Though I'm now working on focusing this blog on technology, social organizing, networks -- with a dose of food politics and Top Chef -- I want to take a minute to touch back on something I've spent some time on in the past: New Orleans, and specifically the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Just about a month after Katrina came through the Gulf Coast region, I was lucky enough to spend time in New Orleans as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP. One of the days I spent down there an NAACP staffer and I headed up to Baton Rouge to have a look at what was somewhat grandly being called Renaissance Village -- a FEMA-run collection of small trailers collected in a gravel pit of sorts several miles outside town. This was just before the camp was set to open, and so we watched as contractors hurried to hook-up the trailers to what there was of a infrastructure grid.
Poking around Renaissance Village that day, it amazed me to realize that the best federal plan we'd come up with for responding to the crisis was to have entire families live in trailers that were literally not big enough to swing a cat in. The trailers were cramped, the setting desolate, and the location remote. How, I wondered, were kids and old people especially be expected to survive here for more than a few weeks?
That was my thinking in October of 2005. It's now the summer of 2008, and FEMA is right now in the process of moving the last residents out of Renaissance Village. I'm not here to rail against FEMA or pretend that there are easy answers on how to handle thousands of people being displaced from an already dysfunctional city. It's hard, complicated, tiring work. But man we're in serious trouble if we don't get it through our thick skulls that we have to start asking better questions now if we ever want to arrive at acceptable answers.
Oh, wow, I almost forgot the point of this little rant. The New York Times has a great photo collection up on Renaissance Village's close.
