Oh no not the brand

This week the governor made the Convention Center available for use as a field hospital as the city continues to overflow with COVID patients. The plan is to ramp up capacity there to as many as 3,000 beds. The supplies necessary to accomplish this are still running short.  Supposedly this is a situation that should be made easier by the President's (rather late) disaster declaration but you never know what might happen if he doesn't feel adequately "appreciated."  Fortunately, he seems to think our governor is a "very good" boy. For now, anyway.

The board members, on the other hand, seem to have concerns.

For the Convention Center board, the idea brought back some bad memories from after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levee system, when the building was used as a shelter of last resort.

“We all see the convention center as the last resort,” Rodrigue said. “We know what it meant to try to come back from tragic images and what it meant for the brand of tourism in New Orleans after Katrina.”

How did "the brand" do after Katrina?  Fifteen years later, how was the tourism business doing in New Orleans?  Pretty well, right?  Too well, maybe.  Mardi Gras 2020 may seem centuries in the past right now but it was only a few weeks ago that the main topic in town was figuring out what went wrong with this year's celebration fraught as it was with tragedy and mishap.  Just as the virus panic was about to ramp up in New Orleans, The Lens published this Carnival retrospective by Jules Bentley. It's a shame the plague caused our attention to veer away so quickly because Jules's point, that over-tourism is killing us and our most cherished event, is something we should have had more time to talk about. This excerpt supplies the heart of his argument.

Mardi Gras brought New Orleans 700,000 visitors in 2006. It’s at least doubled since then. Multiple news organizations cite 1.4 million as the number of yearly Mardi Gras tourists these last few years, though it’s not clear to me where (or when) that figure originated. Since AirBnB hollowing out the city has made so many more tourist accommodations available, I’d expect the number has grown significantly past that.

The New Orleans tourism industry is thriving. It’s determined to keep attracting more tourists here; to succeed it must endlessly expand. Unfettered growth is the raison d’être of this powerful and heavily taxpayer-subsidized culture-extraction industry, the cause championed in its glossy promotional publications and schemed on in its secretive boards and colloquies.

Our city’s beautiful old streets are no wider than they ever were — certainly not to any degree commensurate with the growth of the masses filling them for Mardi Gras. As the yearly influx doubles and redoubles, the ancient, creaking infrastructure of New Orleans bows, groans and begins to give way.

Jamming 1.5 million humans into the same party space that struggled to accommodate half a million in 1970 is, put simply, unsafe. Like the workers killed in the Hard Rock Hotel, this year’s Carnival deaths can be viewed as not anomalous or exceptional but natural, built-in byproducts of an insatiable tourism industry that’s rendered our so-called city leaders handmaidens to its greed. The sloppy rush and corner-cutting on the deadly hotel was itself likely driven — though we’ll never know precisely to what proportion — by its profiteering developers’ declared desire to have it open by Carnival season.

Any so-called solutions that promise safer parade routes must admit and address this reality: New Orleans cannot physically accommodate our rate of tourist growth.

Prominent among those "secretive boards and colloquies" referred to above is the Convention Center leadership. While Jules is arguing that it is their brand in particular that is killing us, they are still resistant to helping save lives during the virus crisis because that might hurt the brand.

Board member Stephen Caputo asked it might be better for the Convention Center to put up some sort of incentive for hotels to take on the burden instead.

“This is our community and I think we’re all feeling it and want to help as much as we can,” Caputo said. “And I think we’re trying to temper that with our obligation to the center for its long term financial success, recognizing that if they show images of the Convention Center being turned into a hospital, it would hurt our brand.”

As the situation moves forward, it's important that we remember how this works.  We should be familiar enough having seen it before. The size of the recovery effort will be determined in Washington.  But the shape of our "recovery" is determined by decisions made by people like Rodrigue and Caputo as they carve out the shares. We already know what their priority will be.

We probably shouldn't allow people like that to choose what happens to the rest of us.  But there's little reason to be optimistic. Our track record isn't great, anyway.  On the other hand, maybe some of us have learned a few things from experience. 

The Convention Center has been discussed as a potential shelter during other hurricanes that have threatened New Orleans but Honoré said those discussions never went anywhere because of opposition from its board, a quasi-independent body. In the current crisis he said he believed the governor likely had to forge ahead over the board's opposition.

Convention Center officials and board members have declined repeated requests for comment about the possibility of using the facility as a field hospital.

“There’s an attitude with this convention center board that we will not use the convention center to save our own people and they can go to hell,” Honoré said.