which housing officials expect to complete in the next two years, reflect HUD’s reorientation towards mixed-income, mixed-use communities located in urban cores and connected to public services. One of them, Harmony Oaks in Central City (formerly C.J. Peete), features wrap-around tenant services in a new community center. A cross-city greenway has been incorporated into the design of another development, the old Lafitte complex, now called Faubourg Lafitte.  The master plan for a third, Columbia Parc (formerly the St.Bernard complex), includes a revenue-generating golf course.

But while residents are publicly enthusiastic about amenities in the new developments, their shrunken size and mixed-income portfolio means that many of the neediest pre-Katrina tenants remain locked out of the modern offerings.

Before Hurricane Katrina, HANO had 5,100 occupied housing-development units and 8,500 vouchers, for a total of 13,600 units. HANO now plans to provide 22,500 households with assistance, but nearly 80 percent of families will receive the housing subsidy in the form of a Section 8 voucher, according to the agency’s 2012 budget. The number living in traditional public housing will have fallen by 20 percent.

Again following federal policy trends, HANO has traded thousands of public housing units for a market-based voucher system that the agency hopes will encourage people to move into privately owned units, thus de-concentrating poverty. The agency does not specifically track whether such a de-concentration is occurring, making it tough to evaluate the policy’s success. Available data  suggests the policy implementation has a ways to go: A 2010 analysis of census-tract level data shows that most of the houses that are approved for voucher usage are located in low-income neighborhoods, within close proximity to the former housing projects.

In addition to the tens of millions of dollars going to complete developments shuttered after Katrina, HANO last year took on another high-profile project — the redevelopment of Iberville, the city’s last major traditional public housing development, and the only one located in touristy downtown New Orleans.

HUD selected Iberville as one of five developments to receive federal support through Choice Neighborhoods.  Its reinvention as a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood will cost upwards of $600 million over the next decade of planning and construction, $30 million of which will come from the Choice grant.

A successful transformation of Iberville carries huge political potential for the city’s leadership as well as for Obama, who has highlighted the community in speeches about the power of Choice Neighborhoods to reinvent American cities. Unlike the Press Park section of Desire, which is separated from New Orleans’ downtown core by railroad tracks, a smoggy stretch of industrial businesses and the Interstate, Iberville can’t be ignored.

“The Treme community plays a vital role in the city’s heritage and cultural identity,” Landrieu said in a press release put out when the HUD announced New Orleans would receive the Choice award. “This grant provides us with an essential tool to transform lives and revitalize one of the greatest neighborhoods in the country.”

Gilmore admits that even if Press Park were his top priority, it would not qualify for the federal support Iberville is getting. “It just would not satisfy the vast array of issues Choice Neighborhoods takes into account,” he says.

HANO is slowly rebuilding the Desire public housing complex, despite its remote, industrial location. HANO chief David Gilmore says that the authority decided to rebuild because residents felt strongly about returning, not because its location makes sense as a place for housing. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

Winners and losers

Ninth Ward Councilman Jon Johnson was mad.  It was day 10 of the City Council’s hearings on the city’s 2012 budget and the only clear message he was hearing seemed to be that his district, which encompasses a large swath of the city’s northeastern neighborhoods, including the city’s most storm-devastated areas, was not going to get much help in the coming year. As the director of the city’s Regional Transit Authority explained that population losses in the 9^th Ward would mean fewer buses, Johnson turned to an aide and spoke quietly for a moment. As soon the authority’s presentation ended, Johnson turned back to his microphone. “We have to stop dumping all of our resources in the core of the city,” he told the crowded Council chambers. “We have communities out here that are struggling to hold on while downtown, things are getting built, things are improving. It is simply not right.”

