NNO: what rough beast
Pawns, the great chess theoretician Hans Kmoch preached, are a position’s backbone; because they alone cannot move backwards, the pawn structure defines the terrain.
Pawn chains divide and fence the open board.
In the same way residential housing — people’s homes — defines cities. Like pawns, homes are small scale (relative to other capital), and the least mobile form of investment (jobs migrate, capital flees), so the constellations of homes — occupied and unoccupied — shape the urban demographic terrain.
Every chessplayer knows the moment when his pawn structure is fixed, and thus weakened and a target, and in the same way, a redeveloping city reaches a moment its skeleton is fixed and it will grow muscle (economic activity) only where the skeleton is strong. Then the policymakers’ time (whether wisely used or frittered away) is over; the markets rule.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Now, nearly nine months after hurricane Katrina destroyed Old New Orleans, that time has come for New New Orleans; what it will be is no longer in the hands of the ostensible decision-makers, but instead is rolling forward inevitably from the decisions of thousands of home owners, past, present, and future, as dispassionately but compassionately chronicled in a poignant Washington Post article:
With Hurricane Katrina nearly nine months gone and about 60% of
Poverty is the driver, but race is the correlate.
Disparities in wealth and in the distance of evacuees from their ruined houses are dictating, in many cases, which neighborhoods will be part of the city’s future and which will be consigned to its history. For a city that was two-thirds black and nearly one-third poor before the storm, the uneven pilgrimage back to
The phoenix that rises is smaller than its parent whose death gave it life.
As I’ve repeatedly chronicled, Old New Orleans was a sick city — declining employment, declining population, staggering poverty rate — so in the emergence of a smaller, more prosperous New New Orleans we glimpse parallels our optimistic vision:
The 6500 block of Memphis Street in Lakeview, a white neighborhood hit hard by Katrina [,]is roaring back to middle-class life, and most owners on the block have committed to coming home.
Landscapers are rolling out sod for new lawns. Granite countertops and commercial-grade stainless-steel stoves are being installed in rebuilt kitchens. There is electricity, water, gas, mail service, newspaper delivery and garbage pickup. Two neighborhood banks are up and lending. A post-Katrina restaurant, Touche, serves breakfast and lunch. Two blocks away, St. Dominic Catholic church has been refurbished and is open each morning for
Big houses, big skeleton.
“Every day and every week is better, and people need to know that,” said Bea Quaintance. With the help of a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is parked in her front yard, she and her husband, Gary, and their son, Steven, were the first family back on
What distinguishes
· Elevation. Lakeview was dry within days.
· Economics. Lakeview’s residents had much more substantial means to cope with Katrina’s cost.
In saying this, I am by no means dismissing race as a factor, rather seeking to distinguish correlation from causation. For rebuilding, the drivers are elevation and economics. It’s entirely probable that the original settlement had the drivers reversed, with race defining who was rich when, and who chose to settle where.
Even as we observe a stronger city slowly arising, parts of the old city have economically died, as illustrated by another much poorer block suffering a fatal case of economic gangrene:
Across town, in a 98%-black, mostly working-class neighborhood that was also wrecked by the storm, the 2500 block of
Like much of the Lower Ninth Ward, the block is empty and silent, with no electricity, no drinkable water, no gas, no FEMA trailers and no signs of rebuilding on a street where many families owned their homes for generations.
No nearby churches, banks or restaurants are open, and no one, not even organizers from groups demanding the reconstruction of the Lower Ninth, seems to have a list of residents with firm plans to come home. Throughout the spring, bodies were found in neighborhood houses.
A sign in the window of Daphne
College students on spring break gutted her house free of charge in April, but she says she does not have enough money to rebuild.
Economics influenced not just which neighborhoods submerged, but where their residents relocated:
After fleeing the storm, black residents, especially poor ones from the Lower Ninth Ward and the city’s public housing projects, were much more likely than whites to end up living far out of town, according to city, state and federal studies. After long bus rides, many ended up in cities such as
There some of them (many of them, we hope) are building hopeful new lives. Distance has shifted the family’s emotional locus:
Middle-class whites fled in their own cars and tended not to go so far, according to the studies. Many of them rented apartments, bought houses, or moved in with friends or relatives in the mostly white suburbs that developed as whites fled school integration. These New Orleanians have remained close enough to get building permits, deal with insurance agents, hire contractors and bird-dog the reconstruction of their houses.
It wasn’t just proximity, nor even predominantly proximity: the low-level neighborhoods are unsafe to reoccupy:
‘Look and Leave’
Until last week, the city had designated the entire Lower Ninth Ward as a “look and leave” area because city water tested unsafe for drinking. That order has now been lifted, but only for about half of the neighborhood.
To deny an option, no matter how valid the reasons, is to force selection of other options:
“People in Lakeview have had the chance to decide whether to come home,” said William Quigley, a professor at Loyola University Law School in
Beyond safety, there is also economic exposure, for with mold omnipresent, the existing structures will be economically valueless, and therefore economically infeasible to rebuild.
Anna Valdery and her husband, David Stirgus, would like to go home to
The brick house, part of what had been a highly successful project for low-income, first-time home buyers, is seven years old and, unlike most houses in the Lower Ninth, appears structurally sound.
But Stirgus, a retired truck driver, and his wife, a nursing-home aide, agree that returning is all but impossible. For one thing, their house on Delery is in the part of the Lower Ninth that remains closed to reconstruction. For another, they have only about $16,000 left in savings from the Katrina flood insurance settlement — not nearly enough to rebuild their gutted house.
Those in new cities, with no home to rebuild (and potentially settlement money in their pockets), are turning away from the vanished Old New Orleans:
Despite months of national publicity and an intensive effort to encourage out-of-town voting, turnout in the Lower Ninth fell 40% compared with the 2002 mayoral election. In the precinct that includes the 2500 block of Delery, turnout was down 50%. The falloff was mirrored in other black districts across the city.
I suspect absentee voting is a very good proxy for interest in returning, for in their hearts, owners of long-submerged property know those old homes are gone.
Where you choose to vote is where you think you live.
Physical relocation and distance has brought on emotional distance and with it emotional relocation.
In the past month, [Ms. Valdery and Mr. Stirgius] have been back to New Orleans for a couple of short, depressing looks at their house and the moldering, abandoned neighborhood that surrounds it.
“The feeling I got when I went back to
Though tragic, it’s long past, and whatever policy chances might have been, are now gone. For Ms. Valdery and Mr. Stirgius, for all those whose former existences are irretrievably lost, let W. B. Yeats pronounce the epitaph for Old New Orleans:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards
W. B. Yeats, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
What might have been, had we but tried.
