Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Celebrate its history of deviance, or disperse its population to the wind. From Tulane to the Heritage Foundation, more proposals for the future of the Big Easy.
Sep 30, 2005 | Anthony Fontenot, taught for five years at Tulane University School of Architecture, currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Princeton University School of Architecture
New Orleans currently finds itself in an extraordinary state, suspended somewhere between its past and its future.
New Orleans and its swampy environs are notorious for being culturally and geographically distinguished as a unique ecological and urban site. This specificity has inspired incredibly creative architectural and urban responses as well as caused unimaginable problems. While the developments of the 18th and 19th centuries can be seen as a series of infrastructure interventions provoked by New Orleans' precarious relationship to its specific environment, today there is a new and urgent need to reevaluate (and perhaps reinvent) the relationship between the infrastructure, the city, and its relationship to the larger ecological context in the 21st century. Beyond the urban and ecological, we are confronted with profound questions concerning a stagnant economy and all-out abandonment of the poor.
It is ironic that many parts of New Orleans that were flooded are the most recent "American-style" postwar suburban developments in the city. On the scale at which we will have to consider the city, New Orleans could become a center for rethinking urbanism and the American suburb, new building technologies, innovative residential designs, and urban responses to wetland ecology.
New Orleans is in a rare position to offer new readings of urban invention and sustainability. This city's long history of deviation in literature, the arts, musical innovation, improvisation and hybridization, should inspire this investigation into the relationship between culture, place and economics. While most American cities experienced radical changes in the postwar era, New Orleans remained largely intact. The fact that our great era of reconstruction is happening in the early 21st century should allow us the advantage of reexamining the limitations and failures of the second half of the 20th century.
Concerning President Bush's proposal to establish "Opportunity Zones" in the devastated region, it is important to begin by asking the question -- opportunities for whom? Major developers will clearly benefit from the establishment of such "free zones." If we should reflect on the history of tax credit economic development, what are the precedents of this type of neoliberal development that have been proven to advance the needs of the poor? In the current political milieu, economic development seems to be guided by an extremely narrow vision capable of responding only to big business and tourism. In fact, the two most important meetings immediately following the disaster were the Forty Power Elites of New Orleans gathering in Dallas and the "Future of Tourism" meeting in Baton Rouge. Nowhere were there representatives of the working class and the poor -- which constitute the largest population in New Orleans. In the U.S., we have yet to see federally supported models of development that engage the poor, let alone ameliorate poverty. The fact that Halliburton has firmly established itself as a player in the reconstruction should indicate just how far removed federal dollars are from trickling down to the local population.
It is critical to understand New Orleans in a much larger context than the immediate post-Katrina discussions. The plans for restructuring New Orleans should be understood as a continuation of a long history of events pushed to the surface by the storm. The desire for a new kind of city consisting of a less black and impoverished population has been played out over the past 40 years. Since the 1960s New Orleans, like many other American cities, has experienced an extreme urban exodus that continues at only slightly abated rates today.
627,525 total population, 37 percent black in 1960
593,471 total population, 43 percent black in 1970
557,515 total population, 55 percent black in 1980
496,938 total population, 62 percent black in 1990
484,674 total population, 67 percent black in 2000
142,851 population loss (23 percent) from 1960-2000
The general trend over the past 40 years has been an outpouring of middle-class residents from the inner city. Whites abandoned Orleans Parish for Jefferson Parish (69.8 percent white, 22.9 percent African-American, 2000 census), St. Bernard Parish (88.29 percent white, 7.62 percent African-American), and later for St. Tammany Parish (87.03 percent white, 9.90 percent African-American), while many middle-class African-Americans moved outward to Gentilly and New Orleans East, leaving the inner city mostly African-American and poor.
