[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.

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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.]

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Such is the nature of our public processes, where those who wish to take an action must submit to a political grand guignol of holding a public hearing, only to be pilloried by those, some number of them from out of town, who come solely to fling political mud and worse. 

Load up!

I’ve previously chronicled, at length, the sorry tale of New New Orleans’ rise from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, and how the submersible part of the city has been doomed since early 2006.  I’ve admired from afar the dedicated work of commission after commission, all thwarted by short-term political pandering by the mayor and city council, and the abject failure of anything like a policy response.  The obituary for an optimistic New New Orleans was written nearly two years ago:

Triage is no joy, and this recommendation gives me no pleasure.

Mayor Nagin, please spend what is left of your political capital by making an unpopular but correct choice.

Deny building permits for everything below sea level.

“We’re holding our breath for decisive action.”

Never mind that the reinvention of New New Orleans has been completely botched, or that the Administration was spectacularly absent when key decisions were being made — the fact remains that because of lawyers, molds, and money, the derelict public housing is uneconomic and should be demolished.  That decision — a correct one in my view — was made a year and a half ago, in June, 2006.  As I wrote at the time:

Last week, New New Orleans took a step forward by officials showing judgment and courage:

NEW ORLEANS, June 14 — Federal housing officials announced on Wednesday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments for the poor were to be demolished here and replaced by developments for residents with a wider range of incomes.

Predictably, the decision was made by one far from the scene:

 “Hurricane Katrina put a spotlight on the condition of public housing in New Orleans,” [HUD Secretary Alphonso] Jackson said in a teleconference with reporters in Washington. “I’m here [in spirit anyway! — Ed.] to tell you we can do better.”

Bravo. I have had many differences with Secretary Jackson in the past, and doubtless will have many more in the future, but on this one he is dead right. New New Orleans should be, will be, and is already becoming smaller and more viable than decaying and decrepit Old New Orleans.

The demolition, which is scheduled to begin over the next several months, would be the largest of its kind in the city’s history and would erase the sprawling low-rises of the St. Bernard, C. J. Peete, B. W. Cooper and Lafitte housing developments.

The Fisher public housing development, October, 2005

Those who stage street theater seem more interested in abstract concepts suitable for a universe other than our own, where some New Orleans neighborhoods are worse than condemned.  Yet before these obsolescent and by now dangerous places can be destroyed, those who would do so must suffer their time in the pillory, as reported in The Washington Post:

Friday, December 21, 2007; 12:55 AM

NEW ORLEANS — Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday on protesters who tried to force their way into a City Council meeting, the latest strife over plans to demolish some 4,500 public housing units in a redevelopment project that council members ended up unanimously supporting.

New Orleans police officers subdue protesters at the New Orleans City Council meeting where the council is expected to vote for the demolition of housing projects in the city of New Orleans, Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007. Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters seeking to halt the demolition of 4,500 public housing units tried to force their way through an iron gate at City Hall.

Take a careful look at that photograph.  Three protesters, who appear not hurt but acting hurt.  One cop, trying to catch a shaved-head man determined to clutch a fence.  One photographer anxious to capture the visual.  It’s street theater.

Whatever it is, we’re against it

Police said 15 people were arrested on charges ranging from battery to disorderly conduct. Four people were taken to hospitals — two of them women who had been stunned with Tasers — and five others were injured and treated on the scene, police said. All four in the hospital were stable, police said.

So I asked myself, what were those protesters hoping to accomplish?

Protesters said they pushed against the iron gates that kept them out of the building because the Housing Authority of New Orleans had disproportionately allowed supporters of the demolition to pack the chambers. Dozens tried to force their way in.

The vote to demolish was 7-0.  What would their presence have done to change the vote?

At the peak of the confusion, some 70 protesters were facing about a dozen mounted police and 40 more law enforcement officers on foot.

“Is this what democracy looks like?” Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, said as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters.

Officers “did not use excessive force in any way,” police chief Warren Riley said.

After roughly 30 minutes of on-again-off-again struggle to get into the meeting, protesters fell back, continuously chanting with bullhorns.

What did the protesters hope to accomplish?  To get into the media — and in that they clearly succeeded.

But are the protesters speaking for the residents?  Perhaps not.

Some public housing residents repeated during the daylong debate that they welcome the plan to replace the decades-old structures with mixed-income, mixed-use development.

They should — mixed-income, mixed-use is what makes cities work.  Concentrating the very lowest incomes in isolated enclaves is what spawns urban riots.

