Katrina’s America

On August 29, 2005, when I was twenty-four and living in Connecticut, I watched the levees surrounding metropolitan New Orleans collapse on television. I called my ex-girlfriend, a fifth-generation New Orleanian who was then living in Lafayette. When she answered the phone, I heard crying in the background. Friends from New Orleans had evacuated to her place, and they too were watching the city fill with water on television. People who had remained in the city were drowning in their attics.

Eager to offer words of hope, I said, “Tomorrow, we will see the most powerful country in the history of the world do something unequivocally good.” This was the era of the Iraq War and though I opposed the war, American power seemed self-evident. I also had faith (albeit with every possible qualifier) that things usually got better over time. So I imagined that the next day would bring something akin to a humanitarian campaign of shock and awe.

The next day, no help came, and more people drowned in their attics. The day after that, no help came, and more people drowned in their attics. Others succumbed to dehydration on hot roofs and highway overpasses. All of this was broadcast live on television. As news helicopters flew low over the city, some people waved white towels, others American flags.

I have thought a lot about that phone call over the past twenty years, and not only because my ex-girlfriend and I ended up getting married. I considered myself a smart person, and not naïve. How could I have been so wrong about my own country?

I became a historian, focused on disasters. I got a job at Tulane, moved to New Orleans, and wrote a book about Katrina. A grim measure of how things have changed since 2005 is that Katrina does not surprise my students the way it surprised me. The current generation of undergraduates in my classes, born after the flood, spent middle school in lockdown drills and high school on Zoom. I think of the young woman who took my class on the climate crisis during the fall 2021 semester: She evacuated Louisiana in advance of Hurricane Ida, arriving to her parents’ house in California in time to help them evacuate from an advancing wildfire. By the time the family reached a hotel, she was developing a cough, so she slept in the car, correctly assuming that it was not the smoke upsetting her lungs, but COVID. She and her peers do not expect that the federal government will meet our nation’s challenges with humanitarian shock and awe.

The realization that New Orleans’s history is America’s future has changed how many of us understand the present. Until recently, historians characterizing the United States in the twenty-first century tended to begin their accounts either with the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, to focus on the changing relationship between the US and the world, or with Barack Obama’s election on November 4, 2008, to focus on the changing salience of race in American life. Both are powerful moments, but neither fulcrum point seems to offer as much conceptual leverage as August 29, 2005, now does. Consider the past quarter century of flood, fire, and disease, our declining expectations and withering state capacity, the widening inequality and fracturing experience of reality. This is Katrina’s America.

The phrase “Katrina’s America” reframes the Katrina story. Katrina has most commonly been conceived of as an event in the history of New Orleans, and one most clearly understood on a neighborhood level. Both the Lower Ninth Ward and Chalmette were underwater after the levees broke, for example, but five years after the flood, in Chalmette, the middle-class white neighborhood in St. Bernard Parish, six out of ten people had been able to return, while in the Lower Ninth, the working-class Black neighborhood just across the parish border, only three out of ten had. Nobody had returned to the Magnolia, Calliope, Lafitte, or St. Bernard housing projects, even though they sustained little damage, because the mandatory evacuation order provided an occasion to have them demolished. On the river side of St. Charles Avenue, in the Garden District, whole house generators and private security guards kept the neighborhood running through it all. Like New Orleans itself, Katrina often is best understood in terms of local distinctions.¹

“Katrina’s America,” in contrast, projects the story on a much larger scale. It asserts that as much as the disaster took place in the attics of the Lower Ninth Ward, it also happened in the South, in the United States, and on earth; it occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, in post-9/11 America, and at the dawn of the climate crisis. Each of these frames reveals new details, including about what happened locally. After all, it was the federal Army Corps of Engineers whose faulty engineering caused the flood, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that mismanaged the rescue effort, and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that promulgated the policy of demolishing public housing. The inequalities of race and class that shape life in Louisiana are largely the product of national arrangements as well, which is why they are manifest across the United States.

