Sand Trap

Or should I say money pit?

As transparently insulting it is for the Louisiana Legislature to burn another $9.2 million propping up an effing golf course, the thing that makes me really ticked off is that New Orleans is proceeding full steam ahead with the construction of TWO taxpayer subsidized golf courses in City Park.

The idea behind these courses is that they'll add revenue once they lure the Zurich Classic away from TPC in Avondale.

Ummm not so much.

Seriously, is it just me or has literally every single public investment post-Katrina been an absolute joke?

I have written extensively in the past about the flawed ideology and corrupt individuals behind the redevelopment of the St. Bernard project.

Depressing

A really disturbing question popped into my head recently and I've really been struggling to find a satisfactory answer.

Given the sober outlook for many of the poorer, lower lying areas of the city over the medium term (10-15 years) in regard to societal basics (economic opportunity, education, housing, health, safety) and fundamental life sustainability (flood protection, subsidence, rising seas), at what point to rational organizations working in the public interest determine that it is more in the interest of disadvantaged New Orleanians to work on subsidizing rescue relocation instead of rebuilding?

Everything I've tried to do in New Orleans from a political standpoint has been predicated on my unwavering belief that it was humanity's moral imperative to rebuild this city while wholly recreating the conservative state institutions and instruments that systemically perpetuate for generational poverty, structural racism, and their associated societal ills.

It was also predicated on my belief that this region is uniquely positioned to capitalize on macro trends that will undoubtedly create economic opportunity around different aspects of the sustainability movement.

But so much and so little has changed.

On the national level, the economic crisis has pushed the obligation to New Orleans further and further away from priority status. Additional infusions of federal capital to the Gulf seem increasingly unlikely given the ideological opposition to federal spending by 90% of our Congressional delegations. The realization of the right of return seems like a pipe dream given the confluence of these and other national and international factors.

On the local level, political discourse in general terms remains largely monopolized by supremacist robber barons and short-sighted machine widgets. The public has little faith in municipal institutions nor is there enough working trust between citizens of different backgrounds to appreciably alter those institutions in the short term. On this front, I have sensed some hard-fought incremental progress.

In other cities, or if this city hadn't experienced such devastating trauma, the incremental change that has occurred over the last 2-3 years would seem monumental.

But the time window New Orleans has in which to make fundamental, perhaps radical change is much much smaller than anywhere else's. We live in a state of political emergency. It may not be right that we should have to prove our right to exist given absolute federal culpability in the disaster that has brought us to this point but unfortunately that's the situation we find ourselves in, isn't it? Especially now after recovery resources have been squandered, stalled, or have otherwise failed to substantially put this city on the road toward short, medium, or long term recovery. Especially now after the national economy has created emergency situations throughout the sunbelt. Especially now as the region's political clout has waned.

I'm sorry that this post is so depressing, especially on such a beautiful sunny day just hours before the Krewe of Muses rolls down St. Charles Avenue. And certainly the morose outlook here is somewhat colored by my personal frustration as a young man searching for stable, fulfilling employment in this time of economic contraction. But I don't think I'm exactly going overboard here.

The fact is that the preconditions for a robust and equitable recovery still remain. But time is running short. Really, really short. Joseph Cao short.

There will be a new Mayor elected one year from now. It's the last best chance to save this city. We have until then to reach out, educate, and organize. The events of this week - the Mayor's politicking and Council's pandering - demonstrate very clearly the uphill climb that remains before honest conversation and evaluation of the city's health can occur in the public domain.

It's too early to pick a Mayoral candidate, but I'm looking for someone that can articulate an optimistic vision for how to maximize the region's advantages without sugarcoating the extremely dire forecast that New Orleans faces if we make no change or only small change.

There's something romantic and courageous about the sinking ship imagery and the unwavering commitment that people have to go down with it, so to speak. But I worry about the people that don't really get a choice in the matter. And I worry about my own transformation from energetic wide-eyed young man to perpetually exhausted and disillusioned curmudgeon.

Priorities!!!

Via email:

Unfortunately, there is no more money in the 2008 budget to make streetlight repairs for the rest of this year, and the 2009 budget that was passed includes only the smallest amount for repairs in 2009, despite Council Member Midura’s efforts to get this infrastructure fund properly funded at the budget meeting.

It is possible your lights are likely to remain out for a while. We will continue our best efforts to provide a remedy to this situation.

Thank you.

Where is our money going instead?

Just a peek, from City Business:

The budget includes $75 million to acquire 34 acres of property for the new VA hospital and remove infrastructure, although the city is still evaluating “that which we can keep and that which we can get rid of,” Blakely said.

Also in the spending plan is $30 million for the first phase of the Reinventing the Crescent project, a plan to redevelop nearly 7 miles of the Mississippi Riverfront. It will pay for “the design and development of 1.5 miles of new riverfront, roughly tripling the length of what folks can access now (at) Woldenberg Park,” said Sean Cummings, executive director of the New Orleans Building Corp. and the project’s conceptual architect.

Sounds like we've got our priorities straight. Zero money for average residential neighborhoods. Tens of millions of dollars to demolish one such neighborhood or for 'economic development' in an elite neighborhood.

Such progress we're making giving all this money to a neighborhood that didn't flood and is doing just fine without the extra assistance.

I live in a neighborhood expected to benefit greatly from the RTC project. I'd love to have pedestrian access to the river, I really would.

But I'd gladly put the whole thing off for a decade in the blink of an eye to help out the neighborhoods that truly need it.

Did you know that for the 2.1 billion some odd dollars we're collectively sinking into the destruction of Lower Mid City, we could build a brand new comprehensive mass transit system? Probably we could build two of them for that kind of money.

If we had a plan to that ready to go, we might even get it funded by the Feds. After all, Obama is proposing to spend a trillion bucks on local infrastructure projects within the next several months.

Update:

Jan Moller tells us that the state is ready to demolish a neighborhood without the hospital construction money in hand. It's apparently illegal for the state to put itself in that much debt. Perhaps they'll scale back plans by NOT demolishing a neighborhood and instead rebuilding Charity Hospital.

With the economy slumping and energy prices falling, state revenue is expected to plunge well below current projections, giving the state even less room to issue construction debt. Moreover, hundreds of projects across the state are competing for money under the cap, making it unlikely that the state would commit $400 million to a single project.

Update II

I was going to let it slide but I can't. For some reason, in an article that profiles the various ways we might reduce the state's financial obligation, in an article that floats a "scaled-back alternative," Moller doesn't even mention the proposal to rehabilitate and reopen Charity.

Just a Neighborhood

Read Karen

You mean we're not done yet?

Updated below

Are we really still shrinking?

