The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau

There Is A New House In New Orleans

by West Virginia Rebel

Government incompetence may actually be a motivator.

In one crucial way, New Orleans’s modern history of weak, ineffectual government helped it recover after Katrina. Though the BNOB luminaries drew up their plan swiftly, nobody had the political will, knowledge, or resources to enforce it. Property owners could show what they thought of the plan—and of various other utopian schemes bandied about by the nation’s architectural giants—by ignoring them.

This approach—or better, lack of one—differs markedly from the reaction to the nation’s other recent large-scale disaster, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In New York, the state government, which had a long history of centrally planning huge projects, quickly monopolized control over rebuilding. Ground Zero, unfortunately, seemed the perfect opportunity for such a project. After all, the World Trade Center had been built as a government scheme 30 years before the attacks, and the towers’ single leaseholder, real-estate investor Larry Silverstein, sweated under immense political pressure to cooperate with the government in its ambitious reconstruction plans. Six and a half years later, Ground Zero is still an early-stage construction site. Worse, what’s eventually built there could be a white elephant.

In New Orleans, by contrast, though the city and feds can still screw up the sites that they control, including now-vacant housing projects, they can’t define the whole reconstruction process. Enterprising homeowners can experiment with what works, rather than being stuck with some starchitect’s vision for the next century. And it will be fascinating, in a decade or so, to see if one or another approach has fared better than the others: Mouton’s enticing new homeowners to bad neighborhoods on higher ground and hoping that others follow; Habitat’s adding entire blocks to a working-class neighborhood; or Pitt’s luring evacuated low-income homeowners back to one of the hardest-hit and least-rebuilt parts of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Disasters, natural and otherwise, can be great teachers. They can show how unecessary government bureaucracy can be.

Comments

Posted by Hal_10000 on 05/21/08 at 04:54 PM from

I was about to post this.  Sometimes, destroying the structure of government is the way to rebuild it to something more effective.

Posted by Ed Kline on 05/21/08 at 08:03 PM from

Pitt’s luring evacuated low-income homeowners back to one of the hardest-hit and least-rebuilt parts of the Lower Ninth Ward.

I know Pitt means well, but doesnt this actually mean someting along the lines of ‘ Getting those poor people back in the ghetto’.

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