This story originally appeared in Nonsite.org on Aug. 01, 2025. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Beg-Knows America is a regular feature on CBS Mornings. Hosted by native Louisianan David Begnaud, the show’s title is a play on his Cajun French surname. Begnaud focuses his segment on human interest stories, profiling ordinary Americans and their sometimes-remarkable everyday experiences. Against the “if it bleeds, it leads” logic of the legacy news cycle, Begnaud attempts to recall a different America — one too often buried in headlines of death, chaos, and political chicanery.
And while the neighbors-helping-neighbors narrative may be a strong tonic against cynicism, it is not above politics. Rather, his news story on New Orleans conforms to the dominant narrative of the city’s recovery since Hurricane Katrina. Instead of focusing on the imposition of an investor-led reconstruction and ongoing political struggles over the city’s future, we are fed a steady diet of stories about the strength of its residents, heroic acts of charity, and sanctimonious talk of the city’s cultural exceptionalism.
Beg-Knows’s coverage of New Orleans obscures how many of its recovery narratives are deeply linked to the privatized charities that dominated the city’s reconstruction in the aftermath of Katrina. In one summer 2024 installment titled “A Lesson in Kindness,” Begnaud profiled the work of Tulane University architecture students who constructed a small home for Benjamin Henry, a senior black man who had been living on the streets for nearly twenty years. When asked how he became homeless, sheltering under the Claiborne Expressway, Henry blamed himself, “My story was bad decisions. Hanging with wrong people, drugs, alcohol.”
It is this narrative, focused solely on Henry’s personal moral failings, that sets up the segment’s redemptive arc, with students designing and prefabricating a 440-square-foot house, which was later reassembled in a Lower Ninth Ward lot — the very epicenter of the 2005 flooding. The ending of this segment is as neat as it is predictable, with Begnaud and the Tulane architects-in-training treating Henry to the kind of big reveal now common on home-makeover television. Tears stream, altruism flows as Henry is given the keys to his “forever home.”
And, on its face, it is hard to criticize this kind of story when so many of us are searching for positive news in these highly uncertain times. However, its narrative focus masks a far more insidious picture of the unevenness of recovery efforts that leveraged the crisis to clear remaining working-class residents from areas ripe for touristic consumption, shore up decades-long battles to privatize public goods and spaces, and subsidize luxury development across the city.
Using Charity as a Smoke Screen
State abdication for an equitable recovery, far from being scandalized, was instead rewritten as returning to the appropriate role of government, and in the place of public responsibility, charity would provide for the deserving poor. In tune with the dominant thinking about how the city should be rebuilt, the segment emphasizes the virtue and utility of private sector–led development and the resiliency (read: deservingness) of those lucky enough to receive support.
It is this abdication that explains why there need be no hypocrisy in noting that these same forces stood by, with some cheering enthusiastically from the sidelines, as in the months and years after Hurricane Katrina, city leaders razed public housing complexes like the St Bernard and Lafitte to make way for market-rate housing, luxury shopping centers, and a slew of high-end cafes.
In 2007, when demolition began, the reigning narrative was that recovery demanded the city attract an influx of middle-class visitors and residents whose deeper pockets and consumer habits would anchor a resurgent economy. It is also why the Beg-Knows segment omitted detailing the rising rates of homelessness across the city, particularly among older adults, that may have provided the structural backdrop for Henry’s reality.
The fact is that this kind of charity work is wholly concomitant with the sort of redevelopment that has taken place over two decades, but the ruling narrative renders invisible nearly five decades of public retrenchment and disinvestment, presenting charity as a celebrated and, frankly, more effective form of social provision and place-making. This shift, which the show depicts innocuously enough, has been one of political intention and design, marshaled into existence by a unique interracial growth regime that had already begun to remake the city into a privatized playground decades before Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.
What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight — as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.
The redevelopment machine began to take aim at the components of the city’s public infrastructure that had long been a bastion of working-class power.
This diverse ensemble of neoliberal proponents argued that recovery required untethering from market regulation, labor rights, and safety standards; the privatization of formerly public sector services like housing and education; and public incentivization of homeowner rebuilding, tourism infrastructure, entrepreneurship, film and television production, and, perhaps most of all, private real estate development. In the days and months following the flood, New Orleans was articulated by hucksters of neoliberalism as a phoenix in the mangrove — a “For Sale” sign pinned around its neck.
