New Orleans the Broken Rubix Cube
We’re barely making it.’ Why more New Orleans families are without stable housing
4 Pieces not coming together for a solution, housing(affordable/re-developed), services, finances(for building), and wages. Hurricanes and the Pandemic have left people, and families on the sidelines, homeless and dying, can NOLA change and end this generational cycle?
Introduction
New Orleans is known and famous for Mardi Gras celebrations, wild parties, and hurricanes that cause destruction beyond belief. What it is not known for is properly picking up the pieces and restoring life back to the broken areas and neighborhoods.
This is a problem that has existed for generations in New Orleans, and they are proud of their bounce-back ability but have no desire to improve and change. In many cases, the deck is stacked against them, but not in all. Let’s look to see why New Orleans is barely making it.
Let’s look at His word as we start today
Hebrews 13: 16
Do not neglect to do what is right, and to share, For God is pleased with such sacrifices
Luke 6: 36
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful
Philippians 1: 4
Always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer
What say you…
Man that lady is out here again, what should I do, the easiest answer is to pick up the phone and report her, after the kids, you know the kids, but should I do that…..why is she begging
All these empty lots, just let the bums camp out on those useless lots, great match, useless lots, useless people, nothing lost, nothing gained, right, I mean come on…
Band-aid on a Bullet Wound
The global Pandemic, Hurricanes old and new, tourists over citizens, entrenched politicians, and a city filled with decaying and aging buildings, more than a bullet wound. New Orleans has been through more disasters than one can shake a stick at but it never focuses on recovery and full restoration. It keeps focusing on the band-aid approach thinking that one day it will magically all be better, and the patient will not be dead.
The Pandemic proved this point so clearly, they were able to get all the homeless off the streets and that meant all but 30, were housed and cared for. However, when the Pandemic reforms, money, and programs dried up, the numbers were worse than ever, rebounding, why, the problems were not addressed. A band-aid on a bullet wound.
Just Google the city and you can see abandoned lot after abandoned lot, some since Hurricane Katrina, in 2005 and the city spends the money on the tourism areas and not the areas to help families and the citizens, more band-aids. But, the bleeding that is intensifying right now cannot be stopped without radical intervention and re-thinking of how we end homelessness and stop this mindset of band-aids are best.
Band-aid thinking is what allows a mom of three who can no longer work full-time to have to panhandle to make ends meet because even with help the cost of living outstrips her benefits. It is what makes $7.25 an hour insane and launches more people towards homelessness. The type of thinking that allows a family to not quite make it once they are out of the shelter system and need to be caught and helped once again.
Rubix Cube Pieces
All of us remember the Rubix cube craze from years back and most of us also remember very few of us could solve that crazy little puzzle. It was 6 colors that someone would kindly mix up for you and then hand back and tell you to solve by putting all the colors back right. Hours of fun and frustration were lost to that tiny toy.
But there is a more serious analogy I want to draw here. The problems plaguing NOLA are about the same number-wise. You have Poverty, Poor Education, Stagnant wages, a Housing Crisis, Broken Families, and a Shelter System that does not function. Some of these problems have been around for decades.
Others are newer, but all are a mix and mash of a growing homelessness crisis with few solutions on the horizon. Just as with the puzzle, the more you fight with the puzzle the harder it is to get the colors set right again, and the leaders are claiming that problem as well for NOLA. Some of the pieces could be fixed which would allow others to fall into place, but solutions have no room in NOLA.
Hurricanes and Housing
Nobody in LA will forget the impact of Katrina on the New Orleans area and the flooding that followed. It was the same lifetime impact as Andrew for South FL residents. It took months to come out of crisis mode and learn of the death, loss, and damage and FEMA did not do a great job in helping.
Too many were waiting for the great federal government to swoop in and save them both during and immediately after the storm and it did not happen. The Superdome is a prime example of that failure. Then 3 short years later came the economic bust of 2008 and all the related problems. New Orleans has not recovered.
