On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines Parish near the mouth of the Mississippi and proceeded to devastate the landscape: upwards of twenty feet of Gulf water was pushed overland while nearly another foot dropped from the sky; wind ripped through whatever space remained between. Louisiana bayou villages like Buras and Port Sulphur, and Mississippi Gulf towns like Waveland and Pass Christian, were effectively deleted from the map. And in New Orleans, half of which lies below sea level, water surging from the Gulf into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain proved too much for the city’s levee system—and, as if to contravene God’s rebuke of Job, the seas were loosed from their divinely ordained bounds and overtook the land once more.
What followed is now an old story. Those too poor, too sick, too old or too stubborn to evacuate faced flooding, drowning, displacement and months of misery; tens of thousands crowded into the hot and leaking Superdome, then after a week were piled onto buses and shipped to cities and towns across the South, many never to return. Hundreds of prisoners were left inside Orleans Parish Prison without food, water or electricity in chest-high water tainted with sewage. Roughly 80 percent of the city lay underwater, some places submerged fifteen feet; well over a thousand people died in the storm. Mayor Ray Nagin called into the only radio station still broadcasting in the city and wept. The crisis never stopped unfolding: a year after delivery, the city’s ubiquitous FEMA trailers were found to contain hazardous levels of formaldehyde; the houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation began rotting just years after construction; and as a kind of coup de grâce, in 2014 Nagin was sentenced to a decade in federal prison for corruption, having enriched himself with bribes from city contract schemes.
I first set foot in New Orleans in 2008, hopping out of a boxcar from Birmingham into the CSX train yard in Gentilly, and it felt like I’d arrived at the edge of the earth. It was a muggy fall night, the air so thick you could eat it, and the city—what I saw of it, at least—was still in shambles. The six or so miles from the train yard to a friend’s home in the 7th Ward was a gauntlet of wreckage and abandonment: house after ruined house was still marked with the now-famous “Katrina Cross” used by search and rescue teams to give a semblance of order to the effort to catalog the number of bodies; empty, storm-damaged hospitals and schools crawled with scrappers and squatters; FEMA trailers hummed in yards and driveways; packs of stray dogs and flocks of chickens sniffed and scratched in grassy lots and puddles. The city had filled with young people like me: black-clad clandestine adventurers of the new American millennium, drawn to postindustrial ruins like moths to a streetlamp. Many came to aid in the recovery effort, joining up with Common Ground Relief—a motley coalition of NGOs and mutual-aid groups, launched by some anarchists and a former Black Panther—to run first-aid centers and gut flooded houses in Algiers and the 9th Ward; others came to have fun. There were generator shows, guerilla theater performances and spontaneous DIY parades that were as ubiquitous as they were entertaining—but viewed with the clarity of hindsight, one gets the impression of a carnival inside of a blast crater.
Over the next few years I’d travel in and out of New Orleans, largely with the seasons. From what I could tell, the recovery effort was conducted at a snail’s pace and seemingly at random. The Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods east of the French Quarter slowly filled with well-off members of the artist and activist classes while the French Quarter bloated with tacky Cajun kitsch; in the early 2010s Airbnb tore through the city like wildfire, and entire abandoned blocks in the Treme and 7th Ward were rehabbed and turned into party districts. Common Ground is largely forgotten, even in New Orleans, but it nonetheless maintains an office and plant nursery by the industrial canal. It made a brief reappearance in the national news in 2008 when Brandon Darby, one of its three founding organizers, admitted to working with the FBI to entrap activists ahead of the 2008 Republican National Convention; he is now a border correspondent at Breitbart News (founded, coincidentally, by a Tulane alumnus).
So twenty years after Katrina, what does New Orleans have to show for its recovery? Since moving back as a graduate student in 2022, I’ve found that few of the fundamentals have changed. There are fewer abandoned houses, to be sure, but dilapidation is still widespread. The building that housed the old anarchist Infoshop and the collective bike project was turned into top-dollar condos with an upscale Italian restaurant; around the corner, luxury lofts fill a building that was once a notorious squat, the graffiti inside preserved as a stipulation of the lease agreement. (The ground-level upscale bistro, however, went out of business this summer.)
New Orleans has been honored with the title “Murder Capital of America” since the mid-Nineties, but in the years after Katrina its skyrocketing homicide rate dwarfed that of every other city in the country. It remains the only place I have witnessed what was likely a murder taking place—a stream of men marching purposefully into a house on St. Bernard Avenue, then gunshots—and where the ranks of the slain include people with whom I’ve broken bread (Neight Train, Lil Joey). And though crime on the whole has been going down, in recent years the city has been reeling from a series of particularly brutal and visible incidents: a 73-year-old woman beaten and dragged to her death by a group of teenage carjackers; men hopping out of parked cars in Uptown and robbing passersby at gunpoint; street-takeover “sideshows” featuring stolen cars and assault weapons. Just as things were getting better, this past New Year’s Day a middle-aged real-estate agent from Texas flew an ISIS flag from a rented truck and drove it onto Bourbon Street, killing fourteen people.
According to a recent report in the New York Times, more money than the Marshall Plan was dumped into the city after Katrina, to essentially no effect. Basic city infrastructure is, to this day, constantly failing: random power outages are common; boil-water advisories are issued by the city’s Sewerage and Water Board on an almost weekly basis; a more-than-century-old turbine that powers the city’s drainage pumps breaks down regularly, leading to major neighborhood flooding during otherwise pedestrian summer rainstorms; roads in much of the city are more a concept than a reality. Charity Hospital, a massive art deco medical complex built in 1939 and abandoned during Katrina, still looms forlornly over downtown, with a redevelopment plan continually stymied by political gridlock.
News from the mayor’s office has an uncanny air of familiarity. Last month Mayor LaToya Cantrell was indicted on eleven counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury, stemming from a years-long affair with her bodyguard that involved bilking the city for spurious overtime. Nagin, fresh off supervised probation, returned to the city for the first time since his imprisonment and gave a speech in her defense at a black church in Harvey: “Are they trying to say certain people shouldn’t be leading you?” he asked the congregation. “Is that what they’re saying?”
I expected to hear more talk about Katrina on its twentieth anniversary, but aside from a few texts with friends it hardly came up. There were various official commemorations put on by the city and its universities, but nobody I knew went. The mood that hangs most noticeably in the thick swamp air these days is resignation, the sense that none of the city’s problems admit of any real solution. Machiavelli wrote that fortune “demonstrates her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her,” and directs her fury “where she knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her.” Alexander Hamilton echoed this idea in The Federalist Papers: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Spend enough time amid the failing infrastructure and broken politics of New Orleans and you can be forgiven for being eventually persuaded by fate.
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