New Orleans says come back! Please!
Nov 10th, 2005, 12:14 PM
#1
Original Poster
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 51
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
New Orleans says come back! Please!
On behalf of everyone who lives in New Orleans, and especially those of us who depend heavily on visitors to keep our businesses going...you can be a part of the recovery.
PLEASE COME BACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!
You can find good updates at these sites to see who's open for business:
http://www.fqba.com
http://www.frenchquarter.com
http://www.neworleanscvb.com
Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood Katrina victim
PLEASE COME BACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!
You can find good updates at these sites to see who's open for business:
http://www.fqba.com
http://www.frenchquarter.com
http://www.neworleanscvb.com
Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood Katrina victim
Nov 10th, 2005, 01:05 PM
#2
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 6,110
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
I and 2 others are coming soon - we will be sure to spend as much money as our expense accounts will allow while we are there. I will insist on wine and dessert for everyone with every meal 
Ok, so I do that anyway, but this time it is for a good cause!
Ok, so I do that anyway, but this time it is for a good cause!
Nov 10th, 2005, 05:40 PM
#4
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 25,035
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Hello, nmlhats. DH and I had considered going to NO over T-giving weekend, but it looks like we will not be able to make it quite so soon. We still hope to visit in the next year. However, I work with a guy whose parents are coming to the US in March from the Netherlands. They had planned all along to visit NO during their stay in the US. But since Hurricane Katrina they now have concerns about safety. You and I know that the press can blow things out of proportion, but can you give some assurance to an older Dutch couple about safety in your city? I could tell them it's OK, but I think it will be more credible coming from someone who lives there.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Nov 10th, 2005, 09:16 PM
#5
Original Poster
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 51
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
New Orleans has gone from being a fairly crime-ridden city to being virtually crime-free. There was an article in the paper in the last day or two about it. There has not been a single murder since the time of the hurricane.
New Orleans Crime Swept Away, With Most of the People
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: November 10, 2005
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 9 - On a single day last June in Pigeon Town and Hollygrove, impoverished neighborhoods of worn frame houses at the city's western edge, four men were killed, adding to the eight already slain there this year. Young men brazenly sold drugs from street corners in broad daylight. The gunfire was constant. Residents were fearful.
There has not been a single killing in New Orleans since the hurricane chaos subsided. A New Orleans police officer in the Lower Ninth Ward. But the bullets and the drugs and the fear are gone now, swept away by Hurricane Katrina, along with the dealers and gangs and most of the people.There has not been a single killing in this violence-prone neighborhood, or anywhere else in New Orleans, since the chaos that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina subsided. New Orleans, the nation's most dangerous city, has suddenly become perhaps its safest, and what had easily been the country's murder capital now has a murder rate of exactly zero. Although several people were believed to have been killed in the disorder that followed the floods for several days, the last killing officially recorded by the police was on Aug. 27, two days before the hurricane hit. A bar owner was found shot to death that day in his establishment on Magazine Street.
And when the city was finally evacuated, the criminals left, too.
Since then some 60,000 to 80,000 residents have returned, a fraction of the city's previous population of 450,000. What is remarkable to criminologists, though, is how few criminals seem to be among them.
Peter Scharf, executive director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice at the University of New Orleans, estimated that there were as many as 20,000 participants in the drug culture in the city before the storm. Those drug users and dealers were the engines of the city's crime, Mr. Scharf said, but are now largely absent. No one is certain where they wound up.
Federal agents and police officials elsewhere say there have not been any noticeable spikes in crime in the cities that took in large numbers of hurricane refugees, including nearby Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and other cities in the Southeast.
What is known is that many of the most impoverished, crime-ridden sections of New Orleans remain largely empty, in part because the expense of returning and repairing homes is beyond the means of previous residents. There is no precise precedent for this transformation in the crime rate, law enforcement officials and academic experts say. While the few residents who have returned are holding their breath to see how long it lasts, the sudden change has become a subject of intense interest for those who study crime.
"This is one of the most interesting experiments in crime we've ever seen," Mr. Scharf said. "Without effective courts, corrections or rehabilitation, we have reduced the crime rate by 100 percent."
Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Scharf continued, "was one of the greatest crime-control tools ever deployed against a high-crime city."
