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"....tens of thousands of (New Orleans) homes....remain vacant or blighted. Tens of thousands of African American children who were in the public schools (aren't) back, nor have their parents been able to return." The metro area lost over 140,000 people, the city itself over 100,000. "Thousands of elderly and displaced people (were affected). Affordable housing" is in short supply, poor and low income people forced either to pay up or do without.
Displaced residents were scattered across the country, in as many as 5,500 cities, "the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio." Most are women. "A third earn less than $20,000 a year" - for a family of four, it's below the Census Bureau's $22,000 poverty threshold and well below minimum needs in any US metropolitan area.
In addition, one fourth of area housing is either vacant or blighted, "by far the highest" US rate. As a result, about 58% of city renters and 45% of suburban ones pay "more than 35 percent of (their) income on housing." Above 30% is unaffordable, forcing families to do without, including for essentials like enough nutritious food and health care, less available to poor people throughout the country, especially in New Orleans where the official poverty rate is double the national average. The unofficial one is even higher, given the indifference to Blacks communities five years post-Katrina.
In greater New Orleans, everything they need is in short supply, including schools, medical care, jobs, public assistance, and affordable housing, the number of public apartments down 75%. Destroying them was planned, upscale properties intended for well off White folks. Blacks aren't wanted.
The same holds for schools, mostly privatized, 85% of their students White in a formerly Black majority city. No longer, and a result, less public ones accommodate 43% fewer students, poor Blacks most affected. They also get less public assistance, fewer social services overall, or none at all.
The entire region was affected, nearly 100,000 square miles of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama communities destroyed or heavily damaged. Over one million people were permanently displaced. Hundreds of thousands lost everything, compounded by the spring Gulf disaster, the greatest ever environmental crime, potentially affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions.
Billions of dollars in promised aid never arrived, going instead for luxury hotels, casinos, private clubs, the oil industry and gentrification, the polite term for dispossessing poor communities, replacing them with upscale ones for the rich and well off, a similar pattern across the country, especially impacting Blacks and Latinos. They're victimized by class warfare under Democrat and Republican administrations, destroying the lives of millions. An uncaring nation left them on their own and out of luck.
New Orleans is a metaphor for as bad as it gets, poor Black communities devastated and ignored, most of the two hardest hit still uninhabited - the Lower 9th and St. Bernard Parish back to less than one fourth of pre-Katrina levels.
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