ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: Let me welcome you all here to the Urban Institute for the first First Tuesday of the new season. These are opportunities for us to get together to share insights that rise out of the expertise and research that is going on here at the Institute, and to be joined by others in the Washington community and elsewhere who have both research and policy interests in these issues, and expertise from grassroots experience.
Today's topic deals with one that has been clearly on the front page of every newspaper for the past month, namely the consequences of Katrina and Rita, which really were unprecedented in modern times with respect to the scope, depth, and severity of the destruction that they caused to public and private property and infrastructure, the disruption of government services and capabilities, and more importantly, the devastation that they have visited on the lives of many Americans—unfortunately, many of them some of the most vulnerable groups in the United States.
Many people, as we all know, have found themselves homeless, displaced, and not living in familiar surroundings. Many have lost their employment and with it often their health insurance and other forms of support. The educational lives of children have been disrupted, and these consequences are going to take a long time to resolve. Lots and lots of questions arise when a situation like this develops. What should be done? What can be done? What do people want who are affected? What do leaders of these areas want and what will the federal government and the state government be willing and able to do to help in this process? How will the nonprofit sector, which is so important in this country, be able to respond?
We have an interesting and insightful panel. And I will introduce them in the order in which they will present their remarks. The first is Lonnie Bunch, who is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, who served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society before that, and has been associate director for curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History.
Following Lonnie will be Marge Turner, who is the director of the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy Center here. She is an expert on federal housing policy, does a lot of work in segregation and discrimination issues, and the workings of the housing market, and was a former deputy assistant secretary for research at HUD.
Marge will be followed by Roderick Harrison, who is the founding director of the Databank Project at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. That is a clearinghouse on African-American and other ethnic populations information and data. He was previously the chief of the Census Bureau's racial statistical branch and teaches sociology and anthropology at Howard University.
Next, will come Olivia Golden. Olivia is a senior fellow here at the Urban Institute and also the director of the Assessing New Federalism Project. Before coming to the Institute a few years ago, she was the director of the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency. Also served as an assistant secretary for children and families at HHS and before that was director of policy and programs at Children's Defense Fund. She is working on a book on the reform of large public welfare systems and how it has gone in the District and a number of other places.
The discussion will be moderated by Beth Frerking, who has been the executive director of the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families for two decades. She was with Newhouse News Services, where she covered child and family issues. She also has been a bureau chief in Washington for the Denver Post and a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, and has won a number of awards for her reporting.
With that, let me turn it over to you, Beth.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you. Welcome to all of you. And I think we're going to have an interesting discussion here. We're going to just go ahead and move right into the speaking. I'm going to be the timekeeper and try to keep us on schedule here so that we can get into your questions once the speakers have finished their presentations. I would urge you to make little notes if you hear something that you really want to follow up on when we move into the questioning. And I will give you a little wave when you're getting to your time. Lonnie, do you want to start?
LONNIE G. BUNCH, National Museum of African American History and Culture: There are few things as dangerous as giving a historian a microphone and a captive audience and asking them to be brief. But I will try to quickly encapsulate some of the issues that I want to explore in the next six minutes.
Let me begin with the fact that on April 18t, 1906, San Francisco was devastated by an earthquake, an earthquake that destroyed the city and led to three days of fires. Those fires destroyed over 25,000 buildings in San Francisco. They left over 270,000 people homeless. They killed 700 people. In fact, it seemed that when the earthquake and fires were going on in San Francisco, the whole city wanted to get out and get to Oakland. Everybody was fighting to get to the ferries, to get to Oakland because Oakland was going to be the salvation. It was going to be the safe haven until you could come back to San Francisco.
As the population left, even before everybody evacuated San Francisco, the city founders were already planning how to revitalize, how to rethink, how to rebirth the city of San Francisco. And when they did, they decided that the key to the success of the new San Francisco was to solve two of the greatest problems they had. One was the Chinese community, and the second was the African-American community.
As part of this desire to rethink San Francisco, the plan initially was to move Chinatown from its location in downtown San Francisco to somewhere further out in the peninsula so that more valuable real estate would be available for the city. And as this plan began to unfold, something happened that got in the way, and that is that the government of China began to raise issues about how its citizens or former citizens were being treated, so much so that the United States government sent the word back to San Francisco that the Chinese would be allowed to return to the formal Chinatown once it was being rebuilt.
Unfortunately, there was no comparable country to protect the African-American community because when the African Americans, like so many San Franciscans, fled to Oakland, they fled with the hope that they would come back because San Francisco has been this wonderful beacon for blacks beginning in the 1850s coming to the West Coast. But to come back to San Francisco, you needed to have a government pass or a Red Cross pass. And for months afterwards, African Americans could not get those passes.
They were encouraged to stay in Oakland rather than coming back to San Francisco.
Eventually, over 4,000 blacks who resided in San Francisco made their home in Oakland because there was not any attempt to allow them to come back to the city that many of them loved. Ultimately, the San Francisco earthquake in an ironic way helped to create the black community of Oakland. While only the most naïve of us would really believe that history repeats itself, there are, however, great trends, great lessons that are clear when we think about how America has responded to disaster in migration.
From the movement of the enslaved who tried to find freedom during the early years of the Civil War, to the destruction caused by the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, to the missteps and mistreatment that followed the great Mississippi flood during the spring of 1927, to the second wave of the Great Migration that changed the tint and tenor of the cities like Chicago during World War II, America really has struggled to find ways to match its generosity and its interests in these disasters with the needs of a racially and economically diverse populace.
And it seems to me there are really four lessons that come out of this by looking at these disasters, looking at these issues of migration. First of all, usually, as in what happened in San Francisco, this rebuilding, this revitalization is done at the expense of and to the detriment of the poor and those of color. After such disasters, cities often use these moments to rethink and restructure their environments. Often prime real estate is reclaimed and those with little power are shunted to less desirable locations. This is clearly the case in San Francisco. It was the case in Chicago after the fire in 1871. There are examples of this over and over again. And it really raises the question of how to make sure that there is an appropriate tension between what the city needs and what its less powerful, less well-off citizens need.
Secondly, after an immediate need for labor in the process of recovery and rebuilding, historically there has been a loss of permanent jobs, especially for those with fewer skills. After the Mississippi flood, for example, in 1927, black laborers were so in demand for the first three months that they were kept under guard in segregated labor camps in order to repair the leevees or to distribute the food. In fact, when food was distributed, the pecking order went—the food went to white southerners, then black southerners who worked as laborers. And then if there was anything left over, other African Americans got food.
