[Click here for an archive of my 2005 New New Orleans posts.]

As we saw yesterday, three years after Hurricane Katrina, I was in New New Orleans at an AHIC conference that included a lunchtime speaker from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, followed by a bus tour of the flooded sections including the infamous Lower Ninth Ward. 

The blue sawtooth is the Levee Canal connecting the Mississippi too Lake Ponchartrain

I was really curious, for I hadn’t posted about New New Orleans for over a year and a half, when I summarized the Battle for New New Orleans:

After Katrina, many of my housing colleagues sought to help New Orleans rebuild.  I admire them.  In some ways, I envy their involvement; I would have loved to do it, hopeless though it be.  And their efforts have made things better.

Yes, it’s better than it was

But not enough.  The New New Orleans has long since taken shape; it is going to be smaller, and much closer to our pessimistic than optimistic view.

I admire those who continue to fight the battle.  But the war for New New Orleans’ future is over. 

Not looking good for the city

Three years in, what has New New Orleans become?  Did the city bear more resemblance to my pessimistic view (Galveston with unemployment) or my optimistic view (Venice on the bayou)?  The optimistic view is based on the modern post-industrial city as the venue for adult play.  As I wrote two weeks after Katrina:

The more complex the mind, said the host of the amusement planet in a great Star Trek episode, Shore Leave, the greater its need for play … and for complex play.

Torn tunics optional, sir!

As homo urbanis’s need for leisure grows, so too grow the leisure cities.  Sin City West is Las Vegas, which continues to boom amid the trackless desert.  Atlantic City is Sin City East.  Gambling fever has broken out across America, and except for Branson, Missouri (please!), in between there is nowhere comparable.  Except Sin City South, the Big Easy.  A playground for adults, be their pleasures adult, adolescent, child-like, or childish.  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

Make fun of me all you want so long as you come to my casinos

Physically and spatially, Old New Orleans was one of America’s most curious cities.  The historical area – the French Quarter, Garden District, even Audubon – stretches in a crescent around a Mississippi River bend selected because it was the farthest upstream that ocean-going sailing ships could navigate.  With technology – structurally reinforced concrete – came the great levees that dammed Lake Ponchartrain and enabled what had been a serpentine configuration to fill out all the marshland northwards to the lakeshore, yielding a city living on borrowed time:

All of the historical city was situated on the pink ground, the natural levee created by the Mississippi River’s centuries of being the big muddy and bringing the great plains to rest on the Big Easy’s banks.  North from that city were marshlands bleeding into wide shallow Lake Pontchartrain, areas that nobody settled – until the levees came.

Built by humanity, living in a below-water-level bowl

What happened we all know: the levees were breached by extraordinary storm surge, and the bowl filled with water:

From far above it looked like this.

And like this closer up

In zoning terms, here’s what flooded:

The numbers denote planning districts.  1 is the French Quarter, 2 is the Garden District, 3 is Audubon.  The hashed vertical line bounding 6-7 on the east and 9-8 on the west is the New Orleans canal, whose levees were breached in multiple places, flooding everything below sea level — mainly the areas marked 5-6-9-10, and 8, which is Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth Ward.

It was self-evident to lots of us that, however tragic the flooding was, these parts of Old New Orleans would be uneconomic to rebuild.  So I wrote, as others wrote, that the city should be re-sized:

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.

Romantic but rickety

While I admire those who build homes on stilts, 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.

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.

Fast-forward three years, glide gracefully over the embarrassing ineptitude of New Orleans‘ municipal government, its mayor’s incendiary and slanderous statements, and the collapse of coordinated rebuilding or master-planning efforts.  What do we have?

The areas above sea level, including the French Quarter, have all rebounded.  Those flooded are anywhere from 35% to 81% depopulated – three years after the fact.

A better depiction of the human displacement is shown in their table of unoccupied addresses:

The bars’ height represents the number of unoccupied houses; they small print shows the percentages.  The areas un-rebuilt are those deepest and longest flooded.

After Katrina, various pundits and solons weighed in on how to rebuild New Orleans.  Harvard’s Ed Glaeser argued Smaller was better; a Rand Corporation projection was also pessimistic: they thought the city would stabilize at 272,000 people.  (Today it’s 325,000.)  For my part, it was all too easy to construct New New Orleans: the pessimistic view, whose main conclusions were the following:

1. The city’s demography was waning anyhow.

2.  Its economy has been shrinking, not growing.

3.  New Orleans‘ valuable land is on higher ground.

4. What will be rebuilt is only what is economic to rebuild.

5.  What has been destroyed has little economic value.

6.  Race and economics enforce their own triage.

Does the end of New Orleans as one of America’s top 50 cities represent a dilemma of race and class in America? Of course. There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.

7.  Ports are — well, portable — and need machines, not people.

In 1996, Lance Armstrong was a world-class cyclist but not tipped as a potential Tour de France winner, when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.  It nearly killed him, but he recovered fully. 

Actually, he came back better.  Lance’s new equilibrium weight – what sports trainers call his ’set point’ was about four pounds lighter than before the cancer.  He had all the muscle, all the aerobic capacity of his pre-illness self – and four fewer pounds to pedal around the 2,200 miles of France.

Lance has thanked for cancer; without it, he has said, he wouldn’t have won.

Major trauma resets the body’s functioning. 

