Essay should include, at minimum, your thesis and points in complete sentences and notes (bullet points okay) about which evidence you plan to use for each paragraph. 

Answers the prompt (about Moskowitz’s rhetoric)

Appeal what are analyzing and how the examples illustrate the rhetorical appeals. 

Thesis should say whether or not you think Moskowitz’s rhetorical appeals are effective.

 Topic sentences should use the terms ethos, pathos, and logos.

Naming a specific audience + Moskowitz’s purpose for writing in the introduction will help you strengthen your analysis.

Five paragraphs, around four or five pages.

1

Hanging On

The first thing you need to know about New Orleans is that neighborhoods in New Orleans do not work like neighborhoods everywhere else. In other cities, the rich and poor live in completely different parts of town—highways, train tracks, and other vestiges of racist urban planning ensure that the rich and poor sections of cities hardly ever mix. Here, water from the Mississippi is a constant threat, so the rich live where the land is highest, and the poor live in the valleys. That has given New Orleans a chaotic topography of inequality.

For decades, the high blocks with grand houses—St. Charles, Magazine, Esplanade—hid behind them a lowland filled with dilapidated shotguns that housed New Orleans’s working class. It used to be that tourists could crawl along St. Charles Avenue on one of the city’s historic-looking streetcars, gawk at 4,000-square-foot, hundred-year-old mansions sitting atop manicured lawns, and never know that if they ventured just fifty feet beyond the avenue to the north, they’d see a neighborhood that looks nothing like the New Orleans of tourist brochures and Hollywood movies. It would be easy to drive, walk, bike, or take a streetcar from the bars on Frenchmen Street through the Disneyfied French Quarter and along Magazine Street or St. Charles Avenue and never realize that just beyond these streets lie the people the city has neglected for so long.

These neighborhoods, tucked behind the ones we usually picture when we imagine New Orleans, were poor and filled with culture and community. Tremé, Bywater, Mid-City, Central City, the Upper Ninth Ward, the Lower Ninth Ward, Uptown, and Carrollton were the places where most New Orleanians lived: the musicians, the second-liners, the undervalued laborers scrubbing the banisters of hotels.

But gentrification has challenged those geographic maxims. The rich crests of the city can no longer hold the rich, who are venturing beyond their traditional redoubts. Nearly every neighborhood in the city abutting the Mississippi River gained white residents in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Those neighborhoods—the French Quarter,

Central Business District, Bywater, Marigny, Garden District, Irish Channel, and parts of Uptown—have for decades created a kind of teapot shape of whiteness within the city, but between 2000 and 2010, Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella noted the teapot had both “

broadened and internally whitened

.” The change could be seen on nearly every street, as new arbiters of hipness—coffee shops, boutiques, art galleries—bloomed on blocks with houses still devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

As the city celebrated its new life, nearly no one in power—the mayor, the governor, council people—seemed to care about the tens of thousands of black people who never returned. When I interviewed African Americans who left New Orleans after the storm, they told me they’re afraid to go back because it feels like a different city, like it’s no longer theirs, and in many ways they are right.

National newspapers and magazines have now taken an interest in the city, experiencing it, in the words of the New York Times, “

with fresh eyes and ears

.” They’ve profiled ad nauseum the new, nearly all white artists, actors, musicians, and chefs who populate the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods. New Orleans, according to these publications, is filled with magic hedonism and is just begging to be explored. “

In New Orleans success

is measured by how unhinged you can get,” one musician told the Times. But the city isn’t quite as gentrified as Los Angeles or New York. “

New Orleans is not cosmopolitan

,” one actress said. “There’s no kale here.”

With its narrative rejiggered from one of poverty and death into one of resurgence, New Orleans could start anew. City officials and other supporters of the change went on a PR war in an attempt to convince the world and the city’s residents that all the new people, the new restaurants, and the old streets and old neighborhoods given new names (or just rechristened with the word new in front of their old names, as in “the new Freret Street” and “new Marigny”) mean that New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, is back—back from the destruction that drove out half of the city’s population, back from economic collapse.

To be sure, the economy is doing better, and the population is approaching pre-storm levels. But back is the wrong word, because the people here now are in large part not the same people who lived here before the storm.

New Orleans lost more than half its entire population

, an exodus of 254,000 people, thanks to the man-made failures that allowed a slow-moving but relatively weak hurricane with an eye that missed New Orleans to decimate the city. When it came back, it came back differently: New Orleans used to be 67 percent black and only a quarter white. Now white people make up 30 percent of the city, while the black population doesn’t seem to be returning at the same rate, accounting for just 60 percent of the population, according to the 2010 Census. That change—67 percent to 60 percent—might seem like a modest one, but when you crunch the numbers the human toll is clear:

by 2010, the city’s white population had

just about returned to its pre-Katrina levels, while today approximately 100,000 black people are still missing from New Orleans.

The city’s priorities have been made obvious by the fact that while officials have gone on media tours celebrating the economic growth of the city ten years after the storm, the local government (along with its federal and state

counterparts) has stopped tracking or even talking about its still-exiled population.

From what little research there is, we know that diaspora includes tens of thousands currently living in Houston and other cities in Texas. We know others have relocated to small towns throughout Louisiana or far-flung places such as Utah and New York

. But their vanishing still haunts black communities in New Orleans today.

I’ve heard the words colonization, occupation, and genocide used to describe what happened here after Katrina. That might seem dramatic to outsiders, but what else can you call a set of policies that in their effect, and oftentimes seemingly in their intent, kicked out a small city’s worth of black people? What can you call a set of policies that encourages the white and moneyed to come in their place? The answers would seem conspiratorial if they weren’t so well documented in local newspaper articles from right after the storm, which detailed politicians and businessmen railing against the old New Orleans and sounding excited to usher in a new era. “

It took the storm of a lifetime

to create the opportunity of a lifetime,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said a few weeks after the storm. “We must not let it pass us by.”

What else do you call a coordinated attempt by thought leaders, politicians, and business interests to radically change an entire city “demographically, geographically and politically,” as one real estate maven put it, except a deliberate attempt to gentrify?

To many of the black people here who have stuck it out, who have been left with little since Katrina, who feel like the city did nothing to help them back or actively dissuaded them from coming home, those words—colonization, occupation, genocide—do not feel sensational. They feel like what happened.

The first person I talked to when I arrived in New Orleans was a woman I was subletting a house from in the St. Thomas section of the city. I made a passing remark about how nice the area seemed, and she replied, “Thank God for Katrina. That really helped clean this place up.”

The block I was on, I would later find out, was located in one of the most rapidly changing sections of the city, which was made clear by the fact that no one I met in New Orleans could agree on exactly what neighborhood I was staying in. To the whites I met, it was either the Irish Channel or the Lower Garden District. To many African Americans from New Orleans, it was still St. Thomas—named after the eponymous housing projects that the city began demolishing in the early 2000s, the start of a slew of demolitions that accelerated after Katrina and left thousands of low-income African Americans displaced. Those projects have since been replaced by a private, mixed-income housing development owned by one of the biggest developers in New Orleans, Pres Kabacoff.

Soon after I arrived in New Orleans I met Ashana Bigard, who is from one of the seemingly few old-line families left in this area. She’s a forty-year-old school and prison justice advocate who was able to secure a spot in the

redeveloped St. Thomas. But she, like many here, is hanging on by a thread. By her own assessment, she told me, she does not fit into the new New Orleans.

“There’s nothing sexy about me,” she said. “I’m from here. I’m black. I’m a parent. I’m boring.”

To Bigard, this area is still St. Thomas, not the Irish Channel, the Lower Garden District, or anything else. She agreed to take me on a tour to show me how much has already been lost.

I picked her up at the new St. Thomas housing complex, rechristened River Garden, where she lives with two of her children. The new development doesn’t fit in with its surroundings. The old St. Thomas buildings looked like many traditional housing projects—multistory brick buildings surrounded by grass yards—but it was better kept and better constructed than most. Katrina spared most of the project, but the city of New Orleans bulldozed it anyway, and replaced it with hundreds of pastel town houses laid out on curving streets surrounding empty, unused, and heavily policed green space. The development is flanked by a suburban-style Walmart on one end. If it weren’t for the concrete levee holding back the Mississippi on one side and the ritzy Magazine Street on the other, you might think you’d left New Orleans.

Bigard has struggled to make ends meet since Katrina. For the last five years she hasn’t been able to find a steady job in nonprofit work, despite her wealth of knowledge—she’d worked in nonprofits with a specialty in education and criminal justice for nearly twenty years. But now, as she passes forty, she’s trying to expand her horizons to scrape together cash. Sometimes she works as a waitress at one of the new fancy restaurants in the Garden District. Sometimes nonprofits ask her to “consult” for a few hundred dollars, but usually they want her to work for free. Her latest gig is showing desks for lease in a co-working space for tech companies and nonprofit workers in a newly renovated building on a newly gentrified block in a rapidly gentrifying area on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard (often called “O.C. Haley”), named after a famed New Orleans civil rights activist who headed the city’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.

We drove over the potholed blocks of New Orleans, past St. Thomas and through the old Garden District, to the section of O.C. Haley in a neighborhood called Central City, which is now starting to show all the normal signs of a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification. New loft buildings, two new small museums, a coffee shop, a performing arts and screening space, a boxing gym, and an upscale Mexican restaurant have all cropped up within a five-block radius in recent years. And while the revitalization of this corridor, which was decades ago home mostly to black-owned businesses, seems like a natural progression for a city doing well economically, here, like everywhere else in the city, there was more top-down planning involved than is noticeable from the street.

In 2006, Mitch Landrieu, then Louisiana’s lieutenant governor and now New Orleans’s mayor, designated Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard one of four “urban Main Streets,” allowing the city to funnel money to street improvements. The other urban Main Streets—St. Claude Avenue, Oak Street, and North Rampart Street—are also located in rapidly gentrifying areas. Soon after, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA), the agency responsible for

managing much of the land left vacant after Hurricane Katrina and for planning major development projects in the city, moved its headquarters to O.C. Haley and helped bring an $18.5 million mixed-use development to the area—mostly office space and condos.

NORA was involved in funding no fewer

than six major projects along the boulevard.

It also loaned about $2 million

to nonprofits and restaurants that now line the corridor.

Finally, the city directed its anti-blight team to prioritize

demolishing abandoned buildings around O.C. Haley. “

I believe in leveraging the market

,” Councilwoman Stacy Head said in justifying her government’s spending on private business on O.C. Haley rather than, say, on affordable housing. “The government’s job is to leverage the market.” And so O.C. Haley became another urban success story that in reality was propped up with millions in city cash.

It’s worth pointing out no one in New Orleans or anywhere else is begrudging the improvements to neighborhoods in and of themselves. But when improvements come with restaurants and rents many can’t afford, then tree-lined streetscapes, bike lanes, and even pothole repair become signposts for displacement and cultural loss. They’re also signs that the people who lived there before the improvements are worth less to governments than new residents. The government did not see fit to make O.C. Haley a nice neighborhood when it was poor and black and had no chance of gentrifying. Anti-blight efforts and streetscapes don’t have to be linked to gentrification, but in our current system, they almost always are.

The co-working space Bigard showed me was beautiful, the crown jewel of this gentrified block. It is located in a former elementary school abandoned by the Orleans Parish School Board twelve years ago. Now reclaimed wood and gleaming tile cover every surface. Massive chandeliers hang from its center over a 23,000-square-foot “fresh-food-focused local and organic market” that occupies its bottom level.

Bigard does not know anyone who frequents these new businesses on O.C. Haley. She said none of her friends go to the new market. She earns a commission for every desk she leases in the co-working space, but at $475 a month, she said, she couldn’t afford one herself. Bigard told me that while she’s happy to give tours of the space, she knows she’s in some way contributing to the gentrification of the area. After all, who can afford an expensive desk in an area on the border of two census tracts where

over 40 percent of families live below the poverty line

?

