The New York Times published this editorial today:
We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.
We said this wouldn’t happen. President Bush said it wouldn’t happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, “There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans.” But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.
There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don’t believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.
At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president’s liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words “pending in Congress” are a death warrant requiring no signature.
The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.
The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year’s estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.
Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?
Losing a major American city.
“We’ll not just rebuild, we’ll build higher and better,” President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.
Of course, New Orleans’s local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.
The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.
Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.
If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.
Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.
So…
If you have been reading this blog for a while, and if you haven’t been to New Orleans since Katrina, you may find this op-ed piece surprising.
Mostly I write about the small steps forward that we’re making in our personal lives. But believe me, the concerns expressed in this editorial are all we talk about in New Orleans these days.
That, and what restaurants have re-opened.
I think we all have to start imagining a New Orleans not any better protected than it is now and if what we are seeing out our car windows today is something we will be able to stand seeing a year or more from now. It is hard for me to expect any real or effective assistance from this current administration. And also remember that Katrina was not the worse case scenario hurricane that everybody’s predicted for years and years. That being said, and although I was living most of my time out of New Orleans for the last couple of years, more and more I’m finding it hard to imagine living anywhere else. Although I have always wanted to figure out a way not to live in NO during the summer months.
I have tried to think along the lines of Jim.
“I think we all have to start imagining a New Orleans not any better protected than it is now”
There is something appealing about it — perhaps the romantic cowboy myth of accepting the facts and soldiering on to get the job done. But what happens is we run smack into the reality that urban spaces are not cowboy zones. No levees = no insurance. No levees = no mortgages. No levees = no small business capital investments. We live in an era of interconnected capital markets and if the large institutional lenders suspect they may loose their investments, they won’t put their capital on the line.
This is potentially good news though because the banks, the mortgage lenders, and the real estate brokers all want to invest here and they want their investments protected. A friend connected to the real estate biz recently attended meetings with some of the big national players in the mortgage market. These out-of-town folks said that the lobbying arm of the mortgage bankers association (don’t know the real name) has made funding of levees their number one priority. That is a national lobbying organization adding its voice to our individual voices.
Who would have thought I’d be on the same page with these folks and happy about a big lobbying effort.
Good points Geoff, I guess my thoughts are borne from the apparent lack of progress in my neighborhood and the also apparent lack of cohesive leadership at the state and local levels. But no, we shouldn’t settle for lesser protection, in the long run. I just think it may be a long while before we see the cohesion of leadership we need and a repopulation that will justify the big dollars we need. I think Landrieu and them kind of f’d up with their initial “just give us everything you got” approach.