Now New Orleans is a mixed city, a city split along color lines sadly and areas of affluence and wealth and money recovered from the storm and its damage well. But step into the Lower Ninth Ward and other areas like it and you will see that much was lost and very little has been rebuilt.
This is where the moms and dads and grannies live, those struggling to make ends meet and often they do not. When the storm came through and then the flooding 100,000 people left New Orleans, and many have not returned. Fraud, theft, and corruption all worked to make lower-income housing a non-priority.
Entrenched Politics
New Orleans has been a city of come and live as you please and we will not interfere with that choice. That meant the government took a hands-off approach and laid-back mindset with the approach to dealing with homelessness. That is until numbers exploded during and after the Pandemic and then they were caught with their old ways and practices of dealing with poverty, struggle, and homelessness.
Hurricane after hurricane has damaged and destroyed housing units and shelter buildings and no one is looking to replace them, the politicians don’t want to upset the local communities with the needed tax money that would have to be raised. Grants are being released, but the city has the final say, how will it actually fix the problems?
Let’s close this section with this note of the government’s ineffectiveness. The mayor brags of creating an increase of ‘low-barrier shelter,’ from 100 to 346 beds, but cannot open the extra beds, no staffing! Does anything more be said?
Family and Generational Poverty/Homelessness
A book I was reading about the destruction of a hospital during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it stated in that book how New Orleans residents had become dependent on that hospital for care from birth to death. It was a generational hospital, and it was nearly 100% government funded. This recent article and that book gives a great oversight of how the area has been allowed to slide into poverty over the years. They were not prepared for the aftermath, with no rescue plan, no help, and mere humans left to their own devices to be rescued, sounds like the government to me.
There is Bourbon Street, the French Quarter, and a few other places that employ people at above minimum wage, but not many. Families have become addicted to and dependent on governmental support and that has killed off the desire to come off the welfare train. With no jobs mixed in it only encourages that generational downgrading of family life. Over 150 families are homeless in New Orleans currently, that is unacceptable. The other factor is very little regarding housing has been fixed or rebuilt since 2010 and the great hurricane, so that is causing more problems.
Impact on Children and Development
Imagine with me for a moment in time, you are raising two young children, they are the apple of your eye and you are doing everything you can for them. The Pandemic came and blew your world apart and you fought as hard as you could, you have no family around, it is just you and the kids are alone in the fight. Next thing you know an eviction notice is posted on the door of your apartment, no hope for recovery now.
Where will you go, there are no shelters, you have already called all of them, but nothing is available, where will you go? Well, you think, the car, a minivan, is paid for, that will work for the meantime, right, better than the streets, our new home? This is reality more often than you could imagine.
Children in given and certain areas are more fragile than we imagine them to be, and growth and development are two of those areas. When their lives are disrupted by homelessness and its related problems and struggles it causes gaps and interruptions in their learning, development, and growth.
This is a well-documented situation for most children who have gone through homelessness and the shelter system, and it impacts their lives. It makes them vulnerable to removal by the authorities, It breaks family connections, stops proper schooling at times, and leaves their development stunted. But even this does nothing to move authorities to end homelessness.
Children and babies are truly the invisible homeless, why, parents fight like momma bears to hide them from state officials? Why is the only tool the state has is removal, and the parents will die fighting that potential, why are there none other?
CTA…
Answer this,
In New Orleans why is it okay for young black men to be in jail, cemeteries, hospitals and not schools and education centers to change their lives and end governmental poverty
Children as young as infants are exposed to homelessness and lack of nutrition and proper care due to family/generational poverty, when will face the truth, accept truth, and change, are we willing……
Is it okay for the New Orleans residents to band together instead of fussing and fighting to end what no outsider can? Or should it stay the same for the next three or four generations? Deady, dying, trapped, lost humans stuck in governmental poverty.