Rebuild New Orleans
By Callimachus | Related entries in Hurricane KatrinaJack Shafer makes a case for not rebuilding New Orleans:
The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it’s a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. … New Orleans’ public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as “Academically Unacceptable” and another 26 percent are under “Academic Warning.” About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.
And according to an AP poll today, 54 percent of Americans agree with him that the parts of the city that flooded should be abandoned. The statistics are unarguable, of course. Which is exactly why I say, “rebuild it.” Right there. Not the same, but better.
Not for the sake of New Orleans’ cultural treasures. As Shafer points out, those will endure. The city could survive as an enclave for the very rich and tourists, much as Venice has. But I wish to see the whole city of half a million brought back to life precisely for the sake of curing the failures Shafer lists above. Because the calamity America keeps revisiting is not a hurricane or an earthquake or a financial collapse or a terrorist attack. It’s poverty in a land of affluence.
That is our first and enduring national agon. We are a land of people striving for material success, and there will always be losers in that game. At the same time, we are a people of deep spiritual sensbility, and our faiths forbid us to leave the poor to suffer.
Frankly, we have never really worked out that balance. Poverty, increasingly for the last 100 years in America, has been urban, poorly educated, and black. As Shafer notes, almost nowhere did those downhill tracks converge more pitiably than in the run-down parishes of New Orleans.
It is time to rise up and be the Americans again, the people we tell ourselves we are in the national stories we treasure. The people Whitman and Sandburg told us we were. The ones who can stare down devils and build shining cities out of waste and wilderness. Time to finish the job. Perhaps this generation can find greatness after all.
Europeans have another view of us, that they mutter to one another: “You can count on America to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” There’s bitter truth in that, too. We tried to order race relations with slavery and black codes. We tried to break down barriers with with Reconstruction and the Great Society. Jefferson tried and Lincoln tried and Truman tried.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: “chaos or community.” What have we done since then? We’ve been stalled on the edge of the Civil Rights dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. The economic advance of blacks in the last three decades has been real and measurable, but it’s painfully slow, and frankly very few in America are getting ahead as fast as we did in the 1950s and ’60s. Too many black folks are left behind, in places like New Orleans. Furthermore, too much of black popular culture (nurtured by all races) rejects conventional success, celebrates thuggery, and suggests whites are responsible for all black problems. About half of whites tell pollsters “blacks could do better if they tried harder.” What would King make of our fetish for “diversity” and “multiculturalism”? He dreamed of integration of hearts and minds as well as bodies.
The cataclysm in New Orleans brought it all in focus. The failure of the governments at every level left the people to shift for themselves. Those with means got out. Those without often sat and waited for someone with power to help them.
Rebuild it. It will be messy, unglamorous. Give the people of the city the tools to do the job, but don’t do the work for them — let them decide how and where to build. Keep the bureaucrats at a distance. Find real leaders, the Giulianis and Honores, in the situation and let them take the lead. Involve everyone. Build out the old flaws, build in new and better patterns of living. So the people who move back there know this is their place, made and owned by them.
And while you build a new city, build something else, too. The Civil Rights Movement tore down the old Jim Crow South. When you’ve torn down something decrepit and dangerous, you’ve only done half the job. You have to replace it with something better.
Government can’t pass laws to force people to sit down and get along. The people must do that, one by one, as individuals, not as demographic blocs, not as census statistical brackets. They go to school together and they work together and they meet in public places and hash out respect for one another amid their differences. It happens on the level of a neighborhood — the 5,000 or so people who live within walking distance of some public swimming pool or library.
To not build — to fail to build — again the city left us as a legacy of two centuries would be worse than letting the World Trade Center blocks stand an empty hole. To fail to build again in Manhattan would teach our enemies to think we were beaten, whether we are or not. To abandon the city of New Orleans would teach our children it’s not worth it. America’s not worth it. Not there, not anywhere.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 and is filed under Hurricane Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 9th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
There’s a practical reason not to rebuild parts of not just New Orleans but the entire metropolitan area. Namely, many of these places are former wetlands. They’re areas that are meant to be flooded, and trying to prevent water from going there just means that the water is going to flood elsewhere. It’s not necessarily wise to regard every flooded piece of land as a place that needs to be drained and built upon.
