If you go to the northwest corner of the Lower Ninth Ward, you might wonder what those giant pyramid-like structures are. They’re 9 feet tall, made out of wood and burlap.
“As we fill them in with soil, we will plant on them,” said Utē Petit, a 29-year-old Black woman with long braids and big plans. She’s a ceramic artist and this is her garden.
“My intention is to plant a lot of fruit trees on them, fruit and nut trees, flowers and herbs, all perennial things that will kind of hopefully live long after I'm here,” she said.
Petit said the garden’s structures will honor her great-grandmother’s Indigenous Houma ancestry. They’re called mounds, and Native Americans up and down the Mississippi River built similar ones for all kinds of purposes including gatherings, ceremonies and burials.
At the same time, the garden will also honor her Black New Orleanian ancestry too because Petit’s story is a rare example of how a family, decades after Katrina, got their land back.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still covered with vacant lots, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward. After the storm, Black New Orleanians, including Petit’s family, struggled to return to their land and rebuild their homes because of the way the city and the state handled recovery. Now Petit has reclaimed her family’s land by navigating a bureaucratic city program with the help of her community.
Petit grew up in Detroit, but would visit her other great-grandmother in New Orleans, who used to own a house on this land.
“I always joke because older Black people, they always love to shut themselves in and have the blinds drawn, so her house was like that,” she said. "And I used to get in trouble because I'd be like 'Can we let the sun up in this place?'"
The last time Petit remembers being there, she was 10 years old, just a couple weeks before Hurricane Katrina. Her great-grandmother evacuated to Tennessee. Petit said after the storm, the house was completely gone.
“Her house floated like two blocks down, when the levees broke,” said Petit, pointing towards the levees just a few blocks away.
Getting the land back
Like so many Black New Orleanians, Petit's great-grandmother could not return and rebuild after Katrina. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, out of the 175,000 Black residents who left the city, only 100,000 came back.
The state’s program to help people rebuild didn’t function as well for lower income Black New Orleanians as it did for whiter wealthier ones. The Road Home Program provided money for poorer residents based on the value of their homes, which was often less than the cost of rebuilding. Many chose to sell their homes to the state instead. If they left Louisiana, the buyout was only 40% of their home’s value.
Petit's great-grandmother's home was valued as less than the cost of rebuilding, so she took the buy-out. She later passed away in 2011 of natural causes at 96 years old. The land became one of those vacant lots that still cover the city, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Lower Ninth Ward. According to a new report from the Data Center, the Lower Ninth Ward had more than 2,400 vacant residential lots in 2023, which is 70% of all the residential land in the neighborhood.
Petit has done something that many others couldn’t. She got that land back, and it wasn’t easy. She said she got the idea a few years ago from her mother.
“I was like, ‘Well this is crazy because the whole block is empty and it would be really cool to start a farm. And she was like, ‘Well, you should try and see who owns it,’” she said.
The answer was the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, created by the state after Katrina. One of its roles is to manage the city’s vacant lots and to put them back into use.
Petit got a little lucky. It turned out that the land was part of the Growing Green program. It gives people a chance to lease land cheaply for three years for community gardens, urban farms, or parks. After that, they have a chance to purchase it.
Still, Petit said it wasn’t easy. The paperwork was confusing. When she got the lease for her great-grandmother’s old land and planted a few trees, the city accidentally cut them down. She eventually managed to lease three other lots too.
And then, when she wanted to buy the land, the price shocked her: $70,000.
“If I was gonna build a house on it, that's pretty good,” she said. “But for farming, that's like robbery.”
Urban agriculture in a post-Katrina New Orleans
Before the hurricane, Pam Broome remembers there used to be more Black residents who had urban farms and gardens.
“ I was born in 1956, so I'm from a generation that I believe sort of saw the close out of Black folks throughout the area growing in their yard,” said Broome, the innovation and entrepreneurship director at NewCorp, a community development organization revitalizing New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, including by using urban agriculture.
