Democrats & Liberals: Archives

Woody, as you know, this is on all taxpayer’s dime, and there are a whole lot of us out here who choose not to get hit with this bill again, and then our children with the same bill later, and theirs after that.

Parts of NO are going to sink no matter what levees are established. Those areas should not be rebuilt on the taxpayers dime, or, those zones should be permanently designated as self-insured zones and anyone choosing to build there must first present self-insurance viability to be monitored for replacement value for any licensee to build there, along with the contract that sale of the property can only be made to another entity capable of replicating the self-insurance fund.

David,

You make good points, but I think they are really tangential to my argument. We all know that a large amount of money, certainly in the billions, is going to be allocated to “rebuild” New Orleans.
My thesis is that the people of New Orleans should decide how that money is spent. Do they want to live in a pretty tourist destination? Do they want to educate themselves to ensure their future prosperity? Do they just want the darn cash (perhaps in an annuity to keep them from spending it all at once)? These are big questions, and I would be very curious to see the people of NO answer them.

Your idea about people assuming their own risk can be incorporated in any one of the proposals.

No writing checks. What happened to the billions people fell all over themselves to donate at every church? The mountains of money Bush and Clinton raised?

Let the natural occurence of events decide what happens.

Amusing article, but with a serious point.

All live involves choices. If you want more of one thing, you get less of another etc. The New Orleans debate (as you can see from my article) has often avoided this ground truth. Some in New Orleans are demanding your first option without considering the costs.

Unfortunately, I agree that big money will be thrown into a place with a tradition of mismanagement and corruption. The best we probably can do is give some choices so that the people affected can prioritize.

I wonder what people would say if offered the option of spending millions of dollars per person to build a higher levee to drain the swamps or use that money and to help people relocate to better ground. On the one hand you get a permanent war with nature. On the other you get a new house.

Jack,

We are obviously on the same wavelength about setting priorities in the face of finite (albeit massive) resources.

Your math is off, though. Metro New Orleans has over a million people. A million people times a million $ is a trillion $.

A point I should have made more explicit: Most of the people who post on this board are probably fairly affluent (at least middle class), or least have the capacity to become affluent. So we naturally value the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans and want to preserve as a nice place to visit. The poor people living in New Orleans, whom we are all concerned about, may have a different perspective. Why not ask?

Woody, you wrote:
“So we naturally value the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans and want to preserve as a nice place to visit. The poor people living in New Orleans, whom we are all concerned about, may have a different perspective. Why not ask?”

I agree they should be asked, but in America unfortunately, city and government leaders rarely include poor people in this type of expensive and weighty decision.
Where I live in the SF Bay Area, no one asked the poor anything after the ‘89 Loma Prieta earthquake, or after the Oakland Hills fire displaced a lot of poorer folks who had lived in apartment buildings that were destroyed. Instead they took the blithe Babs Bush Sr. attitude — that whatever help or charity they’d get they should be grateful for, and that it would “work out well” for them — even though it often didn’t.

My take on rebuilding the priceless cultural gem that is New Orleans is this: All new construction should be undertaken according to strict new codes (just like those we deal with here in earthquake territory), and it should incorporate high tech and environmentally friendly features wherever possible. This is America’s chance to try out things that haven’t been tried on a large scale before — so we should take the lemons we’ve been handed and try to make some lemonade out of this giant disaster.
Also, the fact that the levies and canals failed, causing people to amass on bridges, with the only way left to get out of town was over a bridge (even though the heartless Gretna police stopped those people by shooting off shotguns) should be telling everyone something very important. Obviously the most lasting and safest way to rebuild New Orleans is along the lines of a modern Amsterdam, or Venice.
Let’s face it — it’s usually stupid to fight nature, because it’ll always be too expensive to engineer and then maintain all attempts at holding it back. Better instead to go with it. Let the water do what water does — rise, fall, and flow.

Perhaps a few dollars should be put aside and invested by the city in some type of fund that will insure property losses when the next hurricane hits. This would save the rest of the country from having to pay for the lunacy of building on a sand bar.

The high dollar hotels can advertise “nice view of the levee” from your room. 17 feet of concrete is very attractive from a restaurant, bar or casino.

i am a landscape architect and urban planner, and let me tell you that there is such a thing as a good city, and a bad city. there has been much study that has gone into such things and i think that new orleans should and will become a great example of what good design and do for a community.

rebuilding it how it was is a missed opportunity for improvements, as well as a chance for green / sustainable design that could become the virtuoso example worldwide for good planning from the start.

design with nature, not against it. we saw how the latter worked, lets try to get it right this time.

