New Orleans neighborhood residents focus on rebuilding

LOS ANGELES TIMES

NEW ORLEANS — The middle-class homeowners who gathered here on a recent weeknight call themselves the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association . It’s an unexceptional name — one that belies the challenges they face.

The members talked about public high schools; they said it would be nice if Gentilly had one again. They talked about the storm-blasted tree canopy and playgrounds neglected by a challenged city government. They wondered if grant money might help. Maybe bake sales.

They talked about forming a security patrol, with each household chipping in $26 per month: That day the police chief had announced a 73 percent citywide increase in burglaries.

Angele Givens, the association president, liked the patrol idea but raised an interesting issue, “If you own an empty lot in Gentilly right now, you don’t have much impetus to pay it.”

Givens should know. She tore down her house after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and is hoping to rebuild. She isn’t even living in Gentilly these days.

Getting better

Two years after their city was nearly annihilated by a massive levee failure, the residents of this New Orleans neighborhood acknowledged that their surroundings still looked pretty bad. But they also insisted that things slowly are getting better. Just 31 percent of Gentilly’s 16,000 addresses were reoccupied or renovated as of March, according to a survey by a Dartmouth professor. But another 57 percent finally were being fixed up.

Private citizens, not the government, deserved the credit, they said — a source of grim humor among those laboring to mend the neighborhood.

“Of course, we should also thank George Bush, Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin,” resident Robert Counce said sarcastically as the meeting wrapped up.