Kildee, a Democrat who has announced he will run this year for a U.S. House seat from Flint, Mich., his hometown, has made a name for himself as a leader in the burgeoning “Shrinking Cities” movement. Kildee’s mission is to align the size of cities with their population, creating smaller cities wherein resources and services can be better targeted.  A consultant to municipalities around the country, Kildee has advised the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and stationed an outpost for his organization’s Vacant Properties Campaign in the city. In June, the organization will hold a conference here.

Kildee acknowledges that Johnson is right. There will be losers.

“I would love to live in a world where the federal government could provide enough resources to do it all at once but until that day comes someone has to make hard choices,” he says.  “We know for certain that the old way of spreading money around is not working. But it does keep me up at night, worrying about those communities who may not benefit.”

This report is published in partnership with City Limits, a national urban affairs journal. 

By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |

Byron Orlando Sandoval Lopez, 42, was cycling home on the St. Claude Avenue Bridge when a minivan hit him from behind, flinging him into the moving traffic that took his life. Kory Schenck, 26, was walking his bicycle across the Seabrook Bridge when a car fatally struck him. William Eddington, 64 was biking across Broad Street on Ursulines Avenue, moving against oncoming traffic, when a collision killed him.

In all three instances, drivers told police they didn’t see the cyclists until it was too late.

These three New Orleans deaths provide a window into one of the city’s more insistent – and overlooked —  safety hazards: dangerous traffic conditions for bicyclists. Bike down most streets in New Orleans and chances are you will dodge unlit intersections, potholes big enough to eat a tire, wheel-tripping horizontal grates and designated bike lanes several inches too narrow for safe passage. Even the most map-savvy travelers have a tough time finding bike-friendly streets to carry them all the way across town.  And if you’re bicycling after dark and have to cross a bridge, as Lopez and Schenck tried to do, you’re facing the most high-risk scenario of all.

In 2011, the dangers translated into the death of one biker and another 121 bicycle-related injuries in Orleans Parish, state records show. The prior year, the death toll was three cyclists with another 102 injured.

The numbers are small, but the patterns persistent. In the five years between1996 and 2001, crashes took the lives of 12 bicyclists in the city and injured 135 others, according to Charity Hospital data compiled by the Regional Planning Commission in a 2006 plan. All but two killed were black males and 78 percent of the crashes occurred in or within a quarter mile of a high-poverty census tract, the data shows.

In 2002, the city’s fatality rate won New Orleans  the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous biking city in the country’s third most lethal state for biking. In fact, Orleans Parish accounted for 49 percent of all bicycle crashes statewide, federal highway data shows.

“There’s a lot of ways to get hurt out there,” cyclist Tommy Gremillion, 55, said.

He should know. Several years back, he hit a cyclist while driving a FedEx truck in the French Quarter. The cyclist was riding the wrong way on a one-way street, Gremillion said, and suffered only minimal injuries, but the experience still haunts him.

“That’s why I quit driving,” Gremillion said. “You have to be cautious out there if you want to avoid injury, and not everyone is.

The issue crosses class and race lines. Despite a media focus on young, white and preternaturally hip pedalers, the data show that the majority of the city’s cyclists are men of color who don’t have cars and rely on bikes to get around. And the injury rate tracks that: Of the injuries reported between 1996 and 2001, 44 were sustained by black males under 18, but only two in the same age group were white males, the Regional Planning Commission states in its New Orleans Metropolitan Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, the most recent study of biking fatalities in the city.

“You can’t attribute the popularity of bikes to the influx of new people and the fact that people are all green,” Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer. “It is the fact that we are a poor city. People cannot afford to have cars and they get around on bikes.”

“This has always been the case and now we are becoming more conscious of it,” she said. “It’s an equity issue. People should be able to get to work, school or the store safely, affordably, and in a way that is healthy to them and the community.”

The movement to make streets safer for bikers is beginning to bear fruit in New Orleans. Unlike in other cities where designated bike lanes and other such amenities have been met with resistance from territorial drivers, there has been virtually zero public opposition here. Pre-Katrina, the city had 11 miles of bikeways. Now the city has 43.9 miles of bikeways constructed, including bike lanes, shared lanes, and off-street paths, with another 4.2 miles are currently in construction and approximately 15 additional miles in planning.

