Surviving Katrina: Making a Living in New Orleans (Disaster Documentary) | Real Stories

[Music] there's an african proverb that says until the lion tells his own story then the tale will continue to glorify the hunter three years ago my wife and i drove across the united states and we did this film called independent america to document what we thought was this growing insurgency against corporate chains and the sort of rise of local consciousness we were going to come to new orleans we didn't have time we were exhausted six weeks later katrina hit it was to my everlasting regret that we never came here new orleans is a very unique city you know we have great architecture and you know we're sitting on this precarious position on the mississippi river surrounded by water on all sides geographically speaking it's it's unique but i think it's just the fact that these all these cultures came and truly uh melded together to create this one common culture even as katrina was happening somebody who's in this film was emailing me saying you know i went to law school tulane this town is your classic independent america city so at some point while i was in law school i got pretty sick and i and i i didn't go to class for a week or a little more and they noticed it was breaking my pattern when school wasn't actually out and next thing i know the delivery guy from this store shows up in my house with some basic groceries and a big old muffin out of sandwich which is a beautiful new orleans italian sandwich um just in case in case something was wrong it's such a transparent thing here that these little businesses you know this is one household that was represented by this business plus their delivery guy who was there all the time that's two households that earned their living out of this one little building and it wasn't just you know stringing together part-time job kind of income you know from several jobs this was a solid way to make a living and to be a part of the community and yeah so i think i was i started becoming aware of it here that it really does matter it's sad that i can just take a drive two or three hours north of here and one city looks the same as the next city and it's hard to distinguish which town you're in i always say that you're blindfolded you're taken to new orleans you open a menu and you know where you are and that can't be said anywhere else in the country my father had been struck by a drunk driver and paralyzed for life during that time all the kids sort of divided things up and my specialty became breakfast and so i started cooking breakfast for the family about nine the dinner table was uh everything in our house and so that's where all the family business took place meals every night big meals great meals and i think my love for food and people really came from that once you understand this culture here it's hard to leave it [Music] cool there's such a strange love hate that people have coming back and they're so sick of the rebuilding process and it's so much easier cheaper to tear down and build something new that is not as enduring there was open disdain for everything about the city of new orleans it was taken for granted that everything about the old new orleans should be erased and replaced with something shiny and new the blue on the street loose and complete under skies so smoky blue grey i can't foresee a dixie swim [Music] kinds of issues that we faced overnight every region has faced or will face and how they reclaim their power in that city region will depend on how well they can hold they know what's valuable to them and the best thing about new orleans is every single person here made a decision to come back this area here used to be a very prominent strip mall we had a chase bank which has since closed since katrina this area over here was a rite aid and we also had a pj's coffee house it helped support the life in this community it was a very self-sustained community so pj's was a chain yeah right it was a chain yeah here's a franchise and how does that make you feel that they didn't come back it's kind of upsetting because i would come to this pjs have coffee maybe sit down and do a little reading or studying back when i was in college it just seems like life here isn't it's like it's been given up on by state government large retail chains what's going to bring life back to your community i think the community members are going to have to get involved we're looking out at gentilly which is a real kind of bedrock kind of community it was working class and lower middle class middle class post world war ii but it is struggling i mean as you look out there's still trailers there are very few of these lots of trailers down there very few of these houses are occupied gutted some some that have been completely just sort of left you cannot shop in gentilly you can't buy an entire outfit from shoes to hat to coat you just can't do it in gentilly i mean we get dollar stores if you can find it at a dollar store you can get it but if you can't find it and i love the dollar store don't get me wrong i really do but if you can't get a dollar store you won't get it in gentilly and we have universities here but for some reason there's a disconnect in terms of what we get and what we deserve people need to start getting organized and raised in hell about it and making it a political embarrassment that the city can be considering giving away a couple of million bucks to a major corporation like home depot when there are such basic needs that are not being met what is a what is your kind of like top priority if you had to pick one store to open here at mr joe's site first what would be it first thing he mentioned is a grocery store her first priority is a gas station then a bank then a coffee shop some fun stuff might be an upscale shop for stationery or gift shop and maybe an ice cream shop yeah well we had a beautiful dress shop here a credit union or bank post office shoe store appliance store grocery store cell phone store clinic doctor urgent care a drugstore pharmacy craft shop it's just a perception that we're not familiar there you go we're just not screaming loud and blurry right we're back we're back right like she said we're not making enough noise i mean what percentage of the population are here right now compared to pre-katrina about 50. this house is occupied that one that one this one and every house past that is not and every so if you do the math it's about 50 of the houses on this one little block if nothing comes back or it comes back in a way that's not befitting of a person's lifestyle they're not gonna come back we haven't even reached our pre-katrina levels right we're still at least 100 to 150 000 people away from pre-katrina levels there's still a lot of people who haven't come home and and we still need a lot of help in order to make sure that we get them home you say neighbor please come home because we got the loans and things that like that for them and if they don't want to come home put a for sale sign up the parts of the city that flooded were the parts of the city that developers and the government built and told us were safe put us in there and then said well why are you there new orleans knew what was high ground they kind of got they figured it out they stayed in high ground until the 20th century until the