For decades, Derek Bowman and his neighbors didn’t see many strangers walking around their area of New Orleans’ 7th Ward. Mostly, he recognized everyone who passed his porch. They were neighbors walking to the store a few blocks over or school kids coming from nearby elementary schools.

But about a decade ago, speculators flush with cash became a frequent sight, tucking business cards into front doors, with small notes, asking residents to call if they wanted to sell. More recently, in the last several years, visitors with the rolling suitcases started showing up, usually arriving at short-term rentals in the neighborhood on Friday and leaving on a Sunday.

Houses in his neighborhood used to be passed down within families. If new families moved in, they often had roots in other neighborhood blocks. Not anymore. Today, Bowman and his wife Marie are some of the only longtime neighbors left, he said, pointing to the handful of other homes that still have ties to the people he grew up with. There’s a niece here, a son there, a grandchild down the street. The rest are newcomers.

Bowman can’t imagine leaving. To him, it’s not just his block, it’s his birthright.

During the city’s tropical summers, when grass grows rapidly, Bowman still walks up and down his street each week, trimming all the grass next to the sidewalk.

Like his grandmother before him, Bowman also watches out for a few favorite neighborhood cats, all with Creole French nicknames. “Oh, hello, Minou,” he said, petting an orange tabby that emerges, stretching, from a nap under the house.

“Derek is the steward of the block. I can’t even remember him not being here,” said rap producer “Don B.” Bartholomew, who operates across the street from Bowman, out of a family studio-office made famous by Bartholomew’s father, pioneering producer Dave Bartholomew, who recorded early rock’n’roll legends like Fats Domino.

In 1961, Nira Bowman, brought Derek home from the maternity ward of Sara Mayo Hospital to this narrow shotgun house, which was built in 1924 by his great-grandfather, LaCroix Pierce. From the house’s skinny side porch, three separate doors open into different rooms of the house, a standard architectural feature that allowed working-class families to keep boarders, said Bowman. In his family’s case, the rooms often were used by elderly or frail family members who could be watched over while living separately.

Now, Bowman finds himself fighting to stay in his family home.

In New Orleans, Bowman is a face of climate change.

His story, like nearly all stories about housing here, can be traced back to 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, when overtopped federal levees flooded 80 percent of the bowl-shaped city.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last year, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, saw the early stages of a housing grab and described it as “disaster gentrification.” Similar buyouts and land-flipping happened in New York after Hurricane Sandy and in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.

In every city, storm damage and flooding initially displaced people of every ethnicity and income level, though in New Orleans, like elsewhere, communities of color were harder hit because of historically segregated housing patterns that pushed African American households to lower-lying areas. One analysis of black and white households found that black residents were more than twice as likely to live in flooded areas.

In New Orleans, the disparities were exacerbated during rebuilding, as higher-income people moved into city cores, displacing lower-income families. Similar “back to the city” dynamics are playing out in every urban area across the country. But in disaster-ravaged cities like New Orleans, they’re playing out at fast-forward speed.

From its earliest days, the recovery in New Orleans was uneven. A Louisiana State University study found that during 78 percent of longtime white residents of New Orleans came back within one year after Katrina while only 42 percent of longtime black residents were able to return. The federally funded, state-administered Road Home program, which based its rebuilding grants on pre-storm home values, not rebuilding costs, contributed to the recovery’s inequities.

Black homeowners who couldn’t rebuild with their Road Home grants couldn’t help but notice the bright yellow signs: “We pay cash for homes.” People who faced large rebuilding shortfalls or other barriers were more likely to walk away, selling their storm-damaged homes to speculators. After some repairs, these longtime family homes became short-term rentals or were sold to newcomers looking for newly renovated historic homes.

On Bowman’s block alone, four houses are busy Airbnb rentals. He doesn’t know the owners like he used to, so he just refers to them as the blue house with the yellow doors, the mustard yellow house, the green house, the house with the brick front.

First to go were elderly people and families with children, a trend seen in many New Orleans neighborhoods after Katrina. In the 7th Ward, between the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2012-2016 American Community Study, the number of elderly people and the number of children under 18 both were cut in half, while households without children grew to 70 percent of all households.

Bowman’s block changed almost entirely during the 13 years after Katrina, said Don B. Bartholomew. “Before the storm, everybody knew everybody on this block. Now, you don’t know the people who are living here.”