So in some ways, all of these towns that were rebuilt by this labor, the work that was done in the fields after the flood of 1927 was all done by this group of African Americans. And yet, of the nearly 330,000 black Americans who were displaced during the flood, many were no longer employed within five months after the flood, partly because of the damage done to the cotton fields, partly because this was also an opportunity to increase the use of mechanization. But the fact that suddenly large numbers of blacks were not able to continue working in the South, coupled with the mistreatment that many experienced in these segregated camps, encouraged many to leave the South for the promise of the urban North.
Which leads me I think to the third issue that comes out of this, looking at it historically. It's clear that large-scale migrations change the new city, change the new region in profound ways. Usually the city is changed in a way that these new migrants become the reason new commissions are formed, new governments are created. Obviously these new residents, first of all, often strain the social services in the region. It's clear that in almost every city that was shaped by the African-American migration, whether it be during World War I or World War II, none of those cities were capable of handling the problems of transition and resettling that came with these new migrants.
But also what was clear is that there were great tensions between the new migrants and the older residents, which led to a hardening of racial and ethnic discrimination and distrust. Cities as diverse as Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Los Angeles, all strained under the weight of these thousands of new migrants who came. And what you found were new ways to discriminate, whether it was red lining or new uses of gerrymandering, or restricting people's opportunities to move into certain neighborhoods.
And yet even within these groups, there was great mistrust and great tension. There are a lot of examples within the African-American community: the tension between the older residents and the new residents; the older residents fearful that the new residents who seemed much more rural, who seemed much more backward, would undermine their status within the white Northern community. All of this really begins to shape the city because in some ways the new migrants also bring a culture, whether it is the music, the food, or the attitudes that also begin to permeate this region.
But finally, it's clear to me that this migration, this return and this rebuilding, whenever we look at where this happens, is really a long-term challenge, not a six-month or even a one-year challenge. Most of the cities that experience this, most of the regions find themselves in a state of flux for over a decade as new alliances are formed, new responses are crafted, and new communities are formed.
Finally, it seems to me what is clear historically is the sense of generosity and good will that emanates from all corners of America when tragedy occurs, that is clear. As one of the residents of San Francisco said (it is important for me to recognize and to remember and to be thankful for the quote), "quick generosity of America." Let us hope that this time, this generosity is tempered with fairness as we recover from Katrina. Thank you.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you, Lonnie. Marge?
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: People who were displaced by these two hurricanes and by the tremendous flooding in New Orleans obviously have urgent housing needs. While they are wondering whether and when to return home, they are searching for places to live in unfamiliar housing markets. There are several groups among the displaced families who are likely to face especially difficult challenges as they search for housing in the communities where they have been relocated.
Low-income families are going to face affordability issues. Rents and house prices are beyond their reach. We know that minorities face continuing discrimination in housing markets all over the country when they seek to rent or buy. And disabled people not only face issues finding housing that is accessible for them, but they too face discrimination from landlords and real estate agents.
When we think about how to help families tackle these challenges, it is really important to remember that housing is not just about shelter. It is not just about a roof over people's heads. The place you live also determines your level of security and safety, your access to quality schools for your kids to attend, and your proximity to employment opportunities.
Many of the most vulnerable victims of Katrina were already suffering from the consequences of living in dangerous, distressed, segregated, and high-poverty neighborhoods. Before the storm, one in three poor blacks in New Orleans lived in a neighborhood that was 40-percent poor or more. The average black public school student in the city attended a school where 87 percent of the kids in the classroom were poor. And the city was actually one of the very few in America where racial segregation got worse, not better, during the 1990s.
There is tons of social science research telling us that growing up in these racially segregated, high-poverty, isolated communities undermines the quality of life for kids and for their families, and undermines their long-term life chances, cutting off access to mainstream social and economic opportunities for the future. And historically, public policies, including federal housing assistance policies, have helped create these severely distressed neighborhoods. So it's especially important that we not make those horrible mistakes again as we help families find new places to live, both in the short term and in the longer term, whether back in New Orleans or elsewhere.
In the short and intermediate term, housing vouchers provide a proven tool for giving low-income families access to decent housing and decent neighborhoods. Housing vouchers essentially supplement what families can afford to pay themselves to rent apartments and homes that are already available in the private market. And many of the markets where people have relocated after these storms actually have quite high rental vacancy rates. So if displaced families could get vouchers soon, along with some hands-on help with the search process, they could use them to move into decent apartments, decent homes in neighborhoods of their choice.
Some temporary housing, such as these RV and mobile-home ideas, might be necessary in some locations or for workers who are going to immediately start cleaning and rebuilding the devastated communities. But this temporary-housing approach poses a very serious risk of creating brand-new isolated ghettos for the most vulnerable families.
Over the longer term, when we think about rebuilding and enabling people to return to their communities, vouchers can also play a role. They can enable lower-income families to decide whether and when it makes sense for them to return, and where, in the metro area, it makes sense for them to live.
But there is clearly also going to be a need for a lot of new housing construction in New Orleans, including subsidized development for lower-income renters and home buyers. And here it is absolutely essential to put into place a process that ensures the equitable redevelopment of those poor African-American communities that were wiped out by the hurricane and the flooding. They should be replaced with mixed-income, affordable communities that have a decent quality of life, access to good schools, and access to decent-paying jobs.
We have some lessons from the Hope VI public housing revitalization program—including lessons from failures in that program as well as successes—about what it takes to create that kind of community. We have to avoid re-segregating New Orleans's poor and minority residents in isolated and distressed neighborhoods. But at the same time, we have to work hard not to simply displace them, not to simply wipe out the communities that they come from, communities that have a real history, communities that people care about.
That is not an easy challenge. The active involvement of residents, along with business owners, community leaders, and professional planners is essential if we are going to move toward that kind of equitable redevelopment process. But whatever their destination, the vulnerable families who were hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina should be able to find housing options that offer more than just basic temporary shelter, but real access to social and economic opportunities that will put them in better shape for the future.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you, Marge. Roderick, are you ready to go? Thank you.
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: I wanted to outline, I think, some of the key ways in which employment patterns will drive and shape the rebuilding process in New Orleans. And I wanted to begin with the concept of a base economy—that is, industries in New Orleans that one would think are basic to the economy of the area, in the sense that they provide unique kinds of services, which are likely to be very strong and powerful interests that would need to be rebuilt. And clearly one would begin with the petrochemical, the gas and oil industries along the coast, not just in New Orleans but throughout the entire Gulf area that has been ravaged by the different hurricanes.