This represents a major undertaking by Gordon Russell and the Times-Picayune.

Take a look here, here, here, and here as well. There are a bunch of different parts.

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Ambitious effort

One of my biggest complaints about the Times-Picayune, and about political discourse in New Orleans generally, is the lack of comparative context. New Orleans will never succumb to American typicality, nor should anyone want it to. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful to examine what makes other cities tick and what kinds of policies and practices might be easily fitted to the New Orleans template. I have tried to do this from time to time with the other city that I know well, Philadelphia.

I have done a lot of complaining about how reactionary this city's policies are toward development, poverty, and crime. Mayor Nagin's policies toward homelessness were so backward, for instance, that the Bush administration sent officials down to urge him toward a more humanitarian (and effective) approach. An examination of the permanent supportive housing policies being embraced throughout the rest of the country, in similarly poor cities like Washington D.C would have been extremely useful. Katy Reckdahl did some of that, but the effort was not wholeheartedly embraced or featured by her masters at the editor's desk.

I wrote about Philadelphia's grassroots-driven master plan for the Delaware River waterfront in comparison to the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing to push the Reinventing the Crescent development forward with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps no New Orleans institution deserves that kind of comparative treatment more than our criminal justice system, an objective embarrassment by any standard in the industrialized West and plenty of standards in the developing world.

To date, the Times-Picayune never once mentioned Naomi Klein's name or the theories of Shock Doctrine, her book, though she specifically compares governmental responses to catastrophic disaster. There's even a chapter about New Orleans specifically. Ray Nagin is reading it.

To see Gordon Russell make the effort to contextualize some of the challenges facing New Orleans with a lengthy comparative article is certainly encouraging and opens many additional avenues that I hope the Times-Picayune will stroll.

Wrong Cities

There are a number of issues with this particular effort, however, that I'd like to discuss. The first article of the series sets up the rest of the work. In it, Russell outlines some of the issues facing New Orleans, putting forth the fact that New Orleans was on the decline for decades before Katrina. This, he offers, makes it similar in some ways to Rust Belt cities like Youngstown, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, because these cities have also lost population over the last several decades.

While he does also mention the reasons for those cities' decline - the loss of manufacturing jobs - he doesn't quite convince me of the utility of the comparison.

For one, nearly every historic urban core in the United States bled population during the second half of the 20th Century. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Boston and others were also victimized by white flight and the decline of manufacturing. The key difference is that the cities Russell puts forth also experienced incredible population decline within their respective metro regions. Certainly, the growth of the Sunbelt dispersed economic and political clout from all of the Northeast but the urban decay in Philadelphia, D.C., and Boston was balanced by overall metro area growth.

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown, though they did experience area suburbanization, were so devastated by the decline of manufacturing that the overall metro region decayed to an extent not seen on the Eastern Seaboard.

The New Orleans metro area, though it underperformed in comparison to other Sunbelt cities, did not decline the same way that Rust Belt cities did. Rather, the Gulf Region has grown in spite of the population loss in Orleans Parish proper.

A town like Youngstown has to undertake policies that assume further population loss because they don't have a large enough metro population to bait back into the urban fabric. Baltimore, on the other hand, has a huge suburban population that can be brought back into the city. That is why Baltimore is not bulldozing neighborhoods or talking about shrinking their footprint - and Baltimore has scores of social challenges that Youngstown does not.

Flawed Premise

The other major idea coming out of Russell's article is this dichotomy between 'smart growth' and 'smart decline.' Observe:

The hardest part of "getting real" is figuring out what to do in the parts of town bleeding population.

It's the mirror image of typical urban planning. The debate in a rapidly growing city like Phoenix tends to be: How much must we widen Road A to accommodate new Subdivision B?

Those who study shrinking cities say depopulation should inspire a similar process -- "smart decline," some call it, riffing on the familiar "smart growth."

(later)

In many cities, moving out of the denial stage -- what Bingler called "getting real" -- is the hardest part.

That's because shrinkage connotes defeat. But advocates of smart decline say it shouldn't. After all, continual expansion brings its own curses: sprawl, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions and chain restaurants, much of which New Orleans has mercifully avoided.

Terry Schwarz, a planning professor at Kent State University's Cleveland campus and an expert on shrinking cities, speaks with wry disdain of her parents' adopted home of Phoenix, a city whose explosive growth is often seen as proof of its desirability.

"Have you ever been to Phoenix?" she asked. "It's an awful place."

There is a major problem here. Pheonix, and most every other growing city in the Sunbelt, do not typify 'smart growth.' In fact, 'smart growth' was developed in direct response to places like Phoenix. (By the way, Phoenix is indeed an awful place. It is the worst place I have ever visited in my whole life. Ever.) Places like Phoenix, Dallas-Forth Worth, Houston, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, etc., expanded and developed wildly with no attention paid to urban sustainability. 'Smart growth' is a relatively recent response to that type of wild free-market expansion; it attempts to regulate development in a way that protects residential interests, environmental sustainability, and the limits of infrastructure systems within the framework of dense urbanity. 'Smart decline' is not a response to Sunbelt homogenization or to smart growth - it's just planners and academics trying to be cute with their terminology.

I don't think there's a single person in Orleans Parish advocating for the kind of cul-de-sac, big box, chain restaurant, subdivision, unregulated expansion that the article's dichotomy seems to imply. Rather, I think everyone recognizes the need to regulate how development happens in Orleans Parish moving forward. The problem here is that certain planners like Steven Bingler continue to push for a shrunken footprint, the closure of whole swaths of the city, and the enshrined displacement of Katrina victims. While this is a morally perilous approach, it is also not feasible now, not after tens of thousands of residents returned to the very neighborhoods typically circled for closure. Bingler and the larger planner cabal that brought us the failed BNOB plan continue to cling to that divisive recovery model and continue to poison ongoing efforts to craft a consensus master plan that provides for both sustainability and Parish-wide recovery. It is an illusion to think that nobody will have to sacrifice anything - there's going to need to be green space - but to suggest that 'smart decline' is the right model for New Orleans is counterproductive and wrongheaded.

I'd argue that it is the decliners that need to "get real." They seem to be the ones that continually advocate for dumping hundreds of millions of one time only dollars into gigantic trickle down projects like Reinventing the Crescent, the LSU/VA, and a Superdome Entertainment District while sustainable neighborhoods all over the city cry out for micro investment. It is absolutely silly to proritize the Reinventing the Crescent project over basic investment in New Orleans East, but that's what we're doing. The sliver by the river will do just fine if we stall a massive riverfront redevelopment but can New Orleans East make it another ten years without an urban mainstreet?

Aren't We Still Growing, Anyway?

