Today, Grand Valley State University (GVSU) hosted reporter and author Jed Horne who spoke on Hurricane Katrina's lasting impacts on New Orleans and the United States as a whole. Horne's lecture was hosted as part of the University's ongoing "Conversations on Poverty and Economic Justice" series, the first of which was a lecture last week by Jonathan Kozol. Horne--who is a metro editor of New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper--received a Pulitzer Prize for role in covering Hurricane Katrina. Horne also recently published a book titled Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City from which some of his talk was drawn.

Horne began by telling his audience that Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster but rather that it was a man-made and engineered disaster. Horne said that the problem began when the levee system collapsed after the storm had already passed, revealing that the federal engineering of the levee system was terribly flawed. This was compounded by a complete failure of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to respond quickly to the disaster, with DHS taking a week to enter the city while media was there within an hour. Many of course saw this as racist and questioned the government's priorities, a charge which seems all too clear with DHS' rapid response to recent wildfires in predominately white and Republican area of California. Horne argued that Hurricane Katrina is a defining moment of Bush's presidency and the failure of DHS--like the failure of the invasion of Iraq--is one of the areas on which his legacy will be based. Despite this, many government officials--especially Republicans--have tried to forget Katrina and its revelations of flawed government planning and inequality.

Post-Katrina New Orleans has become an incubator for what Horne called "miniature experiments" in urban planning and social engineering. Horne said that the destruction of the city has brought about possibilities for re-engineering the city and cited several areas including healthcare and education through which new styles of development and planning are being considered. The city has liquidated the government of a host of corrupt officials, consolidating and restructuring the government bureaucracy in an attempt to address its historical failures and corruption. State-level government has taken over the education system, instituting a variety reforms including eliminating the teachers unions and building charters schools. Horne asserted that the plan--while drawing significant criticism for its advocacy of charter schools--fended off a larger rightwing plan to implement a voucher system. There are reasons for "guarded optimism" with the school reform effort, as test scores seem to be up. Similarly, healthcare has been restructured towards a model emphasizing clinics and outpatient care while stressing the importance of preventive care.

All of these "experiments" have arisen out of Mayor Ray Nagin's difficult decision about how best to rebuild the city. Horne explained that Nagin was essentially faced with two choices: allowing people to come back as a means of renewing economic growth or adopting the advice of urban planners who argued that portions of the city were unsafe due to the threat of future hurricanes and should not be rebuilt. Nagin chose a slightly different path, adopting neoconservative plan that gave rebuilding permits to developers and complying with a Bush administration favored reconstruction philosophy emphasizing free-market policies and giving federal money to corporations via contracts. While this strategy worked to get Nagin reelected, Horne told the audience that despite all the incentives given to corporate investors, the investors are not coming through. He further predicted that the reconstruction might do for the free-market system what the Iraq War did for the doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Horne said that 70% of households are now back in New Orleans, but he is worried that rather than redeveloping into a thriving city, a more realistic end might be a city like Detroit. He argued that people will soon realize that while they have their homes back, they are in blight and that they have been victimized twice--once by Katrina and again by blight. He said that many people will find themselves in a situation where they rebuild their homes and then will be unable to insure or sell them. Moreover, middle-class professionals--who are slowly coming back into the city--initially left in great numbers. At the same time, the federal government has been unwilling to build a flood defense system despite the demands of citizens for a flood system that could defend against a category 5 storm. Horne said that without a flood defense system there is really not much point to investing in the city. The country has failed to make the reconstruction of New Orleans a national priority, despite the fact that the $30 billion cost for a flood defense system is a fraction of what is being spent in Iraq.

Despite the difficulties facing New Orleans, Horne expressed a sense of hope regarding the city. He cited a grassroots revival in the city in which in the days, months, and now years after the hurricane residents came together to take care of each other and discuss the reconstruction of the city. Horne said that the radical changes in New Orleans are comparable to the 1960s and the collapse of communism in Prague in the 1990s in that there is a real potential for positive change and a re-prioritizing of life. He said that people in Michigan can help New Orleans by watching the situation and encouraging Michigan's federal legislators to vote in favor of reconstruction projects.