In September, the League of American Bicyclists recognized the city’s progress by designating it as a Bicycle Friendly Community.  The advocacy group, which awarded the city a bronze designation, commended New Orleans for its expanding bikeway network and growing biking population.

Yet even as the political stars align for the urban bicycling movement, significant challenges remain.

Earlier this month, Palmer, an avid pedaler herself, won unanimous approval from the City Council for an ordinance that establishes a “Complete Streets” program at City Hall.  Complete Streets is a national movement to encourage road design that prioritizes the needs of cyclists, pedestrians, transit users and people with disabilities. Much like Complete Streets regulations passed in cities such as Charlotte, N.C., Tupelo, Miss., and Rockville, Md., the Palmer-authored ordinance requires the city’s Public Works Department to work with the City Planning Commission to create design standards and policies that promote walking, biking and transit usage and that comply fully with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under the ordinance, planners must consider amenities such as bike lanes, crosswalks, traffic-calming measures, curb cuts, street and sidewalk lighting and other “targeted pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements.”

New Orleans is the first city in Louisiana to adopt such a policy, though the state itself enacted a similar statute in 2010.

Advocates, including Mayor Mitch Landrieu, say the policy is nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that contravenes decades of planning exclusively for cars and other passenger vehicles.

“Up until now, making streets safer has been done in an ad-hoc way,” said Matt Rufo, program manager for the KidsWalk Coalition, a project of the Prevention Research Center at Tulane University. “This will make it happen as a matter of policy, as the rule rather than the exception.”

The following photo essay is a look at the cyclists who stand to benefit from the new policy. They were photographed at intersections identified by the Regional Planning Commission as crash “hot spots” because of the frequency with which accidents occur there. Several of the cyclists featured were found through Insight New Orleans. Insight New Orleans is a part of American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, an engagement platform for people to share with journalists their knowledge and insights about timely issues. (Photo Essay by Andy Cook)

Click here to share your insights on cycling in New Orleans with us.

Some corners in this city tell quintessentially New Orleans stories, and among them is the intersection of South Broad Street and Washington Avenue. There on the trafficky Broadmoor bend, King’s Meat Market and Grocery sells gumbo-ready mixes of seasoned poultry parts named for whichever store employee or customer first divined the recipe’s proportion of legs to necks to pickled tips.

Walk outside, and to the left, boarded storefronts sit forelornly, still marked with rust-colored floodlines from Hurricane Katrina. Immediately beyond that, on the corner of Eve Street, is the hulking Sewerage & Water Board pumping station that failed to prevent the water from rising.

But if all goes as planned, this Broadmoor juncture soon will be postcard material for another quintessentially New Orleans story – one of post-Katrina reinvention.

This week, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority Board of Commissioners approved a $1 million in public financing for an $8 million, four-parcel project that intends to transform the blocks surrounding the busy intersection into a hub for social enterprise – and a symbol of the area’s journey from proposed abandonment to poster child for progressive urban renaissance.

Developers plan for this long-closed storefront at 2701 S. Broad St. to be part of a renaissance of the intersection of Broad and Washington Avenue. Photo by Ariella Cohen

The state-empowered authority agreed Monday to provide real estate developer Green Coast Enterprises with a $600,000 forgivable loan to build a nonprofit-owned health clinic. Planned for a former pharmacy at 3300 S. Broad St., the South Broad Community Health-operated clinic will offer, through a partnership with Tulane University Medical School, government-subsidized services on a sliding fee scale to uninsured or low-income clients.

