Whatever It Takes

Including college, I’ve lived in 5 cities. My mom and dad lived in only one. And if you’d asked 16-year-old me, that one would have been good enough. 

Before I graduated from college, I accepted a Fortune 500 job working in South Florida. I was supposed to start three weeks after graduation, but I made up an excuse that I needed to be back home, and I moved back to New Orleans to work for my dad. Not sure either of us ever expected me to willingly choose working together, but my decision had nothing to do with a future in photography. I just wanted to be home. 

30 days after my dad hired me, he fired me. He wanted me to start my own business, thought there was an opportunity I needed to pursue, and played my ego perfectly by saying if you think you know everything, go do it. 

And at 22 years old, I did. This week will be the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Twenty years ago, I watched the business I built, the first home I bought, and everything I owned go under 8 to 12 feet of water when I was 26 years old. 

It took six weeks for New Orleans to drain of dark and contaminated water.  It was a few weeks more after that when I was finally able to get back and see that I’d lost everything. Books, photos, writings…office, home, car – all gone. 

I’d left New Orleans on August 24th with a careless assembled carryon bag. I made a last-minute decision to attend a wedding in Oregon and was undeterred by the 11th storm of the season that had yet to be named. No one made special arrangements for no-name weather. I packed a black V-neck that my dad had printed years before I was born and that I’d pilfered from his closet at some point when I still lived at home. NOLAN was printed on the left chest, and WHATEVER IT TAKES on the back. By the time I returned to New Orleans at the end of October, this literal shirt on my back was my oldest and most valuable possession. An unexpected and rare family heirloom. 

New Orleans is a small city, where everyone knows everybody. 80% of New Orleans had been under as much as 15 feet of water in some areas. Nearly every person I knew lost everything. Everybody lost something. More than thirteen hundred people died, and many elders died in the months after, likely because the stress of displacement was too much to bear. 

To say Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levees (which caused the city to fill with brown water like a bowl) changed my life, would be an understatement.  When I graduated from college I made up a family emergency because I was afraid to set roots anywhere but home. Four years later, there was an existential crisis, and my spirit couldn’t be settled anywhere else but in the middle of it. 

For 15 years, from 2006 until 2021, I was in the middle of all of it. Even when I left, to lead Uptown Dallas Inc, it drew me back like an addiction I couldn’t quit and was too eager to fall back into. I was reforming systems, rebuilding infrastructure, developing neighborhood plans, creating parks, standing up a new system of schools, building homeless shelters, rezoning the entire city, and creating intentional networks of people to make lasting change. And I was in the struggle of it all with people I’d known all my life and with new people who moved to town because of the same magnetic pull on their spirit that wouldn’t let go of mine. We always agreed on Saints over Falcons, and wanting to rebuild a New Orleans better than the one exposed in August of 2005. It was as high as I’d ever been. 

We had vicious disagreements over the how. And the where. And at times over who we were rebuilding the city for. Our disagreements faded when it was New Orleans vs everybody, us vs the weather, or everyone taking days off to take to the streets – celebrating being alive, which masqueraded as jazz fest, carnival, or anything we could make resemble a party. 

This year, 20 years later, began with a rare snow on the bayou for my friends and family still living in New Orleans, but for us here in Los Angeles, winter peaked with fires, followed by a summer of ICE. 

The ever-evolving threat to community, whether it be in New Orleans, Dallas, Vancouver, or now Los Angeles -- is the context of my reflection – not a mediation on a broken connection to a still heartbreakingly broken place. What I experienced has been redundantly applicable in each place I’ve worked. Apparently, everywhere breaks a little all the time. And too often these days. Or else no one ever gets around to fixing the last thing broken and generationally unrepaired. 

Earlier this summer, I was asked by CBC Canada about the disruptive presence of the National Guard in Los Angeles, and I couldn’t help but think about how welcomed the arrival of Lt. General Honoré leading the military response to Hurricane Katrina was. It’s sacrilege to call a man a savior, but his leadership saved lives. The misuse of the National Guard in support of unlawful ICE and Border Patrol detainments is particularly jarring in contrast. And specialized guard units to police black neighborhoods and urban centers like Chicago, New York, and DC feels counter to the inclusive and restorative economic work I toiled at when Honoré and his troops left New Orleans better because of their presence. 

We all experienced death, displacement, and vacancy of public spaces in 2020, but even that was nothing like walking through a damp city infested with flies, mosquitoes and wildlife dispersed by water to where wildlife shouldn’t be. So, when the streets of downtown Los Angeles and our neighboring Fashion District were down 70% from the week prior to the ICE raids, protests, and curfew -- this was the 4th time I’d seen a major city center transform overnight into a ghost town. It was so soon after Altadena and Palisades otherwise I may have forgotten they happened. 

It gets easier to see recoveries on the horizon, but patience is still tested, even when warranted. Too much patience and people move on. Not enough patience, and people move on.  

I might contend there may be no one leading a BID in North America more experienced in the unexpected than I am. But that’s a heavy and unnecessary shingle to hang over your door that feels like it could more likely fall and do harm than attract the investment we need to match our vision of what a successful place looks like after whatever crisis inevitably comes next. The unexpected has become a norm; I have many new peers in perseverance expertise. 

I take solace that I once helped rebuild a city that many said should no longer exist. None of DTLA’s challenges will ever deter or intimidate me. I am thankful to New Orleans for that. I have lists and notebooks full of lessons learned to draw from. But honestly the most important lesson, has been to place ourselves in the eye of it all – and this is our quickly passing moment in DTLA – to do like my oldest surviving t-shirt once compelled me – “Whatever it Takes” to make this place better than it has ever been before.