NEW ORLEANS – Robert Green guesses it was about 5 a.m. when the water first broke through.
By 5:10, he, his mother, brother, cousin, and three grandchildren, ages 4, 3, and 2, were on the roof. Within five minutes, their house was floating down the street. By 5:20, the home, pinned against an oak tree, was crumbling under the water pressure. The next 10 minutes were a blur, but sometime within them, his 3-year-old granddaughter Shanai “Nai Nai” Green was swept away by the current.
Through sheer will and determination, Green was able to help everyone else to safety, or at least to a semblance of it. They made it to another rooftop, where they lay in agony for over seven hours.
His mother, Joyce, who was bedridden with Parkinson’s disease, would not make it. It would be months before she and Nai Nai were recovered.
Like many of the tens of thousands of Black Louisianans who lost loved ones — either through the floodwaters, starvation, and police violence immediately after the storm or the long-term ailments and mental health issues that followed — life has remained challenging. But people came to support and help care for the family that seemingly lost everything, including the pink home that Green grew up in along the Lower Ninth Ward’s levees.
In times of disaster, studies show Black Americans are least likely to receive financial support from the government, which leaves them more likely to depend on private, nongovernmental organizations that are not held to the same standards. Back in 2007, Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation stepped in to address the governmental failure and built homes in the especially hard-hit Lower Ninth, which was 99% Black.
Less than 15 years later, dozens of properties have been abandoned or deemed unsafe to live in because of widespread mold, collapsing structures, regular flooding concerns, electrical fires, and gas leaks. Just six of the original 109 homes remain in relatively good condition, according to a 2022 inspection. The remaining residents, still reeling from the worst weather disaster in U.S. history, are left with homes crumbling beneath them again.
Nineteen years post-Hurricane Katrina, the situation exemplifies the nation’s continued failures in protecting the most vulnerable from the fallout of storms that are becoming more common due to climate change. The patchwork recovery process, which private and charitable organizations often support in addition to government funding, continues to stunt the healing process for Black victims
While NGOs often fill invaluable holes in the recovery process, they face more “serious coordination and service delivery problems” than the government.
In 2018, more than 100 homeowners brought a class-action lawsuit, but Pitt’s nonprofit has effectively been disbanded since 2018, vacating its New Orleans’ offices and failing to renew its nonprofit status.
In recent years, Pitt has not issued any public statement addressing the controversy, although sources close to the actor have said he has “denied responsibility.” In 2019, he unsuccessfully petitioned to have his name removed from the class-action lawsuit, and since then, his organization has offered some residents direct help only if they’ve agreed to sign nondisclosure agreements and removed themselves from the lawsuit. Even then, residents told Capital B, there has been no movement over the past two years.
In 2022, there was a glimmer of hope when the environmental nonprofit Global Green agreed to underwrite Brad Pitt’s organization, offering to pay the homeowners $20.5 million. One issue: the organization never actually had the money in the first place.
The email address for Make it Right and Global Green’s New Orleans office is invalid, and the larger Global Green organization did not respond to Capital B’s request for comment.
Global Green hoped that with its name plus nationwide support for New Orleans’ hurricane victims, it would be easy to crowdfund the $20 million. The group would eventually change its goal to $5 million, but two years later, the group says they’ve raised just $380,000. Their public GoFundMe campaign has stalled at $1,035.
In August 2023, the city of New Orleans said it would offer support to the crowdfunding campaign. “This City is excited to right this wrong for our residents of the Lower Ninth Ward,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at the time. But a year later, the city did not specify if any financial or crowdfunding support was actually extended when questioned by Capital B.
A year later, residents like Green remain crowdfunding for repair costs and stuck in homes that pose a threat to their health. The Make It Right fallout shows how disaster recovery failures can compound financial and emotional burdens for Black and vulnerable communities, and there’s no one to take accountability, Green said.
“We didn’t know we were going to be victims again,” he said at a memorial event for Hurricane Katrina’s 19th anniversary on Aug. 31 this year.
“We could have learned from Katrina”
The asymmetrically designed modern-style homes with solar panels were far from traditional New Orleans shotgun-style architecture. The foundation charged residents just around $150,000 for the new homes. The price tag was about $100,000 under actual construction costs, seemingly a steal for the new energy-efficient and flood-protected properties.
Green was able to buy a new house from Pitt’s organization on the site of his mother’s lot in 2011. However, within years, it became clear that the “affordable, green” homes were not built with Louisiana’s climate in mind. They used wood and other materials unable to withstand the soggy heat that exists for much of the year.
Outside Green’s house, which is slanting toward the earth because of bowed support beams, two 6-foot tall signs read a simple message: “Make it Right Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: Fix my house.”
Today, the Make it Right homeowners are left with few options. In the first year after Katrina, more than $3 billion was raised and donated to nonprofits, but hundreds of millions never made it to New Orleans residents. The Red Cross, which received and administered the bulk of donations, spends as much as 30% of its donations on activities unrelated to disaster recovery.
“We thought the nonprofits sent their organizers here to lend us solidarity, but we found out that most of them came to pimp off our struggle,” said Malcolm Suber, a New Orleans resident and founder of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.
A 2010 study found that about 70% of nonprofits and charities involved in Katrina recovery saw their annual budgets and salaries rise following the storm.
“They got their monies through the grantmaking system, but look at our condition today,” he added.