Petrochemicals employs about 40,000 people. The figures I'm going to use are from the 2003 County Business Patterns. The port is much smaller, only about 4,500 workers—a very important industry. But the employment-to-income ratio is rather unfavorable. And then of course there is the tourism industry, which employed about 65,000 people in 2003. I think these industries, beginning with the petrochemical, oil and gas, will be rebuilt fairly quickly. The tourism industry, accommodations and food services, will take much longer to rebuild.
And the concept that we want to look at over the next ten years or so, as New Orleans rebuilds, is that if we assume that some of the petrochemical, oil and gas, and the port facilities will return close to capacity fairly early in the process, that generates a base of workers who need services that other workers can provide. Clearly the construction industry and some real estate finance companies are going to be above capacity for some time. This will generate another base of workers.
One interesting thing about New Orleans is that the largest employer was health care and social systems. This is reflecting in part the high prevalence of poverty, the high prevalence of the need for social assistance, and the elderly population that we saw suffering so heavily.
So if we assume that there is going to be some economic base for these workers, then we could kind of do a lot of what-ifs. We could say what if 50 percent of the tourist, accommodations, and food service industries are restored in the next three years? How many workers would that provide employment for? If it were about 50 percent, that would be about 30,000 workers. And going through the multiplier effects of the economy, how many retail outlets, how many schools, et cetera, would be needed to support this kind of population?
If New Orleans rebuilds as its economic base and its employment base recovers, for some time you might in fact have a substantial drop in poverty rates. You might have a city where most of the people coming back are coming back because they in fact can find employment. There will be substantial numbers of people who can find employment or who can find high enough income who will return and build up the poverty populations, hopefully not in the concentrations as mentioned.
But I think we could begin—or what I would like to do as time permits is conduct this research over the next several months and begin to play with different scenarios about, well, let's
assume such-and-such percent of this industry recovers. How many jobs should that provide and what would that do for attracting workers back to the population? I think there are two questions. One is where are you going to house these workers while you're reconstructing some of the working-class areas?
I think it's important to realize we're not just talking about a poverty population but we're talking about a large working-class population that would have to have housing, as hopefully some of these industries recover. Some of the high-poverty, low-income areas were also residential areas for the working class. And these are the areas that have been most devastated. This might actually create forces that would disperse some of this population into suburban areas that have higher elevations and are less hit by the flooding. So there might be forces that would encourage the dispersion and integration of housing.
But I also think clearly there are going to be people with attachments to the area. I think a substantial portion of the poor population probably lived in New Orleans all of their lives—some
will find employment or opportunities in these cities that they have evacuated to. Others will want to return. And I think we can expect a period in which the poverty rates will start to build back up as these populations grow, unless, again, we can take advantage of some of the pacing of economic growth to do a better job of providing employment opportunities for these populations.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you. Olivia?
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: Good afternoon. My assignment in the group is to talk about children who, along with the elderly and the disabled, were a particularly vulnerable group in Hurricane Katrina. And actually, listening to the array of perspectives on the panel, I am struck by how from different directions we're coming together to some similar implications. So we'll see if that comes through.
I want to focus on three topics in the very short amount of time I have on the circumstances of children and families and the state service systems that responded to them before the hurricane, on the consequences of the disaster for children, and on some brief implications for where we should go from here.
It won't surprise anybody in this room, given what you know and what you have already heard, that children in Louisiana and Mississippi started out before the hurricane with the worst indicators of their well-being on a lot of different dimensions in the United States. The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count Report, which annually ranks states on an array of health and economic indicators for children, ranked Louisiana 49th and Mississippi 50th in the most recent report. For example, on child poverty—actually, the ranks are reversed: Mississippi 49th and Louisiana 50th. But both of them have almost twice the child poverty rate of the United States at about 30 percent.
What are some of the reasons? You have heard about neighborhoods, family structure, history, race, but another issue that I want to touch on for a moment is employment, which has also come up in a couple of the other presentations. The jobs that parents hold are low-wage, insecure, and generally not sufficient to support a family.
In the folders that you have, we have done a ranking, our researchers here at the Urban Institute, looking at the states in terms of the share of children who are growing up in families where parents are working regularly, either full-time or part-time, but they are low-income. And we use twice the policy level as a cutoff for that. So these are families where parents are working often many hours, but not sufficient to make ends meet, or at least not to make ends meet easily.
Louisiana is 48th, Mississippi 47th on this measure. About 4 in 10 children, compared to about a quarter nationally, live in families where parents are both working and struggling to make ends meet. Why does that matter? Well, I think it has lots of implications for what happens afterwards. But in terms of before the hurricane, what that means is that many of those families were living very precariously. Many families in those circumstances report they have trouble putting food on the table, paying the rent or the mortgage, or the utility monthly. And of course what that means is they are not likely to have a cushion to deal with when one thing goes wrong, let alone losing the house and the job at the same time. They are also not likely to have benefits or other kinds of supports from the job.
I want to say two things about the circumstances of the states and their service systems before the hurricane and then go into its consequences. It also won't surprise you, given that account of the families and the level of poverty, that when fiscal experts look at the ability of Louisiana and Mississippi to raise revenues, they conclude they are also in the bottom handful of states in terms of the ratio of their fiscal capacity to their needs, meaning that they have weak economies and low incomes so they can't raise very much in the way of taxes, and they have high needs, so they need a lot. And both of them were in the bottom four of five on that measure.
Not surprisingly, that means that their services are generally not good—waiting lists, not reaching very many people, not generous. I just want to note one important exception, though, because I want to come back to it in the solutions. The Head Start program, which is federally funded and focuses on low-income, young children, has a history—because of its federal funding and its grounding in the civil-rights movement, it actually reaches more children than the average in the South. Mississippi in particular has typically reached one of the largest percentages of eligible children in the country with that federally funded Head Start program. So that is one strong service network in the area.
What are the consequences? If that is where families start, this kind of upheaval for children and particularly young children—there are probably some child development experts in the audience who can do a lot more detail on this. But I would say that the headline is that instability and disruption are bad for young children, not only in terms of their emotional development, but in terms of their learning—young children learn grounded in stable relationships. And the disruption is particularly difficult in a number of circumstances, many of which affected children after Hurricane Katrina, when parents are powerless to protect children, when close relationships, extended family, caregivers, and parents are disrupted, and when children lose lots of sources of stability at once.
