The Katrina Aftermath - Part 2 - The Renaissance

Last week we discussed the dispersion of residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast . After most natural disasters, 90 percent of the people move back home and start re-building. I made the case last week that it might be best for many of the displaced to keep on going. If that is to be so, what happens to New Orleans ? Who should come back?

Ultimately, New Orleans has some good things going for it. First of all, we only have one Mississippi River and an enormous amount of the nation's commerce moves along it. We absolutely need a port in this area. Second, there is a great concentration of petrochemical production off of the Gulf Coast and lots of refining capacity in the area. No one is going to write off domestic oil production, particularly as energy costs rise.

The re-building will start out with homes. But they will be different homes than exited before. You can't build a slum! A slum exists because old housing was allowed to deteriorate to the point where no one felt any investment in is improvement made any sense. Perhaps a landlord could rent a shack for $400 per month. But you cannot build a new home, even a cheap one, that can rent for $400 per month and provide a reasonable return on investment to its owner.

The investor needs, say, $1,000 per month to make it work, which means that new jobs that are created in New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast will have to pay enough to support someone paying $1,000 rent. If an owner wants to rebuild, he has to have a job that pays enough to support a considerable mortgage, because insurance proceeds probably aren't going to cover the costs of construction.

You can quickly see that the new city , the web of housing, jobs and infrastructure has to be different than the old one, and I think that this is a good thing. The economic and political structure that tolerated the strange concoction of tourist and convention dollars, marginal service jobs, graft and corruption, sin, greed, and quick bucks simply cannot work when you wipe away the physical structure that made it possible. The conventions aren't coming back soon, and tourists are headed elsewhere, at least for a while. More to the point, the people that might have been employed to serve them are gone.

I think that this tragedy hold the seeds for new ideas that will mean a better world for all the participants. Here are some more ideas.

Many people who were short-changed educationally are in dead-end, lousy jobs, condemned to living below the poverty line rest of their lives. How about a special GI Bill-type education program for displaced Gulf Coast persons, both those who have left and won't return as well as those who want to try to rebuild their lives there. I'm not necessarily talking college, but basic education for those who did not finish high school plus job training. There will be plenty of jobs in construction trades and these folks can learn the skills required for better income while re-building 200,000 homes.

How about the architects coming up with 10 or 20 different home designs that represent the "best" architecture of the Gulf Coast, designs that can be built as panelized homes. These are manufactured homes, prefabricated in factories to meet local building codes and shipped to the job site where locally trained crews, albeit less skilled, can erect them and connect them to gas, electric, sewers.

How about moving the reported 163,000 car bodies down to where the barrier islands used to be and using them to stabilize the areas and create new islands. They can also be used as fill in rebuilding levees and as rip-rap on canals as some Mississippi water gets diverted into side canals to start re-depositing silt to rebuild coastal marshes

How about taking the million tons of wood waste from what used to be houses, chipping it and sending to particleboard and chipboard plants to make new building material?

Finally, New Orleans is one of the few cities with "SOUL," as those who have been there will attest. There are very few cities like this. Paris has soul. New York and San Francisco do too, but there aren't many others. In my mind, a city with soul will not allow itself to die. That soul will be the catalyst for the new New Orleans . Do this right and Mardi Gras will be back on Bourbon Street again before you know it.

Be optimistic out there!

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