2008: aerial of some of the depopulated Lower Ninth Ward

Though Old New Orleans was living on borrowed time, no one wished Katrina on New Orleans.  Now that it has come and gone, the New New Orleans is here.  It’s a much smaller city, and a much healthier one.

Send post as PDF to

Three years in, what has New New Orleans become?  A month ago I was back in the Big Easy for the first time since Katrina.  Did the city bear more resemblance to my optimistic view (Venice on the bayou) or my pessimistic view (Galveston with unemployment)?

Which would it be for New New Orleans?

I was in New New Orleans at an AHIC conference that included a vivacious and knowledgeable lunchtime speaker, Allison Plyer from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, followed by a bus tour of the flooded sections including the infamous Lower Ninth Ward.

Called ‘lower’ because it’s farther below sea level than the other half of the Ninth Ward

In September, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I was in Cairo, Egypt, working under a USAID contract on a strategic and business plan for an Egyptian housing finance agency.  Sitting at my makeshift USAID-funded desk (”A gift from the American people”) in the idle times between meetings, I wrote a blog post that began:

This blog post is a gift from an American person

However it is rebuilt, the New New Orleans will bear little relation to the Old New Orleans:

Asked in the interview whether it made sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Any resemblance to King Canute is purely coincidental …

However clumsily he phrased it, Speaker Hastert has squished his enormous foot into a highly relevant question, because by the time the water is pumped out, much of the Old New Orleans will be unsalvageable:

Many of the houses will be total losses.  Now immersed in what amounts to sewer water up to the roof, many houses may remain under water for weeks or even months.  Insulation, wiring, ductwork and other systems will likely be ruined, said William Coulbourne, a structural engineer with URS Corp. in Gaithersburg.

And wood immersed in water for protracted periods rots …

In my pessimistic view, New New Orleans would shrivel and become an urban ghost, a Bayou Torcello, or worse, a soggy organized-crime sin palace like Atlantic City:

The historic analogy for New Orleans is Galveston. For 60 years in the 1800s, that coastal city was the most advanced in Texas. It had the state’s first post office, first naval base, first bakery, first gaslights, first opera house, first telephones, first electric lights and first medical school.  Then came the hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900.

Galveston today is a charming tourist and entertainment destination, but it never returned to its old commercial glory.

Why?  Because Galveston lost out to Houston:

The leaders of Houston took one look at what the hurricane had wrought and concluded a barrier island might not be the best place to build the major metropolis that a growing east central Texas was going to need.

That makes the future Baton Rouge look a lot like the present Houston.

Three years on, what have we got?  The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center is upbeat, citing ‘a position of strength’:

Yet even in that first paragraph, the statistics tell a more complex story.  As Allison Plyer, the Center’s chief researcher, told us in a lunch speech, before Katrina, the City of New Orleans had a population of 484,500; today, only 72% of them have returned, giving the city a population of roughly 325,000. 

The metro area has recovered more than the Big Easy itself

Yet 88% of the city’s pre-Katrina jobs are back. 

Metro area employment

After losing roughly 180,000 jobs (metro-wide) through Katrina, the area steadily recovered employment through 2006, and even through 2007 (although at a dwindling rate.  Job growth in 2008 has been essentially flat.

This arithmetic yields a simple syllogism:

28% of the people held only 12% of the jobs

The huge diaspora splashed across America – many, in a bit of hurricane-relocation irony, to Houston – and, if the statistics speak truly, most of those who have not returned were under-employed if not unemployed when they left.  Some of them, as reported in a Washington Post profile, are much better off in their new surroundings (e.g. Atlanta).  For the city they left behind, the result is a stunning positive: before Katrina, unemployment was 16.0%; today it is 3.3%. 

As I wrote only two months after the storm:

Even as Paris suffers through the hideous consequences of malignant income over-­concentration, back home Hurricane Katrina has done what three decades of well-meaning urban social policy could not: it has decisively and permanently deconcentrated poverty from Old New Orleans.   

New Orleans public housing, 2001

Old New Orleans was one of the nation’s sickest cities, with declining population, a shrinking employment base, high poverty (23%), and high unemployment (15%).  In terms of economic demography, Katrina did two things simultaneously:

1. Scattered the poor across the country.

2. Created an unprecedented labor opportunity for those in the building trades.

Who comes back first?  Those who are mobile: the affluent and the economically hungry.  If you wave money, they will come, as this New York Times article reports:

Workers from all over have been pouring into Louisiana, some bused in by contracting companies, others simply turning up on their own in search of jobs. While nobody seems to know how many are here, there is plenty of work; the federal government estimates it will spend more than $450 million just to clean up hurricane debris.

Who comes is not who left.

Those who have returned or immigrated have fewer children than those who left:

“School enrollment lags population recovery”

That demographic swap is highlighted in the Center’s report, which noted “the number of Hispanic students in metro area public school has increased each year” to 5.9% in 2008, versus 3.9% before Katrina.  This is also off a smaller school population base: 14% of the families not returning took with them 24% of the school-age children. 

Though the Center strives mightily to suggest ongoing recovery, its own statistics show that the New New Orleans we see today is the stable state, and its future growth will be normally organic:

That’s also seen in the statistics on applications for and closing of “Road Home” reconstruction housing:

When your applications for roughly $60,000 apiece in free money have stopped dead for nine months, you can officially declare your rebate period over.

What does this new demography mean for the city?

[Continued tomorrow in part 2.]

Send post as PDF to