government came in and started telling them it was safe to live in lower lying areas and said these lobbies will protect you don't protect you never again when will new orleans believe anything without investigating at first i think that in the age of disaster capitalism rubble is the terra nillius the open land i was there ten days after the the levees broke but you know in the first week we were hearing from top developers in new orleans um saying you know this city won't be rebuilt the way it was before um and uh and and it's a clean sheet this this phrase kept coming up again and again clean sheet as if this horrible disaster had created just this um sort of a canvas on which corporate america could draw its most beautiful picture that could be disneyland it could be a sort of x-ray to disneyland is what people were saying that would be the future of new orleans what was it like here during the floods how bad was it up out here oh it was bad yeah we came back probably a year later and it was still bad and everything you see is new here you know the landscaping the sheetrock you name it jackson jackson mississippi how high was the water well however hot that is that's the watermark what is that that's six so it's like six feet i've never actually measured it actually six feet well six and a half six feet six inches the hardest hit was my business i had a backup system but it wasn't very good and it didn't bear any fear and i cried so many days over that because it was it was everything though i have all these little portable drives i'm not feeling with this stuff i'm going to take the cpu on the ground there and if i have to leave one of my children the cpu is going in my car i'm just kidding like i went to atlanta to visit my sister and i'm like good lord she can just turn on her driveway and make another turn and bam all the retail and everything else post off as it disappears and you know for us that's not it's not a reality for us [Music] you know like i'm about to go on vacation when i come back you get in a funk when you come back because when you come back you're gonna see all this with fresh eyes because you haven't seen it in a week when i drive around day in and day out it doesn't really bother me because i see it you get you get immune to it you know you kind of seems normal but then when you go away nobody has come back as far as food goes on this side of the canal than we're at we're like a heartbeat for this area and in a sense where people that are living in fema trailers or men that are working that don't have wives and you know their women home then they need somewhere to eat and they need some good food i've had this restaurant since 1991 and it had closed for a while and just before the storm i was opening up september to face 05 and fixed it up and everything bought all the new equipment and the week before i was opening up not a week a couple of days before i was opened up the storm came along and destroyed everything so we lived in atlanta for nine months and i decided to come back home they're not coming back popeye's not coming back kentucky's not coming back and walgreens right across the street from those two buildings they are not coming back they have sold they built into a charity organization well i guess they don't feel it's profitable enough for them to come at uh you know it's less than 50 of the people are back down here now so i guess it's not profitable enough for them to come back and well i live here so that's the difference i got everything that i need i just need some customers that's all you know we see here how much quicker the local businesses are to come back how reluctant any of the absentee owned businesses are to reinvest in the community until it's back up on its feet and profitable so it certainly i think is an instructive lesson to communities about becoming overly dependent on chains or other absentee owned businesses and the importance for their long-term economic prosperity to have a very strong base of locally rooted businesses that are living in the community and therefore are not going to pack up their bags when things go a little bit sour i see incredible determination among people who are figuring out ways to make it work in a portion of town where maybe five to ten percent of the population is back and yet you see new businesses coming in you see businesses reestablishing themselves you see businesses that never went out really except for the period of the storm that that have confidence in their ability to be successful in this particular geographic point as blighted and as vacant as it as it looks because if i own a small business and god comes and knocks it down the one thing i know to do and the one thing i can do to get my life back is to reopen my business and so if i'm locally based i can't just decamp to atlanta and try selling po boys over there right when i need to reopen and give it a shot and around this town and and certainly in other neighborhoods where there was a lot more damage you'll see that the local businesses came back and they were really flagships in their neighborhood that sort of welcomed people back and they adapted the stock that they sell very very quickly we were back just a couple of days after the storm we left for i guess a day and a half to get some supplies and we came back and i i in a previous life had been in the marine corps and so some of my marine corps friends all got together and started sending me generators and diesel fuel and gas and propane burners what we would call uh crawfish pots down here and so we started making red beans and rice and just feeding whoever wanted food and you know it's one of those cases that you know you're from new orleans when you're feeding people that are hungry that complain that their mother's red beans are better than yours [Laughter] when it comes to things like red beans and rice and gumbo everybody's grandmother makes it better there were hundreds of boats being brought in from all over uh south louisiana people launching their boats down here just right off the interstate to rescue folks and it hit me that we've got this restaurant full of food we've got uh coolers and we've got dry storage we have rice and we can marshal enough rice and beans and we could at least give people some sort of sustenance and as a cook that's what i'm really called to do we're not firefighters we're not police officers we're chefs and we just did what we knew to what to do and that was feed people you couldn't really get a lot of the big food purveyors to deliver you had to make contacts with all your farmers and say hey how are you how's everything going what do you have you have eggs cool i want some i need some eggs you know what are you growing peppers great i want some peppers you know i mean it was just you're kind of scraping scrambling from wherever you can find you start making contact with with not big seafood companies but fishermen you know people who are actually out there selling shrimp we relied on these people before the storm and we relied on them even more after the storm [Music] this is where the community gets built so that's why bringing the market back the tuesday before thanksgiving in 2005 was one of the most vital and important things were you here oh it was the most incredible day because we still didn't know really who was around