Moving Downhill

In New Orleans, after Katrina, prices rose the fastest in what’s called “the sliver by the river,” historic high-ground black neighborhoods like Bywater, Irish Channel and Black Pearl that hug the high ground along the Mississippi River.

Like the floodwaters that had started the process, it happened in waves. People priced out of the higher-ground neighborhoods moved downhill, away from the river, into adjacent, urban-core neighborhoods like the 7th Ward, which stands a short drive from the French Quarter.

A century ago, when Bowman’s great grandfather moved onto North Galvez Street, the 7th Ward was known as a stronghold for the city’s French-speaking Afro-Creole people. Creole craftsmen like LaCroix Pierce built and repaired much of the city. In 1924, when Pierce built the house, black households weren’t able to get federally insured mortgages. So, in this part of town, many Creole craftsmen constructed their own homes, creating streetscapes lined with hand-crafted Creole cottages and double and single shotgun homes.

According to family legend, Pierce, a bricklayer, built the narrow house using wood, to prove that he had a range of skills that went far beyond bricks.

Four generations later, Bowman, a brick mason, can envision how it all came together. It’s here, at the front, he said, that Pierce likely pulled out his trowel with a flourish to show off a little, building a deep brick porch and a set of broad front steps leading up to the wooden house, which is raised on piers more than two feet off the ground. To protect the brick, Pierce finished it with the three traditional layers of stucco.

Finally, to identify the structure as the home of a bricklayer, Pierce bracketed the porch with two front-porch pillars that rise up from prominent red-brick bases.

Before Katrina, the 7th Ward neighborhood had started to deteriorate. Crime rose. Like many urban-core neighborhoods, the area suffered from lack of investment. But as New Orleans rebuilt after Katrina, some of the steepest increases in home values were seen on long-ignored blocks like Bowman’s, which had two key advantages: historic architecture and relatively high ground.

Though his street flooded after Katrina, no water came inside the century-old house, though a heavy military helicopter hovering overhead pulled a large patch of shingles off his roof. The house’s relatively high elevation has fared well during recent heavy rainstorms, even as the city’s antiquated stormwater pumping system and its operators have faltered. That gives his block an advantage — and causes home values to rise more.

Bowman doesn’t know how he’ll be able to stay here, as the cost of living rises around him.

Housing advocates in the city say that it’s one of their top battles since Katrina: trying to find ways to keep “legacy families” like Bowman’s in place.

“One of the things that makes this city special is its architecture. But the buildings can’t be more important than the people,” said Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, a 10-year strategic effort launched in 2015 to address the city’s growing affordable-housing crisis, in what Morris describes as “the second half” of the city’s recovery from Katrina.

Over the past several years, Airbnb moved into New Orleans, bringing another infusion of visitors and speculators to neighborhoods like the 7th Ward. Bowman’s area, a mere 1.5 miles from the edge of the French Quarter, was hit hard. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of short-term rentals in the 7th Ward skyrocketed, with an increase of 133 percent in those three years alone, according to Breonne DeDecker from the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, who described the 7th Ward as a “hotspot” that’s part of a citywide trend.

“In many historically black neighborhoods that are a cradle of our city’s cultural tradition, we’re seeing increasingly prohibitive housing costs that are leading to the displacement of longtime residents,” said DeDecker, noting that tourists can pay much more to stay in a house than a renter can pay in monthly rent.

It’s to the point, DeDecker said, where the very people who maintain the New Orleans’ famous African American culture — its musicians, artists, Mardi Gras Indians and members of the social aid and pleasure clubs — cannot afford to stay in the city.

Most of the social aid and pleasure clubs that parade on Sundays follow traditional parade routes through what were predominantly black neighborhoods pre-Katrina. But now, as high-ground neighborhoods have become majority white neighborhoods, the parades pass homes that once housed generations of black families that now are home to a single professional who uses the spare rooms as an office and a guest room.

In adjacent neighborhoods like the 7th Ward, it’s more mixed. In some sections of the neighborhood, shuttered houses are common, to the point where neighbors might welcome some speculators. In other areas, like Bowman’s, nearly every house is newly painted and few previous residents remain.

Advocates say that it might be still possible to stem the exodus of legacy families in the 7th Ward, which is still 84 percent black — only a 10 percent drop from pre-Katrina.

“We need to support communities as they figure it out,” said Morris, noting that expensive repairs and rising property-tax bills are big issues for these families.