A separate $400,000 low-interest loan will go to Green Coast and a partner organization, Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans, to transform an old rim shop at 4035 Washington Ave., into a 10,000-square-foot shared office space for start-ups, nonprofits and small businesses. Called the Green Hub, the building will be shared by Green Coast, Social Entrepreneurs, Broadmoor Development Corporation and the Broadmoor Improvement Association, as well as Global Green and other to-be-determined organizations. Any organization housed there needs to fit the project’s mission of solving “critical social issues through innovative solutions,” and creating “positive impact in the communities of Southeast Louisiana,” according to the Social Entrepreneurs website.

Around the corner, on an empty stretch from Eve Street nearly to Washington will be a location for Laurel Street Bakery, and possibly, a storefront bank or community development financial institution, said Green Coast Enterprises President Will Bradshaw. In total, the development will cost $8 million, the developer said, including the old Rim City World on Washington, the Apex Paint building and two other commercial lots on the 2700 block of Broad, as well as the former pharmacy aross the street.

This rendering shows a proposed clinic at the corner of Broad and Washington, across Washington from Rhodes Funeral Home. Courtesy of South Broad Community Health

“We are seeding a whole new ecosystem of social entrepreneurs to thrive in a environment that touches five of the most critical neighborhoods of the city,” Bradshaw said. “This project is a physical incarnation of a mission to support social innovation in the heart of the city.”

From its location on a key corner to its mixed-use design and emphasis on neighborhood job-creation, the project reflects the place-based approach to community development championed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu – and by the neighborhood itself. Broadmoor emerged from Katrina with a rallying cry of “Better than before” and visions of Washington Avenue as a tree-lined boulevard with cafes and small businesses.

“It was the neighborhood, and the neighborhood’s leadership that got this done,” NORA Board member James Singleton said at Monday’s meeting.

The two NORA loans – drawn from a pool of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grants – must still be approved by the city and the state, which administers the federal grants. It is unlikely that either Mayor Mitch Landrieu or state officials will object because the project reflects the city’s master plan and has already garnered public support.

These three sites are set to be redeveloped under an $8 million proposal, financed in part through forgivable public loans.

In May, the state awarded the project a $1 million low-interest loan through its Project-Based Recovery Opportunity Program. Like the NORA loans, the money came from the state’s pool of Community Development Block Grants. In addition to the grant-funded low-interest loans, Green Coast is using revenue from New Market Tax Credits and Historic Preservation Tax Credits to finance the project, Bradshaw said.

The Green Coast project will be the second major public-private investment in the corridor since Katrina. The first was the iconic white Rhodes Funeral home across the street, which came back to life with the assistance of a $3.2 million HUD grant and a $250,000 grant from the city’s Economic Development Fund. Another $250,000 went to Rhodes to redevelop the old Bohn Ford dealership, now a gutted frame covered in colorful murals. Rhodes did not return phone calls about the progress of that project.

It is likely more investment will come to the area. This year, the city got started with a $250,000 street improvement project that will bring trees, a crosswalk, a bike lane, lights and other amenities to the Broad and Washington intersection.

Nearby, the Keller Library will soon reopen with a coffee shop residents voted to name Green Dot Coffee. That’s a not-so-subtle thumbing of the nose at the post-Katrina plan that proposed abandoning badly flooded neighborhoods and turning them into green space, signified on planning maps as giant green dots.

“We’ve been working on these projects for a long long time,” Broadmoor Improvement Association President Latoya Cantrell said. “Now they are finally becoming real.”

But today’s reality for many in Broadmoor is still a far cry from the wholesome visions laid out in the community’s master plan. On a drizzly Thursday afternoon, an intoxicated man stumbled into King’s Meat Market and asked clerk Lashawn Buchanan for change.

Lashawn Buchanan, a clerk at King’s Meat Market and Grocery, is looking forward to the proposed development near the store, and hopes it leads to an overall improvement in the area. Photo by Ariella Cohen

“We need what we have. Go,” she said, pointing to the door.  “These jokers,” she muttered, as a co-worker, Tommy Pham, cheerily explained that the rain was keeping most, but not all, the drug dealers off the corner that day.