On our drive back past the new restaurants and new movie theater and new museums, Bigard told me she felt that people like her—low-income, black, not young, with kids—aren’t welcome in newly redeveloped places such as this. Before Katrina there would not have been enough gentrifiers here to make a fresh-food market and co-working space feasible. Sure, the improvements are nice, but they don’t feel like they’re meant for her.

“Stuff like this really scares me,” she said. “When they start putting in a museum in your neighborhood, you know you’re not long for this world.”

Bigard’s life and life choices have remained largely the same since Katrina: she was an educator and activist before, and she still is. She lives in the same neighborhood and in the same city. But at one point she was able to make ends meet, and now she is not. Her life hasn’t changed, but everything around her has.

In its journey from academic jargon to popular use, the term gentrification has been stretched and pulled. In the popular press, gentrification is most often presented as the cumulative effect of the actions of individual actors—yuppies and hipsters move from the suburbs to a previously poor neighborhood and gradually change its identity. The struggles of people like Ashana Bigard are seen as collateral damage. But gentrification is bigger than that. A proliferation of hipsters, displacement, and a worsening quality of life for people like Ashana Bigard are the effects of gentrification, not its causes. Gentrification is a purposeful act, not just a trend, and so it needs a definition that recognizes the actors and actions behind it.

Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich. This trend isn’t limited to cities: for decades conservatives in the US government have been working to deregulate industry and defund our safety nets, to turn the United States from a welfare state based on the vision of John Maynard Keynes (the early twentieth-century economist who believed that a robust government was necessary to ameliorate the inherent instability and inequalities of capitalism) into a neoliberal, corporate-friendly oligarchy concerned only with increasing the share of wealth owned by the upper class.

Jason Hackworth, a professor of planning and geography at the University of Toronto, writes: “

Gentrification is much more

than the physical renovation of residential and commercial spaces. It marks the replacement of the publicly regulated Keynesian inner city—replete with physical and institutional remnants of a system designed to ameliorate the inequality of capitalism—with the privately regulated neoliberalized spaces of exclusion.” In other words, gentrification is the urban form of a new kind of capitalism.

Using this definition, gentrification moves from being an unexplainable phenomenon illustrated by countless New York Times trend pieces to being a knowable and replicable act. And if we use that process-oriented version of the definition, it becomes clear that the effects of gentrification—the coffee shops, the hipsters (and the subsequent articles profiling them), Bigard’s current financial problems—are not an accident but the predictable effects of turning cities into spaces that benefit no one but those who control capital.

In every gentrifying city—that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on—you can usually trace the start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community.

Usually those policies come in the form

of the deregulation and privatization of urban services: transportation, education, and especially housing. By the time the hipsters arrive, the political and economic forces that paved the way for them have been at work for years.

In New Orleans, all the processes of gentrification happened at once. The chaos of Hurricane Katrina provided an

opportunity to enact gentrification-friendly policies on a condensed timeline. Politicians and the developers who supported them were able to ram through laws that likely wouldn’t have been passed otherwise. Local leaders, with the support of federal policies, used the storm to transform the city into one where capital could be squeezed out of every crevice. They privatized schools and housing, busted unions, and gave tax breaks and other incentives to anyone who would bring money to the city, with few strings attached to that investment. And, perhaps most importantly, they did everything they could to ensure that poor black people would not come back. Katrina was not the first time the city had tried to rid itself of its black population, but it paved the way for the city’s most successful attempt.

More than half of the hurricane’s human toll came from one neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, which has always been a symbol and bastion of African American culture, community, and commerce, and therefore has constantly been under attack. In the 1920s a canal was built down the center of the Ninth Ward to facilitate the transportation of oil and other industrial materials. Since then the Lower Ninth Ward has felt cut off from the rest of the city—accessible only by bridge, and lacking good public transit. That has given the neighborhood its own feel, and its residents a unique sense of distrust of the city government. Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth was nearly 100 percent black, and despite its reputation as being a poor section of the city, it was actually mostly middle-income—

the median area income at the 2000 census

was $37,894. The area had

one of the highest rates of African American homeownership

in the country.

During Katrina, the concrete barriers

holding water back from the Industrial Canal broke, flooding the entire neighborhood, destroying the vast majority of its homes, and killing a thousand people in the Lower Ninth alone.

After the storm, residents reported hearing

loud booms as the storm encroached, and rumors flew over whether the levees holding back the Industrial Canal had been deliberately blown in order to save richer areas of the city. Journalists and politicians derided the theories as paranoid, but African Americans had good reason to believe that the government would destroy one predominantly black area to save predominantly white ones.

To understand how politicians and developers tried to change New Orleans after Katrina, it’s important to understand that the city has nearly always been actively hostile toward its black population.

In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded

, and Louisiana flood control officials decided their best option to minimize damage was to purposely breach a levee in Jefferson Parish, a rural section of Louisiana right next to New Orleans, in order to prevent New Orleans from flooding. The area chosen to flood was predominantly black, populated by sharecroppers who were promised money for giving up their land, and sometimes forced at gunpoint out of their houses if they refused. The sharecroppers were also forced to help clean up the destruction wrought by the flood in New Orleans. They were never compensated for the land.

Then in 1965, black New Orleanians experienced displacement

yet again when Hurricane Betsy flooded New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish. The pattern of destruction was eerily similar to that of

Katrina—poor black neighborhoods, including the Lower Ninth Ward, were inundated with water, while the rest of the city was left relatively unscathed.

Knowing that history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Katrina was taken by many in the city as a sign that New Orleans was once again trying to rid itself of black people. “The government is making moves to bring in certain kinds of people to New Orleans and get rid of everyone else,” Kim Ford, a nearly lifelong resident of the Lower Ninth, told me.

The words of the city’s leaders seemed to confirm her theory. The water had not yet drained out of New Orleans when real estate developers, millionaires, politicians, and conservative pundits began their campaign to convince residents and others that Katrina was a blessing in disguise. Yes, the storm was horrible, their rhetoric went, and yes, the deaths of nearly 2,000 people and the displacement of nearly half the city were tragic, but New Orleans had been poor and disorderly before the storm, and this would be a chance to do things differently. James Reiss, a businessman and descendant of a prominent Uptown New Orleans family who fled the storm in a private helicopter, gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal after his return that laid out how many elites viewed Katrina.

“

Those who want to see this city rebuilt

want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” Reiss told the paper. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.” Reiss would go on to chair the city’s Regional Transit Authority under Mayor Ray Nagin, taking control of New Orleans’s meager public transit options.

Then governor Kathleen Blanco presented the storm as an opportunity to rebuild and do away with the city’s history of poverty, especially in the school system. But most prophetic was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist. In a column that came out just over a week after the storm—when people were still stuck in hotels or waiting for food in the Superdome—Brooks advocated for using the storm to leave the poor sections of New Orleans behind, and encourage rich people to move in in their place:

The first rule of the rebuilding effort

should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago.… If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as run-down and dysfunctional as before.… In the post-Katrina world, that means we ought to give people who don’t want to move back to New Orleans the means to disperse into middle-class areas nationwide.… The key will be luring middle-class families into the rebuilt city, making it so attractive to them that they will move in, even knowing that their blocks will include a certain number of poor people.

Given how the recovery has progressed these past ten years, it’s tempting to wonder if New Orleans politicians

used Brooks’s column as a playbook. Katrina became the perfect opportunity for politicians to institute what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine capitalism,” using the chaos provided by the crisis to push through the reforms Brooks suggests: dismantling institutions that served the poor, and making the city more accommodating to an influx in capital. The result is a city that feels richer than before, but also unfriendly to those who do not fit into its new economy. Bigard is one of those people.

New Orleans has the highest percentage

of native-born residents of any city in the United States. And Bigard, like many people here, has roots that go way back, at least to 1809. Her grandfather was a well-known Mardi Gras Indian. But despite her deep roots, Bigard said, she feels like she’s losing grip on her city. Over the past decade, she’s been forced to bounce between houses on Carondelet, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Louisiana Avenue, and South Lopez Street to find affordable rent. A three-bedroom house she rented on Annunciation Street, right in the heart of the Irish Channel, once cost her $550 a month; similar properties in that area now regularly rent for over $2,000. If it weren’t for her spot in the mixed-income River Garden development, Bigard said, she’d likely have to move in with her mom, or leave the city completely.

Bigard’s job prospects have been affected by the gentrification of New Orleans too. When Katrina struck, she’d been working at the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network (NOLAPON), which helps parents navigate the city’s complex school system. But Louisiana politicians used Katrina as an opportunity to shut down nearly every public school in New Orleans and replace them with charter schools. Within months after the storm hit,

107 of the city’s 128 public schools

had been transferred to a new, all-charter district. When Bigard began protesting the changes, she ran afoul of NOLAPON’s new, charter-friendly leadership and was fired. Since then, she’s struggled to find work.

Like many in New Orleans, Bigard never received a college degree

, though she tried, attending Delgado Community College and then the Southern University of New Orleans. But when her mother became sick, with medical bills reaching over $1,000 a month, Bigard had to drop out to look for full-time work. Her lack of a degree had never been a problem before Katrina, but the storm brought a slew of national nonprofits to New Orleans, and those nonprofits seemed less interested in working with people like her, instead preferring to bring down consultants and employees from Washington, New York, and elsewhere.

“I feel like we really got the train moving with gentrification by awarding so much money to these nonprofits and not setting any parameters on how that money was spent and who got that money and what they did with it,” Bigard told me. “A lot of these times I’d go into these nonprofits and people would want to ‘pick my brain.’ If I was wearing a suit and from New York, that would be called consulting and I would be billing you $250 an hour.… I came from a community where you’re supposed to help out your neighbors, but I’m a lot more savvy now. Now when they ask,

‘Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain?’ I would probably say, ‘What’s your budget for consulting?’”

White volunteers and whites working for nonprofits have replaced much of the black middle-class labor force here. It’s hard to get accurate numbers on exactly how many white non-natives came to work in nonprofits and schools after the storm, but anecdotes from residents here suggest there are quite a few. There were at least 375 Teach for America members in New Orleans schools by 2013. Hundreds of Habitat for Humanity volunteers from across the country constructed homes for free that might have otherwise been built by local laborers. As Nat Turner, a black transplant from New York who operates a farm and education center in the Lower Ninth Ward, told me, “The guys you see standing around on corners drinking beers, those used to be the guys that would repair your roof or wire your house.” And white, college-educated professionals working for nonprofits, mostly people from the Northeast, seemed to take the place of people like Bigard. Geographer Richard Campanella estimates that

about 5,000 new nonprofit workers showed up

directly after the storm, followed by more than 20,000 young, mostly white, college-educated people working in nonprofits and other high-skilled, specialized sectors such as the booming movie industry (which was lured to New Orleans with very generous tax credits).

After struggling to find work for years, Bigard signed up for Section 8 housing vouchers in 2012. The vouchers came from a federally funded program that helps people pay for rent in privately owned, market-rate houses and apartment buildings. But the next year, thanks to a federal budget sequester,

the Housing Authority of New Orleans was forced to revoke

700 Section 8 vouchers, including Bigard’s. For a few weeks, Bigard was homeless.

Eventually she found the place where she lives now—

River Garden. Back when it was St. Thomas, the development provided 1,500 families with public housing. But after the city demolished St. Thomas and handed a contract to private developer Pres Kabacoff, it was built back with only 606 units, only a fraction of which are publicly financed low-income housing. There are also 62 units open to low-income families but financed privately, made affordable by tax credits that expire in 2017

. Bigard lives in one of those units, and once that tax credit expires, developer Pres Kabacoff could make her unit market rate. It’s not clear if he will, but given that a unit like hers rents for $1,200 to $1,500, according to the River Garden website, there’s little to incentivize him to keep the rent low. If that happens, Bigard says, she isn’t sure where she’ll go.