Though repopulation has stalled, we're still regaining population, not losing it. And as I'm recalling, there are still some 85k Road Home properties and some 15k affordable housing units in the pipeline still, though they're tenuous because of the credit crisis, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong about that...

Nagin, Leadership to Blame

Though he doesn't spend enough time making the point, Russell smartly fixes blame where it belongs:

Put bluntly, Mayor Ray Nagin's declaration that a laissez-faire "market forces" approach would drive New Orleans' population higher than before the flood seems well off the mark. Although some neighborhoods have recovered strongly, in many the population remains down by 50 percent or more. Across the flood zone, ghost homes sit empty by the hundreds on blighted, overgrown blocks.

This is the biggest reason why we continue to have acrimonious and divided debates over recovery. The only time New Orleans could have made the big changes was right after the storm. At that time, if it was clear that, for instance, much of New Orleans East would remain an unsustainable place to live in the short and medium term, a Mayor could have set forth an ambitious agenda to properly compensate homeowners and renters from those parts of the city and to provide ALL victims of the Federal Flood with access to housing in more sustainable areas of the city where investment and development made more sense. I'm not saying that effort would have worked, as clearly the current civic leadership did not and does not have the trust of the people or the urban vision to pull anything like that off, but that was the time to try it.

Instead, Nagin et al permitted a jack-o-lantern recovery that has really hurt the ability of city government to provide decent services and of residents to have a decent quality of life. But now that we already have that, perhaps the right thing to do is to put some of these big trickle-down projects on the back burner and instead invest more creatively in grassroots neighborhood recovery.

--

What do you think?

My vote for next big Gordon Russell spread is the criminal justice system. You could maybe make up enough money for Reinventing the Crescent by 'shrinking' the local prison-industrial complex alone.

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UPDATE

An anonymous university type, via email:

I think you miss the key point. The majority of displaced blacks were employed (Washington Post survey in the shelters, September 10-12) and New Orleans had a robust economy. People with jobs were forced out of the city a gunpoint, whether they were flooded or not. Their jobs, housing, schools, are still here in one form or another. They are locked out and any policy to discourage their return is racist. When you are forced out of your home at gunpoint and given a one-way ticket out of the city, that’s an injustice that deserves to be remedied regardless of the desires of the urban planners for a middle class city. They use Rigamer’s numbers because the exaggerate by 100,000 the black population to give the illusion that everyone is home that wants to come home. The census bureau says we are missing about 200,000 black folks.

Nagin is no free-marketer. Look at his BNOBC plan—that’s about as draconian as you can get. He just refuses to let white folks, who virtually all think like the TP, to sit down and draw up a plan because the outcome will be to reduce the poor and black population. Would you let Janet Howard and Boysie Bollinger back in the door after what happened before? And this time they would learn from Vallas—make the plan 2,000 pages long so no one can figure it out, then submit to the council for approval while you have a white majority council.

Later:

The point about Nagin as a free-marketer needs to be made—he just uses that as a ruse and the media swallows it. Where’s the free-market ideology in the hospital debacle? He’s just using conservative terms against conservatives. Bottom line is that he made a commitment to the black community not to greenspace it and he has no reason to let urban planners make a liar out of him. The number of blocks with isolated occupied homes is minuscule—and no one has data on it. It stands out when you see it, but it’s hardly an economic problem—one more block for SDT to drive—what’s that, 10 cents in gas? I think the utility companies are the ones primarily behind the “footprint” stuff. They never wanted to re-wire the city and even balked on restoring the gas grid in the ninth ward. My brother-in-law works for a contractor for the phone company and he said that Bell could have rewired the phone service for the whole city in a few months, but decided to use the disaster to convert from copper to fiber optics so they could compete with Cox, thus delaying the recovery of the East by at least 18 months.

One of my friends in the east says 80% of the homes on his block are re-building. I see that all over the east, especially on weekends when people return to work on homes.

This is good stuff. Why don't the university guys talk more often? Are we just not asking?

How We Spend Our CDBG Money

Found some!

This time, we're proposing to spend it on the LSU VA Hospital. Nearly $75 million.

We're using Community Development Block Grant money to demolish an existing community.

Brilliant.

Rather than level that neighborhood, which contains scores of historic houses in both good and bad condition, these groups have pushed the VA to build its new medical center on the site of Lindy Boggs -- the vacant and deteriorating hospital a developer from Georgia is willing to sell. Such a move would not displace any residents or business owners.

In the same vein, the Foundation for a Historical Louisiana recently published an assessment by a Philadelphia architect who determined the state could renovate Charity Hospital into a modern medical center in less time and for less money than it would take to construct a new hospital from the ground up. The state disputed some of the findings in the study, and the foundation responded with its own rebuttal last Tuesday.

"The city, state and VA have chosen the most complex, most damaging, most costly and most time-consuming way to go about bringing back the LSU and VA medical centers," said Walter Gallas, the New Orleans field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Indeed. Smart priorities, you guys.

You know, the LSU VA Hospital project is also being allocated nearly 60% of our 2007 economic development funds too.

Seems like if there's any way to throw money at this ridiculous Blakely pet project, we figure out how to do it.

Pain is bearing witness to the Nagin administration's endless failures

Judge Martin Feldman says that the Nagin administration considers Tracie Washington and other engaged citizens to be a "pain in the behind."

But I'd say it's citizens that think the Nagin administration is a pain - and not just that of a thorn's prick.

I mean, they're tearing down people's homes in a seemingly arbitrary fashion without providing the necessary notification that would allow for appeal while other abandoned properties grow into increasing threats to public health.

That ain't no measly boo-boo. That's much closer to severed limb if we're grading on the pain scale.

Here's what Karen Gadbois has to say today:

Of course I beg to differ the City cry’s “this is hard” as an excuse for everything. They have handed over the process to a demolition contractor who would seem to have a conflict of interest.

The Demolition policy or lack there of is just a reinforcement of the disinvestment in the City that the leadership seems to embrace. I see no one in the Mayor’s office or the Office of Dr. Ed Blakley discussing what we can do to repopulate and reinvigorate the City, instead we have an ad hoc policy of incompetence and ignorance.

Here, here. Go read the rest.

Is there another city or town in America that allows accidental home demolitions?

Blakely Takes Another Job?

Is his abject failure to rebuild one city making him bored?

Apparently, as Ed Blakely is now getting paid for his 'expert advice' by the Dubai Real Estate Corporation.

This is in addition to his supposedly full-time job in New Orleans and his occasional jaunts back to his regular university job in Sydney, Austrialia.

That the international consensus on Blakely is that he's an expert in spite of the local consensus that he's incompetent, unavailable, misinformed, and disengaged is not that surprising. Sometimes it takes a little while for the truth to trickle up.