Just out for a bit o’ fun, that’s all

I’ve had a variety of encounters with resident advocates and resident groups — some years ago, I and my company represented the residents in a complex preservation transaction in Braintree — and it’s made me cynical of some organizers.  Often the advocates have agendas very different from those of the residents in whose name they chant.  And when the protest is over, the advocates come home, somewhere else, and take up the next barricade.

Other residents and their advocates said they fear the plan will result in the loss of badly needed housing for the city’s low-income black residents.

The housing’s already been lost — it’s currently uninhabitable.

Most of the units HUD plans to demolish are vacant [And have been for 2¼ years -- Ed.], and many suffered heavy damage in Hurricane Katrina …

It’s economically irreparable, costing more to fix than it could be worth when fixed.

… but those who oppose their demolition say they should be improved instead.

With whose money?  And why is renovating a fifty-year-old structure better than building a new one?

The C. J. Peete complex, ready for reoccupancy?

From a real estate perspective, I can tell you — it isn’t.  Some properties have to go somewhere to die, and 2¼ years of moist emptiness after a hurricane is a death blow to those physical structures.

Critics of the plan say it will drive poor people from neighborhoods where they have lived for generations —

The storm already did that.

— but HUD denies that and says the plan will create an equal amount of affordable housing as existed before Katrina hit.

It would certainly be legitimate to question HUD’s credibility, given the moral bankruptcy of its Section 8 funding strategy, or the year-after-year starvation of public housing nationwide. 

Are you questioning my credibility?

The council promised to monitor the redevelopment and make sure the poor have places to come back to, but those assurances did little to assuage opponents.

“The vote was already a done deal,” the Rev. Marshall Truehill said. “There were no concessions.”

If by concessions, Councillor Truehill means delays and hearings, these have been extensive already.  

HUD had planned to begin demolition last weekend, but late last week agreed to allow the City Council to weigh in first.

Mayor Ray Nagin on Thursday brokered compromises with HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson on how the redevelopment plan will be carried out, allowing more oversight, opening some new units and redeveloping two of the complexes in phases. He said it will ensure “that our fundamental principle that every resident has the right to return to better housing will not be empty promises but words in action.”

HUD Secretary Jackson (third from left) and Mayor Ray Nagin (behind, right) opening 500 units of new housing in the Lower Ninth Ward

The vote itself was 7-0 — no one opposed demolition.

HUD officials said they hoped to be able to start demolition within weeks.

Critics, however, said the agreement amounted to minor changes.  Endesha Juakali, a protest leader arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace [and an attorney whose law license has been revoked -- Ed.], said Thursday’s confrontation with the council was not the last breath from protesters.

“For everything they do, we have to make them pay a political consequence,” Juakali said. He vowed that when the bulldozers try to demolish the St. Bernard complex, “it’s going to be an all- out effort.”

Then what, Mr. Juakali?  After you’ve made ‘them’ pay ‘a political consequence,’ where will the housing come from? 

For weeks, protesters have been gearing up to battle with bulldozers and have discussed a variety of tactics, including lying in front of the machinery.

How will lying down in front of bulldozers improve the housing? 

Attorneys handling lawsuits to stop the demolitions said they have not exhausted their legal options. One suit is challenging the bidding process for selecting the developers while another one contending the demolitions are illegal is on appeal in the federal courts.

The whole show has a fundamental un-seriousness about it. 

Let’s suppose for a moment that the Federal government is duplicitous, that it cares not a whit for the poor people, and that demolition is simply a pretext for dispersal.  Opposing demolition, and showing no interest in the promises of rebuilding, actually helps your opponents.  They don’t have to build anything new if they are spending time litigating their right to demolish the buildings.  Meanwhile, the residents whom the advocates claim to represent have no housing, and must fund for themselves.

It’s a shame.  The housing is mortally wounded and should be gone.  Energy expended in preventing it from being torn down simply delays the time when new housing may arise. 

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A couple of weeks back, so quietly you might have missed it [You certainly did! -- ed. I said it was quiet, didn't I? -- Ed.], the President took his (and therefore the Federal government’s) position on the rebuilding of New New Orleans. 

He punted.

“Put that problem in somebody else’s territory.”

