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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
New Orleans will be rebuilt. But how? Should its slums be replaced by mixed-income housing? And if the city can't attract investors, should we just let it wither? Six experts cross swords in a Salon roundtable.
Sep 28, 2005 | It's been four weeks since images of Americans devastated by Hurricane Katrina and abandoned by their government took over our television screens and our political discourse. Despite multiple opportunities for distraction -- the death of Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, confirmation hearings on a nominee to replace him, John G. Roberts, even another major storm in the Gulf, Hurricane Rita -- the nation, to its credit, hasn't looked away. Thanks to Katrina, President Bush told a press conference Monday, "Americans saw some poverty they'd never imagined before."
Some Americans, of course, have done more than imagine it -- they've worked for years to understand and ease the crisis of poverty, and to untangle its grim synergy with race, which often paralyzes debate about its causes and solutions. At Salon, we were underwhelmed by the president's policy response to Katrina, much of which seemed like warmed-over Republican nostrums, heavy on tax credits, vouchers and help for "entrepreneurs," but light on big ideas on a scale that could make a difference to the hundreds of thousands displaced by Katrina, many of whom were already poor. Even the name, "Opportunity Zones," harked back to former GOP Rep. Jack Kemp's 1980s-era "Enterprise Zones" -- tax credits and business incentives that had little real impact on inner-city poverty.
But we were also unimpressed with the relative silence of the Democrats, who didn't seem to marshal an agenda to challenge or improve on the Bush Opportunity Zone approach. So we convened an e-mail panel of our own, a group of people working on poverty and opportunity issues from a range of institutions and ideologies, and threw them a set of questions about a real anti-poverty agenda in the wake of Katrina. Can Opportunity Zones work, and how? Are there better models from a new generation of anti-poverty efforts? Should evacuees return, or be helped to improve their lives wherever they landed? Should parts of New Orleans even be rebuilt at all?
The good news is there was some agreement, which in fact shouldn't be surprising. The conservative critique of government poverty programs summed up by Ronald Reagan's now-cliché "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won" could have come from certain liberal critics of the programs, who had critiqued some of the same programs for putting money into bureaucracies and "professionals," while not necessarily making things better for the poor. Two decades after Reagan, there's broad agreement on several issues: that work is almost always better than welfare, that bureaucracies such as housing authorities are often a problem more than a solution, and that there's a strong positive role for the market. (And it's worth noting that while Bush has mostly ignored the issue of poverty, poverty "won" again on his watch, with the percentage of American poor climbing from 11.3 under President Clinton to 12.7 in 2004.
And while it's impossible to generalize about causes and solutions to poverty, the poverty of New Orleans especially evades easy answers. Certainly it's the result of segregation and racism; it's also been worsened by corruption that strangles the best efforts of community members and business owners at reform. It's also not a place where terms like "liberal" and "conservative" always make particular sense. We had a range of opinions on the panel, but they didn't always fit neatly into ideological categories. For instance, we started with the premise that the problem was "disinvestment," the flight of jobs and capital from New Orleans, but at least two of our panelists -- one a liberal, one a relative conservative -- corrected the question, noting there had been all sorts of investment in New Orleans, especially in public housing, but much of it had made things worse, not better.
There were other noteworthy observations. Everyone, even those whom most people would consider liberal, thinks tax credits and market incentives can work, if they're targeted well -- but there's a lot of concern the Bush administration's won't be. And while Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert ignited a storm of protest when he suggested parts of New Orleans should not be rebuilt, there was surprising open-mindedness about what the shape of the remade city should be. (It was hard not to be open-minded when Rita flooded the Ninth Ward again as we began our conversation last Thursday.) Likewise, where only a decade ago there was often anguished debate about displacement and gentrification when many cities, encouraged by the federal government, replaced high-rise housing projects with low-rise, sometimes mixed-income developments, on our panel there was a lot of enthusiasm for trying to create mixed-income neighborhoods when rebuilding New Orleans, rather than just putting poor people back in their places. (There was one dissenter, and not for reasons you might expect.)