What I'd like is for Blakely to just stay over in Dubai full time. I'm sure the DREC pays way better than we do.

He shouldn't feel some altruistic obligation to see through his failures to term, he's done enough for us already. He should resign from the Nagin administration to fully concentrate on his other projects. We'll even throw a parade for him.

Here's a devastatingly sad passage from a T-P article from earlier in the week:

Ed Blakely, the city's recovery director, acknowledged the city has no economic development plan, but still endorsed grants for some businesses that didn't provide basic information about what economic benefit their projects would bring.

Trust the experts, Dubai.

UPDATE:

We also now have another instance of Blakely admitting that he lacks control over his own staff.

Every hour that he is away from his desk means another hour that “nobody is working,” the jet-setting University of Sydney, Australia, professor said.

Cohen does a great job using 'jet-setting' as a modifier there. Now I don't even need to point out that maybe if Blakely spent more time at his desk, he might have more control over his staff. Also the article provides some context by recalling Blakely's embarrassing interview with the New York Times in which he complained about the insubordination on his own staff by somehow blaming it on the racial tensions of the city.

Is this the first executive job of Dr. Blakely's career?

The Credit Crisis and New Orleans

According to the WWL, the credit crisis is going to slow down our recovery.

I'll try not to notice.

There was one selection that jumped out at me:

Miestchovich said if there is a prolonged recession, there are two sectors which would suffer the most in New Orleans: the Port of New Orleans, in terms of world trade, and the tourism and convention business.

That's so fascinating because we really only have those two sectors. One of the things that has made me most frustrated by conservative Nagin recovery policy has been this ridiculous approach to economic development that seems to favor dumping all available resources into inflating the profits of the port and of the corporate tourist economy. When we could have been investing in grants for entrepreneurs, getting in on the ground floor of the green jobs movement, or otherwise diversifying our stale portfolio, we instead continued to shower favors on the preexisting bohemoths.

So what are we going to be left with when our two sectors take their hit?

Tipping Point

In advance of the ball dropping to 2008, Mayor Nagin announced that this would be "the tipping point" for our city's recovery.

He was right.

And things are not going very well.

And everybody knows it.

The City is demolishing houses wholesale with no review and no appeal. A demolition permit has been issued for a home belonging to a regular critic of the Mayor's regressive recovery policy. This woman barely staved off the wrecking ball after crews could not get to her house due to the dumpster she is renting while she renovates.

The School Board is prepared to blindly rubber stamp a facilities master plan that will reduce the capacity of the public school infrastructure for decades, squandering over a billion dollars on a few suburban style campuses.

Entergy is moving forward with a plan to eliminate a system agreement that will have the effect of sending our utility costs even further through the roof.

The Mayor's home remediation program, from NOAH, to help senior citizens was nothing more than a criminal racket that is now under federal investigation.

The Mayor's crime camera initiative was also nothing more than a racket used to funnel undisclosed sums of cash to a friend.

The entire recovery seems to have been narrowly staked on the health of the condo market and its ability to attract wealthy tax payers. The condo market is crashing, merely catching up to well foreseen national real estate trends.

Everyone I know is or has been sick in the three or four weeks since Gustav.

There are no tourists in town and with the national economy free falling, the service industry has had a difficult few weeks. At least those of us that don't make $70k per year.

One coworker is packing up his stuff and will be out of here by the end of the week.

My landlord just told me a few hours ago that he too will be jumping ship; he's put the house up for sale and hopes to move away. (Not that anybody's looking to buy home to move to New Orleans, he joked. Sadly.)

The most energetic advocates for a progressive recovery are growing weary and depressed.

I wish that were all. I wish that were all for the last 7 days.

The tipping point. It's funny because I'm reaching mine too.

Master Plan Truths

NOW IS THE TIME TO DIG IN


The School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish is a document designed by the private planning partnership between Concordia and Parsons. It, if adopted by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), will represent the blueprint guiding the future capacity of public schools as an institution for learning in New Orleans.

- Though misleadingly billed as a "building boom" on occasion, the facilities master plan, in the word of planners, "landbanks" over 60 schools, which means that the schools will be demolished or shuttered indefinitely. Though the master plan has a rough view of schools that may be eligible for phase two construction, because there is no funding for anything beyond phase one, there is no timeline for reopening of any schools that do not receive the phase one designation.

- Some of the schools slated to be landbanked are not amongst those currently too badly damaged to be occupied by students. In fact, according to Francine Stock's incredibly useful map of the schools slated for landbanking, there are ten high school facilities currently open and serving children slated for closure by 2013. Just one of the ten academic programs functioning within those buildings is being promised relocation to another neighborhood. Those schools include such storied cultural intuitions as Carver, Douglass, O.P. Walker, Karr, Schwartz, McMain, Abramson, Rabouin, Cohen, and John McDonogh.

- Though these institutions have had their share of academic challenges, perhaps none has been more difficult to confront than those related to the traumas related to Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent displacements and relocation. These community anchors and the human beings serving inside represent a stabilizing force for recovering areas of the city. Rather than promoting stability and continuity within these already-open bridges to healing, the master plan pulls the rug out from under the talented administrators striving to institute "school reform" in the here and now. What now is the incentive for principals and teachers to implement a long term academic culture when the district is sending the message that their school programs are being written out of existence? After all that work to eliminate the baby-sitter service mentality that had set in at many schools, principals and teachers are essentially being informed that the programs they're working so hard to implement are actually themselves nothing more than placeholders for yet another academic sweep in 2013.

- Rather than embracing the urbanity of our community, the acreage requirements that inform the closure of many schools located in dense neighborhoods impose an arbitrary suburban-style benchmark that actually has no real correlation with academic performance. This design preference of Concordia-Parsons forces the school district to waste precious time and money negotiating land acquisitions and swap transactions when there are buildings open right now that could be renovated at prices cheaper than building new. Further, the suburbanized campus vision and the neighborhood school closures that the policy necessitates flies in the face of national trends predicting a re-migration to cities and the best academic research on long term environmental benefits of 're-densification' of urban cores spread thin during white flight's asphalt boom.

-Far from "agnostic in respect to operator," the facilities master plan provides no path to funding for any construction beyond phase one and explicitly raises the specter that future school capacity expansion could be left to private operators.


Readers, please treat this as a living blog post to be modified in a collaborative fashion. This is meant to represent a starting point for criticism of the facilities master plan. Please tack on additional concerns or edit those that I've opened with to be more cogent frames. By boiling down the repercussions of this master plan, we will be equipped with a helpful starting point from which to engage uninformed neighbors and confront misinformed adversaries.

Loose Debris at the Tarmac

Wind high winds arrive while everyone is out of town...