“I came back after Katrina because I love my city,” Bigard told me. “I feel like even with everything that’s happened, people still greet you here. They talk to you. They lift you up. There’s no place like that. But whether I’ll be able to afford to live here, that’s another story.… I’m going to claw, climb, do whatever I can to try to stay here. I’d like to able to purchase a house and have a good used car in my own city. Will I be able to do that? I don’t know. I pray so. I hope so.”

Even if Bigard stays, she said, she feels like she’ll be left behind, watching on the sidelines as the new New Orleans envelops her old city. The St. Thomas projects used to be dangerous, but they also were a wellspring of

activism and culture. One of the most successful tenant organizing movements in the country, the St. Thomas Residents Council, was birthed on the grounds now occupied by River Garden and Walmart. Bigard and others told me about the legendary parties and barbecues that happened nearly every weekend in St. Thomas. There was a sense of community and camaraderie. Now most residents, isolated in semi-detached single-family homes, don’t talk to each other. And the rest of New Orleans, it seems to Bigard, is headed in that direction too: unfriendly, individualistic, boring.

Bigard, like many others here, understands that the arrival of new people is out of her control. Her biggest qualm with the new people in New Orleans isn’t that they’re here but their lack of appreciation for what makes the city unique. She said they don’t seem to understand that having a city filled with music—jazz, bounce, hip-hop—sometimes involves people practicing their instruments and making a lot of noise next door to you at odd hours. They don’t seem to understand that people like Bigard might have kids who sometimes make noise. The attempt at cultural control and dampening seems particularly egregious at River Garden, where residents in recent years have staged protests against management for reporting them to police for minor violations of housing bylaws: music being too loud, kitchen cabinet knobs missing, light bulbs out. “Jim Crow Can’t Live Here Anymore!” read one sign at a protest in 2013.

“It used to be you’d see people sitting outside in St. Thomas, maybe playing some music, somebody barbecuing, children playing,” Bigard said on a drive around the now desolate streets of River Garden. “You won’t see that shit around here anymore. That’s what connected us. Now you’re not allowed to be a New Orleanian here. Yeah, this was high crime and high poverty. But the crime and poverty haven’t gone anywhere. You’ve just spread it around, and you’ve just taken away the beauty.”

2

How Gentrification Works

The word gentrification was coined by

British sociologist Ruth Glass

in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.

“

One by one, many of the working class quarters

have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents.

The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “

Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’

” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “

I think one should approach the acquisition

of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.”

But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as

well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “

The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes

is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”

Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committee, like similar groups in cities across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to benefit from a gentrified neighborhood. Today gentrification has become an even more pronounced top-down process.

In 1979,

MIT urban studies professor Phillip Clay

outlined four distinct phases of gentrification, which remain remarkably applicable today. According to Clay, the first phase begins when individuals, unsupported by any government or large institution, decide to begin moving into a previously poor neighborhood and renovating houses. National media pay little attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.

San Francisco experienced an influx of gays

during World War II, thanks in part to the military’s practice of dishonorably discharging gay men into the city via military bases on the Pacific Ocean. While there are no hard numbers,

there is evidence that the white LGBT community

, especially lesbians, also played a pioneering role in Brooklyn in the 1970s. New Orleans’s largely white queer scene today also seems one step ahead of other gentrifying places. (Detroit is an outlier here, as there’s not much of a queer scene.)

The second phase, according to Clay, is when those attracted to the neighborhood because of the change that’s already begun start buying up real estate. Some in this second wave are hoping to take part in the neighborhood’s new cultural cachet. Others are small-scale speculators, hoping they can get a house on the cheap and sell it sometime later. This is the phase when media start paying attention, and when the New York Times might write an article about whether said neighborhood is the next hot new thing, or even the next Williamsburg. Vacancies go down, and displacement begins.

I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington,

2

How Gentrification Works

The word gentrification was coined by
British sociologist Ruth Glass
in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.
“
One by one, many of the working class quarters
have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents.
The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “
Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’
” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “
I think one should approach the acquisition
of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.”

But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “
The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes
is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”

Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committee, like similar groups in cities across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to benefit from a gentrified neighborhood. Today gentrification has become an even more pronounced top-down process.

In 1979,
MIT urban studies professor Phillip Clay
outlined four distinct phases of gentrification, which remain remarkably applicable today. According to Clay, the first phase begins when individuals, unsupported by any government or large institution, decide to begin moving into a previously poor neighborhood and renovating houses. National media pay little attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.
San Francisco experienced an influx of gays
during World War II, thanks in part to the military’s practice of dishonorably discharging gay men into the city via military bases on the Pacific Ocean. While there are no hard numbers,
there is evidence that the white LGBT community
, especially lesbians, also played a pioneering role in Brooklyn in the 1970s. New Orleans’s largely white queer scene today also seems one step ahead of other gentrifying places. (Detroit is an outlier here, as there’s not much of a queer scene.)
The second phase, according to Clay, is when those attracted to the neighborhood because of the change that’s already begun start buying up real estate. Some in this second wave are hoping to take part in the neighborhood’s new cultural cachet. Others are small-scale speculators, hoping they can get a house on the cheap and sell it sometime later. This is the phase when media start paying attention, and when the New York Times might write an article about whether said neighborhood is the next hot new thing, or even the next Williamsburg. Vacancies go down, and displacement begins.

I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington, Kentucky; and others—where young people are flocking, where new restaurants are opening, and where intrepid reporters are sent to cover the surprising revitalization of once downtrodden cities. But these phases are also historical anachronisms at this point. Gentrification in places such as Detroit and Cleveland, while appearing as organic as the flocking of gay men to San Francisco, is today most often sponsored by the state and other powerful institutions.

Clark’s third phase is essentially what New Orleans is experiencing right now, as middle-class gentrifiers start taking on more prominent roles in gentrifying neighborhoods—sitting on committees and community boards, promoting neighborhoods to outsiders as a place where the middle class can move and maintain a high quality of life. During this phase, Clark says, you can expect banks to begin lending more frequently in previously disinvested neighborhoods. Developers (as opposed to individuals) become the preeminent renovators and builders. Police and other security forces increase to ensure that the new gentrified class feels safe. Tensions between the “old” and the “new” rise.

Stage four is when a neighborhood is already gentrified and begins to become even more wealthy. Managerial-class professionals replace the artists and punks. Properties that were held vacant by developers are turned into high-cost condos. Displacement is rampant. And gentrification begins spilling over into other, less gentrified neighborhoods.

In 1979, these phases provided a near-complete and prescient description of the process. But several researchers have suggested that today we need to add a fifth phase to that list, in order to grapple with what’s happened to places such as New York and San Francisco. Gentrification in these globalized cities is no longer about individuals, and it’s not even about local developers chasing cash in cool neighborhoods. In the words of geographer Neil Smith, it’s about “

the reach of global capital

down to the local neighborhood scale.”

Today, many development deals are initiated by foreign investors, and many neighborhoods are affordable only to the global elite. Buildings spring up that are meant less to house people and more to house the wealth of millionaires and billionaires. In a stretch of Midtown Manhattan, which has recently become filled with sky-high multimillion-dollar condo buildings,

a

New York Times

investigation found that 50 percent

of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year. In other words, the fifth and last phase of gentrification is when neighborhoods aren’t just more friendly to capital than to people but cease being places to live a normal life, with work and home and school and community spaces, and become luxury commodities.

These phases provide a good outline of how gentrification works, and they also rightly suggest that the process is predictable—that the pioneers and the coffee shops will likely be followed by the professionals and the condos, no matter where you are. But gentrification is also messier than that. Sometimes the phases happen simultaneously, or out of order. Detroit’s gentrification, for example, seems to be largely driven by professionals, not individual “pioneers.” But regardless of what order they come in, the phases all push in the same direction: gentrification heightens the worth of neighborhoods and cities until they become uninhabitable for average people.

Clay’s stages of gentrification are useful to understand how the process happens, but they don’t answer the fundamental question of why. Why do neighborhoods and entire cities all of a sudden become hot for reinvestment? There’s a critical preparatory phase missing from the analysis, a phase zero. Cities’ real estate and zoning policies are determined by local, state, and federal governments. And so for phases one through five to happen, governments have to be willing to allow for it.

There’s still debate in academic circles about what forces convince lawmakers to welcome or encourage gentrification. Some view gentrification as a production-driven process: real estate developers who see profit potential in inner cities are luring in the young and moneyed, displacing those who aren’t as profitable. Others argue gentrification is a consumption-driven process that is more about a million Everett Ortners converging on cities—that generations of white people raised in the suburbs have come to see the inner city as a space for personal liberation and economic possibility, and therefore create spaces within cities that conform to their needs. The negative effects of gentrification (displacement, cultural loss, etc.), in this view, are just unfortunate ancillary consequences of the compounded individual decisions of millions of former suburbanites who believe they’d be better off in the city. To be sure, consumption explanations have some merit: inner-cities are attractive cultural spaces. I know several dozen young white people who were raised in the suburbs and who believed the only place they could live a good life was in the city.

They came to New York to be artists, activists, authors

, and other types of creatives, and/or to liberate themselves from the familial expectations of the suburbs—to be single, gay, queer, or just different.

Others have posited that gentrification represents a more nefarious kind of individualistic expression: that of colonial power. In the same way that people of European descent colonized the Americas, some argue, gentrifiers see the inner city as a place lacking control and in need of white “civilizing” force. “

As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization

, the U.S. city came to be seen as an ‘urban wilderness,’” Neil Smith wrote in his landmark 1996 book on gentrification, The New Urban Frontier. “In the language of gentrification, the appeal to frontier imagery has been exact: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys became the new folk heroes of the urban frontier.”

It’s hard to argue that gentrifiers don’t often harbor this troubling colonialist mind-set. I’ve heard countless times about people who think the only way to make a neighborhood better or safer is for them to move into it. And the language developers and gentrifiers use is often dripping with imperialist subtext. When a new apartment building opened on the west side of Times Square in 1983 (back then a non-gentrified area), its owners advertised in the New York Times with a full-page spread that celebrated the “

taming of the wild, wild West

” where “the trailblazers have done their work.”

Often stores in gentrifying areas will hint at these semi-subconscious colonialist sympathies. In Brooklyn, there’s Empire Mayonnaise and Outpost Café (outpost of what?), both of which are glaringly white businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods. In 2014, a building opened in Bushwick, a predominantly Hispanic section of Brooklyn, called Colony 1209. Its sales materials sound like gentrification-themed self-parody: “

Here you’ll find a

2

How Gentrification Works

The word gentrification was coined by
British sociologist Ruth Glass
in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside.
“
One by one, many of the working class quarters
have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents.
The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “
Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’
” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “
I think one should approach the acquisition
of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.”
But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “
The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes
is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.”
Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committee, like similar groups in cities across the country, were instrumental in crafting the narrative of good-hearted pioneers the media still cling to today. Yet Ortner’s story proves that gentrification was never really about individual pioneers, but rather about a confluence of policies pushed by wealthy individuals, politicians, and the companies that stood to benefit from a gentrified neighborhood. Today gentrification has become an even more pronounced top-down process.