Buchanan – inspiration for King’s eponymous $88.99 mix of chicken parts, pickled tips and turkey necks – lives with her two children on South Prieur Street, between Washington and Toledano streets, a short walk from the house where the mayor grew up.

She feels that her side of Broadmoor has gotten more dangerous since Katrina. “There is more drug activity, more killings. No jobs,” she said.

She is not the only one who feels that way. A sign on a nearby storefront implores, “Please No Chillin’ Outside,” another warns that police will be called on loiterers.

Gunshots recently killed a 16-year-old boy leaving a barber shop a block away.

“He got shot in the middle of the street, in the back. Just like that,” said King’s Market customer, Ashton Thompson.

“I feel a little safer because I grew up here,” he said, watching a butcher wrap a tidy packet of spicy turkey necks. “The dealers are still out there, but they know my dad.

“If you’re not from here, I don’t know what to say.”

Because of fears that streets are not safe for walking, Buchanan drives her 8-year-old daughter to her after-school program at Rosenwald Gym, a few blocks away.  She hopes the development will bring new life to the area and make it safer so her child can walk on her own.

Perhaps even more critically, she hopes it will bring more opportunity. Across the street sits a vacant building where she would like to open a soul food restaurant.

“You say they’re building offices to help people start businesses,” she said. “How do I sign up?”

Good news for your undercarriage – Mayor Mitch Landrieu has secured more FEMA money for street repairs in Broadmoor, the Lakeview area and St. Claude. The combined total of $52 million divided between the neighborhoods came as a result of Landrieu-initiated damage assessments done on neighborhood streets.

The cash infusion brings the total of new FEMA dollars secured for neighborhood street repairs since Landrieu took office to $97 million. In

Scenes like this likely will be fewer and farther between after the city spends another $52 million in FEMA money on street repairs. Photo by Ariella Cohen

August, FEMA awarded $45 million for repairs in the Lower 9^th Ward. As The Lens first reported in August, Landrieu hopes to eventually reassess all flood-damaged neighborhoods, and net FEMA dollars for repairs citywide.

The money is coming down now rather than three years ago because the administration has aggressively pursued these federal resources in a way its predecessor didn’t, Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant said in August.

“We have teams of people canvassing neighborhoods and (drafting) a neighborhood streets program, and that wasn’t done before,” Grant said., “This is kind of ‘Let’s go back to the drawing board. Let’s rethink.’ ”

The St. Claude area will get the largest chunk of road repair money – $21.8 million. Another $16.7 million will go to Lakeview, $7.5 million will go to Lakeshore/Lake Vista, $4.8 million to Broadmoor and $1.3 million for the Milneberg neighborhood. The city has not yet released a map of specific streets that will be repaired.

The mayor’s sister, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., also took credit for the FEMA money because of her position as chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.

“Because of this funding, these neighborhoods can make much needed improvements to their infrastructure and continue moving forward to complete recovery,” she said in a release.

Since taking office, Mitch Landrieu has made it his business to improve the city’s scarred relationship with FEMA. This has meant more efficient negotiations, said Eddie Williams, supervisor of the federal agency’s New Orleans Public Assistance Division.

“The previous administration had this hodge-podge approach,” Williams explained in an August interview. “It was ‘Pick a project today that is the issue and let’s get FEMA to do it.’ It’s different now. More focused. I don’t want to say it was adversarial before, but we were all working in silos. There is more joint collaboration now.”

So far, that collaboration has netted the city more than $125 million shared between street, infrastructure and building projects, FEMA documents from August show.

The negotiations mean that a bank account that had $605.3 million when Landrieu took office, now has $797 million, according to Joseph Threat, Director of the FEMA Louisiana Recovery Office.

After more than a year of delay, Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration soon will begin a long-anticipated federally funded study of how to revitalize the North Claiborne Avenue corridor, his planning director Bill Gilchrist said this week.

