Tearing down the Claiborne Expressway is not a magical means to reviving the neighborhoods it traverses. It won't bring back the dead and gone tree-lined North Claiborne of the mid 20th Century. More likely it will bring about something resembling the South Claiborne of today with its drive-thru fast food and strip malls of dollar stores on every corner.
Or maybe it will make a nice throughway for charter busloads of Jazzfest visitors taking their obligatory Treme Tour. (You laugh, but see it's already taking shape.) And, of course, making it harder to get across town can only further isolate the severely under-served neighborhoods to the east of the Industrial Canal but nobody cares about those people since they don't have near as many second line parades or famous artsy residents as we tend to get back in what the Hollywood fan boys have deemed "real New Orleans".
Planning nerds like to think they can solve fundamental social and economic problems by fiddling with the aesthetics of infrastructure. But all they're really doing is giving the political leadership an excuse to treat roads and buildings as a separate matter from the people those things are supposed to serve. And when that fails, the next step is removing those people since obviously they're what's making all these pretty places so unattractive to visitors. This doesn't take long to come up in the NOLA.com comments.
The Iberville Projects need tearing down, also. They are an eyesore too and they directly infect our biggest tourist attraction. Since tourism is our biggest industry, it makes no since to threaten it with the crime the projects produces.What the commenter doesn't say is that the most likely pretty piece of infrastructure to replace Iberville is also known to produce an awful lot of crime. But maybe that will be less infectious since it will be located so much further away from a major highway by then.
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