and who wasn't um and the community came back together it was a little market but it was a happy market and everybody although there were tears there was incredible happiness everybody seeing each other again we had this little joke about this was the place where the new orleans uptown matron could go and look around and say now this would be the garden district girl who's you know maybe she had a little roof damage but here at the market she could say you see nothing bad really happens and it's true this that became our motto for 2007. where's the happiest place in new orleans the crescent city farmer's market we had a lot of customers who came in that were living elsewhere and they said well brooke is open it gives us the courage to come back it feels like feels like homes coming back the day we opened we had people around the block waiting to get in what were you hearing from what were they saying about it thank you thank you for reopening we're glad you all reopened uh thank you for coming a lot of thank you it's like if you know we were doing them a favor by reopening and i think it was a emotional event because my family's been in business in new orleans for 103 years and we celebrated the 100th anniversary in just a month prior to katrina so it meant something that they weren't losing it was a place that they could come to and feel some type of stability some type of connection with the past i i myself was going stir crazy i just wanted some something that used to be and people would come in and just say you know it's chaos out there but when we step foot in here we get coffee we get pastries we sit down we read the paper we read a book it's just calm and peaceful and you know that really made us feel like we were doing you know something more for the community than for anything and we were open seven days a week and i stayed open as long as i could and i think we worked straight every single day i think for at least a month and a half it was really the only thing that people had to cling to you know just just to come and have a cup of coffee it seems so simple until you don't have it it's really hard to even describe the first business is back we were so grateful to them uh it was just like oh they're back someone's open and i think a lot of businesses uh really grew at that time the ones that were able to open up really quickly um grew people we didn't know i remember coming here in the first of october i believe because that's when i came back i was standing getting coffee and it was perfectly strange woman was standing next to me and i was like overwhelmed with emotion and i reached over and i hugged her and i said aren't we lucky that we're here and she said yes and the question always is and how did you make out that was the question everyone asked for two years but you made friends with everyone because we were so happy we were like a little island you know the half a dozen little stores that opened and what else we were going to do we had no homes we were here having coffee it's much more hopeful in terms of the recovery than when a starbucks opens or a home depot you don't have this sense of oh the community is coming back and people whose lives are here are able to return to this world how can this starbucks be so horrible about this i'm mystified by these people uh i mean i you know i i'm not upset about it on the other hand no absolutely it's just so weird so what do we got here dan we have a dead starbucks yeah right smack dab in really the busiest coolest commercial thoroughfare in the south and and i don't know why starbucks didn't want to come back it's too bad that the boards have been removed and the glass replaced because at one point when these were boarded up there was fabulous graffiti about how crappy starbucks is for not coming back and for not even trying this great local roast coffee across the street they came back within weeks of the store at starbucks starbucks what are we going on three years starbucks is not my favorite so it makes me kind of happy it's kind of like you know i can do it but you can't you know or i want to do it but but you don't it just tells a lot about what what those bigger companies are really about and what the small local mom and pop companies are really about and i hope that people see that and i'm not the only one out there doing it there were lots of places that opened there were places that stayed open through the storm even though they they were fined from the health inspectors for for cooking and serving food and they just said we're not going to close these people you know these people can't get food anywhere and they're tired of eating peanut butter and crackers and we're just this is new orleans and we're going to do it the way we want and so i'm not the only one out there but all of them that stayed open and and did that kind of service are the small individually owned or two people owned places and that's what they do they're not worried about their stocks they're not worried about you know their exact profit margins they're worrying about doing their job and their job is feeding people [Music] i stayed so you know after katrina like 12 days until the water went down then i went up to ohio a little bit because the city had shut down you know there was nothing happened he stayed through the whole thing you know he said look i'm going to open up the club you know i got uh some generators if you could come down you know i'm gonna call a couple of cats and see can they come you know like so i came all down well i love no other than that i missed it you know we we live here in the community we thought that bookstores are a place that are essential to a healthy community and we just wanted to get open as fast as possible and why wait for somebody else to take the leadership when you can make a difference what was the reaction when you opened up i know people oh the reaction was just overwhelmingly supportive i mean i i sent out an email i think the night after we opened and i have never gotten such a response [Music] because a bookstore is a special community place and it's and and the idea that that you could lose that the people didn't know whether they had lost their homes yet some people did lose their homes they lost so much and the the the signal that a bookstore which is at the heart of of a community is going to be reopened is a signal that you can come back there's something to build on as in our name we are a community we specialize in books but we're a center we're more than a store we are a meeting place for many organizations and groups and we're just a place for people to come by and hang out and have very lively discussions about current events politics whatever have you and particularly post katrina people needed a place where they could just take a break from what was happening in their own personal lives even though people would come in at that point and say gosh it's so great to have a business here it's so great to see things coming back obviously it's not a typical situation because people would come in and we had all our storm books right here on this front table and p you know they would they would come over and they'd take a look and you i would look from my desk over there and they'd just be standing here just weeping and it was the photographs of what was here before so i guess