Discussion: Should we rebuild Nawlins ?

vitrifier

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Rebuilding the Gulf Coast

In the aftermath of the tragic loss of life and property that Katrina left, plans to rebuild should begin as soon as possible. Bush said that we were gonna rebuild N.O. even bigger and better, but how can you do that through hiring Halliburton to come in and fix everything, and leaving the displaced inhabitants in the same economic situation that they were in before the storm hit.

Now is a chance for government to fix the inequality that existed.

Here's my idea:

No one can dispute that there is a massive need for construction right now, and basically the Gulf Coast will be a magnet for construction workers for years. I'm sure the plan of Bush will be to have Halliburton tear down all the old houses and rebuild malls and recreation areas. I'm sure gentrification will be exponential, new luxury condos will pop up in warehouses which are still structurally there, but will have to be gutted to get rid of mold etc.. Neighborhoods will be bulldozed, and redesigned with houses that no one there can afford.

Why not this remedy: We know that there will be a high demand for construction workers, and we have a surplus of people who's homes and businesses were lost. We also have a surplus of people who were previously homeless and undereducated. Why not start a work-training program for hurricane survivors that will pay them to train while they are learning useful skills in construction. Not only will people learn something they can use when the reconstruction is over, they will regain pride in knowing they helped rebuild a great city.

We have houses that need to be rebuilt, roads that will need repair, the levy should be upgraded, buildings will need renovation, there will be massive need for cleanup crews. Hell, even exterminators, housing inspectors, engineers, they will need labor for landscaping, masonry, electric systems, painting.

I'm positive what's gonna happen is there is plenty of money there, (Halliburton has it's hands in the pot already) and people from around the country will be invited in to rebuild, they will come, build, and leave with the money in hand.

I really think that on the job training and apprenticeship programs should be instituted, experts can train NO-ites on the job, and then the trained can continue to train others and do valuable work while earning some money. Maybe even some kind of housing program should be instituted so that workers can have somewhere for their family to live while they are rebuilding.

in this way, a significant portion of the $60B can go to NO to help stimulate the local economy and eliminate some of the economic inequity, and not Halliburton so rich people can get even richer.

For a city of that size to be rebuilt, it will easily take 5-10,000 workers, if not many more than that. What I envision is a largescale internship program, where participants are paired with previously trained contractors and workers, where they can learn on the job until they are competant and then can train others. In a scenario where rebuilding will take years, I think its feasible for an intern to learn on the job in a couple months. At the end of the reconstruction, there will be a surplus of people trained in multiple areas, who will be attractive employees for new incoming companies to hire.

Potentially, this long-term solution could bring a great economic upliftment to the city, reducing unemployment and crime in the long term.
 

blackbull1970

The Black Bastard
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Re: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast

The only people they gonna hire to rebuild that City is Illegal Mexicans.

And Haliburton will monitor the whole Re-construction effort.

Peace.
 

vitrifier

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Re: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast

Yeah, I know. Sad, because the way I see it it's a huge missed opportunity.
 

Greed

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Democrats, Unions Blast Bush Over Federal Rebuilding Effort

Democrats, Unions Blast Bush Over Federal Rebuilding Effort
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
September 09, 2005

(CNSNews.com) - The anti-Bush broadsides keep on coming from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

The California Democrat, who repeatedly has criticized Republicans over the hurricane rescue and relief effort, now says the Bush administration is "exploiting" workers when it comes to rebuilding areas devastated by the storm.

Pelosi and other friends of organized labor are furious that President Bush has issued an executive order rescinding the Davis-Bacon Act in hurricane-damaged areas.

The executive order means federal contractors involved in the rebuilding effort will be allowed to pay less than the prevailing wage in parts of the affected states. As the Washington Post reported, that will make it harder for union contractors to win bids.

President Bush told Congress that suspending the Davis-Bacon Act "will result in greater assistance to these devastated communities and will permit the employment of thousands of additional individuals."

Pelosi, however, describes the suspension of Davis-Bacon as the latest example of the Bush administration's "anti-worker agenda."

"It's this simple," Pelosi said in a press release: "Hurricane Katrina took away their jobs, now President Bush will take away their wages when they find new jobs. This is a partisan and punitive decision that will make economic recovery much harder for workers and their families."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney is furious as well: "At a time when Hurricane Katrina exposed the gaping hole of economic inequality and the shortcomings of our nation's infrastructure, it is unbelievable and outrageous that the White House would lift the time-tested standard for insuring quality work and decent living standards for taxpayer-financed reconstruction," he said.

Sweeney said employers are "all too eager to exploit workers," he said allowing that to happen now would be a "double tragedy."

Sweeney accused President Bush of taking advantage of a national tragedy to suspend a law that Bush's corporate backers have long wanted to scrap.

According to Pelosi, the Davis-Bacon Act sprang from the Great Depression - "at a time when scurrilous employers were taking advantage of the desperation of American workers to care for their families." The idea was to ensure that workers are paid a "livable wage" when taxpayer money is spent, she said.

But according to a report by the Cato Institute, Congress passed the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931 to benefit white-only unions at the expense of non-unionized black workers.

According to the Cato report, "Davis-Bacon was designed explicitly to keep black construction workers from working on Depression-era public works projects."