Conversely, if parents' lives are stable—or at least if they are able to pretend that there is stability and calm, and protect children—and if the key relationships in this child's life stay stable, children can be amazingly resilient. Good responses can also help. But the other side of that, which is something I faced in a different context when I ran the District's child welfare agency, is that after a child's life has been disrupted, bad public responses, or bad responses whether public or private, can also make things worse because after major losses, future experiences of instability, upheaval, and abandonment can be even more damaging. So what I take from that is that the stakes are high in our responses and that the consequences really can be very great.
What are the implications for what we do next? I want to highlight very briefly three implications and one proposal, which I will really just mention rather than argue for, and then you can ask me in the questions if you want to hear more about the arguments.
The first theme really builds on what I just said about high stakes. And it's interesting to me. It's very similar. Dr. Bunch came to the idea of long-term from the perspective of history. I come to it from the perspective of a child's development. There are real long-term consequences forchildren in what has happened, and therefore high stakes for the response. The response matters for children's well-being and education. And it's not just about rebuilding, even in a broad sense of rebuilding and recreating networks; it's also about responding to damage that has been done, and that that is on the table and that is what we need to do.
The second theme I want to highlight is the high quality of services that are needed to live up to those expectations from the response: schools, early childhood programs, health care settings. What we know from the research about responding to children's needs is that with substantial disruption in their lives, we would expect that kids would need better, not average or worse, services than other children are receiving. That is really important because a lot of the early responses to the disaster have been in the form of waivers, of saying you don't need to keep your class size or the same standards.
And that is very understandable as an immediate response. We probably all would have chosen to do it in the first days so we didn't have bureaucratic obstacles to children getting services. But after those first days, in the coming weeks or months, I would argue that the evidence suggests that if you needed a class size of whatever before (22 for first grade, 18 for Head Start), you're going to need at least that if not better in terms of the ability of teachers and caregivers to respond to children's needs later on. So, high stakes, high quality.
The third implication I want to highlight is stability. It really matters to reestablish stability in children's lives. And stability for parents is a key part of stability for children. So as we think about education, transportation, housing, about stability for the family and what that means in a context where, you know, even the best response might mean several moves—but how can each of those seem permanent and seem sufficient for the family?
The proposal that I just want to toss out in closing is to just go back to my point that Head Start and Early Head Start, which are high-quality, comprehensive preschool programs. Early Head Start for babies to age three, Head Start for three- to five-year-olds, those represent an approach to children's development, a two-generational approach to families, and a potential for training and jobs for parents that already have some capacity in the affected areas. And so one of the strategies along with I'm sure a panoply of others that I would argue for is a substantial investment in programs along that model as we try to figure out what it will take for children and for communities to rebuild, both in the most devastated areas and in the surrounding areas that have taken in large numbers of families. Thank you.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you to all of the panelists. I want to open with a question and then we'll open it up to the audience. And I would be interested in hearing all of your thoughts on this. Everyone has made mention of the initial response to a disaster like this. But obviously the proof's in the pudding in terms of a long-term response.
I'll start with you, Lonnie. Given your historical background in looking at these kinds of situations, we are already seeing, and I frankly personally didn't think it would happen this quickly, but we are already seeing this story move into the inside pages of newspapers and no longer at the top of the news, particularly with the two Supreme Court nominees and hearings that we have had with Roberts and now Harriet Miers. In keeping with the way this has gone in past events, how do you see this playing out given what you have studied in terms of past disasters, as that initial flood of generosity, as Olivia called it—once people sort of get back into their daily lives? Are we going to forget about this or is this going to stay in the forefront of people's attention?
LONNIE BUNCH, National Museum of African American History and Culture: Well, it is interesting. In a time before television, what you really have is this living on with people much more than we do today—it becomes not just part of daily living but part of the folklore, part of the culture. So one of the things that is interesting is the amount of music that is created out of disaster speaks volumes about how important these things are and how long they are kept alive. So one of the challenges is to find ways to keep national attention focused on these issues, but I think local notions will still remain strong because this is where they are going to be shaped for generations to come.
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: Well, it seems to me less important whether it stays on the front page of the newspaper than if it continues to get serious attention from the public sector, including the federal government, which has the tools and the resources, and has at least nominally made a commitment to help the families who have been displaced and to rebuild those communities in a way that is really constructive.
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: See, one of the things that I have been thinking about is that it will be on the front burner for those teachers in classrooms in Houston who are teaching 40 kids rather than 22 kids and are dealing with kids' experiences. And my worry is that if we forget the context, we'll forget that that is because of our choices, and that if in fact we would right now really focus on recruiting, hiring, supporting more people to do that work, then kid's education could go forward. And so my worry is that it will turn into a story about the damage that these children are doing. It's again Lonnie's point about the detentions. They are not always inevitable. Sometimes they are caused by choices we made but didn't recognize.
I mean, if I were dreaming about kinds of press coverage and information and research that would be helpful, I would imagine following the experiences both through the eyes of children—younger, as well as school age—and through the eyes of a Head Start teacher, a child care teacher, classroom teacher, a nurse, people who reached out at the beginning, and make sure we have information about what that experience is like for them over time.
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: Katrina and the other hurricanes revealed the devastating weakness at the core of what was supposed to be homeland security, emergency response, et cetera. I am very afraid that in fact the longer run is going to reveal the very short attention span of the American public. I think the government has a very strong tendency to propose—it has become a public relations management. It is a matter of keeping the story off the front page—the incentive for bad news. Most of the programs proposed thus far by the president, requested by the delegations from Louisiana, are on one hand pitifully small—now envisioned for addressing the immensity of the problems faced—and on the other hand reflect kind of "Let's get the pork back in."
So I'm afraid that as people scramble to—one interesting thing I think in Olivia's presentation particularly is we're going to commit a lot of money to rebuilding the physical infrastructure. I don't think we have a clue as to what social infrastructure is about. We saw it collapse. We noticed it as it collapsed in the midst of the hurricane. But I don't think we know very much about how social infrastructure works and how you rebuild it more effectively. So I'm fairly pessimistic, and I really think in fact it's going to be in the hands of audiences like this, whether it's pressed enough, whether the issue is pressed enough, or whether we go back to our research, our studies, and everything else.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you. I haven't heard anyone, you know, bring up—look at what happened there. There are people that have studied how trauma affects children from natural disasters as well. There's a professor, I believe, in North Carolina, who has done many studies looking at how that affects families and children, and—you're right, Olivia—the damage can be long term. And it is about instability and keeping people together and in stable situations.