The Airport Deal

Back in April, a group of unnamed business leaders, floated a proposal to sell off Louis Armstrong Airport to the state of Louisiana as part of a long-term effort to grow the airport as a regional hub and a short-term effort to fund critical recovery projects in Orleans Parish.

Maybe this makes sense on the surface. For one, New Orleans must begin to market itself as part of a large, economically crucial region called SE Louisiana. For two, New Orleans has a huge docket of infrastructure and social service emergencies that we really need to address. I mean selling off an important long-term source of revenue like the airport for a short-term fix is not something to do on impulse, Louis Armstrong is amongst the city's most important economic assets.

But the thing that helped me make up my mind was this charming list of social service and infrastructure emergencies for which the business leaders proposed spending the one time revenue:

Under the plan, bond dollars would be invested in five areas in New Orleans: a "sports and entertainment" district on the perimeter of the Superdome and New Orleans Arena; the government complex that is home to City Hall, Civil District Court and the shuttered State Building bordering Duncan Plaza that is slated for demolition; the medical district where a new Veterans Administration Hospital is planned; the theatre district surrounding the intersection of Canal Street and Loyola Avenue; and a six-mile stretch of downtown riverfront that city leaders hope to transform into park and new commercial space.

See? Everyone wins! Rich people get the hospital that they want, their sports and entertainment district, their theatre district, their riverfront development, and their brand new government complex. See? It's win-win-win-win-win.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Seeking to address concerns that only a small part of the city would benefit from the infusion of state money, business leaders recently agreed to consider including funding for a major development -- possibly a distribution center -- for eastern New Orleans.

See, now even those people win too! And that sure is a "major" development, this place for the poor can pick up processed dairy products and canned vegetables - I hear the building is going to be stylish yet understated, not to mention green.

(Even if you remember the deal when it was proposed, I really recommend rereading this article in full. The details are truly blood-boiling.)

But as with any big decision like this, it was more than appropriate for Mayor Nagin to express his reservations, even though he'd proposed selling the airport back in 2002:

In an email statement later in the day, Nagin was noncommittal about whether he supports the plan, describing it as "very preliminary, below expectations, and conceptual in nature."

At this point, Nagin said, any dollar figure associated with the airport is "designed for purposes of furthering discussions," adding that his "ultimate goal is a multi-billion dollar coordinated vision and plan for economic growth." He didn't cite a number that would satisfy him.

Good stuff, let's make sure New Orleans gets every penny. . .

. . . Four Weeks Later:

"Remember my phrase: Sell that sucker," Nagin said.

But the mayor offered one caveat: He doesn't support the legislation's proposed creation of a new agency with both mayoral and gubernatorial appointees to control the cash for city infrastructure. Instead, he wants the existing New Orleans Building Corp., which is comprised of the mayor, his appointees and City Council members, to handle the money.

So let's get this straight. Mayor Nagin's reservations had little to do with how much money the city was getting for what it was the city was spending money on. Mayor Nagin was not concerned that all of the projects proposed, save the token in the East, represent trickle-down developments that demand massive public investment for the direct benefit of wealthy private corporate interests. The minutia didn't bother him. What gave him pause was the fact that the New Orleans Building Corps, which he directly controls, wouldn't get final say over how the money is spent. Nagin wanted to ensure that Sean Cummings, who is President of the NOBC and a close Nagin ally and contributor, would have final say over whether or not to spend public money on the Reinventing the Crescent project, which Cummings himself also spearheads. Nagin wanted to ensure that his NOBC would be awarding the contracts for the Orleans Parish developments.

Well Nagin's courageous stand fell short and the Southeast Regional Airport Authority was born.

Here's a key paragraph:

Nagin controls the final two seats on the board. He gets to appoint one person directly and nominate three people for Jindal to consider for the other position. Nagin spokespeople Ceeon Quiett, James Ross and Leslie Eugene failed to produce information on these appointees, despite five inquiries over the course of 15 days.

Look at this deal! Look at it! This is how business gets done in New Orleans. Wealthy corporate leaders not-so-clandestinely get together and scheme up a way to force the public to pay for pet projects from which they themselves will profit and they leverage their inordinate amount of influence on the political process to garner support. You thought the rules governing NOAH were vague, the conflicts of interest in this deal are blatant.

Think about it:

This city is in pretty dire straights right now. We badly need wetlands and levees. We badly need schools and housing. We need public transportation and roads. This town barely passes the smell test for residency if you're looking to settle a family.

So instead we're going to spend our precious public money on a new sports entertainment district, a theater district, and a new city hall?

It's asinine and I'd like the Times-Picayune to say so. This deal is not in the public's interest. It's the only objective view to take.

What is the Davis-Bacon Act?

One of my favorite things about the internet is the Daily Show 'way back randomizer' that selects a segment from the last decade - at random.

Here's one I just watched:



Remember when we cared about...

A Democrat in Name Only: Ray Nagin's Right Wing Recovery

This week, George W. Bush went out of his way during what will likely be his last appearance in the New Orleans area before he is finally out of office:

I'm also proud to be here with the Mayor of this great city. The Mayor and I have had some quality time. (Laughter.) We have come to know each other. I remember when I first flew down here, there was the Mayor at the end of the steps of Air Force One. I said, "How you doing, Mayor?" He said, "I'm hungry and I haven't had a bath." I said to the steward on Air Force One, "Fix the man up with a meal, and turn on the hot water in the shower."

And I appreciate you, Mayor. I appreciate the fact that you decided to run for office again. You said to the people of this part of the world, there is unfinished business and I intend to be a part of the finished business. And the people listened, they put you back in office, and I'm proud to be with you, Ray. Thanks for coming.

The Mayor is finishing the business of dismantling whatever public assets, public facilities, and public trust that Katrina was so kind as to leave behind. And George Bush thanks him for that.

How to Make it Play Even Better

Jeffrey says that photographs showing protesters from last night's theatrical objection to Mayor Nagin's insulting award for "Excellence in Recovery" will subvert effects of the mobilization because the protesters are white.

Yet, here is the Times-Picayune's headline:

Inside, Nagin's a hero, outside, he's a joke

And the article takes it further. You really have to read the whole thing to get a sense of its construction. The article describes the protest itself as a party and juxtaposes the party on the street with the one occurring at the Ritz.

Look:

In a scene reminiscent of a satirical Carnival parade, about 75 protesters chanted and waved handmade signs outside a posh Canal Street hotel Friday evening while inside a gilded ballroom two stories above them Mayor Ray Nagin accepted the inaugural Award of Distinction for Recovery, Courage and Leadership from an honorary committee packed with his political allies.

