After getting through the initial shock, anger and grief over the devastation of New Orleans brought on by the post-Katrina failure of the federal levee system, residents began the long (and still unfinished) slog of rebuilding. Physical, social and economic infrastructure were all devastated. Communications systems were unreliable, as was plenty of the information going out through those systems.
To many people, New Orleans felt like the old Wild West, a frontier town fraught with a mix of danger and opportunity.
Understandably, quantifying some aspects of the damage remains difficult. However, a generally accepted ballpark estimate is that about one-third of businesses and nonprofits in the city closed forever.
The extent of the damage made New Orleans a challenging environment for entrepreneurial activity.
The entrepreneurial spirit, though, was thriving, and the needs — from nonprofit services to help with rebuilding and refurnishing to a place for a good, hot meal — were many.
Countless new enterprises were launched in the years immediately following Katrina. Some came and went quickly, but others have lasted to become local institutions. Some were responses in the moment, others were the fulfilment of a life-long dream, but all of them saw, and met, a vital need in a difficult time.
Baru Latin Caribbean Bistro
Edgar Caro, Chef and Owner
In 1999, 17-year-old Edgar Caro moved from Cartagena, Colombia to join family in New Orleans. He was immediately attracted to the city’s vibrant food and beverage scene. Drawing on his experience working in his grandfather’s butcher shop back home, he jumped at the first entry-level position he could find.
“I worked my way up through all the positions you can imagine in the restaurant industry,” he recalled. “I was managing a restaurant at the time Katrina hit the city.”
Returning to the devastated city was shocking. “Katrina had a profound impact on my life,” remembered Caro. “I lost friends who had to leave the city, lost colleagues. But I saw how passionate people were about rebuilding the city. It gave me the fuel that I had to be part of it.”
Caro took the plunge. “It was always my dream to open a restaurant,” he said. “Helping rebuild the city inspired me to open a place that would resonate with the residents.”
He took his life savings and began working on Barú. While there were far fewer people around to patronize restaurants, there were also fewer restaurants, and many of the residents who had returned were looking to dine out. Caro’s Magazine Street location put him in the “sliver by the river,” that stretch of high ground that didn’t flood and had the basic services in place.
Still, the challenges were many. Supply lines were fractured. Promotional opportunities were few. His available funds could barely cover operations. He actually lived in an apartment above the restaurant, both as a way to keep costs down and to be available constantly to work on it.
In addition, “one big challenge was we had no alcohol license for the first five years,” Caro said. We didn’t have enough square footage initially, so we allowed people to bring in their own bottles.”
"Helping rebuild the city inspired me to open a place that would resonate with the residents.”
Despite the many obstacles, Barú was an almost immediate success, as Caro’s cooking style resonated with the community.
“It makes me very happy to be able to showcase Latin cuisine,” he noted, “to use local ingredients and recipes from Colombian cuisine.”
From this shoestring beginning has come remarkable success. Barú was named Best Latin American Restaurant in New Orleans for 10 consecutive years, and Caro won the 2018 Chef of the Year award from New Orleans Magazine. Caro has opened four other restaurants, including Basin Seafood and most recently, Brasa South American Steakhouse in the old Morton’s location in Canal Place.
With this expansion comes new challenges. Hiring staff is a constant headache, especially for the new restaurants. The slowdown of visitors, especially international tourists, has Caro anticipating a particularly slow summer; he hopes that the arrival of the Michelin Guide will help, creating more interest in New Orleans cuisine in general.
Yet Caro remains positive. “This just makes us more creative. You have to be persistent and believe in what you do. You listen to the customers.
“I see the city’s potential,” he continued. “I’m proud that the New Orleans community has supported me through 20 years, and I hope people continue supporting the small businesses and small restaurants. They are the heart of the city.”
Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development
Arthur Johnson, CEO
No part of New Orleans was hit harder by the levee failures than the Lower Ninth Ward. The apocalyptic scenes of houses washed off their pillars, with vehicles resting on top of them, horrified the nation.
What many people never understood about the Lower Ninth Ward was the true character of its neighborhoods pre-Katrina. High rates of multi-generational homeownership made it a thriving, if under-resourced, community. While the death and destruction were incalculable, the community spirit remained strong. Nonetheless, many residents were concerned that the damage and lack of unity would cause the Lower Ninth to be eliminated.
