Localism and Segregation
David D. Troutt
22 June 2007
In the decade before and after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education,1 de jure segregation, the system of racially identified space, coalesced with formal land use planning to institutionalize de facto segregation in the city and suburbs of New Orleans, notwithstanding some of the most considerable early antisegregation forces in the nation’s history. Although the actual geographic fault lines changed over time, the basic color scheme did not. Race-neutral land use regulation reproduced the patterns of racial inequality that slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation inscribed. To the present, whites in the New Orleans metropolitan area have enjoyed unrestricted access to and economic opportunities arising from appreciating markets of higher, less polluted lands. For poor blacks in public housing or increasingly concentrated low-ground, antimarket neighborhoods, life became routinely more isolated from the political mainstream, viable neighborhood institutions, economic opportunity, and stability. It also became significantly more dangerous.
All of this became fatally apparent on August 29, 2005, when Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane, devastated the city and its compromised system of levees and canals, producing flooding that killed over 1,800 people, destroyed 200,000 homes, and inundated almost 80 percent of Orleans Parish.3Despite the wide swath of destruction and the inevitability that a great many moderate- and middle-income Orleanians would be affected, Hurricane Katrina’s force fell disproportionately on the city’s huge population of very poor people.4 Their lack of resources, as well as their overwhelmingly dark skins, was on international display for several excruciating days of the aftermath as they waited in and outside the city’s convention center and Superdome for rescue by the National Guard. In most cases, one single aspectof their vulnerability made them visible: they lacked access to a car. Beyond that, many lacked the capacity to stay in hotels or to travel by public transportation to friends or families elsewhere. In their race, class status, and addresses, they represented for a city and a nation the unimagined devastation to which people with limited social capital5 are routinely vulnerable.
The relationship between race and poverty associated with the worst of Katrina’s damage brought rare visibility to the country’s social landscape. Eighty percent of the households living in flooded areas of the parish were black;6 the average annual income of those households was $38,000, compared to $55,000 in nonflooded areas.7 The rate of homeownership in the flooded areas was 53 percent (though some affected areas, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, had even higher rates), compared to 69 percent in nonflooded areas.8 However, renters, whose losses and voices were hardly discussed in most public conversations about rebuilding or participation in planning, were more than 50 percent of the displaced.9 The gaping proportion of renters is not merely a constant among persistently poor populations; they tend to have low rates of homeownership. It is also a reflection of the large numbers of public housing residents who were displaced by the storm, every one of whom was black.10 Those projects, we have seen, were primarily located in “extreme poverty” neighborhoods (i.e., census tracts in which at least 40 percent of the households have below-poverty incomes). In 2000, New Orleans had forty-seven extreme poverty census tracts, and Hurricane Katrina inundated thirty-eight of them.11
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