The future of New Orleans

As the floodwaters are pumped out and the decomposing bodies are collected, the slow and difficult task of rebuilding this ruined city will begin. Amid the wall-to-wall media coverage of the aftermath of Katrina – an event which will almost certainly go down as the worst natural disaster in this nation’s history – a great deal of discussion regarding the future of New Orleans, and by extension the entire Gulf Coast, is occurring. What will a rebuilt New Orleans look like? Will it be able to retain its unique culture in the wake of this calamity? How many people will return to the city? Should the city, which sits below sea level, be rebuilt at all? These questions have spawned numerous articles in numerous publications, from the Boston Globe to the Chicago Tribune to the Dallas Morning News to USA Today. Even local bloggers are engaging in the discussion.

Most fundamentally, does it make sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild the flooded city at all? Jack Shafer at slate.com says "no" while George Friedman at stratfor.com says “yes.” Friedman’s argument is that New Orleans “is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist” due to its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River. There needs to be a place where the river barges carrying goods and materials from the Great Plains and the Midwest are  offloaded onto ocean-going vessels, and vice-versa. The Port of New Orleans is critically important to our nation’s economy, and for that reason the city that supports it will return, “because it has to.”

Even if New Orleans is rebuilt – and I think that much of it will be – it will clearly never be the same city it was before Katrina obliterated it. For one, it will be much smaller. It’s impossible to stay at this time just how many of those who called New Orleans home on August 28th will return once it is safe to do so, but it is clear that many of those who have left – some having been evacuated to places as far away as Utah or Alaska – have nothing to return to and very likely will not be coming back. Those that do return to the region are likely to choose a location that is not as vulnerable to tropical storms. That’s why I believe that Baton Rouge, which in the same general region but many miles upriver from New Orleans, and whose population has been swelled by refugees from New Orleans, will probably eventually surpass New Orleans to become Louisiana’s largest and most dominant city, much the same way Houston overtook Galveston to become Texas’s major city after the 1900 Hurricane. 

Houston’s future, likewise, will almost certainly be different. A New York Times article (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune) declares that “no city in the United States is in a better spot to turn Katrina’s tragedy into opportunity” and notes that corporations are already moving their headquarters from New Orleans to Houston, even if only on a temporary basis. Added to this is the influx of tens of thousands of evacuees from New Orleans, many of whom are likely to stay. There will be a short-term economic boost as evacuated businesses fill vacant office space, evacuated residents fill empty residential space, and millions of dollars in federal aid for the displaced flows into Houston. The long-term economic, demographic and cultural effects of Katrina on Houston are less clear but are nonetheless likely to be positive. And the positive coverage Houston has received from the media regarding the city’s generosity and compassion for the victims of Katrina is likely to boost the city’s national image as well. 

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.  Unfortunately, a lot of these links are now dead. The tenth anniversary of Katrina is approaching and I will probably write something about it later this week.)