this is kind of an odd thing to have merchandise that makes people weep but because of what they've lost i am the only educational supply store in the city of new orleans we had four feet of incoming water and i had a natural skylight what happened was the roof peeled back like a sardine can [Music] people don't come and loot educational stores it's books you know how they tell you you can hide things in a book people won't steal educational things so my business wasn't looted thank god for that i guess they would just take a book and learn so when you said you were doing business still that means you were doing business with evacuees up in dallas in dallas and texas the mobile teacher's stop was it actually started yeah like right then just people would call and say okay my child has a project and chrissy we need some help what can we do because they were in a new city and places they didn't know where to go what to buy they were just familiar with new orleans they tell businesses come back they want to help the businesses come back they want people to come back with all the school thing everyone would have thought that old schools are starting over so they're going to have to buy new supplies and they're going to come to you but when it happened government gave them so many supplies and when government gave them supplies it was through government bids with them doing it that way it kind of knocked out the smaller stores [Music] there was very little public discussion about that borders they've left the facades of that building and they're inserting a suburban model border store in between those walls that will be sort of bolted to the wall we're going to do an excellent job at what we do and provide the best service we can and and show people what the difference is between what we do and what they do they were open up until the storm in fact in fact there were bodies in there that got um left oh for um you know like a long time this was another one of those surprise you're getting a chain book store in your neighborhood this is a real key intersection here and yet what do we have we have a closed up gas station we have a rite aid we have an empty lot where a cafe restaurant once stood and adjacent to that is one of the few mcdonald's in you know close proximity as people are looking at it the the preservation of this footprint was extremely important and so by making that concession then they were able to to push this through with very little resistance they have an investment here which they may be able to sever and or they may simply be happy with collecting their uh insurance while they wait and see what happens and meanwhile we're out in the trenches doing what needs to be done to jump start the economy and to bring the place back we were lucky and very unlucky out here in metairie we took on a little water but not much at all we were the first supermarket that opened up on veterans highway uh after the storm we opened september 19th which was only 20 days after the storm hit we had a lot of cleanup to do we text the councilman and said hey we've got milk we've got water we've got bread we've got food if you can get us back into the city we can open up the store and y'all can have it and essentially they did do that we acted as the supply center for the whole jefferson parish in the beginning it was a week before the fed sent down a bottle of water to jefferson parish so they were relying on us in the very beginning to serve the community the original store in new orleans there was a different story now you know for the first time in the 75 or 80 years we had been at that location there was flooding there and the merchandise was ruined and it sat for two and a half weeks in water that was approximately 18 to 24 inches high we applied to the city for permits to rebuild tear down and rebuild and we had to get approval and that approval took about nine months had we been able to do what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it undoubtedly we'd have a new building there now how does that make you feel because that that location is so historic to your family the area that we serve the gentility and legion fields and everything east of that location there is only two or three supermarkets that are open to service that whole area so that area is terribly underserved [Music] the garden has had its ups and downs not just post katrina but post george bush people are really aware that like groceries are getting really expensive and and hard to find in new orleans now there's a grocery down carrollton avenue here but there used to be a lot of three groceries within a mile and a half radius you should shop and buy your food closer to your home sure let's face it we don't go so that's why he said it's a food desert because it's barren we don't really have grocery store options close to our home i'm tired of my ice cream melting there you go don't make a stop even grassroots organizations neighborhood association neighborhood level organizations who assemble all the resources they need say to bring a grocery store in their community they can submit a proposal and receive funding from help me dana notice the funding availability it comes through federal through the office of recovery right blakely's office this has been such a low tax environment that it's been very difficult well somebody's coming there it's been very difficult to have a tax base that would support doing a lot of this about 80 percent of our taxes go to police and fire so that doesn't leave you a lot to do streets and things like that if you see things and you know if there's no straight line to recovery you know i wish there were but there is a straight line we're gonna have to do something about this street there's no straight line to that because the developer's supposed to be responsible for the streets we're going right so what's the purpose of this bike right now uh this is about my oh 12th 14th bike ride and the purpose of all these bike rides is uh well two reasons one you you really can't see a city or understand a city uh in an automobile or fast movie hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on here illegal dumping i wanna i want to call get that called in okay here's the city at work putting the street in people say we don't do anything there's some of our work right there okay what would help me the most a little less criticism a little more work oak street hardware has been on oak street since 1929. my dad bought it from the original owner in 1964. we've been here through freezes where everyone's pipes have busted through hurricanes through tornadoes through floods through looting i showed up every morning to repair the doors in the glass every morning they broke in we kind of patrolled oak street unfortunately we had to arm ourselves we started haphazard selling out of the store you know it was kind of a meeting place too for people lowe's opened i think may 2007 business has been dropping ever since it wasn't so bad in the beginning but um it's gotten worse i mean i would like to think that we we we provide a nice tax base for the city of new orleans between property taxes and sales taxes we're rebuilding a city a lot of plywood and sheet rock and tons of nails and paint i shop at clement hardware on magazine street however i need four nails i need picture hooks i need a