In 1979,
MIT urban studies professor Phillip Clay
outlined four distinct phases of gentrification, which remain remarkably applicable today. According to Clay, the first phase begins when individuals, unsupported by any government or large institution, decide to begin moving into a previously poor neighborhood and renovating houses. National media pay little attention, and any increase in the concentration of gentrifiers comes largely from word of mouth. There’s some evidence that historically this phase of gentrification was often spearheaded by gays and lesbians in search of safe spaces outside homogenized suburbia where they could congregate.
San Francisco experienced an influx of gays
during World War II, thanks in part to the military’s practice of dishonorably discharging gay men into the city via military bases on the Pacific Ocean. While there are no hard numbers,
there is evidence that the white LGBT community
, especially lesbians, also played a pioneering role in Brooklyn in the 1970s. New Orleans’s largely white queer scene today also seems one step ahead of other gentrifying places. (Detroit is an outlier here, as there’s not much of a queer scene.)
The second phase, according to Clay, is when those attracted to the neighborhood because of the change that’s already begun start buying up real estate. Some in this second wave are hoping to take part in the neighborhood’s new cultural cachet. Others are small-scale speculators, hoping they can get a house on the cheap and sell it sometime later. This is the phase when media start paying attention, and when the New York Times might write an article about whether said neighborhood is the next hot new thing, or even the next Williamsburg. Vacancies go down, and displacement begins.
I would argue that these first two phases are still happening in some cities—Detroit; Cleveland; Lexington, Kentucky; and others—where young people are flocking, where new restaurants are opening, and where intrepid reporters are sent to cover the surprising revitalization of once downtrodden cities. But these phases are also historical anachronisms at this point. Gentrification in places such as Detroit and Cleveland, while appearing as organic as the flocking of gay men to San Francisco, is today most often sponsored by the state and other powerful institutions.
Clark’s third phase is essentially what New Orleans is experiencing right now, as middle-class gentrifiers start taking on more prominent roles in gentrifying neighborhoods—sitting on committees and community boards, promoting neighborhoods to outsiders as a place where the middle class can move and maintain a high quality of life. During this phase, Clark says, you can expect banks to begin lending more frequently in previously disinvested neighborhoods. Developers (as opposed to individuals) become the preeminent renovators and builders. Police and other security forces increase to ensure that the new gentrified class feels safe. Tensions between the “old” and the “new” rise.
Stage four is when a neighborhood is already gentrified and begins to become even more wealthy. Managerial-class professionals replace the artists and punks. Properties that were held vacant by developers are turned into high-cost condos. Displacement is rampant. And gentrification begins spilling over into other, less gentrified neighborhoods.
In 1979, these phases provided a near-complete and prescient description of the process. But several researchers have suggested that today we need to add a fifth phase to that list, in order to grapple with what’s happened to places such as New York and San Francisco. Gentrification in these globalized cities is no longer about individuals, and it’s not even about local developers chasing cash in cool neighborhoods. In the words of geographer Neil Smith, it’s about “
the reach of global capital
down to the local neighborhood scale.”
Today, many development deals are initiated by foreign investors, and many neighborhoods are affordable only to the global elite. Buildings spring up that are meant less to house people and more to house the wealth of millionaires and billionaires. In a stretch of Midtown Manhattan, which has recently become filled with sky-high multimillion-dollar condo buildings,
a

New York Times

investigation found that 50 percent
of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year. In other words, the fifth and last phase of gentrification is when neighborhoods aren’t just more friendly to capital than to people but cease being places to live a normal life, with work and home and school and community spaces, and become luxury commodities.
These phases provide a good outline of how gentrification works, and they also rightly suggest that the process is predictable—that the pioneers and the coffee shops will likely be followed by the professionals and the condos, no matter where you are. But gentrification is also messier than that. Sometimes the phases happen simultaneously, or out of order. Detroit’s gentrification, for example, seems to be largely driven by professionals, not individual “pioneers.” But regardless of what order they come in, the phases all push in the same direction: gentrification heightens the worth of neighborhoods and cities until they become uninhabitable for average people.
Clay’s stages of gentrification are useful to understand how the process happens, but they don’t answer the fundamental question of why. Why do neighborhoods and entire cities all of a sudden become hot for reinvestment? There’s a critical preparatory phase missing from the analysis, a phase zero. Cities’ real estate and zoning policies are determined by local, state, and federal governments. And so for phases one through five to happen, governments have to be willing to allow for it.
There’s still debate in academic circles about what forces convince lawmakers to welcome or encourage gentrification. Some view gentrification as a production-driven process: real estate developers who see profit potential in inner cities are luring in the young and moneyed, displacing those who aren’t as profitable. Others argue gentrification is a consumption-driven process that is more about a million Everett Ortners converging on cities—that generations of white people raised in the suburbs have come to see the inner city as a space for personal liberation and economic possibility, and therefore create spaces within cities that conform to their needs. The negative effects of gentrification (displacement, cultural loss, etc.), in this view, are just unfortunate ancillary consequences of the compounded individual decisions of millions of former suburbanites who believe they’d be better off in the city. To be sure, consumption explanations have some merit: inner-cities are attractive cultural spaces. I know several dozen young white people who were raised in the suburbs and who believed the only place they could live a good life was in the city.
They came to New York to be artists, activists, authors
, and other types of creatives, and/or to liberate themselves from the familial expectations of the suburbs—to be single, gay, queer, or just different.
Others have posited that gentrification represents a more nefarious kind of individualistic expression: that of colonial power. In the same way that people of European descent colonized the Americas, some argue, gentrifiers see the inner city as a place lacking control and in need of white “civilizing” force. “
As part of the experience of postwar suburbanization
, the U.S. city came to be seen as an ‘urban wilderness,’” Neil Smith wrote in his landmark 1996 book on gentrification, The New Urban Frontier. “In the language of gentrification, the appeal to frontier imagery has been exact: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys became the new folk heroes of the urban frontier.”
It’s hard to argue that gentrifiers don’t often harbor this troubling colonialist mind-set. I’ve heard countless times about people who think the only way to make a neighborhood better or safer is for them to move into it. And the language developers and gentrifiers use is often dripping with imperialist subtext. When a new apartment building opened on the west side of Times Square in 1983 (back then a non-gentrified area), its owners advertised in the New York Times with a full-page spread that celebrated the “
taming of the wild, wild West
” where “the trailblazers have done their work.”

Often stores in gentrifying areas will hint at these semi-subconscious colonialist sympathies. In Brooklyn, there’s Empire Mayonnaise and Outpost Café (outpost of what?), both of which are glaringly white businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods. In 2014, a building opened in Bushwick, a predominantly Hispanic section of Brooklyn, called Colony 1209. Its sales materials sound like gentrification-themed self-parody: “

Here you’ll find a group of like-minded settlers

, mixing the customs of their original homeland with those of one of NYC’s most historic neighborhoods to create art, community, and a new lifestyle. Let’s Homestead, Bushwick-style.” It’s worth noting that the building received a fifteen-year tax abatement from the city worth $8 million.

But these cultural explanations don’t go far enough toward explaining the why of gentrification, the phase zero. Yes, it’s important that young white people with money find inner-city spaces attractive, but at the end of the day gentrification isn’t about culture, it’s about money. Gentrifiers may be seeking art, emancipation from suburban norms, and a sense of discovery, but the entire process would grind to a halt if it weren’t profitable. Developers don’t build condos to lose money or support the arts. They don’t pressure cities to rezone entire neighborhoods because they believe in inner-city liberation. So to answer the question of why gentrification happens, we have to answer the question of how the city became profitable to gentrify.

Cities do not gentrify unless the process is profitable for real estate developers. Yes, hipsters and yuppies can move into a neighborhood and inflate local real estate values, but it is developers’ profit motive that causes massive, citywide change.

The city wasn’t always profitable. Up until the 1960s, developers could make much more money in the suburbs—buying land cheaply, constructing single-family houses, and taking advantage of a burgeoning mortgage industry to sell to the (mostly white) middle and upper classes. But at a certain point, profit potential in many suburbs was more or less maxed out. If you look at the inner-ring suburbs of New York, you can see why: by the 1960s, in places near commuter trains or within a reasonable driving distance of the city, nearly all of the land was developed and housing prices were high, making it hard for developers to buy on the cheap and sell at a markup. Sure, they could buy land even farther from the city and attempt to develop it, but commuters are only willing to travel so far, and New York’s suburban commute times were already pushing the hour mark. The city, on the other hand, was a bargain, thanks to white flight and deindustrialization.

In 1979, geographer Neil Smith came up with what has become possibly the most influential academic theory on gentrification: the rent gap. Smith posited that the more disinvested a space becomes, the more profitable it is to gentrify. The idea behind his theory is a basic tenet of free-market economics: capital will go where the rate of potential return (i.e., the potential to make profit) is greatest. Smith realized that gentrification wasn’t happening at random. It was predictable. If you wanted to find the neighborhood that would gentrify next, all you had to do was figure out where the biggest potential for profit was in a city—the place where buildings could be bought cheap and made more expensive in a short period of time.

By looking at tax data, Smith could pinpoint blocks that seemed to be gentrifiable, which usually meant buildings

were in disrepair (so they could be bought cheap) and were close to other gentrified areas (so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for gentrifiers to move in). The rent gap was the disparity between how much a property was worth in its current state and how much it would be worth gentrified. The larger the gap in a neighborhood, the higher the chance it would gentrify.

Gentrification might seem rapid when you’re in a neighborhood experiencing it firsthand, but it’s really a long game: real estate developers (at least the smart ones) know they can benefit from the vast, decades-long shifts that happen in metropolises. As Smith points out, developers reap profit by charging the highest rents they can to poor people and skimping on repairs, milking buildings for all they’re worth, and then they benefit from kicking out those residents, making repairs, and charging much more money to new residents.

“

Having produced a scarcity of capital

in the name of profit they now flood the neighborhood for the same purpose, portraying themselves all along as civic-minded heroes, pioneers taking a risk where no one else would venture, builders of a new city for the worthy populace,” Smith writes.

This milk-and-revitalize strategy can sound conspiratorial, and the reality often bears out that interpretation. New York’s real estate and banking barons bought up cheap land in the outer boroughs before they lobbied for the deindustrialization of Manhattan, so they could profit both off the city’s new condos and the industry and poor people forced into Brooklyn and Queens. But it doesn’t have to be the result of clever plotting. Creating markets where profit potential is highest—that is, purchasing declining and underfunded buildings, and then quickly renovating and flipping them—is just sound economics. A rental market where the poor are adequately provided for, where there is enough space in a neighborhood to accommodate everyone, costs building owners more and is less profitable.

This constant search for the highest profit potential—what Smith calls a locational seesaw—is what created the suburbs, and it’s what created the gentrified cities of today’s United States. In the 1930s, most Americans were stably housed in either cities or rural areas, but the entire country was in an economic depression.

By funding the construction of roads outside cities

and by subsidizing and underwriting mortgages for suburban homes, the federal government created the suburban housing industry in a matter of years, and promoted billions of dollars in economic growth for developers. Later, once the suburbs were built out, developers had to search for new ways to revitalize their profit rate, and both gentrification and exurbanization were part of this search.

Using the rent gap theory, Smith was able to accurately predict the gentrification of many New York neighborhoods, including the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Park Slope. He looked at tax arrears data and found that gentrification happened right after buildings hit their highest level of tax debt—a sign landlords were milking their buildings by not doing repairs or paying their taxes in preparation for flipping them. The same sections of Park Slope that Everett Ortner was attempting to gentrify hit their highest levels of tax arrears in 1976. Sure enough, 1977 was the first year in which several buildings were converted from rentals to co-ops and condominiums.

Between 1977 and 1984, there were 130 such conversions

in Park Slope. The neighborhood’s rapid conversions accounted for 21 percent

of all such activity in the entire borough those years.

Does Smith’s theory mean every gentrifier is seeking a high return on profit? Of course not. And it doesn’t mean developers are even conscious of the dynamic they’re playing into. But regardless of individual intent, the basic tenet holds true: gentrification works on a mass scale only because most inner cities have been purposely depressed and therefore are now profitable to reinvest in. That led Smith to conclude that “

gentrification is a back-to-the-city movement

all right, but a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people.”