My take on rebuilding the priceless cultural gem that is New Orleans is this: All new construction should be undertaken according to strict new codes (just like those we deal with here in earthquake territory), and it should incorporate high tech and environmentally friendly features wherever possible. This is America’s chance to try out things that haven’t been tried on a large scale before — so we should take the lemons we’ve been handed and try to make some lemonade out of this giant disaster.

Yes, exactly.

Tree - YES

Adrienne - ALSO YES

Build smart. Work with nature. Make it nicer. Don’t repeat mistakes of the past. We have a rare opportunity, almost a blank slate.

Remember Chicago. Not everyone appreciates it, but after the fire they built a really interesting city in the loop. They didn’t just put it back as it was.

I’m with David on this. Sense we are going to pour Billions of dollars into rebuilding NO, anyone that wants to build there should have to present proof of self insurance. Or at the very least, they should have to buy flood insurance that will cover the total cost of rebuilding.
I understand that some insurance companies are refusing to pay because they claim that flodding wasn’t covered. Only huricane damage.

Wow Jack! We agree! Nice to know we can do that on something.

You wrote:
“Build smart. Work with nature. Make it nicer. Don’t repeat mistakes of the past. We have a rare opportunity, almost a blank slate.”

Right. And recycle wherever possible — all those lovely metal balconys for example. And it’d be great if they could remember where they are, and be cognizant and respectful of some of the unique architectural styles and features they’ll replacing with the new construction. Yet, (and here is where we may disagree) I think it would be a tragedy if it turns into some kind of a bizarre corporate-sponsored Disneyland.

I don’t live in New Orleans, but believe it or not, I live at the corner of River Rd and River St., and there is a river at the end of my block, more than 1000 miles from New Orleans. After 170 years, we have found out that we are in a flood plain. All new constuction is above ground, with parking on the ground floor. That doen’t do much for residential housing, except to make it obsolete.

My understanding is that New Orleans was originally built on the real estate that was above river level, but the low-lying areas were eventually drained with canals and dikes. Can individual homes really be built high enough above ground in an area that’s already below river level? I don’t think so.

Tulane University claims to be the largest employer in Orleans parish. I looked them up since I know someone who attended there and came home when the hurricane closed them down. They will require all returning students to take part in the rebuilding of New Orleans in some fashion, in order to graduate.

Do people believe this kind of hurricane will occur with more frequency in the future, or is it just bad luck? I don’t think people will want to gamble their lives, unless they’re sure that everything is being done to protect them. Does anyone seriously think that the Bush administration will ever be equal to doing anything about it? I don’t

As some of you other posters already know, I live just south of N.O., and was severely affected by the two hurricanes. They basically wiped out my business as most of my customers are no longer in operation.

Anyway, there are some good points raised here. When the city was originally built, they did not know what we know today. Hurricanes then were quirks of nature; probably the result of an angry God as much as a predictable product of nature. Draining swamps and marshes was considered progress. Levees were the mark of modernism.

We now know that you should not mess with Mother Nature. She’s way too powerful, and everything “good” you do will have an equally bad side effect. The Miss River should never have been channeled so that it eliminated the building of land down along the Gulf coast.

My point is that we should realize all of this now and take our losses. Prevent anyone from building in those areas that are the worst prone to flooding from Cat 4 and 5 storms, because they are coming again. That is about 25% of the city. Rebuild the levees to protect the rest of the city from the most severe storms, but allow the sacrificed 25% to act as a flood buffer zone. Move the new construction to higher areas and let the city’s growth head in that direction. It will limit the growth, but the future disasters from rebuilding in the same areas will be avoided. Strictly enforce new building codes to account for flooding and wind damage.

Take some of the money from the fed govt and give it to those who lost their own homes so that they can start over in another spot.
There is enough of the core city that will survive that it will be alive again.

Also remove some of the Miss River flood controls south of the city and allow limited sediment deposition to rebuild the land, which is the storm surge buffer provided by nature.

Use technology such as that used by the Dutch to break up storm surges before they ever hit the shores. Their flood gates are very effective in mitigating the amount of surge that gets through. Remember, it’s the water, and not the wind, that is the worst culprit in this area.

To try to rebuild the city as close to possible as it was is only inviting future disasters over the next 10-15 years, which is the predicted cycle of severe hurricanes for this area.

let me get this strait you’re saying that one resident of New Orleans who somehow has the money to put on an election should. then we assume the results have not been tampered with?