Squeezed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the Lower Ninth Ward was home to 14,000 people, 98 percent of whom were Black. More than a third of them lived in poverty.

While New Orleans was still submerged in water, business developer Pres Kabacoff suggested remaking the city into an “Afro-Caribbean Paris.” One city official told reporters that New Orleans would now be the Hollywood of the South, a hotspot for filmmakers and tourists. In all this chatter, however, one spot of New Orleans quickly rose to the top of the debate: the Lower Ninth Ward.

Squeezed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the Lower Ninth Ward was home to 14,000 people, 98 percent of whom were Black. More than a third of them lived in poverty, but nearly 59 percent of residents owned homes that had been in their families for generations—at least since the end of World War II, when Black veterans settled there. The houses were built on the most vulnerable of lands, what was originally swamp land.

Today, the Lower Ninth Ward has become symbolic of whether New Orleans will be turned from a black majority city into a white one. In January, the city’s rebuilding commission recommended giving residents a year to rebuild any neighborhood regardless of safety concerns. This move would leave political officials unaccountable. Since the city won’t promise financial assistance or even open schools and health care, it would basically say: if you have the money to rebuild, then go ahead. The proposal was a slap in the face since many poor residents had not even been able to afford to leave the city on their own, let alone now return to it.

Activists in the Ninth Ward claim that the bulldozing has actually already begun, but that is difficult to prove since the Lower Ninth was officially closed to the public for three months. But many buildings have been tagged by the city as uninhabitable, and in nearby St. Bernard Parish, 320 buildings have officially been slated for demolition.

In the Ninth Ward itself, the issue of rebuilding has become controversial even among organizers, who can’t agree on what would be best for the Black neighborhood. Some are calling to bring poor, Black folks home from the many cities where the government has scattered them. Other activists, however, insist the city isn’t safe enough. Some are even questioning what, exactly, anyone would be coming home to.

Is It Safe?

But Henderson insists that “the only way we’re going to build a new New Orleans is to be idealistic.”

Bringing people back to the Lower Ninth Ward is nihilistic, according to Russell Henderson, an organizer with the Rebuilding Louisiana Coalition, a grouping of small businesses and neighborhood associations. Henderson says that the same edict goes for Lakeview, another neighborhood that was devastated by the hurricane but which is home to middle-class whites. Both neighborhoods should be converted into wetlands, says Henderson, a white social policy professor at Dillard University.

Henderson takes issue with activists who want to bring people back to the Lower Ninth. “All of this discussion about bringing people back to the death zone is closing off discussion about what the real issue is—which is getting people to secure and safe ground,” he says.

Other organizers wonder what there is left to come home to. The Lower Ninth Ward had failing schools. Twenty-nine percent of residents didn’t have a high school diploma. “We fight to hold onto stuff that’s no longer working,” says Barbara Major, a Black community organizer who has been appointed to the mayor’s rebuilding committee and whose own home in New Orleans East was destroyed by the flooding.

Fear of future flooding isn’t the only issue. Environmental advocates warn that it’s hard to tell how safe the city is for people to be cleaning up their homes and rebuilding. For three months, city officials refused to open the Lower Ninth Ward to the public, citing safety concerns, including that buildings might be in danger of collapsing. For Tanya Harris, a Black organizer with ACORN and resident of the Ninth Ward, these concerns for safety have been used as tactics to keep poor, Black folks out of their neighborhoods. The wealthy Lakeview area was open to homeowners much sooner, and “they’re not being told that they’re contaminated,” she says.

Harris readily acknowledges that Lower Ninth residents need to know about environmental hazards, but she wonders why city officials aren’t concerned with other neighborhoods. “The floodwaters that washed over them are the same flood waters that washed over us,” she says.