Time to build

Mitch is right.

The only marginally cogent argument against this hospital project was its negative affect on people living in its footprint. That matter is now a fait accompli. I and others have been arguing that it always was anyway but, for a time, I could at least momentarily understand the point of view of people who were unable or unwilling to see past this issue to the next move. The trouble is, anyone with the slightest sense of how things work in this town, can't give these people the benefit of the doubt for long.

A key factor, if not the factor in New Orleans' decline relative to other American cities has been the smothering grip on progress exerted by its social and economic elites. Ever content to remain the richest club in a poor and shrinking city, New Orleans' socialites resist any and every effort to grow the economy. They dress this conservative agenda up as "preservation" but it's better described as ossification. What gets "preserved" are old buildings, staid pageantry, anything that might make easy packaging for a hotelier or a filmmaker to sell. This keeps the New Orleans brand out there and helps enlist the aid of your duller intellectuals and interloping Jazzfest fans who don't want their getaways to Culture Disney disrupted.

I hate to have to give this lecture over and over but, as the Mayor points out, on the few occasions when the preservation elite loses these fights, the city ends up winning big.

The project's naysayers offer a familiar refrain. There was opposition to the Superdome in the 1970s, the Convention Center in the 1980s and the Arena in the 1990s. The Dome was threatened with dozens of lawsuits and was called "the world's biggest pimple." The Arena was called a "gamble." But today those three visionary economic development projects provide this region with an annual economic impact upwards of $2.8 billion.

Quite simply, if done right, the UMC has the potential to be the largest, most catalytic economic development project in this city's history -- surpassing the Superdome and Convention Center -- and will place our city and state at the forefront of innovation and change in America.

We'll be watching the T-P idiot page this weekend for some smug asshole's rebuttal to Mitch's op-ed. Maybe David Simon will say something.