Those discriminatory effects continue today, the report says - "by favoring disproportionately white, skilled and unionized construction workers over disproportionately black, unskilled and non-unionized construction workers."

Democrats are calling on President Bush to immediately rescind the executive order and restore the "prevailing wage" law.

Earlier this week, Pelosi accused President Bush of being "oblivious, in denial, dangerous" when it comes to "all that didn't go right" in New Orleans.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=\Politics\archive\200509\POL20050909a.html
 
S

Sir 0tter

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A washingtonpost.com article

A Sad Truth: Cities Aren't Forever

By Joel Garreau

The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.

The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes, those, too.

But the far larger swath -- the real New Orleans where the tourists don't go, the part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the waves? Not so much.

When Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert said that it makes no sense to spend billions of federal dollars to rebuild a city that's below sea level, he added, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." In the face of criticism, he hurried to "clarify" his remarks. But according to Washington lore, such a flap occurs when someone inadvertently tells the truth. New Orleans has had a good run for 287 years, but even before Katrina hit, the city was on the wane, as its steadily dropping population figures for decades have shown.

All the brave rhetoric about the indomitable human spirit notwithstanding, we may want to consider some realities. As much as it causes heartache to those of us who love New Orleans -- the whole place, not just the one of myth and memory -- cities are not forever. Look at Babylon, Carthage, Pompeii..

Certainly, as long as the Mississippi River stays within its manmade banks, there will be a need for the almost 200 miles of ports near its mouth. But ports no longer require legions of workers. In the 21st century, a thriving port is not the same thing as a thriving city, as demonstrated from Oakland to Norfolk. The city of New Orleans has for years resembled Venice -- a beloved tourist attraction but not a driver of global trade.

Does the end of New Orleans as one of America's top 50 cities represent a dilemma of race and class in America? Of course. There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.

What the city of New Orleans is really up against, however, is the set of economic, historic, social, technological and geological forces that have shaped fixed settlements for 8,000 years. Its necessity is no longer obvious to many stakeholders with the money to rebuild it, from the oil industry, to the grain industry, to the commercial real estate industry, to the global insurance industry, to the politicians.

If the impetus does not come from them, where will it come from?

New Orleans, politically defined, is the 180.6 square miles making up Orleans Parish. (In Louisiana a "parish" is comparable to a county.) This place is roughly three times the size of the District of Columbia, though in 2004 it was less populated and its head count was dropping precipitously.

The original reason for founding La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718 was the thin crescent of ground French trappers found there. Hence the name "Crescent City." Elevated several feet above the Mississippi mud, it was the last semi-dry natural landing place before the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That crescent today is where you find all the stuff that attracts tourists, from the French Quarter, to the Central Business District (the "American Quarter") with the convention center and the Superdome, to the Garden District and Uptown. This area is roughly comparable to Washington from Adams Morgan through K Street to Georgetown and Foxhall Road.

That tourist crescent is relatively intact. (Only two of the 1,500 animals at the Audubon Zoo died.) But it is only perhaps 10 percent of the city.

The rest to the north of the river -- as distinct from the Algiers district on the south bank, which has always been something of an afterthought -- is under as much as 25 feet of water. For the last 90 years, this vast bulk of the city has required mammoth pumps to clear the streets every time it rains. This is where you'd find working folk -- cops, teachers and nurses -- with bathtub madonnas and colored Christmas tree lights. It's also where you would find areas of soul-destroying poverty, part of the shredding fabric of a city that had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Planners have warned for years that this area would be destroyed if the levees were ever breached.

Yet, as novelist Anne Rice wrote of her native city a week ago: "The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries . . . . They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs."

Sentiment, however, won't guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance -- without which nothing can be rebuilt.

Distinct from Orleans Parish is the rest of metropolitan New Orleans, with a population of 850,000 -- twice that of the "city." These parishes, including Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John, Plaquemines and St. James, were hard hit. There was four feet of water in some expensive living rooms in Metairie. But they were not scenes of comparable devastation.

Also distinct from the city are the region's ports, lining 172 miles of both banks of the Mississippi, as well as points on the Gulf. For example, the largest in the Western Hemisphere is the 54-mile stretch of the Port of South Louisiana. It is centered on La Place, 20 miles upriver from New Orleans. It moved 199 million tons of cargo in 2003, including the vast bulk of the river's grain. That is more than twice as much as the Port of New Orleans, according to the American Association of Port Authorities. The Port of Baton Rouge, almost as big as the Port of New Orleans, was not damaged. Also, downstream, there is the LOOP -- the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port out in the Gulf that handles supertankers requiring water depths of 85 feet. These ports are just a few of the biggest.

Illustrating how different the Port of New Orleans is from the city, its landline phones were back in business a week ago, says Gary LaGrange, the port's president and CEO. "The river is working beautifully," he reports, and "the terminal's not that bad."

Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between "port" and "city." As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans -- or Baltimore or Rotterdam -- thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.

The dazzling Offshore Oil Port, for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos.

Compare that to the tourism industry, which employs about 25,000 people in the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food sectors -- some 5 percent of the city's former population, according to the census.

