Survey: New Orleanians dissatisfied with quality of life, city government

3rd June 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Drew Costley
Contributing Writer

(VeriteNews.org) — Residents of New Orleans are stressed out. About crime, about the economy, about the weather – and about the viability of a future in the city for themselves and their children.

And they don’t like their quality of life or city government.

That’s the overriding message from a survey of 700 New Orleanians from across the city commissioned by Verite News. The survey, conducted by nationally recognized pollster Silas Lee in 2023, asked residents for their opinions on quality of life, social stressors and local government.

Residents disapprove of the job elected officials are doing, saying they lack confidence in the ability of the politicians to improve their quality in the near future. They also disapprove of the job city agencies including the Sewerage and Water Board and New Orleans Police Department are doing.

The results show a city whose people are profoundly appreciative of its culture, but are otherwise deeply dissatisfied and distressed. That may come as no surprise given recent news from the U.S. Census Bureau. People are leaving the city and the surrounding area at a historic rate. New Orleans experienced some of the fastest growth in the nation in the early 2010s as some longtime residents who were displaced by Katrina were able to return and new residents flocked to the city. Now, both the city and the region are losing residents. According to 2024 Census estimates, the New Orleans metropolitan area recently dipped below one million people for the first time – other than the years immediately following Hurricane Katrina – since 1970.

Among those who responded to the survey, 86 percent predicted an exodus of young people seeking better opportunities elsewhere in the coming years. And more than half said their children would not have a better life than their parents if they stayed in New Orleans.

“A majority [of people] do not believe young people will enjoy a better quality of life than their parents. That’s very telling,” Lee said. “You know, parents usually are very optimistic. And they hope and expect things to be better for the next generation and children.” He added that respondents’ attitudes are a reflection of what people are seeing and experiencing.

The levels of dissatisfaction and stress are not uniform across all demographics, however. Lee’s survey shows significant disparities in satisfaction with quality of life and local government along racial, class and gender lines. People from communities of color, people from low-income communities and women generally reported less satisfaction with quality of life and government and heightened social stressors than people from white communities, people from affluent communities and men.

For example, 58 percent of respondents overall said that meeting monthly household expenses had been a very or somewhat significant source of stress within the past year. But when broken down by race, 67 percent of Latinx and 64 percent of Black people said it was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, compared to 54 percent of white people. And 60 percent of women said it was a very or somewhat significant source versus 57 percent of men.

That more or less tracks with the average incomes for those groups. But the differences in attitude and experience showed up in non economic matters as well.

While 50 percent of respondents said they were either a little satisfied or not satisfied at all with the job that the city’s public charter schools are doing, 56 percent and 55 percent of Black and Latinx respondents, respectively, said they were a little satisfied or not satisfied at all with schools while 42 percent of the white people surveyed said the same.

And although 41 percent of respondents overall said that lack of job stability had been a very or somewhat significant cause of stress within the past year, 55 percent of Latinx and 44 percent of Black respondents said it was a significant or somewhat significant source of stress, while 37 percent of white respondents said the same.

“We have two societies. One that can participate in mainstream economic and social activities, and one that’s removed,” Lee said about the results of the survey. “And that’s a reflection of income inequality, racism, sexism, lack of investments in terms of people and opportunities.”

For city institutions and leaders, disapproval abounds
One thing nearly everyone could agree on? That they’re not happy with the local government and its leaders, including Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the New Orleans City Council, New Orleans Police Department and Sewerage and Water Board. Less than 50 percent of respondents overall said they strongly or somewhat approve of all of those city officials and agencies.

In only a handful of demographic categories did a majority of respondents say they approved of City Council and the police department – and even then, the percentages were in the low- to mid-50s. Not a single demographic group gave Cantrell or the Sewerage and Water Board a greater than 50 percent approval rating, after multiple scandals have plagued the city’s leader and the agency in recent years.

And when respondents were asked how they feel about how New Orleans is spending tax dollars, 56 percent of them said the city is doing a poor job. The majority of respondents also said they have very little to no confidence that local government can make the city safer, create better-paying jobs or improve infrastructure or quality of life.

