New Orleans

New Orleans has decided to go ahead with some much needed repairs to their city proper.  The levee system is under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers and rebuilding there has been running as fast as possible since the water was drained.  It is the other parts of New Orleans that are now up for fixing. 

Ray Nagin has been reelected handily, with a reasonable plurality.  Now the local government is going ahead with demolition of areas that are too far gone.  The city is calling in sweaty guys with heavy equipment and bad socialization skills to destroy everything left standing and cart away the rubble.

This is extreme, but with whole neighbourhoods rendered uninhabitable, restoration is not practical in many circumstances.  Pull it down and start over is heartbreaking, but does make sense.  There is too much damage to fix. 

For their first trick, the New Orleans city government and the federal Housing and Urban Development agency will bulldoze three or four big public housing projects.  Everyone has to leave now, take what few possessions they have and go someplace else. 

The replacement housing will take at least two years to build.  It will be ‘mixed use’ housing.  Mixed use means of 500 units, two might be allocated to poor folks, but only if they scream.  The rest will be gentrified, near-downtown, elegant housing for those who can afford the tab.

There are, as best I can tell, no plans to flatten whole swaths of the middle class and wealthy areas.  The well-off can afford to contribute to political campaigns, which means they might turn off the money if we forcibly relocate them and drive an eleven-ton Catepillar D-6 over the mouldy, smelly, overgrown, decrepit remains of their housing.

Scratch that; the well-off don’t have housing, they have homes.  Poor people have housing, which isn’t nearly as important as destroying someone’s home.  Since these are poor people being uprooted and Ray has his job back for a few years, the authorities can screw them over with impunity, which is exactly what they are going to do. 

In two years time, when the housing is ready for occupancy, the seven or eight thousand people who have been shoveled off, will have resettled in another city, or be so bereft of any kind of resources to protest, that things will just naturally progress without much fuss. 

Years ago in Ottawa, around 1960, we had an area near the Supreme Court, called LeBreton Flats.  It was a poor, rundown, blue collar neighbourhood.  The National Capital Commission owned the land and decided that a slum, housing four or five thousand people near the Parliament, was not a good thing for any number of reasons.  Primarily aesthetic but also because, well, Ottawa doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have poor people that you can see.  The NCC decided to raze it all.

The NCC promised to build new houses for the people they were going to displace and to their credit the NCC did.  A couple of hundred truly ugly townhouses went up to replace the nearly two thousand they were tearing down.  Notice the numbers weren’t the same?  Well, I guess some of the people here will just have to, oh, move somewhere else, preferably far, far, away.

The NCC then sat on the land for nearly thirty years, mowing the grass once a week and letting the occasional festival trample the lawn.  When Pope John Paul II visited Ottawa in the 80’s, they put the temporary stage on LeBreton Flats.  A couple of years ago they built the Canadian War Museum on a piece of the Flats.  There is a bus transitway that bisects the area and that is about it.  No housing.  No businesses.  No apartments.  No greengrocers.  No pubs.  No shoe stores.  Nothing was put back. 

The people who used to live there?  A lucky few got to move into the 1960’s vintage ready-made planned community next door.  If you look at the history of the Flats, the replacement housing they originally hoped to build, and got agreement to, was quite nice for its time.

What was actually built, due to unforeseen budget constraints that magically appeared, was a well-planned, readymade concrete ghetto.  The rest of the people who used to live in LeBreton Flats?  They scattered to the winds.

Will New Orleans try the same thing?  In a years’ time, when all the poor folks who used to live there are scattered all over the southern US, New Orleans will have to ‘study’ the land.  Then do an ‘environmental assessment’ and an ‘economic analysis’, followed by ‘public consultations’. 

I can even write the last chapter on public housing in New Orleans, specifically the areas that are going to be torn down.  Ready?  The city does not want to interfere with free enterprise.  We need the tax base to support our rebuilding process.  The land use must be market driven.  The magical government code word is, market driven, meaning bend over and grab your ankles.

The undertext to the people who used to live there?  Don’t come back.