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.
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.
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.
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.