The four residents that Capital B spoke with for this story besides Green declined to speak on the record because of an ongoing lawsuit and because many have signed nondisclosure agreements with Pitt’s organization, but they shared how mold growth led to headaches and breathing problems and ate through their floors and side walls, exposing their rooms to extreme heat and torrential rains. A walk through the neighborhood makes the situation clear: gaping holes in walls, tarps covering windows and roofs, sagging stairs and decks, and mold-speckled facades.
Trudy Green, a Make it Right homeowner, died in 2018 due to bronchitis and diabetes complications, about a year and a half after a city health inspector condemned her property, forcing her to vacate due to toxic mold. Green’s family believes the toxicity issues contributed to her death. At the time of her death, she was trying to get the foundation to build her a new home.
The foundation has said it has completed repairs over the years on about 40 homes and has even sued some of its material suppliers. (It is widely reported that private construction companies profit greatly from recovery contracts.)
Pitt’s organization has also contributed to community blight. They still own over two dozen empty lots littered with trash and razed trees throughout the neighborhood. Not to mention the lots made empty by the Make It Right homes that were demolished because they were inhabitable.
From this perspective, it seems their attempt to rebuild the neighborhood has stifled it.
Before Katrina, Green’s community had one of the highest homeownership rates in the city, but many families who had been there since the early 20th century did not have title paperwork. Without the paperwork, they had no avenues to return. Just 25% of the people living there before 2010 remain there today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Because most of the Make it Right homeowners are lower-income and are paying mortgages, there is little reprieve. They can’t afford to fix their homes, nor leave them and relocate. Green’s home is now worth less than what he paid for it in 2011, according to Zillow’s home market value tool. In fact, Louisiana is the only state in the country where home values are in decline, and New Orleans has the third-lowest rate of home appreciation among the nation’s 246 metro areas.
“We could have learned from Katrina,” said Andreanecia Morris, executive director of the housing advocacy nonprofit HousingNOLA.
“We had enough to do what we needed, but we did it without a plan, and we did it very naively. There is a belief that housing isn’t something that the government should be doing, and it leads us to the conclusion that it’s something the government can’t do. That all just manifests itself as programs poorly managed by the federal government and private industry.”
When you’re in New Orleans, you can still see Katrina
Make it Right homeowner Tineka West originally bought her property before Katrina in 2002. After it was destroyed, she sold it to Make It Right for $10,000 in 2013, then bought the property back from the foundation for $170,000 after they built a new home. But she has struggled with the same issues as most of her neighbors. Since February, she has been trying to sell the home, but has found little luck as she’s had to drop the asking price by $30,000.
Pitt’s organization wasn’t the only private, charitable endeavor to leave Black Katrina victims in a bind. Habitat for Humanity built more than 120 homes for low-income people throughout New Orleans, including about two dozen in the Lower Ninth. However, they required the homeowners to sign a costly property insurance agreement in addition to their mortgage agreements. As the combined payments have lurched toward $2,000 a month, many homes have either already been foreclosed on or at risk of. (The median monthly household income in the Lower Ninth Ward is $1,300.)
Last year, New Orleans had the nation’s highest rate of missed mortgage payments.
As affordable housing development in New Orleans and beyond has stalled, Habitat for Humanity said it was only doing the right thing by filling a gap that the local and federal governments had created. Louisiana has only 41 affordable and available rental homes per 100 extremely low-income renters. Still, that ranks them tied for the eighth-best rate of affordable housing units nationwide.
Read More: The Housing Crisis That Climate Change Built
Habitat for Humanity also noted they have no control over the increasing costs of insuring properties in the South, as premiums continue to rise with climate change bringing more frequent and intense disasters. Nationwide, the average home insurance bill has risen from $900 in 2010 to $2,700 this year. Louisiana’s situation is more dire, as at least 20 insurance companies have left the state since 2020 due to high climate risk.
“People are housing insecure at levels we haven’t seen since Katrina,” explained Morris, “and the insurance crisis puts that in stark relief.”
The federal government has its hands tied as climate change has made disasters more common, and a highly partisan budget process has made it difficult to fund disaster recovery. For the second year in a row, the federal agency tasked with recovery, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has depleted its budget, forcing it to stall rebuilding efforts for more recent disasters, including Hurricane Francine, which struck New Orleans last week.
The Make it Right homeowners have also attempted to utilize local solutions. Before going through Pitt’s organization, some homeowners attempted to use the state’s recovery program, the Louisiana Road Home, but it disproportionately shortchanged low-income homeowners by using pre-storm property values rather than repair costs to determine grants. This meant poorer, predominantly Black neighborhoods would receive less aid that would not put a dent into actual recovery costs.
As it has happened increasingly over the past several years for disaster victims, the remaining residents have been forced to start their own donation campaigns, but most have yet to procure enough funds to move away or fix their homes. This spring, an anonymous donor paid $28,000 to help fix one Make it Right homeowner’s roof. Green’s GoFundMe, which you can find here, has raised just 2% of its goal.
At the Katrina memorial, Green wore a shirt with the words “The Original Roof Top Rider,” plastered across it. Below the words, a Black man standing on the roof of a flooded home waves an American flag. He spoke clearly about the pain that has carried him throughout the past 19 years, but also the joy he’s found in still being here.
When you’re in New Orleans, you can still see Katrina, he said, but it is for that reason that he is even less likely to give up hope for his home, community, or country. At the very least, “we have life here again.”