Charles Allen and Pam Dashiell, acutely aware that the area’s economic health might lead to a slow recovery, recognized that rebuilding was largely going to start from within, so in 2006 they founded the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development.
The nonprofit was created to address the challenges that Katrina brought to the Lower Ninth Ward.
“CSED was created to be a funnel for resources, to be a tool for all residents in the Lower Ninth in their recovery,” noted CEO Arthur Johnson.
Initial funding from the Blue Moon Foundation helped launch the organization. Johnson noted that from the beginning, “the focus was building sustainable communities within the natural environment. We are three-quarters surrounded by water,” including wetlands and the Mississippi River.
After Dashiell passed away in 2009, Johnson, who owned a consulting company but had a background in nonprofit work, came in to assist with a matching funds campaign.
“After about a week, the chairman of the board asked me if I would come on permanently,” remembered Johnson. “I’m still here.”
The challenges were extreme.
“The Lower Ninth Ward was the last community in the city to start the recovery process,” Johnson said. “Even when I came in, people were still trying to figure out their next move, still assessing available resources. There were still conversations about turning the area into green space.”
“CSED was created to be a funnel for resources, to be a tool for all residents in the Lower Ninth in their recovery.”
While CSED’s main objective was to help rebuild homes and bring residents back, the organization also wanted a seat at the policy discussion tables. Re-establishing schools was a major objective along with attracting new economic investment. Even today, the population is less than one-third of what it was; there were many elderly residents before the flooding, and few of them returned.
This has led Johnson and CSED to focus on the younger generation, aided by the fact that environmental issues are particularly important to this group.
“The next generation is who we have to depend on,” he observed. “We have to make sure they know the history, understand the past, the present and the future. And environmental issues impact our whole quality of life.”
Major CSED programs include an environmental research internship, where youth age 12 to 18 participate in service learning projects and study local water resources and systems. The nonprofit also offers guided kayak tours of the Bayou Bienvenue Wetland Triangle in order to bring awareness to efforts to support the ecosystem. CSED also partners with the Brown Foundation and Pontchartrain Conservancy on a native tree nursery in Bucktown where they cultivate trees used for coastal restoration.
Johnson considers the success he and his four staff members have had in building the next generation of local leaders to be their most significant achievement.
Financial resources remain a challenge, as does “getting people to believe they can make a difference, and what that looks like,” noted Johnson. “We continue to give the community a sense of hope. We’ve seen these things before, and hopefully we will prevail as before. We’re not going anywhere.”
The Occasional Wife
Kay Morrison, Founder & Owner
In August 2005, Kay Morrison was working her way up the corporate ladder as an executive for Starwood Hotels. Though born and raised in New Orleans, and by that time married with two children, in her words “I was never here. I lived on an airplane.”
The flooding inundated her Fontainebleau house, forcing the family to relocate first to Providence, Rhode Island, then closer to home in Jefferson Parish. Travel remained a constant until, while preparing to leave on yet another business trip, “I realized how exhausted and sad I was. I cried the whole time I was on the plane.”
She quit almost immediately upon arrival and returned home. Her income, however, was necessary for her family. The entrepreneurial spirit struck quickly.
“My husband used to joke that we needed an occasional wife,” she recalled. So she took her 401(k) funds and launched The Occasional Wife, a business that helps people organize their homes, businesses, events and lives in general.
“There was a good market for it, because everyone was in that rebuild mode, and I was able to offer the services that helped people get back in their homes,” Morrison explained. “People were either being minimalists, getting rid of everything, or being the opposite, replacing everything they had lost times ten.”
For the former, Morrison helped empty their spaces, reselling many items in her newly opened store, which in turn supplied those in the latter category.
From that emergency response beginning, The Occasional Wife has now blossomed into seven stores with 60 employees, including locations in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and Pensacola, Florida. Services include on-site estate sales, organizing and decluttering (with some of the discarded items consigned to the stores), packing and moving, and event planning, among others.
“There’s a huge market here, so many beautiful antiques and vintage items,” Morrison observed.
