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The Inevitable City

The Resurgence of New Orleans and the Future of Urban America

St. Martin's Press

HARD CALLS

DO THE RIGHT THING

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IT'S 10 A.M. ON A SUNDAY AND I'M AT MY DESK, WRITING. OUTSIDE the window, across the street in Audubon Park, a group of Mardi Gras Indians are practicing for St. Joseph's Day, one of the lesser-known holidays on the New Orleans calendar. Mardi Gras is the biggest blowout of the year, but we celebrate a lot here — formal occasions like St. Joseph's Day and Super Sunday and informal ones like second-line parades and jazz funerals. People take to the streets all year long, swept up in tides of music and movement.

Looking out my window, I see that the Indians are wearing their costumes — extravagant scaffolds of plumes, rhinestones, and beadwork. They're riveting. Arms flung wide, feet stomping, the men execute peacock struts and ruffle their feathers. The tambourine shakes out a beat and strange words float in the air.

The Mardi Gras Indians are African American, with possible traces of Caribbean and Native American heritage, strains that are evident in the songs and dances. According to local lore, the impulse to dress up as Indians stems from a feeling of kinship with the Native American tribes who took in runaway slaves in the nineteenth century. Some of the chiefs say that another motivating force for the creation of tribes was opposition to the predominantly white Mardi Gras processions. Feeling unwelcome, African Americans made their own parade.

One of the complicated things about New Orleans is the racial divide: How divided is it? You talk to different people, you get different answers. On the one hand, there's a lot of easy warmth and acceptance, a feeling of "we're all from here." There's also a strong multiracial element, with many genetic mixtures and many shades of skin color. On the other hand, there are occasional collisions along racial lines. Even so, it's not like elsewhere. The civil rights movement stopped short of New Orleans, at least in the sense of open hostilities. Everything down here is more subtle, more encoded, than elsewhere.

I should add that I'm not "from here." I'm originally from New Jersey, a place with very different social codes. I was also, for a long while, a transplant to Cleveland, Ohio, the rust belt city derided as "the mistake on the lake" but in fact a place of interesting textures and customs. Still, New Orleans is different: more intricate, more layered. There's something in the air, a complicated, liberating ethos of permissiveness, indulgence, acceptance, forgiveness. As my wife Margie puts it, she's never lived in a place where she's known so many people who've been in jail, not for violent crime but for white-collar misdeeds, shady dealings, minor corruption. People tend to shrug off other people's mistakes, as they shrug off their own. That's the way it is down here.

In my seven pre-Katrina years in New Orleans, I was, in a way, a tourist. But since Katrina, I feel more like I'm "from here." I've become engaged with everything New Orleans — the music, the food, the artists, the history; the hurricane parties, the Mardi Gras floats, the smell of jasmine, the glitter of the river. I've met remarkable people, like the late Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee, who figured out how to get Tulane's database files out of a downtown building when the city was under martial law, and like Quint Davis, the mastermind and producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, who almost singlehandedly brought the city's music — everything from the Mardi Gras Indians' chants to Professor Longhair's blues — to national prominence. And then there's Bob Breland, my regular cabdriver, whose colorful turns of phrase, careening sense of humor, and encyclopedic mind for city detail remind me of Ignatius from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

There are also the people I don't know personally but who make me feel like I know them. I was in the grocery store not long ago, and a woman in an extravagant hat, some sort of feathered thing sitting on the rim, passed by me in the aisle. She smiled warmly and said, "How ya doin', baby?" I smiled back and told her I was fine, how was she doin'? It's like old home week everywhere you go. In the pre- hurricane years, I grew to love this town. It was Katrina that changed the landscape, literally and figuratively, and gave me the chance to do something here.

I turn again to the window. The Mardi Gras Indians are still chanting, and I try to make out the words. Hey Mama, hu tan nay, pock a way pock a way. It's patois, mixing English with what sounds like nonsense words. We have a group of linguists at Tulane who are analyzing Indian songs to try to identify their roots in French, Spanish, and Native American dialects. We also have a group at the law school trying to copyright the costumes of the Indians as works of art, so that the tribes, some 40 of them, will benefit whenever they're displayed at art museums or on the web.

I love watching the Indians dance, but I'm aware that I'm only an observer. I see them framed in the window: They're out there, I'm in here. A lot of the life of the city, vivid, messy, exotic, is "out there," while I spend my time in offices and conference rooms. Maybe I've become more part of the city, a transplant with roots, but I'm still somehow separated from the culture — which may be one reason I've been able to do certain things, hard things, that people born and raised here couldn't or wouldn't.

