They're trying to shrink us away

What I don't like about these stories is that they continue pushing the wrong-headed idea that we'll somehow recover our city by dismantling it.

"Shrinking" the city may work fine for certain segments of the community with an interest in maintaining their larger share of the small pond. It's good news for the old-line Carnival Krewe types who don't depend on a growing economy or well-funded and maintained city services to get around town or to educate their children. It's an easy sell to the corrupt, disinterested political leadership who can make as much money privatizing city government or demolishing buildings as they can building anything. (In our post-disaster context, there's more profit in this than ever before... just ask the mayor) And, of course, it's a "sensible" no-brainer for Yuppie Left types who mistakenly believe that a smaller city is automatically a safer and less corrupt city.

But what this really amounts to is a scaling back of the number and quality of opportunities and support systems for the majority of the city's working poor population. All of this comes in the wake of catastrophe... on the cusp of economic collapse... a time when one would think abandoning people would make the least sense economically or morally. But as we said last week, it's what we do in this town. We hate ourselves, our city and its people, so we might as well just tear the whole thing down, right?

Update: Eli says,

I don't think there's a single person in Orleans Parish advocating for the kind of cul-de-sac, big box, chain restaurant, subdivision, unregulated expansion that the article's dichotomy seems to imply. Rather, I think everyone recognizes the need to regulate how development happens in Orleans Parish moving forward. The problem here is that certain planners like Steven Bingler continue to push for a shrunken footprint, the closure of whole swaths of the city, and the enshrined displacement of Katrina victims. While this is a morally perilous approach, it is also not feasible now, not after tens of thousands of residents returned to the very neighborhoods typically circled for closure. Bingler and the larger planner cabal that brought us the failed BNOB plan continue to cling to that divisive recovery model and continue to poison ongoing efforts to craft a consensus master plan that provides for both sustainability and Parish-wide recovery. It is an illusion to think that nobody will have to sacrifice anything - there's going to need to be green space - but to suggest that 'smart decline' is the right model for New Orleans is counterproductive and wrongheaded.

The problem is, you're never going to have a proper managed recovery that honestly "provides for both sustainability and Parish-wide recovery". What you have, instead, is the same thing you always have in politics. Interested parties wrestle with one another for control of the circumstances. In my view, there is no such thing as a viable "consensus master plan". Whatever you get is bound to be "poisoned" from somebody's point of view. In our case, it's the developers who poison things for the city's poorer residents. It's one of the several reasons I'm concerned about the recent decision to give the forthcoming master plan the force of law.