“Folks are so under pressure,” she said. “They think that because they own their own homes, they should be doing better. But we need to figure out how they can stay in a beautiful home that nurtures them and the generation after them.”

One of the current barriers are short-term rentals, which are particularly thick in neighborhoods like the 7th Ward that are close to tourist districts like the French Quarter.

A generation ago, the area’s proximity to the Quarter was essential, not for tourists, but for people who lived in the 7th Ward. Bowman’s great uncle — LaCroix Pierce’s son — Joseph LaCroix “DeDe” Pierce, a blind trumpet player, worked often in the Quarter, along with his wife, piano player and singer Billie Pierce, who had started her musical career as a teenager, playing piano for blues singer Bessie Smith.

It was like a family compound in those days. Bowman’s grandmother, Marie Camille Pierce, DeDe’s sister, lived in the wooden house with his mother. His uncle Theophile Pierce also stayed in a room there. DeDe and Billie lived near the property’s back fence line in a newly built, three-room house made of cinder blocks painted green. Bowman remembered how neighbor kids would sit outside and listen whenever the two musicians rehearsed.

On gig nights, a taxicab would arrive at the front curb. The Pierces would walk from the back house. Drummer Josiah “Cie” Frazier would come from the back of the white house on the corner. Willie Humphrey, carrying his clarinet, would stroll over from his house on North Prieur, a few blocks away.

Later than night, the cab would be waiting on St. Peter Street when the four members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band finished their gig. They’d walk out the Hall’s big iron gate, climb into the cab, and seven minutes later, be back home in the 7th Ward.

Lower 9

Thirteen years later, the effects of 2005 still resonate in places like the Lower 9th Ward, where floodwaters reached 20 feet in some place, as federal levees gave way onto the neighborhood, washing houses off their foundations and carrying them blocks away.

Before Katrina, the Lower 9th Ward had some of the highest African American homeownership rates in the city. Today, grandmothers live in tidy houses rebuilt in areas where the weeds tower overhead for blocks at a time. Vacant lots harbor wildlife and snakes and are used as dumping grounds for tires and rusted automobile hulls.

Citywide and in neighborhoods like the 7th Ward, the proportions of elderly people dropped. Not in the Lower 9, where the proportion of people over 65 climbed slightly, from 14 to 15 percent. There are far fewer people overall: Only about one-quarter of the neighborhood’s pre-Katrina population has returned. But seniors are well-represented among them, as illustrated by the senior section of the Sanchez Community Center in the Lower 9th Ward, which is the most active senior center in the city and has a waiting list of hundreds trying to get in.

On a recent morning, Vera Fulton, 94, ate breakfast at the senior center, not far from at a noisier table known for card games. ““Our blocks are too quiet,” Fulton said. “We come here because it’s full of life.”

Her friend Mary Thomas, 75, lives on a block of Alabo Street where all she sees from her front porch is weeds that have grown far above her head. She bought her house in 1986 after being raised the next block over. When her parents died, she and her brother completed a succession for the family home, just to be sure that they kept a clear title for it. But to open that succession was $1,300 — a steep price tag, she said.

As her granddaughter, Shannika Bennett, 28, arrives home with groceries, Bennett shook her head at the tall grass. “We can’t really see houses,” she said. “There are busted streets and everything is messed up.” On the plus side, it feels like the country. “It is sorta peaceful,” Bennett said. “But before Katrina, I was used to hearing, ‘Hey, neighbor’ on every corner as I passed. I would like it to get back to that.”

Thomas knows the story behind every empty lot. One of her neighbors had become ill, was being cared for by a brother, she thought. Another one had been mowing the lot until he passed away; his daughter lives in Texas, too far to travel to cut the grass. Ms. Barbara Jean Rose, at 1827 Alabo, sold her lot to Road Home. Another neighbor lost his lot to the city. Two brothers from the Jeanjacques family used to take care of a corner lot, but they haven’t been back for awhile.

She and her neighbor next door mow the empty lot that stands between them, whose owners keep up with the property taxes, but don’t take care of the lot. “When I called about it, the city told me, ‘Let it grow,’” she said. “But I told them, you don’t stay next to it.”

At a meeting earlier this year led by planners from the American Institute of Architects, neighbors chose the overgrown lots as one of their top concerns.