The study, which is expected to take more than a year of work by a city-contracted consultant, will be partially financed by a $2 million grant awarded to the city by President Barack Obama’s administration in October of 2010.

The study will look at the feasibility of redeveloping the city’s busiest interior highway, including the possibility of demolishing the elevated Interstate 10 expressway between Elysian Fields Avenue and the Pontchartrain Expressway, near the Superdome. A private study done by the Congress for the New Urbanism found that returning Claiborne to the street grid by turning the expressway into a multilane boulevard would cause minimal traffic delays — four to six minutes differences in most trips, traffic planners say — while reconnecting historic neighborhoods, making them more tourist-friendly and attractive for investment.

Built in the 1960s, the 2.2-mile highway’s construction destroyed the tree-lined commercial spine of the Treme neighborhood. For decades, neighbors have criticized it as an emission-spewing wall dividing vibrant downtown communities from less-affluent neighbors, and discouraging investment.

“It never should’ve been built, and it has never been a healthy neighbor to my community,” said Vaughn Fauria, president of NewCorp business assistance center nearby on St. Bernard Avenue.

And while many area residents, business owners and real-estate developers share that view, others are skeptical the move would benefit the people who have made home in theinterstate’s shadow.

Conde Monier, 25, and a business management student at Dillard University, could hear the interstate from his childhood bedroom in the 7^th Ward. In February, he and his family opened a barebones daiquiri shop in a strip mall on Claiborne, near Laharpe St., Just Chill Food and Daiquiris. The expressway’s rumble is Monier’s white noise. Its traffic breaks up his skyline.

“It’s what I see,” he said recently.

Monier points to a blue Ford Expedition parked under the elevated highway.

“That guy parks there every day during his lunch break and takes a nap,” he said. He points to a faded painting of an oak tree on one of the highway’s concrete beams. “That’s where the second lines come.”

Conde Monier owns a daiquiri shop on Claiborne opposite the elevated Interstate. He questions how its demolition will benefit him. Photo by Ariella Cohen

The dreadlocked entrepreneur doesn’t believe that tearing down the expressway would benefit his business, or the second line parade-goers that refuel at his shop.

“Destruction is not where you start,” he said. “They say they want to tear down to build up. I feel like they are really tearing it down so then they have a reason to tell people not to be here, not to hang out here.”

Others share his doubts.

At a forum on the future of the interstate held Tuesday at the Louisiana Humanities Center, one person in the audience raised her hand to ask why more neighborhood residents hadn’t been surveyed on the issue.  A young man asked if planners were considering that that overpass was being used, if only as shelter from rain and sun during Mardi Gras parades and second lines.

For the older generation that remembers the shopping on a tree-lined, pre-interstate Claiborne, opposition to tearing down the intrusion is almost nonsensical.

On Wednesday afternoon, Conde Monier’s mother, Crystal Clay, sat behind the counter of her son’s empty daiquiri shop and reminisced.

“Tearing it down would be good for business,” she said. “Right now, people get on the freeway and they just keep going, never even seeing us down here.”

“Don’t you think?” she prodded her son.

The decision belongs to Landrieu and the federal government, which the mayor will depend on to help finance either a demolition of the highway or needed repairs that the Federal Highway Administration estimates will cost more than $50 million. The forthcoming study of Claiborne will weigh the cost of tearing down the expressway, as well as the cost of alternatives.

Advocates say removing the expressway will be cheaper over the long term than continuing to maintain the aging structure. For context, in Milwaukee, it cost about $45 million in 2002 to demolish a one-mile stretch of highway and reconstruct the road. The city, the state and the federal government shared the cost. Under the terms of the federal planning grant,  the city must contribute at least $758,000 in money or services as a match.

John Norquist, who was mayor of Milwaukee when it dismantled the inner-city highway and is now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism said it would have cost about $80 million to rebuild the Milwaukee freeway. Norquist’s group co-sponsored Tuesday’s forum, with a coalition of neighborhood groups called NewCity Neighborhood Partnership.

