All the King's Men Cannot Save New Orleans: Federal dollars won't make the Crescent City great.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
OpinionJournal.com
So we are sending all the king's horses and all the king's men to fix the Humpty-Dumpty of New Orleans. Put it back together on a sinking wall of mud and see if it falls off again.
President Bush has proposed a Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will test the novel idea of whether market forces can function while some $200 billion of public money is coursing through Louisiana. Louisiana political culture has run that drill for about 60 years; the result was New Orleans, before the storm. Congress's idea of giving back is to open the spending levees. A short list of the federal bureaucracies on the case include FEMA, DHS, EPA, HHS, SBA, HUD, plus their partners in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Will this revive New Orleans? Should it? The residents of Detroit or Camden, N.J., might reasonably ask: What about us? Our neighborhoods look like they were hit by a hurricane? How about new houses for us?
The answer to whether we--America--should rebuild New Orleans is not obviously and simply yes. We have a precedent. The answer to whether the World Trade Towers should be "rebuilt" in some fashion was also obviously and overwhelmingly yes. Four years on, nothing has been rebuilt largely because there is no evident market need for 10 million square feet of commercial space in lower Manhattan, and also because New York's politics is a distant relative of Louisiana's.
New Orleans, however, is not Podunk. Like the Twin Towers, New Orleans makes a special claim on the spiritual and historic life of the nation; or at least that claim has been made the past week in paeans to the place by every famous writer and celebrity who long ago moved away.
OpinionJournal.com
So we are sending all the king's horses and all the king's men to fix the Humpty-Dumpty of New Orleans. Put it back together on a sinking wall of mud and see if it falls off again.
President Bush has proposed a Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will test the novel idea of whether market forces can function while some $200 billion of public money is coursing through Louisiana. Louisiana political culture has run that drill for about 60 years; the result was New Orleans, before the storm. Congress's idea of giving back is to open the spending levees. A short list of the federal bureaucracies on the case include FEMA, DHS, EPA, HHS, SBA, HUD, plus their partners in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Will this revive New Orleans? Should it? The residents of Detroit or Camden, N.J., might reasonably ask: What about us? Our neighborhoods look like they were hit by a hurricane? How about new houses for us?
The answer to whether we--America--should rebuild New Orleans is not obviously and simply yes. We have a precedent. The answer to whether the World Trade Towers should be "rebuilt" in some fashion was also obviously and overwhelmingly yes. Four years on, nothing has been rebuilt largely because there is no evident market need for 10 million square feet of commercial space in lower Manhattan, and also because New York's politics is a distant relative of Louisiana's.
New Orleans, however, is not Podunk. Like the Twin Towers, New Orleans makes a special claim on the spiritual and historic life of the nation; or at least that claim has been made the past week in paeans to the place by every famous writer and celebrity who long ago moved away.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 1:05 PM
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