New Orleans Leading Export, The Smackdown
A Bollinger Dry Dock in New Orleans on the Mississippi River by Jeffery Putman.
It has been a long time since the inaugural Recovery Planning Smackdown. Then smackdowns became the norm. Today was a glorious day in New Orleans smackdown history. The new Inspector General, Robert Cerasoli, has received the blessing of the City Council for $3.2 million to fund his brand new office. Whether or not he receives the money will be the subject of future smackdowns.
But, I mention smackdowns because we are now nationally known for them. From New Orleans Smackdown, Portland Style.
Beck’s musings did not sit well with local writer and sometime WW contributor Kevin Allman, a recent transplant from New Orleans. “I’ve read a lot of ignorant writing about New Orleans post-Katrina, but this one takes the doberge cake,” Allman blogged today
So who’s right? Dunno. But the disagreement is more entertaining than endless blog natterings about whether Steve Novick or Jeff Merkley is the truer Democrat. And a doberge cake also sounds like something worth importing from the Crescent City.
Doberge Cakes and smackdowns.
New Orleans Blogger in Exile
The response of Portland local Kevin Allman was on key with the our own local writers. From “Why should we bother rebuilding New Orleans?”
If a major metro daily, two years after the failure of the federal levees, can be mulling over the fate of Americans who have been busting their collective ass to save themselves as if their survival is some abstract problem, if a major metro daily can write a couple thousand words about “fixing” New Orleans without once mentioning the root cause, the failure of the federal levees, then I have to say: there’s not even room for dialogue here.
There are only a few points in the couple thousand words that do not sound like boilerplate New Orleans observations. You know, second-lines, poverty, race, architecture and all that. That’s wehre the author Chris Beck deigns to give us some advice; tear up one mile of I-10 and make building a riverfront park a priority.
Allman jumps on it like one of our own, in a delightful response. Please read “Why should we bother rebuilding New Orleans?”
The Boy in the Bywater Bubble
Chris Beck has a myopic view of New Orleans. A Marigny-Bywater tourist. It’s like Casablanca for him. There’s a war going on out there, but we’re at Rick’s singing As Time Goes By knowing full well that the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
He’s the sort that gives preservation a bad name. He truly cares more about the houses than the families within them. He is one of those visionaries who wants to take the “opportunity” to “shrink the footprint” of New Orleans. The summer of 2006 was spent in endless planning processes where people abandoned by their insurance companies and their government where tormented with the task of proving the viability of their neighborhoods. The discussions that took place at the Community Congresses made my skin crawl. Wouldn’t you rather swap your Lower 9th Ward home for a condo in the Warehouse district?
At the heart of it is this urban planning notion of Shangra-La is a magical New Orleans cleansed by the waters of Katrina. A New Orleans without crime and without poverty. All the pretty buildings survive but none of the suburban style development like Lakeview, Gentilly or East New Orleans. If we could bulldoze those houses, they’re owners would have to come and live by the river in historic homes in the Treme that they’d have to restore. We’d be a city of Bob Villas.
Or perhaps, a childless young city living in the new riverfront developments.
I love New Orleans’ historic architecture. I also love that New Orleans is just as New Orleanian in neighborhoods composed of ranch houses as as it is in those composed of double shotguns. It’s not the architecture that makes New Orleans a great city, it is the people.
Chris Beck’s couple thousand words are an echo from a delusional summer of planning. Few that raised the specter of the shrunken footprint bother to make those arguments today. In New Orleans the issues of recovery are levees, pumps, the Road Home and NORA. We’re not worried about the jogging paths for the Bywater tourists just yet.
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Whether or not we discuss the cause of the flooding (federal neglect/incompetence, obviously enough), it is a simple and obvious fact that we cannot rebuild every property in the city simultaneously. Some areas will come back quicker than others, and some may not come back at all.
At their myopic worst, the urban-planning dreamers ~ especially those who don’t live here ~ have a very easy time designating which neighborhoods are worth rebuilding and which are not.
They need to realize that each lot on each city block belongs to a PERSON (or a family, or even in some cases, I suppose, to a corporation). And they also need to realize that the only rebuilding going on around here is being done by those individual property owners who are able to help themselves. God knows the government, on every level, is not much help, and in fact is often a hindrance to progress.
Like it or not, planned-for or not, progress across the city is geographically piecemeal. Some neighborhoods weren’t flooded at all, others were devasted; some flooded-out areas are being rebuilt at a moderately rapid rate, others are not.
It’s interesting how an area’s average income and social status is impacting the process. Areas of greatest poverty, predictably enough, are having trouble coming back, but the converse ~ which one might expect ~ is not the case at all. Seems like folks flooded out of the most affluent neighborhoods are much less committed to returning than are those in areas of more modest means.
Look at Lakeview, where there are entire city blocks with only one or two houses still standing. Part of the explanation is that homeowners in this highly affluent area can afford to demolish and rebuild bigger and better (”McMansions,” if you really think that’s something “better”). But these are also people in a position to bail out, move away, and take their chances on whether they lose or gain a few bucks selling their gutted houses or empty lots.
Homeowners in more modest areas are more likely to feel attached to their little pieces of New Orleans as “all they’ve got,” and to think of their property simply as “home,” and not ever as “an investment.”
Those New Orleanians committed to staying in the city, whether rich, poor, or in-between, whether native or “Orleanian by choice,” are the only ones who are determining what gets rebuilt and where. All the writing and “blogging” anyone can do, here or elsewhere, can’t change that basic fact.
[...] Ah, condos by the river. Part of the childless Starbucks dystopia envisioned upon by the New Urbanists and Pacific Northwesterners. I can see it now. Seniors night at the Holwin’ Wolf, show your AARP card and get half off your slippery nipple. [...]
[...] Ah, condos by the river. Part of the childless Starbucks dystopia envisioned upon by the New Urbanists and Pacific Northwesterners. I can see it now. Seniors night at the Holwin’ Wolf, show your AARP card and get half off your slippery nipple. [...]
[...] fatigue, or merely a weekend urban planner who doling out the hackneyed perspective that the destruction of post-war New Orleans is a golden opportunity to experiment with bulldozers and [...]