New Orleans's economy is vividly illustrated by its supply of white-collar jobs. Its Central Business District has not added a new office building since 1989, according to Southeast Real Estate Business. It has 13.5 million square feet of leasable office space -- not much bigger than Bethesda/Chevy Chase, where rents are twice as high. The office vacancy rate in New Orleans is an unhealthy 16 percent and the only reason it isn't worse is that 3 million square feet have been remade as hotels, apartments and condominiums..

There are no national corporations with their headquarters in New Orleans. There are regional headquarters of oil companies such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, but their primary needs are an airport, a heliport and air conditioning. Not much tying them down. In the Central Business District you will also find the offices of the utilities you'd expect, such as the electricity company Entergy. But if you look for major employers in New Orleans, you quickly get down to the local operations of the casino Harrah's, and Popeye's Fried Chicken.

Hardly a crying demand for a commercial entrepot.

This is not the first time that harsh realities have reshaped cities along the Gulf of Mexico.

The historic analogy for New Orleans is Galveston. For 60 years in the 1800s, that coastal city was the most advanced in Texas. It had the state's first post office, first naval base, first bakery, first gaslights, first opera house, first telephones, first electric lights and first medical school.

Then came the hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900. As yet unsurpassed as the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it washed away at least 6,000 souls. Civic leaders responded with heroic determination, building a seawall seven miles long and 17 feet high. Homes were jacked up. Dredges poured four to six feet of sand under them.

Galveston today is a charming tourist and entertainment destination, but it never returned to its old commercial glory. In part, that's because the leaders of Houston took one look at what the hurricane had wrought and concluded a barrier island might not be the best place to build the major metropolis that a growing east central Texas was going to need.

They responded with an equally Lone-Star-scale project, the 50-mile-long Ship Channel. It made inland Houston a world port. In the wake of the Spindletop gusher that launched the Texas oil industry, Houston became the capital of the world petroleum industry. As the leaders of the "awl bidness" were fond of saying, "Don't matter if the oil is in Siberia or the South China Sea -- you buy your rig in Houston or dig for it with a silver spoon." Houston went on to become a finance, medical, university, biotech and now nanotech center. The first word from the surface of the moon was not "Galveston." It was "Houston?"

What will New Orleans be known for in 100 years?

How a city responds to disaster is shaped both by large outside forces and internal social cohesion. Chicago rebuilt to greater glory after the fire of 1871 destroyed its heart. San Franciscans so transformed their city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 that nine years later they proudly hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to toast the Panama Canal and their own resurrection.

Not long ago, I co-taught a team of George Mason University students in a semester-long scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the winners and losers 100 years from now. The students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their calculations, among hundreds of other factors. Yet in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, "If it turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, 'I know this guy in Jersey.' "

Will such fortitude be found in New Orleans? In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country -- the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement "I do better than average in a fistfight" than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans's murder rate, which is 10 times the national average. Not to mention the political candidates through the ages who, to little effect, have run on promises of cleaning up the corruption endemic to the government and police force. New Orleans is not called the Big Easy for nothing. This is the place whose most famous slogan is " Laissez les bons temps rouler" -- "Let the good times roll."

I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?

Joel Garreau, a Post reporter and editor, is the author of "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier" (Doubleday).
 

Zero

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Re: A washingtonpost.com article

His logic is solid, but there is a deeper delimma that the U.S. is facing that this article uncovers. The U.S. and it's industrial forces have a list of "throwaway" cities that grows longer and longer. If the country continues to focus on a few areas around the country and write off others, the issue is not "What will NO look like in 100 years", the real question is "What will AMERICA look like in 100 years". We have large pockets of population living in areas that are being thrown away. These people STILL need to support themselves and it is getting to the point where their only option is to move to massive metroplexes. This creates urban sprawl, out of control real estate prices and will eventually create massive urban ghettos and ecological destruction. Will America end up being a few Megaplexes and the remainder of the country a landfill to accomodate the garbage created by them? The end result could be a wasteland not unlike what is seen in movies with huge walled cities and massive swaths of "scorched earth" inhabited by social outcasts that provide no value to the remaining civilazation. Every time you abandon a city, you abandon PEOPLE (wealthy, poor and in between) and people need to go somewhere.
 
S

Sir 0tter

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Re: A washingtonpost.com article

Zero, let me first state that I rece'ed the article from my wife and I passed on your reply to her...below is her reply to your post....

No, what is happening is that people are starting businesses, opting for self-employment often when no other options are available. They are creating their own jobs when corporate America either won't create jobs for them or when they find themselves competing for jobs with Bangladeshi workers who will work for Bangladeshi wages. The biggest problem with this is that the current Administration has been busily withdrawing all support for microenterprise development, particularly among low-income entrepreneurs ... presumably with the thinking that you always need a few serfs around. Even now, a lot of people in rural areas have been getting ignored in the economic development mix because the so-called experts insist on smoke-stack chasing or on developing plans that revolve around luring high-growth entrepreneurs who need infrastructure and population density that leaves those rural areas out in the cold. These people have no clue. The explosion of very small businesses in the country over the last couple of decades is noteworthy (did you know that, right now, 75% of the businesses in the country have no employees?) and a lot of that growth is being fueled by legions of folks taking their economic destiny back into their own hands instead of waiting for crumbs from the capitalists. But these people need support, rather than lip service, from the politicians and the public.