Most were family homes that didn’t go through succession for a few generations, making it almost impossible for anyone to claim clear title, which is what’s required to receive rebuilding grants or insurance settlements. If not for succession issues, many more families would have returned, neighbors say. “It was a big issue. They couldn’t get nothing,” Thomas said. “Though I think some still want to try.”

Neighbors have high hopes for new Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who spearheaded rebuilding efforts in the Broadmoor neighborhood rebuild after Katrina and sympathized at the recent AIA meeting with neighbors who complained about succession. “It’s how people got screwed,” she said, nodding. After Katrina, Cantrell saw the succession issue pop up repeatedly across town, she said.

The lack of successions has become such a common barrier to rebuilding in disaster-struck areas of Louisiana that it’s now viewed as an essential part of disaster preparedness. Each year, as hurricane-season approaches, legal-aid lawyers for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services work with families along the Gulf Coast who haven’t gone through a succession for generations. Though they can only reach a sliver of at-risk homeowners each year, those homeowners are able to enter the storm season with clear title, better able to deal with properties that may be damaged by hurricane winds and storm surge.

Ostensibly, in the Lower 9th Ward, many people could claim title to each family lot. And yet, because the lots belong to no one, they have now become everyone’s problem, a weight on the entire neighborhood.

“These lots are symbolic,” said landscape architect Diane Jones Allen, who lives and works out of the Lower 9. “Every last one of those green spaces had a mother, father, a family.”

She believes that simply keeping the lots mowed has value in itself. “Just cutting it down will say, ‘People lived here,’” she said. “When you cut it down, there’s possibility. And all the memories, of what was there. It becomes a place again.”

Artists

Zack Smith, 43, grew up in Lafayette, in south-central Louisiana, and moved to New Orleans nearly 20 years ago to pursue his passions: music and photography.

Young artists are often seen as the leading edge of gentrification, because they don’t make much money and so they often move into low-income communities for financial reasons.

At first Smith slept on his cousin’s couch Uptown. But he didn’t worry much about rent even once he moved out, because much of New Orleans was within an artist’s budget. At the time, pre-Katrina, half of all apartments in town rented for $500. Not many people were paying exorbitant rent, which made sense, because the economy in New Orleans wasn’t great and so not many people made decent money.

First, he and a roommate moved in a two-bedroom apartment, paying a couple hundred each. That continued for the next few apartments. Smith liked to be in the middle of things. He’d walk out his door and capture street scenes. He’d take his camera to clubs located five minutes from his house and take amazing shots of New Orleans musicians.

“At that time, I wanted to be where the action was at, the vibe, the energy,” he said. “I wanted music on the corner all the time.”

The post-Katrina real-estate costs didn’t hit him at first, because he had always lived fairly informally, without formal leases. In his first apartment after Katrina hit, Smith traded rent for photography in an apartment on Magazine Street. After that, he house-sat for someone in Holy Cross, an unflooded high-ground section of the Lower 9th Ward that lies next to the Mississippi River.

Meanwhile, real-estate prices were doubling across the city.

A few years after the storm, Smith began moving more into commercial photography and rented a place on his own. “That’s when it got kinda real,” he said. He paid $850 a month to live on Barracks Street near Bayou St. John. Then in 2012, he moved into an even higher-priced rental on Pauline Street in the Bywater neighborhood, though he split costs with his soon-to-be wife, Helen.

When the couple decided they wanted to buy a house, they started looking in the city for a safe, affordable spot. Bywater, which had become a poster child for gentrification, was definitely out. They thought they’d find something else. But they didn’t. “We looked all over the place,” he said.

In the end, they realized that properties they could afford in New Orleans were so dilapidated that they’d have to spend $100,000 in repairs, he said.

That’s because there’s a scattershot approach to housing in the city that has left New Orleans with a shortage of affordable housing at the bottom and middle tiers. There’s a glut of top-shelf housing and empty condos. In the Central Business District, there’s a 30 percent vacancy rate.

As the Smiths found out, New Orleans also still has lots of vacant lots and derelict homes, because its housing stock still reflects the much larger city it was in 1960, when the city’s population was 627,525. Since then, the population has dropped by about a third. “There’s a 20 percent vacancy rate across the city. But we don’t have the right inventory. It’s not priced correctly,” said Andreanecia Morris of HousingNOLA.

The couple was at a standstill. Then Helen, a nurse, was working in the neighboring county, St. Bernard Parish, told him about a ranch house that she passed every day, with a lot that included a 1,200 square-foot shed, with 25-foot ceilings, and a decent yard, along with privacy and safety.