Before the storm, New Orleans was reeling, with a daily round of killings and gunfire as bad as any in the city's history; Mr. Scharf projected that without the hurricane there would have been 316 killings there in 2005.
After a brief hiatus in the mid-1990's, the city's murder rate had shot back up: in 2004 it was 59 murders per 100,000 population, compared with 7 per 100,000 in New York, giving New Orleans the highest murder rate in the nation, according to the F.B.I.
Now, police officers are answering some calls for domestic disputes and responding to a few looting complaints. But the whine of sirens, the sound of police cars rushing to a killing scene, is gone. And the Police Department, badly shaken by desertions and looting after the hurricane, has much more time for training, a department spokesman, Marlon Defillo, said.
"The calls for service are not violent in nature," he said. "Over all, the officers are not seeing violence."
In Pigeon Town, the sound of hammers and demolition equipment - signs of the reconstruction of homes - mix with pounding radios. Some residents have returned, but one segment is conspicuous by its absence.
"The dope men, like, they're out of town," said Nona Ivey, a resident of General Ogden Street, sipping a beer on her front porch. "We're hoping they don't come back."
"Both the perpetrators and the victims have been washed out," said Lawrence N. Powell, a historian at Tulane University here. "We've solved our crime problem in a brutally Darwinian way."
New Orleans Crime Swept Away, With Most of the People
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: November 10, 2005
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 9 - On a single day last June in Pigeon Town and Hollygrove, impoverished neighborhoods of worn frame houses at the city's western edge, four men were killed, adding to the eight already slain there this year. Young men brazenly sold drugs from street corners in broad daylight. The gunfire was constant. Residents were fearful.
There has not been a single killing in New Orleans since the hurricane chaos subsided. A New Orleans police officer in the Lower Ninth Ward. But the bullets and the drugs and the fear are gone now, swept away by Hurricane Katrina, along with the dealers and gangs and most of the people.There has not been a single killing in this violence-prone neighborhood, or anywhere else in New Orleans, since the chaos that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina subsided. New Orleans, the nation's most dangerous city, has suddenly become perhaps its safest, and what had easily been the country's murder capital now has a murder rate of exactly zero. Although several people were believed to have been killed in the disorder that followed the floods for several days, the last killing officially recorded by the police was on Aug. 27, two days before the hurricane hit. A bar owner was found shot to death that day in his establishment on Magazine Street.
And when the city was finally evacuated, the criminals left, too.
Since then some 60,000 to 80,000 residents have returned, a fraction of the city's previous population of 450,000. What is remarkable to criminologists, though, is how few criminals seem to be among them.
Peter Scharf, executive director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice at the University of New Orleans, estimated that there were as many as 20,000 participants in the drug culture in the city before the storm. Those drug users and dealers were the engines of the city's crime, Mr. Scharf said, but are now largely absent. No one is certain where they wound up.
Federal agents and police officials elsewhere say there have not been any noticeable spikes in crime in the cities that took in large numbers of hurricane refugees, including nearby Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and other cities in the Southeast.
What is known is that many of the most impoverished, crime-ridden sections of New Orleans remain largely empty, in part because the expense of returning and repairing homes is beyond the means of previous residents. There is no precise precedent for this transformation in the crime rate, law enforcement officials and academic experts say. While the few residents who have returned are holding their breath to see how long it lasts, the sudden change has become a subject of intense interest for those who study crime.
"This is one of the most interesting experiments in crime we've ever seen," Mr. Scharf said. "Without effective courts, corrections or rehabilitation, we have reduced the crime rate by 100 percent."
Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Scharf continued, "was one of the greatest crime-control tools ever deployed against a high-crime city."
Before the storm, New Orleans was reeling, with a daily round of killings and gunfire as bad as any in the city's history; Mr. Scharf projected that without the hurricane there would have been 316 killings there in 2005.
After a brief hiatus in the mid-1990's, the city's murder rate had shot back up: in 2004 it was 59 murders per 100,000 population, compared with 7 per 100,000 in New York, giving New Orleans the highest murder rate in the nation, according to the F.B.I.
Now, police officers are answering some calls for domestic disputes and responding to a few looting complaints. But the whine of sirens, the sound of police cars rushing to a killing scene, is gone. And the Police Department, badly shaken by desertions and looting after the hurricane, has much more time for training, a department spokesman, Marlon Defillo, said.
