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September 14th, 2005 by Geaked

Interesting article over at The Slate. Jack Schafer pens some points to ponder in his September 7th entry “Don’t Refloat. The case against rebuilding the sunken city.”

Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And how many of the city’s well-off and wealthy workers—the folks who provide the city’s tax base—will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won’t be rebuilt.

An interesting read.

http://bluefairlane.blogspot.com <![CDATA[Clint]]>

I read this article a few days ago and found it fascinating.

Despite the sentiment New Orleans holds in American thought and culture, I’ve known from the start of this that the concept of rebuilding would be a tenuous one for the city … though I’m not as pessimistic as I was a week ago. The fact is, though, that a city is an economic entity that exists by the choice of the people, and the people of New Orleans will not choose to live there anymore. The cost will be too high, and nobody–New Orleanians or the US at large–will be inclined to pay it, not for a city that already was at the bottom of the class barrel. In the end, I think the French Quarter may survive to become a Key Wetstish, Mackinaw-type tourist destination, and there may be a supporting population approaching 20,000 or even 40,000, mainly concentrating in seasonal service jobs. The ruins themselves could ultimately become a tourist draw, depending on hold much we bulldoze and how much we leave to decay. New Orleans as we knew it, though, is dead.