CULTURE CLUB: A Chance to Change Course

Urban redesign in the Big Easy

Chuck Twardy

Stop me if you've heard this one: Where does George Bush stand on Roe vs. Wade?


He says it really doesn't matter how all those poor people get out of New Orleans.


But seriously, folks. The Hurricane Katrina fiasco has exposed the twin ills of this administration—its contempt for government as anything more than a pasture for fund-raising cronies and its staggering, arrogant incompetence, already well-showcased in Iraq.


Still, fairness requires that blame spread to other quarters. Those darned environmentalists, back in the late 1970s, got a court to halt a sea-barrier project that might have stemmed the flood. Of course, a more recent project to bolster the Lake Ponchartrain levees, likewise devised by the Corps of Engineers, was blunted by Bush budget cuts, and it took the president two days to notice that something was amiss in the Crescent City.


But again, let's be square; this was a catastrophe that might have stymied any government. As George Will notes in column run by the Sun, Louisiana's federal lawmakers saw no problem in packing pork into the recent transportation bill—"$540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee." Well, they weren't alone, but it might be argued that they should have fought more assiduously to keep the levee funding flowing. So some blame lands in their corner. How's that for being equitable?


In a sense, though, we all share responsibility for a cultural and an urban-design failing going back a half-century. In 1956, Congress set up the funding mechanism for what became the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, a crucial element in modern urban development. The Interstate system certainly aided commerce, but it also whisked people away from inner cities to the suburbs. Once there, they found that government at all levels had rigged things in their favor. The Federal Housing Administration, through which the government insures home loans, was a New Deal invention intended to create construction work, but its rules abetted the building of new houses in the suburbs. Tax law allowed the deduction of mortgage interest, and most mortgage lending, FHA-insured or not, went joyriding in the countryside.


All of this nursed American individualism into a pathology, of sorts. The wealthy and bourgeois sealed themselves in their large houses, reached by their large cars, and left behind a forgotten underclass with no jobs in crumbling, neglected inner cities. And so it apparently never occurred to anyone that some people would not be able to evacuate New Orleans, or that stuck there, or packed into the Superdome, they would fall prey to criminals.


Will excoriates liberals for suddenly noticing the poor in Katrina's wake, and to some extent he has a point. We're all responsible for the modern city. He goes on, though, to note, "indelicately," the high birth rate among unmarried women in Louisiana, another sort of pathology that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about in the 1960s. African-American leaders have taken up this crusade, too. But Will conveniently ignores why this pathology exists and what to do about it.


Well, what should we do? The president vows that the federal government will fund the rebuilding of New Orleans. But, as Paul Krugman observes in The New York Times, neither the history of corruption in Louisiana nor the administration record in "rebuilding" Iraq bodes well. Conservative think tanks hover over the inundated city, eager to test more free-market (read: crony) theories in a new lab.


New Orleans already had cast its fate to Richard Florida's "creative class" ideal—a variant of what many cities have tried ad nauseum in recent years, pumping themed entertainment and renovated lofts into moribund downtowns. In essence, this is stealing a page from the Las Vegas playbook, which even Las Vegas has been trying to do.


But making New Orleans a Venice-like museum of itself will not do. As urban theorist Joel Kotkin observed a few weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times, "New Orleans should take its destruction as an opportunity to change course ... Instead of trying to refashion what wasn't working, New Orleans should craft a future for itself as a better, more progressive metropolis." Kotkin emphasizes attention to detail, especially infrastructure, and clearly this is crucial.


More important, though, before it starts doling out federal dollars to slavering developers, the city should convene a broad-based task force to imagine a model 21st-century city. Perhaps instead of square miles of dense hopelessness, it can create dense pockets of mixed-use neighborhoods, encourage manufacturing and high-tech industries to infill other spots, and let nature reclaim other areas.


Katrina incarnated an incipient environmental nightmare, and it might be that large swaths of city will be useless. Many who left will never return.


But an opportunity in responsible city-building remains, if anyone cares to notice.



Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.

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