We're going to open it up for questions. What I'd like you to do when you stand, if you could stand and identify yourself. This is being taped, and there's a transcript of it. We want to know who you are. If you could say your name and then state your question
JIM KLUMPNER, Senate Budget Committee: It seems that a crucial quantitative question in this whole thing is what proportion of the population is going to be able to move back how soon. And a lot of the discussion here seems to suggest that the panel maybe believes that a large proportion will be able to move back, say, within two years, and I want to question that assumption.
Right now, much of New Orleans is essentially a gigantic Superfund site. Before the storm, there were something like 130 existing chemical spills that then got covered with water. There were petrochemical and other chemical releases from vehicles and businesses during the storm. There are significant biological threats there now, and there's going to be unknown stuff that will be uncovered as we clean up. In addition, the leevees for a couple of years are not going to withstand predictable hurricanes. Is this really a good assumption that a significant number of people are going to be moved back? Or should our policy approaches instead assume that we're going to have a significant number of displaced people for a long time?
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: I'm the neutral moderator so I don't have an opinion. Roderick, do you want to start?
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: I would agree with your assumptions. I have no assumptions that this is a two-year process. I really do think that large areas of Orleans County will not be rebuilt at all and for years to come. I think you're going to have a pattern. I think you're going to end up 10 to 20 years from now with a much smaller city. New Orleans was about half a million people. I think something in the range of a quarter of a million to 200,000 people.
I don't see, in the near future, it regaining its population at all. I think one of the key issues—elevation problems, the flooding problems, and the toxic environmental problems—one of the interesting things is that these are concentrated in the center of the city. For no other reason, it will mean that much of the housing will have to be in the higher lands of the suburbs, in the suburban counties, which will create a very different pattern, particularly as we do settle lower-income, working-class, and other populations in some of these areas. It's going to force a different kind of residential integration, residential dispersion of income in some of the suburban counties than existed before. But I think this is a long healing process. This is really going to take a long time and a long commitment.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families: Marge, did you want to respond?
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: I agree. I think we don't know how long it will take or how big New Orleans will get again. It's not going to happen fast, and that's part of the reason why we need to think about assistance for families in the cities they evacuated to, not as some short-term, three months then it's over process, but as part of a long-term solution. And I think there's a tendency here to think there's the rebuilding, and then there's the really quick short-term stuff. And these vulnerable families are going to need assistance with children's issues, housing issues, employment issues, and health issues over a considerable period of time while the rebuilding process happens.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Can I also add there were some good figures that you all put out, just a reminder of the cities that these people are going to, the ones who are going to large cities. And in Atlanta, for example, the percentage of blacks in poverty is 33 percent. In Dallas, it's 24 percent. In Houston, which has one of the largest groups, 44 percent of the blacks in that city are in poverty. So as you said earlier, they are moving into cities that are already stressed. And those states—I don't have figures on their social services records. You probably know that better than I do, Olivia.
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: Well, I was going to make a similar comment to Marge's, which is that I have no expertise on the issues of physical rebuilding and no knowledge of what families will do. I've been very struck by how many rooms I've been in in the last few weeks, where people have very intense debates about that. People have very strong opinions, one way or the other. And where I take that is to this thought about what do you do if you want to respond with flexibility because we genuinely don't know. And what that takes me to, as it does with Marge, is questions of, what are the strategies that support families where they are? And if they return, what are the strategies that support informal social networks? People have moved in; they're overcrowded. Is there anything that could have that temporary solution work a little better or keep them with some connections?
Part of why I suggest some of the Head Start and Early Head Start models is that many of those don't have as heavy a reliance on facilities. There are approaches where you can have some center-based and some home-based so you can respond to populations of uncertain size. And I also think that the other theme—if you're thinking flexibility, it forces you to think about the incentives for states and how you structure federal funding or combine federal-state funding in ways that may be different from the existing programs out there. If you want Texas to seriously continue responding to these children, but also you want to think about having incentives that are neutral for families and that encourage a national response. So I think where I would put it, which I think is the same suggestion Marge was making, is that we think about what you do when you have uncertainty that's going to stretch over an extended period.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: I want to open it up over here.
ADEANA LEWIS, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Hi, excuse me, sorry. Thank you all to the panel members. This has been very enlightening. My question is about the president's suspension of the provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act and the ability to pay a prevailing wage. And I guess it's a two-part question. Number one, how would that affect the ability of the short-term influx of construction workers to create stability and build homes. And then the second part of that is—and I don't know if you can speak to this—but how would that affect the ability of unions to be effective in that arena if that large tool of theirs to be able to negotiate for a standard wage is taken away, if you thought that had any impact?
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Can I ask you one question? Did the president say how long it was suspended for? Is it just suspended generally for—is there a limit? Indefinite?
Roderick, do you want to say anything about that?
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: I think there are a lot of things that make sense. We had a couple of other examples as temporary emergency measures that would be counterproductive in the long run. This would be one of them. Clearly one of the problems, nicely detailed, of the New Orleans economy is that it has a lot of working poverty. And working poverty comes from low-income jobs. I don't think you want to create conditions over the long run of the recovery where you're replicating, perhaps exacerbating, that problem. So for some emergency period, it might make sense over the long run. If you really want economic redevelopment in the area and you want people to be able to afford better housing, build better neighborhoods, better institutions, I think you would need at least a prevailing wage in these areas.
One thing, I have heard of reports largely over the radio, I think, NPR, so I don't have citations that in fact—right now the demand for labor in some of the cleanup and construction and oil, et cetera means that firms are paying a premium. They are paying higher wages simply to attract. So it could be that the laws of supply and demand will actually work temporarily in our favor. One big question is how many of these people will be local? How many will stay? How many are simply there for the immediate cleanup and will be going back to taking nice paychecks in other communities?
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Lonnie, I know you talked a little bit about that. Could you put that in a historical context for us?
LONNIE BUNCH, National Museum of African American History and Culture: I really don't know that as well.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Other questions? Patrick.
PATRICK BOYLE, Youth Today: I'm wondering if anybody can speak about the implications of this for people who work with kids who are in out-of-home placement at the time the storm struck. In particular, I'm thinking of child welfare where of course you have got kids in biological families and case workers strewn all over the place. Plus there are other agencies that are going to have to try to put themselves and their caseloads back together again.
