"Hard Living in the Big Easy with Post-Katrina Rental Surges" : NOLA Indymedia

Hard Living in the Big Easy with Post-Katrina Rental Surges

The well-known moniker of New Orleans as the “Big Easy” was washed away with Katrina’s floodwaters. In its wake, we have been left with a crippled economy and the murky residue of rents that resemble prices in the “Big Apple.” If you have not heard, one-bedroom apartments are renting from $1,100 to $1,300, and two-bedroom units are advertised from $2,000 to $2,400 of hard-earned greenbacks. Often, I ask myself, “Self, who can afford these prices in an environment of financial uncertainty with limited options for employment?”

Before Katrina, the Treme, Marigny, and Bywater, three historic neighborhoods that survived the flooding, were already experiencing outrageous rental surges, and the African American communities, the musicians, the artists, the creative lifeblood and soul of this city who live in these areas, were being threatened by the encroaching gentrification.

The property piranhas were having a feeding frenzy, and in a three-year period from 2002 to 2005 pre-K, the costs of homes had reached an alarming peak. In the Marigny neighborhood where I live, downriver and east of the Viuex Carre, a double shotgun Creole cottage that was worth $120 grand in 2001 was selling at the hefty speculated value of $240 to $280 thousand dollars.

Fast-forward to the present and that same Creole cottage is selling for $350 thousand to half a million. Why? Because having outlasted the levee breaches in high-ground neighborhoods has become justification for even more inflated prices in a housing market not far from where people drowned to death. It’s all disturbingly macabre.

Obviously, the real-estate agencies want us to forget that the city remains more vulnerable to Mother Nature’s hurricanes, with an unfinished protection system, but I wonder whether the Army Core of Engineers will surprise us again, unveiling a new state-of-the-art papier-mâché levee constructed with all the missing mail that the post office has not delivered since the storm.

I am trying desperately, amigos, to find some humor in our “Big Easy” romanticism of the past, but there is little laughter left for those of us who rent in the future. Most landlords in the surviving neighborhoods have escalated rents to amounts that are beyond price gouging. With no end in sight and no rent control laws, there is a steady exodus of our artistic talent moving elsewhere. I hear very little concern about it in the local and national press. If Katrina didn’t displace you permanently, the perverse rents being demanded for the inhabitable apartments in the city will certainly flood your wallet, and leave its nasty watermark on your checking account.

If you are not in the construction industry, the service industry, or selling nails and sheetrock for a living, you are not in the few lucrative businesses that have outlived Miss bad thing’s fury. If you are in the arts industry, like myself, you are treading on swampy ground as the burgeoning arts economy before Katrina has taken a dramatic hit. Theater spaces are fewer and countless galleries have closed, while even the major museums are operating on limited hours.

This summer our wounded village is living up to another one of its famous
characterizations as a “city of ghosts.” The previously thriving street performers’ scene of musicians, jugglers, and magicians, who gave visitors to New Orleans a visceral experience of live entertainment, is also a long lost memory. In a recent walk through Jackson Square, the heart of the French Quarter, I saw one lonely tarot card reader at one end and two musicians blowing trombone and trumpet at the other corner, playing to invisible tourists.

The grand public plaza, normally the epitome of a daily carnival atmosphere, was desolate. New Orleans of old as a creative cauldron of bohemian tolerances, street life, and ritualistic culture, which was known to rise up from the ground, is a sad postcard of itself.

I truly love this city, but in my twenty-two years of life here, I have never been at such a crossroads, singing the familiar rock-n-roll Clash anthem of “should I stay or should I go now?” Even the local newspaper, “The Times-Picayune,” which has failed miserably in covering the rental crisis, has used this lyric as front-page headline to denote the mood of thousands caught in the same personal debate.

The tragedy is that I may not have an economical choice to stay and forge a living when basic shelter is oppressively expensive. New Orleans has been my poetic muse for half my life, but for numerous artists and working class residents, it is hard living in the “Big Easy” with post-Katrina rents as high as the lingering water lines.

Jose Torres Tama
poetafuego@juno.com
June 17, 2006