Timeline for recovery

Our professors have urged us not to take any preconceived notions with us to New Orleans. And yet each of us carries our own life experiences. I drove down 14th Street today and found my self thinking of the devastation that I had experienced there during the 1968 riots. It is now almost forty years later. What remains with me is the pain in the decades that followed when so little was done to help those who had lost their homes; and the mostly unsuccessful struggles to maintain the neighborhood that was with housing for the poor. Decade after decade there were empty lots. Even the stores were gone; particularly absent were places to buy food. And now in the last decade the bright lights are returning construction is everywhere; there are two new super markets and we are even getting some big box stores (made possible by all those empty lots).

But for me the lights are dimmer for the knowledge of families no longer here to enjoy them. Today even young D.C. teachers and social workers too often are commuters from Lounden County and Williams County in Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland priced out of the city by the lack of affordable housing and the opportunity to buy elsewhere. Our devastation was much less than New Orleans and we shall never recover. Once this city was home to almost 900,000 people; today it is at approximately 600,000.


So I think of New Orleans, facing a much larger disaster and I wonder what will be the time line of recovery? What does recovery mean? Recovery for whom? Will it be twenty years or forty years before we know the answers?