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Notes from New Orleans 2006-2010, June 4, 2015 148 Animals Are Always Making Music "Put 'Coming Together', Ya Heard Me?" Drawing by Christopher Cardinale, Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans, January 2006 Animals Are Always Making Music 149 Notes from New Orleans 2006-2010 The notes in this section are particular to their time and place, New Orleans over a span of five years, 2006 through 2010, but the positive news that they have to tell applies across our planet in the 21st century, I think. The essential story these notes have to tell is: People are ready to help one another. People all over the Earth are already acting with great energy and sacrifice to help one another. People are steadily doing great things apart from Municipal, State and National Governments. Most of the recovery in New Orleans since infrastructure's failures flooded the city in 2005, post-Hurricane Katrina, has been done through the hard work and stalwart commitment of residents and volunteers, combined with contributions from supporters outside this city. Their number amounts to hundreds of thousands in five years. People-power provided basic needs first after the levees- failure flooding of Orleans and Saint Bernard Parishes. Water, food, shelter, clothing, health-care and legal advice. Next came efforts to remediate and restore housing. Next came projects for structures that might be sustainable in southeast Louisiana's more and more threatened environment. Accompanying every step was focus on the people and cultures that specially enrich New Orleans and southeast Louisiana A new model for the 21st century needed multiracial roots. And always the mix has been the same: residents, volunteers, and donors, come together in New Orleans for this place at the heart of the Americas. The efforts of people apart from Government in New Orleans over the past five years offer proofs of what's still and ever more possible. We have the past, the present, and the tools for an encompassing new freedom. 150 Animals Are Always Making Music 'In March alone, Common Ground had 2800 people gutting and cleaning houses citywide.' New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 1, 2006 The organization known as Common Ground and formally identified as the Common Ground Collective or Common Ground Relief organized more than ten thousand volunteers in New Orleans between September 2005 and December 2006. Begun with $50 in Malik Rahim's kitchen on the Friday after the post-Katrina flooding--that $50 the sum of funds held by Malik, his partner Sharon Johnson, and Scott Crow of Texas--"Common Ground" grew to serve the most hard- hit parts of New Orleans during the new organization's first few months. Dozens and then hundreds of activists from outside the city joined residents. In September, during the weeks-long swelter between Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the early volunteers of Common Ground provided water and ice. Across a city whose major streets under water, they provided food, clothing, and shelter as far as they could reach. They slept out in tents and waited for the single bathroom in Malik's house. Over the next few months, as electricity and running were still missing in New Orleans' poorest Wards, Common Ground volunteers set up Clinics and more centers for providing food, water, shelter and clothing in those Wards. They worked 18+ hours a day for weeks straight .They also stopped with their bodies the demolition of houses and churches and schools and hence communities in the Lower 9th Ward. By January 2006, Common Ground had working: a 'House of Excellence' for legal aid and computer-use in the 8th Ward: gardens and soil-remediation programs in several Wards: a center for house-gutting crews in the Upper 9th Ward: a radio-station: a lending-library: two Clinics: and the protectively occupied 'Little Blue House' in the Lower 9th Ward. I got to New Orleans from California on January 11. Animals Are Always Making Music 151 In February 2006 housing for Common Ground volunteers opened at the Catholic Church's Saint Mary's of the Angels School in the Upper 9th Ward, nearby location of the former Desire housing-project. In March, during weeks of colleges' Spring break, Common Ground lodged and fed busload after busload of volunteers at Saint Mary's and at the Art Egg building in New Orleans' Gert Town neighborhood. What got done that month made for a poster: 2854 Volunteers from 220 Colleges and 50 States and 8 Nations remediated ("gutted") 232 houses, four Schools, and one Church of New Orleans over a period of 30 days. Common Ground 'Coordinators' at Saint Mary's and elsewhere worked 18+ hours a day for weeks straight. I and many more marveled at them. We marveled at other accomplishments of volunteers (visiting and resident) that Spring. Unsanctioned work by "Common Grounders" helped to re- open the Martin Luther King, Jr. School in the Lower 9th Ward. Occupation by "Common Grounders" helped to keep open the St. Augustine Catholic Church of New Orleans, the United States' oldest African-American Catholic parish, in the Treme neighborhood. In early March 2006. while I was with a Common Ground delegation to Venezuela, ABC News' --Nightline-- ran a story about Common Ground that said about the organization: "A very remarkable group of Americans who just might save New Orleans." 