9/11/2005

I've just got back from Assateague Island (yes, Assateague) on the Maryland coast, so I've been disconnected from the news since Friday. But I just caught Sen. Mary Landrieu on the replay of "Fox News Sunday" arguing with anchor Chris Wallace about how much the state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans are responsible for what went wrong. She got quite angry when he flashed that infamous photo of the sunken school buses, but her defense largely rested on the assumption that the state and city institutions don't work even on good days.

At least here in the Northeast Corridor, putting New Orleans back together again the way it was is fast sounding as unlikely as it ever was that we would rebuild the North and South Towers of the WTC. Four years ago this week I heard it said by many (including me) that the towers would be replaced with copies of themselves. They weren't, and as the days pass it seems even less likely that New Orleans will be restored to its former shape. Take this Slate assessment by Jack Shafer, and this Washington Post essay by "Edge City" author Joel Garreau. This is elite opinion and not necessarily the consensus, but consider some of the factors in play, via the Post:

When [the insurance industry] looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance -- without which nothing can be rebuilt.

But the port is important, right? Surely we'll rebuild it because of the port's economic importance to the country. Maybe not:

Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between "port" and "city." As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans -- or Baltimore or Rotterdam -- thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.

And which New Orleans-based companies were providing those jobs before Katrina? Not many:

There are no national corporations with their headquarters in New Orleans. There are regional headquarters of oil companies such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, but their primary needs are an airport, a heliport and air conditioning. Not much tying them down. In the Central Business District you will also find the offices of the utilities you'd expect, such as the electricity company Entergy. But if you look for major employers in New Orleans, you quickly get down to the local operations of the casino Harrah's, and Popeye's Fried Chicken.

New Orleans' population has declined roughly the same way Detroit's has — by the tens of thousands for decades, since the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, other cities have gone in the opposite direction. Washington is one. I don't have the numbers before me, but the level of private industry and population growth in the Beltway area has gone through the roof over the same period. As Brian Beutler can tell you, this area boasts among the hottest of the current housing markets (bubbles?). When I look out my French doors across the city, I count a half-dozen building cranes along the downtown skyline, and that's just within my line of sight.

The last few years have been among the most horrifying and agonizing and polarizing as this country has had since at least the 1960s. Americans are no doubt better off today than back then, but I'm young enough to have missed the turbulence of those years, not to mention the anomie of the 1970s; I don't know quite how it felt before Reagan's "morning in America," our solidified geopolitical dominance under Bush pere, and techno-economic party time with Clinton. It'll be awhile before things settle down again and become boring (and rock bands start writing lyrics like: "I wish it was the sixties / I wish I could be happy / I wish / I wish / I wish that something would happen"). God Bless America, even if it doesn't always feel the way it used to.

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posted by WWB at 6:32 PM |