Desolation row: The betrayal of New Orleans

Jennifer Johansen's belongings have been safely packed up by the movers. She has said goodbye to her friends. This morning she will close the door on her yellow-painted house, take a taxi to the airport, and leave New Orleans for ever for a new life in Seattle.

Johansen's story is the story of the city. It is not the whole story of course: no single narrative can weave together the multiple layers of history and culture, and certainly not the current trauma besetting this remarkable place. But in its own way, her experience provides an insight into the many challenges confronting New Orleans 18 months after Hurricane Katrina.

Johansen is far from alone in making the decision to quit the city. Just quite how many people have decided to leave, having initially tried to rebuild after the storm struck, is unknown. But there are numerous anecdotes of people who, having struggled long enough and hard enough to put their lives back together, could not summon the will to remain. One recent poll suggested that as many as a third of the city's residents are considering leaving within the next two years. As it is, its population is barely half of what it was before the storm struck.

"It's been a gradual thing," says Johansen, quietly reflecting on her decision to leave as she stands in the kitchen of her carefully decorated home, in a part of the city known as the Irish Channel. "There would be crime, then it would go down, then there would be more.

"I would love to contribute more to the city of New Orleans - I think it will be a great city again - but I think it will [take] 10 years."

The backdrop to such upheaval is a combination of factors that have emerged in the aftermath of Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and large parts of America's Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005. The hurricane killed more than 1,800 people and left a trail of destruction that could cost $80bn (£42bn) to repair.

In the 18 months since the storm, efforts at reconstruction have been hampered by multiple layers of bureaucracy and questionable decisions taken by politicians at both state and local level. Unprecedented numbers of residents are suffering from stress; experts report a widespread mental-health crisis. But there is another prism through which to view the problems of New Orleans.

Though President George W Bush may feel able to travel to the city - as he did last week - and claim that his government is "committed to the people of this part of the world and the Gulf Coast" - many people here, particularly the poor and the city's large African American population, say they have been abandoned by the Bush administration. They cannot believe that that the glacial-paced reconstruction efforts would have been permitted elsewhere; they cannot believe that the outside world would have ignored their plight had so many of Katrina's victims not been society's most marginalised. They cannot believe America has allowed New Orleans - or at least a part of it - to go to Hell.

Those who feel this most acutely are the residents of the Lower 9th Ward, a poor and scruffy district in the east of the city. When the levees were breached by Katrina's storm surge and New Orleans was flooded, nowhere suffered more than the Lower 9th. Today, a full 18 months later, its streets still resemble a war zone. City block after city block remains empty of people and signs of life. There are virtually no functioning services and perhaps just 5 to 10 per cent of the original residents have returned.

And nowhere better than the Lower 9th symbolises the battle that is being fought for the very future of New Orleans - a battle over what the city should be, both geographically and culturally. Are politicians and officials struggling to save all of New Orleans or - as many here believe - are they only interested in the parts that lure the tourists and make money?

***

It's early evening on Fat Monday, the beguilingly named day that proceeds Fat Tuesday, the equally delightfully named day that marks the end of the Mardi Gras celebrations before Lent.

Bourbon Street is awash with people and vomit. On the famous thoroughfare that bisects the city's French Quarter, there's barely room to breathe. Here, tens of thousands are squeezed together, drinking and shouting and hugging. From the balconies of the bars and restaurants that line the street, people are throwing necklaces of brightly coloured beads towards the outstretched hands of the throng. Two young men are each carrying oversized bottles of beer that contain more than half a gallon of some pale, insipid brew. They are laughing, uproariously.

Earlier in the day there had been just as many people packing the streets of the Garden District (like the French Quarter, largely undamaged by Katrina) and Mid-City, where the carnival floats had paraded. Last year's Mardi Gras - the first after Katrina - had been a small, highly emotional affair, held more as a sign of collective defiance than with any real enthusiasm for celebration. This year there appeared to be a need to prove that the city "was back". That, and the need to collect the tourists' dollars.

Indeed, for the majority of tourists and visitors who restrict their movements to the raucous bars of the Quarter or the casinos of Canal Street, it would have appeared that New Orleans "was back", and that the worst of Katrina's devastation had been dealt with. On their ride in from the airport they would have seen little, if any, indication of the storm's impact. If they were staying at a hotel in the Garden District they would have noted that all the fallen trees had long been cleared. As they leant back laughing, their hands reaching out for airborne beads, they might well have concurred with the strapline on a magazine produced for tourists which announces, confidently: "The good times are rolling again." At Mother's Restaurant, a no-frills diner on Poydras Street where the kitchens serve up bowls of steaming seafood gumbo and platters of oysters and catfish, I fall in with some locals to talk about whether the good times really are rolling again - and whether staging this decadent carnival is really appropriate when so many people in the city are still struggling.

While some insist there's a collective catharsis attached to Mardi Gras, others observe that New Orleans' big party is a very different beast to the less-commercialised events elsewhere in Louisiana.

One woman, a mother of three called Kathy Webre, later follows up with a detailed e-mail. "What you see downtown and in the French Quarter is Mardi Gras the business venture, which is so needed in a city that has lost its tax base," she writes. "It is a show put on to lure the tourist dollars that right now are the lifeblood of a broken economy. No one would question whether or not a food store or gas station should function after a major disaster."