Dawn Rivers Baker
Editor/Publisher

The MicroEnterprise Journal
http://www.microenterprisejournal.com
Where the nation's business meets microbusiness.
 

Zero

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Re: A washingtonpost.com article

Sir 0tter said:
Zero, let me first state that I rece'ed the article from my wife and I passed on your reply to her...below is her reply to your post....

No, what is happening is that people are starting businesses, opting for self-employment often when no other options are available. They are creating their own jobs when corporate America either won't create jobs for them or when they find themselves competing for jobs with Bangladeshi workers who will work for Bangladeshi wages. The biggest problem with this is that the current Administration has been busily withdrawing all support for microenterprise development, particularly among low-income entrepreneurs ... presumably with the thinking that you always need a few serfs around. Even now, a lot of people in rural areas have been getting ignored in the economic development mix because the so-called experts insist on smoke-stack chasing or on developing plans that revolve around luring high-growth entrepreneurs who need infrastructure and population density that leaves those rural areas out in the cold. These people have no clue. The explosion of very small businesses in the country over the last couple of decades is noteworthy (did you know that, right now, 75% of the businesses in the country have no employees?) and a lot of that growth is being fueled by legions of folks taking their economic destiny back into their own hands instead of waiting for crumbs from the capitalists. But these people need support, rather than lip service, from the politicians and the public.

Dawn Rivers Baker
Editor/Publisher

The MicroEnterprise Journal
http://www.microenterprisejournal.com
Where the nation's business meets microbusiness.
I agree with your wife and think what she says pretty much goes hand in hand with what I'm saying. Even with small business, you have to follow the markets and the abandonment of large swaths of the country to "follow" the money to these metroplexes is damaging. Small businesses are not able to create markets in these areas because the consumer base is lost. B2B is also hurt because many small business survive as support arms for larger entities or government agencies. When you take a city like Detroit or Cleveland and abandon it, you create a void in those cities that is filled by decay and poverty. First the busineses run, than the people run and what's left begins a steady state of decline. Small towns have it worse than the dying cities since rural America used to be the stronghold of entrpeneurship and now all of those small businesses have been swallowed by the WalMart's of the world. I've witnessed several small towns in LA and TX that have gone from thriving microeconomies to wastelands with a SuperWalmart as it's economic base. Those people continue to pour into cities like Houston and eventually those large cities hit a critical mass (think of a nation of NYC's with high crime, high poverty, high real estate and crumbling infrastructure).
 

QueEx

Rising Star
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Colin Powell slams Katrina effort

<font size="6"><center>Colin Powell slams Katrina effort</font size></center>

ABC Online
September 11, 2005

Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state seen as a potential leader for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, has joined the chorus of Americans criticising the disaster response at all levels of government.

"There have been a lot of failures at a lot of levels - local, state and federal," Mr Powell said in an interview with the American ABC network.

Political figures from both major US parties have assailed the slow response to the hurricane's assault last week on the Gulf Coast.

The hurricane devastated New Orleans and killed hundreds, possibly thousands, in the region.

"There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans," Mr Powell said in excerpts of the 20/20 interview published on ABC America's website.

"Not enough was done. I don't think advantage was taken of the time that was available to us and I just don't know why."

He said he did not think that race was a factor in the slow response but that many of those unable to leave New Orleans in time were trapped by poverty which disproportionately affects blacks.

Mr Powell was the highest-ranking black official during US President George W Bush's first term and chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Gulf War.

He is among various names mentioned in Washington as a potential 'hurricane czar' to take over the long-term recovery effort.

Two senators from Mr Bush's Republican party on Thursday proposed that such a job be created.

White House officials have not ruled out the option, saying it is among several being discussed.

Some black leaders, including Democrats in Congress, have charged that racism contributed to the misery of New Orleans's predominantly black storm victims.

"I don't think it's racism, I think it's economic," Mr Powell said. "But poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200509/s1457260.htm
 

QueEx

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Re: Colin Powell slams Katrina effort

<IFRAME SRC="http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=255" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=255">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 
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Dolemite

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Re: Colin Powell slams Katrina effort

cnn's polls are even worse for Bush's approval and for the racial disparity by what white people think and black people think
 

Warrior 7

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Re: Colin Powell slams Katrina effort

shit is fucked up in America for black people
and it won't get no better

not this
not anything will change the way whites (the ones who own shit)
fell and behave to the black and poor

marcus.gif
 

Fuckallyall

Support BGOL
Registered
I mean as it layed prior to Katrina

Pros-

Integral piece of American history;

Busiest port in the country;

Strategic placement (being at the mouth of one of the worlds largest rivers);

Cons-

In a silty delta (being at the mouth of one of the worlds largest rivers);

In hurricane alley in the worlds largest gulf, which turns tropical depressions into powerful hurricanes;

Most of it's below sea level, and still sinking (even as the ocean rises);

Some od the poorest and least mobile populations;

please feel free to add.
 

dockoldheart

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well the thing i worry about is that gentrification is a lot easier now that all the poor people have been moved out, and they don't necessarily HAVE to go back, there isn't anything necessarily there for them to go back to.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="5"><center>Hostility Greets Katrina Recovery Plan</font size>
<font size="4">Residents Assail Eminent Domain and
Other Facets of New Orleans Proposal</font size></center>

PH2006011102229.jpg

Carolyn Parker of the Lower Ninth Ward voiced disagreement
with the recovery commission, which envisions a much smaller
New Orleans. Photo Credit: Photos By Ben Margot -- Associated Press



WAshington Post
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006; Page A03

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 11 -- Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city's recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.

