Dilapidation

When Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Betsy before it, devastated New Orleans, the Black population of the city who had begun to repair their own homes with little to no help from insurance companies, the Red Cross, and FEMA, saw no desire by the federal government to protect them. Today, post-Katrina EPA testing has shown an increased concentration of arsenic in residential soil and sediments as a result of this catastrophe. As of 2020, dilapidated housing and buildings of the Lower Ninth Ward area can still be easily spotted even from distant popular parts of town. Predominately Black and often lower-income neighborhoods like these sometimes continue to remain in this state decades after their horrendous desolation, existing for years as traumatic remainders of the 1970s South Bronx fires, the Philadelphia bombing of MOVE in 1985, the 1921 race massacre bombing in Tulsa, OK, and countless more.