Was it not tax incentives and federal subsidies of the interstate and suburban developments that generated our current racially sorted urban geography? Therefore, the immobility of the poor and tax-incentive development strategies are nothing new to New Orleans and American cities. In fact, they have become the hallmark of neoliberal development since the 1960s. While residents with the resources to move generally did, this left behind the poor and elderly. The decline of the oil and gas industry, the increasing mechanization of the port, the lack of high-technology and industrial employment, plus deeply troubled public schools and a high crime rate, have shrunk New Orleans' population by 23 percent in 40 years, leaving the city mostly African-American, undereducated, and poor. Only low-paying service jobs in the city's ever-growing convention and tourism economy offer opportunity to the nonprofessional population, as this once-great city has had to resort to selling its past. In the post-suburban era, the removal of poor black populations from the inner city has become increasingly aggressive as the desire increases to expand the tourist city and "Opportunity Zones" for investment.
The federal program to demolish public housing projects, which often occupy prime real estate, began in the 1990s. The demolition of the St. Thomas public housing project was begun in 2001, dispersing its residents across the city. This was followed by the planned destruction of most of the public housing projects in the inner city. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) planned a transformative project typical of the federal program called Hope VI. While the program is "intended to decentralize poverty and create communities with a mix of economic classes and the amenities necessary for thriving neighborhoods," it is better known as a second wave of federal devastation -- the first being the destruction of the existing neighborhoods to build public housing following the 1937 Wagner housing act. The second wave is the demolition of these same projects for the implementation of Hope VI, a neoliberal program based on tax incentives and a hybrid of public and private investment.
In many ways what President Bush is proposing is nothing new. The fantasy of the neoliberal state is to believe that progress can happen without planning and that the market economy will automatically rise to the occasion to resolve economic and social crises while providing the basis for a healthy and just society.
Concerning New Orleans, what type of fundamental changes will occur as a result of massive federal funding guided by a neoliberal ideology of development? The restructuring of the city should be understood as a larger project of social and political restructuring initiated long before Hurricane Katrina. Aside from the questions of how to reengineer the levee systems is the more difficult question of how to address the social reengineering that has long been under way. If the poor folks of New Orleans were struggling for survival and rights to the city before the flood, after the reconstruction they just may be permanently evicted.
If the estimates reported are anywhere near accurate (80 percent of the city flooded), then New Orleans will be renovating and building houses for many years to come. Indeed, as some have stated, we could be facing the very real possibility that most of the houses between Claiborne Avenue and Lake Pontchartrain, the lower 9th ward extending into St. Bernard, and New Orleans East are beyond saving. This exceptional predicament could develop into one of the largest research projects in the world along with the greatest boom in the construction industry.
Over the past five years or so, as the city has made slow but steady progress -- a few critical lessons should be learned from the real estate and construction industry. It proved to be one of the fastest-growing industries employing individuals from entry-level positions to master tradesmen. The rise in the construction and real estate market has attracted everyone from local unskilled workers to professionals. For example, a friend of mine gave up his law profession to become a contractor specializing in renovating houses because the market was so lucrative. I have black and white friends who grew up poor in neighborhoods such as the Irish Channel who became plumbers, electricians and carpenters and now make very decent salaries.
>From entry-level positions to highly specialized craftsmen and contractors -- the residential construction and renovation industry could serve as an excellent base for generating new knowledge as well as a solid economy for a full spectrum of the population.
While planning more ambitious goals for the future -- such as overhauling the public educational system, attracting real industry (besides tourism), and providing high-paying jobs to retain graduates from some of the most impressive local institutions in the region -- is necessary, it is critical to initiate immediate strategies for the transitional first phase. A bottom-up strategy which utilizes the existing social infrastructure of small-scale neighborhood-based economics would allow the areas to develop while remain rooted in the cultural production of the place.
To believe that the neoliberal market-driven economy, which produces the market-driven city without regulation or planning, will attend to the needs of the poor is simply naive. With economic resources directed at active social groups, this city that resists (by default or otherwise) the sterile homogenization of typical American urban developments can continue to provide a rich cultural landscape of diverse ethnic and economic groups living in proximities unheard of in most American cities. If New Orleans is to prevail, it will not do so because of grand federal projects; it will do so by reinventing itself -- out of necessity -- with new forms of economic, urban and cultural grass-roots advancement and development in its own peculiar un-American way.
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