While Landrieu has remained somewhat taciturn about the potential teardown, the move would be aligned with his stated commitment to building a denser, more bike-  and pedestrian-friendly downtown. Gilchrist appears on board.

“This could be a tremendous opportunity to reconnect two of the city’s most historic neighborhoods,” he said Tuesday. “This could be a game-changer.”

In a city confronting an ever-rising homicide count and profound infrastructural and economic challenges, one place remains relatively calm: City Hall.

With a noticeable absence of strife or dissent, the City Council voted today to unanimously approve a  $497 million general operating budget for 2012 that looks remarkably similar in substance and detail to the budget proposed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu in October.  The budget reduces spending in nearly all departments excluding the Coroner’s Office, the Fire Department and the New Orleans Police Department, which received a 9 percent budget increase to $119 million from $109 million in 2011. Landrieu has maintained throughout the budget process that improving public safety and lowering the city’s notoriously high homicide rate are his top priorities.

Despite grumbling from council members throughout the three-week budget hearing process about the amount of money the city spends on non-essential government tasks – such as the mayor’s communications office, which received $898,622 for 2012 – the council did not move any money from these areas.  Landrieu’s communication budget for 2012, while smaller than last year’s, is 21 percent larger than that of his predecessor, Ray Nagin.

Little happened at today's council meeting to take the smile off members' faces.

Stacy Head, arguably the most outspoken member of the council and a frequent critic of bureaucracy, said there was no “councilwide, meaningful discussion” of shifting funds from these executive-level offices to other city departments because of an overall sense that the budget generally reflects the needs of the city.

“By and large, this is a good budget,” she said.

The budget passed easily not in small part because of conveniently timed decisions to increase the size of the budget from $494 million to $497 million. The move prevented the council from needing to reduce some departmental budgets in order to increase others and fulfill their own goals.

Earlier this week, the city’s economist readjusted the city’s 2012 revenue projections upwards by removing a $1.8 million expenditure on support services for Harrah’s Casino with the expectation that the state will cover the cost. That came on top of an $800,000 savings generated by an adjustment to the city’s pension financing.

The combined $2.6 million windfall gave the council and the mayor clearance to restore unpopular cuts. A $440,000 injection into Department of City Planning will let the department avoid dreaded staff cuts.

”Hopefully it will mean we don’t have to let anyone go, but just because the council allocated the money doesn’t mean the city will spend it,” department administrator Arlen Brunson said.

The Public Defenders Office also received a $475,000 funding bump.

A $16,000 allocation will pay for the Fire Department to hold previously unfunded civil service exams for fire district chiefs.

Also funded by the late-breaking cash infusion: a politically popular pothole-filling crew, Department of Sanitation “sanitation rangers,” and $25,000 for the Arts Council.

These changes, made at the request of Landrieu, with the support of the council, show the mayor’s skill at negotiating with the council. Each restores a reduction in funding that the council had complained about during the three weeks of budget hearings that proceeded Thursday’s action. Despite the smoothness of that transaction, the mayor declined to request a restoration of the $753,620 Landrieu cut from the council’s $9.8 million 2011 budget, leaving the council to restore that money on its own, without political cover.

In addition to restoring its budget to current levels, the council moved $500,000 from the NOPD to the Office of the District Attorney. The council explained the move as one that would ultimately help the NOPD because they hoped the additional funds would go to strengthen the DA’s witness-protection program, a program the NOPD depends on.

“Though it is money taken from police department, the money will assist the police department,” Council President Jackie Clarkson said. She said that the witness-protection program is the “best thing” the city is doing for criminal justice.

Despite the council’s intention to support witness-protection services, the legislative body has no legal authority to ensure that the money they allocate is spent for the purpose they intend.

“It’s up to the mayor and the departments,” Councilman Eric Granderson said.

“People get caught up in the budget approved on Dec. 1, but if you come here on any Monday or Thursday you see the budget being adjusted and amended. It’s a document that will keep on living and changing.”

