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137 15. CHANCE TO ASSESS THE RECOVERY IN LATE NOvEMBER 2008, AS My APPOINTMENT AND THE second term were coming to an end, Mayor Nagin and I met over lunch to take the next steps and begin changing the city’s message from “recovery” to “normalcy.” Continuous stories of struggle at some point wear out. There was talk in Congress of Katrina fatigue. I discussed options with the mayor. We agreed that the recovery phase for the city needed to move on. At a budget hearing for 2009, the mayor and I put in place a new organizational approach that featured an office of community development. For me, that felt like coming full circle: community development is the idea to which I’d devoted my career. After almost two years as executive director of ORDA, I was exhausted. My professional challenges and my tenure as recovery czar needed to be framed so that I could tell my story. I wanted to let my colleagues and others know what I’d done, and to take stock of the recovery myself. In addition , I felt the need to escape the pressure cooker of post-Katrina New Orleans politics, and to bounce my ideas off an intelligent, dispassionate audience. The opportunity came in early 2009, when I was invited to Harvard to talk about New Orleans’s recovery. I couldn’t go until May, just prior to my departure from my post. I would be addressing students and faculty at the university ’s well-known Kennedy School of Government. During my first year in New Orleans, I had visited Harvard to present the recovery from the inside and to correct some of the misinformation and perceptions about it that were floating around the country. At that time, my work was just beginning, and I was hoping for good press and help with my work from Harvard colleagues 138 Chapter 15 Now, I was looking back at the experience, curious to hear what others had to say—and ask—about it. Duce and I had left for the airport late, and were soon racing down the same streets that I’d first come to know two years earlier. But this time they were alive. The trolley was rolling down the St. Charles Avenue median strip, with its green grass on each side. People were smiling and talking animatedly, as New Orleans folk do, with their hands moving as fast as their lips. The sky was not gray, as on my first day in January 2007, but a beautiful blue. Duce was a master of reckless yet purposeful driving. He whipped around the dense commuter traffic—notably denser than when I had arrived in 2007—rode the shoulder of the road reserved for disabled cars, and honked at anything in the way. When we almost ran up the rear of a sheriff’s vehicle from another parish, the deputy cleared a path for us, his sirens blaring, too. I worried about leaving New Orleans in a casket. This time, however, speed didn’t kill; it paid off. Bolting into the airport with five minutes to spare before my gate closed, I hit the security checkpoint at a full sprint. A TSA man on duty spotted me and waved me past the crowd. “C’mon, Doc,” he called. “We know who you are. Go get us some more money.” I smiled, electing not to admit that I was going in search of intellectual approval rather than funding. Now, on the plane to Cambridge, I took out my ballpoint pen, opened my notebook, and collected my jangled thoughts, based on the challenges I’d listed that first evening in New Orleans. It now seemed so long ago. I outlined my entire experience as czar of the city’s ungainly, halting, and confused reconstruction job—the high points, the many low points, the challenges , the lessons, the good, the bad, the ugly. If the Harvard community wanted to know what this czar business was like in New Orleans, how frustrating and in the end difficult it turned out to be, I would tell them, straight out. . . . My Harvard appearance covered two days. The morning after the harrowing departure from New Orleans, I left my hotel and made the short walk to the Littauer Building, where most of the Kennedy School classrooms and offices are located. This is my favorite academic building in the world. When I was at the University of Southern California as dean of urban planning...

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