Affordable Housing Institute : US

However it is rebuilt, the New New Orleans will bear little relation to the Old New Orleans:

 

Asked in the interview whether it made sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

 

 

Any resemblance to King Canute is purely coincidental …

 

Hastert later issued a statement saying he was not “advocating that the city be abandoned or relocated.”

 

“My comments about rebuilding the city were intended to reflect my sincere concern with how the city is rebuilt to ensure the future protection of its citizens and not to suggest that this great and historic city should not be rebuilt,” the statement said.

 

However clumsily he phrased it, Speaker Hastert has squished his enormous foot into a highly relevant question, because by the time the water is pumped out, much of the Old New Orleans will be unsalvageable:

 

Many of the houses will be total losses.  Now immersed in what amounts to sewer water up to the roof, many houses may remain under water for weeks or even months.  Insulation, wiring, ductwork and other systems will likely be ruined, said William Coulbourne, a structural engineer with URS Corp. in Gaithersburg.

 

And wood immersed in water for protracted periods rots …

 

While high-rises could be stripped down to the concrete, power-washed and then refitted, most houses would be much harder to clean up even if they remained structurally sound.

 

Adding to the physical challenges, financial pressure will also place caps on the rebuilding, because people will only rebuild what they can afford to rebuild.  And that is governed by their insurance coverage:

 

Much of the damage was and is being caused by flooding, a peril that is not covered in normal homeowners insurance. The federal government offers coverage but many of those eligible never apply.

 

Further, although it is required by most lenders in flood-prone areas, mandated coverage is often limited to $250,000 — which is the federal policies’ limit for a residence — or to 80% of the replacement cost of the home, whichever is smaller.

 

Thus, many of the families who have coverage will find themselves responsible for 20% of the cost — $30,000 on a $150,000 home — if the house is a total loss and they want to rebuild.

 

So people will rebuild new, different homes.  What was gone will not be replicated, it will change.

 

Meanwhile, the Federal government will likely step in with some catastrophic assistance, it may fall short of a total rebuild:

 

Hastert, in a transcript supplied by the suburban Chicago newspaper, said there was no question that the people of New Orleans would rebuild their city, but noted that federal insurance and other federal aid was involved.  “We ought to take a second look at it.  But you know we built Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild too.  Stubbornness.”

 

There are “some real tough questions to ask,” Hastert said in the interview.  “How do you go about rebuilding this city?  What precautions do you take?”

 

And who pays for what?

 

These questions are particularly relevant because the cost to protect a below-sea-level city is prohibitive.  As a 2001 Scientific American article warned (hat tip: Belmont Club), specifically about New Orleans:

 

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.

 

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms.  The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing.  A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh–an area the size of Manhattan–will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes.  Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes.  Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.

 

The Scientific American article estimated upwards of $30 billion for prevention … and it might not work.

 

Nor are the inundation risks confined to the Old New Orleans:

 

Fixing the delta would serve as a valuable test case for the country and the world. Coastal marshes are disappearing along the eastern seaboard, the other Gulf Coast states, San Francisco Bay and the Columbia River estuary for many of the same reasons besetting Louisiana. Parts of Houston are sinking faster than New Orleans. Major deltas around the globe–from the Orinoco in Venezuela, to the Nile in Egypt, to the Mekong in Vietnam — are in the same delicate state today that the Mississippi Delta was in 100 to 200 years ago.

 

In Future Boston, a mosaic novel shared-world future that my writer’s group and I created a decade ago, we took as our first postulate that Boston would sink, four inches a year, a conceit I found fascinating:

 

 

“How did you get that picture?” someone once asked me.

“I took off my shoes and socks and waded into the Swan Pond.”

 

While Future Boston’s fictional catastrophe happened ten thousand times more slowly, we concluded in the end that water-covered surfaces would be depopulated.  My story “Dying In Hull” chronicled one woman’s day in a city vanishing beneath the ocean, complete with scavengers and vigilante justice:

 

As the town of Hull sank, its houses had fallen to the Atlantic, singly or in whole streets. These rich proud windward oceanfronts, unshielded from the open sea, were the first to go.  Black asphalt shingles had been torn from their roofs and walls by many storms.  Porches sagged or collapsed entirely.  Broken windows and doors were covered with Cambodian territorial chop signs of the Ngor, Pran, and Kim waterkid gangs.  Some homes had been burned out, the soot rising from their empty window frames like the petals of black flowers.

 

A girl’s rusted blue motor scooter leaned against the front stairs of 172 Beach.  Barnacles grew on its handlebars.  Mary Donovan and her parents had lived here, Ethel remembered, before she moved to downtown Boston and became an accountant.  A good student who had earned one of Ethel’s few A-pluses, Mary had ridden that scooter to high school every day, even in the snow, until the water had made riding impossible.

 

Most people in my fictional Hull moved away, as many in New Orleans are doing, and relocated elsewhere:

 

“I could have told you folks,” Ethel addressed the ghosts of the departed owners. “You don’t stop the sea.”

 

So, when you do build New New Orleans, where and how do you build it?  What do you do differently, on a grand scale?

 

Forgive me for finding this an absolutely fascinating case of palimpsest urban planning on the grandest scale imaginable.

 

 

What will we write on the new bayou?

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