So yes, rebuild New Orleans, but rebuild it wisely. Don’t regard every empty patch of land as a construction opportunity.
September 9th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
This is whimsy, but the ancients would have simply torn down the old city, heaped it up, and built a new citadel on top of the pile. That’s how Troy got to be a mound.
September 10th, 2005 at 2:26 am
Jeez…with each post you teach me something new Cal, I swear.
Personally, I’m torn on this issue. I agree that we should rebuild, but the question is obviously, “How?”
Right now we have an opportunity to create a new city ABOVE the flood plain that will be much safer against natural disasters. Some wish to never build in those places again. I think we should simply fill in the land and build on top of it.
Whatever may come to pass, I’m sure the whimsy will be considered and I hope that’s the prevailing wisdom. It doesn’t make much sense to replicate a situation where people will get everything wiped out.
However, I come from a place where my family has been flooded several times and the city finally widen the river to accomodate the reality of the situation. There seems to me to be some sort of compromise in this situation and the “mound” you speak of could be accomplished with enough money and enough time.
Will it happen? I have no idea, but I hope that we can recapture the spirit of this city without completely reshaping and relocating it.
September 10th, 2005 at 8:07 am
“The city could survive as an enclave for the very rich and tourists, much as Venice has. ”
New Orleans, the new Venice…..Nuff Said.
September 12th, 2005 at 10:15 am
[Katrina's aftermath] is our first and enduring national agon. [sic] We are a land of people striving for material success, and there will always be losers in that game. At the same time, we are a people of deep spiritual sensbility, and our faiths forbid us to leave the poor to suffer.
By the same token, faith combined with common sense forbids us from setting people up to suffer in the first place, which is exactly what we would be doing by rebuilding New Orleans on its current site, below sea level in a frequent path of hurricanes and sandwiched between the sea, a major river and a huge lake. No matter what precautions or preventive measures are taken, or how well New Orleans breaks from its socially dysfunctional past, it’s only a matter of time before the “soup bowl” where New Orleans now sits ends up under water again, and again, and again.
And Jack Shafer’s not the only one making a case against rebuilding at the current site. This page on the Porkopolis blog not only makes the same case, but links to several other bloggers who also advocate moving the city, if not disbanding it outright. The author makes a great point that has received short shrift in the debate over rebuilding New Orleans:
To put it another way: Are we Americans, including those of us who are also Louisianans or New Orleanians, really willing to risk someday putting any of our children, grandchildren or descendants through the same kind of hell that the people of New Orleans are going through now? Are we really willing to sink billions of dollars into rebuilding the city each and every time it floods? We have to think about these questions now, before we make not only a bad decision, but a historical precedent to make the same bad decision over and over again in the future.
September 12th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
“Agon” is not a typo. It’s a word. Look it up.
September 12th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
I’d ask, then, if it would be even more ethical to abandon Los Angeles and San Francisco right now, because we know with statistical certainty that at some date they will suffer enormous earthquake damage.
February 10th, 2006 at 11:10 am
People who appear to be perfectly rational question whether New Orleans should be rebuilt after the devastating failure of its infrastructure to stand up to two catastrophic storms in one month. That is not a rational response to the desperate plight of New Orleans residents.
Here in Oregon we sit astride the mother of all subduction zone faults. We’re downstream from millions of gallons of radioactive material that’s moving at groundwater speed into the Columbia River. Downhill from Mount St Helens, an erupting volcano, we mistakenly feel safe in our little bastion. In my hometown; Portland, Oregon, if the mountain had been pointing our way when the big one blew in 1980 hundreds of thousands of Portland residents could have been in the same sorry shape as the hundreds of thousands of wandering New Orleanians: waiting in some god-awful motel in Fresno or Pocatello to hear if our fellow Americans would care enough about our corner of our nation to come dig us out. The essence of our pact with our fellow Americans is this: “We’ll dig you out”.
Levees, drainage and storm water engineering are all issues that can be dealt with. Focus on the people. The solutions to these issues need to be created for the people of New Orleans, wherever they are scattered and wherever they will reside in the future