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: Patrick, you may know better than I the current status in terms of Louisiana and their foster care caseloads right afterward. One of the things that was certainly in news reports was that they didn't know where foster parents had evacuated to. And so clearly that question for children in the state's custody—what is the right way to prepare, and how do you make sure that you're making sure of those children's safety is one that I'm sure everybody in a child welfare agency is thinking about.
My own limited experience in Hurricane Isabel, which the District used as kind of a practice, was that you do get a few days notice with a hurricane, and so you can do things like make absolutely sure for medically fragile children that you know that they have backup electrical sources for equipment they might need and so forth. But I think everybody is probably planning on that a lot more.
But the other issue that I would highlight—I think this was in your question—is that there is one issue, which is children who already because of abuse or neglect are in the care of the
state. But there is a second issue, which is children who are separated from their parents through evacuation. And child welfare agencies typically have the responsibility of trying to connect those children back.
And my experience in the District and my reading of the news reports here has suggested to me that that is an area where there is a real risk of people's generous instincts being at odds with what you really want to do. There is often an instinct to say, "Oh, these kids are alone, can we adopt them? Can we create an institution for them?" Where in fact what you really, really, really want to be doing is working very hard to find the family and reconnect the children. And my sense is that that
is now what is happening around the country with support for that, but that is a key piece.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Next question, in the back.
MAGDA HERRARA, Consumers Union: I have a question just speaking in my personal capacity. The Latino population, more specifically, undocumented or noncitizen Latinos—are there any studies or policy proposals that are being made to deal with their welfare concerning post-Katrina and how they are going to recover?
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: I actually don't have any numbers with me. The numbers of immigrant and undocumented families and children are relatively small in Louisiana but larger in Mississippi, including Asian as well as Hispanic populations. And I don't know—I'm looking at Sheila—if anybody in the audience has information. There has clearly been an issue reported in the news that particularly for people who came with particular kinds of guest visas to work in the fishing or in the casinos that their ability to evacuate to somewhere else and get a job is not there. But I don't at this point know any specifics about policy responses.
KATHY LOTSPEICH, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Homeland Security: I want to answer your question or try to give a little information on that real quick, but then I also want to say that Homeland Security asked its employees if they wanted to volunteer for FEMA about three days after the hurricane. And I was very lucky to be able to go, and privileged. And I actually worked in Baton Rouge for about two weeks placing people in trailers. So I just wanted to give a brief observation about that work.
But first of all, I just wanted to state that according to the training that I received from FEMA, immigrants are only eligible for aid from FEMA if they are a qualified alien, which I think comes from the 1996 welfare legislation. However, immigrants without documents could be eligible for non-cash, I believe, and other types of assistance through what they call the disaster recovery centers if they were to go in and apply for aid. The numbers are really small in Louisiana. I think it's about 3 percent of an immigrant population in Louisiana, about 5 percent in Mississippi, largely from Vietnam, Mexico, and Honduras. And I know that immigration has put out some responses on processing and suspension of documents. But I actually wasn't really involved in all of that because I was in Baton Rouge when they were making that response. I was working on something else.
But a brief point on transitional housing. I was assigned to a team that went into shelters, interviewed people to see if they wanted to live in trailers, and then pretty much took them to trailers that day. And I was really surprised at how eager people were to move into a trailer immediately. I mean, bags packed by the curb within two hours. I'm not exaggerating. And there was also an issue of shelters closing down around them and people being pulled into larger shelters. They were being taken out of schools and churches and being put into community centers. There is the CajunDome. Maybe you have read about the CajunDome in Lafayette, Louisiana, where there are about 1,000 people.
And so I guess my point is not to be so quick to discount the trailer homes as a temporary solution, only if it's temporary for a couple of months because the churches and the schools, some of them were getting kind of tired of housing these people. That was the impression I was getting. I literally had a pastor say to me, "Please take some of these people out of my church. I want my church back." And so we moved some people into trailers. And a couple of times I was kind of worried. I felt like these people are very fragile. And they need—some of them need social workers.
And I was pleased to see that while I was there in a disaster—and it was my first disaster, maybe my last, I don't know—(chuckles)—but conditions changed every day. And so by the time I left the State of Louisiana and FEMA and Catholic Charities, which were all working together at the FEMA headquarters in Baton Rouge, were working on getting social workers assigned to the trailer homes so that they could work with the families. And I felt better about that because moving people into a trailer-home situation, it was kind of scary, but at the same time I was surprised at how desperately they wanted to get out of the shelters.
So I guess my point is I think that the trailer homes are an option, but as long as they would have some kind of an assistance, somebody checking in on them, and then to try to get them out as soon as possible, because the shelters are just—it's like a dwindling resource. That is all I wanted to say.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Does anybody want to respond? Marge?
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: Yeah. I think if I was sitting in a shelter, especially one that was being closed down around me, I would be really eager to take the RV also. But I really think that if what you had had in hand to offer those families had been a voucher so that they could go out with some help and rent an apartment or a house, that they would have been even happier. The social worker could have visited them there also. And that would have been a semipermanent solution for them, not one that we hope they will be out of that RV in a couple of months and have to be going through a move again. So I wasn't suggesting that leaving people in shelters is preferable to trailers. We have a tool that is so much more effective, and we're still not using it.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Can I just ask you one question to be clear since you were there on the ground. Where were the trailers? Can you describe the parts of cities that they were in?
KATHY LOTSPEICH, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Homeland Security: The plan at the time changed every day while I was there. I mean, conditions are constantly changing. The plan was to find when a contractor would deliver some new trailers to an area, and then we would go to the nearest shelter, so the people wouldn't have to relocate from one side of the state to the other. The idea was to move them into a trailer home within a 20-mile radius of where they were in a temporary shelter. And your point on housing vouchers—I just don't know where the housing stock is in Louisiana. I'm just talking about Louisiana for them to use those vouchers. I think it's an amazing resource for them in, like, Houston or Dallas. I just don't know what is available, especially if they are right on the outskirts. But then you run the risk of a trailer becoming a much larger home.
And then one other quick point is that a lot of the parishes while I was there—I would read the metro section of The Advocate, which is the Baton Rouge paper, every morning. And every day a new parish was passing an ordinance to prevent trailer park development in their parish. They were putting rules up that you had to file a Wetlands Act waiver prior to August 29th. (Laughter.) That is—that is a good one—
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: So that response was already happening—to shut out—to keep people out of areas.