152 Animals Are Always Making Music Pages of Seth Tobocman's Battle of the Lower 9 published in the After the Flood 'sine that Seth edited for the Common Ground Collective and World War III Illustrated, September 2006 Animals Are Always Making Music 153 154 Animals Are Always Making Music Donors to Common Ground in 2005-2006 included well- known artists and activists who lent their names--Dave Chappelle, Ben Cohen, Damian, Julian and Stephen Marley, Michael Moore, Bonnie Raitt, Anita and Gordon Roddick, Patti Smith, Cindy Sheehan, Built to Spill, Rancid, Sufjan Stevens, Steel Pulse, Veterans for Peace--and several who wished to be anonymous. Other artists worked in the field with Common Ground. Francesco Di Santis drew three to five portraits of survivors of the flood and volunteers to Common Ground, recording their statements, every day for nearly one year, from Fall 2005 onward (Check out http://postkatrinaportraits.org/ for Francesco's book.) Christopher Cardinale, Mac McGill, and Seth Tobocman came from New York City in 2006, gutted houses, and contributed drawings. In May 2006 Common Ground began to shift some resources and offices to the 13.2-acre Woodlands Apartment complex in Algiers on the West Bank of New Orleans. The "Woodlands project" meant to make a base, deepen roots, and expand connections with those who were native and long-deprived in the city. Opened in the late 1960s and once a luxurious enclave for tenants such as New Orleans Saints players, the Woodlands had become a recipient of U.S. Housing and Urban Development funding. It had grown even more neglected by its management after the 2005 flood. Less than 20% of the Woodlands' 361 apartments were occupied when we came to it in May 2006. Elevators no longer worked. Rats ran in waist-high grass. Gunfights over Crack-dealing popped off in the late night between the complex's three-story blocks. Trash heaped and stank on parking-lots beneath tenants' balconies because the apartment-complex's owner, Woodlands Development, LLC, hadn't paid bills. Animals Are Always Making Music 155 The finances of Woodlands Development, LLC were source of wonder and suspicion. Between July 2001 and April 2005 Woodlands Development, LLC accumulated a total debt of more than $5 million to their mortgage-holder, Am-South Bank. During that same span Woodlands Development, LLC reaped more than $1 million per year in profits from rentals at the complex and subsidizations from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Somehow profits had produced borrowings in almost equal measure--a seeming double-dip for Woodlands Development, LLC and its principals, who included former Tulane fullback Anthony Reginelli and current Orleans Parish School Board member Woody Koppel. Common Ground's accomplishments at the Woodlands between May and October 2006 included: •Setting of rents at pre-Katrina levels •Employment of more than forty residents in rehabilitation of the complex, many of these new employees ex-offenders or otherwise at-risk •Rehabilitation of more than 100 apartments. •A day-care center and alternative school •A satellite of the bicycle-shop RUBARB (Rusted Up Beyond All Recognition Bicycles) that was flourishing across the street from Saint Mary's in the Upper 9th Ward •Beginnings of a partnership between Invest Construction and Rebuild Green to employ 'previously low- income men and women' in the creation of low-cost, energy- efficient, elevated housing across New Orleans.' 156 Animals Are Always Making Music The Woodlands was lost between September and December 2006. The Woodlands Development, LLC repeatedly reneged on an agreement to sell the property to Common Ground despite huge improvements to the property under the CGC's management and substantial additions to our $5.5-million offer for purchase. Details of how our Woodlands base was lost, 'Facts of the Contested Sale', done to introduce a law-suit, follow as a cautionary guide for others. Residents of the Woodlands suffered most from the broken promises and insincere negotiations that you'll see detailed in the 'Facts', as these poor people lost jobs as well as their homes in November and December. Five years later, the onc-time base for Common Ground and residents' work and hopes is back to less than 25% occupancy of its apartments. Articles reporting on the succession of sorry events, including New Orleans Police Officers' assistance in a theft of property from Common Ground offices, remain up on the Internet.
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