City Journal: Will New Orleans Recover?

[question everything]

Nicole Gelinas.

Will New Orleans Recover?

Weak and struggling before Katrina, the good-time city now teeters on the brink. | 31 August 2005

(snip)

But to anticipate what the city must go through now, after damming up its broken levees and pumping the floodwaters back into Lake Pontchartrain, is heartbreaking. No American city has ever gone through what New Orleans must go through: the complete (if temporary) flight of its most affluent and capable citizens, followed by social breakdown among those left behind, after which must come the total reconstruction of economic and physical infrastructure by a devastated populace.

(snip)

The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?

(snip)

New Orleans teems with crime, and the NOPD can’t keep order on a good day. Former commissioner Richard Pennington brought New Orleans’ crime rate down from its peak during the mid-1990s. But since Pennington’s departure, crime rates have soared, to ten times the national average. The NOPD might have hundreds of decent officers, but it has a well-deserved institutional image as corrupt, brutal, and incompetent.

How will New Orleans’ economy recover from Katrina? Apart from some pass-through oil infrastructure, the city’s economy is utterly dependent on tourism. After the city’s mainstay oil industry decamped to Texas nearly a generation ago, New Orleans didn’t do the difficult work of cutting crime, educating illiterate citizens, and attracting new industries to the city. New Orleans became merely a convention and tourism economy, selling itself to visitors to survive, and over time it has only increased its economic dependence on outsiders. The fateful error of that strategy will become clearer in the next few months.

Sure, the feds must provide cash and resources for relief and recovery—but it’s up to New Orleans, not the feds, to dig deep within itself to rebuild its economic and social infrastructure before the tourists ever will flock back to pump cash into the city’s economy. It will take a miracle. New Orleans has experienced a steady brain drain and fiscal drain for decades, as affluent corporations and individuals have fled, leaving behind a large population of people dependent on the government. Socially, New Orleans is one of America’s last helpless cities—just at the moment when it must do all it can to help itself survive.

(snip)

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_08_31_05ng.html

[damntexdem]

1. It could -- but not if the GOP stays in charge.

But, then, American reaction to the Bushista mismanagement of the entire affair might remedy that in 2006. Sorry, New Orleans, you'll have to wait it out another year -- had you not been in a red state in 2004, you would have been better off.

[daninthemoon]

2. Just like the affluent Hollywood homes that slide down hillsides

that anyone can see won't hold a house, the affluent homes in NO will be rebuilt by a combination of insurance and federal aide. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before NO drowned, but tht won't stop rebuilding for the wealthy, or many businesses. What is not clear however, is what is going to happen to those same people left at the convention center, and the stadium. There is not going to be a good solution for any of this. Best solution would have been fixing those levees beforehand, but this still would have happened sometime. The flood that is, not the lack of response.