The throughline from the earlier growth regime into this steroid-fueled thrust into hyperprivatization relied on the city as a site for touristic consumption. In earlier decades, city officials had pushed for containment and at times the removal of the working class from sites of consumption. Now they utilized disaster to fast-track rapid luxury gentrification of neighborhoods that had once been working-class strongholds. Redevelopment plans proposed in the subsequent months suggested everything from the reduction of the city’s footprint, excluding some of the most devastated and poor neighborhoods, to new, more restrictive zoning practices that would make the inclusion of affordable housing or public services near impossible.
Undermining Working-Class Power
In quick succession, the redevelopment machine began to take aim at the components of the city’s public infrastructure that had long been a bastion of working-class power: within six months of the storm, the city fired 4,500 public school teachers in preparation for what would become the nation’s first all-charter school system; a project to demolish public housing that met resistance before the storm was accelerated — by 2007, more than 85 percent of the city’s public housing was either awaiting demolition or had already been torn down.
At the same time, the public dollars earmarked for rebuilding took the shape of reinforcing private infrastructure, including more than $450 million for upgrades to the Superdome, hundreds of millions in new hotel development, and new incentives aimed at enticing tech startups with the promise of remaking the city à la Austin by way of San Francisco. The city became a laboratory of Frankenstein proportions for the most extreme forms of uneven development.
What appeared surprising to those of us watching was that this massive dispossession of the laboring classes of New Orleans happened with, what at least has appeared to be, little opposition and none of the national protest demonstrations that would be dedicated to the causes of individuals like the 2006 Jena Six case. Even the aforementioned firing of the city’s public educators, traditionally seen as essential to city infrastructure, met little organized resistance within or beyond the city.
Similarly, there was little criticism and even less outrage as the city utilized the suspension of federal labor regulations to coerce migrants into the risky, abusive, and highly exploitative labor of rebuilding the city’s touristic core. In part, this was a result of the forced exodus of working-class residents following the storm to Houston, Memphis, and elsewhere. However, this was also possible because conscious, powerful working-class organization had ceased being a living, breathing part of the city’s framework as it had throughout the nation after the mid-twentieth-century taming of organizing labor and subsequent deindustrialization. The swift precision with which this restructuring took place has allowed narratives of the city’s unique recovery to operate as siren songs for the continued advance of urban neoliberalism.
It was also buoyed by the pervasive narrative of think tanks and profiteers and parroted by local elected officials on “resilience.” Promulgated as a catchphrase among right-leaning think tanks seeking to expand urban privatization, the language of resilience took on a life of its own in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Resilience, functioning as a dog whistle of sorts, reinforced a framework of what can only be described as neoliberal Darwinism as policy: within the context of personal responsibility, it was only those with individual motivation who had been able to bounce back. Indeed, “resilience” provided the city with the shorthand necessary to actively promote the influx of middle-class prospectors with each new condominium built and sold as essential to recovery. The fanfare of resiliency masked how this modern-day bootstrapping, which was creating a new elite across the city, was in fact subsidized by the state.
Where public outrage emerged, it focused not on the dislocation of the working poor but on the displacement of black New Orleanians from what then mayor Ray Nagin quipped should stay a “chocolate city.” It was comments such as Nagin’s that obscured focus on how an interracial, black-led political regime united in the months after Katrina to advance city-subsidized privatization.
Instead of a strategy aimed at delivering critical resources to dispossessed residents, the benchmark for a “just” recovery was calibrated as the maintenance and return of black residents with little regard for their relative need. Demands for racial equity, engendered in the basest forms of representation (i.e., black mayors, black developers, etc.), have operated to blunt the disruption and devastation of the city’s rebuilding, thus making the sharply growing precarity of most city dwellers easier for some to stomach. Indeed, since the 1970s, the infatuation with a market-first approach to city revitalization transcended both partisan and racial lines. The result, consistent across the past six decades, has been devastating for the working class and poor.
An Expanding Affordability Crisis
There is nowhere where this is more evident than in the realm of housing, where gentrification has been driven by the speculative market to new and extreme proportions. Twenty years after the storm, rising living costs and stagnant wages have contributed to New Orleans’ crisis of affordability. The Data Center’s 2024 report, “Who Lives in New Orleans and Metro Parishes Now?,” reveals a precarious, cost-burdened population in the decades since Katrina. Increasing numbers of New Orleanians are severely cost-burdened, meaning over 50 percent of household income is absorbed by housing costs. While 24 percent of New Orleanians were identified as severely cost-burdened in 2004, two decades later, the Data Center reports, some 34 percent of city residents faced the same predicament.
