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New Orleans Diaspora A "Blessing"?

Posted by: Michael Dudley

22 January 2007 - 11:00am

Was pre-Katrina New Orleans unable to support its former population, and thus now -- as a smaller city -- better-positioned economically? Or is it in danger of losing its cultural identity without that population?

"[S]ome economists and demographers are beginning to wonder whether New Orleans will top out at about half its prestorm population of about 444,000, already in a steep decline from its peak of 627,525 in the 1960 Census. At the moment, the population is well below half, and future gains are likely to be small.

The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city’s failure to thrive.

In this view, the storm was merely a grim exclamation point to conditions decades in the making. Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that.

Hurricane Katrina may have brutally recalibrated the city’s demographics, setting New Orleans firmly on the path its underlying characteristics had already been leading it down: a city losing people at the rate of perhaps 1.5 percent a year before Hurricane Katrina, with a stagnant economy, more than a quarter of the population living in poverty, and a staggeringly high rate of unemployment, in which as many as one in five were jobless or not seeking work.

'Where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can’t see a way out,' said William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University who has studied the city’s economy for decades. 'Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.'"

Full Story: New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size
Source: The New York Times, January 21, 2007
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Interesting point, but perhaps anti-urbanist and even racist

Submitted by vtboy99 on Mon, 01/22/2007 - 20:00.

While I do agree with the author's argument for dispersing concentrations of poverty and at the same time integrating disparate socioeconomic constructs, it seems as if the article is ever-so-slightly tinged with elements of anti-urbanism, and perhaps even racism.

Was the city of New Orleans unsustainable prior to Hurricane Katrina?

Or were the socioeconomic conditions which persisted for decades before the catastrophe just a direct result of the standard deindustrialization of America's urban economies? Post-industrial and globalization forces have left countess American urban neighborhoods with an aftermath of extreme segregation and concentrations of poverty and crime over the past 50 years. The author's argument for depopulating inner city neighborhoods in order to make them more sustainable could also be made for countless other districts in cities such as: St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Bridgeport CT, Oakland, Detroit, Bronx NY, Gary IN, Newark, Camden, Richmond CA, etc etc.

The author is taking the typical "pro-small government", Reaganist, post-modern approach for pointing the finger in New Orleans on the "bloated, corrupt welfare state", as if there were no other social or economic factors to take into consideration. Perhaps Adam should take a course in urban economics and urban history before he attempts to write an article of such magnitude. Reality ends up being much more political and messy than the author would care to admit.

And what if a natural disaster would happen to befall upon one of those cities mentioned above? Would the author hold the same opinion regarding the support of the "emptying out" of those predominately lower income, black areas in other cities? I believe so. He is merely using the term "unsustainable" as a way of justifying the horrendous and devoid emergency response efforts after Hurricane Katrina on the part of the local, state, and federal governments in providing adequate food, shelter, and reconstruction resources to those who have called New Orleans home for countless generations.

To fill in the apparent leadership vacuum, the free market and private sectors were deliberately and intentionally allowed to guide the entire planning and redevelopment process, through the strong encouragement of George W. Bush, Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco, Mary Landrieu, Albert Ratner (Forrest City Partners), Joseph Canizaro, Congress for the New Urbanism, and the Urban Land Institute. Hyper-privatized, segregrated, master-planned city building, in the tradition of J.C. Nichols and his Country Club District in Kansas City. That's what is happening to New Orleans, and that's why it is completely failing. Andres Duany happens to be an outspoken supporter of J.C. Nichols; Duany even did a documentary about the guy. Scary connection!

By the way, as a side note, J.C. Nichols promoted the technique of mortgage "redlining" and restrictive covenants to segregate his affluent "communities" from Jews and Blacks. Not sure if Peter Calthorpe realized that dirty little secret when he won the J.C. Nichols "Visionaries in Urban Development" prize a few months ago. He probably did, but it really doesn't matter to him. Gotta get those "New Urbanist", transit-oriented projects built, regardless of who provides your financing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Clyde_Nichols

And now we have "New Orleans 2007". A disneyfied, predominately white, ghost of its former self. Oh, and by the way, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have decided to now call the "Big Easy" home.

Perhaps they feel it's a bit safer now...

Here's an article by Mike Davis entitled "Who is Killing New Orleans". It provides a much better take on the current state of affairs in the Crescent City.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis

New Orleans

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 01/24/2007 - 17:06.

Duany and the New Urbanists held numerous charettes with New Orleans citizens to get public input and a public vision in designing a revitalized New Orleans for New Orleanians. Contrast this with Reed Kroloff's pie-in-the-sky Dutch utopian megastructure cities with no public input whatsoever and ivory-tower architectural juries making all the decisions and dictating to the public about what is "good" for them.

I thought this discussion was over?

Submitted by vtboy99 on Thu, 01/25/2007 - 07:46.

Talk about a delayed response. :)

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All of that only scratches the surface of what's wrong with this study. The idea that complex urban development patterns and human behavior can be meaningfully studied according to one primary criteria — density — is wrong from the start.
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