How to Save the Big Easy - Newsweek

[liberal N proud]

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek

<snip>
To survive, New Orleans must rewire its insouciance into seriousness. The city is at once enchanting and exasperating, romantic and fatalistic. Will the Big Easy learn to work hard enough to resurrect itself? Or is it, for all practical purposes, gone—a place on the map and not much more? History can make the argument either way.

The first week augurs ill. If House Speaker Dennis Hastert is saying now—with sympathy at its peak—that pumping billions of federal dollars into restoring a city below sea level "doesn't make sense," then aid from Washington will plummet in a few months when attention turns elsewhere. Some wealthier refugees are saying privately that they've all but given up on the place. The pictures of looting seemed to burst a psychic dam inside them. Invest in this? Pay more taxes for them? That's a recipe for white flight—overnight. On the other side are blacks—well over half the city's population—who are fed up with a power structure that could not keep them alive, much less house and educate them. Whites and blacks in New Orleans were swimming in a fetid swamp of racial tensions long before Katrina showed up.

The "before" is critical. Experts in urban recovery say that the most important factor in how a city fares is not the extent of the damage but the pre-existing trend lines. Chicago was mostly destroyed by fire in 1871 and San Francisco by earthquake and fire in 1906. But both cities had been on the way up beforehand. So while the rubble still smoldered, entrepreneurs were already getting loans to rebuild. Almost overnight, San Francisco constructed 8,000 barrackslike "refugee houses," with six to eight families in each. Within seven years it had recovered enough to host a world's fair.

<snip>
I have heard it already from Jimmy Reiss, the chairman of the New Orleans regional transportation authority and the head of the city's Business Council. Reiss, whose family came to New Orleans 150 years ago, has been brainstorming with a handful of business leaders to "use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic" that has crippled New Orleans. "We have the opportunity to build communities from scratch that don't just warehouse people." And because the historic French Quarter and Garden District have been looted but not obliterated, tourism can eventually revive. Eventually.

In the late 19th century, Camden, N.J., was a lovely, freewheeling river city. Walt Whitman lived there. To avoid Camden's fate, New Orleans will need not just the superhuman efforts of loyal locals, but the love of the nation it does so much to enliven. To save this city—or any city where people are hurting—requires rejecting the "glib ephemeralities" of heedless tax cuts and I-got-mine selfishness in favor of the sense of community and competence that all Americans deserve.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9190577/

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. We need to rebuild it better.. but we cannot let it become gentrified

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Save the Gulf:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=106&topic_id=22507&mesg_id=22507

Then save the nation!
http://timeforachange.bluelemur.com/electionreform.htm