Every week Alicia Plummer leaves home through the landscaped entry of Fairway Estates ineastern New Orleans and shops for groceries at the nearest store that meets her needs: a Wal-Mart Supercenter on Tchoupitoulas Street, 13 miles away.
Merlin McGhee, a public school math teacher who works in Algiers, also does most of her shopping long before returning to her restored home in eastern New Orleans’ Spring Lake subdivision, where nearly 80 percent of her neighbors have rebuilt their community after Hurricane Katrina.
Neither has much choice.
That’s because the area of New Orleans east of the Industrial Canal remains a commercial desert, despite the fact that a population roughly the size of Lake Charles lives there — and is wealthier. On balance, the east is wealthier than the rest of New Orleans, too.
The area has one major supermarket, no department store, no major electronics or appliance stores, and perhaps two white-tablecloth restaurants — almost nothing in the way of ordinary retail amenities. This in a community that, hidden behind the commercial blight lining Interstate 10, contains largely rebuilt subdivisions of neat brick homes reclaimed by homeowners who clawed their way back from Katrina.
Residentially, eastern New Orleans is back. Commercially, it’s a near-basket case.
“Somebody said we have to drive past 50,000 people to buy underwear,” said McGhee. “But there’s money out here in the East. We don’t understand why there isn’t a huge amount of interest.”
Residents are baffled
The apparent disconnect between supply and demand has left residents baffled and angry.
Some neighborhood and community leaders see evidence of a de facto conspiracy by bankers, planners, nonprofits and at times city officials — no matter the administration — to promote the recovery of other areas of New Orleans over the interests of the East.
Asks Greg Hamilton, a former federal housing executive and former neighborhood association president: How else do you explain that the community houses nearly a quarter of the city’s population, “yet virtually nothing happens in New Orleans East in terms of development?”
The conundrum even baffles many professionals.
Demographer Greg Rigamer has data indicating that 71,000 people live in eastern New Orleans. If it were a city, it would be the sixth-largest in the state.
Their median household income is about $41,000, according to Esri, a national demographics consulting company. That is significantly higher than the $36,200-per-household Esri estimates for Lake Charles.
“I think it’s lack of confidence in the community,” said Rigamer. “I don’t know what else to say. You clearly have the demand. You clearly have the property available. So why don’t you see a movement to invest to serve that community?”
The most common answer is: perception.
Under this widely held theory, eastern New Orleans remains haunted by its pre-Katrina reputation as a community overburdened by a disproportionate share of unkempt, federally subsidized apartment complexes that blossomed after the crippling oil crash of the early 1980s. By Katrina’s arrival in 2005, dense, low-income housing, lax code enforcement and the crime those conditions bred had blighted what once had been a robust and diverse bastion of middle- and upper-income New Orleanians.
Moreover, that pre-Katrina reputation seems to be validated behind the windshield if a tour of the area is confined to its major commercial arteries of Interstate 10, Lake Forest Boulevard, Read Boulevard, Morrison Road and others, where shuttered and under-used strip malls are the norm.
But behind those dreary commercial corridors are built-out subdivisions where scattered vacant homes still dot almost every block, but where the overwhelming impression is of recovery. In some areas, like Eastover and along Bullard Avenue, the impression is not just recovery, but substantial prosperity.
“Most people never get into the residential area,” said Barbara Johnson, executive director for an economic development initiative in the East called Fast Forward Main Street. “When you tell them there are 70,000 people back — to a person, people are shocked. Because the public areas look like a bomb went off.”
City Councilman Jon Johnson and others say the region also suffers the burden of the public sector’s slow recovery. Joe Brown Park is still largely closed, the East New Orleans Regional Library has not been rebuilt and 7th District police officers still work out of temporary quarters.
The area’s major hospital, Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital, which many believe will be a commercial magnet, has not reopened.
Perhaps most crucially, neither has Lake Forest Plaza, the long-awaited reincarnation of the big regional mall that in the late 1970s was the crown jewel of the East. Planners and neighborhood leaders want to see the mall, stagnant long before Katrina, rebuilt to catalyze growth all around.
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