Everyone agreed on a couple of other things: that solutions to the problem have to be regional -- no city, especially New Orleans, can solve its poverty problems alone -- and that the wishes of those displaced should play a role in what our ultimate answers will be. But there was also plenty of debate, which you'll see unfold.
Andrew Leonard and I moderated the panel. Our panelists are busy people, and just when we thought we couldn't ask them to keep this debate going, they kept talking. In the spirit of open inquiry, we're going to publish the first part Wednesday, and run the rest Thursday. We'd love to hear from you, and we'll run a package of reader ideas and reactions on Friday. And we've opened a thread in our membership community Table Talk, for those who want to chat there. We'll keep the conversation going as long as there's interest, and we hope that's for a long time.
The panelists:
Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, a nonprofit organization working to advance policies to achieve economic and social equity.
Xavier de Souza Briggs is a professor of sociology and urban studies at MIT and co-editor of "The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America."
Craig Colten is a professor of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University and the author of "An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature."
Edward Glaeser is a professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Howard Husock is a contributing editor to City Journal and the director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. He is the author of "America's Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy."
Bruce Katz is vice president and director of metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution.
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Forget Tourist New Orleans: Decades of disinvestment, racism, concentrated poverty and corruption made inner-city New Orleans one of the poorest, most dangerous and dysfunctional urban areas in America -- before Katrina. President Bush has proposed Opportunity Zones to rebuild the Gulf and New Orleans -- a package of tax breaks, tax credits, homesteading programs, etc., a response that's almost entirely reliant on the private sector and market incentives. Can any of it work, and how? Are there better tools, and if so, what are they?
And for extra credit: Do Bush (I) and Clinton-era Enterprise and Empowerment Zones offer lessons, cautionary or otherwise, or does the devastation of so much of New Orleans make comparison impossible?
Howard Husock
First, it's important to appreciate the essentially correct impulse underlying the Bush proposals. The physical rebuilding of New Orleans should not be our central focus. Cities -- and their built environments -- exist for economic reasons. "Disinvestment" in New Orleans was not a conspiracy of indifferent capitalists. It was a reflection of the city's failure to offer a healthy climate for investment. The combination of corruption and a failure to invest in essential public infrastructure let the oil industry, and much else, slip away to Houston. New Orleans ceased to be a magnet for new immigrants and those in search of opportunity went elsewhere, leaving behind "concentrated poverty," disproportionately supported by transfer payments.
The White House is correctly seeking to do what it can to make New Orleans an attractive locus for new investment. As for what kind, hard to say. Tourism, indeed, is not much on which to build an economy. Spinoffs from the port? Better commercialization of its deep and rich music culture (which is not just nostalgia)? One wonders what entrepreneurial ideas have been still-born in years past. So a low-tax, non-corrupt environment must be considered a crucial first step. Government clearly has infrastructure investments to make in flood control. But how far should that extend? Why not take the opportunity to make New Orleans a model for privately owned transit (sell off the ineffective bus system)? Why not sell off public housing rather than going the deeply subsidized Empowerment Zone/HOPE VI reconstruction route? Let the market decide what the highest and best use of that real estate is.
[Moderator's note: "HOPE VI" was an ambitious, $5 billion urban redevelopment plan launched during the Clinton presidency.]
The fact that the terminology (Opportunity Zone) of the president's proposal is reminiscent of President Clinton's Empowerment Zone does not mean the two are similar. The latter sought -- in the Model Cities tradition -- to rebuild specific buildings and corridors, and offered grants to city governments and "community" groups, generally staffed by professionals. A low-tax "free-trade zone" New Orleans would be a different matter, if that's really where we end up going. The political difficulty: no immediate ribbon cuttings.
Angela Glover Blackwell
Tax policies and market incentives have the potential to produce equitable outcomes, but the record is mostly disappointing or worse: crony capitalism, influential developers and businesses receiving the breaks without producing quality jobs or desirable housing and communities.
The few examples where they have worked the best operate on these principles and cautions:
