New Orleans, one year later
It has been one year since much of New Orleans was destroyed, and initially defiant cries of survival and rebuilding have been replaced by an eerie silence. Mile after mile of urban abandonment stretches across much of the city and the Gulf Coast, a magnitude of devastation impossible to fully capture on camera. Block after block of decaying homes lie dark and vacant, their doors creaking in the wind.
It’s really something unimaginable, a microcosm of what the remains of our civilization might look like should we ever be struck collectively dead by some virus or manmade catastrophe.
Ever since Katrina I’ve always believed that plans to rebuild this city were foolish. You can’t just plop down roads, houses, schools, police stations and firehouses and expect people to move in like some kind of “SimCity” simulation. Building a living, breathing city takes time and the creation of a virtuous economic cycle: jobs bring people, which bring more jobs, which bring more people, and so on. The economy of this city has been destroyed, with more than a third of its jobs eliminated. Economically there is nothing to bring people back.
What reason do people have to uproot whatever lives they may have built elsewhere and come back to New Orleans? Who would want to move back into an empty block, being the only person there surrounded by ghostly houses, with no shopping centers, supermarkets, or other amenities nearby?
Why should we spend federal money building things that nobody may use, in an area that cannot be guaranteed to flood again if hit by another Katrina-type hurricane?
The answers are becoming painfully obvious one year later. It is highly unlikely that New Orleans or the nearby Gulf Coast will return to their former glory anytime soon, and it is far more likely that vast areas will remain abandoned. Rebuilding should be focused in and near the areas that were more minimally affected and which still contain populations. If the remainder is to come back at all it will do so organically, over time, in the way all cities and populations have grown.
The truth is sad and marks yet another decline of the American Empire, but it is what it is.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: gulf-coast, katrina, new-orleans
Tragically, this is one of the problems where the president’s power of the bully pulpit has been urgently needed and shamefully absent. After a lot of what appears to be empty talk about making New Orleans, and the whole Gulf Coast, whole and safe again, we get attention to the matter only now that the political season is ramping up and the Republicans find their fortunes waning.
And still we have no credible response to the one dire lesson learned the hard way from the aftermath of Katrina. No answer to the simple question, “If the Bush administration, elected on a promise to protect the homeland, could not meet the challenge of responding to a hurricane that gave the nation days of advance warning and a clear understanding of the impending harm, how could they possibly be expected to protect us from the threat of terrorists who will give us no warning at all?”