Lessons Not Learned

By: Mr. Wilson on January 11, 2006

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that so many people want to rebuild New Orleans. Those who lived there want to be able to go "home", while many others just want to get plastered again come Mardi Gras. What bothers me is that those people want me to pay for it, to the tune of billions (and billions) of dollars. Kiss my grits, Basin Street. The rebuilders are deluded. Consider this:

Doug Meffert, co-chairman of the sustainability subcommittee, said it also will be essential that homeowners can be bought out at fair market value. The subcommittee will recommend that the corporation buy out properties at full value minus what insurance pays out.

Fair market value for many, if not most, of the damaged and destroyed properties is about six bucks. But that's not what Mr. Meffert means. He doesn't want property owners to be bought out at "fair market value", he wants them to be paid the replacement value for their property. And not the current replacement value, but the replacement value as it existed prior to the storms. In other words, he wants to free property owners from all responsibility for their property and to pay them many times more than what their property is actually worth. Ironically, Doug Meffert is co-chairman of the sustainability subcommittee. There ain't nothin' sustainable about a government that frees property owners from all responsibility for adequately insuring their property. It gets better:

Commission members were invited to think big when dreaming up ideas, with little regard for the price tag. That will be dealt with later, when New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast divvy up the $29 billion in federal aid designated for hurricane recovery and reconstruction. Some audacious ideas being considered are re-creating a long-gone jazz district, building a network of bike paths and commuter rail lines, and establishing a top-flight school system.

You can't make up this sort of bizarro thinking. Irresponsibility first, responsibility later is not the way to plan a city, and it's certainly not the way to plan for the use of $29 billion in other peoples' money.

Another idea is to use tax credits to re-create Storyville, the city-backed red-light district that operated for 20 years until it was shut down in 1917. It was later razed. The idea is not to bring back the sex trade, but rather reclaim the district's musical legacy. Many jazz pioneers -- Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Manuel Perez among them -- played in the district's bordellos.

They're not rebuilding New Orleans, they're building Disneyland -- a quasi-authentic artificial version of reality that can never replicate the charm and character of the original, like those Cheers bars in airports. Rebuilding New Orleans based on a longing for the past, rather than on an honest assessment of the present and future, is likely to be the one disaster that will cause more damage to the U.S. than the hurricans.

Comments

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Karin Dalziel

January 15, 2006 at 12:09AM

It’s amazing that tragedies like this inspire people to reason that anyone who lived there should be compensated, just for being part of the tragedy. If my home is destroyed by a tornado, I have no expectation that I would get anything over what insurance pays out. In the aftermath of 9-11, families of the deceased were given thousands and, sometimes, millions of dollars. While it was a horrible tragedy, what about all the other families that lost primary caregivers in the same year?

In a way, it seems like it’s an effort to sweep it under the rug by buying everyone off.

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