New Orleans is still devastated and desolated, reported the panel invited to New York city by the Vision Jazz Festival.
The Big Easy is actually on the brink of violent events, warns Lionel McIntyre, an architect who was briefly advisor to the mayor Ray Nagin, and now teaches urban development at Columbia University.
Katrina precipitated a crisis that Jackie Harris, a prominent music producer, and Jacques Morial, a local activist, felt was imminent before the hurricane. Now, the population is armed, and people cut off by FEMA are coming back to town, doubling up, or tripling up in what is left of social housing, explains Lionel McIntyre. The situation can only worsen, as Jack Morial reminds the audience that the city just announced that 3/4 of that housing is going to be demolished. He adds that the aid package just voted in Congress will not help: it is geared towards the home-owners, not the renters or small landlords. The process of emptying the center of the city of its poor, black residents had begun long before Katrina, but it is now accelerated.
All the panelists did point to their discomfort with the well-meaning efforts to rebuild a "village" for musicians and artists - a "reservation", jokes one. It shows a fundemental lack of understanding of the workings of the city, of culture, and of the necessary interaction between the two. If there is no community left, how is the human exchange that feeds art and creation possible?
Is there hope? In solidarity: the panelists ask once again for the nation's help and support, as they plan to rally and protest. And in the action on the ground of grassroots groups: Acorn, Common Ground, The People's Hurricane Relief Fund. And, finally, in political change.