Not surprisingly, in recent years, upward of 20,000 New Orleanians are awaiting subsidized housing vouchers that would significantly lower their rent, while a nonprofit watchdog organization estimated that the city needed more than 47,000 additional units of affordable housing to adequately shelter its existing population.
Even with a Section 8 voucher in hand, the market-driven motives of those in power make housing access for working-class residents nearly impossible. Recent data demonstrates that more than 70 percent of landlords in the city refuse housing vouchers, leaving low-income residents in areas of concentrated poverty that double as resource deserts with little access to food, public transportation, or social services. In just the last year, family homelessness has risen across New Orleans by at least 62 percent and is anticipated to keep climbing; nearly a quarter of the city’s population lives in poverty. In reality, neoliberal restructuring vested a city that is increasingly economically polarized.
These statistics do not make New Orleans an outlier by any means but rather reflect a broader, national affordability crisis that is now taking shape in New York, Los Angeles, and in college towns and smaller cities like Madison, Wisconsin, as well as other centers of the “New South” like Austin, Atlanta, and Nashville. As in other historical moments, the rising costs of housing have forced many Americans to make tough choices, such as prioritizing rent over other basic needs, living farther away from the city center and facing longer commute times, or sometimes being forced to accept substandard, overcrowded, and unsafe housing.
Unlike other historical moments, we bear witness to the further abdication of even basic protections for working-class residents that were once seen as the responsibility of the state.
Yet, unlike other historical moments, we simultaneously bear witness to the further abdication of even basic protections for working-class residents that, at least during the reign of the New Deal Democratic Party coalition, were seen as the responsibility of the state. The problem of gentrification in New Orleans and cities across the nation and globe is not merely what it has come to be depicted as: a cultural problem of yuppie invaders, pretentious foodie scenes, and long-rooted communities of color under siege — though one cannot walk down Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and not comment on all these phenomena. Rather, the core problem here is one of a market-dominant approach to housing and the ideological acceptance of housing as a commodity rather than a basic right.
As the government continues to cede responsibility for social welfare, the fact is that the origins of and the solution to the current crisis lie squarely within the realm of politics. The rent-intensification currently underway in New Orleans and elsewhere entails a series of complex processes that undergird what has become essentially a dom/sub relationship between capital and the state: corporate tax breaks, diminished environmental regulation and labor rights, and zoning laws; state incentivization of private sector commercial development; degraded public transportation infrastructure; the siting, construction, and demolition of public space and buildings; and real estate market speculation.
The state is central and yet subordinate to the reigning growth coalition that runs New Orleans and all American cities, for that matter. This is the outcome of a concerted and sustained assault on social democratic reforms built by the New Deal coalition from the Depression years through the reforms of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Always more anemic compared to more robust social wage in other advanced industrial societies, the decimation of social democracy in the United States has returned inequality to levels that rival the age of Robber Barons and empowered an obscenely wealthy capitalist class to reign over labor, land, natural resources, public institutions, and infrastructure in ways that are increasingly impervious to popular democratic pressure and redress.
Cynics and Trolls
For those who believe that the state should provide basic protections for all citizens, things do not look promising in the current moment. The twentieth anniversary of the Katrina disaster coincides with the first year of Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House, and unlike his first term, which was marked by congressional opposition and obstruction to his intended reforms, this second act has steamrolled what remains of social protections built up during the reign of the New Deal coalition; the right to asylum, which defined US Cold War policy; and even constitutional civil liberties.
Trump was sworn in just as wildfires ravaged parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The combination of a prolonged dry spell and strong Santa Ana winds coming in from the Transverse Ranges allowed the fires to spread rapidly and to the point of being uncontrollable; fourteen separate fires in Los Angeles and San Diego County burned the entire month of January 2025.
All told, thirty people were killed, over 200,000 southern Californians were evacuated, and some 18,000 structures were destroyed, consuming nearly ninety square miles of land throughout the region. The disaster images on social media and mainstream news were apocalyptic, with century-old, iconic Mexican fan palms turned to cinder and whole communities and strip malls reduced to charred rubble.
For a time in twentieth-century America when progressive state intervention was widely expected, such a catastrophe would have been met with national concern and coordinated action. Not this time. Instead, right-wing bloggers and pundits quickly peddled apocryphal nonsense, with one of the most widely circulated tales being that a homeless person set the initial fires. Others questioned the actions and competency of firefighters in the region, their level of preparation, and tactics. When the president finally visited Los Angeles, he seized on this unsubstantiated criticism of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, which is among the country’s most well-trained and seasoned in dealing with wildfires.
