Katrina, New Orleans and Reality

It’s been four years since I was traveling through the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on a delightful vacation when a newspaper headline caught my eye. “New Orleans Evacuated!” That will make you buy a paper no matter how oblivious vacation has made you.
Katrina. We read. We bought more papers (we were camping that trip—no motel TV). Gas prices spiked to the then unthinkable $3.75 a gallon. A waitress told us her brother managed a service station nearby and he had been told he would soon be out of gas.
We filled our tank—not waiting to get to the Indian Reservation where it would be cheaper. We had enough to drive all the way across the Bridge to the Lower Peninsula where there would be more. That was my experience with Katrina.
We were a thousand miles away, only reading about the hell the people in New Orleans experienced. For us in Michigan a lot of water has gone over our dams since then. Detroit’s unemployment has reached 29% (nearly one out of three out of work). The nearby Little Caesars Pizza just closed up for good. The kid next door who had a construction job now works part time cleaning out garbage cans for the local trash hauler. He’s going back to school. A friend just sold his house for what he put into it four years ago. He had to write a cheque to pay closing costs before the deal could go through. He was glad to do it.
I don’t think much about Katrina or New Orleans, I admit. Probably a lot of us here in Michigan or other places caught in the recession don’t. The recession was already starting in 2005. I put a house in Grand Rapids up for sale three months before Katrina. By the time we sold it, thirty days later—were we blessed! Somebody really, really wanted that particular house--the price for comparable homes in the area had dropped over ten percent. The number of properties on the market was rising by the thousands each month.
Katrina did not pick a good time to happen for New Orleans. For the first time in over a century, if the nation wanted to do something it had to think about cost and viability. (The next time this may happen is when a hurricane slams into the expensive homes built on the barrier islands along the lower east coast. We won’t be rebuilding them quickly either.)
What makes the New Orleans situation particularly tricky is the fact that not rebuilding some of the exposed (and thus non-viable neighborhoods in that city) opens you to charges of racism. That makes the whole situation much harder to deal with rationally.
We’re luckier here in Michigan along the flood plain of the Grand River. Most of the folks who insist on building right down next to the river—and who get flooded out every two or three years—are white. We can save their sorry butts by hauling them out and then leave them pretty much to their and their insurance companies own devices.
They aren’t rich, by the most part, but they do somehow manage to have flood insurance and/or the means to rebuild after the water goes away. No newspapers or TV stations yell, “Bigotry!” and no Congressman cries, “Racism!” No one accuses national or local political figures of “just trying to get rid of a lot of Democratic votes”.
Let’s face it, those houses are not in a viable neighborhood. No one’s going to open a Walmart, a McDonalds, a gas station or a hardware store down on the river flats. If you want those amenities, you’re going to have to drive upland to where sane people invest money.
Let’s talk for a second about how New Orleans is situated. On the banks of the Mississippi—one of the mightiest rivers on earth. When it floods, we’re not talking about the little trickle our Grand River can muster. Nope. We’re talking WHOOOOOOOOSHHH!!!
This is a river that over the centuries has twisted and turned, creating whole new channels throughout the millennias it has rushed down the center of our continent. It has flooded the plains of New Orleans since long before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees.
It is wonderfully arrogant of human beings to imagine that they can tame by dyke and levee such a vast force forever. As the character says in the movie “Jurassic Park”, nature will find a way. My Dutch forefathers who have wrested their land from the water still live in real fear of the North Sea—and spend tons of money on the everlasting fight to hold it back—more money than Louisiana ever thought to spend on New Orleans!
The Dutch have to. They live in one of the most incredibly crowded countries on Earth, on land that only barely ceases to be sea floor—they have nowhere else to go. The people of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans do—the rest of the US. THAT’S how we should be helping them.
In all of New Orleans there is only one spot that’s truly viable. That’s the “mound” that stayed above the floods before there were levees. The French built their small city there; that’s why we call it the “French Quarter”. It doesn’t flood; it didn’t flood four years ago.
It’s back in action today. Tourists and residents see little sign of Katrina there. This really isn’t because the people in the Quarter are racists. It’s because, for hundreds of years, it’s been the only sensible place to put a house, a warehouse or a business.
I really have only this to say to those who insist that Bush was heartless, that all the rest of us are racists because we won’t spend billions to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward: when YOU are ready to take all of your retirement funds and invest them in businesses and housing on that flood plain, then I will listen as you castigate me for not doing the same.
I don’t see Walmart doing it. I don’t see McDonalds or Lowes or Sears putting their businesses down in the lowlands. They don’t think it’s rational. I agree with them. Why should I want my tax dollars to go there either? If the 9th Ward insists on rebuilding right where the river wants to come, that’s their business—just like it is along the Grand River.
Sanity and fiscal good sense do not necessarily always equal racism.