Affordable Housing Institute : US

The Moon’s most visible crater (although not its largest) is Tycho:

 

 

 

It is named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the last pre-telescopic astronomer.

 

 

 

Though Tycho was formed ‘only’ 100 million years ago, we know exactly where and how it happened, because we see its ejecta pattern, the hundred-mile splash of basalt and rubble radiating outward in every direction.

 

Tycho is our reminder of Old New Orleans, the city that is gone, and a visual metaphor for New New Orleans, the city yet to come.

 

That the Old New Orleans is gone, there should be no doubt.  As the New York Times reports:

 

The scale of the rebuilding is likely to be larger than that of any other disaster in the United States because the losses are so much greater.  After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, about 28,000 housing units were destroyed, Mr. Carliner said.  According to estimates from the American Red Cross, about the same number were ruined by the four hurricanes that struck Florida last year.  In New Orleans, as many as 100,000 homes could be damaged beyond repair.

 

Meanwhile, many are already resettling elsewhere, such as upstate in Baton Rouge:

 

As refugees from New Orleans poured into Baton Rouge last week, along with workers who expect to help with the rebuilding effort along the Gulf Coast, the local housing market, which up until now has plodded along at a stable pace, suddenly experienced the kind of frenzy that has been associated with New York, Miami or Silicon Valley in the last few years.

 

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Robert Cook, a real estate agent with Re/Max Elite in Denham Springs, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge. “It’s sort of scary.”

 

Mr. Cook said he represented five buyers in two days last week who made offers on homes, and fielded hundreds of calls and e-mail messages from others.  On Friday, he said, he was with a couple from Picayune, Miss., who made offers on several houses only to discover they had already been sold.

 

 

Eighty miles, an hour and a half … and a new life

 

Sometimes cities die because a cataclysm fatally wounds them.  Ancient Ephesus was once a metropolis of 200,000 and one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  St. Paul caused a riot by his preaching to the Ephesians.  When its river silted up, Ephesus lost its place to Izmir.  The Greek city died, and today Ephesus is a mere day-trip from Kusadasi (pronounced koosh-ah-dess-ah).

 

Let’s speculate, therefore, on what New New Orleans may become.

 

1.         Baton Rouge wins big

 

Because of its pale contrast with flamboyant laissez les bon temps roulez Old New Orleans, we have come to think of Baton Rouge as a sleepy backwoods town, but it is the state capitol.  This will assume greater importance as massive resources funnel into New Orleans.  Through where?  Through Baton Rouge.

 

It’s also the home of LSU, whose Tiger Stadium holds 91,000 people.  That matters because the New Orleans Saints will have to relocate there, and for the next 17 weeks, every sports fan in America will be getting new views of Baton Rouge.

 

Before Katrina, Baton Rouge had a population of 227,000 people, less than half of New Orleans‘ 484,000.  Within five years, Baton Rouge will be larger, and possibly the relative populations could be reversed.

 

2.         The Port of New Orleans recovers first

 

At the mouth of the Mississippi River, the watershed area for 40% of the nation,

 

 

Draining 31 states and 2 Canadian provinces

 

New Orleans is a critical shipping port, vital to the nation’s commerce.  It must be put back into service quickly, and it will:

 

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels.  The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem.  Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north.  New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

 

Old New Orleans has always been important historically as well:

 

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn’t have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers – which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

 

3.         The New Port is a massive upgrade over the old port

 

With New Orleans all but depopulated, there is a sudden tremendous opportunity to restructure the infrastructure to improve efficiency.  Container shipping is vital to the United States, but containers are now perceived as vulnerable to security infiltration.  So RFID smart-tagging and similar electronic security will be added, to the extent it is not.  With the enormous sums now being mooted about, the Port that revives will be constructed like a national infrastructural priority:

 

New Orleans is not optional for the United States‘ commercial infrastructure.  It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist.  With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating.  The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon.  As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans.  But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

 

4.         Finance relocates to Baton Rouge

 

Capital moves at the click of a mouse.  Higher-income people move almost as fast.  The temporary headquarters to be established in Baton Rouge will give away to permanent legations working the state and Federal relief waterfall for every drop imaginable.  Whole new practices will spring up. 

 

Finance has been in New Orleans for the same reason Istanbul is Turkey’s financial capital — because it lies astride the source of wealth — transit.  But just as Kemal Ataturk sought to cleanse his modern Turkey of Istanbul’s dissolute corruption by moving his government to Ankara, there are many who, given a deep breath to consider the matter, will realize that Baton Rouge makes a better financial hub than New Orleans.  Baton Rouge, controlling the purse strings, will take economic revenge on its boozy neighbor.  No more upstate-downstate fights.  No more need to work inside a corrupt city government.  A chance to build afresh. 