Another reason I could do things is Tulane itself. New Orleans, already beset by multiple urban problems, was in danger of a disastrous decline in the aftermath of Katrina. Because the fate of the city was so closely tied to the university, I ended up playing a part in its rebuilding. Tulane's part of the story is about seizing an opportunity and assuming a responsibility that chance presented and, in the midst of chaos and paralysis, taking action. Action meant hard things: challenging tradition, breaking rules, disrupting the status quo, causing pain. But "before" wasn't ever coming back. Everything we did at Tulane was done in the belief that the cost, and there was always a cost, was worth it — because we had to change things, and fast, if we were going to have a future.

The story of the four months after Katrina is really two intertwined tales: what the university did to "build a village" in the flooded and anarchic city, so that students could come back for a spring term, and what happened in the city itself, where civic leaders tried to plan a new urban environment while half of the community was scattered across the entire nation. This chapter describes what we did at Tulane; chapter 2 takes up events in the city. Both narratives cover roughly the same time period: those critical months of posthurricane chaos.

I begin with what happened in the autumn of 2005, when the very idea of a future was in doubt.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE STORM, TULANE, like every other institution and business in New Orleans, was scrambling for basic survival. Though the situation was dire, it was also clouded with uncertainty — the fog of disaster. In the end, the facts looked like this:

• More than 1,500 people died in the Greater New Orleans area. Most drowned in their homes or expired in the 100-degree heat of their attics. Many hundreds more died from stress-related illness and inadequate health care in the year following the storm.

• More than 200,000 homes were destroyed, and many more were damaged.

• More than 1 million people — 80 percent of the greater metro population — were displaced for at least six weeks, many for months. (And, according to some estimates, 100,000 have still, nearly a decade later, not returned.)

• More than 80 percent of Orleans Parish, or county, was flooded — a landmass equivalent to 7 times the size of Manhattan.

• The hurricane resulted in 22 million tons of debris, more than 12 times the amount of the 9/11 tragedy.

• Katrina has been ranked the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States.

Tulane University was not immune to this devastation. Seventy percent of the main campus and all of the health sciences campus were flooded with water ranging from one to three feet in depth. The university experienced losses in excess of $650 million.

But we didn't know all this at the time; we were dealing with facts as they emerged, day by day, in the aftermath. I was the president; the buck stopped with me. And there were hard decisions to make, actions to take. It was not a time (if there's ever a time) for crowd pleasing or grandstanding or leisurely democratic consensus. It was up to me to decide what would be most effective, productive, fair, and beneficial for a broad range of people and interests.

"Managers do things right, while leaders do the right things." Doing the right thing is not a matter of correctness or following a blueprint; it frequently entails difficult, controversial decisions, because the "right thing" is often in the eye of the beholder. Yet doing the right thing is what separates true leaders from those who do not have the capacity or insight to search out what's required to resolve complex issues. Leaders ultimately are held accountable for their actions and measured by their achievements; and it's doing what's right that determines success versus failure.

The central theme of this chapter is leadership and the challenges it poses for those who can find the strength and will to effect positive change.

DURING ALL OF SEPTEMBER 2005, following the August 29 landfall of Katrina, the administrative staff was in emergency mode, hunkered down in a hotel room in Houston with a flip chart itemizing the day's top priorities. (Except, that is, for a three-day hiatus in Dallas to escape Hurricane Rita, which, coming less than a month after Katrina, felt like one hurricane too many.) We worked 20-hour days there, people sitting underneath tables and sprawled on couches, taking notes and working on cell phones. We'd evacuated the school, at least, but its fate remained uncertain. There was a tremendous sense of urgency. I thought of the old joke: "How do you eat an elephant?" Answer: "One bite at a time." I took my wife's advice; I think of the flip chart as the concrete analog of her suggestion to make a list. We would get things done, one bite at a time.

I concentrated on Tulane, blocking out, as much as I could, the continuous tragedies elsewhere in the city. Some of my colleagues were not as good at compartmentalizing; some were separated from their families, some had lost their homes. I remember a key staffer, one of the administrative vice presidents, who was near meltdown: incapable of making a decision, not eating or sleeping, often on the verge of tears. I called him in and said, "I want you to know that I understand what you're feeling, but I have to ask you: Can you do the job?" He says my question knocked him out of his daze. After we talked, he shook off his paralysis, got down to work, and more than rose to the occasion. Others were not as resilient and, hard as it was, had to be replaced. There was so much to do, none of us could afford to feel things that intensely.

The first thing we did was decide to keep everyone on the payroll, despite the fact that we had no money coming in. It was clear people couldn't manage for months without a paycheck, and without a faculty and staff, we had no university. We'd get the money from reserves, loans, insurance proceeds, and eventually the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), though the latter became an almost impossible challenge.