He issued Executive Order 13389 — Creation of the Gulf Coast Recovery and Rebuilding Council, with the following stirring mandate:

Section 1. Policy.  It is the policy of the United States to provide effective, integrated, and fiscally responsible support from across the Federal Government to support State, local, and tribal governments, the private sector, and faith-based and other community humanitarian relief organizations in the recovery and rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region affected by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

“Apres vous, my dear Alphonse”

The Executive Order thus places the burden on state and local government to develop a reinvention plan.  Under ordinary circumstances, this would made perfect sense … but this is the Big Easy, and who is going to spend the money, New Orleans city government? 

Among the many daunting challenges New Orleans faces in its rebuilding is replacing its battered housing — but many homeowners may not return. (By James A. Finley — Associated Press)

Many are covering their eyes:

Billions of dollars in public and private funds are going to be spent on rebuilding New Orleans, but those efforts could be undermined by forces that have long beset the city — a tradition of corruption and dysfunction and a weak economy that clouded New Orleans’s future years before the rains began in August.

“Always broke. Worst school system in the state. Highest crime rate in the nation. Shrinking population. All the corporations have moved out,” said Bernie Pinsonat, a political analyst in Baton Rouge. “Any poll I do, the rest of Louisiana thinks, ‘New Orleans is a deep, dark hole, and no matter how much money we send, it doesn’t seem to get better.’ “

To give you some idea of how things worked in the Big Easy:

“We’ve seen every type of corruption imaginable,” said U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, whose office indicted 44 public officials in the past fiscal year alone. He pointed to skimming, bribery and shakedowns across a spectrum of government employment: judges, police, teachers, administrators and traffic court workers.

Nor is the state government regarded as any paragon of virtue:

In a recent Louisiana State University poll of 419 business executives, corruption was ranked among the worst aspects of doing business in Louisiana. Investors and managers elsewhere are reluctant to come “because they don’t want to pay the corruption tax,” said Rafael C. Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission.

The challenges ahead are huge, for the New New Orleans will be vastly different from the old:

A significant uncertainty is how large the city will be, and how many of its more than 450,000 residents will return, given an economic base that has been shrinking for years, especially since the oil and gas business migrated to Houston. The Port of New Orleans, for generations an economic engine, is so mechanized that it needs just 2,500 workers on an average day. New Orleans has one Fortune 500 company.

Analysts doubt that the largely unskilled workforce, even if it does come back, can sustain a prosperous modern economy. One in four adults has no high school diploma. The poverty rate in New Orleans is more than twice the national average, and the crime rate is among the nation’s worst.

The challenge is unprecedented, the complexity enormous, the need for urgency great, and the local administrative capacity indicted.  Markets and people are moving even if government is not, and the problems are piling up: a local utility gone bankrupt, housing prices skyrocketing as FEMA funding drives the market in what is likely a boom-and-bust cycle. 

The deferential “apres vous, Alphonse,” however administratively restrained and politically prudent, means the big decisions that have to be made first will not be made at all.

I am absolutely sure the Administration believes it is acting prudently.  Forcing a Federal czar onto Louisiana would not only invite infinite political scapegoating, it would also inhibit state and local authorities taking responsibility and making better decisions.  So the case can be made.  But in my bones I feel that while this worked brilliantly in New York City after 9-11, it will not work in the Big Easy, for several reasons:

• New York City had one site flattened.  New Orleans has had its entire infrastructure wiped out.
• New York City relocated only a few people, and not beyond reach of the subway.  New Orleans has been depopulated and the diaspora is returning slowly if at all.
• New York City was and is thriving.  New Orleans was on the wane.
• The part of New York damaged was the central business district, a place to which money flows first. The part of New Orleans most damaged was the worst, where money will flow last, if at all.

Even with all that, the Federal government stepped in early with the victims’ compensation fund:

Because of concerns that liability claims would clog the courts and create further economic harm, the federal government limited the liability of airlines, airports and certain government bodies. The government established the Victim Compensation Fund to make payments to families for the deaths and injuries of victims. In addition, the government funded a major economic revitalization program for New York City.

No analogous action, like condemning and compensating all of Under New Orleans, is taking place on the delta.

Should one adhere to a sound philosophy when there won’t be a second chance?  When the funds wasted may run into the billions, and the city’s future irretrievably compromised?

That’s using your head

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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%):

Of the 49 metropolitan areas with a Census 2000 population of 1 million or more … the highest jobless rates among the large areas were recorded in New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA, 14.8% ….

The largest over-the-year unemployment rate increase was reported by New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, La. (+10.6 percentage points).  No other large area had a rate increase greater than 0.9 percentage point.

