The Katrina Pain Index

by: Jeremy Burton

Mon Aug 09, 2010 at 13:30:26 PM EDT

With the fifth anniversary of Katrina coming up later this month, the Louisiana Justice Roars blog helpfully provides this disturbing (and also hopefull) update of the facts on the ground.  The report was compiled by a collaboration amongst local academics, in cluding Lance Hill from Tulane who has met with many of our service teams over the years, and Davida Finger from Loyola, a Jewish New Orleans native a human rights attorney who came back to her hometown after the storm and has been a leader in the local just recovery movement.

In sum:

The challenges of post-Katrina New Orleans reflect the problems of many urban and suburban areas of the US - insufficient affordable rents, racially segregated schools with falling populations, great disparities in income by color of households, serious pollution from remote uncaring corporations, and reductions in the public services like transportation. Katrina made these more visible five years ago and continues to make a great illustration of the US failures to treat all citizens with dignity and our failure to achieve our promise of liberty and justice for all.

Overall there are 100,000 fewer people in the city, with less dramatic but still lesser absences in the surrounding parishes.  51,000 properties in the city remain blighted.  Employment in the region is down 16% from before Katrina (and this is pre-BP).

People ask me all the time these days how they can help after BP, particularly those who've been down in the past and want to do service in support of the cleanup.  Unfortunately (for their particular wishes to do good), the cleanup work is mostly not for the volunteers: it's specialty Hazmat work, and, because BP should be paying for all the costs, it's not volunteer work but rather paid jobs (hopefully going to locals who've been put out of work by the spill).

What I tell them, and what this report indicates, is that there is still plenty of other work to do in the region; not BP cleanup, but the steady ongoing effort of working with families, local communities, churches and others... to rebuild and to keep on creating good jobs and good homes so that, five years on, everyone who wants to come back can still come back.

The recovery is a long process, and it is not over.

Read the full index here.