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Old woes cloud vision of 2015 in New Orleans

By Allen G. Breed and Cain Burdeau
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS — Two years after Hurricane Katrina, much of the “city that care forgot’’ still lies in ruins. But Otis Biggs’ task as he shuffles his Tarot deck this moist August day is to peer into the future to 2015, the storm’s 10th anniversary.

Rings of silver and turquoise flash as one card, then another flops onto a zodiac-patterned table in the incense-perfumed Bottom of the Cup Tea Room in the French Quarter, where the diminutive Biggs has been telling fortunes for 32 years.

An upside down tower — violent storms will hold off until levees are repaired. The ace of cauldrons — money will flow. The empress — stability, fruitful things.

Downtown, near the riverfront, Biggs sees a gleaming glass and steel tower rising, the tallest in the state. Elections will bring new blood and vision. Companies will feel safe to invest in the city, and most of those who fled will return.

“There’s hope,’’ Biggs says, his hazel eyes twinkling in light reflected through a crystal ball.

There may be hope, but there are few assurances for the recovering Big Easy.

“For every positive that’s going on in New Orleans right now, there’s a negative, there’s a concern,’’ says Reed Kroloff, who until recently was dean of the school of architecture at Tulane University.

The failure of federally funded, state-administered recovery programs to quickly take hold, and the city’s struggle to define and fund plans for neighborhood redevelopment, have shaken confidence about New Orleans’ short-term future. Mayor Ray Nagin favors a “market-driven’’ recovery of the city. Critics say he has not made the tough decisions necessary to get planning for the city’s future moving into high gear.

New Orleans still struggles with corruption. A congressman is under indictment, a senator has been implicated in a sex scandal and a city councilman thought to be a favorite as New Orleans’ next mayor pleaded guilty in August to federal bribery charges and resigned.

Major geophysical challenges

There are geophysical challenges ahead, too. By 2015, parts of New Orleans will have subsided nearly an additional 8 inches. The city filled up like a bowl when Katrina broke levees on Aug. 29, 2005. Roughly 240 more square miles of the eroding wetlands that protect the city from storm surge will be gone by 2015.

The city’s population will be smaller a decade after the storm. A recent estimate pegs the current population at around 270,000 — about 60 percent of the pre-Katrina total.

Rich Campanella, an urban geographer at Tulane, predicts that by 2015, the city’s population will be somewhere around 350,000. Blacks will still outnumber whites, but the margin will be significantly less.

Health care and housing

Health care challenges and the dearth of affordable housing will continue to influence the pace of recovery.

Nearly half of the hospitals open in the parish before Katrina remain closed, and one is a shell of its former self. The remaining hospitals serving the city lost a combined $56 million in the first five months of 2007, and the projected operating loss for the year is $135 million, says Leslie Hirsch, who took over Touro Infirmary a week before Katrina.

Before Katrina, many locals rented homes — garrets in the French Quarter, wings of faded mansions Uptown, shotgun homes in Bywater. For the impoverished, sprawling public housing projects offered shelter to more than 5,000 families.

But Katrina closed four-fifths of that subsidized housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to demolish four of the biggest housing projects and turn them into Norman Rockwellian mixed-income neighborhoods. That has met with fierce opposition from housing advocates who fear the poor would lose their foothold.

Visitors can be a bright spot

Tourism is a bittersweet bright spot. The French Quarter survived Katrina, and the music and restaurant scenes continue to rebound. Some musicians are still missing in action. But Jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, a co-founder of the renowned Rebirth Brass Band, says he and friends are busy as ever.

“It’s just so wonderful to be alive and swinging in New Orleans,’’ he says. “We’re going to be buried here, man. That’s for sure. That’s for DAMN sure.’’

Most of the city’s signature restaurants — Brennan’s, Emeril’s, Commander’s Palace — have reopened. A Trump hotel and condominium tower is planned for the central business district.

But as millionaires stake out lofty digs, the city continues to bleed jobs. Tourism is notoriously poor-paying. There are huge questions about where thousands of good-paying jobs needed to sustain the city’s rebound will come from.

That means the economy will muddle along, bouyed by short-term construction jobs and spending. For the economy to prosper long-term, the city must be seen as safe and well-run.

And there, the jury is out.

Local businessman Aidan Gill doesn’t need Tarots or tea leaves to know what New Orleans will look like in 2015. All he has to do is read the local newspaper and history books: It’ll be just as corrupt and seedy as before Katrina, he believes.

“I am mystified at grown-up, mature, intelligent, educated people for talking about this ‘new New Orleans,’’’ says the Irish native, who dispenses $45 haircuts and $600 alligator belts from his men’s haircuttery and haberdashery on Magazine Street.

“A simple way of putting it for the simple natives: You cannot make a gumbo using the same ingredients every day, and then at the end of every day expect it to taste any different.’’

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