Soul Survivor
How to revive the economy--and the heart--of the Crescent City
A utopian notion? University of California-Davis historian Ari Kelman, author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, thinks so. He is wary of what he calls "well-intentioned, pedigreed experts" who find the disaster a perfect opportunity for slum clearance. Kelman suspects that the displaced people would most likely be moved into soulless high-rise housing projects similar to the ones known as "the bricks," which have already proved to be an urban planning disaster. And he points out that while many of the mostly African-American people living in the vulnerable areas are poor, a goodly number still often own their own homes. "New Orleans," Kelman says, "is one of the few remaining major metropolitan centers where people can live even if they are beneath the poverty line."
Is that just sentimentalizing a barely livable ghetto existence? Some would say so. But historian S. Frederick Starr, a former vice president of Tulane University and still an owner of property in the Ninth Ward, says that it is precisely neighborhoods like those found in his and the Seventh wards that have historically provided the deeper character of the city, fostering its crucial social networks and nurturing the city's most valuable resource, its human capital.
That distinctive New Orleans character derives not just from the architectural aesthetic of the old neighborhoods' single and double shotguns (so called because if you opened all the doors of the four or five rooms that are lined up one behind the other, you could shoot a shotgun through the house without hitting anything). It also emerges from the way those double shotguns, typically occupied by the owner on one side and a renter on the other, bring together often quite disparate families, drawing newcomers into the extensive networks of the longtime residents. "Do you really want to get rid of this and build some plastic substitute version?" Starr asks.
The neighborhoods were also once (and to some degree still are) incubators of talented and ambitious individuals--craftsmen, artisans, artists, and professionals. Many were part of one of the most successful urban African-American communities in America. (To be sure, many of the most talented African-Americans--think Bryant Gumble and Andrew Young--now move elsewhere to make their mark.) Then, too, the most distinctive cultural form associated with New Orleans, jazz, was born in the shotguns, honky-tonks, and performance halls of these and other neighborhoods on both sides of the Mississippi River. Whether in music, literature, or the culinary arts, New Orleans acquired its considerable cultural capital precisely by being a city of profound ethnic and social diversity, a place where high-culture forms such as opera and symphony collided and subtly commingled with popular forms like the blues, where French haute cuisine merged with Africa-based soul foods. Eradicate the sites of those comminglings, Starr and others maintain, and you kill the deeper sources of a culture whose energies may now be dormant but could easily be recalled to life.
Whatever geographical, environmental, or planning justification is used, many urbanists argue that razing and transforming the old neighborhoods is not the solution to New Orleans's decline and may only aggravate it. The real challenge, apart from restoring and preserving the best qualities of old urban districts, is to do something about nurturing the city's crucial human capital. The way to do this is not to "preserve a chimera of the past, producing a touristic faux New Orleans, a Cajun Disneyland," writes urbanist Joel Kotkin in the Los Angeles Times. Instead, he argues, now is the time for the city to begin to move beyond its too-easy reliance on a tourism-based economy, which produces few high-wage or high-skill jobs, and to expand in areas where New Orleans could enjoy a comparative advantage. Following Houston's dynamic example, for instance, New Orleans could and should invest far more in its port facilities and in energy-related businesses, as well as such unglamorous infrastructure works as sanitation and freeways. And Kotkin is not alone in pointing to another field in which New Orleans should excel. At one point, "we had momentum toward becoming the healthcare center of the Caribbean," says Jindal. But while New Orleans had Tulane and LSU medical schools as well as Charity Hospital to drive this momentum, again it was Houston, with its Texas Medical Center, that came to reign as the region's dominant medical center. Still, as people like Jindal and former Sen. John Breaux suggest, it is not too late for New Orleans to play catch-up.
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