Preacherman
Member
An article in the Times of London suggests that New Orleans business leaders are lobbying the Mayor to rebuild the city in a different way, leaving out the "projects" and housing for the poor that gave rise to some of its more rancid suburbs. Wonder how much this has to do with the mandatory evacuation - as in "Oops, your old neighborhood had to be bulldozed for sanitary reasons!"???
September 09, 2005
Business elite hopes for a future without the poor
From Giles Whittell in Washington
COULD the new New Orleans be a place of low poverty, low crime, good schools and minimal racial tension? Some affluent exiles, all white, hope so. In a private meeting in Dallas yesterday they urged the mayor, Ray Nagin, to embrace a controversial vision that could transform the city from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one.
New Orleans will be rebuilt with up to $200 billion (£1.09 billion) in federal aid. It will have to be safer, and on higher ground. But if the business leaders have their way, it will be different in one key respect: fewer poor people.
It would be rebuilt “in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” James Reiss, an electronics magnate, told The Wall Street Journal. “The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again.”
As the great pump-out continues, the great rethink has begun. Everyone agrees that Hurricane Katrina is an opportunity as well as a disaster, but few have had the nerve to suggest that the mass exodus of the city’s overwhelmingly black poor may be part of that opportunity. One plan calls for an “Afro-Caribbean Paris” to emerge, with broad new boulevards, electric trolleybuses and a riverfront park. Another sees it as a new Las Vegas.
Most of the 100,000 residents who lived on or near the poverty line, have been removed. Thousands have found jobs and homes elsewhere. Some will never return, and this historic shift is being built into projections for the future.
“About half the dispersed population is likely never to come back,” Mary Comerio of the University of California at Berkeley said. “It will change the character of New Orleans.”
If it is like Mr Reiss’s neighbourhood, it will be more salubrious. He lives in a gated community near Audubon Park, which has been hit by fires but not flooding. He returned after the hurricane by helicopter and flew in an Israeli security firm to guard his community, according to the Journal.
But as the city’s business elite plots its future, it might reflect that lawlessness, broadly defined, made New Orleans different — and that was priceless.
September 09, 2005
Business elite hopes for a future without the poor
From Giles Whittell in Washington
COULD the new New Orleans be a place of low poverty, low crime, good schools and minimal racial tension? Some affluent exiles, all white, hope so. In a private meeting in Dallas yesterday they urged the mayor, Ray Nagin, to embrace a controversial vision that could transform the city from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one.
New Orleans will be rebuilt with up to $200 billion (£1.09 billion) in federal aid. It will have to be safer, and on higher ground. But if the business leaders have their way, it will be different in one key respect: fewer poor people.
It would be rebuilt “in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” James Reiss, an electronics magnate, told The Wall Street Journal. “The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again.”
As the great pump-out continues, the great rethink has begun. Everyone agrees that Hurricane Katrina is an opportunity as well as a disaster, but few have had the nerve to suggest that the mass exodus of the city’s overwhelmingly black poor may be part of that opportunity. One plan calls for an “Afro-Caribbean Paris” to emerge, with broad new boulevards, electric trolleybuses and a riverfront park. Another sees it as a new Las Vegas.
Most of the 100,000 residents who lived on or near the poverty line, have been removed. Thousands have found jobs and homes elsewhere. Some will never return, and this historic shift is being built into projections for the future.
“About half the dispersed population is likely never to come back,” Mary Comerio of the University of California at Berkeley said. “It will change the character of New Orleans.”
If it is like Mr Reiss’s neighbourhood, it will be more salubrious. He lives in a gated community near Audubon Park, which has been hit by fires but not flooding. He returned after the hurricane by helicopter and flew in an Israeli security firm to guard his community, according to the Journal.
But as the city’s business elite plots its future, it might reflect that lawlessness, broadly defined, made New Orleans different — and that was priceless.
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