NNO: Smaller is better, Part 2: the reality
Yesterday (Part 1) I discussed the tough choices that have to be made. Meanwhile,
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 4 — Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
Do we really want to fund rebuilding the beige areas?
When we have a good idea where the water might come back?
By the way, this is a common feature of zoning/ building code change: existing structures are grandfathered, but the grandfathering ceases on substantial renovation:
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this battered city. “What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below fifty percent,” a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90% of the time,
You can’t expect a local official, facing a distraught homeowner, to say No in these cases. It takes some distance, and some political guts.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
Condemn, compensate, relocate, rebuild. Anything else is a false compassion, and a deeper cruelty.
