Last Friday, the documentary Trouble The Water opened at Chicago's Century Centre and I urge all of our readers in the area to see it. Directed by Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the film follows two residents of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward as they recover from their harrowing experience during Hurricane Katrina. 

Unable to find or afford transportation out of the city as the storm approached, Kimberly Rivers Roberts hunkered down with her husband Scott, her friends, neighbors, and dogs -- not to mention her camcorder -- to ride out the storm from the attic of her house.  Lessin and Deal intersplice Kimberly's riveting home video of the storm with their own footage of the weeks following the disaster.

I was invited to a screening of the Trouble The Water in early August organized by the filmmakers to start a conversation about how the movie -- following its theatrical release -- could be used as an organizing tool locally.  With that pretext in mind, I watched the documentary and kept noticing the similarity between the hurricane in New Orleans and the systematic displacement of public housing residents in Chicago.

In both cases, isolated and extremely poor communities watched as their homes were destroyed.  In both cases, the government failed to adequately prepare the residents for this fate. In both cases, the broader public watched this displacement occur with the perception that the affected communities were nothing more than "hellish slums" (as the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson recently described Chicago's greater South Side).

Lost amidst the destruction was any acknowledgement of the tight-knit bonds that permeated these abandoned communities -- bonds quickly severed as thousands of families were dispersed over large geographic areas. 

In that vein, one of the more moving and valuable sections of Trouble The Water comes near the beginning as Kimberly walks through the neighborhood, camcorder in hand, in the days prior to the storm's landfall.  Apart from reports of the high crime rate and thriving drug trade, there are very few accounts of life in the Lower Ninth Ward before the storm and the sense of community that permeates Kimberly's pre-storm footage is important to see.

Of course, despite all the similarities between these two scenarios, there is an important distinction.  The residents of the Lower Ninth had the opportunity to join their neighbors, return home, and attempt to rebuild the community together.  For Chicago's high-rise public housing residents, that's not an option.