hammer i wouldn't drive to lowe's or home depot for that but in rebuilding a house yes i would go to lowe's and home i think every i think there's room for everything so the pressure from the ordinary citizens bring more walmarts bring more lows when we were home depots and you say well that's going to put these you know little guys out of business and they say well right now i got to think about building my house i can't think about that guy's business at least a few times a day you'll get people come in and say oh i couldn't find it at lowe's and i've searched all over town and they only live a few blocks away and kind of hurt your feelings you know after after serving them helping them through all kinds of problems you know and then they'll they'll start a project go buy everything from from them and then come to you for the final thing that they can't quite get or they just one little piece short and you know it just kind of grates on you honestly you know and after it happens quite a few times you know they make the statement don't take it personal well you know when you when when you have to drop your health insurance and you can't order quite as much inventory as you want and you have to watch what you're doing like like most business people you know it you do take it personally i thought those little guys are the ones who were around with after katrina who opened their building businesses when nobody else was around to help and they've been around well yeah yeah but but when you're going in the store you don't say who was around you say what's this you know your pocketbook doesn't recognize uh uh the attributes of of uh stability and longevity your pocketbook doesn't stretch that for you you're not getting an extra dollar every week for that recognition and you've got a family to feed and the price of that's gonna utilities bills here are through the roof there's only a certain amount of dollars that go around and you you know they they take a lion's share of it it seems like i understand competition and i understand that's you know that's just the way business is local government seems to cater to them and they've forgotten about us because after the storm all the chain stores of course went to the city government and started saying what are you what you got for me we have gotten no help from from from the government certainly none from the city government except raising our property taxes four thousand dollars a walmart corporation has received well over a billion dollars in public subsidies just those that were able to be quantified and measured and many folks are estimating that's probably less than 10 percent of the actual total and even if your community isn't offering those subsidies it's a single bank account for these companies so any subsidy anywhere in the country or in the world is creating a distinctly uneven playing field it's our tax dollars that are going to fund the construction of our competitors that's amazing what's your recourse nothing just fight hard so they come in they pay no rent and and from what i understand they pay their employees terrible so they come in and give very low prices which we have to then try to compete against it's it's almost like being in business against your hometown government you have corporations like cabela's and bass that are getting multi-million dollar subsidies across the country in community after community they're able to sell this as hey this is going to be a big tourist attraction and if you don't give us money we're going to open up in the town next to you and suck the life out of the sporty good stores in your community it's basically a legalized extortion but it's succeeding on a grand scale what absolutely scares me and and and freaks me out the most is the cities that are getting in business with these big stores like cabela's and bass pro shop to not just entice them to come into town but are giving them the buildings free you know to come compete with their local merchants you know don't put a thumb on a scale at the very least small businesses i mean these people are not socialists they don't want the government to cut futs with them at all i mean they want the government to leave them alone and give them a permit but they definitely don't approve of the government then getting into the market and playing favorites with non-locals so yeah really all local businesses ask is that keep a level playing field and let them compete fairly if you talk to my father who's president of the company he's burned and chapped and just you know it's it's you know the why not invest in the city it has been such a slow hard slog for this part of town that i'm excited when anybody opens doors and creates commerce and jobs that we would invest in our own i would i'd far prefer that but at the same time you know for the first year that we were out here i think grocery shopping was um hitting the mini mart at a gas station and there was one in the area you know so when a winn-dixie opened which is not locally owned it is a chain it was still such a gift but the tax incentive is a little bit infuriating if you put other businesses out of business at the same time you're adding low-paying jobs that perhaps don't have good benefits or other kinds of things that we would hope to have in our community we really haven't done anything positive to increase the quality of life for the whole community and i think those are the kinds of things that we ought to ask really hard questions about before we say oh yeah come in and we'll give you everything if it keeps going away it's going either we'll have to do some drastic changes you know i could foresee giving it up i mean i can i could probably make more money renting my building that i'm that i'm taking out now in the post uh storm scenario it's it's interesting because small businesses have really been here and they came back right after the storm citizens who knew how the city worked and knew how to get things going they got us up and got us operating but the city is really coming in and subsidizing these big retailers right and the big retailers are coming in and essentially they're going to kill these small retailers and so if the city subsidizes a walmart or subsidizes a home depot they're really subsidizing the process of killing all the small businesses that have really helped to prop the city up and sustain it this far through the recovery [Music] when we developed the revitalization of saint thomas the city had promised to put 20 million dollars of infrastructure into the development and the mayor told me they just didn't have the money so i had to find another way to bring the 20 million dollars to do the infrastructure in the project and we had a vacant industrial corridor adjacent to the area that we were going to develop and i told the mayor that if i can bring a retailer to town one of these major big boxes they pay lots of sales tax if we could take that sales tax and use it as a revenue stream to create the 20 million dollars would you do that he said absolutely if you can pull that off and so we scoured the market this is before katrina and only walmart was interested in opening an urban store in the city of new orleans they came in and actually paid all of their taxes and put the first large big box that made a lot of sense because all of the people in orleans