Public housing in Old New Orleans … if you lived here, you and your home would both be gone by now

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, as demonstrated by this story in the Chicago Tribune:

NEW ORLEANS, November 3 — Every day throughout the French Quarter and downtown, the ranks of deeply tanned, Spanish-speaking men in soiled clothing grow and become more visible amid the ruin.

The work that has brought them here is neither glamorous nor high-paying:

Jose L. Garcia, right, and fellow workers originally from the Mexican state of Michoacan get $10 for every refrigerator they throw out.

Jose L. Garcia and five of his friends were camping recently under a live oak tree, sharing three tents, eating food from a church kitchen and bathing in a plastic garbage can.  The men live in Charlotte, N.C., but said most of them knew one other from the Mexican state of Michoacan.

Behind their pickup trucks were two large trailers, which the men use to transport debris to a dump. They get $10 for every reeking refrigerator they throw out, Mr. Garcia said, but they do not want to do that work anymore – it makes them smell too bad.

Even as the Latinos arrive, many Old New Orleanians will not return:

As more Latinos move into the region, a September survey found that most New Orleans evacuees in Houston, a large percentage of them black, didn’t plan to return.

The change is visible:

Louisiana has only a small Spanish-speaking population, which is concentrated in and around Kenner. New Orleans itself is 3.1% Hispanic, according to the latest census, and the state as a whole is just 2.4%, far less than the national average of 12.5%. Therefore many of the newcomers stand out.

The situation is new to Louisiana, which has little tradition of attracting large numbers of transient workers, unlike Florida and other booming areas, said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Economy.com. The stagnant economy here has not provided many job opportunities since 2001.

As a result, not only will New New Orleans be considerably smaller than Old New Orleans, it will be far more Hispanic and far less black:

The swelling numbers of Hispanic migrant laborers, legal or not, have raised political tensions. A Tulane University historian speaks of a possible “population swap” between the city’s evacuated black population and its new Latino workforce. 

The gap between job demand and housing supply is also defining who comes (those who do not mind living …) and who doesn’t:

The complaints also reflect the widespread frustration over the continuing lack of housing in the area.  Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, leaving their former residents adrift.  Businesses of all sorts are frantically advertising for workers, even as the jobless rate for Louisianans jumped to 11.5% in September, from 5.8% in August.

Who comes depends in part on who will live in what New New Orleans currently has available:

The camp, operated by a New York company called LVI Services, is not much to look at: a row of tractor-trailers crammed with bunks, a long line of portable toilets, a couple of RV’s and three tents with striped roofs. Gun-packing guards wear black T-shirts reading, “Police.”

It is a temporary home for hundreds of LVI’s workers, some of whom said they were in the United States illegally. They are commuting into New Orleans, swabbing the mold off walls, ripping the guts out of buildings, removing mountains of soggy debris.

In some places, the workers are creating spontaneous communities:

There are less formal living arrangements, too. On the west side of City Park, in the north part of New Orleans, campers are parked next to forklifts, tents have sprouted next to dump trucks and hammocks are slung next to front-end loaders. Judging by the license plates on the trucks, many of the inhabitants appear to be from nearby states.

Informal settlement, Seattle, Great Depression

They were named “Hoovervilles” in mockery of President Herbert Hoover

Why would people come from hundreds of miles around and then choose to live in minimally acceptable housing?

One man, a Honduran who said he was afraid to give his real name, said he wanted nothing more than to return to Houston, where he had lived for six months. But he did not have enough money after sending most of his last paycheck back to his family.

In a word, remittances.  When the family is in one place and the job another, the breadwinner goes where the job is and voluntarily chooses a dormitory-style minimal (or worse) accommodation.   Today remittances are among Mexico’s biggest sources of US foreign exchange.  As a result of this sudden demand for basic accommodations, nowheres become new towns:

In Kenner, just west of New Orleans, the City Council has passed an emergency ordinance to try to regulate workers’ trailers and tents that have mushroomed all over the city.

Does this mean a new ethnically different poverty will reconcentrate?  Possibly. 

Meanwhile, as the Federal government fails to grasp the opportunity to create a viable strategic plan, Mayor Ray Nagin continues to make asinine and irresponsible statements:

The backlash was fueled by New Orleans‘ African-American mayor, C. Ray Nagin, who recently uttered remarks deemed offensive by some.

“How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?” Nagin asked at an October forum with business people as he discussed the city’s future.

Way to throw out the Welcome Mat, mayor.

“Mexico’s that way, fellas.”

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

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