Solution or land grab?
Posted by R. Neal
According to this New York Times article, Congressman Richard Baker from Baton Rouge has proposed an $80 billion federal buyout that would pay willing owners and lenders 60 cents on the dollar for property destroyed by Katrina and sell it to developers. The program would be funded by bonds that would be paid off with proceeds from sales to developers.
Unfortunately, that might be the best offer some (most?) of these folks will get. But I'm not so sure about selling it to developers. For some reason I'm always suspicious whenever developers are involved. It could be the most massive land grab in history. Not counting the Pilgrims or the westward expansion, I suppose.
What do you think of the proposal?
According to this New York Times article, Congressman Richard Baker from Baton Rouge has proposed an $80 billion federal buyout that would pay willing owners and lenders 60 cents on the dollar for property destroyed by Katrina and sell it to developers. The program would be funded by bonds that would be paid off with proceeds from sales to developers.
Unfortunately, that might be the best offer some (most?) of these folks will get. But I'm not so sure about selling it to developers. For some reason I'm always suspicious whenever developers are involved. It could be the most massive land grab in history. Not counting the Pilgrims or the westward expansion, I suppose.
What do you think of the proposal?
2 Comments:
This is a rapidly developing feature of disaster mitigation. Disasters with short timespans, such as New Orleans, would seem the logical (in a neo-liberal mind) place for this sort of plan to be impemented, but it was actually honed in places like Camden, NJ where long-term economic disaster has, for lack of a better analogy, fallowed the fields. Problem is people live in those fields. I just finished a paper for a globalized disaster conference in April when I go into what may be afoot in New Orleans. Not to step on too many toes, but there are a lot of people with money who would love to have investment properties in NO or pied a terres for holidays. Here's the trick: A lot of the desirable, architecturally interesting housing stock is in the hands of Blacks in a city where less than 30000 people were living in public housing. Katrina did not flush people out of the projects. It flushed them out of shotgun houses, Creole townhouses, double gallery houses and Creole bungalows. 60 cents on the dollar sounds like 40 acres and a mule.
Who is going to pay for the increasingly desperate and expensive engineering works needed to keep this land from flooding when the next hurricane or Mississippi flood hits? The value of the delta as a place of residence is largely in opposition to its value as a fishery. Which is more important?
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