She said the practice of Black residents growing food in their yards was already waning, but Katrina accelerated it. Then after the storm, New Orleans seemed like a prime place to do urban agriculture, because of all the vacant land as well as the lack of access to grocery stores, so new people came in.
“People were moving into the city who were coming as a result of the devastation of Katrina as volunteers,” said Broome. “Those that were coming to lend a hand, there was sort of a resurgence of gardening, transitioning into urban farming to take advantage of the increased volume of vacant properties.”
Yuki Kato, an urban sociologist and author of the book Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City, said land access was still a major barrier to building out urban agriculture in the city.
“A lot of the growers that I studied had a very difficult time finding and accessing the space,” she said.
Kato said there was an emphasis on market solutions as a way to solve problems left behind by the storm, including the vacant land problem.
“How do we actually sort of increase the property value instead of thinking about what is the best use for maximizing public benefit?” she said.
Based on the negative experiences she’s heard from growers in the program, Kato said Growing Green seems to be more of a way to get residents to help the city maintain its lots, until the authority could take them back and use them for something else.
“ I think it also really underscored that the interest was not to support urban ag, but was really essentially using urban ag as a way to temporarily manage until the property value increased,” said Kato.
Brenda Breaux, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority said the authority has a different goal to help people in mind.
“To be quite frank with you, based on the current housing crisis, our primary focus with turning lots back into commerce has been focused on housing,” she said.
New Orleans does have an affordable housing crisis. Breaux says they’re also trying to improve Growing Green. They now tell farmers upfront how much they’ll have to eventually pay to buy the lots, and they’re trying to increase the number of lots in the program. The authority has sold 36 lots through the program and there are 27 lessees currently participating.
“Our goal is to put properties back into commerce, and we recognize that housing isn't the only alternative that can be used for these vacant lots.”
The City of New Orleans also recently created a new position to help urban farmers navigate city programs, which was advocated for by the Greater New Orleans Growing Alliance. Grace Treffinger was hired into the role earlier this year.
“ Most growers that I've spoken with are really are leasing from private landowners because at this moment, there's not a really robust options within public pathways for leasing from the city,” said Treffinger.
She said the biggest barrier she’s hearing from growers is the price of the land.
“The cost is often prohibitive,” she said. “The few folks who've been able to successfully navigate that are mostly nonprofits that have been able to fundraise.”
At the same time, one of Treffinger’s main challenges is balancing making it easier for growers to access land with making sure that land doesn’t get abandoned again.
“ Because often gardens and farms, they just require a lot of energy, labor, money and time and everything like that,” she said. “And so in programs in the past that have attempted efforts similar to this, a lot will often end up back in code enforcement.”
She said she’s looking to other cities, like Boston, for examples on how to better operate these kinds of programs. Boston prevents housing and urban agriculture from competing with each other by having the Office of Urban Agriculture under the Mayor’s Office of Housing.
For Petit, there was no way she alone could afford to buy back her family’s land, so she leaned on people and organizations such as the Greater New Orleans Growing Alliance and the National Black Food Justice Alliance who helped her raise the money.
“ They weren't really flexible at all,” she said. “I just bought it, thanks to a constellation of people and nonprofits and guardian angels and whatever else. Everybody helped me.”
She said finally owning the land now feels “surreal.” Eventually, she wants her garden to be a meeting place where locals can hang out and make art. She also wants it to memorialize what happened during Hurricane Katrina to her family and so many others, but most of all she envisions it being a garden that feeds the neighborhood.
“There's gonna be fruit, trees and flowers blooming at all different times of year, and it's just gonna be a very abundant, nourishing place,” she said. “And it's going to feel like an ancient memory, like the earth remembered and brought something back.
Petit said she’s going to name the garden after her great-grandmother, Vivian.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Vivian Petit passed away a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina. She in fact passed away in 2011.
