Touring the Gulf Coast, seeing Cedar Rapids’ future

A partially repaired home in the Lakeview District of New Orleans. Homeowners who have returned to the area have yard signs demanding an investigation into the levee breach and renouncing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for proposed property buyouts.

Pull up the palm trees and other tropical plants, and it would be fairly easy to mistake some of the hurricane-ravaged communities scattered along the Gulf Coast for flood-weary Cedar Rapids.

Like most Iowans, I don’t like to play the game of comparative misery. People hurt, whether in Iowa or along the Gulf of Mexico, whether displaced from their homes or plodding through government red tape. But it was difficult to look across the still devastated landscape of Louisiana and Texas without wondering if I would see the same scenes years from now in Iowa.

In Houston, Texas, an area hit by Hurricane Ike in September 2008, residential areas are dotted with blue rooftops. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) moved in shortly after the storm and helped the residents by placing blue tarps on their damaged or missing roofs. Residents of these homes tell the same stories of frustration that I hear daily in Cedar Rapids. They wait for federal assistance, for home-insurance payments or for Small Business Administration (SBA) loans to complete their disaster recovery.

As I looked upon the destruction still evident in Louisiana, the words of a woman I interviewed in the late 1980s came to me again: “We should be and can be a community that cares for its own.”

Parts of New Orleans and other towns along the Louisiana coastline still sit battered and beaten from the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Many residents left and have never returned. The tattered remains of blue tarps can be seen draped in and around damaged properties. Landlords there, much like landlords in Cedar Rapids, simply shake their heads in dismay. They have found little help in repairing their properties, if they’re repairable at all. Most are resigned to the idea that they’ll sit and rot until razed by local authorities.

While outsiders can often identify predominantly poorer sections of a city, there is no mistaking the poverty-line boundaries in New Orleans. Neighborhoods with money have rebuilt. Poverty-stricken areas sit abandoned like ghost towns while life buzzes around them.

In the more affluent parts of Louisiana, the roads have been repaired. In the poorer sections, exit and entrance ramps to the interstate remain closed. Concrete barriers have been placed along the shoulders of bridges, serving as long-term substitutes for missing guardrails. Shanty houses, never the sturdiest of structures, have again sprung up in a landscape that resembles the aftermath of a prairie fire. Birds rest on broken tree trunks, the only remaining evidence of the area’s flora and fauna.

The Lakeview District, a working-class neighborhood next to the 17th Street Canal, was perhaps the most shocking — and the most similar to the damage I left at home. I expected this neighborhood of primarily blue-collar workers and ranch-style homes to be recovered. In short, it wasn’t. There were some renovated properties, and quite a few Realtor signs at the curbsides, but others sat like those in Cedar Rapids — gutted and abandoned.

A man I spoke with at a gas station in New Orleans told me that a recent newspaper report said many of the renovated properties have regained the value they held before the disaster, but those that sit with damage continue to decline in value. Those mostly unaffected by the storms saw a nearly immediate value hike but have now settled back into their pre-disaster values. He added that while fuel costs now hover around the national average, rents in the city have remained well above what they once were. It was a situation, he mused, that further frustrated landlords, who can’t rent abandoned properties they’ve been unable to repair.

As we exited New Orleans, I was content to bide my time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. My eyes had filled with tears and I cried not only for those who lost their lives, homes and businesses in natural disasters but, selfishly, for myself and my own community. I had been searching the Gulf Coast for hope. I wanted to carry its recovery back with me to Iowa. Instead, I found the same story of social class divisions and sadness that has already emerged back home.

People in the Midwest have said that we shouldn’t cry for those in Louisiana, that they “chose to live there” and that “New Orleans is just a bowl that filled with water.” I wondered if those back home who uttered such phrases would be shocked to know that some people there, while wishing us well with our recovery, also believe we brought the floods on ourselves by clearing land for farming and creating excess water runoff into our rivers.

Few Gulf Coast survivors are actually interested in the blame game. Those relocated to Houston and Dallas miss the lives they left behind. Like residents and business owners here, they continue to go through the motions, but it’s only half-hearted living. One woman said it is difficult to live a full life when a piece of you remains elsewhere, likely swept away in a storm by floodwaters.

Our nation has not cared for its own — not the people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and not the people of Iowa and Illinois. Gov. Chet Culver argues that the federal government, which faced more than 30 national disasters in 2008, cannot provide for all of its citizens’ needs. Iowa will need to generate its own help, he says.

But driving along the Gulf Coast, I’m inclined to believe that if the nation had stood up for people hurt by the hurricanes years ago, we might have nurtured a stronger national conscience. Instead, we looked upon those without electricity, without shelter and without shoes and demanded they pull themselves out of the muck by their own nonexistent bootstraps. We should cry for the people of New Orleans who remain displaced and unable to repair their homes.

We should cry for them because, short of an uprising, they are us.