It then titles a subsection of the article "who's edgy," implicitly ridiculing the Nagin quote to follow:

"I think around the anniversary we get edgy, and I think we're edgy right now, and I think we'll get past it, "

Mission accomplished.

I think it was a great success.

==

But, on the other hand, I do entertain some criticism that speaks to Jeffrey's concerns regarding race and perception. And I think that with some honest reevaluation, the next time people get together to criticize the mayor, regardless of the racial diversity of the mobilization, they'll achieve an even greater success.
The thing I noticed after seeing this was the consistent mention of the high rate of crime.

While of course crime concerns everyone throughout the city and affects everyone throughout the city, it is better to consider the systems.

I don't just angrily criticize Nagin for being unable to control the city's rate of crime. In poor cities throughout the country, the crime rate has risen during the Bush administration. There are sometimes trends above and beyond the control of a Mayor and his Police Chief.

That is not to absolve Ray Nagin and Warren Riley of any wrongdoing, for certainly they are guilty of incompetence and disengagement. Riley's police force has unacceptably low morale as a direct result of Riley's poor leadership. And certainly the NOPD needs more help than it is getting.

But is the high crime rate the biggest reason why I think this recovery has been a failure?

Absolutely not.

What about housing?
What about fair wages?
What about health care?
Where are the infrastructure improvements?
What about the coddling of the tourist industry's monopoly men?
What about the misappropriation of CBDG money?
Where is the vision?
And so on and so forth.

These are the things that make Nagin's administration exceptionally bad, not the crime rate.

The high rate of crime might not even represent the most glaring failure of Mr. Nagin's leadership related to the criminal justice system. This city has one of the highest rates of prosecution for non violent drug offenses in the nation. This state has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. The police department continues a 'catch-and-release' policy when it's own paid consultants have suggested the implement community policing practices with all deliberate speed.

What has made Ray Nagin's award for excellence in recovery exceptionally insulting is his pathetic execution of an even more pathetic reactionary ideology.

Saying that the crime rate is too high is a tremendous oversimplification.

Mayor Nagin deserves more blame than that.

It is more even than an ideological refusal to address the underlying social conditions of which crime is a consequence - Nagin's reactionary and regressive recovery policies exacerbate them.

In Defense of Mayor Nagin

The American Zombie on Monday:

I just got an angry email in my AZ account from someone claiming that Nagin is being attacked because he's black and that I and "all the other bloggers" in the New Orleans blogosphere are racist....I guess the person wasn't including the African-American bloggers in this city who have been critical of Nagin as well.

By the way...is there a pro-Nagin blog out there?

Anywhere.....where.....where.....where....

Gambit contributor Kevin Allman in the comments section of that AZ post:

Just a note: I've got keys to the Gambit blog and I will GLADLY run a pro-Nagin essay by a New Orleans blogger as long as it's original and not a press release.

I've looked for pro-Nagin blogs so I can invite the authors to contribute. I can't find any.

Anyone: get in touch with me.

Yes, this will be a "pro" Nagin blog post.

--

There is an appropriate time to 'defend' Ray Nagin. It occurs just about once a year, around the anniversary time when conservative pundits can't avoid discussing Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf's recovery process.

Conservatives hate Hurricane Katrina because, perhaps more than any other singular Bush Administration failure, as the federal response to the disaster most irreparably battered the President's highly cultivated image.

Look at what happened to his approval ratings in late 2005 and early 2006.

Bush fluffers would prefer to ignore that painful episode as much as possible. It provides evidence of the fallacy of the neoconservative model of governance blatant enough that it doesn't take an effete Wall Street Journal liberal to point it out. (Cons: "Gov't=Bad" :: Cons manage Gov't badly :: Cons: "See how bad Gov't is?") The Katrina tragedy also brought the issue of poverty back into the national discourse. Conservatives don't like talking about poverty because the policies they advocate so often exacerbate it - and pretty much everyone knows that.

Thus, when discussion of Hurricane Katrina is unavoidable, like it will be next week, drowning conservatives have little flotsam to which they can cling.

There are only a few things they can try.

One is to blame the citizens of New Orleans for their 'refusal' to evacuate. This one is usually only parroted by uber-insulated conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that are not accountable to the mainstream public and never have to justify their statements with demonstrable fact. There are a few reasons why this argument isn't really attempted outside of ignorant talk radio. First, the rebuttal to this fabricated refusal myth is a discussion of poverty that conservatives don't want to have. Second, the language associated with the refusal myth, which touches on some expectation of government handouts, laziness, and stupidly is so racially loaded that any media personality that faces a mainstream audience knows better than to indulge.

What mainstream conservative pundits can do to is deflect criticism of the Bush administration and avoid substantive conversations about America's responsibility to the Gulf, the human rights of displaced New Orleanians, and poverty is to drop the hammer on C. Ray Nagin.

Last week, I did my first ever radio interview for an extremely obscure talk show based out of New York. Though the program was billed for political independents, I was greeted with the following question, which I will paraphrase:

The Hurricane was awful, we all remember the tragedy as it came into our living rooms, yada, yada, yada... In the days after Katrina, there was a fleet of school buses ready to go and Ray Nagin told them they weren't needed. Wasn't Ray Nagin terrible? Isn't it all Ray Nagin's fault? Isn't he an idiot and the worst guy ever?

Now certainly Ray Nagin deserves a great deal of blame for our failed hurricane preparation but to get a question like that three years after the fact demonstrates the lengths the conservative message machine has gone to put forth a revisionist history of the storm. This effort has been buttressed by more competent federal responses to the wildfires in California and the flooding in Iowa. It has given conservative voices an opening with which to carry out the Rove disaster response plan: blame the Democrats. (Never mind the fact that Mr. Nagin was instrumental in originally implementing the very Rove-hatched media response plan which Nagin himself is now the most direct target - I'm trying my best to make this 'pro' Nagin.)

It's funny because conservatives don't want to talk about Nagin's failures as a mayor post-Katrina because Nagin's most glaring failure has been his implementation of a generally conservative recovery ideology: outsourcing to private developers, dismantling public assets, stalling investment in the most devastated neighborhoods, and refusing to address low wages, high rents, and nonexistent health care. Instead, the focus is on Nagin's failures as an agent of FEMA during a 3 week period 3 years ago.

Beyond that, conservatives bring on local guests willing to talk about how far our tourism industry has come since Katrina and how you could walk the French Quarter and not even know a Hurricane had ever hit.

Ray Nagin is an unfair victim of conservative racism and attempts to paint the mayor of New Orleans as indicative lazy do-nothingness on the part of New Orleanians during the storm. Neoconservatives don't want to place the blame for the Katrina response where it really belongs, at the feet of their own ideology that implements broken government on purpose.

