The Direction of New Orleans
To reverse an exodus from New Orleans, city leaders and policymakers must address critical quality-of-life issues.
To hear local pollster Silas Lee tell it, the most important numbers might be the ones he can’t count. During a Gambit Weekly interview about his latest political survey, which noted some differences in the ways blacks and whites view New Orleans, Lee offered an informal survey of the citizens we are losing.
During his business travels, Lee says, he encounters more and more former New Orleanians in airports. Generally, he either taught them as a sociology professor at Xavier University or went to school with them at Loyola University and the University of New Orleans. Demographically, he says, they are upwardly mobile, college-educated, blacks and whites, men and women, ages 25 to 50. All left New Orleans for better careers. The chance meetings are disquieting, Lee admits, because the people he greets are the kind of folks Louisiana can ill afford to lose.
“It’s not the best feeling in the world,” Lee says. “They are natives and they have very strong feelings about home. These are people in their social and economic prime. They are still very concerned about the future of the city, but they had to leave because of opportunities they had in another state. … I generally hear, ‘I love New Orleans, I love Louisiana, but I had to leave.’ And once they leave, they seldom come back.”
Lee’s observations add gravity to his recent poll on the direction of New Orleans and the major issues confronting the city. “More voters continue to say that the city is headed in the wrong direction — 46 percent — with 43 percent saying the city is heading in the right direction,” Lee says of the 600 Orleans Parish voters he surveyed during the week of June 7. The remaining 11 percent said they did not know or were not sure if the city was on the right track. (The poll had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percent.) While the difference between those numbers is within the margin of error, the real message is that New Orleanians overall are not optimistic.
A closer look at the numbers reveals a racial divide. Only 39 percent of blacks surveyed said the city was heading in the “right direction,” and 48 percent said the city was heading in the “wrong direction.” The remaining 13 percent offered no opinion. Among whites, 51 percent said the city was heading in the “right direction,” 42 percent said “wrong direction,” and 7 percent did not know or were unsure. “African Americans are very pessimistic about the future and are concerned about crime and economic opportunities,” Lee says.
Lee says he hasn’t seen “wrong direction” spikes this high since the late 1980s and early ’90s. Bear in mind, Lee’s poll was conducted before a week of violence that left 13 people dead.
Asked to rank the major issues challenging the quality of life in New Orleans, 53 percent of all voters polled ranked crime as No. 1. Education was second at 24 percent; jobs/economy placed third at 17 percent. A majority of both blacks and whites ranked crime as their top concern.
Lee’s poll tracks an April survey conducted by University of New Orleans pollster Susan Howell. The UNO poll found that, for the first time since 1977, more voters say the city has become worse than say it has become better. Howell also said voters were feeling less safe, heard more gunfire in their neighborhoods, and perceived that the quality of police and schools had declined. In addition, voters said job prospects were “poor.”
Last year, Lee’s self-financed 20-year survey of census data painted a picture of a divided city, one with sharp income and educational disparities between the races. Forty-one percent of local whites earned an annual income of $50,000 or above in 2000, compared to 17 percent of blacks. Meanwhile, 32 percent of all blacks had no high school diploma, compared to 11 percent of all whites. On the other end of the scale, nearly three times as many whites as blacks were college graduates, 26 to 9 percent.
Lee says the low percentage of black college graduates stems in part from a public school system that sends only 30 percent of its high school graduates to college, compared to 95 percent of graduates from non-public schools. Another factor for the low percentage is the “exodus of black college graduates after graduation,” the study found.
Those graduates are among the uncounted New Orleanians, both black and white, whom Lee meets in the airports of other American cities. Their numbers won’t decrease until city leaders address critical quality-of-life issues as well as root economic causes. As Mayor Ray Nagin and City Council members head into the second half of their current tenures, these numbers should provide some focus to their political agendas: Bring crime down. Increase job opportunities. Bring hope back to New Orleans.
That’s the only way to point all New Orleanians — and the city itself — in the right direction.
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