Soul Survivor
How to revive the economy--and the heart--of the Crescent City
Can America afford to forget the city that care forgot? House Speaker Dennis Hastert suggested as much in an unguarded moment soon after Katrina devastated New Orleans, questioning the economic wisdom of spending billions of tax dollars to rebuild a city that sits below sea level.
And while Hastert quickly amended his impolitic remarks, saying he meant only to express "sincere concern with how the city is rebuilt to ensure the future protection of its citizens," many others are echoing his original sentiment--without apologies or clarifications. "Politicians and others must not make hollow promises for a future, safe New Orleans," writes Columbia University geophysicist Klaus Jacob in the Washington Post . "Ten feet below sea level and sinking is not safe. It is time to constructively deconstruct, not destructively reconstruct." Pointing to the city's poverty, high crime rates, and abysmal school system, Slate 's Jack Shafer charges that it is folly to bring large swaths of a failed city back to life. Moreover, he asserts, "unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years--an unlikely to absurd proposition--the place won't be rebuilt."
New Orleans will be rebuilt, of course. There's political reality to consider, not to mention the city's role as a major port located near the mouth of the nation's most extensive waterway. And as former Rep. Bob Livingston tells U.S. News , if vulnerability to disasters determined the fate of American cities, "you could apply that logic to cities in the tornado belt or to New York's being a target for terrorism."
Still, if talk about New Orleans's demise is a matter of rhetorical overkill, the more realistic questions of how, and how much of, the city will be rebuilt are by no means simple to answer. Restoring New Orleans--its soul as well as its infrastructure, its culture as well its economy--will involve far more than raising levees and restoring wetlands, costly as those projects alone will be (story, Page 50). And it will certainly require far more than cleaning up its relatively undamaged French Quarter or Garden District so that tourists can return to revel on Bourbon Street, dine at Galatoire's, sip chicory-flavored coffee off Jackson Square, or ride a streetcar named Desire.
"No silver lining." There is little debate that New Orleans was in decline even before Katrina's winds sent high waters raging through its streets--a decline made worse by the city's traditional deficit in responsible and effective governance. Yet it is also true that the city possesses incalculable geographical, cultural, and human assets that could provide the basis of a major urban recovery. Political will--local, state, and national--is the crucial factor in determining whether those assets will be effectively exploited. "There is no silver lining in a disaster like this," says Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district includes New Orleans. "But seldom has a major American city had such an opportunity. We have a challenge to do things right."
Doing right at the level of physical rebuilding is itself no small challenge. The lowest-lying and therefore most flood-prone areas of the city, including the lower Ninth and the Seventh wards, are also home to many of the 27 percent of New Orleanians who live under the poverty line. Some planners would like to see these neighborhoods returned to nature. "We need to use some of these lower areas as flood retention areas, as places to collect the hazards," says Louisiana State University geographer Craig Colten, author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature. Colten, however, does not call for forcibly evicting neighborhood residents. He would like to see government provide incentives and education so that the citizens in question would move of their own accord.
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