This is the introduction to a five-story project, The Lens’ Embracing Katrina Narratives project.
Last summer, in July, a group of influential New Orleanians gathered, with hopes of preparing the city for a national spotlight ahead of Super Bowl LIX.
Michael Hecht, the CEO Of Greater New Orleans Inc., who was tapped by Governor Jeff Landry to lead Super Bowl preparation efforts, informed the group that the GNO Inc. “internal Super Bowl team” had taken a drive around the Lower 9th Ward, checking out beautification and infrastructure needs in the neighborhood.
The visit was made to “anticipate any features of the neighborhood which could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative,” Hecht had reported, according to a slide presentation from the meeting.
The group, which dubbed itself the “Super Gras Subcommittee,” included Orleans city officials and representatives from the French Market Corporation, Downtown Development District, and the Audubon Institute.
The meeting had a broad focus, ranging from potholes to street flooding to dingy-looking surfaces. The city’s Department of Public Works updated the committee on road resurfacing and sidewalk and catch basin repairs. The Sewage and Water Board ran through the leaking fire hydrants on their to-do list. And the city’s Department of Property Management discussed a much-needed pressure wash of City Hall.
Most of the efforts discussed that day, according to a slide presentation from the meeting, were centered around the major tourist hubs — the French Quarter and Central Business District.
But it was the Lower 9th Ward mention that reminded neighborhood residents about the inequities that still remain, nearly 20 years later from the disaster we call Katrina — while Hurricane Katrina was spinning in the Gulf of Mexico, faulty federal levees broke and flooded the community to its rooftops.
Why was Hecht’s team straying so far from the commercial hub of the city? To be charitable, it seems possible that the team was trying to ensure that the pre-Super Bowl investments in New Orleans were made equitably. But that is not within the summary given to the subcommittee that day.
Hecht and other city officials did not respond to questions from The Lens regarding what they meant by “Katrina narrative.” Nor did they identify the specific upgrades that have taken place in the Lower 9 neighborhood ahead of the Super Bowl. When asked, neighbors could only think of the Saturday litter cleanup on January 25, led by the city of New Orleans, a team of GNO Inc. staff, the rapper Juvenile and some of his colleagues.
Yet, still today, resident Robert Green, 69, can walk down any block in the Lower 9 and describe the damage done there by Katrina and the breached federal levees, which submerged the neighborhood in 17 feet of water in some places. Though the majority-Black neighborhood has come a long way since Katrina hit on August 29, 2005, it is, in many ways, the poster child of the inequitable recovery that followed the 2005 storm.
On top of an early suggestion to completely abandon the Lower 9 and other hard hit neighborhoods, the state’s Road Home program that issued rebuilding grants massively shortchanged people in low-income neighborhoods like the Lower 9. A survey conducted in 2015, 10 years after the storm, found that 80 percent of white New Orleanians felt the city had “mostly recovered.” Just 37 percent of Black residents felt the same.
Today, many properties in the Lower 9 remain vacant, many in disrepair. On some blocks, weeds that tower like trees have taken over empty lots. Strict zoning requirements can make it difficult to rebuild on the community’s small standard lot sizes.
Were the Super Bowl planners concerned about exposing those inequities to the world? That has long been an uncomfortable local — and national — conversation.
Green has watched it all first-hand, both the triumphs of recovery and its pitfalls. Twenty years ago, when Katrina hit the city, he weathered the deluge in the Lower 9 inside his family house, which came off its piers and floated down on Tennessee Street.
To him, the pretense of ignoring the “Katrina narrative” seemed nonsensical. “There’s no way you can enter the Ninth Ward, upper or lower, without talking about what happened in Katrina,” Green said. It’s not something you can avoid. It’s like going to Manhattan and ignoring that the Twin Towers came down.”
To counter the “Super Gras Subcommittee” narrative, Green and four of his neighbors told The Lens what Lower 9 landmarks Super Bowl visitors should see – and what Katrina narratives go with those landmarks.
This story has been updated to make clear that in New Orleans, the root cause of the 2005 devastation that we often refer to simply as “Katrina” was inadequate flood-protection design and construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that caused local levees to breach, submerging 80% of the city including communities like the Lower 9. Beyond New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and its massive storm surge devastated Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.
