Soul Survivor
How to revive the economy--and the heart--of the Crescent City
Middle management. New Orleans has long relied on charm and local color to attract new citizens, but those qualities, particularly after the destruction of Katrina, will lose some of their luster. More important, drawing and holding a talented middle class requires quality social services and schools, both of which are deplorably deficient. But a city can't even begin to correct those problems without a more vibrant economy. "The government can't go out and make all the decisions," says Breaux, "but it can lay the groundwork through things like tax incentives. We have to make the city attractive to business, whether it's a local laundry or an energy company."
But can New Orleans even bring back all of its some 475,000 residents, who now constitute a vast nationwide diaspora? It has a good chance if it heeds the lessons of other recent disaster-struck cities, says Robert Olshansky, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois. And he says that the most pertinent example is the experience of Kobe, Japan, in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake that killed more than 6,300 residents and destroyed about 400,000 housing units. The most sobering lesson of Kobe is that the process of recovery will be long--up to 10 years--and that the first three years will very likely be hellish. But New Orleans will recover, Olshansky maintains, and could do so even more swiftly than Kobe did by profiting from one of that city's mistakes: "They found that they should have kept temporary communities closer to the old neighborhoods, with people living next to their old neighbors," he says. Proximity is essential to preserving the social networks, the strongest urban glue. Without it, Olshansky says, there will be no people to do the work when the businesses get up and going.
Almost as important is having a strong and locally run planning effort, particularly when it comes to managing the difficult trade-offs between doing things quickly and doing them well. Federal government can assist in this effort, Olshansky says, but it should not dominate. At the same time, he acknowledges, local governments in Louisiana and New Orleans, known for inertia if not outright corruption, may need the spotlight of national attention to keep them from reverting to their traditional ways.
Jindal puts its similarly: "We need to use the time when we are on the national stage to accomplish things that need to be accomplished." Indeed, despite Olshansky's confidence that New Orleans will come back, the example of another once-great port city, Alexandria, Egypt, which also stood near the mouth of a mighty river, should be sobering to those who doubt the importance of political will to the life of a city. From being the largest city of the Mediterranean basin in the two centuries before the common era and a center of learning during the Roman Empire, it was allowed by its later Arab and Ottoman rulers to decline into an insignificance--particularly in the 14th century, when indifferent governors permitted the city's canal to the Nile to silt up. Sic transit gloria, yes. But history suggests that leadership matters.
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