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107 11. MORE THAN BRICKS AND STICKS: REVIVING NEIGHBORHOODS ON My MANy BIKE EXPEDITIONS AROUND NEW ORLEANS AS the Bicycle Guy, I got to see the city’s residents as neighbors, and in neighborhoods . Some places suffered little storm damage but had large-scale problems that predated the storm, such as dilapidated houses and neglected streetscapes. I saw that income was and is a dividing factor, but not entirely so: a larger determinant of a neighborhood’s viability appeared to be the mix of people who were committed to making the neighborhood a stronger community after Katrina than before. The residents of Broadmoor and Lakeview, for example, had neighborhood survival characteristics. They asked for little and did a lot for themselves. Interestingly , as a result, these communities became the target of abuse by others who perceived them as getting more than their share of city government attention and assistance. years of corruption had bred suspicion that if you paid off city officials, your community would receive favored treatment. Some places, such as the Ninth Ward, whose travails received the most media coverage, got help from church groups nationwide. I observed that the more help they received from the outside in the form of volunteers, the more they expected from both the outside volunteers and the city. For two consecutive weekends, city staff did an energetic sweep in New Orleans East. Working side by side with local volunteers from the area, we fixed up and cleaned up. We removed truckloads of trash and mowed lawns. Three weeks later, I got irate calls from several residents, saying that we needed to come back. The weeds, they complained, were continuing to grow. When I asked the callers if they could do some of the work, they responded, “We get around town. We see how you keep up those other neighborhoods!” 108 Chapter 11 My biggest contribution to New Orleans neighborhoods, before we got any money for the communities, was to ride my bike into them and bolster the residents’ resolve. Although the trips gave me more information, that was little solace for the people who had waited years for any sign of federal help. I took my share of hostile comments for failing to get the money delivered faster. Federal Community Block Grant funds are by law restricted to neighborhood renewal and similar objectives, so any federal recovery funds using community block money had to meet this test. We received little money from FEMA to repair our neighborhood police and fire stations. The city had to take $30 million from its tight budget to repair vital facilities quickly—with no assurance that this huge amount would ever be reimbursed. In other recoveries I’ve worked on, the state or FEMA advanced the funds so that vital facilities could get up and running again. My observation of the help President Bush sent was that neither Donald Powell, Bush’s first Katrina emissary to New Orleans, nor his second one, Donald O’Dell, was very interested in representing us to Washington or trying to get things done for the city. Powell spent most of his time meeting with non-city or non-state people on what seemed like local political issues. O’dell considered his mission to be making the city’s new requests better organized and articulated, rather than getting the long list of previous requests even looked at by FEMA or other agencies. Moreover, my colleagues at FEMA who had worked with me earlier in Oakland were very candid and told me it was best to come directly to them because they didn’t report to Powell, and they were even more emphatic about that directive after O’dell assumed the same role. It was clear that there was more than a little bureaucratic infighting going on as to who was in charge. I pushed for an independent assessment of our FEMA claims, and Senator Mary Landrieu got that done, but with no assistance from anyone at the White House. I found that I had much better results going directly to FEMA, HUD, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), either on my own or with delegates from the other parishes, to get funds for neighborhoods and housing. Senator Landrieu’s office was very sympathetic to our plight and worked with us. Curiously, just before I left New Orleans, the senator’s office came down hard on the mayor and city for underspending HUD funds, even though that was easily explained and, within a...

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