Well, I have to start off with my apologies. I’ve been down sick and out of the loop for a bit, got to love flu season! Anyway I’m back now and have a lot of catching up to do.

Let us begin with St Bernard Parish. For those based elsewhere, Louisiana has parishes instead of counties; it’s a holdover from the French era and a sign of the predominantly Catholic culture down here. Some of you may have heard of St. Bernard Parish before, an entire parish that was pretty much devastated, almost two thousand square miles.

In the Wikipedia entry for St Bernard we find the following:

On August 29, 2005, St. Bernard was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The storm damaged virtually every structure in the parish. The eye of Katrina passed over the eastern portion of the parish, pushing a 25-foot storm surge into the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (”MRGO”). This surge destroyed the parish levees. Almost the entire parish was flooded, with most areas left with between 5 and 12 feet of standing water. The water rose suddenly and violently, during a period which witnesses reported as no more than fifteen minutes. In many areas, houses were smashed or washed off their foundations by a storm surge higher than the roofs.

Dry text. Despite the damage done and the snail’s pace of recovery, the above is still just dry text if you have not been there. Fortunately I have been there, and often with a camera in tow, so before we get to the announcement du jour allow me to share a few visuals. After all, a JPG is worth a thousand TXTs.

Here is a house in St. Bernard, one of the ones that got off comparatively easy:

That picture was taken about three months after hurricanes Katrina and Rita rolled through. While the population has begun to return, there are still vast swaths of neighborhood that look like this or worse to this day.

Here is another one I took during that same time period (like many people, I was doing construction work when I returned because at first there was not much else available). The picture quality is poor because I was using a camera-phone, so if you are having trouble identifying it, the image is of a refrigerator in a tree. It’s a minor example of what storm surge can do.

So, despite its location adjoining the Lower 9th Ward, this area has not gotten much play in the national media. An entire parish submerged. Amazing.

Flash forward a little over three years to the present day. According to New Orleans Citi-Business it looks like a point of light has appeared on the horizon:

Ground was broken Tuesday for the redevelopment of the former St. Bernard housing development site, marking the start of construction for the first public housing to be built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

Dubbed Columbia Citi Residences at Bayou District, the project will include 1,326 rental and homeownership units. A total of 346 units will be public housing.

The process of rebounding from Mother Nature’s blows has been one fraught with problems. Take a look at the work of the OSI Katrina Fellows on this website and you will see. Through it all the lamentable lack of housing has been the specter casting its shadow over the process. People cannot return without a place for them to live, and the shortage of available housing has caused rents to skyrocket.

While the rest of the nation comes to grips with the mortgage crisis and floundering market, we are still fighting the post-hurricane destruction of viable living spaces.

I am very glad to see this getting started. As a city that has been in the grip of poverty for generations, and one that has a decided leaning towards working class or service industry jobs, housing is of paramount importance.

Would you want to be out in the cold for the holiday season?

Photos by George “Loki” Williams.