Footprint

Stephanie Grace seems ambivalent about it here but she also gives Ray Nagin too much credit for a decision he didn't make.

2) Mayor Ray Nagin rejected the idea of shrinking the footprint.

After surveying the angry reaction to the green-dot map, the mayor declared that no area would be deemed unprotectable or unserviceable, and as few homes as possible labeled beyond repair — though, in his inimitable way, he said there were certain areas he’d advise against resettling. (He didn’t identify them.) The result is exactly what the advocates of aggressive land use policies had predicted: Some flooded neighborhoods have bounced back, while others are contending a pattern of spotty habitation known as the “jack-o-lantern effect.”

Another result of Nagin’s decision: over time, the conversation has shifted. There’s no real point debating the wisdom or fairness of piecemeal, property-by-property redevelopment, because it’s a done deal. Now, the city’s challenge is to manage the consequences, to properly target recovery resources and figure out how to pay for a sprawling infrastructure that supports a smaller population on a reduced tax base.

I don't like the way Grace characterizes the "done deal" as a choice between shrinking the footprint and "Jack-o-Lantern" effect. The choice that was never taken seriously or implemented was honestly rebuilding all affected neighborhoods at once. Instead, (some but not all) flooded areas of the city were asked to pick their poison from among demolition via bulldozer or demolition via neglect.

Keep in mind that Nagin was actually for shrinking the footprint before he was against it so we really have the green dot reaction to thank for at least rhetorically winning that argument. In truth, Nagin only deserves credit for caving to public pressure. But that's as far as it went. While nothing as brash as bulldozing entire neighborhoods ever became official public policy (although there was some talk at the time that it should) we ended up with a kind of shrinking by neglect of many of the green-dotted areas.

It's taken five years to even begin resolving the glaring health services problem in New Orleans East, for example. The East and the Ninth Ward have also suffered from lack of attention in infrastructure restoration as well as transportation services. All of which was occasionally justified with the shrug-shouldered argument that residents weren't returning to those area as quickly as they were to others. There's a sort of obvious chicken-or-egg question begged by this argument but even that isn't difficult to answer. The city was forcibly and totally depopulated by one external event beyond the control of its residents. Those residents deserve to return to the same services to which they were entitled prior to the event. Arguing that they suddenly don't deserve or need those services because they have been temporarily removed is patently unfair and hostile policy. I live in a house. My house is hit by a meteor. I need a house again. The fact that I'm not currently living in one does not refute that point. But this was the Nagin policy. As an alternative to actively shutting your neighborhood down, we will wait until you either prove yourself worthy of our help or blow away on your own. Jack-O-Lantern is a mark of laissez-faire policy, not the result of over-ambitious rebuilding.

Meanwhile, as we've seen this week, Road Home's inefficiency and overtly discriminatory practices have also restricted growth in the East and in the Lower Nine and prevented poorer citizens from rebuilding in all parts of the city. In this context, the Nagin laissez-faire approach to recovery essentially penalized homeowners and neighborhoods for having already been victimized by flooding and by Road Home. In fact, it was during this time that the city's most noticeably aggressive recovery project involved knocking down as many troubled properties as possible while shoveling the federal funds for this to friendly non-profits and contractors. It was sort of a big scandal at the time. Made all sorts of news.

But I kept wondering how it would have been any different from just bulldozing the green dots in the first place. Much of the consequences of that action we were most concerned about have, in fact, been realized. Five years later, New Orleans is a smaller economy more reliant than ever before on tourism and entertainment as its sole lifeblood. Its historic neighborhoods already gentrifying before the storm are becoming more so while the parts of town where the majority of the city's middle and working class people lived have had to struggle for the progress they've made. And so when we read that the city's population is "richer" but smaller this isn't exactly a cause for celebration.

And so now five years later we're starting the process over again. Mayor Landrieu recently released a list of recovery projects which, if implemented proplerly, could represent a first step in the right direction.

While not everything on the list is something worth getting excited about, one does find a number of public service, police and fire department buildings scheduled to be rebuilt. Which is interesting since, according to General Russell Honore, all that stuff has been done already.

But there is good news. Post-Katrina tax incentives have had a dramatic impact. The region has more hotels and restaurants than it had before the hurricane, and its major infrastructure -- sewer, water, public service buildings, police and fire departments, National Guard -- has new or rebuilt buildings. Federal money has transformed the schools in New Orleans, reorganizing them into charter schools, which are a far cry from pre-Katrina's dysfunctional schools operating in dilapidated buildings.

One thing that could hurt the rebuilding program this time around is the promotion of false "We Are OK enough" narratives favored by clueless boosters like Honore or, always the problem, marketing professionals worried about the city's image in the eyes of potential tourists. We've already seen the effects of this uncomfortable tension on efforts to ensure the safety of our seafood in the wake of the oil disaster. And the Landrieu people do appear susceptible to this sort of thing themselves quite often. But, if we are looking for reasons for optimism, we can at least be grateful that the fight to maintain the "footprint" is, in fact, a "done deal" conceptually. Time will tell whether or not it can be made so in reality.

Update: I started writing this post when I read Stephanie Grace's column on Sunday. But today's Grace column is just as relevant to it.

Former Mayor Ray Nagin may have cast himself as the face of the city’s post-K period. But due to circumstances beyond the new mayor’s control, plus a few directly under his control, Landrieu could wind up going down in history as New Orleans’ recovery mayor.
That’s partly because Nagin himself left so much undone, so many decisions either unmade or in desperate need of rethinking.