KATHY LOTSPEICH, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Homeland Security: There was definitely kind of a fear of the evacuees. But I was only there for two weeks. That is not—
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: That is more than any of us I think. Thank you for sharing that.
Somebody else in front here?
JOAN MAGANA, National Disability Rights Network: I just sort of wanted to amplify some of the comments with respect to people with disabilities. We could talk for a long time about the evacuation problems that people had, but more in terms of the long-range planning and the issues with people evacuating to other cities. First, to add to some of your statistics, in New Orleans, 22 percent of adults, 21 to 64, are people with disabilities. And in the over-65 population, it's 48 percent. So it's a huge population of people with disabilities who were affected.
In moving to othercommunities, they are going into communities, as you say, that are in many cases high-poverty areas with stressed social-service systems. And this is putting more stress on those social-service systems for housing, for special ed, for paratransit, for all of the types of services that people need. So that is one issue.
And another issue that has already arisen in some Texas cities that we have heard about is backlash for people who have been on waiting lists for years, and people—the Katrina evacuees coming in and jumping over them for services. There is just a need for greater services and a concern that one of the proposed responses to provide the federal funding for all of the rebuilding is to cut some of these social-service programs, which will just have a disastrous effect nationwide.
Another issue, I think, and an opportunity really is the rebuilding and the need not to relax rules for building accessible businesses, accessible housing when the rebuilding is done. But I think the issues for people with disabilities are just huge.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Thank you. Do you have any
questions you want to ask the panel?
JOAN MAGANA, National Disability Rights Network: Well, is any research being done particularly focused on these issues? That is—because I don't want that to get lost in the shuffle with children and with housing and with all of that.
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: Well, one comment I just wanted to make is to link some of those ideas to Patrick's comment about children in foster care. We have been thinking particularly about the immediate response but also the longer-term response in those situations where the government had a very particular responsibility. Either children were in custody or they were in institutions like nursing homes and hospitals or they were in jails because it does seem clear that there were some terrible responses, and also possibly some successful ones. And so we have actually been thinking about is there a way to look and to compare and to try to understand what was involved in those institutions that responded successfully and those that responded badly? So we have been thinking about those very particular obligations as something to study.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: More questions? Yes.
MAKANA THEMBA-NIXON, Praxis Project: So thank you all. I had a quick question that had to do with policy approaches to integrating some of those who are affected into the policy process. I mean, there are a lot of decisions being made. And some of them have to do—I was thinking about the Greene County, Alabama, situation, where they are talking about possibly doubling the population of Greene County by placing almost 10,000 evacuees in a county that has about 10,000 people, predominately African Americans—getting to some of what you were talking about in terms of the concentration of African Americans. And some of that also has to do with the fact from my understanding from folks on the ground that they don't want to have them go into the cities and tip the political balance with having more African Americans in Selma and places like that.
So I was just curious to what extent are there proposals, either commissions or at the federal level, to try to integrate their voices? What might be some precedence for that that people can draw on?
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: I haven't heard that anything along those lines has started to happen yet. I have heard, though, that in New Orleans, one of the sort of promising social mechanisms is whole networks of Mardi Gras crews and social clubs, which reach into all parts of the community, including the African-American community, and that there is an opportunity there to use those existing social structures, which are surviving the dislocation as a way to involve people at least in the decisions about how New Orleans should gradually be rebuilt.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Let me just follow up on your question. I have been sitting here thinking of the average person out there who is not in the affected communities and watching this from a distance. And I guess one of my dumb-reporter questions, which isn't so dumb, is how do you get—and I would be interested in all of you speculating on this—there are these great ideas and great discussions even at this table. Have you all been invited by any state officials, federal officials? In other words, is there a sort of a team Katrina that is going to involve the best of federal, state, and nonprofit minds to be put together to look at how best to avoid the mistakes in the past? Have any of you been called upon to do this? And what would your sort of fantasy of the best way to do that be?
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: Well, it's interesting because several of us assembled a group of people focused on child and family issues to have some of that conversation a few weeks ago. And at that point, of course, part of the issue—groups like the National League of Cities and the National Governors Association are keeping in touch with their members. But having been the child welfare director in the District on September 11and been part of our planning thereafter, even never
having dealt with anything of this scope, I know that people on the ground are so overwhelmed. It's incredibly hard early on to figure out how to be in touch in a way that is not burdensome.
I do think that structuring ways of both being useful and sharing ideas is important. And I'm genuinely undecided. I'm curious about other people's reflections on how much people can do that
just by deciding to, and how much there need to be auspices. I mean, clearly the foundation that the two ex-presidents are raising money for is intended to have an extensive board and experts. That is going to be one mechanism. I gather the mayor of New Orleans has appointed an advisory group.
And I guess I do think that having a lot of careful reflection about the process would be useful. I suspect and I would actually be interested in Lonnie's perspective—I suspect that the American tradition is it happens ad hoc from a million different directions. But I'm curious whether there are any examples other than Robert Moses in New York, where somebody is appointed a czar and given the money, and it has actually worked. So in the areas that I'm familiar with, people are exploring ways of being in touch and being connected, but I don't think there is anything clear or systematic.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Right. Lonnie?
LONNIE BUNCH, National Museum of African American History and Culture: From the cultural community, there have been a lot of gatherings of museums and educators looking at what has happened there and what role we can play. And the truth of the matter is that 9 out of 10 of those meetings are really done out of ignorance, that there really aren't the connections with those on the ground, so that the real frustration is you have this sort of most sophisticated—let's just talk about museums—museum community in the world and it has no idea what to do to help. So part of the challenge is really to sort of take local-grown talent and let them find the lead. But the question is when is that the appropriate moment to have that conversation versus when you're putting too much on their shoulders.
I was struck by what happened in San Francisco when I was six—the African-American community got a—some predecessors to the NAACP. They came together and created forums around the country looking at questions of race and disaster in San Francisco, but they were led by San Franciscans or
now people from Oakland. And that really began to shape what I thought was an effective response, at least politically, for what happened in early California. So I think the lesson is to give those on the ground the opportunity to shape what is going to be done in the future.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Roderick?
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: I think this is a good example of how this is revealing some of the weakness in the fabric and fiber of our ability both for short-run and long-run responses. I don't think we have the institutions. I do think this wonderful American reliance on individual initiative, citizen—voluntary thing—is marvelous, but at the same time is clearly overwhelmed in the immediate response. And I'm afraid they are going to be equally overwhelmed in trying to develop long-term things.
