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ShareNEW ORLEANS—Jocelyn Lagerman leaned against an exposed wood beam, beside a Mardi Gras bead hung over a nail.
She only briefly contemplated the question: Why was she spending $200,000 to renovate a home drowned by Hurricane Katrina?
“I wouldn’t give up on here,” Lagerman said, over the hammering of two laborers. “There’s no other place I want to be.”
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, but swaths of the city look as if Katrina washed through only days ago: boarded up homes, vacant lots where houses were demolished, abandoned businesses, crooked street signs.
But Broadmoor, an integrated, middle-class neighborhood of 7,200 residents in the center of New Orleans, is coming back, thanks to residents like Lagerman. Researchers say Broadmoor’s success serves as a recovery template for other neighborhoods in New Orleans and could provide a model for other cities struck by future disasters.
The model requires the fierce determination of residents to return, ordinary folks to organize in a grass-roots effort and a willingness to bridge existing racial or ethnic barriers.
Over and over again, Broadmoor residents say, they are not letting anything keep them from returning home. Not fears of the levees breaking again. Not the paucity of government aid. And not the racism that has held back this city for so many years.
“We could not have achieved what we have accomplished without blacks and whites working together,” Marilyn Doucette, an African-American caterer, said in her rebuilt home. “What I’ll bring to the table is not necessarily what a white person will bring, and it might be vital.”
To be sure, racial tensions remain, and other neighborhoods, particularly those that are poorer and mostly African American, still look as if they belong in an underdeveloped country.
The Lower Ninth Ward remains a shell of its former self. Only about 2,000 of the 14,000 residents have returned, far below the 50 percent level believed by analysts necessary to create the critical mass for recovery.
Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, blames “cultural indifference” by wealthier whites for the failure of tens of thousands of African Americans to return to New Orleans. He notes that a land-use plan called for not rebuilding low-lying neighborhoods where African Americans predominantly lived.
“The efforts—whether deliberate or not—have had the effect of locking out African Americans,” Hill said.
An irony, however is that one of the neighborhoods targeted for razing in the early planning was Broadmoor. And perhaps even more ironically, that served as a catalyst to rebuild the neighborhood.
Ernie O’Steen, a retired financial analyst for General Motors, had planned to ride out Katrina as he had previous hurricanes: sitting on his raised porch, three pistols by his side, to head off trouble-makers. But authorities persuaded him to leave just before the storm. He had only a gym bag full of clothes.
When he first returned to Broadmoor two weeks after Katrina, the entire neighborhood was under several feet of water. Everyone was gone. The stench of death and decay was overpowering for O’Steen, an Air Force veteran.
“It looked like a napalm bomb had hit,” he said.
O’Steen was discouraged. But when he learned that a government-sponsored planning committee called for turning Broadmoor into a flood plain, he and a handful of other returnees in January 2006 organized a rally on Napoleon Avenue, which bisects the neighborhood.
“Help Rebuild Broadmoor,” read a homemade sign fashioned by O’Steen. Some 100 people showed up.
An existing group, the Broadmoor Improvement Association, revved up, led by LaToya Cantrell, a 35-year-old African American who headed a local nonprofit. The group’s white leaders had decided they needed an African-American leader in a neighborhood and city that were two-thirds black.
Cantrell has proved to be dynamic and indefatigable for Broadmoor, even as she rebuilt her own flooded two-story home.
“We said, `Our community will return,’” Cantrell recalled. “We will make it return. We can’t wait on government. We have to do it ourselves.”
Cantrell and other Broadmoor leaders sought out their neighbors—living throughout Louisiana and the rest of the South—and encouraged them to return.
Slowly but steadily they did, with each return buoying others. As their numbers grew, Cantrell and her lieutenants found a block captain for each of Broadmoor’s 151 blocks. They created a Web page that served as a crucial community bulletin board.
“The city is struggling and infrastructure is crumbling, but it was never a question whether Broadmoor would come back,” said Oliver Thomas, a Broadmoor resident who is president of the New Orleans City Council.
Broadmoor’s successes prompted Harvard, Bard College and other universities to send in dozens of students and professors to help muck out homes or provide planning advice, with funding from companies like Shell.
Today, about half of Broadmoor’s residents have returned home and another 20 percent are rebuilding their homes. The neighborhood’s library and elementary school have been cleaned up and are awaiting repairs.
“There are 73 neighborhoods in New Orleans, and 49 of them were flooded,” said Douglas Ahlers, who heads Harvard’s effort in New Orleans. “Of those 49 neighborhoods, Broadmoor is coming back the fastest.”
Added Fred Palmer of Shell: “They are providing the Xs and Os of what we should focus on to make a neighborhood recover. Broadmoor is showing how academia, the corporate community and a neighborhood can work together to effectively and efficiently effect their recovery.”
Dave Snyder covered the wrenching efforts to integrate New Orleans during the 1960s, as a reporter for The Times-Picayune newspaper. Now retired, he said that racial relations in Broadmoor have improved in step with the neighborhood’s recovery.
“At just about every house, there’s (reconstruction) going on,” Snyder said, as he drove his pick-up truck through the neighborhood. Piles of rebuilding debris could be seen on nearly every block.
“Five years from now, this area will never have looked this good. Because it will all be new.”
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ON THE WEB
Information on New Orleans’ recovery
Broadmoor Improvement Association