“Katrina’s America” brings other events into focus, too. It suggests a map and a timeline that extend from Hurricane Rita, which made landfall in southwest Louisiana in September 2005, to whatever calamity has befallen the country between when I am writing these words, in May 2025, and whenever you are reading them. I was going to attempt to name the signal events, but there are too many. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration counts 285 “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” between 2006 and 2025, when the Trump Administration announced it would no longer maintain the list. There are entries for every year since 1980 except 1987. Nonetheless, this list underrepresents our current historical moment, which has given rise to the word “polycrisis,” because it considers only monetary damages, rather than more expansive understandings of loss, and is confined to events associated with the weather. The list of 285 recent calamities does not include the BP oil spill, for example, which some called “Obama’s Katrina.” Nor does it include the COVID-19 pandemic, which some called “Trump’s Katrina.” Katrina has given us a shorthand for a specific form of suffering: the kind the federal government could have prevented but did not.²

The notion of “Katrina’s America” also answers the argument from 2005 that New Orleans should be abandoned. The idea, widely repeated, was that Katrina’s challenges could be contained by amputating New Orleans from the national body. Recall Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert asserting, “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” For Katrina’s tenth anniversary, the New Yorker ran a long piece by Malcolm Gladwell arguing that New Orleanians were better off when they moved away. Gladwell’s message was the same one Barbara Bush, the former first lady and then-president’s mother, had delivered while visiting evacuees at the Houston Astrodome in 2005: “So many of the people in the arena here were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Fewer people suggested offering vouchers to encourage New Yorkers to attempt a fresh start elsewhere after Hurricane Sandy, or abandoning Los Angeles after the wildfires. Perhaps the response to New Orleans reflected a racist disdain for a majority Black city, or a regional disregard for the South. Perhaps it is clearer now that no place is safe from the climate crisis.³

*Relativity*, by Kayori Maeyama, 2019. Oil on panel, 24 x 18 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

We who live in Katrina’s America continue to have much to learn from those who experienced America’s Katrina up close. Among their most important lessons are those having to do with solidarity.

Monique Verdin is an artist and activist whose Houma family has been in the territory she prefers to call Bvlbancha since time immemorial. In 2017, when she visited my US history class at Tulane, a student new to New Orleans asked her a good question. This student cared about Louisiana and wanted to get involved with efforts to repair and improve it. But she was aware of being an outsider, an interloper in a place defined, for centuries, by extractive relationships. What gave her standing to say something about this place, let alone to act on it? Verdin was sympathetic but unflinching in her response. “You have inherited this earth,” she said, “so you have legitimacy and responsibility to speak.”

Verdin’s teaching reminded me of something Malik Rahim said in 2006. I was leading a team, on behalf of the Southern Oral History Program and the Louisiana State Museum, to document how New Orleanians were imagining the future of the city. Rahim’s imagination was utopian. The former Black Panther had founded the Common Ground Collective and was recruiting hundreds of volunteers from across the country to come to New Orleans to staff a free health clinic, remediate houses, and plant marsh grasses. He imagined a city with a high minimum wage and universal health care, freed from fossil fuels, and protected by restored wetlands. If those things were not achieved, and the city returned to the way it had been before the flood, Rahim told an interviewer, “that is because we are damn fools.”

The interviewer asked, “Who do you mean by ‘we’?”

Rahim answered, “Adults.”⁴

Those dreams remain unrealized. Today, 11 percent of Americans live in poverty. In New Orleans, the rate is 23 percent, including 11 percent of white New Orleanians and 4 percent of white New Orleans children. For Black New Orleanians, the poverty rate is 30 percent. For Black New Orleans children, it is 43 percent. In a 2015 survey, two in every ten New Orleans kids met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Four in ten reported having witnessed a shooting, stabbing, or beating, more than half reported that someone close to them had been murdered, and nearly one in three children in New Orleans reported that they worried about not being loved.

Median household income in New Orleans today is $55,580. Adjusted for inflation, this is 13 percent higher than it was in 2000, but 28 percent lower than the national median of $77,719. The median income for Black households in New Orleans is $38,092, which is $16,835 lower than the national median; for white households, it is $97,494, which is $14,373 higher than the national median. Economic inequality is more pronounced in Louisiana than in any other state except New York. In 2000, 24 percent of renters in New Orleans paid more than half of their household income on housing and utilities; today, 34 percent do. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of rent and utilities in New Orleans has increased by 31 percent since before the flood.

