Residents, Volunteers Defeat Land-Grab in New Orleans, 2005 into 2006
Residents of New Orleans and Common Ground's 10,000 Volunteers between September 2005 and December 2006 saved Houses, Churches and Schools
The numbers are wonderful! They represent tens of thousands hours of W-E-R-K-E by residents of New Orleans’ Upper and Lower 9th Wards, mostly, and an endlessly vigorous influx of live-in volunteers from the United States (most of the U.S.’ 50 States, in fact) and round the world (Russia, the U.K,, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, … represented).
• Over 1200 houses gutted (that is, stripped to their 2x4 framing, mostly, so that they could be rebuilit) for free!
• 17 Schools and 12 Churches four Day-Care Centers gutted, too!
• A Center for rows of Computers’ use, named the House of Excellence, maintained between 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m, along Franklin Avenue by North Robertson, from Winter 2005 to Winter 2006.
• A Women’s Center begun in November 2005.
The Common Ground Women’s Center as summarized in the One-Year Anniversary edition of the Breaking Ground print publication that was later included in the very valuable Katrina Reader compilation about efforts to preserve the Neighborhoods and Cultures of Black and/or Working-Class New Orleans.
Much more of images and individuals from C G 2005 and 2006 can be found over on donpaulwearerev.com. This PIECE.
Of course Common Ground had to combat ‘Build Back’ Committees’ plans that would have summarily dispossessed Black home-owners across Blocks-wide swaths of these long-time residents’ City. On the Thursday, January 11, 2006, that my 50-miles-per-hour-maximum Dodge Camper-Van ( “… Goes faster than a Crawdad / Slower ‘n a Moose”) delivered five dogs and their 12-hours+-per-day driver from the San Francisco Bay Area, after six days of slogging Interstate 10, to Malik Rahim’s house (and volunteers’ home-base) on outer Algiers Point, the West Bank of New Orleans, the region’s Paper-of-Record, the Times-Picayune, published what soon was derided as the ‘Green-Dots Plan.’
The Straight-Ahead Arrogance and Multi-Fold Absurdities of ‘The Plan for the Future’ by the ‘BringNew OrleansBack Commission’ leapt from the Newspaper’s Front-Page. It was like a Parody. The breadth of Plan’s dispossessions of those left without their homes by the “Federal Flood” and the Plan’s dismissal of those tens of thousands of home-owners was marvelous. ‘Nagin (Ray Nagin was then New Orleans’ Mayor; he’s now in Prison) Panel Says Hardest-Hit Areas Must Prove Viability […] Full Buy-Out Proposed for Those Forced to Move’
Yesterday, in my Post about the “National Disgrace” shared by victims in New Orleans 2005 and in North Carolina 2024, a Map of the Wards most flooded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed that these Wards were Black and/or Working-Class and Middle-Class.
The Bring Back New Orleans Commission’s intentions were more revealed the more that we of Common Ground studied their ‘Plan for the Future’. The Devil was in the details.
You see? The soft-yellow swaths over most of New Orleans are designated for a ‘Building Moratorium until neighborhoods prove viability.’ These swaths of course don’t reach the City’s wealthy Uptown. The Green Dots for Parkland or Greenspace take out much of the Lower 9th Ward and of New Orleans East. What’s left of these neighborhoods and almost all of the Upper 9th Ward are bounded by Red Lines (how apt) that indicate that they’re ‘Areas to be redeveloped, some with new housing for relocated homeowners’.
Amid the howls of Scorn and Disbelief and Alarm that carried over New Orleans, volunteers with Common Ground went to work. One of C G’s most impressive and significant accomplishments was and is, to me, its gathering of more than 12,000 home-owners’ contacts and responses. That gathering accreted through a lotta-lotta phone-calls and walking door-to-door. It speaks again to how committed and indefatigable those dozens unto hundreds with us were. Below is one page of our list.
We won new directions of urban planning in short time. We made a reality on the ground CERTAIN that residents houses in the Upper and Lower 9th Wards would be preserved. By March 1, 2006, Mardi Gras Day, ABC News Nightline featured volunteers in a piece that said about Common Ground: “A very remarkable group of Americans who just might save New Orleans.”
On May 1 of that year, the Times-Picayune said: ‘In March alone, Common Ground had 2800 people gutting and cleaning houses citywide.’
We made a Poster/Flyer from precise Numbers of our relentlessly non-stop Spring Break surge.
2854 Volunteers from 220 Colleges ad 50 States and 8 Nations remediated (“gutted”) 232 hours, four Schools, and one Church of New Orleans over a period of 30 days.
Common Ground and its several thousands combined victories for People on the Ground that can be multiplied BOUNDLESSLY with the tools that humanity holds in 2024!
Let me close here with images from three artists who traveled from New York City to both gut houses and to contribute drawings for Common Ground: CHRISTOPHER CARDINALE, SETH TOBOCMAN, and MAC MCGILL. Our in-house chronicler of portraits was dedicated as any—FRANCESCO DI SANTIS. Click on images below to learn more about each artist.