Most cities in the US experienced slow bleeds of capital thanks to deindustrialization and white flight, which eventually made their inner cities ripe for gentrification. But New Orleans’s economic devalorization was instant, thanks to Katrina. The city’s real estate was already relatively inexpensive before the storm, but Katrina pushed values low enough that even hobby investors could afford to snatch up a few damaged properties. And the storm made the potential value of the place higher: before Katrina, many New Orleans neighborhoods were not exactly welcoming of (white) outsiders. Crime was high. Most neighborhoods were majority black. The storm changed that, allowing developers to envision entire neighborhoods as majority white or at least more mixed, more upscale, and therefore more profitable. With real estate prices low and the potential for remaking the city high, the rent gap was bigger than ever, and so it made economic sense to gentrify New Orleans.

Private profit only partially explains gentrification, though. Gentrification may not happen without the confluence of shifting cultural desires and newly focused real estate capital, but its pervasiveness—its existence not only in major cultural and economic capitals but also in rural towns and midsized postindustrial middle American cities—can be explained only by the active promotion of gentrification by a third party, a party large enough to influence policy: the government.

For the past half century, as the federal government has repeatedly slashed funds for everything from public housing to neighborhood development, anti-poverty programs to public transit, cities have been left to fend for themselves. And that’s pushed many into “entrepreneurial” and neoliberal forms of government—encouraging the growth of businesses and industries that in turn encourage the attraction of high-income and upper-middle-income families into cities. Through their taxes, those families help pay for the basic necessities of cities that used to be funded by the federal government. At the same time, cities have been forced into slashing the budgets of necessary but expensive parts of any good city: parks, transit, programs for the poor. In other words, cities are looking for the rich and the upper middle class to use their tax dollars and spending power to fund what used to be paid for by America’s semi-robust federal welfare state.

Detroit, New Orleans, and countless other cities are hoping the spending power of millennials who can afford to live consumption-oriented lifestyles will provide the tax dollars that everyone relies on. In richer cities with more infrastructure, such as San Francisco and New York, governments are relying on those millennials, along with big companies, millionaires, and billionaires, to provide the bulk of their tax revenue. In 1960, economist Friedrich

Hayek, one of the fathers of neoliberalism, laid out this gentrification strategy: “

Though the majority of residents may never contemplate

a change of residence, there will usually be enough people, especially among the young and more enterprising, to make it necessary for the local authorities to provide as good services at as reasonable costs as their competitors.” Hayek, who also advocated for a near-zero-spending federal government, was saying cities needed to fight for the young and moneyed in order to survive.

Nearly sixty years later, you can see that strategy playing out in most American cities: in New Orleans’s all-out attempt to attract companies, especially the movie industry, to move into the city; in Detroit’s various incentives for young people to move to the city; in San Francisco’s policy of giving Twitter and other tech companies millions in tax breaks to stay in the city and build offices in its poorest neighborhoods; in New York’s policy of subsidizing housing for the richest with the idea that they’ll help fund the rest of the city.

“

They are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes

,” New York’s billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “They’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.… [I]f we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

Federal spending on cities has been declining for decades, but it was President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 with a mandate to slash budgets, who really sealed the fate of many urban centers.

Reagan cut all nonmilitary spending

by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities’ abilities to pay for public housing. The Department of Transportation also had its funding cut by about 10.5 percent during Reagan’s first term and 7.5 percent in his second. Those cuts forced cities to turn to alternative sources of funding, in particular bonds, to finance things such as public transit and road repair. But not just anyone can issue a bond—governments first had to prove they’d be able to pay that bond back. And there are only two entities that decide if a government or company is capable of paying back a bond: Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, ratings agencies that until relatively recently mostly concerned themselves with rating companies’ investment-worthiness. But now, with cities looking to take out loans to fund their operations, the agencies rated cities in the same way. They’d downgrade the rating of any government with high spending (i.e., a basic social safety net) and not enough income (i.e., too many poor people).

That’s exactly what happened to Detroit

: its costs were too high and its income too low, and so its credit rating was downgraded again and again until it was nearly impossible for the city to get a loan.

The result, to paraphrase planning and geography professor Jason Hackworth

, was that cities were forced into becoming more entrepreneurial in a short period of time. They hired city managers and PR teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities, as if cities were corporations. It’s not uncommon these days for smaller cities to launch campaigns in larger ones, attempting to lure monied twenty- and thirtysomethings away.

At one point ads promoting “Life in Cbus

” (Columbus, Ohio) with slogans such as “Where Standing Out Never Means Standing Alone” littered Metro stations in Washington, DC. Philadelphia also paid for promotional billboards in Washington,

DC, as well as in Chicago, and started an organization called Campus Philly, which runs incentives to get people who come to the city for college to stay once they graduate.

New Orleans has been less direct, but no less committed to wooing rich people to the city.

Through its tax credit programs

, the city has incentivized tech companies and movie and TV studios to set up shop in the city.

It sold off properties (many abandoned since Katrina)

in poor areas to luxury developers.

It began marketing residential neighborhoods

beyond the French Quarter in its tourism ads, especially rapidly gentrifying ones such as the Marigny and Bywater (this inspired a pretty great parody video in which a black New Orleanian makes fun of all the new white tourists in the Bywater getting their bikes stolen).

That’s all left New Orleans a radically different place than it was pre-Katrina: it’s richer, whiter, and slightly less populous. And this newer, richer, whiter city was built on the forced removal of tens of thousands of poor black people, which sounds terrible—unless you’re a member of a city government that is only concerned with its bottom line. If that’s the case, things are going great.

“

Hurricane Katrina was an awful event

,” Ryan Berni, a senior aide to Mayor Mitch Landrieu, told Politico in 2015. “But it presented the opportunity for New Orleans to become this country’s laboratory and hub for innovation and change.”

3

Destroy to Rebuild

When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you.

There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans

after the storm, but

of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA

after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A year later, there were at least 111,000

Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“

FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could

,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”

There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.

But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula.

Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina

. That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35

percent.

Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry. When white people, followed by white businesses, show up in a place like Bywater, they seem not to integrate into the fabric of a neighborhood, but take it over. Many black-owned businesses on St. Claude Avenue, the fast-gentrifying strip at Bywater’s northern edge, simply never reopened after Katrina. And while the ones that took their place don’t have “Whites Only” signs in the window, their clientele suggests there’s a clear dividing line between the old and new New Orleans. On St. Claude, there’s the Healing Center (also owned and developed by Pres Kabacoff), which includes an upscale food co-op and art spaces; there are also new queer punk bars, organic juice joints, and expensive coffee shops and brunch spots. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these places in theory, Idakula said; it’s just that it feels like they’ve replaced what was before them without acknowledgment. The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people.

“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”

Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.

For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”

“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”

The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.

“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.

Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm,

one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover

was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide.

Police also shot and killed two unarmed people

who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.

“

These are some of the 40,000 extra troops

that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.

“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”

Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.

“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools.

Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system

was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.

Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.

“

This is a tragedy

,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Just weeks after the storm, Governor Blanco signed Legislative Act 35 into law. The bill empowered the state to take over any “failing” school districts across the state, though its timing made it obvious that the law’s intent was to take over the New Orleans school system. Louisiana already had a law on the books allowing it to take over schools that achieved an average of 45 points or less on the state’s standardized School Performance Score for four years in a row. But by July 2004, the state had only exercised its power to take over one Orleans Parish School Board school. Three months before the storm, the state had taken over only four OPSB schools, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s schools did not fall below a score of 45 for four consecutive years. But Blanco’s new LA 35, passed in the wake of Katrina, drastically changed the state’s standards: after Katrina, any school that fell below the state average of 87.5 could be transferred to state control. The vast majority of New Orleans schools failed to meet this threshold, and the state was able to move nearly every New Orleans school to a new Recovery School District (RSD) within two years of the storm.

Research from Tulane University

found that many New Orleans schools fell just under that 87.5-point score but were transferred to the new district anyway, while no other schools in Louisiana that scored above a 60

were taken over by the state.

Activists called the takeover an educational land grab

.

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids.

Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful

: its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as

only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD

are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.

There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else.

A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent

of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents

to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.

The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.

“

It is about breaking unions

,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped

of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina.

During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent

of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.

The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.

In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing

were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.

Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.

“

The storm destroyed a great deal

,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”

Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “

There’s just been a lot of pampering

, and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say

that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans

.… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Soon after Katrina, the demolition of St. Thomas was fast-tracked, and the City Council began debating what to do with the city’s remaining four projects. Thanks to a well-organized protest movement and infighting in the City Council, the removal of the city’s remaining 4,500 units of public housing was delayed. But in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades,

the City Council finally voted to knock down

the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard),

that means 12,381 people

, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two

decades, most right after Katrina.

The projects in New Orleans were also home to a well-organized tenants’ rights movement, and displacing thousands of black New Orleanians by demolishing public housing quelled a stronghold of black activism. In St. Thomas in the 1990s, activists such as Robert Horton, who goes by the name Kool Black, helped form first-of-their-kind networks for community policing and after-school activities for kids. And St. Thomas was one of the first public housing projects to establish a board of residents that worked with nonprofits in the area to ensure that government-funded services in public housing were actually benefiting residents.

In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either.

Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies

monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.

“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”

The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well.

Road Home, Louisiana’s main program

meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out.

And in 2011, a court found that Road Home

distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.

Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found

New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market

in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But

they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent—to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there for the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else. A gentrifier’s intent isn’t meaningless. A new neighbor concerned with his or her new neighborhood can make strides toward healing the wounds brought by gentrification. A neighbor concerned with preserving the culture of a neighborhood or joining in political action can make a real difference. Intent helps, but intent cannot stop gentrification. As New Orleans’s history shows, being white and having more money than most people in a given neighborhood gives you more buying power, more privilege, and more autonomy than those who have been systematically held back from achieving the same levels of wealth. I believe this is why gentrifiers do not like to acknowledge that they are gentrifiers: they do not want to feel like perpetrators of violence and inequality.

The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification. And while it’s hard to sympathize with the wealthy, even

they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “

We must understand that self-destruction of diversity

is caused by success, not failure.”

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”

“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”

John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.

“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.

Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.

“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

I met John and Alicia Winter at a street fair on Freret Street, a previously nearly abandoned strip of land in the northeast of the city. Freret is not far from some very fancy neighborhoods. It’s just north of St. Charles, which is lined by stately houses on both sides and has a famous streetcar line down its middle, and just east of Tulane and Loyola Universities, where professors and administrators inhabit some swanky digs. The area right around Freret Street has for decades housed a sizable middle-class black population. But the commercial strip of Freret Street for decades housed mostly vacant storefronts. Now the area is rapidly gentrifying.

The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood

dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in.

Home values have more than doubled

, from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too:

between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract

, the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22

percent.

Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis. In the same way the outskirts of every city host a confluence of chain stores—Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, OfficeMax—every city now seems to contain a Freret Street.

The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”

John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.

Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.

When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.

“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”

But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Down the street from the Freret Neighborhood Center is Dennis’ Barber Shop, which Dennis Sigur has run in the same location for forty-three years. He’s seen the neighborhood go from bustling and mostly black before the city’s

3

Destroy to Rebuild

When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you.
There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.”

There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans after the storm, but
of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA
after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul.
A year later, there were at least 111,000
Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta.

“
FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could
,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.”
There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearly 600 New Orleanians were housed in Utah, of all places, after the storm. Tens of thousands more were scattered between southern states such as Georgia and Texas. Many never came back, either because they couldn’t afford to or because they didn’t want to—their homes and communities had been destroyed, and they’d already begun making new lives and building new communities where they’d settled.
But Idakula was determined to go home. Needing the money and running out of options, she changed her application to claim she planned to settle in Atlanta, and when she checked her bank account a few days later, she found a direct deposit from FEMA.

