Back in New Orleans, but New Orleans isn't back
We're back in New Orleans for the Institute's Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch project (check out the new website, still in progress). It's been 283 days since Katrina hit, and it's always striking to see just how much still needs to be done.This evening, we attended a meeting of the interesting neighborhood planning process the city has adopted. It's a decentralized effort, with neighborhoods banding together to create proposals for their own revitalization. The approach definitely has the advantages of getting citizens involved. It also is chaotic, and has led to problems such as neighborhood groups overstretching their territory and attempting to "plan" for other communities.
There's also a fundamental problem with any rebuilding process that claims to come from the people, but excludes the thousands of New Orleans residents who haven't come back. As an organizer for the People's Hurricane Relief Fund said at tonight's meeting, "I've been to all sorts of planning meetings, but it seems that many of them haven't written the first chapter of the book: getting our folks back home."
And that question goes back to federal leadership. The reason people aren't coming back home is because, in many communities, a lack of jobs, schools, health care, and other basic necessities make return difficult to impossible. With resources, leadership and creative thinking, many of these problems could have been solved by now. But that's not the kind of leadership we have in Washington now.
4 Comments:
Thanks for posting. Disappointing, but good writing.
Imagine if Bushco was in charge of rebuilding Europe after WWII . They’d still be walking around on rubble.
Oh, please. You're not reading the news. The reason people haven't come back to New Orleans is that they're watching TV from hotel rooms in New York.
The people that want to be in New Orleans are there. Those that don't care, except to suck the government tit, can stay anywhere and do that.
It seems to me that the new progressive mantra of "grassroots organizing" would have some relavancy here.
People won't come back until there are jobs and housing, there won't be jobs and housing until people come back to buy and spend and create an economy. The big question is whether it it the State's (in the all-govenrnment sense) job to pour money in to jump-start things. And if they do, is it all going to line the pockets of people who are from elsewhere and just came dow to feed at the government trough. Remember carpetbaggers? I thought so.
The way New Orleans will get 'done' is for those people who are still ther to get to work building back their lives. As small shops and businesses begin to appear they will attrack and allow other to come in and build on to the small but growing economy. Sure, the government can help, but they can do it best by focusing on infrastructure - roads, schools, power, and the levee system. That bring in the jobs and people who will spend their paychecks at the small businesses and build back the neighborhoods.
Doing it that way will create a new city, not shoehorn the old one back into place. But it will be a more viable city and one composed of people with a vested interest in doing it right.
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