New Orleans East responds to demographic pushes and pulls

7th August 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer

Since development took off in New Orleans East more than 50 years ago, the area’s racial and ethnic mix has shifted, influenced by national policies—especially as they relate to integration, housing, lending and highways—and external events, including the 1975 Fall of Saigon. The East is the city’s largest in terms of area, running from the Industrial Canal to Bayou Sauvage and Lake Catherine.

Its main conduit, Interstate 10, is crossed by boulevards and avenues that take residents to homes, man-made lakes, apartment complexes and businesses. The East’s population is smaller since Katrina and stands at just over 75,000 residents now, versus 95,000 in the 2000 Census.

Starting in the late 1930s, Lincoln Beach in the Little Woods section of eastern New Orleans was a Black swimming area. In 1954, the Lincoln Beach amusement park opened along Hayne Boulevard, only to close 10 years later when the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public places.

Longtime, New Orleans East developer Wade Verges recalls the series of camps along Hayne Boulevard in the early 1960s. He used to fish the area with his grandfather. Whites and Blacks resided off of Chef Menteur Highway, which connected to the rest of the city.

Development surged in the East after I-10 was built, Verges said. In 1966, the High Rise Bridge above the Industrial Canal along I-10 East was ready for drivers. Federal loan programs helped veterans and others buy homes. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a building flurry brought houses, town homes and apartment buildings to West Lake Forest and neighboring areas. Lake Forest Plaza opened in 1974 and was the state’s biggest shopping mall. “It had an ice-skating rink and was a destination, attracting people from all over south Louisiana and Mississippi,” Verges said.

Between 1960 and the 1980s, old New Orleans saw an outflow of whites, who headed to newly drained suburbs in eastern Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, according to Richard Campanella, Tulane University geography professor, in a December 2007 article in “The Journal of American History.” Push factors then included resistance to school integration, declining public schools, rising crime and urban decay, he said. Pulls included safety, suburban lifestyles, less congestion and and lower living costs.

Cyndi Nguyen, executive director of VIET or Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training, said her family was part of the first wave of Vietnamese to move to the East in 1975, after Saigon’s fall. “My parents, grandparents, siblings and I spent three month in Iowa, but it was cold,” she said. “We’re Catholic, and with assistance from Catholic Charities, we arrived in New Orleans East and lived in the Versailles Arms Apartments for ten years. It had 400 units, other Vietnamese families were there, and we had help from HUD.”

The immigrants focused on finding jobs. “My grandfather and father were fishermen, and some of the men shrimped. A lot of people worked for Schwegmann’s” grocery warehouse. Schwegmann Brothers closed in 1999. “After we had settled in for awhile, my mom went to work so there’d be two incomes,” Nguyen said. Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church opened in 1979 and was a lifeline to immigrants. “Today my parents own their home,” she said.

A drop in oil prices in the mid-1980s took a toll on south Louisiana. White singles lost interest in the East’s garden apartments. Low-income families, using Section 8 vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, began to fill up those complexes. White flight commenced, with people moving to the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Verges said. An expansion in the city’s bus services hastened an influx of low-income families to New Orleans East.

“Having been mostly White in the 1960s and 1970s, New Orleans East swiftly became mostly Black in the 1980s, with the oil bust and the rise of subsidized, multifamily housing,” Campanella said.

The nation’s savings and loan crisis from 1986 to the early 1990s hurt developers, Verges said. Home buying and building slowed in New Orleans East as credit dried up. But starting in 1992, the area’s housing market gradually recovered, he said. Middle-income and professional Blacks from New Orleans, many of them first-time home buyers, moved to the East in the 1990s.

“We showed models of houses under construction, and our African-American customers wanted brick,” Verges said. “Going from a shotgun in the city to a brick home in the East was moving up in the world.” White buyers’ tastes, meanwhile, had shifted from brick to stucco and other materials.

Realty had rebounded in the East, and residences were nearly 100 percent occupied when Katrina struck in 2005. Flooded by the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet or MRGO, some areas were under water for two to three weeks. “It took Entergy time to get the power on, partly because cables in New Orleans East are underground, but mainly because of the sheer size of the East,” Verges said. “My company had generators, and we were back in a week with construction crews. But most people settled elsewhere for awhile.”

Vietnamese Americans were the first to come back, and they could exist without grocery stores. “We’d always grown our own food and were self-sufficient,” Nguyen said. In 2006, Vietnamese Americans, led by MQVN Church, fought pollution from the nearby Chef Menteur landfill, which was accepting tons of Katrina debris. In response, Mayor Ray Nagin closed the dump that August. “Just because some members of our community didn’t speak English was no reason to allow dumping near us,” Nguyen said.

Today you still see blighted homes in the East, but they’re fewer of them, Verges said. He was shocked when he viewed damage from last February’s tornado around Chef Menteur Highway. “One house was fine, and the next one was devastated,” he said. And he suspects that federal help was less generous here than in some tornado-ravaged areas in other states.

Nguyen said the East’s Vietnamese population hasn’t returned to pre-Katrina levels, and numbers roughly 5,000 in Village de L’est now. Many Vietnamese families have fanned out to the West Bank, Metairie and Kenner, however. “People are still coming back after Katrina, and immigrants continue to arrive from Vietnam to unite with family members here,” she said.

More than a thousand Hispanic families live in the East now, and MQVN Church holds masses in Spanish for them. “Our church offers support to anyone, particularly people with language barriers and those who aren’t used to filling out paperwork,” Nguyen said. The church helped fishermen get compensated for losses after the 2010 BP oil spill.

As for crime, the East’s murders, robberies and car thefts are well above national averages. This year, the police department’s Seventh District, which covers New Orleans East, has had the city’s most shootings, with 97 people killed or injured through midyear. On a brighter note, Verges said that grab-and-run robberies at the area’s convenience and dollar stores appear to be subsiding.

What happened to the Lake Forest Plaza mall? It fell on hard times and lost stores before Katrina. Part of the mall was boarded up with sheet rock when the storm struck, and what remained was demolished in 2007.

Nearly 80 percent of the East’s residents, including a fair portion of the city’s Black middle class and professionals, have returned. “For home buyers, you get the biggest bang for your buck in New Orleans East,” Verges said. “You get a larger house for the price than anywhere in the city. But one real problem in the East is a lack of amenities, with limited shopping and entertainment. People buying homes here now are mostly middle aged.” The big thing is the Walmart, and the Winn-Dixie that was hit by the tornado reopened in June, he said. Residents have to go elsewhere for many of their needs.

Should the area go it alone as Citizens for New Orleans East Secession, a group that feels they pay more in taxes than they get in services, has proposed? “That’s not a viable idea,” Verges said. “It’s coming from people who don’t understand economics.”

Nguyen said the East is headed in the right direction, but needs another decade to get on track. “We have to elect leaders, especially in the City Council, who will represent the entire area,” she said. Nguyen and others are running for District E council member, a seat now held by James Gray, in the city’s October city elections.

This article originally published in the August 7, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.