“We got our house for a price you can’t believe,” said Smith, who keeps his drum set in the shed and finds it ideal as a photography studio, since there are huge rolling doors he can open to get natural light.

The storm surge that preceded Katrina pushed water over rooftops in St. Bernard, which stands between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans. But a fear of flooding in the distant future wasn’t enough to deter them from choosing a place that worked within the couple’s budget and also allowed them to thrive as a family. That became especially important two years ago, when their daughter, Vega, was born.

Their new home is 15 minutes from downtown New Orleans, which seemed like forever at first, but now seems like the blink of an eye. “It’s a state of mind,” he said. “After I drove it a few times, it wasn’t far anymore. I listen to a podcast, catch up on some news, call my mom and dad.”

A lot is going on nearby. In Arabi, a small St. Bernard Parish town just across the parish border with New Orleans, an arts corridor is developing. So his fellow artists are genuinely curious about Smith’s new digs, he said. “They call and say, ‘How is it out there? Can I come over?’”

Conclusion

When DeDe Pierce died in 1973, he was memorialized with a sprawling, five-hour funeral parade that included four brass bands and several thousand people. As it left Corpus Christi Catholic Church a few blocks away, the procession stopped at the house on North Galvez to pay its respects.

Within a year, another procession passed the house on Galvez, this time playing a dirge for Billie Pierce. The couple had no children and his other cousins have moved away. So Bowman considers himself the resident historian. He preserves old newspaper clippings about his family in a cardboard box kept in a back room of the house.

“There’s so much history here,” Bowman said, as he filed through the box. He is feeling worried about his future here on North Galvez. He was blindsided a few years ago when a suburban land investor bought the house from beneath him through a municipal tax sale. At first, Bowman paid rent to stay in his family home. Then, a second buyer appeared earlier this year, giving him a five-day eviction notice. That’s when he consulted a legal-aid lawyer.

Bowman is hard on himself about the situation. He scraped the house so that it’s ready for painting and has made some repairs on his own, out of an obligation he feels to his great-grandfather’s work. But he doesn’t want to sink more money into the house until he’s certain it belongs to him. So he’s embarrassed that needed repairs have gone undone. He’s ashamed that he and his family didn’t figure out that no one was paying taxes. And he’s worried sick about what the future could bring.

His lawyer, Hannah Adams, of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, is concerned that other generational owners like Bowman may also have lost houses, because of new municipal ordinances and policies intended to move Katrina-damaged properties into the hands of new owners.

In 2015, Bowman discovered that, in 1997, a city treasury official had adjudicated the property for back taxes of $577.91, sending certified mail notices to his grandmother, Marie Camille, who had been dead for nine years, and to DeDe Pierce, who had been dead for 23 years. There’s no record of whether certified mail notices were sent and no records of any notices being returned undeliverable.

Had he known, he would have simply paid the taxes, Bowman said.

But he had no idea about it until nearly 20 years later, in 2015, when Bowman received a notice from the city addressed to “Occupant,” advising him that his house would be going up for sale in 60 days if he didn’t pay $31,625 to the city.

He and his daughter Tiffany rushed to the assessor’s office and offered to pay $10,000 on the spot, with more to follow. He was told that the city could only accept the full amount; shortly afterward, the city sold the house for $61,300. Since then, Bowman has been paying rent to stay in his home. A legal-aid lawyer filed suit on his behalf in July, alleging that the tax sale didn’t comply with state law. “I’m not walking away from this house that easily,” he said.

Sitting on the side porch, with a cat lounging on the driveway nearby, Bowman leafs through old photos. There’s a picture of his Aunt Billie clowning with her sister Sadie, also a piano player, who married New Orleans trumpeter Kid Sheik. A small wallet-size image is of Derek at age 8, when he was attending a Catholic school nearby. He thumbs through a stack of travel photos from a glamorous young aunt who was in the U.S. Air Force.

Finally, he holds up a photo of his grandmother Camille, a stunning beauty who worked as a seamstress and was buried with the rest of his family in their above-ground vault in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.

Bowman knows that there are big-picture issues at play like Katrina-spurred gentrification and policies governing adjudications and short-term rental policies. But he can best demonstrate what’s at stake through this box of family images, he said.

“I can understand an investor buying a property,” he said. “But you are buying something you never knew,” he said.

Published December 21, 2018