Hundreds of residents packed into a hotel ballroom interrupted the presentation of the long-awaited proposal with shouts and taunts, booed its main architect and unrolled a litany of complaints. One by one, homeowners stepped to a microphone to lampoon the plan -- which contemplates a much smaller city and relies on persuading the federal government to spend billions on new housing and a light-rail system -- as "audacious," "an academic exercise," "garbage," "a no-good, rotten scheme."

"You missed the boat," homeowner Fred Yoder, who lived in heavily flooded Lakeview, told committee members. "Give me a break: We don't need a light-rail system. We're in the mud."

The plan released Wednesday is the first stage of what is sure to be a multi-layered, multi-level effort to resuscitate New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who can accept or alter the proposal, will have to present the plan to a state commission that will control allocation of billions of federal dollars, as well as to Donald E. Powell, President Bush's hurricane recovery coordinator, and the White House. The commission's recommendations are heavily dependent on federal money, counting on $12 billion to buy storm-damaged homes and $4.8 billion for infrastructure improvements, including an ambitious light-rail proposal to connect downtown New Orleans with the city's airport, Baton Rouge and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The furious reaction to the plan is the latest agonizing episode in this city's troubled campaign to reinvigorate itself after the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Katrina last August. Nagin, already politically weakened by widespread criticism of his response to the flooding, now faces the difficult challenge of guiding decisions about whether some parts of the city will cease to exist.

Some activists have long accused the commission -- which was appointed by Nagin -- of trying to find ways to abandon predominantly black neighborhoods, such as the Lower Ninth Ward. Wednesday's unveiling did nothing to assuage their fears, even though commission members promised to give all neighborhoods an opportunity to prove that they should be rebuilt by convening planning groups in coming months. The proposed moratorium would be in the city's most damaged neighborhoods, and officials would use the four-month period to gauge whether enough residents will come back to make the areas viable.

"If this plan goes forward as it is, many people's worst fears about our African American heritage and population will come true," said Sue Sperry of the New Orleans Preservation Resource Center. "It's almost like it will be extinguished from this earth."

Within minutes of the plan's unveiling, Nagin was already showing signs that he might back away from the commission's most controversial proposal. He told WWL-AM that he had some "hesitancy" about the building moratorium. He promised to seek more public input before making a final decision.

At least two of the commission's proposals -- the creation of the Crescent City Rebuilding Authority to buy flood-damaged homes and the implementation of a master redevelopment plan -- will require changes to the city charter, a prospect sure to be contentious because of the mayor's long-standing animosities with the New Orleans City Council. The city is also waiting on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine base elevation levels required before flood insurance can be issued. The commission is hoping that Congress will approve a quasi-public recovery authority proposed by U.S. Rep. Richard H. Baker (R-La.) that would sell bonds to buy flood-damaged homes, then work with private developers to rebuild neighborhoods.

Despite the hurdles ahead, the commission urged fast action on a broad set of recommendations, including stronger levees and a restructured school system. John Beckham, a consultant who helped devise the plan, urged residents to "imagine the best city in the world."

Beckham -- who declined repeated requests Wednesday to identify the private foundation that hired him to draw up the plan for the commission -- told the audience that New Orleans could have "a park in every neighborhood," "a bustling downtown" and a city connected by bike paths and public transportation systems.

Beckham was introduced by the commission's urban planning chairman, Joseph C. Canizaro, a real estate developer and major fundraiser for Bush, who chuckled when he was booed by some in attendance. "This is just a beginning," Canizaro told the audience.

Mindful that Bush will have a tremendous influence on how much money finds its way to Louisiana, Beckham displayed some of the president's pledges on large screens. He reminded the crowd that Bush said Sept. 15 that "we will do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans and of his promise in December to build levees that are better and stronger than before. On Thursday, Bush will visit the city for the first time in three months.

The commission's recovery plan anticipates a city that will be only a fraction of its pre-Katrina size of nearly half a million residents. Beckham said the city now has about 144,000 residents and is projected to grow to 181,000 by September and 247,000 by September 2008.

The shrunken city will need a restructured and more efficient local government, Beckham said, drawing smirks from City Council members seated behind the committee. The City Council, which has clashed with Nagin repeatedly -- most recently trying to use zoning laws to block sites he selected for temporary housing trailers -- has effectively been cut out of the power loop in the recovery process and does not have authority over the recovery plan. Before the commission's report had even been announced, five City Council members -- responding to leaks of the plan's main components to the city's influential newspaper, the Times-Picayune -- held a news conference to condemn the committee in the same hotel where the recovery plan was to be unveiled.

Council member Jackie Brechtel Clarkson called the proposal "a blatant violation of property rights."

"I think it's unprecedented in America," said Clarkson, who is also a real estate agent.