It is not clear how many of the people living in New Orleans today returned to the city after an evacuation, brief or extended, and how many are new arrivals, but the Census does show that in 2000, 77 percent of people living in New Orleans had been born in Louisiana, while today, 67 percent were. There are 23,503 fewer white people living in the city now compared to 2000, and 120,876 fewer Black people. In 2000, 67 percent of New Orleanians were Black; today, 56 percent are. The city’s total population has fallen from 484,674 to 362,701.⁵

The most important thing to know about the population changes is how little they had to do with the storm. This is what New Orleanians and their allies meant when they argued that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.” The changes were the product of social arrangements made before the flood and policy decisions made after, chief among these being the decisions to close public housing, to close the public Charity Hospital, to dismantle the public school system and lay off the unionized teacher corps, to provide housing recovery aid to homeowners but not renters, and to do so by means of a public-private partnership that took years to distribute a single grant—those grants determined using a formula that ultimately was found to have shortchanged Black homeowners by hundreds of millions of dollars—and Congress’s underfunding the recovery effort generally.⁶

In 2015, researchers asked New Orleanians “how much efforts to rebuild New Orleans . . . have done to help people like you.” Two-thirds of white people and people above the poverty line answered “some” or “a lot.” Half of African Americans and people below the poverty line answered “not too much” or “nothing at all.”⁷

There is a new levee system. The Army Corps of Engineers had referred to the old one, formally, as a “hurricane protection system” (an internal audit later described it as “a system in name only.”) The new one, legally, is a “risk reduction system.” The more modest name reflects a more modest ambition.⁸

The new levees are built to a lower standard than the ones they replaced. After the flood, the only aspiration all Louisianans seemed to share was the need to protect the city against large hurricanes. The Association of State Floodplain Managers agreed, recommending a so-called five-hundred-year standard of protection or, put another way, a system designed to withstand a storm that had a 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year. The Bush White House blanched at the cost, and in 2007, Congress voted to lower the authorized standard of protection for metropolitan New Orleans to a one-hundred-year storm. Theoretically, the 1 percent annual likelihood should correspond to a 26 percent chance of occurrence over the next thirty years, but the rating does not account for increasing vulnerabilities due to climate change, sea level rise, regional subsidence, or the continued collapse of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. In 2023, Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority predicted that, in the best-case scenario, but without additional action, 1,100 square miles of Louisiana would sink into the sea over the next fifty years.⁹

And what became of the leaders? New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, City Council member Oliver Thomas, and Congressman William Jefferson all spent time in federal prison, though none for crimes related to Katrina. Speaker Dennis Hastert, who had suggested bulldozing New Orleans, went to federal prison too, for financial crimes related to his having been a serial child molester. Louisiana senator David Vitter lost a subsequent run for governor, in part because of a sex scandal. He is now a lobbyist. Former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who announced his campaign for president in 2006 in New Orleans—“We need to show that the most powerful nation on Earth won’t stand by and let this continue,” he said then—returned to New Orleans in 2008 to announce the end of his campaign, after a sex scandal: “We have not just a city of New Orleans to rebuild,” he observed. “We have an American house to rebuild.”¹⁰

Michael Brown, George W. Bush’s director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who resigned on September 12, 2005, started an emergency preparedness consultancy. Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, started one too. George W. Bush wrote later, in a memoir, that “the worst moment of my presidency” was “the suggestion that I was a racist because of the response to Katrina.”¹¹

Back in August 2005, the real estate heir and reality television personality Donald Trump had promised to build “absolutely the most incredible building New Orleans has ever seen.” After the flood, some believed the project could be, as one man put it in a 2007 letter to the Times-Picayune, “the key to reclaiming New Orleans’ glory.” In 2011, the site was foreclosed and sold in a sheriff’s auction for use as a parking lot. Donald Trump is now the president.¹²

Malik Rahim, meanwhile, who founded Common Ground, was surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And Ivor van Heerden, the Louisiana State University scientist who publicized the Army Corps’ engineering mistakes, was fired.¹³

*Relativity Twice*, 2019. Oil on panel, 24 x 36 in.