But, she adds: "Mardi Gras is not restricted to New Orleans - it is celebrated, though on a much smaller scale, in many towns and cities along the Gulf Coast... The people of New Orleans and the surrounding areas who have suffered hardship and are trying to rebuild their lives have something they can hold on to that no storm can destroy - their traditions."

***

No more than a couple of miles from the "revived" Bourbon Street, William Waiters is also trying to rebuild his life. He regards Mardi Gras and its excesses as little more than a distraction. When we meet, he is working in the overgrown back garden of his wood-framed house in Holy Cross, a neighbourhood in the Lower 9th, located alongside a lazy bend of the Mississippi.

Sitting on his stoop, Waiters chooses his words with care and tries to contain his emotions. But it's clearly hard for him to hide his anger. He followed the warning to evacuate the area and saw Katrina's devastation unfold on television from Florida. "We watched people on the I-10 (interstate), the Claiborne overpass, pleading for help," he says. "Help was late in coming. It was almost as if we were watching a documentary about a third-world country. Eighteen months later, it's still the same."

At the centre of Waiters' criticism is the so-called Road Home Programme, a $7.5bn scheme established by Louisiana's Governor, Kathleen Blanco, and other officials. The scheme - funded by the federal government's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) - was designed to help ease the return of residents who had been forced to leave the state. At its core was a plan to provide up to $150,000 to help people rebuild.

But the scheme is the focus of persistent and valid criticism for its seemingly vast inefficiency. To date, of the 109,000 families that have applied for help, only 1,300 have received any cash.

Indeed, many of the decisions and damage assessments made by the scheme's officials appear nothing short of remarkable. The local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, reported recently how a couple in their 90s, Saul and Mildred Rubin, whose home suffered roughly $260,000 worth of damage when it was subsumed by flood water up to nine feet deep, were told that they would receive just $500 to repair their property. "My concern is, the people we need in this city are going to say, 'Screw it', and leave," said the Rubins' son, Alan. "If they don't have time to do this thing right the first time, when are they going to find time to do it?"

So why such a shoddy performance? Blame whomever you want. The state points the finger at the federal government, contractors blame the city, others blame Virginia-based ICF International, a private contractor that oversees the scheme. Recently, Blanco was loudly booed when she told a public meeting at Dillard University in New Orleans that she was doing all she could.

A report published last month by the Brookings Institution, an independent research and policy body, notes: "Recent indicators suggest that New Orleans' recovery is only inching along. Some important policies have been put in place, but decision-makers at all levels need to reduce red tape to put momentum back into rebuilding efforts."

Waiters, a 59-year-old factory supervisor who came to New Orleans to attend college 40 years ago, echoes the opinion of many when he explains what he believes is happening here. Put simply, he says, the authorities are trying to reshape the population of New Orleans and build a city without the poor, largely black segment that has been dispersed west, to places such as Houston and San Antonio in Texas.

And this demographic shift may already have happened; figures suggest that in the aftermath of Katrina, the city's black population shrank by 61 per cent; that its populace is now smaller, older, whiter - and more affluent. In Waiters' neighbourhood - better placed than much of the Lower 9th because its houses have historic status and their owners are eligible for additional restoration grants - no more than 15 per cent of people have returned.

"The government and the mayor say 'come home'. Come home to what? Where will they live?" he says. "Anything past Canal Street, and [the government] couldn't care less. They are trying to make it a 'cosmopolitan' area and keep the tourists on the uptown side of Canal Street... There, they have put on a good face. But if the tourists go any further they will see the underbelly." Many of the decisions by the authorities regarding the provision of affordable housing appear strange at best. Bill Quigley, a professor of law at Loyola University and a veteran public-interest attorney, has highlighted how New Orleans' public housing units are being torn down - by HUD - even though studies show 80 per cent of them to be structurally sound - and replaced with a smaller number of homes aimed at a mixture of renters. In January, when activists occupied some of the public housing units to try and keep the bulldozers away, they were arrested.

Quigley is convinced the city is involved in a fight for its "spirit and soul" - and that the poor are being kept out. The decisions, he believes, are being made in Washington. He wrote recently: "It is impossible to begin to understand the continued impact of Katrina without viewing it through the lenses of race, gender and poverty. Katrina exposed the region's deep-rooted inequalities of gender, race, and class... But the aftermath of Katrina has aggravated these inequalities. In fact, if you plot race, class and gender, you can likely tell who has returned to New Orleans."

Gerald Ruffin is one Lower 9th resident who is back. He returned five months ago, living in a white mobile home provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which he parked outside his ruined home in the Bywater district. Each weekend and every night when he got in from his job as an engineering supervisor he worked to rebuild his home. He is one of just a handful of people in his neighbourhood who have come back.

Ruffin stands outside and weeps, wiping at his eyes with a hand as he recalls his struggle to rebuild his life, and how he was tempted to go along with his wife's suggestion that they just move to Maryland and make a fresh start.

