A Very Good Long Article About New Orleans by Peter Gosselin

Peter Gosselin writes:

On Their Own in Battered New Orleans - Los Angeles Times: What Bush said would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts ever is becoming a private affair, leaving the tough choices to residents as their risks increase. Laurie Vignaud faces a double dilemma: If she rebuilds her wrecked ranch house at 1249 Granada Drive in the great suburban expanse south of Lake Pontchartrain, will her neighbors do the same? And even if they do, will that guarantee their Gentilly neighborhood does not end up an isolated pocket in a diminished, post-Katrina New Orleans?

Nothing in Vignaud's 46 years, not even her job as affordable housing vice president with Hibernia Bank, the region's biggest financial institution, prepared her for this problem. From her relocated offices in Houston, she recently confessed, "It's scary. I don't know when I'll ever go home." Double dilemmas abound in this deeply damaged city, and represent considerably more than the start of the slog back from disaster. Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own. Lost is that New Orleans' recovery -- which President Bush once suggested would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts the world had ever seen -- is quickly becoming a private market affair.

"My constituents have pretty much concluded that it's up to us to put our neighborhood back together and get on with our lives," said Republican city council member Jay Batt, who represents the Lakeview neighborhood just west of Vignaud's. To market advocates, this is the way it should be. Rugged individuals settled the American West in the 19th century and can resettle the Crescent City in the 21st. But the risks that individual New Orleanians must shoulder in such an on-your-own recovery appear staggeringly large.

"There is no market solution to New Orleans," said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations. "It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations," Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. "If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don't, we won't. But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,'' he said, "seems impossible."

Comments

[Movie Guy]

What would you do if you owned a flooded out house in the New Orleans area? And you knew that it had to be torn down.

Would you rebuild? What about employment? Schools for the children? Grocery stores? Name it.

Seriously.

[NBarnes]

Don't be absurd, Brad. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as a collective action problem. Health Savings Accounts, hooooooo!

[monkyboy]

Schelling has been a hero of mine for a long time. Glad to see him win a Nobel Prize. Bush should put him in charge of N.O. reconstruction.

Today is Day 992 of the Iraq War. Only 8 days until Day 1000.

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[wkwillis]

One of the things I like about Junior is that instead of doing the obvious thing and rebuilding New Orleans with better levees, he is deliberately sabotaging the process. This is a good idea because in the age of cheap nukes, cities are a bad idea.
If cannon, not castles, if centrifuges, not cities.

[bakho]

Junior does not care about N.O. one way or the other. Junior made sure that N.O. relief money was directed to his corporate sponsors. Since his corporate sponsors have already pocketed the money, there is nothing left for NO. Bush has been notorious for bringing the political corruption that is usually confined to state and local levels to the national level. The prevailing ideology is greed.

[dilbert dogbert]

wkwillis,
thanks for that wonderfully upbeat comment.

[Jason]

Haven't the last 49 years of Federal urban intervention taught anyone anything?

That depends. Some of the cities the feds have built seem to doing just fine, thanks. Los Alamos, I'm looking at you. Besides the federal gov't doesn't necessarily have to build anything: it should be organizing (resources) and (assist in) planning the city and region so that reconstruction will be faster and the end result better (than previous). The gov't should play the proxy of *the people* in a case such as this, steering development in the public interest. It might also help to prime the pump of development via targetted loans or grants for mixed income housing, especially to attract potential residents that may be "priced out" of other new development. The nuts and bolt is better left to the private sector.

[bakho]

Lack of planning leads to urban sprawl and housing sited on problem locations. The pullout of the Feds has left many communities with inadequate supply of low income housing. Why are there so many homeless in the US?

This does not mean that the current effort by the Federal government is either competent or accountable, but it could be if administered properly.

[Davis X. Machina]

What happens when The Invisible Hand, gloved in latex, says 'Turn your head and cough'?

The good people of New Orleans will shortly have the answer.

[Bitter NYer]

My gut tells me that in order to recreate the "19th century" motivations, thereby allowing market forces to rebuild NO in the 21st century, we would have two choices. A. We could rebuild the levees up to modern "European" standards, that is, use the power of the federal government to help these people back into the 21st century, and then allow the market to take hold. B. We could allow the rest of America's cities devolve to 19th century status, by withholding federal support.

[Buce]

"What happens when The Invisible Hand, gloved in latex, says 'Turn your head and cough'?"

Look, I'll spot you the talking hand, but aren't you therapeutically confused here? I should think the hand you are talking (sic) about is the one that says "alright, spread 'em."

[walt]

a friend owns several B&B's in N.O. He's worried about tax increases in a city of few residents and huge municipal expenses.

Walt

[linnen]

@ Robert Cote,

Care to cite the locations where regulations caused the sprawl?
In the samples that I am aware of (DC-Beltway, Annapolis-Baltimore MD, and Rehobeth Beach DE) the regulations are in reaction to sprawl or in anticipation of sprawl.

[Slocum]

"Care to cite the locations where regulations caused the sprawl?"

Minimum lot size requirements in 'rural' areas surrounding cities are routinely cited as causes of sprawl.

[Jason]

Robert Cote: Wrong. Not something I stated. You need to take bakho to task there (good luck, I don't envy you).

Besides, how do you "mediate and stabilize planning" without having some nominal control? If you can't veto the very worst ideas, or specify in some general way what resources are needed, what's the point in even attempting to control the process? Also, I live in St. Louis, MO, and the sprawl here is terrible, and mainly a result of extremely cheap land away from the core, as opposed to regulations. Of course, the sprawl can actually be made *worse* by regulations that prevent infill development in the urban core, or by policies designed to "price out" all but the upper income types.

[a different chris]

>The places with the most sprawl have the most planning regulation.

Houston?

But yes, you wonder why people don't live in the upper half of their stores outside of the old urban cores?

Because you're not allowed to sleep where you work in many, many cases. Homes were separated from shops and both were separated from industrial areas starting about 50 years ago, maybe even before -- that was the thought process that went into Levittown.

There was a guy in Monroeville like in the 80s who got into a shitpot full of trouble because they found a carefully disguised bedroom in his office building. And I mean this was like a 5-story zillion square ft behemoth. I couldn't see why he wasn't allowed to sleep in his own goddam multi-million dollar building (although if he was your normal sleazy developer, I suspect it wasn't so much a crib as a place to take hos-- but still).

[Stafan]

That's exactly wrong. The places with the most sprawl have the most planning regulation. It is precisely planner meddling that induces all kinds of suboptimal land use decisions. We need to reorder the planning process to more resemble the way the Federal Reserve operates.

[bakho]

I guess it depends on who does the planning. In the Midwest, we get conservsion of old downtown hotels, schools and other buildings into apartments and lots of development with store under and living space upstairs. The trailer parks and other sprawl is mostly outside the zoned urban areas.

Developers left to their own devices will create an unliveable mess.