The council members were flanked by leaders of the large Vietnamese community that flocked after the Vietnam War to New Orleans East, one of the areas that would be affected by the moratorium. "It just hurt us -- again," said the Rev. Luke Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. "We have 700, 800 families already returned, ready to gut and fix their houses."

Nguyen streamed into the reception hall, shouldering past activists and homeowners bristling with anger. On a table nearby, the commission had placed placards, declaring, "We're Home." Nguyen did not bother to pick one up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6011102146.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
 

QueEx

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<IFRAME SRC="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4604204.stm" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4604204.stm">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 
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nolaboi504

Star
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QueEx said:
[frame]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4604204.stm[/frame]


Hell yeah they should rebuild New Orleans. If they can spend billions on Europue after WWII and pour billions of dollars in Iraq they can spend 15Billion on levees in New Orleans.

New Orleans didn't die on August 28.
 

Fuckallyall

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Hell yeah they should rebuild New Orleans. If they can spend billions on Europue after WWII and pour billions of dollars in Iraq they can spend 15Billion on levees in New Orleans.

New Orleans didn't die on August 28.

Good point, but I have a couple of problems with it.
1. It is not "they" rebuilding it, but "us", as every penny comes from taxpayers.
2. Europe did not suffer thier damage from a natural disaster that history shows has a great if not definite chance of repeating itself, especially if many climatologists are right about powerful hurricanes becoming more frequent. And, if we did not help repair Europe (which benefited the US trmendously), many more countries would have gone commie. The NO has no such political implications.
3. Aren't we pissed that we are spending so much money in Iraq? How does it make sense to repeat what many consider to be a folly ?
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="6"><center>A City Fears for Its Soul</font size>
<font size="4">New Orleans Worries That Its Unique Culture May Be Lost</font size></center>


By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 3, 2006; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans, the theme park?

Frightening as it sounds, the prospect of this sultry, eclectic city rising from the muck of Hurricane Katrina as a sterile imitation of itself is becoming an abiding preoccupation. Even as the city's riverfront high ground -- now dubbed the "Isle of Denial" by one scholar -- gamely revives, miles of culturally vibrant neighborhoods that once smelled of simmering red beans and hosted funky second-line parades lie dark and empty, their futures in doubt.

A quiet but increasingly urgent conversation about that culture's survival consumes this city, both on its street corners and in its institutions. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a woman who stables horses on the Mississippi River levee frets about "a land grab" that could bulldoze her home to make a "playground for the rich." In the Bywater neighborhood, an acclaimed photographer longs for the sound of teenagers blowing horns from porches. At Loyola University, authors and academics convene a panel to ponder whether New Orleans culture can be saved.

Their worry is that the curious and crazy that developed naturally here over time will be replaced by an artificial version of what once was, that a desperate attempt to resurrect New Orleans will turn it into a sanitized, charmless, soulless city.

"Will this quirky and endlessly fascinating place become an X-rated theme park, a Disneyland for adults?" Tulane University professor Lawrence N. Powell asked in a speech that has been copied and circulated, gaining a cultlike following. "Is it fated to be the place where Orlando embraces Las Vegas? That's the American Pompeii I apprehend rising from the toxic sludge deposited by Lake Ponchartrain: an ersatz city, a veritable site of schlock and awe."

Countless plasterers, folk artists, brass-band high-steppers, corner barbers, Mardi Gras Indians, dive-bar guitarists and neighborhood kooks are among more than 300,000 former residents flung across the country. Their epic diaspora has shrunk this now-fractional city's population to 140,000. Gone with them is one of the world's most intriguing street-life scenes, a culture blended of Catholicism and voodoo, Haitians and Italians, Spaniards and French, slaves and free men.

Much of the official chatter about the revival of New Orleans culture is trained on grand projects with limited prospects because of a lack of money, such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's proposal for a jazz district and a musicians village. But the greatest worries here are about the loss of the earthy characters and eccentrics who populated the city's now silent neighborhoods.

After all, as historian Alecia P. Long put it, "New Orleans is the place where the weird turn pro." It is a city that not only tolerated, but celebrated, a woman nicknamed Ruthie the Duck Girl, who not long ago was routinely wearing a wedding dress to walk her leashed ducks in the French Quarter.

Preservationists warily point to a bleak street downtown, a zone of drab modern buildings and parking lots, as their nightmare vision of the future. A giant clarinet painted on the side of a hotel looms over the area, once home to a rich cluster of jazz clubs. The clubs are gone, but the clarinet with its frozen painted shadow remains, a silent still-life to replace the musical potions once created there.

New Orleans politicians and power brokers have helped along the sense of unease, saying and unsaying all sorts of things that trouble the purists. Members of Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission first said all neighborhoods of the city would be rebuilt. Then they reversed themselves, recommending a building moratorium in much of the city and suggesting that some neighborhoods -- many of them centers of African American culture -- be forced to prove their viability or be bulldozed. Amid the ensuing uproar, the mayor came out against the moratorium, reverting to the position first articulated by his committee members.

The mayor at one point announced that he wanted to create a casino district to stimulate growth, then quickly dumped the idea. Later, he declared that New Orleans would again be a black-majority "chocolate city" -- then he apologized, saying chocolate is made by blending dark chocolate and "white milk."

