New Orleans on slow rebuilding road triggering criticism

New Orleans, the largest city in the U.S. state of Louisiana, has been on a slow rebuilding road 10 years since Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005.

US President Barack Obama, who visited the city on Thursday, blamed the government for the slow recovery.

"What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster -- a failure of government to look out for its own citizens," Obama criticized during a speech in the Lower Ninth Ward of the city, an area that was hard hit in Katrina.

According to the president, almost 40 percent of children still live in poverty in the city, and more than 100,000 African-Americans fled New Orleans following Katrina, never returned.

"Our work here won't be done," he said, "that's not a finished job. That's not a full recovery. There's still too many people who haven't been able to come back home."

Obama mentioned the structural inequities that stood long before the start of the storm, naming poverty, crime, a lack of affordable housing and disparities between white and black residents as inequities that appear to loom largest.

"New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing," he said.

"Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty," Obama said.

On Aug. 29, 2005, Katrina caused major damage to the Mexico Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida. Nearly 2,000 people died, mostly in New Orleans, with another 1 million displaced.

The government led by then U.S. President George W. Bush was widely criticized for mismanagement and lack of preparation in the relief effort in response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Specifically, there was a delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans.

Then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was also criticized for failing to implement his evacuation plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provision for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions.

A decade later, the slow rebuilding of the city has once again triggered sharp criticism even from the country's president, which is a clear sign that the city still has a long way to go for fully recovery.

The federal, state and city agencies were widely seen doing far too little to help the stranded and displaced, and doing it much too slowly.

It was reported that just more than 50 percent of the neighborhood's housing units are now occupied, and the population in 2010 was just more than 2,000 -- 80 percent smaller than before Katrina.

The average household income stands at 33,557 U.S. dollars per year -- 4,000 U.S. dollars less than it was in 2000, five years before the disaster. Nearly one-third of the population lives below the poverty line, more than twice the national average.

Marc Morial, a New Orleans native who served as the city's mayor before becoming the president of the National Urban League, echoed Obama's opinion, saying that "this recovery is at halftime, and because it is at halftime, there is so much more to be done. Until Lower Nine is back, we cannot say this city is fully recovered."

The U.S. media also lashed out at the slow recovery of New Orleans. New York Times published on Saturday a story named "The Water receded. The Anger's Here."

"Why are we still so angry? Even sympathetic newcomers can't quite figure out why we New Orleanians are not over it a decade later. But it's not just anger we feel. It's also a profound and abiding sense of loss," the story said.

Source: XINHUA