Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Conflicts between the city, its suburbs, and the state of Louisiana only partly
involve racial tensions and have deeper roots. Like many port cities, New Orleans
has a long tradition of detachment with respect to the Protestant rednecks who
dominate the rest of Louisiana. For the rednecks, the “Big Easy” has always been
regarded as a den of iniquity, which only aggravates the religious divide within a
predominantly Catholic city. During the great flood of 1927, New Orleans officials
dynamited the Mississippi levees downriver from New Orleans at Caernarvon to
relieve pressure on the levees and save the city by flooding the rural St Bernard and
Plaquemines parishes. Resentment is still felt in these parishes. Nor can we forget
that the white communities of East Bank Jefferson Parish and St Bernard Parish
were literally built in opposition to New Orleans, using red lining to prevent
African-American settlement in these predominantly white communities.
Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, St Bernard enacted a multi-family housing
building moratorium, as well as an ordinance that restricted the rental of single-
family residences in St Bernard Parish to those related by blood to the owner of the
property, officially to preserve the “rural community” traditions of St Bernard, but in
reality to prevent African-American families from entering the parish, where
housing prices were much lower than in the neighboring Orleans Parish. Challenged
by black activists, St Bernard was condemned on February 27, 2008, in a court
ruling that concluded that the moratorium and the “blood relative” ordinance
violated the Fair Housing Act 1968. The Parish government immediately issued a
new multi-family dwelling moratorium in September 2008, that led to another
lawsuit, and a renewed condemnation on March 25, 2009, of racial discrimination.
The New Orleans center city coped with population pressures through non-
sustainable wetlands development. The erosion of the New Orleans' city centre tax
base, as a result of massive middle-class flight and the high cost of social services
related to the concentration of poverty, placed the city under serious financial
difficulty as early as the 1970s. This dynamic explains the desire to develop East
New Orleans during the oil and gas boom. The objective was to attract businesses
and middle-class residents to an area with a residential capacity of up to 250,000
people. Despite a relative failure, given the oil and gas crisis of the 1980s, New
Orleans East subdivisions attracted over 32,700 households and just under 95,000
inhabitants by the time of the 2000 census. Attempts to retain the white middle class
in the territory of Orleans Parish had failed, however, and the district became the
neighborhood-of-choice for the black middle class. Extremely vulnerable in terms of
their negative elevations and geographic location abutting the wetlands, these
neighborhoods experienced flooding in excess of 2 m (6½ feet) of water and their
reconstruction is just beginning (see Figure 9.7).
