New Orleans neighborhood rescues itself
By JOHN MORENO GONZALES / Associated Press Writer
Paul Pablovich was the very picture of a good neighbor as he shoveled debris off the curb
and mowed other people's lawns in Lakeview, a middle-class section of town that was
swamped with 15 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina and is now a patchwork of
gutted and newly built homes.
But he wasn't doing it entirely out of the goodness of his heart. He was protecting his
investment.
Pablovich, an entrepreneur who lived in a different part of New Orleans before Katrina,
bought a bungalow on the street from an elderly resident after the storm, renovated it and
plans to live there with his fiancee. He purchased a second abandoned house for
$107,000, fixed it up and hopes to resell it for $214,000. He would like to "flip" several
other properties on the block, too.
The way he sees it, capitalism is the road to recovery for Lakeview.
"It's how the country was built," Pablovich, 38, said of the $600,000 he has pumped into
the real estate market. "Free-market economics will kick in."
Lakeview, a 7,000-home mostly white enclave in a city that is predominantly black, has
emerged as a success story in the reconstruction of New Orleans through entrepreneurs
like Pablovich and strong civic organization that existed long before the storm.
In contrast, hard-hit black middle-class neighborhoods in eastern New Orleans do not
have the same financial means and civic organization, and are not drawing nearly as
much private investment. As a result, their recovery is crawling.
"If you're going to speculate, you're much more likely to speculate in Lakeview than you
would in the east," said Louisiana State University sociology professor Jeanne Hulbert.
"But you could end up, potentially, with a social and economic structure in the city that
really carves out the black middle class."
Nearly 21 months after Katrina, Lakeview has lights and other utilities, but still has no
firehouse and no public school.
But it is a community so fiercely independent it tried in the 1990s to secede from the city.
And its residents - who include business executives and other professionals - have
considerable organizational skills.
Lakeview's churches arranged for volunteers around the country to plant trees along
Canal Boulevard, the main drag. And recently, nearly 1,000 original and potential new
residents came to a civic association tutorial on how to navigate the city's bureaucracy
and find a reputable contractor.
In fact, the civic association drew up a list of recommended contractors by running credit
checks on them and consulting the Better Business Bureau.
The group is so organized it has compiled its own data on rebuilding, finding in a
February survey that 67 percent of Lakeview's lots were in some stage of transformation.
Seventeen percent were newly inhabited, just over 26 percent were under repair, and 23
percent had been demolished to pave the way for rebuilding.
In contrast, neighborhood leaders in eastern New Orleans, which encompasses four ZIP
codes to Lakeview's one, are just now undertaking a house-to-house count.
Independent research, at first glance, suggests Lakeview and eastern New Orleans have
rebuilt at similar rates. GCR and Associates Inc. found last week that based on utility
hookups, close to 36 percent of residents in the Lakeview ZIP code were back, versus 33
percent in the eastern New Orleans ZIP codes.
However, Richard Campanella, associate director of Tulane and Xavier universities'
Center for Biomedical Research, found that the flooding in Lakeview was, by some
measures, far more severe. For example, nearly 22 percent of homes in Lakeview got
more than 8 feet of water, compared with 3.5 percent in eastern New Orleans.
Lakeview has eclipsed eastern New Orleans in real estate sales since Katrina. Sixty-nine
houses were sold there nine months before the disaster, compared with 147 during the
past nine months of recovery, a 113 percent jump. In eastern New Orleans, 215 singlefamily homes were sold in the nine months before Katrina, and 287 during the past nine
months, a 33 percent increase.
As he painted over the rust on an iron fence that ringed his family's home in eastern New
Orleans, Hank Long said it was obvious to him that his part of town was rebuilding with
sweat equity more often than financial equity.
"In Lakeview, many of those houses were already paid for. A lot of people are still
paying their mortgages here," said Long, a 60-year-old black man. "Nobody has big
money here. They gutted out their house, and that's as far as they got. Whatever they
could do, they did on their own."
Hulbert of LSU said: "You have to remember the black middle class only took hold in the
1960s. That is different from several generations of middle-class life. Many middle-class
blacks in New Orleans were the first in their families to go to college, and it appears
many had their entire savings tied up in their homes."
David Bell, president of the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission,
which formed in March to bind together 15 area groups, said a lack of private investment
means eastern New Orleans is much more dependent on government recovery aid, with
all the bureaucracy and politics that entails.
For example, a centerpiece of the eastern New Orleans redevelopment plan is a proposed
$100 million shopping strip. But federal grants for the project will not be fully released
until the city comes up with 10 percent.
Back in Lakeview, residents like to say that they ask mostly one thing of the city: for it to
get out of the way.
TKTMJ Inc., a builder that is selling modular homes in the neighborhood, found the area
so profitable that it established an office in Lakeview and has dubbed one of its designs
"The Lakeview."
Tommy Callia, a sales representative with the company, noted that most of those able to
rebuild are middle class and white.
"I think we're not going to be as diverse as we once were, and that's going to be sad," he
said. "You can say it's a little like a gumbo: If you don't have all the ingredients,
something is missing in the taste."