Living in New Orleans now isn’t easy for Idakula.
Home prices in Bywater, where she lives, doubled post-Katrina
. That mirrored the jump in rent across the city: in New Orleans the average amount spent on rent citywide rose from 14 percent of income before the storm to 35 percent. Idakula is able to afford her two-bedroom home only because her landlord, a retired activist who wanted to make sure someone black and involved in social justice could still live in Bywater, charges Idakula $500 a month.

She told me she has no problem with white people moving to the area, but she wishes they had an understanding of the power they carry. When white people, followed by white businesses, show up in a place like Bywater, they seem not to integrate into the fabric of a neighborhood, but take it over. Many black-owned businesses on St. Claude Avenue, the fast-gentrifying strip at Bywater’s northern edge, simply never reopened after Katrina. And while the ones that took their place don’t have “Whites Only” signs in the window, their clientele suggests there’s a clear dividing line between the old and new New Orleans. On St. Claude, there’s the Healing Center (also owned and developed by Pres Kabacoff), which includes an upscale food co-op and art spaces; there are also new queer punk bars, organic juice joints, and expensive coffee shops and brunch spots. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these places in theory, Idakula said; it’s just that it feels like they’ve replaced what was before them without acknowledgment. The new people, according to Idakula, are not commingling with longtime residents in a melting pot, but instead are reaping benefit from the physical removal of 100,000 black people.
“It’s not sharing the table,” Ruth told me. “It’s coming here and shoving our shit off the table and then demanding we eat your shit.”
Wayne Glapion has a similar feeling. He grew up in Tremé, a neighborhood famous for its concentration of free people of color—African Americans who were not enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and usually had some European ancestors—and more recently for its concentration of jazz musicians and other cultural icons in the city. Glapion, a New Orleans–born music manager, has been battling ever since the storm to hold on to his piece of Tremé, a traditional double shotgun house that his parents bought in 1945.
For Glapion, every step back was a difficult one. After Katrina struck, he was forced to paddle in a small boat from that house to dry land. He then walked to the Convention Center, one of the city’s rescue operations centers notorious for the disarray and lack of services. A bus eventually took him to an army base near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He’d been separated from his extended family by the storm and heard some had been taken to Fort Worth, Texas. Glapion wanted to get back to them, so he left the base on foot, hoping to walk the nearly twenty miles to town to find a car, plane, or anything else that would get him to Fort Worth. A few miles into his walk, a white couple stopped him and asked, “Are you a refugee from New Orleans?”
“I didn’t think of myself as a refugee,” Glapion told me. “But I guess I was.”
The couple offered to pay for a rental car for Glapion, and so he drove to Fort Worth. He left two weeks later to return to New Orleans and rebuild his grandparents’ house.
“The grass was still gray, there were no birds, no insects,” he said.
Glapion would work at gutting the house every day, sleep in his van most nights, and every Wednesday and Sunday drive three and a half hours to Lake Charles, where his cousin lived, to shower. Nearly every day in New Orleans he’d be approached by National Guard troops or private military contractors who told him he couldn’t be there. He often feared for his life as he gutted his house, and for good reason: racist violence was rampant in New Orleans after Katrina. In the aftermath of the storm,
one black New Orleanian named Henry Glover
was found shot and burned nearly beyond recognition in the back of a police car. Five police officers were found to be involved in the shooting and apparent attempted cover-up of Glover’s death. One, David Warren, who shot the unarmed Glover, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was acquitted after an appeal in 2013. It wasn’t until 2015 that Glover’s death was ruled a homicide.
Police also shot and killed two unarmed people
who were attempting to get to a hotel on higher ground via a bridge.
“
These are some of the 40,000 extra troops
that I have demanded,” then governor Kathleen Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded.… I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
Glapion didn’t see himself as a “hoodlum,” but he knew the cops might view him as one. But he risked arrest, or worse, and continued to rebuild.
“They threatened to send me to Angola [the Louisiana State Penitentiary],” he said. “But they didn’t understand the importance of this city. I was trying to get it back to what it was.”
Glapion spent years keeping the house up, slowly making the repairs it required, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to hold on to it. Neither FEMA nor Louisiana’s Road Home program ever provided enough money to fully repair the house, so it was left partially dilapidated, and eventually he ran out of funds. Recently he sold the home to an investor who plans to convert the two-family shotgun into a single-family home. Glapion still lives in New Orleans, but now in another neighborhood, further north than Tremé.
“It’s not the same city anymore,” Wayne told me over coffee at a café near a club he promotes downtown. “It’s still vibrant. And it’s gonna come back. But I’m not going to say better than it was, because I know too many people who couldn’t come back. The city’s going to have a somewhat new face.”

Gentrifying New Orleans took more than keeping black people out. Institutions needed to be dismantled. First came the public schools.
Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system
was like many others in poor US cities: underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming. Less than two years later it looked nothing like any other school system in the country. It was still underperforming, overcrowded, and underfunded, but it was now, with the exception of only four schools, the nation’s first all-charter school district.
Nearly every conservative pundit and institution, from the American Enterprise Institute to one of the biggest backers of neoliberalism, economist Milton Friedman, called on Louisiana to use Katrina as an opportunity to transform the city’s school system.
“
This is a tragedy
,” Friedman wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Just weeks after the storm, Governor Blanco signed Legislative Act 35 into law. The bill empowered the state to take over any “failing” school districts across the state, though its timing made it obvious that the law’s intent was to take over the New Orleans school system. Louisiana already had a law on the books allowing it to take over schools that achieved an average of 45 points or less on the state’s standardized School Performance Score for four years in a row. But by July 2004, the state had only exercised its power to take over one Orleans Parish School Board school. Three months before the storm, the state had taken over only four OPSB schools, as the vast majority of New Orleans’s schools did not fall below a score of 45 for four consecutive years. But Blanco’s new LA 35, passed in the wake of Katrina, drastically changed the state’s standards: after Katrina, any school that fell below the state average of 87.5 could be transferred to state control. The vast majority of New Orleans schools failed to meet this threshold, and the state was able to move nearly every New Orleans school to a new Recovery School District (RSD) within two years of the storm.
Research from Tulane University
found that many New Orleans schools fell just under that 87.5-point score but were transferred to the new district anyway, while no other schools in Louisiana that scored above a 60 were taken over by the state.
Activists called the takeover an educational land grab
.

Fast-forward ten years, and conservatives and other pro-charter reformers are now using New Orleans as a model for cities struggling to educate their kids.
Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful
: its high school graduation rate is now almost 80 percent, up from 54 percent in 2004. But it’s unclear if that’s as good a sign as it seems, as
only about 6 percent of high school seniors in the RSD
are graduating with ACT test scores high enough to get them into a college in Louisiana. That’s still 2 percent better than before the storm, but by no means a success story.
There’s also evidence that black students aren’t getting the same benefits from the new school system as everyone else.
A 2013 survey found that while 53 percent
of white and Hispanic parents thought the school system was better after Katrina, only 29 percent of black parents felt the same way.

And New Orleans’s system of school choice requires parents
to apply for schools at the beginning of each school year. The process involves mountains of paperwork and can be confusing. That means it favors parents with extra time and money, and it often means that the students struggling most end up in New Orleans’s worst schools. School choice also translates into longer travel times for parents and their kids, especially since many of the city’s new schools do not have extracurricular activities such as music and arts programs. To attend those, students have to be picked up by parents and driven to other schools, as no public transportation for extracurriculars is provided.
The takeover of New Orleans’s school district also enabled the state to dismantle a bastion of the city’s black middle class: the teachers’ union. The United Teachers of New Orleans represented 7,500 teachers before the storm. Ninety percent of teachers in the Orleans Parish School Board were black. But when the state took over New Orleans’s schools, all 7,500 were fired and had to reapply in the new state-run district.
“
It is about breaking unions
,” the head of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, said at the time. “It is about breaking the spirit of working-class people. It is about denying them their rights.”

Those who were hired back were stripped
of their collective bargaining rights, in many cases were threatened with dismissal if they discussed their salaries, and were given “at-will” contracts, meaning their employment could be terminated at any time. And it’s unclear how many of those 7,500 teachers were in fact hired in the new district. One clue as to how many weren’t rehired comes from a Tulane study that looked at the years of experience teachers in New Orleans had pre- and post-Katrina.
During the 2004–2005 school year, only 9.7 percent
of New Orleans teachers had less than one year of teaching experience. Nearly 30 percent had twenty-five or more years of experience. But in the 2007–2008 school year, 36.7 percent of teachers had one year or less of experience, and only 11.6 percent had more than twenty-five.
The other bastion of black New Orleans was the city’s public housing, which came in the form of traditional brick projects: C. J. Peete, Melpomene, B. W. Cooper, St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Lafitte, Iberville, and Press Park. Today, nearly all are gone. Some have been replaced by mixed-income, privately run, for-profit housing such as River Garden. Some are still empty lots awaiting private development.
In nearly every city in the United States, the public housing stock has been decimated by a federal program called Hope VI, which was instituted under President Bill Clinton. The program rewards local housing authorities for demolishing traditional public housing (usually those big brick buildings that people often call “the projects”) and rebuilding with suburban-style, low-density, mixed-income housing instead. Frequently those new units are built not by housing authorities but by private developers and nonprofits. The idea behind Hope VI was to alleviate the symptoms associated with concentrated poverty—in particular, high crime. But what Hope VI has done in practice is encourage the demolition of tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and then come up short in terms of funding their replacements.

Between 1990 and 2008, 220,000 units of public housing
were demolished, and at least 110,000 of those can be directly traced to the Hope VI program. But Hope VI has provided funding for only 60,000 units of mixed-income housing as a replacement. Some cities were hit particularly hard by Hope VI. Chicago lost nearly 16,500 units of housing. Philadelphia lost 7,800. New Orleans started out with less public housing than those cities, but the destruction of 5,628 units of housing has nonetheless been a burden to the poor here.
Plans to demolish several New Orleans housing projects, including St. Thomas, were under way years before Katrina, but with tens of thousands still evacuated from the city, and the city’s politics shaken up by the storm, the demolitions were able to proceed at a much faster pace. The rhetorical attacks on public housing began just days after the storm.
“
The storm destroyed a great deal
,” Finis Shelnutt, a real estate developer, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel in September, “and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money.… Most importantly, the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don’t come back.… The party’s finally over for these people and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live in the US.”
Local politicians used the storm as an excuse to ramp up attacks on public housing as well. “
There’s just been a lot of pampering
, and at some point you have to say, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” said Oliver Thomas, a city councilman at the time. “We don’t need soap opera watchers right now.”

One state representative went as far as to say
that public housing residents should be sterilized. And former US representative Richard Baker, who’d represented Baton Rouge for ten terms, said: “
We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans
.… We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Soon after Katrina, the demolition of St. Thomas was fast-tracked, and the City Council began debating what to do with the city’s remaining four projects. Thanks to a well-organized protest movement and infighting in the City Council, the removal of the city’s remaining 4,500 units of public housing was delayed. But in 2007, with its first white majority in more than two decades,
the City Council finally voted to knock down
the remaining public housing stock. Assuming an average household size of 2.2 people (the US government standard),
that means 12,381 people
, 99 percent of whom were African American, were removed from stable public housing in New Orleans in the last two decades, most right after Katrina.

