A local man’s view on the real recovery of post-Katrina New Orleans

Ten years ago, Carrey Bowers had a job he loved and a family home he was proud of. Then Hurricane Katrina disrupted his world. A decade later, he’s still putting the pieces of his former life back together.

“Losing my job and my home at the same time was devastating,” says Bowers, 55, a native of New Orleans who left the city to find steady work after the storm.

He spent six years chasing job opportunities around the country before he decided to move back to New Orleans for good. For more than two years, he’s been working as a full-time driver for a medical clinic that serves senior citizens.

Shuttling around town 40 hours a week has afforded Bowers an up close look at the parts of the city that have recovered since Katrina, as well as still-struggling neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward.

“I hate to say it but it’s like the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East are forgotten,” Bowers says as he drives along quiet streets with empty lots, unpaved roads, and boarded-up homes that have been left untouched for years. By 2010, fewer than 5,600 people had returned to the Lower 9, or about 28% of the pre-storm population, according to the Data Center, compared to the city-wide average of 70% returning to pre-Hurricane Katrina households.

Less than five miles down the road, there’s an abrupt change in scenery. The bustling downtown Central Business District feels like a different city entirely with new buildings, bright lights, and little sign that a storm ever came through.

Stopping along Canal Street in front of Saenger Theatre, where he worked as a box-office manager for 11 years – where he was when Katrina barreled through New Orleans – Bowers looks out his driver’s seat window and describes what it was like to be sheltered inside the theatre for days. When the flooding began, he knew the venue was a solidly built structure, so he convinced some of his family members to go there instead of the Superdome where most of the city’s displaced were heading.

Once the floodwaters began pouring into the basement, Bowers abandoned the theater and drove out to the first hotel that had room for his family. It wasn’t until they watched the news in their Baton Rouge hotel room that they realized the magnitude of the destruction and death in their hometown.

“I’m not a man that is prone to cry, but you’re having all these emotions going on…My city is destroyed, our homes are destroyed, our jobs are destroyed – everything,” he says.

Both the theater downtown and his home in Gentilly had suffered from significant water damage and renovations would take years. His aunt’s home, where his mother lived, in the Lower Eighth Ward, completely collapsed. Like one million others who were displaced after Katrina, Bowers had to figure out a way to make ends meet and stabilize his family’s life until he could come back home. While most of his extended family decided they would not be returning to New Orleans, Bowers, along with his wife, Jeanne, and their three children, always planned on coming home.

But once they returned, jobs within his field were hard to come by. The Saenger had still not reopened, so Bowers decided to pursue more lucrative opportunities outside New Orleans, even if it meant being separated from his close-knit family. When the Apollo Theater in New York offered him a box-office managing position that would pay him twice as much as he made in New Orleans, he felt he needed to take the job.

Still, Bowers regretted his decision to leave. “Being apart from my wife and kids wasn’t good for any of us. If I had realized that I could sustain myself then, the way I could do now, I would’ve stayed,” he says.

There are still many parts of New Orleans where recovery has been stilted. But Bowers sees promise in the growing number of jobs created by expanding industries like film and medicine. “We might have to reinvent ourselves and be trained for various jobs, but we can’t say there won’t be any jobs because they’re coming back,” he says.

When Saenger Theatre reopened, Bowers was interviewed, but didn’t get rehired. He’s no longer actively pursuing theater work because he finds purpose in his driving job today. But he has kept abreast of the changes in venue management by working part-time box-office gigs for the New Orleans Pelicans during basketball season.

He says: “The job that I do now, even though it may not have the sparkle to it, the excitement, I like what I’m doing for a different reason.”

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