Help me write a platform for New Orleans

At least their restaurant critc (and sometimes music critic) can do this I guess:

Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson has been selected as a member of the Nieman Foundation Fellows Class for 2013. He is one of 24 journalists chosen, the Nieman Foundation announced Friday.

The Nieman Foundation administers the prestigious fellowship program, which allows accomplished and promising journalists a year of study at Harvard, with time to pursue individual areas of interest, along with integrated class work to enhance their expertise.

African-American New Orleans banker Alden McDonald has done what he can, but ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/why-new-orleans-black-residents-are-still-under-water-after-katrina.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-3&action=click&contentCollection=Magazine®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article

The city had a population of 455,000 before the storm, two-thirds of whom were black; by 2010 there were 24,000 fewer whites and 118,000 fewer blacks.

You could say Alden McDonald triumphed over adversity, too. Today he runs the country’s third-largest black-owned bank, according to the Federal Reserve. But despite his personal success, McDonald is still focused on the eastern half of that map that he marked up at our first meeting. There, the recovery is far from complete — and in some areas things are worse than before the storm. In this frustration, he represents what might be called the black Katrina narrative, a counterpoint to the jubilant accounts of Landrieu and other New Orleans boosters. This version of the story begins by noting that an African-American homeowner was more than three times more likely than a white one to live in a flooded part of town. Where Landrieu sees black and white coming together, many African-Americans recollect a different New Orleans: rifle-carrying sheriffs and police officers barricading a bridge out of an overwhelmed city because they didn’t want the largely black crowds walking through their predominantly white suburbs; a white congressman overheard saying that God had finally accomplished what others couldn’t by clearing out public housing; a prominent resident from the Uptown part of the city telling a Wall Street Journal reporter that in rebuilding, things would be ‘‘done in a completely different way, demographically, geographically and politically’’ — or he and his friends weren’t moving back.

Now there are still 100,000 fewer black residents living in New Orleans than at the time of Katrina. McDonald estimates that one-third of his friends have not returned, because their homes were destroyed. ‘‘I still have family members stuck in Houston, some cousins,’’ McDonald says. ‘‘They’re terribly homesick.’’ Only about 80 percent of the residents of New Orleans East, where a good portion of the city’s African-American middle class as well as a large share of the city’s black elite lived, have returned. In the Seventh Ward, he says, where he grew up, only about half of the homes are restored a decade after Katrina. ‘‘There was never a plan to bring people back home,’’ he says. ‘‘There was never a plan of any kind.’’