New Orleans: Images of its future?

September 30, 2005 | Uncategorized

Two nifty graphics illustrate how New New Orleans should and will differ from Old New Orleans.  First, courtesy of USA Today, where have all the people gone?

 

Hurricane Katrina has dispersed 1.3 million Gulf Coast households to communities in every state from Maine to Hawaii, according to the first official accounting of the disaster’s unprecedented ripple effect.

 

 Usa_today_katrina_map_evacuees_050929

 

Doesn’t this quite resemble the splash pattern of Tycho crater? 

 

Meanwhile, Baton Rouge continues to win big:

 

After Katrina, almost 100,000 evacuees quickly sought refuge in and around Baton Rouge, and about 81,000 fled to the Houston area. Most other displaced families fled to major metropolitan areas in the South.

 

Meanwhile, when it comes to building New New Orleans as the 21st century Venice, might we not want to look far enough in the future to examine where the city will sink?  Courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers, a look at Louisiana, 2050:

 

Louisiana_2050_no_more_no

 

The red areas are going to be under water.  Much of Old New Orleans’ low-lying crescent qualifies.

 

As former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp said the other night (at the Harvard Kennedy School John T. Dunlop Lecture, about which I will blog next week):

 

“We can’t build New Orleans the same as we all knew it.  We can build it as it can be and should be.”

 

So let’s be very smart about where we spend all those billions, and how.

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