Affordable Housing Institute : US

How can we fix New Orleans?

[Previous posts on New Orleans here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

 

“There’s no need to fear, blogging man is here!”

 

Perhaps the Federal government’s embarrassing dither about New New Orleans is due to lack of a visionary prescription for how to reinvent the city.

 

“Take sixty-five billion and call me in the morning.”

 

Worry no more: here it is. Like most tonics, it has a bitter initial taste, but the sooner you take it, the better you’ll feel.

 

“A spoonful of captions helps expenditure go down.”

 

1. Think big, act swiftly

Even before Katrina, New Orleans was failing: demographically (losing population), economically (high structural unemployment), politically (it was a byword for inept local government), and socially (with increasing poverty concentration). Other than nostalgia, there is no justification for recreating what was decaying by inexorable half-decades. Reinvention is mandatory.

Many of the great urban reinventions came through a strong initial vision. Wren’s London, L’Enfant’s Washington DC, and Haussman’s Paris all drew clean straight lines through what had been warrens of alleyways and tenements. All of them projected a future vision of the new urbanist city, one that was people-friendly.

 

This is the best time to lay out the big boulevards, the strategic mass transit, the diversified tenure and income mixes. Otherwise, once you have embedded constituencies, you have the absurdities that the Long Island Parkway detours sinuously around Westbury and Hicksville, the DC Metro doesn’t stop in Georgetowne, and the LA subway doesn’t go to LAX.

 

Alternatively, and both embarrassing and costly, you build a BART and then decide, gee, maybe we should run it to SFO — or the apotheosis of open-heart urban surgery, the Big Dig, where we are know, with billions of Federal dollars (Thanks, Teddy! Thanks, Tip!) burying a functioning highway that was previously a neck tourniquet to a great maritime city.

 

If you want any kind of scale, you have to move in an organized fashion.

 

Decisions also have a scale – what affects most should be decided first, as a platform for later decisions. The U. S. Constitution, still my ideal example of appropriate scaling, deals only with the major issues of governance, legislation, and jurisprudence, leaving the rest to be developed and changed as required.

 

2. Condemn (and compensate) everything below sea level

The scale of a city is set by its land area, its major streets, its public transportation, its zoning, and its money flows (especially the central business district). Everything flows from the land area, and until that is settled, nothing else can recover.

 

While I admire those who build homes on stilts,

 

Romantic but rickety

 

romance is no basis for rebuilding, especially when the evidence is overwhelming that while one can survive or rebuild from a big blow, there is no way of cost-effectively defending property that is below seat level. As I wrote in a short story, “I could have told you folks. You don’t stop the sea.”

 

So let’s say what seems abundantly obvious: everything below sea level is economically unsalvageable. Nothing below sea level should be rebuilt with Federal funding.

 

It isn’t that the homes are physically uninhabitable (although many of them are), but rather than they are economically untouchable (mold).

Let’s be clear: we’re not abandoning that property. Condemnation means compensation: pay the property owners the pre-Katrina value of the property, and allow them to resettle wherever they like.

 

Yes, this means the Federal government will be paying many who are uninsured, but as I said a few days back:

 

There are some risks it is not cost-effective to insure. Hurricane Katrina was one of them.

So what happens after one of those uninsurable risks happens?

 

What happens? The federal government covers the unfortunate. Because that is what a wise government does.

It’s ironic that this most massive use of condemnatory power will come on the heels of a highly controversial eminent domain case — Kelo v. New London, decided for the locality by a jumbled majority opinion.

 

Mass condemnation with generous compensation. The sooner someone does this, the better for New Orleans. Otherwise the molds, torts, finger-pointing, and funding uncertainty will mean that the city never acquires a twenty-first century skeleton.

 

3. Get the money flows right and everything else will work

To rebuild New Orleans, every bit as important as solving the geography is solving the economics. Money is the ultimate liquid commodity, it flows speedily to those places of financial opportunity, and it evaporates just as speedily from uncertainty, ambiguity, or non-viability.

Experience in developing nations shows that market-enabling environments are created by sound governmental policies. In emerging nations, these are fundamentals like transferable written title, clear rule-writing and viable economic propositions — things we have in the US … but not in Old New Orleans, at least those parts of it formerly underwater and now uninhabitable.

 

Re-establishing the economic conditions of contest is thus an equal precondition with establishing the physical conditions of contest.

“Free your bucks, and the rest will follow!”

 

And that starts with defining what is economically safe and prudent for investment. This leads to ….

 

4. Avoid flash-flood capitalization

As my earlier speculations have made clear, the future of New Orleans teeters on a precipice between comic and tragic visions. And the dark side is all too tempting, as witness Mayor Ray Nagin’s floating the obvious (and shortsighted) concept, which I have previewed, of bringing in the casinos.

 

Why float up and down the Mississippi to gamble when you can step aboard a moored paddle-wheeler?

I have seen the future, and it has bad taste.

In Superdome did Donald Trump

A garish gaming hall decree

Where big the muddy river ran

As drawn on a rebuilding plan

Down through strong new levees

Casinos are good for city government, and they generate pots of revenue. They’re not good for civitas, but their presence does mean a huge low-wage employment base, and a corresponding need for an enormous amount of sustainable affordable housing.

 

Some years back, Atlantic City got on the gambling gravy train, and today Atlantic City has an oceanfront strip of neon palaces, a vastly misshapen labor distribution (few high-income jobs, many menial ones), a significant affordable housing problem, and a decaying urban inner ring dotted with boarded-up, abandoned, or demolished properties.

 

To that end, Brookings recommends mandatory inclusionary zoning within the recovery zone. That makes excellent sense.

 

[Part 2 continues tomorrow]

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