"The calls for service are not violent in nature," he said. "Over all, the officers are not seeing violence."
In Pigeon Town, the sound of hammers and demolition equipment - signs of the reconstruction of homes - mix with pounding radios. Some residents have returned, but one segment is conspicuous by its absence.
"The dope men, like, they're out of town," said Nona Ivey, a resident of General Ogden Street, sipping a beer on her front porch. "We're hoping they don't come back."
"Both the perpetrators and the victims have been washed out," said Lawrence N. Powell, a historian at Tulane University here. "We've solved our crime problem in a brutally Darwinian way."
Nov 11th, 2005, 08:16 AM
#7
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 6,110
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Good idea about buying some Christmas presents while I am there. I will definitely see if I can fit in some shopping time
Good article too.
Another note on crime and safety - My husband and I spent a week in NO in 2002. We spent our time in the French Quarter, Garden District, CBD, and Fauburg Marigny as most tourists do. Never did we feel unsafe in those areas. Before we went, we heard all sorts of warnings about safety, but it seems that the vast majority of the violence and crime was occurring outside the areas where a tourist would normally go - just like in LA, the SF Bay Area, or any other metropolitan area. It is terrible for the people who live in the crime-ridden areas, but doesn't affect visitors much at all. When we were in NO, the only thing we were really concerned with was pick pocketters, but then we would be concerned about that in any crowded place.
Good article too.
Another note on crime and safety - My husband and I spent a week in NO in 2002. We spent our time in the French Quarter, Garden District, CBD, and Fauburg Marigny as most tourists do. Never did we feel unsafe in those areas. Before we went, we heard all sorts of warnings about safety, but it seems that the vast majority of the violence and crime was occurring outside the areas where a tourist would normally go - just like in LA, the SF Bay Area, or any other metropolitan area. It is terrible for the people who live in the crime-ridden areas, but doesn't affect visitors much at all. When we were in NO, the only thing we were really concerned with was pick pocketters, but then we would be concerned about that in any crowded place.
Nov 11th, 2005, 08:20 AM
#8
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 1,356
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
At nytimes.com, the NY Times has New Orleans Watch feature that updates which hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc. are open for business. Great resource, and very reassuring to those who still have their doubts about visiting.
Nov 11th, 2005, 10:41 AM
#9
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,594
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Beyond purse snatchings, the bulk of the crime in New Orleans pre-katrina was black on black violence involving those in gangs. This is why it has been a Top Murder Rate city consistently.
What people here hope is that this storm will make people face up to the reality of what has been allowed to go on in the bad neighborhoods of New Orleans. Many of the housing projects will likely be bulldozed (which they should have been for years) and there is talk of doing mixed income housing on a large scale.
The harsh reality is that a lot of the criminal element cannot afford to come back. They've moved to other cities like Houston where they've probably already established themselves in the city's crime scene. Hopefully this awful situation may prove to help New Orleans in the long run (and will allow people that work in New Orleans to feel comfortable enough to live in the city, which will greatly improve the hideous property tax base of the city pre-katrina).
What people here hope is that this storm will make people face up to the reality of what has been allowed to go on in the bad neighborhoods of New Orleans. Many of the housing projects will likely be bulldozed (which they should have been for years) and there is talk of doing mixed income housing on a large scale.
The harsh reality is that a lot of the criminal element cannot afford to come back. They've moved to other cities like Houston where they've probably already established themselves in the city's crime scene. Hopefully this awful situation may prove to help New Orleans in the long run (and will allow people that work in New Orleans to feel comfortable enough to live in the city, which will greatly improve the hideous property tax base of the city pre-katrina).
Nov 11th, 2005, 12:24 PM
#10
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 4,571
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
My "ex" just left today! We're (usually) on speaking terms, so I'll b sure to post his trip report f once he returns.
This is great news, about the re-openings. Was there last April, loved it, and had such a sense of loss after The Evil Lady (which is waht my NOLA friend calls it) struck. Glad to hear that sentiment was premature.
This is great news, about the re-openings. Was there last April, loved it, and had such a sense of loss after The Evil Lady (which is waht my NOLA friend calls it) struck. Glad to hear that sentiment was premature.