parish were driving to the suburbs to do their big box shopping taking their tax dollars out of the cities the amount of federal subsidy um that's available for public housing and for for housing across america has declined and so developers have had to look for other ways and housing authorities have to look for other ways in order to to finance their projects and what's striking about walmart in new orleans is that precisely this model of knocking down public housing and replacing it with so-called mixed-use housing which has very few actual affordable housing units um at with a walmart as the centerpiece there was a huge battle in new orleans over this before the hurricane [Music] they're a good corporate citizen and the fact is there isn't necessarily an either or situation with the local businesses and the chain retailers the question is how do we preserve nurture strengthen the businesses born and raised here who come back first when we need them how do we ensure that those corporate citizens are good to us and and don't capsize the local economy [Music] towns across america favor big box stores through economic development tools known as pilots and tiffs these tools allow them to quickly approve new projects without appearing to raise taxes in both cases a town will issue bonds to finance construction of a new retail property with payment in lieu of taxes or pilot the big box store transfers over title of their property in exchange for the public financing because the town now has title to the land the big box no longer has to pay property tax instead the big box company usually agrees to pay a smaller percentage of what it would normally owe in property taxes this often saves the company millions of dollars over several years with tax increment financing or tiff the town pays off those bonds by redirecting the revenues from a big box's property taxes or sales tax both pilots and tiffs usually benefit the larger size big boxes to the detriment of independent local businesses big box taxes are either reduced or they're diverted into specific projects either way the town's general treasury gets less money this usually means that mom and pop now have to shoulder a larger tax burden even as they face increased competition and usually reduce sales from the presence of these out-of-town giants the problem is that that these these these tax breaks are usually in the form of debt and small businesses can't handle any more debt uh so you know the appearance it looks like a tax break but in fact it's a debt instrument you know a go zone bond so you've got to pay it back and small businesses can't handle that occasionally there's something that's done for a big business like street closures and that sort of thing so now we can't do anything about that situation there because right on the private property so those people are within the legal limit but this one here looks like a takedown no it's got it well no there's fire damage barry where's barry barry it's fire damage 15 15. we try to create diverse vibrant and sustainable communities and what we saw after katrina was that there was going to be a great need for housing because people had been dislocated in the hundreds of thousands and that the federal government would be supplying lots of dollars to help us rebuild and so we tried to help the public agencies formulate policy that would develop mixed income housing we were concerned that all the money would go into affordable housing and you'd end up creating concentratedly poor communities the housing authority of new orleans decided that they're going to demolish all the city's public housing and they don't provide an adequate plan that will allow citizens to to return or to find enough intermediate housing while they do so and then what they also say is well we promise that we're going to give you more complexes like river gardens right and remember river gardens doesn't adequately provide low-income housing only seven percent of residents were supposed to be low-income citizens the ability to provide public housing ends up being tied to the success of uh of retailers and so it this is just a classic example of having these controversial policies already on the books already lying around but you have this problem and what's the problem well it's people you know and they're stubborn ways and the fact that they organize their communities and the fact that they have opinions about how their communities should run and that's extremely inconvenient to this you know to this vision it's much more convenient to imagine a blank slate and a clean sheet where you can just build it and what's so striking about the housing projects is that most of them sustained minimal flood damage so the whole idea that they are being destroyed because of katrina is a lie they're being destroyed because katrina created the excuse to destroy them my girl my girl don't lie to me tell me where did you sleep last night come on tell me baby in the ponds in the pond by the sun don't ever shine [Music] all night how do you feel about some of the issues sort of surrounding the what people think is like the privatization of housing uh that is national phenomena and uh wow wow what have we got going on here [Music] what have we got going on [Music] what we got going on here let's look like we took out a house they demolished one house and if you see the stick they're gonna put another house that's been surveyed okay yeah but see we can't demolish this house i assume it's occupied it's unoccupied so we can't touch it we got to find out you know who the people are who live there whether they're going to come back or anything they might be able to do something over there but even that's not a bad structure we don't want to demolish it part of what what we look at and and question is how the the large businesses don't just come in here and start up like a like hillary has for example with their own capital and so forth but with a lot of tax subsidies and and so forth and what it really boils down to is your tax dollars my tax dollars hillary as a small business owners tax dollars going to subsidize the large chain and so what if that million dollars was divvied up among 10 15 20 small business hardware stores how much could they expand their capacity to provide us what we need in the way of sheetrock nails et cetera et cetera i think your your theory is wonderful but frankly i just think it's a pipe dream here's follow the money if a big box is coming in here somebody's got their hand out and in this case it was very beneficial to nagin i'm probably going to be sued for this but yeah i'm come on clement hardware is not going to give nagin's sons a contract to install um granite yeah he's a businessman first politician second and and his his decision to to help his sons create this opportunity with this granite contracting um deal with home depot demonstrates what his long term view is and his his long range plans are and it's i think as a businessman that's where he intends to continue um working and so you know it's probably a very pragmatic decision on his part and makes personal sense but as a mayor of a city or city we're struggling to recover it it's horrible magazine street is an amazing little street because it's uh it's pretty much a continuous stretch of little businesses in buildings this size i mean