The projects in New Orleans were also home to a well-organized tenants’ rights movement, and displacing thousands of black New Orleanians by demolishing public housing quelled a stronghold of black activism. In St. Thomas in the 1990s, activists such as Robert Horton, who goes by the name Kool Black, helped form first-of-their-kind networks for community policing and after-school activities for kids. And St. Thomas was one of the first public housing projects to establish a board of residents that worked with nonprofits in the area to ensure that government-funded services in public housing were actually benefiting residents.
In the city’s new housing developments, there are no tenants’ rights groups, and residents told me there’s no sense of community either.
Instead, management groups run by nonprofits and private companies
monitor the mixed-income developments with a close eye and a penchant for unnecessary discipline.
“What is activism going to look like in these places? What is speaking truth to power going to look like? What is social services going to look like in these new places?” Kool Black asked me when we met near his apartment, about ten miles away from St. Thomas in a sprawling, suburban-ish section of the city called New Orleans East, where he’s lived since the demolition of the projects. “This is what they destroyed with Hope VI.”
The storm also decimated the city’s market-rate housing stock, and the programs put in place to help those living in single-family dwellings come back to the city were deeply flawed and racially biased as well.
Road Home, Louisiana’s main program
meant to help homeowners rebuild their houses, was meant to distribute billions of dollars from the federal government. But by 2008, two-thirds of the funds hadn’t yet been doled out.
And in 2011, a court found that Road Home
distributed grants in a racially biased way, awarding homeowners in majority-white neighborhoods more money to rebuild than those with similar homes in majority-black neighborhoods.
Those who couldn’t make it home, or who could only afford to partially fix up their Katrina-damaged homes thanks to lackluster government grants, often found their properties seized and auctioned off by the city. If the city considers a home blighted (which could just mean, for example, it needs a paint job or its grass is overgrown), the city cites it and imposes steep fines often adding up to thousands of dollars a month. If the owner doesn’t fix the property within a month or can’t pay off the fines, the city imposes a lien on the property and then waits another thirty days. If the owner is unable to bring the property up to code by then, the city claims the property as its own and puts it up for sale in an online auction. Since 2010 the city has sold off or demolished at least 13,000 properties, most of which were abandoned after Katrina and many of which are in rapidly gentrifying areas.

With far fewer public housing projects and a thinned housing stock, New Orleans is now more expensive than ever. In 2016, one nonprofit found
New Orleans was the second-least-affordable housing market
in the country based on how many people devoted 50 percent or more of their income to rent. The increased unaffordability represents another factor in the city’s mass displacement. I talked to several former New Orleans residents living in Houston and other parts of the South who did not experience direct discrimination via FEMA or other governmental agencies. But they’d found relatively affordable housing elsewhere—in Houston or Dallas, Atlanta or Shreveport—and so they decided to stay. They wanted to return, but they were simply priced out.

This is what gentrifiers and gentrification boosters often fail to grasp about gentrification: it’s not that most poor people or people of color hate the idea of anyone moving to the city, but that gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss. Gentrifiers see cities through fresh eyes, unencumbered by mental maps that might suggest something more nefarious than revitalization had happened before their arrival. Gentrifiers might even have noble intent—to become a part of a community, to help better a community, to fight for political change. Or they might just be there for the cheaper rent. Either way, it is rare to see gentrifiers take a full reckoning of history and recognize that their presence is often predicated upon the lessened quality of life of someone else, the displacement of someone else, or, in the case of New Orleans, the death of someone else. A gentrifier’s intent isn’t meaningless. A new neighbor concerned with his or her new neighborhood can make strides toward healing the wounds brought by gentrification. A neighbor concerned with preserving the culture of a neighborhood or joining in political action can make a real difference. Intent helps, but intent cannot stop gentrification. As New Orleans’s history shows, being white and having more money than most people in a given neighborhood gives you more buying power, more privilege, and more autonomy than those who have been systematically held back from achieving the same levels of wealth. I believe this is why gentrifiers do not like to acknowledge that they are gentrifiers: they do not want to feel like perpetrators of violence and inequality.
The irony is that in remaining ignorant of their class positions, gentrifiers often become victims of the process. If you look toward San Francisco and New York, cities that have a few decades of gentrification under their belts, you’ll see that the gentrifiers—punks, artists, LGBT communities—are inevitably replaced by a flood of hipsters with more money, and those hipsters with more money are then pushed out by yuppies with even more money. Small, independent businesses give way to Starbucks and bank branches. Rising housing costs put a strain on everyone, even the white middle class. And the rejiggering of a city to squeeze out profits hurts nearly every citizen, regardless of socioeconomic background: budget cuts means public transit gets worse, museums and other cultural institutions suffer, public schools have to do more with less. There are few winners in gentrification. As Ruth Idakula put it, if the city is a ladder, gentrification pushes everyone down one rung: the most disenfranchised get pushed off completely, the middle class ends up on the bottom rung, and even the rich feel pressure from the top.

Only those who can afford to do without the government institutions most of us rely on every day—those with private transportation, money for private schools, and enough funds to either buy real estate or withstand rent fluctuations—can float above the effects of gentrification. And while it’s hard to sympathize with the wealthy, even they are affected in less tangible ways. A completely gentrified neighborhood is a boring neighborhood, and a completely gentrified city (a good example being New York) is a boring city, one that can’t provide the social life, diversity, and sense of authenticity that gentrifiers seek. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “
We must understand that self-destruction of diversity
is caused by success, not failure.”

Gentrification brings money, new people, and renovated real estate to cities, but it also kills them. It takes away the affordability and diversity that are required for unique and challenging culture. It sanitizes. And because it is obvious to most that this is happening (even hypergentrifiers in New York and New Orleans mourn the loss of culture in those cities), no one wants to be seen as a gentrifier. Who would want to be held accountable for helping kill a city?

John and Alicia Winter moved to New Orleans for the same reasons most people move to New Orleans: it’s cheap compared to other major cities and, as John put it, it “feels European.”
“This is like the closest to a European city in America,” he told me. “It reminds me of Brussels.”
John is from London, Alicia’s from Texas, and both lived in Houston before deciding to move here. John programs software for banks and energy companies and works from home, so he can work anywhere. Alicia works in education. Now that they’ve moved, she’s hoping to open her own day care center. The thirtysomething couple said they were ready to start new lives in a truly urban setting, and both decided that Houston represented everything wrong with American cities—it was sprawling, it lacked a sense of community and diversity, and they needed a car to get anywhere.
“In Houston they’re not passionate about the city,” John told me.
Alicia agreed. Plus, she said, Houston was missing New Orleans’s diversity.
“It’s nice to be in a place with a range of incomes,” she said.

I met John and Alicia Winter at a street fair on Freret Street, a previously nearly abandoned strip of land in the northeast of the city. Freret is not far from some very fancy neighborhoods. It’s just north of St. Charles, which is lined by stately houses on both sides and has a famous streetcar line down its middle, and just east of Tulane and Loyola Universities, where professors and administrators inhabit some swanky digs. The area right around Freret Street has for decades housed a sizable middle-class black population. But the commercial strip of Freret Street for decades housed mostly vacant storefronts. Now the area is rapidly gentrifying.
The proportion of vacant buildings in the Freret neighborhood
dropped from 28 to 16 percent between 2008 and 2010, a sure sign that people who can afford to renovate things are moving in.
Home values have more than doubled
, from a median of $81,000 in 2000 to $184,000 in 2013. And white people have multiplied too:
between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract
, the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22 percent.

Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis. In the same way the outskirts of every city host a confluence of chain stores—Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, OfficeMax—every city now seems to contain a Freret Street.
The fair where I met John and Alicia Winter, called the Freret Street Festival, takes place every year in March and is essentially an advertisement for the “new” neighborhood. Those generic coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries splay their wares on the sidewalk, and the fair’s attendees (nearly all of them white) stroll through, consuming $6 sliders, parmesan fries, cold-pressed juices, and other hipster-approved items below banners reading “Welcome to the New Freret.”
John and Alicia were there checking out their new neighborhood. A few months prior, the couple had purchased a home on Upperline Street for $370,000, a price they acknowledged was much steeper than it would’ve been a few years ago. They fell in love with the neighborhood as soon as they moved, but they wanted to feel like they were part of its fabric. So they stopped into the Freret Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps low-income people in the area, to see if any volunteer opportunities were available. John wondered if he could maybe teach a computer class. Alicia wondered about the area’s child care needs. They took the business card of one of the center’s staffers and left.
Both had heard of the term gentrification. John said he hated what the process had done to a neighborhood in London called Dalston. He has a lot of friends there and said the place had changed around them, going from edgy and hip to bland and filled with yuppies.
When I asked if John and Alicia saw themselves—two young white transplants making enough money to buy a $370,000 house—as gentrifiers, both said they’d never thought about it, but that perhaps they were.
“I don’t know if we’re doing the same thing as in Dalston,” John said. “But maybe we’re the pricks changing the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel guilty and wonder if the neighbors think, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they see me.”
But both John and Alicia said they felt like they were working hard at integrating themselves. In addition to checking out volunteer opportunities, John said he made sure to hire a local to help run his software development company, even though that local had less experience than other candidates. And Alicia said she planned to make sure her new day care center was affordable, or she’d at least set up a scholarship program. Yet despite all their good intent, it seems that people like John and Alicia Winter can’t stop a changing neighborhood’s more deleterious effects.

Down the street from the Freret Neighborhood Center is Dennis’ Barber Shop, which Dennis Sigur has run in the same location for forty-three years. He’s seen the neighborhood go from bustling and mostly black before the city’s economic crash and white flight in the 1970s to gentrified now. His shop is not meant for gentrifiers—nothing prevents them from coming in, but Dennis makes no effort to attract them. His employees are black, and from what I could tell, so are all of his customers. The shop is busy, Dennis said, but less busy than it used to be. Yet he sees new businesses catering to white people opening constantly.

“Our customers are getting further and further away,” he said. “We’re struggling. But the welcome mat is rolled out for the newcomers.”

Freret’s newcomers have gotten a bit of red carpet treatment: After Hurricane Katrina,

the state designated Freret a cultural district

, allowing businesses opening along this strip to receive tax incentives—exemptions from income taxes for artists, tax credits for rehabbing storefronts, and the like. Only new businesses were eligible, not long-running ones like Dennis’ Barber Shop. The city also passed a zoning overlay that allowed bars and restaurants to concentrate in the area like almost nowhere else in the city. In a city that already has an abundance of liquor options, the City Council is hesitant to issue new liquor licenses, but not on Freret Street.

Thanks to that zoning overlay

, any new restaurant on Freret can apply for a liquor license without seeking the City Council’s approval. That allowed several new restaurants to open in rapid succession and attract a young, white, liquor-swigging crowd in a matter of months. That might not seem like a big deal, but imagine an alternative scenario in which restaurants on Freret were required to go through the same permitting process as everywhere else in the city. Imagine that many of the stores weren’t allowed to exist tax free for a number of years. There’s a chance Freret would’ve developed very differently.

Most New Orleanians I spoke with seemed to have no problem with the incentives used to lure people to forlorn parts of the city. But some took issue with the way they were used. If incentivizing businesses is often synonymous with bringing all-white, upscale businesses to an area, it seems obvious that the process isn’t working for everyone. In the spring of 2013, a hundred Freret-area residents crowded the cafeteria of a charter school to discuss a proposal to raise property taxes in the neighborhood and use the revenue to hire private security to patrol the area. At the meeting, two white people sat at the table representing those for the idea. Two black residents represented those who were opposed. There was so much opposition to the proposal—mostly black residents who feared security guards would add to the already rampant police harassment of black people in the neighborhood—that the proposal was shelved. But it nonetheless highlighted that in New Orleans, the revitalization of an area nearly always comes with tension between those benefiting from the new city and those who feel they’ve been left behind.

“It’s going to come to the point where if you don’t have a good income you can’t stay,” Dennis Sigur told me. “There’s a growing divide between the new and the old.”

This middle phase of gentrification—after the “pioneers” have settled in and capital goes on autopilot, seeking out any

neighborhood that seems potentially profitable—tends to divide everyone in a city, not only into black and white, rich and poor, but also into groups within those groups. Gentrifiers begin filtering into self-defined niches in order to differentiate themselves from those they feel are ruining the city. No one wants to be labeled a gentrifier, and a new class emerges: the white, relatively well-off who also hate gentrification.