Rather than commit the federal government’s resources full stop, Trump used the disaster as a way of throttling his opponents on the Left.
Rather than commit the federal government’s resources full stop, he used the disaster as a way of throttling his opponents in this Left coast region, and he openly questioned the leadership of the city’s first black woman mayor, Karen Bass. And shortly after his Los Angeles tour, his administration pledged to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.
Not to be outdone, some on the Left launched their own divisive petty politics in the ethers. Instead of a broad appeal for the redress of disaster victims built on the best overtures of the New Deal and Great Society periods, many began parsing out victims, reaching conclusions based on racial identity and deserving status. Many quickly seized upon the fate of Altadena, a community at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains that had a sizable black population and a long-standing history of interracial liberalism like its neighbor Pasadena.
The fixation on black homeownership and wealth creation recalled post-Katrina fetishism of the Lower Ninth Ward, especially by national media, celebrity benefactors, and activist organizations, who had quickly singled out a neighborhood of black homeowners as more deserving of investment, all the while ignoring the plight of black public housing tenants. In addition to fixating on Altadena as the target of aid, others on the Left simultaneously chided any attention to victims in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu areas, writing them all off as white, wealthy, and undeserving despite the equally horrific loss of life, livelihoods, community, and housing in those areas.
This was shortsighted and misanthropic, the kind of social media moralism that thrives, festers, and spreads because of its oversimplicity if not outright simple-mindedness. How we got here deserves its own dedicated thesis, but this grim state of affairs is partly a consequence of decades of neoliberal rollbacks, which have not only decimated old social democratic institutions but also civic expectations about government; our connections to each other as a polity, however tenuous and fraught that might be; and the sense that we might solve our problems through collective action and the political process.
What the cynics and trolls miss is how thousands of working-class lives were negatively affected by the fires in these more affluent areas, where many working Angelenos lost their jobs and other resources, and as the displacement of wealthier residents created pressure on housing markets and affordability throughout an already exorbitantly expensive metropolitan area.
Neoliberalization
Looking back from our own times, the arrival of Lyndon B. Johnson in New Orleans in the wake of 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, where he pledged to shore up the city’s levee system and guarantee that the housing market was insurable and viable, all seems light-years away from our political moment. In the face of the complete abandonment of national disaster preparedness and protection Trump has pledged, New Orleans continues to operate as a portent of what is to come in American cities.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the things we are now witnessing are novel outcomes of the long durée of Katrina or the subsequent subprime mortgage crisis or, worse yet, the hubris and chaos that have defined Trump’s leadership in American public life. Instead, it is important that readers and anyone who cares about the future of the city and American urban life more generally be aware of the longer historical processes that have created these deep inequalities of power and wealth.
This double issue invites readers to come to terms with how New Orleans has been remade in the interests of the investor class — a shifting constellation of local and national corporations, developers, government officials, think tanks, and pundits — even as they’ve leveraged authenticity and nostalgia to placate dissent and how the battle for a more just city is yet to be won or even waged in any sustained way. As a collection of essays, written in response to recovery efforts over the last two decades, Missing New Orleans is addressed explicitly to questions of political economy, describing how a recovery project driven by propertied interests has fostered an extreme housing affordability crisis, and makes the case for why decommodification of housing should be the centerpiece of popular left politics in the Crescent City and beyond.
This collection will serve as a primer for those unfamiliar with the events of 2005 and as an antidote to the broader problem of amnesia that afflicts American life more generally. In particular, we want to remind publics of how New Orleans provided a laboratory for the most extreme neoliberal policies that are now being enacted throughout cities globally. Because, for the city’s decades-old growth machine, this debate and the wholesale displacement wrought by catastrophic flooding offered an opportunity to rapidly adopt modalities of neoliberal urban governance, now the modus operandi in cities across the globe. New Orleans was the harbinger for what is to come, and now from Los Angeles to Detroit, we are bearing witness to ways hyperprivatization is producing and compounding new and increasingly acute inequities.
The essays presented here interrogate the fissure lines within the recovery narrative but also complicate depictions of the storm itself as the defining crisis for the city; instead, the authors map the contested, bipartisan, and diverse nature of the neoliberal assault on the city prior to the storm and the agents of and processes by which subsequent restructuring was enabled. This symposium examines how neoliberalization not only restructures state-market relations but also how it is implicated in our understanding of ourselves as consumers and citizens, our sense of political possibilities, and processes of culture-making that become critical to selling the narrative of recovery, all the while undermining any socially just alternatives.
