The city we were

I'm trying to pin down the actual complaint in this Lens story about recovery spending.

In August, when Mayor Landrieu announced his plan for spending New Orleans’ hard-won recovery dollars he warned a famously tradition-bound city that the time had come for change. “It’s especially important that we stop thinking about rebuilding the city we were and start creating the city we want to become,” he said, echoing his inaugural address.

A review of how the Landrieu administration is spending the city’s $411 million pot of discretionary recovery dollars, however, reveals a reality that doesn’t quite match the mayor’s rhetoric.

According to state records, the lion’s share of the discretionary Disaster Community Block Development Grant dollars – a total of $226 million of the $319 million that’s been obligated thus far — is going, not toward the invention of a smarter, more forward-looking city, but toward rebuilding streets and buildings, and for urban revitalization efforts in downtown areas that did not suffer the worst of Katrina’s wrath.

I don't feel like unpacking all of the complications of the post-flood planning, charetting, scheming, screaming, conspiring, and subsequent misunderstanding, ignoring, and half-implementation of all of the above. But for our purposes here, I'll say that at the time I thought there was far too much talk about "blank slates" and "reinventing" going on when it seemed to me the actual problem at hand was the "city we were" was the, you know, actual victim and as such deserved primary attention. In my view this would have meant spending as much time and money as possible rebuilding streets and buildings and other "mundane" (Lens' term) business of making the people affected whole again.

Obviously others felt differently. Some of them, no doubt, for well-meaning reasons, but many I think for less well-meaning reasons managed to refocus the discussion on things they didn't like about the "city we were" and inappropriately seized upon an opportunity to grind their axes a bit. Call it Shock Doctrine if you must, although I think the process was more chaotic than the sinister implications of that term. Not that there weren't sinister actors but that's digressing too far into matters I already said I don't want to unpack.

What's happened as a result of the confusion is that five and a half years later we really are faced with the dual challenges of rebuilding what we initially neglected AND investing in creative ways to create "multiplier effects" and re-grow a city we've allowed to shrink. Given that, it's hard to read through that article and not come away thinking that the city is right in trying to balance those priorities. Of course we'll disagree about what that balance should be and about the specifics of how it's being achieved. But even if we were completely happy with all of that (which we are not) it's safe to say we're going to need to have more money dumped on us. And I don't think that's about to happen for anybody in this political climate.

Anyway, if your first goal upon returning to post-flood New Orleans was to build a smaller city with a higher cost of living that is more dependent on tourism than ever you've got your wish. Happy?