Debra Joseph moved back to New Orleans three weeks ago and is living in a trailer, but says the city "will come back" as a "different flavor."

09:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 23, 2006

BY KAREN A. DAVIS
Journal Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- Debra Joseph has avoided driving through the worst-hit Ninth Ward, a neighborhood she has known intimately.

Journal photo / Kris Craig

Linda Mace, of Berkley, Mass., and Brett Hawkes, of Seekonk, yesterday survey the destruction from Hurricane Katrina which ravaged Ninth Ward homes.

She did return to her hometown and even shuttled back and forth to a temporary home in Houston for nearly five months.

Yesterday for the first time, she went back to the Ninth Ward.

"I had to prepare for this," she said, as she drove through narrow streets with empty foundations, overturned cars and piles of rubble that used to be homes. "You have to prepare for devastation."

Joseph said it is hard to see an area of the city that she loves become a shell of what it once was -- a place where houses remain unoccupied, open fields have been converted to makeshift landfills and interstate underpasses have been turned into parking lots for washed-out cars.

Even though she had seen pictures of the devastated Ninth Ward, "pictures don't do it justice," she said yesterday.

Joseph moved back to her Gentilly neighborhood three weeks ago. But she is living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency-issue trailer in the front yard, unable to move back into her house because of flood damage and the toxic mold on the walls and ceilings.

Although the trailer is tiny compared with her three-bedroom home, Joseph calls it a blessing because, "at least I have a place to stay and food to eat" as she works to reclaim her own house.

Joseph, is a longtime resident who greets strangers, calls everyone "Baby" or "Sweetie" and apologizes for her Southern drawl.

Like most city residents, she has a story to tell about leaving New Orleans.

She and her elderly mother were rescued from their home the day after Hurricane Katrina hit and were taken to the Superdome, where they stayed for four days. Because her mother was ill, they were airlifted to the triage center at the Louis Armstrong Airport -- which Joseph calls "another story of stupidity," because officials had no water, no food and no medicine there for sick patients.

Joseph said her family was fortunate because she, her mother and brother were able to stay together and evacuate to Houston. Her mother died there in November.

Many other families were split up and many others lost family members. Joseph said when people were allowed back in the Ninth Ward after Dec. 1, more bodies were found in some of the houses.

Despite everything, Joseph has no doubt that her city will bounce back.

In time, residents will return, the closed retail stores and businesses will reopen and rebuilding will take place.

"It has to come back; it will come back," said Joseph, who serves as chairwoman of the board of the Central Congregational Church in New Orleans. "It will just be a different flavor. It won't be the New Orleans that I've grown up in all of my 56 years of life. They'll still do the partying and the Mardi Gras. But, as far as the real texture and flavor of the city, it will be different. It will be a different mixture of people."

Officials estimate that the population of New Orleans as a whole was about 65 percent African-American before Katrina. After the 1960s, when whites fled the city for the suburbs, the inner city became nearly 90 percent African-American, Joseph said.

After the hurricane ripped through the city last August, residents of all economic backgrounds were forced to leave.

Many are now pondering whether to come back.

"It's not that they don't want to," Joseph said. "The people who were here, who were poor and disenfranchised, can't come back. Those who were higher up the economic ladder can come back but won't because the education system's so terrible."

Rents in predominately black city neighborhoods in post-Katrina New Orleans doubled and tripled, Joseph said. Houses that would have rented for $400 or $500 per month a year ago are now going for $1,500 per month.

Even if people had insurance, settlement amounts fall far short of what they will need to repair their homes.

The inner city, which was just beginning to experience the arrival of condominium projects that aim to attract young professional whites and blacks, has now become a magnet for developers looking to buy up land and accelerate that process, Joseph said.

Now she sees the avenue for African-Americans to move up the economic ladder closing down with the elimination of affordable housing -- both rental and owned. She said that will irrevocably change the fabric of the city's formerly close-knit communities.

And even those who are financially able to return to the city may not come back because their children have moved to places with better education systems, Joseph said.

In New Orleans, the state has taken over the city's ailing school system, reopened a small number of public schools as charter schools and given pink slips to veteran teachers, who were part of the city's middle class, she said.

As a result, the schools aren't open and the teachers no longer have jobs, she said.

In the Ninth Ward, Joseph said, many people lived in homes that had been handed down from generation to generation. "Once you grow up in the Ninth Ward, you don't leave the Ninth Ward," she said.

"It couldn't be easy for any human being to lose all this and to live with it," she said -- "to have your house one day and come back to rubble."

kdavis@projo.com / (401) 277-7353

MULTIMEDIA: See more photos of the church group's activities and audio reports from Journal staffers Kris Craig and Karen Davis, who are traveling with the church group, at:

http://projo.com/campkatrina