There is an important—about three or four of these questions—it's so important to distinguish rebuilding in New Orleans from building, growing—(chuckles)—in some of the recipient areas. We have already heard what some of the planning is in some of these areas. Keep the trailers out. (Laughs.) Let's get the zoning and let's get this in place. So I think some of the planning will in fact be taking place. It won't necessarily be if you sat and said what would be the best way to reattract some portion of the population, redistribute some portion of the population. I doubt what we're getting is going to be that.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: So piecemeal is kind of what we are going to see.
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: I think we are going to see a lot of piecemeal, ad hoc things. We'll see a lot of best practices floating to the top. And we'll never be able to integrate the best-practice solutions into a coordinated response. One of the things with the trailers is—we're talking about not creating new ghettos. Well, giving the long time that I think it will take to rebuild in New Orleans as opposed to Houston and some of the recipient cities, you are looking at trailer park slums.
It is going to take a massive coordination effort to rebuild housing quickly enough in the New Orleans metro area to avoid that. You're going to start looking three, four, five, eight years down the road before you can rebuild the housing capacity sufficiently to house these populations. So I think it is as predictable as the hurricane was itself. Louisiana isn't predictable. We will be sitting here five years from now talking about trailer park ghettos.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: You had a question. Thank you.
DON DAVIS, National Council on the Aging: Of course the last comments touched upon some of the questions I had about the classism and racism that came out of this hurricane in fact. And of course many of the conditions that existed in New Orleans before the hurricane still exist today throughout urban America, and also in the Appalachian area of the country that I come from where you have severe white poverty.
Now, my question to the panel is what can we do to force a domestic policy that deals with some of these infrastructure problems that we have had for ages because many of the residents in the southeastern part of the country have been through four and five generations of poverty. And the Head Start program that was mentioned has been a very important vehicle in alleviating some of those poverty conditions and raising the quality of life for people. But yet, still, we don't have a country
that is willing to invest what is needed in the early ages for a child before they become an adult when it is very difficult to turn around some of the conditions.
And I would like to know what can we do as a country to develop a domestic policy that deals with some of these problems that we talk about and not wait until we have another hurricane to make people pay attention to the fact that there are folks living in this country day to day who are the working poor, with two and three jobs, and still don't make enough money to afford their families. So what can we do as a country?
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Good closing question. Thank you. Who wants to start? Let's just go down the road. Do you want to start? And you only have a minute. (Laughter.)
LONNIE BUNCH, National Museum of African American History and Culture: You know, one of the things history teaches me is not to be optimistic that that will ever happen. And that there are moments of great clarity where you can quite candidly use certain moments like a hurricane to draw people's attention to it, to try to make incremental gains. But I haven't seen anything that convinces me that in the long term that some of those very core infrastructure issues of dealing with poverty will really rise to the surface enough to be dealt with more than in an ad-hoc way.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: Marge.
MARGERY AUSTIN TURNER, Urban Institute: Well, I agree that there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about how this is going to play out. But I think it would be a real mistake to just sit around and talk about how pessimistic we are. We actually do have proven tools that work. They have never been implemented at scale. We should be talking about how to deploy those tools in this setting, pushing on the institutions that are in place, pushing against the discrimination and prejudice, and trying to force ways to prove that the country can do better out of this tragic circumstance.
OLIVIA GOLDEN, Urban Institute: I'm by nature an optimist as well, which has both been behind my public-sector career and my research career now. And I think what makes me an optimist is that I look for the next improvement, not getting all the way there. And I really believe that even if Lonnie is right and we'll never transform, that we do have lots of evidence of being able to make step-by-step improvements. In the '90s we had lower rates of child poverty than we do now. And that was about lots of things, I would argue, partly about how we thought about work and the economy.
I also think that one of the things about Head Start, which is important to note and to link to another strategy, is that we have now had for the first time a very rigorous scientific study, random assignment of children and of programs, and it says, yes, it makes a difference; it makes a difference in terms of children's attainment and in terms of their parents. So as we build up knowledge, I guess I am optimistic enough to believe that makes incremental differences.
So I guess for me it's really about constantly seeking to push the frontier forward even if it is only a little bit and taking pride in the changes we have made in people's lives along the way.
RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: God, I wish I could be optimistic. (Laughter.) I hate to end on this note—you are looking in Katrina at the people who are on the opposite side of that incremental progress, the massive progress of the 1990s. These were the people who were left behind. What you are looking at with this is like—the analog is we're going to be trying to do emergency-room treatment over the next 10 years with these populations.
And the analog would be emergency-room treatment in war zones, in developing nations where there is an inadequate basic medical and health structure, which is the persistent poverty, the persistent lack of sufficient economic opportunity and growth, our inability to create even after this incredible expansion of the 1990s. We should realize if we have had the largest economic expansion in recorded
history sustained, and we're looking at 30, 40 percent poverty rates, these are the people who are left behind.
Economic growth and free markets are not going to do it alone. All of the programs that we have are not going to do it together. I think if we are serious, we need the equivalent of the kinds of investments that we put into medical—discovering new drugs, discovering new treatments, things of this sort. We don't put anywhere—I don't think there is a national commitment to it. I don't think there is a national conceptualization of the problem. And you would need the kind of funding—a lot of it would need to be private (in medicine a lot of it is private)—that builds the medical system that we have and still can't distribute its care to everybody in the country. But I think we should be humble in the face of the enormity of the problem.
BETH FRERKING, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families: I want to say thank you and use the last minute just to say that from my perspective running the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families, we do highlight coverage every day. Please go to our website at http://www.cjc.umd.edu. Each day on our homepage we feature three stories from around the country from reporters who cover issues involving children and families. We are a training center at the University of Maryland.
And I would like to say that while there is some sensational coverage of these issues, people who have been covering children and family issues for their whole careers knew about—they did cover those stories about the poverty that existed before it became suddenly visible to everybody else. Those stories are out there and as you say from an ad hoc and piecemeal standpoint, people do write about them. There does tend to be a focus in the media. Several people are setting up new bureaus in New Orleans and in that area to cover this as a commitment to a longer-term story, which I find heartening as someone in the media. So please look at our website. See some of the good work that is being written out there.
Thank you to the Urban Institute for sponsoring this today. And thank you all for coming. I'm sure if you want to ask the panelists questions individually they would be happy to talk to you. Thanks.
(END)
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