Well, it's now 10 years since the Katrina Storm thingy.
It's all over the UK news as to how things are going after such devastation.
Col, while I do not claim exclusivity on this issue, I have the inside track on a lot of what has happened in New Orleans and the surrounding area since Katrina wandered through the area. I have lived through the recovery and have taken a small part therein. I've watched it through the eyes of the local news crews and with my own eyes.
It seems basically that anything to do with white people has been fixed and is carrying on as normal - carnivals and the like, whilst black people still live in poverty, very few homes of blacks have been fixed.
Not entirely true. The "very few homes... have been fixed" statement is categorically not true. What IS true is perhaps a bit more subtle. If the people whose homes were destroyed were living in extreme poverty before the storm, they have a monumental rebuilding task before them and their poverty makes them a bad loan risk. Does this same class discrimination not happen in the U.K.? If you are a bad loan risk, do you get a loan?
In New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward (to the southeast and east of the main part of town) was an extreme-poverty area. A lot of the people moved to other cities and have established lives elsewhere. Some were just poor. Others were looking for a "Free Welfare Ride" (I think you folks call this "on the dole") forever and couldn't get it in New Orleans. But for those who stayed, the dole or welfare was never designed to support a person in rebuilding their homes on-site. See also previous comments about poverty and loans.
Not only are the rebuilding efforts harder to manage when on welfare, but there is the matter that if you rebuild a home that had been leveled by the storm, you have to rebuild it to modern building codes, which is far more expensive and extensive than simply repairing superficial damage. For people who are in poverty and who probably are poor because of a limited education, this kind of rebuilding effort can be daunting, verging on impossible. The updated flood maps make rebuilding some of those homes nearly impossible because of the requirement to elevate the homes based on the Katrina flood levels. In some cases, the building code says you have to construct your home 20 feet higher than ground level to meet the post-flood code standards, when it was legal to be only 3 feet off the ground. You can't get a loan if you don't meet code because you can't get the insurance required by the loan institutions, and for a 20-foot elevation, it only gets that much worse.
Black ghettos are crime ridden with murders, rapes and robberies a common daily occurrence.
Yes, and how does this differ from the situations in the ghettos of other major cities in the world, cities that have ghettos with street gangs,
la familia, or whatever passes for groups of disaffected, drug-using, thuggish, violent youths?
I would say that most of the problem with the rampant crime is in the New Orleans East area (yes, the precincts and wards to the east side of the city) where due to limited police presence throughout the city, there never seem to be enough officers to cover everything. That can be said of MANY parts of our city - and, I'll bet, many other cities as well. It comes down to that area being a place where drug traffickers can hide because our law-enforcement staff has to spend more time elsewhere.
We have to balance the city's budget with schools, police, fire, roads, water, sewage, etc., and the infrastructure underground here is crumbling. (Having weeks of standing water soaking your soil will do that to you...) We have to nearly totally rebuild our water supply system and sewage system because soil swelling followed by subsidence caused many of the older pipes to crack. It was estimated that two years after Katrina, we were losing 50% or more of our water to cracked pipes before it ever got to our citizens.
Now, let's ask this question and PLEASE Col, be honest with the answer. When you start rebuilding things, do you rebuild where the greatest number of people still reside or do you start rebuilding to feed areas where nobody lives? Of COURSE the Lower 9th Ward is slow to get full restoration of services. But they aren't the only poor, black neighborhoods. Many others have rebuilt with black - but less poor - residents and they are doing OK.
Now multiply that question by each department in the city that has to rebuild - police, fire, education, health support, roads, drainage, ... you get the idea, I hope.
All main UK TV channels have interviewed black residents who all say the same, that they are lesser citizens and are virtually forgotten (on purpose), live in poverty and shanty towns whilst the whites prosper. Some even say Obama doesn't care and is as bad as GWB at ignoring black citizens.
The people complaining on TV probably don't understand the problems of making ends meet with insufficient funds to go around at the city level; they just know they can't build their homes like they once were, deep in the bottom of the Lower 9th Ward bowl. You should also realize that the TV news crews look for the sensational stories, not the {ho-hum} success stories.
However, if you wished to take this as an opportunity to criticize President Obama, I hope I can get out of your way fast enough to give you free rein on that particular activity. (Sorry, had to slip that one in.)
Sounds to me like the story of everywhere in the USA.
I believe this is merely your prejudice and your ignorance of the USA reality showing a bit, plus perhaps a bit of selective blindness to the areas closer to you in the UK. But I can forgive that kind of myopia - the kind that says, "This can't be happening in MY neighborhood." It is a common human failing. See, for example, the documented cases of German citizens in villages just a few miles from the death camps, folks who were unaware of the atrocities being committed in their name.
) there was a news item about Obama visiting New Orleans , it painted a different picture to that by Col.