 

That New Orleans has long had rotten city government is not in dispute.  (Personally, I speculate that some of the blame being aimed at FEMA is projective camouflage to cover up city and state failures.)  The Housing Authority of New Orleans has bounced in and out of HUD receivership and is today still one of the nation’s worst; it has long been a national embarrassment: “mired in bureaucratic bungling.”  More on this in a future post.

 

New New Orleans will maintain importance — there’s a core infrastructure of world-class high-rise office towers that are too valuable not to reoccupy — but the center of gravity has shifted and will stay shifted. 

 

5.         The French Quarter remains

 

The Quarter was largely above water.  It remains the anchor of the New Orleans tourist business. 

 

 

 

All those premium-paid workers will be looking for places to blow off steam, and toss beads around the necks of comely inebriated lasses (no picture for R-rated reasons). 

 

Incentives to preserve historic property are plentiful.

 

The wrought iron, Spanish moss, and jazz funerals will all be preserved, even if their surround is quite different.

 

 

O when the Feds/ Start writin’ checks!

O when the Feds start writin’ checks!

O Lord I want to get me a number

O when the Feds start wri-ting checks!

6.         Most of the rest is wiped clean

 

Americans are an active people, especially when the news is in front of our faces 24/7.  Beyond the extraordinary outpouring of support, with the forced evacuation New Orleanians are being taken in throughout the country; many in scale.  The economy will absorb the New Orleans diaspora.  Indeed, the temporary economic resettlement will lead many of the more employable to enter their transplanted workforces.

 

Ironically, the very Web interconnectedness of Americans will make it easier for them to resettle far from Old New Orleans.  Email is omnipresent; the Web knows it is a king unbounded in infinite space.  Once it was hard to stay in contact; now it’s hard not to.

 

Much of Old New Orleans’ submerged inventory will be economically obsolescent — ‘totaled’ in car-wreck lingo.  It will be cheaper to build new than renovate.  And if one is going to build new, and has a new job and a new life elsewhere, why return?

 

The New Orleans diaspora will prove substantially irreversible.

 

7.         The New New Orleans becomes a huge urban-planning upgrade over the old

 

So sophisticated has America become, so efficient our protection systems, that we have lost contact with the sense, pervasive among people before the 20th century, that sometimes tragedy strikes.  The 1666 Great Fire of London was a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.  As 17th century private blogger Samuel Pepys chronicled it:

 

So I rode down to the waterside …. and there saw a lamentable fire….  Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down.

 

Shades of Old New Orleans.

 

Having stayed, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavouring to quench it … I to Whitehall (with a gentleman with me, who desired to go off from the Tower to see the fire in my boat); and there up to the King’s closet in the Chapel, where people came about me, and I did give them an account [that] dismayed them all, and the word was carried into the King.

 

So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw; and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses ….

 

The Great Fire was devastating:

 

By the end of the fire some four fifths of the City had been destroyed, approximately 13,200 houses, 87 churches and 50 Livery Halls over an area of 436 acres.  

 

But like many a previous urban catastrophe, it had numerous delayed benefits, starting with public health:

 

Although the fire only claimed a few lives it may actually have saved many more – the rats that had helped to transmit the bubonic plague (Black Death) the previous year mostly died in the fire. The number of plague victims dropped rapidly after the fire.

 

It changed government (catastrophe is a precondition of reform):

 

The Great Fire of London set in motion changes in the capital which laid the foundations for organised firefighting in the future.  

 

Wooden houses and designs dating back to the medieval period were replaced with brick and stone buildings

 

Better construction, not just replacement.  In the New New Orleans, structures will be built with habitable space above sea level.  The ground floor will be used for garages, sub-basements, container storage — anything that can recover after long spells under water.  Building systems will be insulated, encased, and otherwise configured so as to survive immersion, which is much cheaper than trying to prevent immersion.

 

and owners began to insure their properties against fire damage.  The new insurance companies quickly realised that their losses could be minimised by employing men to put out fires.

 

Under the Law of Economic Gravity, changing finance changes incentives, which changes operations.

 

Christopher Wren, the great 17th Century architect began the reconstruction of London and built 49 new churches together with the great cathedral of St. Paul’s that we know today. After the fire of 1666, the face of London had changed forever.

 

Out of the Great Fire of London came the masterpiece of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

 

 

 

What new landmark will come to symbolize New New Orleans?

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