(BALTIMORE – August 29, 2025) – I just finished watching the recent Hurricane Katrina documentary on Netflix, and it truly gutted me.
At the time of Katrina, In 2005, I was 14 and I didn’t fully grasp connection between disaster, tragedy, and systemic racial injustice. Watching now, has hit me in a way I wasn’t ready for. The aftermath was worse than I remembered: families displaced, residents criminalized instead of cared for, and recovery that too often felt like punishment.
One line stuck with me: “My mother said gentrification was on the way when she saw the bike lanes.” By 2020 that was reality, which reminded me of the first time I saw bike lanes in East Baltimore, in the midst of decades long of community destruction from poverty, drugs, and lack of resources. A study showed 13 wards in New Orleans underwent gentrification, with home prices jumping over $200,000 once rebuilding finally began. And that’s the point—it took years for the city to even start rebuilding. And when it did, it wasn’t for the people who had survived Katrina or those who wanted to return home…