Down in the bowl that is the Lower Ninth Ward, all the back-and-forth has left Shelby Wilson, a graphic artist who stables her two Arabian horses on the Mississippi River levee, feeling suspicious of "a screw job, a power play," despite assurances to the contrary. Her home, a sturdy bulwark with three-foot-thick walls made from old barges, could be bulldozed if her neighborhood, which is predominantly black, is not rebuilt.

"They're trying to mold this city into a psuedo-Disneyland, gambling center, party center, a facade," Wilson said. "But that is not what New Orleans is about . . . the allure of this city is that mix of people, those ingredients."

Drive up out of the Ninth Ward and the images are disheartening. The century-old St. Roch Market, a weather-beaten, peaked-roof jewel where generations of African Americans lined up for chocolate-colored gumbo and crawfish, stands in silence. "Oh, they had the best po' boys," Pam Dashiell, a neighborhood activist, said while driving by one recent afternoon.

Up the street, a hulking pink grocery store is empty, no longer dishing out roast beef sandwiches. The Saturn Bar, a spot filled with kitschy garage-sale paintings and baseball caps that drew whites and blacks, is shuttered. The owner, an irreplaceable local legend named O'Neil Broyard who would tell you about naked boxing matches if you were lucky, died cleaning up after the storm.

Gone, too, is Joseph Casamento, who died while evacuating; he shucked oysters for half a century amid the floor-to-ceiling tile of his family's eponymous restaurant across town on Magazine Street. And gone, too, is Mary Hansen, the 95-year-old institution who before the storm served rich, syrupy delights called nectar ices at her landmark stand, Sno-Bliz.

"This damn storm and its aftermath killed a lot of keepers of the flame," said Camille Strachan, a lawyer active in neighborhood-renewal projects. "There are all of these hard-to-quantify little losses."

Strachan said she finds herself driving through neighborhoods whose existences are imperiled, and every time she sees something else that has disappeared. "Look over there -- Slim's Barbershop," she said one afternoon, pointing at the boarded windows of a tiny shop in the Dryades neighborhood near downtown. "If he were open, we could go in there to get the pulse of the neighborhood. How are you going to know anything, if you don't have barbershops?"

Race permeates every conversation here. Even though some predominantly white neighborhoods such as Lakeview were decimated by the flooding, it is the poor black neighborhoods that seem most endangered. It was those neighborhoods that birthed jazz funerals and the spontaneous second-line parades, black New Orleans's response to the white-dominated carnival season parades. A Brown University study concluded that 80 percent of New Orleans's black population may not return if flooded neighborhoods are not rebuilt.

"It can certainly be a whitewashed city," said Michael E. Crutcher, a University of Kentucky professor who is an expert on New Orleans marching clubs. " 'Whitewashed' means both things -- sanitized and whiter. The people who aren't here seem to have been forgotten."

Crutcher predicts that black sections such as Faubourg Treme, where he once delighted in the scent of yak-a-mein, a concoction of turkey necks and noodles, will be given over to expensive condominiums, pricing out poor blacks.

Even the most optimistic city boosters -- people such as Marsalis, who has said that New Orleans "will sustain its culture" -- are worried. "We never did a good job with our culture when it came to anything that had to do with black people," Marsalis said in an interview. "It's very difficult to try to sustain it in a culture of racism. In the U.S. of A., we're good at building malls, putting up parking lots and putting more black people out of their homes."

Many of the city's Mardi Gras "Indian tribes," which once gathered in tiny "home bars" -- seductively dark places, some illuminated only by dangling light bulbs -- don't have home bars anymore. Now the chiefs get together in the more controlled environment of Tipitina's club, calling out to their spy boys and their flag boys -- immortalized when the Dixie Cups recorded "Iko Iko" and sang, "My flag boy told your flag boy: I'm gonna set your flag on fire."

One recent Sunday at Tipitina's, the crowd surged forward, mesmerized by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux's call-and-response rhythm and the spy boys taunting each other with exaggerated grimaces and herky-jerk dance moves. But a thick, sad-eyed man walked toward the door.

"Where you going?" another man called out above the drums.

"Back to Georgia," the thick man said.

The gyrations were the same, the beat was as intoxicating as ever, but many in the room had been reduced to visitors, mere tourists from Houston or Atlanta or Dallas, here to a spend a few days or a few hours in a city that was once theirs.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6020202746.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
 
B

Borg

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hell no. imho nagin is a "tom". put in place by the powers that be to appease and control the "colored folk". Katrina knocked down the fence and slaves escaped. Now, bossman needs his negroes back to perform his menial labor and keep his tax dollars flowing -thru the courts, sales tax and the likes, so he has "TOM" ray Nagin on tv begging for folks (black) to come back.....
 

Fuckallyall

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Borg said:
hell no. imho nagin is a "tom". put in place by the powers that be to appease and control the "colored folk". Katrina knocked down the fence and slaves escaped. Now, bossman needs his negroes back to perform his menial labor and keep his tax dollars flowing -thru the courts, sales tax and the likes, so he has "TOM" ray Nagin on tv begging for folks (black) to come back.....
Who are the "powers that be"? Please don't just say "The Man".

Also, could you consider the fact that the NO should not have been built where it was, and nature caught up with our error ?
 