Leslie Heindel fits into this category. I met Leslie through her mother, Lisa, a real estate agent whom I’d visited to talk about New Orleans real estate values. But while I was interviewing Lisa in her office in the upscale Garden District, her daughter kept stopping her work and audibly sighing. Eventually Lisa suggested she chime in. It turns out gentrification is something Leslie and her friends talk about on a near-daily basis.

Leslie said she sees gentrification as an ever-present threat to her way of life. To stay afloat in New Orleans, she works at least two bartending jobs at a time in addition to the administrative work she does at her mom’s office. She, like a growing number of twenty- and thirtysomethings, rents an apartment as opposed to owning one. She doesn’t have the money to afford a down payment on one, especially now that real estate values are skyrocketing in her city.

Over cigarettes and draft beers at a bar in the Irish Channel, just a few blocks from where Ashana Bigard lives, Leslie and her friends told me about everything wrong with New Orleans today—the movie industry coming in and taking up space and houses and jobs; Airbnb, which allows people to rent their houses for short periods of time and has been shown to cause rent inflation; the increased touristification and Disneyfication of every neighborhood near the French Quarter; and the lack of community that comes with all those things.

“I’ve worked at this bar for ten years,” Leslie told me through a cloud of Marlboro Lights smoke. “There are nights I know nobody here.”

Leslie and her friends have the luxury of being middle class, so their fear of gentrification has less to do with outright displacement and more to do with a sense of being squeezed into different neighborhoods and smaller apartments and having to take on more work in order to stay in their city. They see themselves being pushed down Ruth Idakula’s metaphorical ladder.

“Everyone who grew up here has experienced a different New Orleans,” Leslie admitted. But, she and her friends said, the changes since Katrina have been different, faster, and more tumultuous.

“If you had talked to me six years ago, I would have said we were moving in the right direction,” Leslie’s friend Crista Rock, a video producer, said. “I would’ve said the movie industry is great, and all the entrepreneurial stuff is great. I don’t think anyone could’ve foreseen this. I had real big hopes for us.”

The industries Leslie and Crista complained of had been wooed here with taxpayer money. Like every state in the country, Louisiana uses tax breaks and other incentives to lure and keep companies, but Louisiana uses more of them than most places.

The state gives away 21 cents per dollar

of the government’s budget to companies—a higher percentage than any other state besides Texas and Michigan.

In Louisiana, there’s a ten-year tax exemption

for buying materials used in manufacturing, a 40 percent tax break for companies using technology developed in the state, a 25

percent tax break for companies that record sound in Louisiana, a 100 percent five-year tax break for restoring old commercial structures, and the list goes on.

In 2011, the state gave $214 million

to make sure shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls stayed within New Orleans.

The same year, it approved tax incentives

worth $1.5 billion for Cheniere Energy, a natural gas and oil company that paid its CEO $142 million in 2013.

But no industry in Louisiana gets tax credits more often than film and television production, which is centered in New Orleans. Cheniere might’ve been the biggest single deal, but Louisiana gives away hundreds of millions for TV and movies every year.

In 2013 alone, the state gave away $251 million

in tax credits to the industry. Every time the A&E reality show Duck Dynasty filmed an episode in Louisiana, the show received incentives worth $300,000.

Those incentives bring to New Orleans thousands of high-paying jobs, which usually come with salaries higher than

New Orleans’s median income of $36,964

. This essentially creates two economies—one filled with low-paid natives, and one filled with people who make higher salaries, subsidized by Louisiana taxpayers. That second category views Louisiana’s real estate as a relative bargain. Leslie told me most of her clients now come from out of town, especially New York and Los Angeles. And so, in her own small way, Leslie is helping push herself down the ladder.

But how’s the view from the top of the ladder? If not even many gentrifiers think gentrification is good, why does it keep happening? Pres Kabacoff is one of the city’s biggest developers—he’s the one who turned the St. Thomas housing projects into for-profit mixed-use housing. And he’s intimately tied in with city decision making. He chairs the city’s Housing Task Force Committee and is a member of the Urban Land Institute, a powerful national urban planning group. When Kabacoff talks, city officials listen.

Kabacoff is a genial guy with some surprising views for a multimillionaire who makes money off private development. For example, he believes the federal government should spend way more on housing poor people, and he thinks the United States spends too much on war and not enough on things such as education. But when it comes to gentrification, Kabacoff has some troubling views for someone who wields so much power in a majority-poor, majority-black city.

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” he told me from his dark-wood-filled office, located in a building he owns downtown. “It’s certainly not a good solution to stop development to protect neighborhoods.”

In Kabacoff’s view, the best way for New Orleans to grow is to start looking more like New York and San Francisco: “We lost our middle income dramatically and it becomes a vicious cycle. The middle class don’t require a lot of services, but they pay for services that are provided. When your middle class leaves and your poor get more concentrated, your service needs go up—the tax base is gone and you go into a vicious downward spiral. And you get

what happened here, and in Detroit, and Newark, and Gary, Indiana.”

But what about the Ashana Bigards and even the Leslie Heindels—the people who feel they’re being pushed further and further down the ladder by his attempt to bring a sizable middle and upper-middle class to the city? His answer, essentially, was that this is an inevitable consequence of progress.

“It’s true when a neighborhood comes back many people who found it to be an affordable place are priced out,” he said. “But the cold truth is, if you’re going to revitalize a neighborhood that’s in bad shape or where market rate won’t go—because the amount of crime, the amount of poverty or the amount of minorities, or whatever keeps market rate uncomfortable moving there—one of the realities is that when the market rate come in, those people move to another neighborhood. It’s a pain in the ass, but they move.”

Given the city’s apparent willingness to incentivize, unchecked, the kind of revitalization Kabacoff and other major developers promote, I asked Kabacoff if he thought New Orleans was on its way to becoming like New York or San Francisco, where people are marching in the streets over gentrification, and where even those in the middle class feel like they’re hanging on to their cities by a thread.

“You might argue New Orleans could use a little gentrification,” he told me. “In San Francisco and New York, you reach that saturation point and once you reach that, people start to march. Am I worried about people marching in New Orleans? Not yet. We’ve got a ways to go.”

It’d be easy to paint Kabacoff as a villain, a 1 percenter toying with his city without regard to the people who live in it, but his ideas aren’t so different from Leslie Heindel’s, or the policies of most members of the New Orleans City Council, or the ideas of academics and planners and pundits who see gentrification and revitalization as near-synonyms. Most people who aren’t directly displaced by gentrification seem to want just enough of it to improve their lives, but not too much—they don’t want it to overwhelm their own bank accounts. Hipsters are fine with coffee but eye boutiques and banks with suspicion, yuppies are fine with the boutiques and banks but see landscapes radically altered by development as cultural losses, and developers such as Pres Kabacoff are fine with those landscapes as long as they don’t inspire protest. The problem is that these steps are all part of the same process, and once you start turning the city into a capital-accumulation machine, it’s kind of hard to turn back.

It’s hard to say what New Orleans will look like in ten or twenty years, but it’s become obvious that the city is almost solely focused on economic growth, not on repairing or moving beyond the trauma of Katrina. The press today in New Orleans rarely mentions gentrification or displacement. The politicians of New Orleans have all but given up trying to get any of the 100,000 displaced residents back to the city. Those former New Orleanians have disappeared, and the city has opened a new chapter, one that seems to contain no mention of race or class, just “progress.”

In an essay analyzing political rhetoric after Katrina, Colorado State University ethnic studies professor Eric Ishiwata writes that the storm shed light on the fact that many Americans still don’t accept the existence of extreme racism and extreme poverty in this county. The idea that there’s a group of people who on a daily basis are having their rights violated and their lives threatened occurs to many Americans only in moments of national trauma. Katrina was one of those moments. Weeks after the storm, the lead story in the September 19 issue of Newsweek would deem these “forgotten” people the “Other America.” And four days after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, explained the disastrous FEMA response by saying: “

The American people don’t understand

how fascinating and unusual this is—is that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”

According to Ishiwata, phrases like these

—“people we didn’t know exist,” “the other America”—show that “a large segment of Katrina’s victims had, to the point of the disaster, been cast as personae non grata—citizen-subjects rendered invisible by the reigning neoliberal ideology of a ‘colorblind America.’”

In other words, until they were abandoned by their governments and forced onto bridges where CNN cameras delivered images of them into the homes of millions of Americans, poor black people’s lives in New Orleans rarely weighed on the conscience of Americans, even the Americans meant to protect them, such as FEMA director Michael Brown.

Katrina opened a window that allowed us to peer into the real America, but as soon as the disruptive event was over, that window closed, and the country’s consciousness went back to its usual state of ignoring the fact that black people, especially low-income black people, are daily denied democracy and equality in this country. As Ishiwata points out, we didn’t just go back to forgetting that issues of inequality and racism exist; we went back to forgetting that an entire group of disenfranchised people exists.

Closing that window explains why it took only days before people seemed to stop caring about the rebuilding of New Orleans, to stop caring that nearly 100,000 African Americans were not able to return after the storm. To many politicians and thought leaders such as David Brooks, the idea that we’d need to get a majority-black, majority-poor city back to its former self seemed unnecessary, even irresponsible. After taking a tour of the Houston Astrodome, where thousands had been bused after Katrina, former first lady Barbara Bush told a radio show that people seemed better off there than in New Orleans.

“So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said. “So this is working very well for them.”

Less than a week after the storm, when asked if he thought billions should be spent rebuilding New Orleans, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said: “

I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me

.… It looks like a lot of that place should be bulldozed.”

The country’s collective ignoring of black New Orleanians’ lives also explains why there was no federal effort

undertaken to figure out where exactly all the evacuees from Katrina had ended up. Ten years later, not one federal agency is studying the diaspora caused by Katrina.

The biggest study of their whereabouts

was performed by the nonprofit RAND Corporation, and that tracking program ended five years ago.

A decade after the man-made failures that preceded and followed Katrina tore New Orleans apart, the “other America” narrative has been completely forgotten. The chasm has closed. And a new narrative—one of rebirth and growth—has overtaken the country’s popular media.

The city has been “resurrected

,” according to the Daily Beast.

Its growth is an “economic miracle

,” according to the National Journal. The city is indeed growing at a rapid clip, making its way up the lists featured in business magazines and newspaper travel sections of the top ten places to live or work or fall in love. New Orleans, despite the tens of thousands still missing from it, is “back.” And now, with the benefit of hindsight, despite all that went wrong, and all those the recovery failed, its leaders are confirming that, yes, just like David Brooks said, Katrina was truly a blessing in disguise.

This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as “People are starting to move to that neighborhood,” or “No one used to go there, but that’s changing.” The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance. This is what is happening in New Orleans and every other gentrifying city. If you ignore the destruction of the lives of the people who’ve always mattered the least, things are going great. If you acknowledge that their lives exist and that they matter, then it becomes immediately obvious something is terribly wrong. So what does it mean that we are not only ignoring these people but increasingly erasing their narratives in the name of progress?

Here’s the image we’ve created of the gentrifying city:

People are experiencing New Orleans through fresh eyes

and ears.

People are moving to Detroit to change it

and make it better.

They’re spotting areas of Brooklyn

that have yet to be discovered.

They’re finding San Francisco’s next hot markets

.

They’re discovering renewal in the ruins

of abandoned sections of town.

Neighborhoods are being revitalized

.

Entire economies are being turned around

.

But we know that from the perspective of the gentrified, revitalization looks like displacement, new business opportunities often look like racial preference, and hot neighborhoods mean a loss of community.

I think both these perspectives are true: some people are discovering neighborhoods they think are hot, others are discovering they can no longer afford to live in those neighborhoods. Some people really are finding hope in the new New Orleans and the new Detroit; others are not. Whether or not gentrifiers, policy makers, and others with power and money can grapple with both narratives—the one about discovery and betterment, and the more complicated, uncomfortable one about loss, about economics and race—will determine the future of our cities.

As Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “

Private investment shapes cities

, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.”

So what image of our cities do we hold in our hearts?