Cannot Save New Orleans

Daniel Henninger wrote in OpinionJournal So we are sending all the king's horses and all the king's men to fix the Humpty-Dumpty of New Orleans. Put it back together on a sinking wall of mud and see if it falls off again. President Bush has proposed a Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will test the novel idea of whether market forces can function while some $200 billion of public money is coursing through Louisiana.

Actually Bush never suggested $200 billion of public money; that figure came from others. He proposed

• the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone, encompassing the region of the disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama. Within this zone, we should provide immediate incentives for job-creating investment, tax relief for small businesses, incentives to companies that create jobs, and loans and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again. It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity; it is entrepreneurship that helps break the cycle of poverty; and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the Gulf region.
• the creation of Worker Recovery Accounts to help those evacuees who need extra help finding work. Under this plan, the federal government would provide accounts of up to $5,000, which these evacuees could draw upon for job training and education to help them get a good job, and for child care expenses during their job search.
• that Congress pass an Urban Homesteading Act. Under this approach, we will identify property in the region owned by the federal government, and provide building sites to low-income citizens free of charge, through a lottery. In return, they would pledge to build on the lot, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity. Home ownership is one of the great strengths of any community, and it must be a central part of our vision for the revival of this region.

As far as I know, the federal government does not own that much property in the part of New Orleans that is below sea level, but I am sure they do own plenty of land that is above sea level, and where people displaced from New Orleans could build a home to live in, in a new city unincumbered with all of the dishonesty that has been in New Orlenas since Hewey Long's days. And he never said he was going to build the houses for them, he said "they would pledge to build on the lot, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity" (neither of which would cost the government any money.

Louisiana political culture has run that drill for about 60 years; the result was New Orleans, before the storm. Congress's idea of giving back is to open the spending levees. A short list of the federal bureaucracies on the case include FEMA, DHS, EPA, HHS, SBA, HUD, plus their partners in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.... The answer to whether we--America--should rebuild New Orleans is not obviously and simply yes. We have a precedent. The answer to whether the World Trade Towers should be "rebuilt" in some fashion was also obviously and overwhelmingly yes. Four years on, nothing has been rebuilt largely because there is no evident market need for 10 million square feet of commercial space in lower Manhattan, and also because New York's politics is a distant relative of Louisiana's.... So what should New Orleans now become? It could resume life as what it was, a tourist venue

Which is reasonable. The French Quarter is above sea level, as are many other parts of New Orleans. Protect them with levees, but dont try to protect land that is 7 to 15 feet below sea level.

... New Orleans probably needs more than a storied past.... Several years ago, Sir Peter delivered a lecture in Glasgow called "Creative Cities and Economic Development." If New Orleans' next incarnation is to become anything other than a fancy future slum, its new city fathers (and they'd better be new) should lend him an ear. What, Peter Hall asked, enabled the rise of six famously potent centers of urban creativity--Athens, Florence, London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin? They "were all capitalist cities," he answered, and "they were all great trading cities." New Orleans, site of a famous port, could be both, but isn't.... What is New Orleans today? It is the impoverished, lawless product of Huey Long's anti-capitalist populism, cross-fertilized with every poverty program Washington produced the past 60 years. The currently popular notion that "the country" somehow failed to notice that much of New Orleans had become a social and economic basket case is false. Every college student knows the basic storyline of "All the King's Men" if not that of former Governor Edwin Edwards (1992-96), now serving 10 years for extorting businessmen.