these are classic old buildings and it's a continuous stretch from downtown all the way up to ottoman park which is a stretch of several miles city government you know looks at a walmart and says oh that's going to be x million dollars in in sales tax revenue and what they can't get their heads around is count this entire block both sides and you've got the size of a walmart and it's a whole lot more city revenue and a whole lot more jobs and typically better jobs come out of a street like this but government officials never get it and they're they're awfully quick to subsidize the the new urbanist development nearby that that accommodates those big [Music] we've had a chance to study the economic impact differential between local businesses and their chain competitors we call it a local premium because it really is that local premium is called the multiplier effect if you go and spend 100 at the big box store some of that money stays in the community to pay employees and sales tax but corporate chains centralize their services so a lot of that money ends up thousands of miles away in the hands of shareholders and out-of-town advertising accountancy and law firms spending that same 100 at a mom and pop store can benefit the local economy two to three times more essentially what you have spent multiplies throughout the town that's because almost all that revenue stays inside the community as mom and pop purchase their services and supplies from other local businesses and those providers purchase goods and services from each other all in all keeping your money closer to home last year spent over four million dollars on buying groceries for our restaurants and so what if we could make that impact here locally what would that do for the economy if other restaurant groups started doing that i didn't see these when i was at the farm yeah they're just coming in it's gotten better the markets have the farmers have always been here the produce and the vegetables and the meat and chickens and everything i've always been here but the people that are coming now to buy this stuff there's realization that oh my god i can get the products i can get it right here it's so good it's cheap and i didn't have to drive all the way to the grocery store i didn't have to go and hit some farm stand out in the middle of nowhere to get these peaches i can come right here and it's in my backyard i mean that's the realization i mean it's always been here it's just people are now starting to really utilize it and get involved and and they want to be a part of it you know and that's that's that's the best thing i mean you know we're kind of going backwards in a way but it's a good way i mean it's the way we need to be going the more you become aware of your endangered food systems the more valuable your local food connection becomes so we are in essence lucky because we've been whacked so hard here that in some ways we're so far behind we're actually getting ahead so we've got green space that other urban areas don't have ours is all conveniently green what to do with vacant land and helping people in their rebuilding process to utilize their yards as sources of uh producing food which is something that is you know akin to our history here a lot of people are looking at it as a way of actually at least supplementing their diet and in my case uh i eat out of my garden every day every dinner most of what you're gonna find on the table is gonna be from the garden here or from the river because i live on the river every house here belongs to a farmer all the melons herbs eggplants squash peppers and um just one patch leads to the next they go on and on and on it's amazing it's amazing out here with the adversity of the storm and um everything that they've been up against they've come back with vigor and enthusiasm and you know talk about creating something land you know really i think this is this has never been done before not in new orleans having a uh green community garden i mean 20 acres is basically one when it is complete it's going to be the largest in the united states there's no urban farm that large because we're still within the city limit we basically 95 recover six months ago so right now we're we can say that we are complete without uh recovery and we are moving on to development to me it means a lot to support these communities we have towns and villages all across south louisiana depended upon people like me buying shrimp from them a lot of the french quarter restaurants they use pretty much domestic but you know your your red lobsters and your apple bees and your you know big chains they all worried about the money they they get strictly imports you start thinking well what am i going to do if i don't do this business because i don't know anything else is what you know my dad does his dad me and my brother that's all we know well i mean i'm getting like 85 85 90 cents a pound right now by the time you finish and pay all your expense that's all you're coming out about two hundred dollars how much longer that you can stay in business not much longer matter of fact she might be on her last lady now i got the motorbikes off having trouble with it might not even make it out tonight sure did well good luck to you all hey good luck to all of us nice to meet you we're in this together man yes we are to me with a great tragedy what's happened in new orleans is not that the city wasn't rebuilt exactly as it was it's the democracy it's that people were who had lost so much who had been utterly abandoned by all three levels of their government left on their roofs and their addicts lost loved ones treated with such inhumanity in such brutality were excluded from the only thing that really could have healed their community which was to reimagine a better city if people don't have fresh fruit or groceries nearby let's start there then let's focus on providing basic clothing and hardware and the other things people need and make sure every part of the city has that within a reasonable walking distance and if the economic development money is put in that direction to do those market studies to provide the kind of consulting and support for local entrepreneurs low interest loans if you put a couple of million dollars into that kind of activity it's going to create so much more wealth [Music] foreign we have an opportunity post katrina to create all sorts of resources in our own neighborhoods from scratch so that we don't have to drive and use gas we can walk we don't even have to use gas to leave our driveway we can walk to these businesses i can walk you can't say let them come and then i'll build it it's more of the build it and they'll come you got to kind of balance that dynamic because you know when uh you look at like a mall or go out in suburbia build a mall up then all of a sudden all the subdivisions pop up around that retail center so it's kind of like it's a cat it's not necessarily and i think we've been relying too much on the if y'all come and show me you'll come then i'll build it everything from schools to commercial facilities and in my humble opinion that's not the entire dynamic the dynamic is you put something there i want and we'll start migrating to that area there it is that's merlin marlins that's right but so the businesses like merlin's and sweet savers they're having to take