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3. New Orleans Everywhere: Bureaucratic Accountability and Housing Policy after Katrina
- University of Massachusetts Press
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3 New Orleans Everywhere Bureaucratic Accountability and Housing Policy after Katrina Susan M. Sterett there will be a little bit of new orleans everywhere when our refugees move into your communities. here are some of the changes: . . . You will no longer experience any faith in your government—if you still have any. our refugees will teach you how to be self-reliant, depend on your community, and live without any faith in the government. —Andrei Codrescu, 2006 states and Disaster Housing assistance for those displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina began immediately after the hurricane and continued for those who have qualified through March 2009, although the numbers have decreased over the years. Some lost assistance because they had found jobs and housing where they had moved. Others moved back to New Orleans. Still others lost assistance for reasons they could not understand or because they could not document where they had been living. Extended housing assistance presents a puzzle in the U.S. social welfare state. Why offer extended assistance to displaced people, many poor and imagined to be almost exclusively African American? It would seem unlikely that the central state would institute a generous policy to those who had been long neglected and most isolated, and yet in the context of substantial cuts to assistance to the poor over the years, extended housing payments seem generous. Where public assistance has been imagined to go primarily to African Americans, it has been most stigmatized.1 Little about U.S. politics would suggest extended payments. cha Pter t hree The aftermath of Katrina rapidly came to represent governmental failure . As people waited on rooftops for rescue the week after the storm, the world recognized long-term neglect of the urban poor.2 The extent of displacement and the slowness of rebuilding in New Orleans means that the practices of assistance outside New Orleans are significant in understanding the state’s management of Katrina.3 Setting the puzzle as one of extended assistance to stigmatized people assumes that the state settles principles and acts upon them. People are or are not deserving of assistance when injured through no fault of their own. The American state, however, does not settle issues once in a way that is then implemented throughout governance. First, the American state is disaggregated. Caseworkers, courts, and executive agencies make decisions that are not tightly linked either with one another or with a decision set in principle from a statute. The state in the United States has never been one of a unitary sovereign, and as the state has taken on tasks of managing the population, networks and nodes of exercising power have come ever closer to describing governance.4 Governance draws people into surveillance by the state when it offers benefits, for one must document that one qualifies, and one’s life must become one that fits within state categories. The puzzle is best understood by analyzing the conjunction of decisions by multiple authorities, including negotiations through lawsuits, rather than holding that the state did or did not assess people as deserving victims after disaster. Decisions are emergent in the ties between judges, advocates, clients, shared homes, and the hurricane that blew them all together and apart.5 The very puzzle would seem limited to Hurricane Katrina only. The damage was extraordinary, as was the chaotic policymaking embedded in a mass displacement that no one experienced in the field of disaster relief in the United States had ever dealt with before. What could such a series of cascading events tell us about race, or disaster, or hurricanes, or housing as it rippled through networks of governance? First, events such as disasters reconfigure connections between organizations that are often otherwise not visible.6 The disaster allows us to trace housing, race, social welfare, and advocacy through mud, roads, telephones, the Internet , and the court cases that advocates brought. Second, coastlines in the United States, vulnerable to violent storms, include billions of dollars in development; property values on the coasts have increased dramatically since World War II. In a state in which social welfare spending appears in fits and starts, often in response to events, relief to displaced people [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:26 GMT) new orleans everywhere is likely to increase rather than decrease. In September 2008, the damage that Hurricane Ike brought to Galveston, Texas, evoked displacement again. Expectations of extended displacement color human rights conversations about climate change.7 Katrina...