The NOLA will be rebuilt , yes it will. But it will rebuilt with maximum realestate profits in mind so don't expect the hoods or even the lower middle class areas to return when the new NOLA is built. Once construction starts expect property values to skyrocket as white people become intere$ted.
 
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Fuckallyall

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TheGunslinger said:
The NOLA will be rebuilt , yes it will. But it will rebuilt with maximum realestata profits in mind so dont expect the hoods or even the lower middle class areas to return hwne the new NOLA is built. Once construction start expect property values to skyrocket as white people become inter$ted.
Then why don't you start by buying some land now? Why do you seem to have such a dislike for making money ?
 
Fuckallyall said:
Then why don't you start by buying some land now? Why do you seem to have such a dislike for making money ?

I have no problem making money.

I thought that people where concerned about the gentrifcation of NOLA so that the black population would not be what it was before!? I am not sure if the sales of land have started yet but even if they have I can't afford any now.
 

smoovetek

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Nawlins will be rebuilt but not for the better i'm afraid. The city need some one to unify it. The whole region needs to unify. They have no laws in place to protect the little man. No housing provisons. No plan. So why would people come back to live in less than desirable conditions. The majority of the black population in Nawlins rented. The land is already in the hands of wealthy people who do not even live in Lousiana. The only people sticking it out in the N.O. are those people who own property.
 
B

Borg

Guest
Fuckallyall said:
Who are the "powers that be"? Please don't just say "The Man".

Also, could you consider the fact that the NO should not have been built where it was, and nature caught up with our error ?

"the powers that be"- the profiteers,- the ones who gain from helping "others" to remain stupid, drunk, and ghetto happy.
 

Fuckallyall

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Borg said:
"the powers that be"- the profiteers,- the ones who gain from helping "others" to remain stupid, drunk, and ghetto happy.
Dude, you just said "the Man", only that you used 20 words to do it. BTW, people can only profit when somebody else is willing to pay them. Unless the governments involved, which of course many people want, but then get pissed when they get jerked.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

Still No Home for the Holidays
for Katrina Survivors

National Fair Housing Alliance Files Housing Discrimination Complaint
and Issues Report about Discrimination Post-Hurricane


WASHINGTON, D.C. - December 22, 2006 -- The National Fair Housing Alliance today filed race discrimination complaints against two apartment complexes in Gulf States of Florida and Texas: Governors Gate Apartment Homes in Pensacola, Fl and Crestbrook Apartments in Burleson, TX. The Alliance also issued StillNo Home for the Holidays, a report outlining housing discrimination tht hurricanse survivors continue to face this holiday season.


Report - Still No Home for the Holidays for Katrina Survivors
http://www.nationalfairhousing.org/resources/newsArchive/resource_70545735064146942713.pdf

`
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Re: A washingtonpost.com article

19 months later ....


Nagin Suspects a Plot To Keep Blacks Away



PH2007031602005.jpg

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said
the slow recovery may be intended
to hange the city's demographics.
(By Hamil R. Harris -- The Washington Post)


Washington Post
By Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 17, 2007; Page A07

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has suggested that the slow recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina -- which has prevented many black former residents from returning -- is part of a plan to change the racial makeup and political leadership of his and other cities.

"Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere," Nagin said at a dinner sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers that target black readers. "They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community."

Nagin's remarks Thursday night recalled the controversy stirred up by his prediction in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in 2006 that, despite the evacuation of thousands of black people in the wake of Katrina, New Orleans would once again become a "chocolate city." The mayor later apologized for the comment, which had infuriated many whites and African Americans.

Nagin, who won reelection last May over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, referred obliquely to the "chocolate city" comment at the dinner and suggested that his assertion that New Orleans would once again be a majority-black city had made him a political target.

"Everybody in America started to wake up and say: 'Wait a minute. What is he doing? What is he saying? We have to make sure that this man doesn't go any further,' " Nagin told a room full of black newspaper publishers and editors at the Capital Hilton.

Referring to Landrieu, who is white, as "the golden boy," Nagin suggested his chance at reelection in the mayoral race had seemed slim because "they dispersed all of our people across 44 states with one-way tickets."

"They thought they were talking about a different kind of New Orleans," Nagin said. "They didn't realize that folks were awake, that they were paying attention."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031601951.html
 

Duece

Get your shit together
BGOL Investor
QueEx said:
Bumped on 2nd Anniversary


Douglas Brinkley said New Orleans is a tail of 2 cities and he's right, the parts of New Orleans that are really up for debate are New Orleans East and Ponchartrain Park. During the time racial segregation in New Orleans mayor Chep Morrison and Victor Schiro who were both racists supported building in the East and Ponchartrain park because it ensured segretation, it gave blacks middle and upper class neighborhoods where we could buy decent houses in decent neighborhoods and kept them from moving into other white neighborhoods, although there was white flight from the 9th Ward to St. Bernard and other areas. The point is the parts that up for discussion are those two largely black voting blocks, those areas were built on swamp and wetlands, basicly land nobody wanted and they gave it to us, after Katrina they wanted to turn it into greenspace, when they should've turned it into greenspace in the 50s and 60s not 50 years later
 
D

DANGEROUSBLACKMAN

Guest
They Should Only Rebuild If It's Fair For Both Sides (Blacks & Whites Etc).
 
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