this leap of faith and come back with the belief that if they come back despite the fact that there are very few people living in the neighborhood by coming back the customers will still find them so um it's that they're trying to break that chicken and egg cycle you know they're they're saying okay if i build it and they will yep they're they're still working on that in this it's see now merlin's has just opened up in the last couple of weeks or reopened so it looks pretty packed it does one of very few eateries in gentilly so what's so special about your restaurant why do people come from far beyond to eat here because we're from here and we know what people like here and we're just it's a new orleans style type of cooking my dad learned how to cook from his great-grandmother so he's been cooking for a very long time he has old recipes which make our cooking here just a little bit different i'm learning from my dad i do i do some of the cooking i make the hot sausage every morning the hamburger fresh we didn't have a restaurant before the storm hopefully i'm starting something i welcome other restaurants i would like this area to be known again as a restaurant area a food place do you think you act as a symbol for the rest of the neighborhood then in terms of your here it's okay to come back sure sure the juju bag opened up coffee shop the cleaners is about to open and the gas station has opened i was the first to open and these guys had followed right behind so it's i think it's on a good roll i think it's people like this that are making a difference in the community the fact is it's people it's not government and it's not big business but it's little business and it's uh little people like us that are making a difference and that will be the success of new orleans there's a handful of real cities in this country that have streets like this and you know for a second-tier city in the sun belts it's a little surprising to come and find such a great urban diversity uh of businesses lined up in a really urban setting like this i think what they need is leadership they need to hear from the city leadership that local businesses matter that what they're doing matters that we want to talk to them and get their input into what it is that they need to stabilize sustain and grow which is what they want to do that's why they're here did it ever cross your mind not to reopen after katrina no why not it wasn't an option first of all new orleans is my home and secondly just the commitment we have to our friends and our family it's just what we love to do and it's necessary so if not us who so back in new orleans for the film premiere we'll see how it goes uh the possibility of another hurricane coming through here just around the time of the film i think if there's either a mandatory or voluntary evacuation then we'll of course have to postpone a mandatory evacuation is likely tomorrow for orleans parish yes it is and when it's ordered by the mayor they are to leave this garage closes starting at noon saturday the 30th that was the day we were supposed to have it from here so today is the third anniversary of katrina we got possibly hurricane gustaf coming into town so everybody's talking about evacuation right now if we weren't here at all the small businesses the restaurants the the coffee houses the bookstores the hardware stores i mean who you know we might not have a city at all right now fundamentally for me my interest in doing this movie was not necessarily to make a film about new orleans it was to make a film about a community in distress and how it came back and how the rest of the country and maybe even the rest of the world can look to new york as an example of when this happens to you and it will in one way or the other what are you going to do and who's going to be there to help you the lesson here is do it yourself pull yourself up by your bootstraps because you're the only one that's going to do it waiting for gustav category 3 predicted evacuation urged this is the mother of all storms this storm is so powerful and growing more powerful every day that i'm not sure we have seen anything like it the national weather service is saying it's the worst possible storm that they can imagine okay thanks all right bye-bye what did you just do are you just calling for plywood i'm not panicking i am just trying to be prepared you see this window right over here we have our this is our katrina souvenir right here that was all it did but it's kind of a big a big window of vulnerability right there so you just sweep this call uh oak street ace my neighborhood hardware store for plywood people people are coming in you know people are very aware of what's going on and they're pretty nervous and which i can't blame them because people in new orleans have been through a lot you want to go first yeah sure why not the ones that are most invested here the local businesses are going to be the ones that come back because i mean for one thing they don't have any other options so their their instinct as is ours as residents is to get back to normalcy as quickly as possible and that means where they're concerned they're going to open up their business as quickly as possible start serving whoever is here i am tired of evacuating for hurricanes so until we find a solution that we'll have to keep doing it so you are going to come back oh yeah yeah it won't take two years this time i'll probably come back immediately even if there is a huge disaster i'm not sure what left there is to wipe out i mean as you can see this house is still still in shambles what is the latest dude same thing how's your inventory oh we're down you know we're we're almost out of you know d battery we still got some flashlights left and some plastic for covering things and i'm not glad we're gone that's gone uh that was gone yesterday but uh you know we're still servicing people so you know we'll we'll see anybody say anything about lowe's or home depot here well i had a guy call me uh about 10 minutes ago uh the guy low sold him a generator and he's angry he was angry he was kind of angry at me because the guy low stolen the generator that's not hooking up to his 220 power i was like i was like i feel for you buddy but you need to call him [Music] we have no power there's minimal damage just some little sticks in the yard plywood looks like it was beat up a little bit not much it's still really quiet here in the neighborhood here there's a power up on oak street so maybe i can juice up my phone i can do that with a car charger here's the culprit right here this is why we don't have power and the next block over does like [Music] [Music] maple leaf never [Music] another custom city [Music] under is [Music] tree [Music] of a new [Music] don't you know [Music] um is [Music] you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 55,792

Keywords: Real Stories, Real Stories Full Documentary, Real Stories Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, full documentary, Hanson Hosein, hurricane katrina, hurricane katrina documentary, new orleans hurricane, new orleans hurricane katrina, new orleans hurricane katrina footage, INDEPENDENT AMERICA: RISE FROM THE RUINS, Mom & Pop, mom & pop shop, mom & pop business funding

Id: 8aMPHLHNPho

Length: 70min 47sec (4247 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021