The Mayor’s Office declined to comment on this story. Verite News reached out to all of the city’s council members and only District B Councilmember Lesli Harris, District D Councilmember Eugene Green and District A Councilmember Joseph Giarrusso responded to requests for comment. Harris pointed out that the approval rate for the council (45%) was higher than its disapproval rate (32%) and that it was hard to parse out if people were responding based on their perceptions of the job performance of the mayor or city council in questions asked about both entities together.

“I don’t know necessarily that folks understand that the city council is not like a monolithic entity that’s with the administration, and that they understand exactly what we do,” she said. “And I think that’s important for people to know, what the city council’s duties are versus what the administration’s job is.”

Harris also said it was “alarming” that people said in the survey that they don’t see a future for their children in the city. Both she and Green said there are positive things the council is doing – like trying to increase access to early childhood education, working to offer more affordable housing and fill gaps left by the state discontinuing its Summer EBT Program – that aren’t reported in the media.

“Overall, perceptions are sometimes a little bit skew-ed, especially by what dominates the news,” Green said.

Giarrusso said that based on Verite’s poll and one his office did in April that he’s not surprised that quality of life issues are front of mind for residents. “People want communication from the departments about how long their issue will take to get fixed and then the follow up to get it done,” he said.

NOPD and the Sewerage and Water Board did not respond to requests for comment.

“People want more accountability and responsiveness from elected officials [and] the institutions of society,” Lee said. “They don’t want handouts, but they would like to get some relief in terms of what they are experiencing, fulfill their dreams and their personal obligations to give themselves and their families a better quality of life.”

Lamar Gardere, executive director of The Data Center, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data on Southeast Louisiana, reviewed some of the results for Verite News.

He said that when considering the dysfunction of city services, accusations and scandals that have rocked city officials and agencies and a lack of articulation of a vision for how to improve the city, he expected approval rates for local government to be lower than the national average. And that is the case. A Gallup poll from October 2023 showed that 67 percent of people nationwide said they trusted their local government, which is much higher than the 35 percent of people who said they have confidence that the mayor and city council could improve their lives in the next three years in the Verite News survey.

“Locally…you can point to specific things that we don’t like about the city and there are few things you can point to” that are positive, he said. “It doesn’t mean that nothing is happening positively. It just means that we’re doing a poor job of talking about the things that are positive.”

Survey respondents did like some aspects of living in the city – primarily its culture, which the survey defined as the way of living, values and attitudes of the people in the city. Survey respondents also named food and drink, music and entertainment, and family as aspects of the city they liked.

Crime in the city
Over 60 percent of people surveyed noted their fear of crime was something they disliked about living in New Orleans. Most people who responded to the survey said they either felt only a little satisfied or were dissatisfied when asked about how safe they feel from violent crime (80%) and property crime (72%).

But Gardere said these findings should be taken with a grain of salt because there’s often a gap between how safe people feel compared to how safe they actually are from crime.

“The data on crime suggests that there are much higher levels of safety from crime than people believe,” he said. Gardere pointed to one survey finding, where 60 percent of respondents said they felt somewhat or much less safe in 2023 than they did in 2021. But the city also experienced a spike in violent crime during the first two full years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., when there were 218 murders in 2021 and 280 murders in 2022, both more than any year since before Hurricane Katrina. That has significantly abated since, with a 25 percent of murders in 2023.

Gardere noted that violent crime has significantly decreased from past eras, such as in the mid-90s, when the city’s murder rate was its highest ever, or in the years immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

The survey also asked people what they felt contributed most to the city’s crime rate. The top factor selected by survey respondents was “lack of access to mental health or social officers,” followed by “not enough police officers” and “too many guns.”

The top three most effective strategies to reduce crime, as identified by survey-takers, were: “providing more mental health services, social services and counseling for youth,” creating “more opportunities for job training” and “providing counseling and social services for parents and adults.”

How we’ll use this data
Over the next several months, Verite News will use the data in this survey to help inform our reporting, delving into some of the most significant findings through our stories. Visit veritenews.org to see some of the findings broken out into charts. The presentation of the survey data created for Verite News is also available to download. It is our hope that the survey results help readers, policymakers, public officials and servants, and residents of the city make informed decisions about how to live and build community in New Orleans and hold public officials and agencies – and each other – accountable.

This article originally published in the June 3, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.