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

Backlit by the insistent neon signage of New Orleans City Hall, the Rev. Jesse Jackson last night told Occupy Nola protesters that they had a right to assemble peacefully in Duncan Plaza, the Loyola Avenue public green where Occupy first set up camp in early October.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson tells a crowd at Duncan Plaza to "keep hope alive." Photo by Ariella Cohen

“This park is our park,” he said, employing the call and response speech structure of Occupy protests nationwide. “We have the right.”

Our partners WVUE FOX8 News caught some video of the event.

The veteran civil rights leader’s short appearance fell on the eve of a planned sit-in at City Council chambers, scheduled to coincide with a national day of action being observed in cities across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Lower Manhattan.

Though occupiers have maintained a non-hierarchical structure that isn’t conducive for sending a singular dominant message, the movement’s main demand is for a lessening of the growing income gap between the county’s top earners and the other 99 percent of its citizens.

Unlike in other cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, where council members have been vocal in support for the Occupy movement, the New Orleans council has kept out of the fray. Mayor Mitch Landrieu has in recent weeks been more vocal about the possibility of evicting demonstrators from the public space, an often empty, if well-maintained, stretch of green that last made it into the news when homeless people formed an encampment there in 2007.
“We think that we have been a great host to Occupy NOLA,” Landrieu told The Times-Picayune. “They have been there in a peaceful way. But at some point in time, we’ve got to say ‘Look, you’ve worn out your welcome.’

“At some point in time, it’s going to get beyond just a First Amendment expression.”

The last tent city in the space became politicized as a symbol of a post-Katrina housing crisis caused in part, activists said, by the decision to not reopen the city’s largest public housing developments after the storm. In late 2007, the state and city gave more than $1.4 million to the nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans to relocate people into temporary and permanent supportive housing units.

The Landrieu administration has not explained what its logic would be for the eviction of the peaceful Occupy protestors. A spokesman for the mayor could not be reached Wednesday evening for a response to this question.

Landrieu wouldn’t be the first to evict the protesters. Occupiers have been forced out of encampments in Oakland, New York and Portland, Ore.

Legal reaction to such forcible removal has differed. Earlier this week, a judge in Dallas upheld the right of Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings to evict the demonstrators from City Hall. Yesterday, a judge in Boston temporarily barred such an action there.

Citing the demonstrators’ right to free speech in her decision, Judge Frances A. McIntyre said that without emergency circumstances such as a fire, medical emergency or outbreak of violence, the city would need a court order to shut down Occupy Boston.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week banned the use of tents, tarps and sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park, effectively ending the two-month downtown Manhattan encampment. His legal argument depended on a legal clause requiring the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, to maintain the privately held park for all New Yorkers.

The eviction was supported by a court ruling.

“The protestors will be able to continue to exercise their First Amendment rights in Zuccotti Park, or anywhere else in New York City,” Marc Lavorgna, a spokesman for Bloomberg said in a statement. “Brookfield requested the City’s assistance so they can meet their obligation to maintain this public park for all New Yorkers. Protesters can remain in the park during Brookfield’s section-by-section clean-up and they will be able to return to the cleaned sections once work is completed tomorrow and can stay in the park 24/7 so long as they follow park rules. We will continue to defend and guarantee their free speech rights, but those rights do not include the ability to infringe on the rights of others, which is why the rules governing the park will be enforced.”

In New York, progressive council members have kept up support of the Occupy movement. A letter signed by 13 of the council’s 51 members implored Bloomberg to “respect the deep traditions of free speech and right of assembly that make this is a great, free diverse and opinionated city and nation.”

The mayor’s political foes have also jumped on the issue

“Mayor Bloomberg made a needlessly provocative and legally questionable decision to clear Zuccotti Park in the dead of night,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said in a public statement reported by the website Capital New York. De Blasio is planning a run for mayor in 2013.