So:

Sometimes I feel like defending Nagin when he is used as a punching bag or used as a symbol for black people in general by neoconservative Bush administration brown-noses.

That's the best I can do for him.
--

There is a great irony here and it's not 'e doesn't actually like Nagin.'

All of the apologists out there that rail against Nagin critics by levying charges of racism are themselves ignoring what Nagin's policies are actually doing to the African American community of New Orleans.

The reality is that the biggest Nagin apologists out there aren't those that think attacks on Mr. Nagin are racist, they're the racist Republicans that themselves profit from Mr. Nagin's implementation of a bastardized free market disaster "recovery" policy slate that disproportionately hurts poor African Americans.

Recall that Ray Nagin himself contributed to George Bush's campaign in 2000 and nearly maxed out to the evil Billy Tauzin.

Also recall that campaign donations of members of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, hand picked by Mayor Nagin, went to GOP candidates a whopping 94% of the time.

It is Nagin and the policies of his administration that are propping up and perpetuating the economic and racial injustice.

Those that call critics of Mayor Nagin's recovery policy racist should look in the mirror. They should think about who's really holding up Ray Nagin. They should look at who's really behind the Mayor's Excellence in Recovery Award (i.e. excluding those that were tricked into membership). They ain't exactly the victims of Katrina - they're the profiteers of false recovery.

So to Kevin and the American Zombie, if we're looking for a real pro-Nagin blog, maybe we should be contacting the exclusive class of boosters profiting from our city's unrecovery. They'll be above the Ritz on Friday.

Jimmy Fahrenholtz Sure Does Read Fast

OPSB member and perpetual candidate Jimmy Fahrenholtz was presented the school facilities master plan at a regular Orleans Parish School Board meeting this evening at McDonough 35 High School.

After looking it over for no more than the length of the meeting he proudly proclaimed to the Times-Picayune that he is "100 percent in support of the master plan."

That's rich because it was Jimmy Fahrenholtz who cut short Una Anderson's surprisingly strident questions regarding high school distribution uptown supposedly because tonight's meeting was only to be about determining procedure, not about expressing reservation or support.

While Mr. Fahrenholtz clearly isn't interested in hearing any public concern regarding the master plan or displaying any kind of his own healthy skepticism before taking one side over another, you'd still think he'd at least have the respect to at least sleep on the damn thing before expressing his undying enthusiasm.

Just for the sake of everyone's memory, let us recall that Jimmy Fahrenholtz is a frequent violator of campaign finance law and was very recently barred from running for Congress in District 2 due to outstanding penalties levied by the Louisiana Board of Ethics. Because those fines were levied as a result of his failure to follow the law during his race for Orleans Parish School Board, he has no business leading any kind of debate on the facilities master plan and his opinion shouldn't really be printed in the paper without the context I've provided here.

Let me mention that I can't seem to find where Mr. Fahrenholtz has filed a financial disclosure report since the storm. Also, I'll say that Steven Bingler's sister-in-law Sarah Usdin, a big education policy stakeholder in her own right, contributed to Mr. Fahrenholtz's 2004 race for OPSB. Also when Ms. Usdin was named to the Gambit's 2004 40 under 40, Fahrenholtz claims that he'd "trust her to back me up in a knife fight."

Now this simple contribution from four years ago, nor Mr. Fahrenholtz's closeness to members of the Bingler family would be a major problem except that, again, Mr. Fahrenholtz just pledged 100% approval for a plan he barely had a chance to look over.

Mr. Fahrenholtz should be excused from all debate related to the master plan and should also abstain from voting on any related binding or nonbinding recommendations. If he does not, the OPSB will have a hard time credibly passing judgment on this critical matter, particularly as voters elect replacements potentially poised to trumpet entirely different views.

This City's Implementation of CDBGs Gives Me the Heebie-Jeebies

Amongst the most important sources of federal rebuilding dollars we have available to us is Community Development Block Grants, administered through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Thankfully we had a greedy political hack out to reward supporters of George W. Bush running the helm at HUD and negotiating the strings of the purse we so desperately need to open.

So even though he resigned in disgrace earlier this year, the administration of our precious post-Katrina CDBG rebuilding funds has been almost entirely in his hands.

Here are three critical recovery projects we have already spent, just approved spending, or are currently proposing to spend our limited CDBG money on:

NOAH: The Mayor's Home Remediation Program

NOBC: Reinventing the Crescent

The RSD and OPSB: School Facilities Master Plan

So we're using the money allocated to help at-risk communities for fraud, profit, and to permanently castrate the city's public education infrastructure.

Brilliant.

Evaluating the School Facilities Master Plan: 2nd Grade

I have the demographic projections informing facilities master plan. The master plan is based specifically on the moderate scenario.

This document has the neighborhood-specific raw data for low, moderate, and high projections.

This document has the general summaries for each scenario.

It is interesting to note how contingent the low and moderate scenarios are on the "notion that affordable housing will not be replaced on a one-for-one basis."

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Francine Stock has mapped all the schools to be 'land-banked' or already demolished under the master plan.

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Thinking further about the upcoming process...

The master plan needs to be accepted or rejected by BESE and by the OPSB. The clock begins ticking on the 30 day public comment period tomorrow. Mr. Pastorek indicated that while no date has been set for a vote by either BESE or the OPSB, it would most definitely occur sometime this fall. When I heard that I assumed that the statement left some degree of wiggle room in terms of whether or not the OPSB vote would occur before or after the election. This was critical in my mind because 5 of 7 incumbents are not running for reelection and would therefore their decision on this monumental matter would not be accountable to voters. Yet I realized that if the vote is to occur this fall, it will not matter whether or not it occurs before or after the OPSB election because the new OPSB will not officially take office until 2009.

Thus, we cannot count on the OPSB vote to reflect public opinion on the master plan. Unless the RSD and the State Dept. of Education will accept waiting for the new OPSB to be seated all the way in January, the only fair solution is to put approval of the master plan directly to the voters as a ballot referendum.

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I'll republish later with more thoughts.

Evaluating the School Facilities Master Plan

Today, the planning partnership between Parsons and Concordia released a much-hyped facilities master plan that, if approved, will guide the recovery of New Orleans public schools. I have been following this process for some time and can say confidently that the final plan is exactly what it was expected to be: a backdoor attempt to codify the smaller city size vociferously opposed by the vast majority of native New Orleanians.