It is why, as long-time lovers of New Orleans, we continue to cherish the city but in the way you might love estranged kin: keenly aware that an intimately shared history and deep affection remain, but sobered by each and every interaction, bracing for the inevitable letdown that comes quickly and without reprieve. And yet, we also believe that there is, and there must be, a fight for a redistributive city politic.
The effort to decommodify housing must focus on broader state regulations and the revival of approaches that once guaranteed some level of appropriate, safe, secure housing outside of one’s ability to pay.
If this struggle is to coalesce in New Orleans and elsewhere, it will indubitably center on housing — a struggle being crystalized within the mayoral race in New York City where an upstart campaign from the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has made affordability the central issue — disrupting the bipartisan growth regime that is now floundering in a rare moment where an expanded electorate embraced a working-class politic.
The effort to decommodify housing must instead focus on broader state regulations and the revival of approaches that once guaranteed some level of appropriate, safe, secure housing outside of one’s ability to pay. Rent controls are making a comeback in some cities, and housing cooperatives, a proven model in many places, might be expanded with state support to meet housing needs and minimize working-class displacement in rapidly redeveloping areas.
Lastly, public housing was abandoned as a social ideal in the United States long before the Clinton administration enacted HOPE VI legislation, a program that sought to remake public housing parcels into a boon for developers and bastions of middle-class consumption under the guise of mixed-income redevelopments. Likewise, we should remember the earliest public housing complexes like New York’s Harlem River Houses and Chicago’s Ida B. Wells Homes, which were constructed during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration, respectively, were conceived as transitional housing and opposed by politicians who feared substantial investments in public housing would open the door to socialism.
Hope for New Orleans and Beyond
Despite its maligned place in Cold War America, publicly financed and managed housing might and should be revitalized, perhaps along the model of social housing instituted in places like Vienna, which embarked on an ambitious plan of expropriation, the construction of some sixty thousand new apartment units between 1923 and 1934, and supported homeless war veterans and the poor who seized unused lands for housing construction. Apartment complexes were connected to consumer cooperatives, childcare facilities, and schools. Rents were kept low, based solely on operating costs, and averaged about 4 percent of a worker’s monthly wages in 1926.
Since its foundation, the Viennese social housing system has been modified and includes a more extensive public-private partnership, but the process of housing development remains substantially more democratic than any city in the United States. In the housing schemes of Vienna, residency was not strictly limited to the most impoverished segments and consequentially was not stigmatized and socially isolated as it was in the postwar United States, where inner-city public housing and suburban homeownership were codified as the provinces of the undeserving black poor and the deserving white middle-class citizens, respectively.
There are signs that this shift is possible. Over the last year, Seattle residents voted overwhelmingly to establish a social housing development agency. And in an even more stunning victory, they voted to fund the new agency through a progressive tax on the wealthy, a measure that faced the loud opposition of the city’s powerful technology sector. These are concrete alternatives to our current market-centric model of housing, which has produced hypersegregation, slum conditions, homelessness, and social instability in cities like New Orleans. And while none of these housing alternatives should be seen as panacea, there is at least a possibility that, when combined, they comprise a path toward decommodification and the guarantee of housing as a basic right.
The official discourse of remembering the disaster and marking the road to recovery has come to resemble the form of the city’s iconic jazz funerals. In that beloved local tradition, a slow, solemn dirge guides the funeral procession to the grave site, and then at the decisive moment of internment, joyous horn blasts and an up-tempo drumbeat celebrate the life of the departed, carne vale in the truest sense of farewell to the flesh, the spirit cut free from worldly travails.
In the jazz funeral repertoire, Negro spirituals like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “I’ll Fly Away” transform mourning into momentary escape from earthly travails. Local elites have appropriated this tradition as yet another symbol of resilience and a poignant marker of the city’s cultural particularity, emptying the practice of its deeper roots in working-class struggles, social aid, and benevolence. As it turns out, all traditions can be bought and sold.
Those who care about social justice need to strike up a new band, one that places the interests of the Crescent City’s dispossessed and laboring classes in the main line and call a new tune that lays bare the fundamental political-economic forces producing inequality in New Orleans and other cities across the country. Otherwise, we will be left with the same ensemble of powerful investor-class interests, their think tanks, foundations, and second liners. And we know they are marching down a dead-end street.
