NEW ORLEANS — (CNN) President Barack Obama returns to an outwardly thriving New Orleans Thursday to mark strides 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. But underneath the visible recovery lie persistent racial and economic inequities that haven’t receded a decade since the storm.
Tens of thousands of African-Americans fled New Orleans after Katrina hit, never to return. The city’s poverty rate has remained near 30%. And according to one analysis, African-American households in the city earn more than 50% less than their white counterparts — well above the national average.
Those barometers of racial inequality aren’t unique to New Orleans, and haven’t dampened the city’s enthusiasm for what has otherwise been a steady recovery that includes new construction, jobs and visitors.
But the now-chronic gaps between rich and poor, and whites and blacks, were poised to provide a sober backdrop for Obama’s tour of the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward on Thursday, where he plans to visit residents and assess the district’s recovery.
In 2010, when Obama marked the five-year anniversary of Katrina in the second year of his presidency, he scarcely mentioned the issues of racial disparity that plagued the city, both before and after the storm, despite speaking at the historically black Xavier University in Gert Town.
Now in his second term, the President has become more open about addressing issues of race, including the opportunity gap visible in inner-cities around the country.
On Thursday he’ll argue Hurricane Katrina “started out as a natural disaster” but “became a man-made one — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” according to excepts of his speech released by the White House.
“What that storm revealed was another tragedy — one that had been brewing for decades,” Obama will say. “New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing. Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty.”
“We acknowledge this loss, this pain, not to harp on what happened — but to memorialize it,” he will say. “We do this not in order to dwell in the past, but in order to keep moving forward.”
Book-ended by major events promoting his environmental agenda, Obama isn’t planning to use the storm’s anniversary to make another push to curb climate change, though the White House said Obama would hold a roundtable meeting to discuss steps to prevent the type of infrastructure collapse that devastated the Gulf Coast after Katrina hit.
Instead, he’s expected to tout his administration’s steady success in eliminating bureaucratic barriers to rebuilding New Orleans, and to point to projects like an overhauled school system and newly rebuilt hospital as examples of a city on the upswing.
“This is a city that slowly, unmistakably, together, is moving forward,” Obama plans to say. “Because the project of rebuilding here wasn’t simply to restore the city as it had been. It was to build a city as it should be — a city where everyone, no matter who they are or what they look like or how much money they’ve got — has an opportunity to make it.”
In the mostly African-American Lower Ninth Ward, where Obama plans to visit, the recovery efforts are varied: he’ll speak at a multi-million dollar community center, built with the help of federal funds after Katrina, that sits only blocks from the abandoned cars and blighted lots that have become symbols of a slow recovery.
Just more than 50% of the neighborhood’s housing units are now occupied, according to figures from the Data Center, which has tracked statistics in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The population in 2010 was just more than 2,000 — 80% smaller than before the storm.
The average household income stands at $33,557 per year — $4,000 less than it was in 2000, five years before the storm. Nearly one-third of the population lives below the poverty line, more than twice the national average.
In his remarks, Obama will acknowledge the neighborhood’s sometimes halting recovery, saying a speech in the Lower Ninth Ward might have “seemed unlikely” in the years immediately following Katrina but that forward-thinking residents had rallied together to reconstruct their neighborhood.
“That, more than any other reason, is why I’ve come back here today,” he will say.
In some ways, Obama’s language Thursday most closely echoes his remarks on Katrina from before he became president, including a 2007 speech wading into the racial disparities visible in the federal Katrina response.
Though he told a church crowd then that the administration of then-President George W. Bush was “colorblind in its incompetence” during its response to Katrina, he suggested the storm exposed long-festering inequalities in the city.
“Everyone here knows the disaster and the poverty happened long before that hurricane hit,” Obama said then. “All the hurricane did was make bare what we ignore each and every day, which is that there are whole sets of communities that are impoverished, that don’t have meaningful opportunity, that don’t have hope and they are forgotten.”
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