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New Orleans Post-Katrina

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Concept Paper: New Orleans Post-Katrina

December 8, 2013

New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina, which hit the southeast United States in late August of 2005 was one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in United States history. The city of New Orleans was arguably hit the hardest by the hurricane. The objective of this paper is to analyze the link between economic, political, and social conditions in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina and the conditions in New Orleans post-Katrina. Although natural disasters are an inevitability, the human suffering that citizens faced in New Orleans immediately following Katrina were largely avoidable, the result of a lack of adequate evacuation planning and massive governmental negligence. Furthermore, it was no accident which people suffered the most in the aftermath of Katrina. Financial, political, racial, and social disparities in New Orleans long before Katrina dictated who would be most affected after Katrina, both immediately and years after the hurricane. Rebuilding efforts, just like the evacuation, have tended to favor the rich and White and neglect the poor and Black.
Pre-Katrina New Orleans was disproportionately Black and poor relative to the rest of the United States. According to 2000 U.S. Census data, Blacks made up 12.3% of the nation’s population while Whites made up 75.1% of the nation’s population (U.S. Census, 2000b). In contrast, the city of New Orleans was 28.1% White and 67.3% Black in 2000 (U.S. Census, 2000a). In 1999, 27.9% of individuals in New Orleans lived below the federal poverty line, more than twice the rate for the entire United States (12.4%) (U.S. Census, 2000a, 2000b). In 1999, 23.7% of families in New Orleans lived under the federal poverty level, almost three times the rate of the United States as a whole (9.2%) (U.S. Census, 2000a, 2000b).
According to the

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