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Politics : A Neutral Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (241)	9/19/2005 9:19:27 AM
From: Constant Reader	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2253

Welcome Geoff! Yes, Kholt was the first to mention that here and I agree it would be great - most of the historically significant areas were not flooded. Your point about the difficulties involved in saving wooden structures that were under water is well taken. US News & World Report contributor Michael Barone discussed some of the things you mentioned in his weblog last week. (You'll have to visit his weblog to see the embedded links): The future of New Orleans The incomparable Joel Garreau (most recent book: Radical Evolution) takes a look at the future of New Orleans in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post, and he begins by stating that "The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt." Garreau takes the same view that I did in a recent column but has much more in the way of facts and figures. He agrees with me that the tourist sections, which are on relatively high ground, will be rebuilt, along with the convention center and airport, and that the port facilities along 172 miles of the lower Mississippi will have to be rebuilt; indeed many are operating today. I wrote that the ports are not labor intensive; Garreau supplies the numbers: "The dazzling [Louisiana] Offshore Oil Port [on the Gulf of Mexico], for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel, and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos." New Orleans's central business district is stagnant, with about as much office space as Bethesda, Md., and a considerably higher vacancy rate. The suburbs, writes Garreau, will probably mostly be rebuilt. Not so vast swaths of the central city. Why not? "Sentiment, however, won't guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance–without which nothing can be rebuilt." Literary critics have always noted with wonder that the poet Wallace Stevens spent his whole working life working for an insurance company. Turns out insurance is important and probably pretty interesting too. As I pointed out, the economic value of residential and commercial land in high-crime areas (like so much of preflood New Orleans) falls toward zero. No one is going to insure a building on worthless land. New Orleans has one other problem that I failed to mention and Garreau points to. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone noted that Louisiana ranks No. 50 among states in measures of social connectedness. That is the quality that Alexis de Tocqueville found so common in America and that he found so uncommon in his native France, with its centralized government and discouragement of private voluntary associations. I have argued that the cultural folkways of New Orleans, reflecting its origins, are, uniquely in America, French. Garreau ends with a thought that echoes my own: "I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?" Here are a couple of articles suggesting that New Orleans–or at least much of it–should not be rebuilt. One is from geophysicist Klaus Jacob in the Washington Post. Another is from Slate's Jack Shafer.