What do you envision the city will look like after say . . .5 yrs? I think we will definately see a more affluent city. I doubt many of the poor will return to the city. I can definately see the developers coming in and rebuilding and adding. I dunno. I think It will definately be even more touristy Rocket River
The city will be very, very different. Much more affluent. A lot of its soul will be lost. I don't see how pro sports will stick around. Maybe a population approaching 500,000. Jefferson Parish seems to have done OK. But Orleans Parish and St. Bernard are in shambles. The decisions made in the next couple of weeks by businesses that previously had offices there will be huge. Many are saying there is nothing left there to serve. Small business there is dead; no clients and receivables are worthless.
A revived central business district, a repaired Superdome, a viable French Quarter and Garden district, acres of suburban apartments to house the working class and a vast wasteland of desloated low income housing that will never be restored. (in other words a little Houston!)
They should make the new New Orleans what the old New Orleans had become... at least the touristy sections. It should be an adult amusement park. They would have Jazz Street U.S.A. as one of its lands. They would have a Red Light District with all the strip places. VooDoo corner would contain a first class haunted house, a second haunted mansion type ride, and historical places. Various French, Creole, and Southern food stands and restaurant would be all over the place. So much of the touristy areas already were trying to capitalize on the various stereotypical images of the city, why not go all out, at this point.
I agree with all of that except I don't think the Superdome will be repaired. I think its going to be raised.
I was going to post a thread along these lines but I will go ahead and tag onto this thread. How do y'all think the reconstruction of NO should be handled? Is this a job that should mostly be left up to the private sector or to the government? How much planning should be involved? Even if it is mostly private development should government regulations and planning take a big role like in cities like Portland and Seattle or should government take a back seat and let it develop more along the lines of private dictates like Houston?
i still don't know who's going to insure re-development there without significant improvements to the levees. and sishir is right. the superdome is history. with a pricetag of $400 million just to renovate it, they could knock it down and build a new stadium. of course, that will take 4-5 years to complete all that...by that time the saints will have found a home elsewhere. and the "new" new orleans won't have the capacity to support a pro football team.
that's why i think the real heart and soul of nola won't be the same. this was in the Chronicle's website yesterday: How long will your house guests stay? Do you think New Orleans will eventually be rebuilt? No. New Orleans had a great period, and now it is going to sink into some kind of glorious mess, like Venice, and become just a tourist spot. People will come to gamble in the casinos and feel the grandeur of what was once there, which the tourist bureau will do its best to recreate. Must you be so defeatist? I am sure the city will be re-engineered, but I am afraid that in the process it will lose its soul - the people who sing the blues will be gone. A lot of writers and artists won't return to New Orleans. They have no houses. They will go all over the country, back to where they came from. -- Andrei Codrescu, Baton Rouge writer
Yes that's exactly what I meant and here is my concept sketch for the New New Orleans. Note the new new Superdome on the right hand side of this other sketch. Plus I plan on giving Mayor Nagin a makeover including a toupee.
aahh ha... I see now how the mayor plans on keeping law and order in the New New Orleans. BLASTERS!!!! btw...It wouldnt surprise me to see alot of the diehard jazz/creole/dixieland performers return. Alot of them see NO as the only place to practice their art...they want to retuen and attempt to revive the heart and soul of the city...the music scene.
VERY interesting article. I have to admit I was thinking last week how I'd like to go buy some property in New Orleans right now. I'm not a complete heartless b*stard though.....I genuinely believe that no matter what, some people just won't want to return. That will create an imbalance in supply and demand, and make for some bargains. Looks like the reverse could be true though.
