FOX News Radio’s Eben Brown reports from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, ten years after the area was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
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The Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is arguably the hardest hit neighborhood in the city, and is still struggling to rebuild after Katrina.
A historical marker sits in front of a newly built levee, in the same location where the previous levee was breached by a wayward barge.
Rushing water from the Industrial Canal, an outpouring of the Mississippi River, tumbled into and over the Lower Ninth Ward, leaving most things underwater.
Stampeding canal water wasted no time wiping homes inhabited by families for generations clearly off their slabs. Today, the ward is eerily quiet as concrete foundations hide below wild grass.
Empty lots have served as storage since then. Occasionally the wild grass is mowed, betraying the tombs of houses.
Ghost drives lead to houses that haven’t stood in ten years. The only address marking is a scrawled street number, ensuring the lot is remembered.
Some home structures weren’t completely destroyed, but they were rendered unlivable. Floodwaters not only topped the homes, but invaded ever room, leaving them with destroyed electric, plumbing or heating systems, molded walls and beams, and unstable joists.
Boards keep out light, and perhaps looters too. If only these homes still kept anything anybody wanted.
As abandoned as the homes are, they are still property of the families who lived there. Many don’t want to return, and others had true financial roadblocks to rebuilding.
A home such as this one might have been owned first by a great-grandparent, and been passed down through the generations. This, however, proved to be a stumbling point in the neighborhood’s recovery.
Families often never updated property titles, so despite generational family ownership, no one could prove it, making securing rebuilding funds and mortgages incredibly difficult.
A home like this might have been in decent shape before Katrina, and was home to countless grandchildren.
Katrina left it a shell. You can see through the doors and out the back window.
But turn a corner as you drive through the Lower Ninth Ward and you can find new signs of community life. Rebuilds and New Builds pop up in between blocks of sobering emptiness.
Charities and volunteer outfits, like LowerNine.org, have helped to either build new homes or rehabilitate surviving ones. LowerNine has provided volunteer skilled labor enough to rebuild and improve roughly ten homes every year.
And for those who needed or wanted new structures, groups like Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation helped to fund construction on modern green homes.
In a neighborhood once known for dilapidated and aged houses, and now infamous for barren lots, one finds perky and futuristic dwellings, built high up off the land and with economic and environmental favors. The homes are mostly constructed of new high-tech eco-friendly or recycled materials. They also sport trendy design and motif.
The homes come with solar power, and can reclaim rainwater to help with lawn-care.
New Orleans can boast a health return rate of close to 90% of its citizens, but the economic issues of the Lower Ninth Ward had held return rate to about one third of its pre-Katrina count.
Some families have done everything they can to stay and revive a cherished neighborhood. Others found new places to live, either in New Orleans or elsewhere.
But now the Lower Ninth sports unique sights and architecture, unlike anything else the mostly-Antebellum style city. The renewel has been, according to those who live there, slow. But it is not hopeless. Ten years may not be enough to return to normal, but most residents would tell you the old normal wasn’t sufficient, and so their goal is for a better Lower Ninth.