The first attempt to 'shrink the footprint' was the plan released by the Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Their prototype map of the future New Orleans showed large green dots signifying a plan to raze culturally significant and historic neighborhoods and replace them with parks. The second attempt was the toothless Unified New Orleans Plan, or UNOP. This plan was empowered to do largely the same thing as the BNOB plan, only this time with the rubber stamp of "citizen input." The citizen participation process for UNOP was lead by Concordia, an architecture and planning firm lead by Steven Bingler. From the perspective of citizens, Concordia's public participation efforts were abysmally undemocratic. Public meetings were poorly advertised and input was largely relegated to those with access to internet or fax. The idea was to create the illusion of democratic participation in order to codify the same small footprint proposed by Bring New Orleans Back Commission.

Thus, it came as no surprise when the State Superintendent of Education, Paul Pastorek selected Steven Bingler's Concordia to lead the master plan for New Orleans schools. Teaming with Concordia to assess the state of New Orleans school facilities was Parsons Corp, recently the subject of a large scale investigation after bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars in bogus postwar rebuilding contracts in Iraq.

Presciently, education advocates in New Orleans sensed that the ultimate facilities master plan put forth by Concordia-Parsons would consolidate the capacity of the New Orleans education system by closing down and demolishing scores of former schools. Certainly, many buildings are so badly damaged that they need to be replaced, but many school sites will not be rebuilt. Everyone recognizes that population exodus from New Orleans and from public schools since 1970 has necessitated some closures, yet advocates feared that large-scale consolidations would again sap public resources away from already-struggling neighborhoods and deny those neighborhoods the services that ultimately determine whether or not it can provide for former residents evaluating whether or not to return.

The public participation process as conducted by Concordia was again suppressive-by-design. Poorly advertised, meetings featured surveys asking leading questions that reinforced the preexisting agendas of professional planners. Perhaps most damning, the Recovery School District had already begun demolishing buildings throughout the city before public participation meetings had started, rendering the process disingenuous from its very onset.

I attended what was the last public briefing on the status of the master plan and was decidedly disappointed, not by the turnout of the community, but by the efforts to prevent (or not attract) turnout amongst critical stakeholders, such as parents.

The result of the facilities master plan was finally released in Sunday's Times-Picayune.

The schools' master plan, provided to The Times-Picayune before its widespread release Monday, calls for the construction or complete renovation of 28 schools in about five years, including eight new high schools. Six of the projects included in the master plan's first phase are already under way as part of the system's "quick start" construction initiative.

Just as important, officials say, the plan would close or liquidate dozens of buildings -- for instance, cutting the number of high school campuses in half -- to create a more efficient system housed in state-of-the-art environments. All told, more than 50 existing buildings would be sold or put to new uses as part of a $1.8 billion, six-phase facilities plan designed to span three decades.

To reiterate, 52 of 125 campuses will be sold or "repurposed". Twenty eight schools will see construction. The Times-Picayune labels their map of buildings to be renovated as a 'Building Boom.' The plan is better characterized as a 'demolition depression' and might be more accurately illustrated if closures were also plotted on the map.

There is currently funding for the Phase I construction and renovation of 28 schools over the next five years. Beyond that, there is no funding to expand to more facilities, thus there is no concrete Phase II.

Students at Carver High School in the upper 9th ward, will remain in trailers until 2013 without any assurances that new facilities will ever be built on-site. Frederick Douglass High School, housed in a very solid facility on St. Claude Avenue, will close in 2011.

Thus, there is to be no high school located in the Upper or Lower Ninth Ward by 2013. There is no planned high school construction in Gentilly either. Mid-City is left out of Phase I almost entirely.

These are sustainable neighborhoods. These are culturally significant neighborhoods. But, they sustained significant damage from the Federal Flood.

Why does this keep happening?

Why is it that neighborhoods most in need of attention are so consistently being punished by rebuilding plans?

When you boil it down to its core, there was a major ideological decision made by technocrats, politicians, and/or business leaders that guides every recovery decision. This decision is routinely glossed over by professional planners and totally ignored by the media we rely upon to provide proper context.

Planners believe that services must be improved to better serve the most populated areas after the storm. This is not an improper calculation by itself but becomes regressive when one considers the practical consequences of this seemingly rational policy. In order to receive money, attention, and services a neighborhood has to prove it's viability through re-population estimates and projections. Sections of the city that were more severely damaged during the storm obviously repopulate at a slower pace and therefore do not qualify as viable neighborhoods and are subsequently enshrined as poor investments. Thus, it is the neighborhoods that did not flood (generally better-off socioeconomically) that are being provided the lion's share of recovery dollars. Neighborhoods that sustained heavier flooding (generally worse-off socioeconomically), are not seen as having a large enough population to necessitate things like roads, schools, public transportation, police, and hospitals.

For flooded neighborhoods to recover, they need these types of basic social services. In order for businesses to open in damaged neighborhoods, they need to see that people will return. For people to return, they need to see that the government will extend the courtesy of basic social services.

Various governmental agencies, all operating out of the same technocratic playbook are enshrining the continued starvation of already victimized neighborhoods for decades to come. By basing these important decision on current population estimates, they deny damaged neighborhoods with critical catalysts that might spur rebuilding and re-population, rendering future demographic estimates showing continued struggles a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Already-damaged neighborhoods starved of basic municipal services will only continue to flounder. Those still displaced from these communities will see little reason to rebuild and those that have already spend thousands to do just that will be stuck in the margins.

This accomplishes a de facto shrinking of the footprint, a de facto smaller New Orleans, and a de facto permanent displacement of tens of thousands of our neighbors.

The school facilities master plan will be a major contributor to this process. They've based their enrollment projections on demographic estimates that take into account the plans of other municipal and state agencies to emphasize or ignore certain neighborhoods. The insistence on locating schools near community assets ensures that schools will not be located in areas still struggling for access to rebuilt those basic assets.

Moments ago, I attended the media presentation of the master plan at the Contemporary Arts Center. I asked State Superintendent Paul Pastorek to what extent he believed the locations of schools facilities might impact future population patterns. He answered that he believed it would have a positive effect. I then quickly followed up by inquiring whether it then followed that the population of a community might be negatively impacted because it was not selected to receive a school. He had no satisfactory reply, stumbling toward an insistence that the master plan was not in the business of influencing re-population.

If the presence of governmental facilities, assets, and services contributes to an individual or family's decision to return and rebuild, to what extent does the absence of such basic maintenance discourage population renewal?

Did planners not ask themselves this question?

Or more macabre, did they smile at the answer?

--

Tomorrow at 5PM, the RSD will present the master plan to the OPSB in a public event at McDonough 35 High School at 1331 Kerelec St. After that, the public will have thirty days to comment. It is likely that there will be an effort to ensure the master plan is approved by the current Orleans Parish School Board. This is unacceptable because five of the seven members of that body are not running for reelection. Any binding OPSB vote MUST be delayed until the citizens have a chance to elect a new board.