Some people who had left, he says, did not want to come back. They had found better-paying jobs with benefits in other cities. But for those who wished to return, it was a terrible struggle.

"[The authorities] don't want the people to come back. They want the French Quarter - it brings in tourists, it brings in money. But they don't want the people who made this city... I thought about not coming back, but I am not going to give them the satisfaction."

Such claims of lack of official support - claims, indeed, of deliberate obfuscation by officials - abound in the Lower 9th, where the R&B legend Fats Domino is among the residents trying to rebuild their homes. The only effort being made to gut houses of their filthy, ruined contents, rebuild properties, or provide emergency food and shelter, appears to be from volunteers.

***

Brandon Darby is the operations director of Common Ground Relief, an organisation of volunteers from across America that has set up an office in an abandoned school in the Lower 9th. From there, Darby and up to 200 other volunteers run an operation which provides emergency shelters, a clinic, two libraries, reconstruction help and a food kitchen for local residents who want to come back.

"There is an historical context to this. If you look at the way people of colour have been treated in this country, then you get a sense of [that] context," he says. He claims that in the aftermath of the storm, the Lower 9th's residents were deliberately dispersed across the country. "And the media reports that the area is totally destroyed and that people have no interest in coming home." Sitting in my passenger seat, Darby points the way through the devastated streets of the Lower 9th to an area in which volunteers have been working to gut homes, and prove to the authorities that work is being done to restore them. He says that under a programme of the city government's, if a homeowner fails to have their home gutted or treated for mould, the authorities can reclaim it.

At the so-called Little Blue House operated by the organisation on North Derbigny Street, Darby introduces me to one of Common Ground's founders, Malik Rahim, a former member of the Black Panthers and a veteran community organiser. We watch as a group of students from New York, all wearing face masks and overalls, tear out the destroyed contents of a two-storey home. He says: "The government cannot send one battalion of troops to help clear this up. That tells me that America may be a strong nation and rich, but it has stopped being a great nation... Now we cannot help ourselves."

The owner of the property, Walter Goodwin, is standing by, holding a picture of his 99-year-old mother, Ollie, who before the storm had lived in the home since 1947. "They are the only people helping here [while] there are lots of people talking," he says of the volunteers. "The key to getting people back here is to [show them] that we are rebuilding."

***

You might imagine such chaos and insecurity would have created stress and pain for the people of New Orleans. It has. In the first four months following Katrina, the suicide rate in the area rose by around 300 per cent. One survey showed that a quarter of families said at least one member needed mental-health counselling. A recent report in a US newspaper suggested that emergency calls from people seeking psychiatric help have increased by 15 per cent.

It seems that everywhere one goes in New Orleans, this city where the good times are apparently rolling again, people tell you about their stress levels and anxiety. If they themselves are not taking some sort of prescription drug to help with their stress, someone else in their family - a brother, a spouse - usually is.

Judy Rohrbacker nods when I ask if she has been taking anything to ease her anxiety. She, her husband, Donald, and their two grandchildren have been living in a mobile home, squeezed together alongside 300 or so other families in the gravel car-park of a sugar mill. The families are all employees of Domino Food, and the Rohrbackers' mobile home has been parked outside the company's clattering, 13-storey refinery since November 2005. The families are grateful to Domino for its hospitality, but the company has told them it wants them off its land by the end of next month.

"If you don't have a house... rents are ridiculous. People are still waiting for the money to fix their houses from the insurance companies," says Rohrbacker, 59, who had been sitting outside her aluminum trailer talking by mobile phone to a friend living on the other side of the river. "We feel really safe here. It's a lot safer than other trailer parks where there are problems with drugs. We feel grateful that it's all Domino people."

Rohrbacker says her own home in the nearby town of Arabi was flooded up to the roof and stayed like that for two weeks. What will happen to the four of them if Domino insists they leave is unclear. It is an obvious source of concern. She says: "It's hard, especially with children. But they adapt, too." Psychologist James Barbee, a professor at Louisiana State University and author of a report on the extent of the mental-health issues, told Time magazine that there was no "post" to the post-traumatic stress syndrome currently being experienced by the residents of New Orleans.

"The event is still unfolding. People are losing jobs. They're moving because they're so discouraged by the situation. There's a lot of uncertainty about the future. It's not easy to live here," he said. "People are just wearing down. There was an initial spirit about bouncing back and recovering, but it's diminished over time, as the weeks have turned into months." Little wonder then that people are leaving. Figures show that last December the number of houses on the market had reached a level not seen since the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the number of actual sales has been on the decline.

Catherine Whitner is among those who are trying to sell up and move on. Having returned to her repaired home in the Metairie district five months ago, she is now planning to relocate to Florida, and a for sale sign is posted outside her front door.

Her concern is the depletion of the city's health services. "I'm 75 and I'm in good health, but I'm worried that the medical facilities are not coming back at a rapid enough rate," she says. "Many doctors and nurses are moving away. Many hospitals have closed down."

Ironically, Jennifer Johansen, the woman who has sold her house and who will fly away today to a new life in Seattle, has been working as a nurse in New Orleans' Tulane University Hospital. Has she been suffering from stress? "Definitely," she says.