Though I am writing in May, I think I can guess what the set pieces will be in August, when the national media will again discover New Orleans. There will be archival film footage of the flooded city, juxtaposed with more recent clips of Mardi Gras Indians and second line parades (the maskers and dancers rarely named as individuals), and paeans to resilience. There will be features on rain gardens and the new levee system, reporters walking atop levees in zip-up fleeces asking some expert or another if we are prepared for the next Katrina, without pausing to consider who “we” are, or what “Katrina” was.

I might even turn out to be one of those experts. I’ll be asked about my book, but I’ll be thinking about my kids. By virtue of their mother, my children are sixth-generation New Orleanians. Before we moved recently to Connecticut, which is my homeplace though not my parents’, and where the rate of economic inequality rivals Louisiana’s, my two daughters spent the first years of their lives in Algiers. This neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter is where their great-great-aunt played piano at the silent movie theater on Opelousas Avenue, and where their great-uncle can still be found posted up at the Old Point Bar. Before the pandemic, my older daughter was a regular too, toddling up to the bar to order a seltzer on the rocks with three cherries and a bag of Zapp’s. (Once she was served, she was usually sent out—after all, she was three years old—yielding the joke that she had eclipsed Uncle Brian’s family record for most times being kicked out of the bar.) When my mother-in-law was growing up in Algiers, she had a recurring nightmare that could launch a thousand American Studies dissertations: that Mardi Gras Indians would kidnap her and carry her away. My daughters remain confused, even now several years removed, when a parade passes by without someone tossing them a trinket.

It will be hard to share what any of this means to me in a short news hit: the family connections, the sense of place, the sound of the boats on the river, the music, the knowledge that every summer could be the last, and that 2005 nearly was. That New Orleans survived at all is a wonder. That it survives in the face of continued assaults, while its citizens—particularly those who are made to bear the heaviest burdens—continue to create beautiful moments on a world-historical level, should be regarded one of the country’s greatest achievements, attributable entirely to these New Orleanians’ insistence, as the poet Kalamu ya Salaam puts it, to “be about beauty.” It is rare to read a paragraph that conveys the miracle of a second line, and I will not attempt one here. You had to be there. And you still can, for now.¹⁴

New Orleans has a way of making metaphors real. Before we moved to Algiers, Hurricane Katrina had ripped a large piece of the metal roof from a neighbor’s shed and impaled it on a high branch of a live oak tree that reached across what eventually became our driveway. There it was, every day, hanging over our heads as we took the children in and out of the car.

The man who lived across the street from us had spent August 29, 2005, in the Superdome with his father, before being evacuated to rural Texas. His father, who had been a tugboat captain, had a heart attack en route. They remained in Texas for over a year because he was not strong enough to make the return trip. He died in exile. The older couple next door had not evacuated. When Hurricane Ida came in 2021, they offered to loan me a gun. A few doors down, the people were addicts; one night, the man hanged himself. Another neighbor got there before the paramedics and cut the rope, but it was still too late. Malik Rahim lived around the corner, with several months’ supply of water stored in rain barrels. “If I had been white,” he observed recently, considering his life’s work on behalf of his neighbors, “I’d be the retiring governor right now.”¹⁵

The common word for New Orleanians’ capacity to endure is “resilience.” I expect it will be in wide circulation this August. What do New Orleanians think about resilience? During the BP oil spill in 2010, Tracie Washington, a lawyer with the Louisiana Justice Institute, told a reporter, “Stop calling me resilient . . . Because every time you say, ‘Oh they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I’m not resilient.” Someone printed her comment on signs and posted them across the city. Around Hurricane Ida in 2021, another New Orleans resident told a reporter, “I’ve hated that word for 16 years. It carries an expectation that you have to take some kind of abuse.” When Senator Amy Klobuchar said New Orleans was where “the spirit of our nation’s resilience abounds” during the Democratic National Convention in 2024, the New Orleans librarian who goes by the name “skooks” observed on Twitter: “I want to puke New Orleans is the most battered place in America by climate change, by gentrification, by privatized schools, by everything the Amy Klobuchars of the world created. These shameless criminals. These absolute ghouls. They can’t help but give you a little condescending pat on the head at the very moment they consign you to the fire.”¹⁶

Even as Katrina comes into focus as a story about the twenty-first-century United States, it remains first and foremost a story of hundreds of people dying preventable deaths, tens of thousands of people being rendered homeless by preventable error, and hundreds of thousands of people enduring years of preventable suffering. New Orleanians’ resilience is a measure of the cruelty that has been imposed on them.