Next was communications. David Filo, a Tulane grad who had cofounded Yahoo!, set up an emergency website where I conducted Live Chats with students, parents, and employees. Then we went after Tulane's database — our entire archive of information technology files had been left behind in a downtown high-rise. New Orleans was in lockdown, no one in, no one out, but Harry Lee, the Jefferson Parish sheriff at the time, the one with the magical connections, helped us arrange a raid: A self-designed SWAT team flew into New Orleans by helicopter and carried crates of discs down 14 flights of stairs to waiting trucks and then an airplane, which made it out of the city before curfew fell.

With email back in operation, we at least had a fully functioning virtual community. But physically, the displaced students, more than 13,000 of them, had to go somewhere for the semester. Higher education groups across the country leapt in with aid. Hundreds of colleges and universities offered placements, and most of them, in a move beyond generous, didn't accept tuition for the semester. That meant we could keep the tuition from the fall term to pay faculty and staff during the months of suspended operations.

Another make-or-break question was whether we could persuade students and faculty to come back to New Orleans by January 16, the start date for the second term. Here's where the wider anguish of the city, which had so affected me when I saw TV images on the treadmill in Houston, seeped into my make-a-list mindset. The city — not news to anyone who has read the Katrina accounts — was a mess; it was no wonder people felt uncertain about returning. It was soon clear that FEMA couldn't manage itself out of a paper bag, and mocking graffiti ("Katrina survivor, FEMA victim," "FEMA Kills," "I've been FEMA-ed") sprouted all over town. The police couldn't handle the looting and crime, which continued long after the storm had passed, and rescue teams couldn't keep up with the bodies of those who'd perished, leaving scrawls on buildings ("1 Dead in Attic") to direct the coroner to where the corpses were.

City services were very slow to come back. Weeks after the storm, refrigerators full of rotting food still lined the streets; the smell of human waste hung over large portions of town; power hadn't been restored in many neighborhoods; and the New Orleans Parish School Board didn't open a single school in the fall term because of damage to buildings and the diaspora of so many students and teachers. Meanwhile, Ray Nagin, the mayor, seemed paralyzed: At the height of the crisis, he had failed to show up at the Superdome and the Convention Center to tell the huddled refugees what was going on in the city or provide the kind of encouragement and support so desperately needed. Since then he'd appeared in public only rarely, offering the occasional manic pronouncement ("New Orleans will be the new Las Vegas!") but no clear, credible plan of action.

Rage and despair were in the air, and conspiracy theories were beginning to flourish. Chapter 2 describes in detail the heated controversies about what, exactly, had happened in New Orleans and what, exactly, would happen next. In these early months, the media was often oil on the fire; reporters were on the prowl for the most dramatic and contentious storylines, and public figures weighed in with impassioned opinions. The Wall Street Journal published a piece suggesting Uptown businessmen who were opposed to rebuilding the flooded African American neighborhoods were plotting to reengineer New Orleans as a white corporate town. Rapper Kanye West said, "President Bush doesn't care about black people." Movie director Spike Lee held similar views, given full expression in his 2006 documentary, When the Levees Broke. Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and Mayor Nagin also subscribed to the view that covert forces at the highest corporate and government levels were conspiring against the majority black population.

I'm slow to believe in conspiracies, but I can personally testify to the government's incompetence and stonewalling, based on a meeting I had with Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw FEMA. FEMA, which had been folded into Homeland Security after 9/11, had lost status and funding because of the intense focus on terrorism. From a psychological perspective, natural disasters were a far less satisfying foe than jihadists, and preparedness for such disasters was spotty in many American cities. As with most complex events, there was no one cause for the collapse of aid and rescue in the aftermath of Katrina. But the attitude of bureaucrats like Chertoff was certainly a major obstacle.

One day in early November, I sat in the steely light of Chertoff's office to make the case for a more flexible interpretation of the Stafford Act. The act was, in essence, a reimbursement regulation guiding FEMA's actions, and completely inadequate for a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina: It required contractors to engage in a long bidding process in order to repair damaged or destroyed property. This was time we didn't have, either at Tulane or in the city at large, if we were to save New Orleans from stagnation and despair.

I tried to impress on Chertoff the situation as I saw it, describing the devastation I'd witnessed, the potentially disastrous consequences of approaching the recovery with a business-as-usual mentality, the need to act boldly and flexibly. But Chertoff, a lawyer by background, would not, or could not, respond in a human way. All his answers were strictly legalistic and canned — he kept citing the language of the Stafford Act, as though scoring points — and his tone was officious. It was like talking to a robot. Finally, I stood up in frustration. "Mr. Secretary, this is getting us nowhere. Thank you for your time, but I'm leaving." I was at the door when he said, "Come back, sit down." We talked for another half hour after that, and his tone veered 180 degrees. He stopped issuing the standard message points and went into listening mode. I left with some hope of help, but it soon became clear that Chertoff was just pacifying me. Ultimately nothing came of the meeting.

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Excerpted from The Inevitable City by Scott Cowen, Betsy Seifter. Copyright © 2014 Scott Cowen. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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