NEW ORLEANS — Throughout the year, we've unraveled how the past impacts the present through our first three installments of Follow the Line. We revealed the history of discrimination in New Orleans which is a line that can be traced back to the city’s origin story.
In this episode of Follow the Line, we reveal how that discrimination yielded negative and even deadly results for some New Orleanians.
Studies have shown your zip code can determine your life expectancy, but if you were to put a map of New Orleans against the redlining map of the city, you'd learn life expectancy isn't the only thing your zip code can determine.
“If you essentially segregate black folks and people of color into certain neighborhoods then you're going to have compounding effects in terms of exposure to violence, lack of access to healthy foods, a number of isolating effects that are going to be detrimental," Chief Demographer at the NOLA Data Center Allison Plyer says.
The most recent example of those compounding effects is the rate of COVID-19 infections in New Orleans at the beginning of the pandemic.
Studies by the New Orleans Data Center show COVID-19 disproportionately affected black residents. In the first year of the pandemic, Black residents made up 77% of COVID-19 deaths, while white residents made up less than 20%
If you take out those who live in long-term care facilities like nursing homes, there was an 88% death rate for Black residents and only 9% for white residents.
In 2020, Jeff Adelson with our partners at the Times-Picayune, New Orleans Advocate, created a database of COVID-19 infections by neighborhood. The map indicated which neighborhoods, early in the pandemic, had the highest rate of infection.
“It became apparent, almost immediately, that there was there was a pattern,” Adelson said. “By the spring of 2020, which is when we started doing some geographic analysis it was very clear that particularly in New Orleans, communities that were largely black, and also communities that were lower income than average, we're seeing a higher number of infections.”
Adelson says communities with an alarming rate of infections were in New Orleans East, particularly the Little Woods area.
“It's interesting to note that areas like Lakeview and some of the Uptown neighborhood, wealthier uptown neighborhoods anyway, were particularly low rates and those are generally whiter, wealthier areas in the city,” Adelson says.
We wondered why there was a disparity in impact. Maxwell Ciardullo and Carshauna Hill with the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center say it centers on the pattern of discrimination.
“These are already communities that were dealing with a lack of access to opportunity and then these crises have compounded the harm that was already visiting upon these communities.”
The New Orleans Data Center believes the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 cases is connected to multi-generational housing and frontline occupations. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found Asian, Black, and Hispanic Americans are most likely to live in multi-generational family households. For reasons ranging from financial issues to caring for a loved one.
As far as "frontline occupations,” many people consider those in tourism, grocery and hospitality as essential workers. Hotel Jobs, for instance, often puts workers directly in contact with customers from all over.
In 2018, the year before the pandemic, the New Orleans hotel workforce was 57% African American, 9% Hispanic and 29% White. Most of the lowest-wage jobs were filled disproportionately by Black and Hispanic workers. As work came to a halt for a lot of us at the height of the pandemic, so did the workers’ pay. No pay means no money, which means no rent. This could lead to eviction.
“We have eviction court data that shows where those cases are coming from, and we have infection and death data from COVID that shows were those cases are coming from and it's no surprise to us that the same neighborhoods that were disinvested from and not offered an opportunity to thrive and not offered opportunities for homeownership or to build wealth. Those same neighborhoods are the ones that today still generations later are still being devalued and still seeing the effects of this,” says Ciardullo.
In a 2019 study, Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative used court data to reveal that evictions predominantly impacted Black renters. The neighborhoods that were hotbeds for evictions include Treme, New Orleans East, Central City and the Lower Garden District.
“We've set up a system where low-income, working-class black folks in this city are just being displaced,” says Hill.
We’ve also seen a direct correlation between neighborhoods that were historically divested and who was impacted most in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
“If you look at the rest of the city, you'll see there is a correlation between race, income and lower flood elevation generally speaking the poor folks and the black folks, are going to be in the lower elevation,” says Dr. Robert Collins, Professor of Urban Studies and Public Policy at Dillard University. “The only exception of that is the Lakeview area and the Lakeview area is a White wealthy area simply because it's right next to the lake and as a principal of real estate if you're close to a body of water the property values go up.”
Hurricane Katrina damaged most of the city of New Orleans in some way, but minority communities took a harder hit. While there is data to show that correlation the images tell the same story.
The disaster left New Orleanians sprawled across the country. Some stayed wherever they landed, while many attempted to return. The help being offered then by the federal government exposed yet another disproportionate challenge.
The U.S. Government used a formula of using pre-storm home values to factor into rebuilding grants. The formula shortchanged people who live in poor neighborhoods instead giving people living in wealthy neighborhoods more help to rebuild their homes.
WWL Louisiana Investigator David Hammer covered this disparity extensively along with our partners at the Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate and Pro Publica.
“I quickly found that because of the way they had created the program, the road home program, and giving grants based on the value of the house, not on the cost of rebuilding each house, you ended up in a situation where the same exact house same size, same materials in two different neighborhoods, one majority black, one majority white, were getting different amounts of money, because of the historically lower values of homes in black neighborhoods,” says David. “The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and fair housing groups sued to say that this was discrimination, racial discrimination. And it never concluded in court, it was settled out of court.”
David said this was a missed opportunity to correct some of the historical wrongs minority New Orleanians faced.
“This was a huge disaster. We can almost start fresh, start over, and correct the wrongs of the past where people in Black neighborhoods had devalued homes because of redlining, because of these historic inequities with home lending, and that all of that could have been wiped away if they had created a program that was more equitable, and they missed the opportunity,” says David. “I don't think that there was any evidence that that was done on purpose. In fact, there were a number of things that they implemented, including additional grants for lower-income people that were supposed to wipe away some of those historic inequities based on how much people made. The problem was, you had middle-class Black families who made too much money to qualify for that but still lived in majority Black neighborhoods where the values of the homes were depressed and were affected by redlining over many, many decades, and they were excluded from any of those additional grants.”
While the formula is no longer being used in terms of disasters, some say the damage is already one. More wealthy communities have rebuilt while others, 18 years later, are still recovering.
As disasters compounded in New Orleans, our disparities were on full display for the world to see. Soon we'd learn some saw them as a tragedy while others saw them as an opportunity.
Be sure to join us next week to learn how some found Hurricane Katrina to be the perfect opportunity to make New Orleans one of the most gentrified cities in America.
We will continue to follow this issue through our series “Follow the Line” be sure to follow Charisse Gibson on Facebook at Charisse Gibson TV, Twitter at @OkayCharisse and Instagram at @CharisseGibsonWWLTV for updates on this series.
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