here ya go: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502010_pf.html Poll: Many Evacuees Plan to Settle in Houston By Richard Morin and Lisa Rein Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, September 16, 2005; A01 HOUSTON, Sept. 15 -- Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters here say they will move back home while two-thirds of those who want to relocate plan to settle permanently in the Houston area, according to a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. The wide-ranging poll found these survivors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath remain physically and emotionally battered but unbroken. They praise God and the U.S. Coast Guard for saving them, but two weeks after the storm nearly half still sought word about missing loved ones or close friends who may not have been as lucky. Most already know they have no home left to return to. The overwhelming majority lack insurance to cover their losses. Few have bank accounts, savings accounts or credit cards that work. Still, nearly nine in 10 said they were "hopeful" about the future. And while half say they feel depressed about what lies ahead, just a third say they were afraid. "I'm setting goals for myself and I'm ready to conquer them," said Lakisha Morris, 30, who was plucked from her roof and spent two nights outdoors on an interstate highway before boarding a bus for Houston. She said she wants to start her own business in this city, possibly day care for the children of fellow evacuees. The poll vividly documents the immediate and dramatic changes that Hurricane Katrina has brought to two major American cities. It also suggests that what may be occurring is a massive -- and perhaps -- permanent transfer of a block of poor people from one city to another. That may have social, economic and political consequences that will be felt for decades, if not generations, in both communities. Forty-three percent of these evacuees plan to return to New Orleans, the survey found. But just as many -- 44 percent -- say they will settle somewhere else, while the remainder are unsure. Many of those who are planning to return say they will be looking to buy or rent somewhere other than where they lived. Overall, only one in four say they plan to move back into their old homes, the poll found. Some can't wait. "Every morning I wake up and pray for them to say we can go back to New Orleans," said Lynette Toca, 26, a homemaker with two young sons who had never been outside her city before they drove to Houston the Saturday before the hurricane swept through on Aug. 29. According to the poll, most of those who do not plan to go back to New Orleans are already living in their new hometown. Fully two in three of the 44 percent who won't return say they plan to permanently relocate in the Houston area, the city that now is home to about 125,000 New Orleans evacuees. A total of 680 randomly selected evacuees living temporarily in the Astrodome, Reliant Center and George R. Brown Convention Center as well as five Red Cross shelters in the greater Houston area were interviewed Sept. 10-12 for this Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey. More than 8,000 evacuees were living in these facilities and awaiting transfer to other housing when the interviewing was conducted. More than nine in 10 of these evacuees said they were residents of New Orleans, while the remainder said they were from the surrounding area or elsewhere in Louisiana. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus the percentage points. Potential differences between these evacuees and those not living in shelters or those who lived elsewhere in the affected Gulf Coast region make it impossible to conclude that these results accurately reflect the views of all Gulf Coast residents displaced by Katrina. The Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll suggests these evacuees will start their lives with virtually nothing. Seven in 10 currently do not have a savings or checking account. Just as many have no usable credit cards. Missing, too, from their lives are the vital support networks of relatives and friends that have temporarily absorbed the bulk of those who fled the Gulf Coast storm zone: eight in 10 say they have no one that they can stay with until they get back on their feet. The poll suggests that the story of these evacuees is not merely about how little they were left with -- it is also about how fragile their lives were even before the storm hit. Together, those findings suggest the long-term challenges posed by the evacuees to local and state governments already cutting back services to their