“...everyone was in that rebuild mode, and I was able to offer the services that helped people get back in their homes.”
With expansion has, of course, come challenges. Staffing is never easy, especially post-COVID, but Morrison makes the jobs more attractive by being very flexible.
“The idea behind The Occasional Wife was to be a woman-owned business for women, so they could work and still go out and pursue what they want to do,” she elaborated. “We want women to have a good work-life balance.”
In addition, insurance costs of all kinds are spiraling. And each new location, while exciting, also requires managing all kinds of license and code requirements. “Anytime you own a small business, there’s nine million challenges all the time,” Morrison noted with a wry laugh. “And it’s not easy to own a business in New Orleans. I love my city, but we could do so much more for businesses and keeping people here.”
None of this is stopping her from continuing her growth.
“Next thing on my horizon is updating all my stores, giving them a cleaner look, finding more efficient ways to distribute between stores,” she said.
Even bigger news is the imminent opening of a new store in Brooklyn, New York.
“My son lives there. He works in the film business, so he has a lot of down time to help out,” Morrison said. “The vintage business is just exploding up there; I already have a lot of clients.”
Morrison knows she fills a special niche in the business landscape.
“Not everybody loves to dig through houses and clear them out,” she noted. “But I love offering my services to people. I love helping our city.”
MLM Custom Homes and Renovations
Machi Medrzycki, Owner and General Contractor
As a kid growing up in Poland, Machi Medrzycki loved building exotic structures with his Lego set. “I was always drawn to doing stuff with my hands,” he recalled, adding, “I was always drawn to the United States and wanted to live here.”
At age 19, Medrzycki seized the opportunity to join his brother in Buffalo, New York. Eventually he moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, where he went to work in a souvenir stand.
Soon thereafter the owner decided to expand, and Medrzycki, still interested in building things, signed on to be part of the process. Working with the contractor hired for the job, he began learning the trade and ultimately went to work for the contractor.
“He was a one man shop doing small, high-end projects,” he recounted. “I learned a lot about practical applications.”
When Hurricane Charles hit, and the work expanded dramatically. “That taught me production, how to do a volume of work. That sped up my learning process a lot.”
Then Katrina hit New Orleans. In summer of 2006, Medrzycki moved to Slidell and began rebuilding in St. Bernard Parish.
“It was a gloomy time,” he remembered, passing through state police checkpoints to get to job sites, “but there was a lot of work.”
As his experience and skill sets grew, so did his business. By 2011, he had obtained both residential and commercial contractors’ licenses and expanded into New Orleans and the Northshore.
“We started hiring for the purposes of company culture. I want people who share the same values, like the customer always comes first.”
Around the same time, he developed connections in the commercial property management field, adding commercial projects to his residential work. The increased scale required using lines of credit to float some of the projects, but whenever possible, Medrzycki used the proceeds from one job to start the next.
Nearly 20 years later, MLM is well established in the local construction industry, focusing on historic and luxury home renovations and additions, along with commercial renovation and buildouts. The company has received the coveted Best of Houzz award for eight consecutive years, along with Best of Home in 2015 and 2017. Recent major projects include renovating the Park Esplanade apartment building and the Fairfield Inn on Baronne Street and rebuilding a Family Dollar store destroyed by fire.
Ironically, a big challenge now is competition from new firms.
“There are a lot of newcomers who are very hungry,” he commented. “They may have low overheads or not really understand the actual costs of the projects.”
More recently, the economy has created difficulties.
“Interest rates are high, and there is a slowdown in cash flow,” he reported. “People are paying attention to every dollar.”
In response, Medrzycki has initiated a substantial shift among his seven-member staff.
“We started hiring for the purposes of company culture,” he elaborated. “I want people who share the same values, like the customer always comes first.”
In the meantime, “I have abandoned my office, now I work out of the conference room. I want people to come in and talk. We keep everything out in the open.”
To help with stress reduction, Medrzycki has even installed a punching bag that the staff can use to vent their frustrations.
The real answer, though, is continuing to scale up. “Smaller projects make more money, but they require constant work,” he explained. “We want to keep moving to the larger projects, where there may be a lower profit percentage, but that comes out of a higher-priced project.”
