Op-Ed Columnist: Rebuilding on Their Own

"Cities change from the bottom up, block by block," said Roberta Gratz, as we drove down Magazine Street, on our way to the Lower Ninth Ward here.

The author of "The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs," Gratz, like her friend and mentor Jacobs, is a student of what she calls "urban regeneration." Since 2007, she has owned a home in New Orleans, and she was giving me what amounted to a tutorial on her next book subject: the rebuilding of the city post-Katrina.

"Look at this," she said, gesturing to storefronts. "This is one of the longest shopping streets in the country. There are residential and commercial buildings, and local stores and chain stores. Very little was done for streets like this because the big money went to the tourism districts," she said. "This grew back organically." Which, she believes, is the way it always happens.

I was already coming around to that point of view. Some months earlier, when I had gone to the Rockaways, a stretch of New York coastal towns that had been pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, I had been struck by the lack of government response. Personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up offices, where they sipped coffee while waiting for Sandy victims to drop by. The city's sanitation department did heroic work, but other city agencies were largely invisible. (City officials later complained that they had done much more than I had acknowledged.)

Mostly, people helped other people. Churches donated space where victims could get staples. Nonprofit organizations were everywhere. Volunteers went from house to house, helping homeowners clear out debris.

I remember wondering at the time if it was always going to be like this. Despite the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for Sandy recovery, would the rebuilding be as ad hoc, and as volunteer-dependent, as the initial emergency phase? If New Orleans is any indication, the answer is yes.

It is not as if New Orleans didn't have a grand plan. Its plan was put together by many of the city's machers, which concluded that the Lower Ninth, the poorest district in the city, which had been virtually wiped out by Katrina, should never be rebuilt. The plan called for turning a neighborhood that once had 14,000 residents into "green space." The plan died a quick, deserved death.

And then?

"I remember going to visit a house in the Lower Ninth four months after Katrina with the owner, who was seeing it for the first time," said Gratz. "It was as bad as anything you'd ever seen. He looked at it and said, 'It was in bad shape when I got it. I fixed it once, and I'll fix it again.' "

Gratz told me this story in a sweet little restaurant called Café Dauphine in the Lower Ninth. It had been open for nine months. The woman who owned it lived across the street. Business was good, said the maître d'. Many of the houses on the surrounding street had been rebuilt, but there were still many that had not been touched since Katrina.

That is what you saw all over the Lower Ninth. People had trickled back — not everyone because not everyone could afford to come back, but more than you'd think. Volunteer groups were helping to rebuild homes. Neighbors were helping neighbors. Most strikingly, Brad Pitt's rebuilding organization, Make It Right, has spent $24 million to build around 90 colorful, environmentally friendly homes in the Lower Ninth — with plans to build about 60 more. There are many people in New Orleans, Gratz included, who believe Pitt is one of the true heroes of the rebuilding effort.

The city government no longer ignores the rebuilding in the Lower Ninth. It has small but meaningful programs to help smooth the path for people who want to move there. Then again, it has idiotically planted palm trees along one of the Lower Ninth's major streets, an inexplicable choice in a city known for its great live oaks.

Back in the Rockaways, the "ground up" rebuilding has already begun. Habitat for Humanity has arrived in force. In 2005, firefighters from New York went to New Orleans to help out after Katrina; now, firefighters from New Orleans are returning the favor. A group called Friends of Rockaway, using grant money from the Robin Hood Foundation, the primary philanthropy of the hedge fund industry, is employing local people to rebuild homes in their neighborhoods.

And government? New York City started a program called Rapid Repairs. People would order a boiler from the program and then wait for weeks for it to arrive. And half the time, it was the wrong boiler and had to be returned. It only reinforced what people in the Rockaways were coming to understand.

They're on their own.

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