neediest citizens. According to the poll, six in 10 evacuees had family incomes of less than $20,000 last year. Half have children under age 18. One in eight were unemployed when the storm hit. Seven in 10 said they had no insurance to cover their losses. Fully half have no health insurance. Four in 10 had suffered from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or were physically disabled. When illness or injury strike, they were twice as likely to say they had sought care from hospitals such as the New Orleans Charity Hospital than from either a family doctor or health clinic -- needs for costly services that now will be transferred to hospitals in the Houston area or wherever these evacuees eventually settle. This survey suggests some of these emergency shelters may be forced to host evacuees for weeks and months, or perhaps longer. While half expect to be relocated to an apartment, house or with a volunteer family within a few days, one in five expected to be living in an emergency shelter for at least a few more weeks. Indeed, Houston officials said this week that they have delayed their goal of emptying the temporary shelters by this coming weekend, in part because so many of the remaining evacuees lack resources to set up households on their own. The survey also provides disquieting clues as to why so many residents remained in New Orleans to face Hurricane Katrina despite orders to evacuate. A third of those who stayed said they never heard the mandatory order to evacuate issued by the mayor the day before the storm hit. Somewhat fewer -- 28 percent -- said they heard the order but did not understand what they were to do. Thirty-six percent acknowledged they heard the order, understood it but did not leave. In hindsight, 56 percent said they could have evacuated while 42 percent said it was impossible. Bad decisions, bad luck or sheer stubbornness kept many in town. More than a third said the single biggest reason they did not leave was that they thought the storm would not be as bad as it was, or they decided too late to flee. One in 10 simply did not want to leave. Slightly fewer stayed behind to protect their homes from damage or theft. A handful said they did not want to leave pets. Angie Oneal, 44, a housekeeper from the Sixth Ward, heard the warnings to leave on her radio. But she stayed, to protect her belongings. "I said to myself, if we went through Bessie, I thought we could go through Katrina," Oneal said. "I thought it was just going to pass over." She worried about the new TV, computer and bedroom set she had just bought. The days immediately after the storm but before they were evacuated to Houston were filled with terror, pain and uncertainty. A third of the interviewees said they had been trapped in their homes and had to be rescued; four in 10 said they spent at least a day living outdoors on the street. Four in 10 were rescued by the Coast Guard, National Guard, police officers or firefighters. Still, half said friends or neighbors helped them to safety (25 percent) or they managed to reach safe havens on their own (24 percent). A majority said there was a time when they were without food or water. A third were trapped in the city without their prescription drugs. One in five managed to survive the storm, only to be threatened or assaulted by other survivors in the chaos that followed Katrina. Religious faith has sustained the respondents through their worst days in New Orleans and now during their time in Houston. Eight in 10 said their faith was very important during the past two weeks. Remarkably, 81 percent said the ordeal has strengthened their belief while only 4 percent said it weakened it. "We say, God did this for a reason, to clean up the shootings and murders that have become New Orleans," said Dorothy Stukes, 54, a school security officer from Jefferson Parish who said she spent "four days of hell" in the Louisiana Superdome. "Ninety-five percent of us are good people, but now God is going to take care of those that are not." While the hurricane drew most New Orleans evacuees closer to God, it further estranged many from their government and political leaders. Three-quarters agreed that the response was too slow "and there's no excuse." Seven in 10 disapproved of the way President Bush has handled the recovery effort. But majorities also were critical of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (58 percent) and New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (53 percent). Overall, six in 10 said the initially sluggish government response has made them feel that "government doesn't care" about people like them, according to the poll.