You might think that this point, at least, would be possible to get across, but among the things that still surprise me about Katrina is how resistant people are to the idea. I notice this most when I am doing book talks. I have had the privilege of doing so with many different interlocuters, most of them smart, and not naïve. Their last question is almost always the same: “What gives you hope?”

I know what the questioner is asking me to do. Most often, the audience is college students, that ever changing same of the next generation that is meant to solve the problems that the current generation has caused or passed on. The questioner is asking me to repair the rip in the social fabric that our conversation has created, to beg forgiveness of Progress, that ubiquitous American deity who demands that we see, in every sky, how the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.

But I have come to believe that professing hope in the face of this wreckage only defames the dead. And it is their forgiveness, could they give it, that we should seek.

What gives me hope? Not Katrina.

Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and he serves as the Connecticut State Historian. He is the author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.

Header image: Subaquatic Homesick Blues, by Kayori Maeyama, 2019. Oil on panel, 32 x 48 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

NOTES

Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), 157 (for Chalmette and St. Bernard), 158–162 (for public housing).
“U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather & Climate Disasters 1980–2024,” National Centers for Environmental Information, accessed June 6, 2025, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/events.pdf.
Charles Babington, “Hastert Tries Damage Control After Remarks Hit a Nerve,” Washington Post, September 3, 2005; Malcolm Gladwell, “Starting Over,” New Yorker, August 17, 2015; “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off,” New York Times, September 7, 2005.
Interview with Malik Rahim by Pamela Hamilton, May 23, 2006, interview U-0252, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Data in the preceding three paragraphs, current to 2023, is drawn from “Who Lives in New Orleans and Metro Parishes Now?,” The Data Center, September 26, 2024, https://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/who-lives-in-new-orleans-now/. For the 2015 child survey, see Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, Emotional Wellness and Exposure to Violence: Data from New Orleans Youth Age 11–15 (2015), 3. For national statistics and inequality, see Katherine Engel and Kirby G. Posey, “Household Income in States and Metropolitan Areas: 2023,” https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acsbr-023.pdf. For the nativity rate, see American Community Survey, 2023 ACS 1-Year Estimates Data Profiles, “DP02 Selected Social Characteristics in the United States,” https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2023.DP02?q=DP02&g=050XX00US22071.
Horowitz, Katrina, 148–176.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, New Orleans Ten Years After the Storm: The Kaiser Family Foundation Katrina Survey Project (2015), 5.
US Army Corps of Engineers Interagency Performance Task Force, Performance Evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Protection System, Vol. 1 (US Army Corps of Engineers, 2009), I-127.
Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, 4th Edition (State of Louisiana, 2023), 38; Horowitz, Katrina, 176–180.
John Edwards, speech in New Orleans, December 28, 2006, https://p2008.org/edwards/edwards122806spt.html. John Edwards, speech in New Orleans, January 30, 2008, https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/01/edwards-speech-005752.
George W. Bush, Decision Points (Crown, 2010), 326.
Greg Thomas, “The Donald Signing on to Poydras project,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 26, 2005; Andrew Jennings, “Tower Will Bring Good Things,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 26, 2007; Rebecca Mowbray, “Trump Tower Bites the Dust,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 28, 2011.
Delaney Nolan, “When the Feds Are Still Watching,” The Nation, December 20, 2024.
Kalamu ya Salaam, Be About Beauty (University of New Orleans Press, 2018).
Malik Rahim, Instagram post, May 19, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ2fDYUOr-CL/?igsh=NnZ3cjczcm52OW5o.
Al Jazeera English, “In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril,” Fault Lines, June 17, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4itfAVq19U; Todd A. Price and Andrew J. Yawn, “Why ‘Resilience’ Became a 4-Letter Word After Ida,” The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), October 10, 2021; @skooks, X post, August 21, 2024, https://x.com/skooks/status/1826458464203288963.