Following up on the questions that I asked earlier in the thread apparently there is a huge brewing debate among Congressional Republicans regarding how much government money should be spent, especially in light of the promises made by GW Bush in his speech tonight for the amount of Fed. aid. From the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/p...&en=293958618168cb71&ei=5094&partner=homepage G.O.P. Split Over Big Plans for Storm Spending By CARL HULSE Published: September 16, 2005 WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - The drive to pour tens of billions of federal dollars into rebuilding the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast is widening a fissure among Republicans over fiscal policy, with more of them expressing worry about unbridled spending. On Thursday, even before President Bush promised that "federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone," fiscal conservatives from the House and Senate joined budget watchdog groups in demanding that the administration be judicious in asking for taxpayer dollars. One fiscal conservative, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said Thursday, "I don't believe that everything that should happen in Louisiana should be paid for by the rest of the country. I believe there are certain responsibilities that are due the people of Louisiana." Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, called for restoring "sanity" to the federal recovery effort. Congress has approved $62 billion, mostly to cover costs already incurred, and the price tag is rising. The House and Senate approved tax relief Thursday at an estimated cost of more than $5 billion on top of $3.5 billion in housing vouchers approved by the Senate on Wednesday. "We know we need to help, but throwing more and more money without accountability at this is not going to solve the problem," Mr. DeMint said. Their comments were in marked contrast to the sweeping administration approach outlined by Mr. Bush in his speech from New Orleans and a call by Senate Republican leaders for a rebuilding effort similar to the Marshall Plan after World War II. Congressional Democrats advocated their own comprehensive recovery program Thursday, promoting a combination of rebuilding programs coupled with housing, health care, agriculture and education initiatives. The president also emphasized the importance of private entrepreneurship to create jobs "and help break the cycle of poverty." Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said he believed that providing rapid and extensive help overrode the need to cut spending elsewhere. "I think we have to understand that we have a devastation that has to be taken care of," Mr. Reid said. "And I'm not into finding where we can cut yet." That mindset is troubling to other lawmakers who fear that in addition to a reborn Gulf Coast, something else will rise from the storm: record federal deficits. "We know this is a huge bill," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. "We don't want to lay it on future generations." Given the fierce political backlash to the stumbling relief effort in the days after the hurricane struck, House Republican leaders have been reluctant to stand in the way of any emergency legislation. After the speech, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert acknowledged that the price tag means that "for every dollar we spend on this, it is going to take a little bit longer to balance the budget." He said he was willing to listen to ideas to pay for the aid, but, "Quite frankly, we have to get this job done." Despite those comments, many Republicans are increasingly edgy about the White House's push for a potentially open-ended recovery budget, worried that the president - in trying to regroup politically - was making expensive promises they would have to keep. "We are not sure he knows what he is getting into," said one senior House Republican official who requested anonymity because of the potential consequences of publicly criticizing the administration. The fears about the costs of the storm are building on widespread dissatisfaction among conservatives about spending in recent years by the Republican-controlled Congress. That unrest was already high after Congressional approval of a transportation measure that critics denounced as bloated with marginal home-state projects. That sore spot was rubbed raw earlier this week when Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, suggested that the Republican Congress had already trimmed much of the fat from the federal budget, making it difficult to find ways to offset hurricane spending. Mr. Coburn called such a claim ludicrous and other Republicans took exception as well. "There has never been a time where there is more total spending and more wasteful spending in Washington than we have today," said Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and the head of the conservative Club for Growth. "There is ample opportunity to find the offsets we need so that this does not have to be a fiscal disaster as well as a natural disaster." On another front, Republicans and Democrats continued their dispute over how to investigate government failures in the storm response. The House approved a select committee to oversee the inquiry despite Democratic objections that only a special commission outside of Congress could do a credible job. The House voted 224 to 188 to establish a 20-member panel to work in concert with a similar Senate panel in studying the adequacy of local, state and federal preparations for the storm and why the relief effort was so troubled, stranding thousands in chaotic conditions without sufficient food, water or medical care. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said the special committee was an effort to "whitewash" the inquiry though she later said she would not stand in the way if Democrats want to sit on the panel. In another effort to reduce Democratic opposition, Mr. Hastert on Thursday named Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a sometimes Republican maverick from Virginia, to lead the panel. As for paying for the recovery, Ms. Pelosi raised the possibility of 50-year bonds tied to the reconstruction. The conservative Republicans worried about the outlays said the president and Congressional leaders need to ask the public to share in the sacrifice and suggested savings could be easily wrung from federal agencies or in Congress in ways like eliminating pet projects. "Katrina breaks my heart," said Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana and chairman of a caucus of more than 100 House Republicans who advocate conservative spending policy. "Congress must do everything the American people expect us to do to meet the needs of families and communities affected by Katrina. But we must not let Katrina break the bank for our children and grandchildren."
They should replicate Bourbon St. as much as possible and try to guilt people for not visiting N.O. before Katrina. I guarantee you that when things settle back down, a lot of people are going to visit N.O. just because they feel they better take the chance now.
