Soon Only Shiela Stroup Will Be Left Standing

Rumor is that this Wednesday's column by James Gill will be his last at the Times-Picayune.

It is hard to believe the T-P couldn't figure out something to at least keep one of their top political columnists through the elections next Spring.

Their capacity to cover important issues in this city is shrinking far too quickly.

Me no like.

Blowing Up

Lots of referring traffic today now that the AZ is out and about as the other JB.

Good times.

Hay Problemas

James Perry suing the Mayor doesn't make the paper edition.

Ouch.

Not News: Gun Battle Outside Mayoral Campaign HQ

Yesterday afternoon, I was nearby enough to hear the machine gun fire that occurred right outside Mayoral candidate James Perry's new campaign headquarters.

He's just opened up shop there, right on the corner of Palmyra and S. Dorgenois and his building narrowly avoided getting sprayed with bullets yesterday evening at around 5:30ish.

Apparently, two cars came screaming down Palmyra St. before one opened fire on the other.

Luckily, nobody got hit or hurt.

Remember that this happened just a stone's throw away from Orleans Parish Prison, Orleans Parish Criminal Court, and thus, tons of police officers.

That demonstrates a depressingly bold disregard for consequences. Or, unfortunately, a fearlessness of consequences.

This is why DA Cannizzaro feels he needs to go all bullworth on his own office and the NOPD. We've got a broken criminal justice system...

-

Strangely, the venerable Times-Picayune doesn't think it's news when a mayoral contender has to hit the deck as some nutcase fires off a round right outside his office.

I don't just know about it because I saw him standing outside as the police arrived, James Perry released a statement about the attack within an hour or so of the gun battle.

There was nary a mention of it in today's paper.

What gives? Was the story about the guy masturbating in a parking lot really so important that it couldn't be bumped from B-2?

Perry's statement is here.

New Orleans, LA – James Perry, New Orleans Mayoral candidate, released the following statement on the gun battle that occurred moments ago just outside his campaign headquarters.

James Perry, New Orleans Mayoral Candidate: “The gun battle outside my campaign headquarters brings home a point many of us know all too well: we will not be able to move forward as a city until we solve our public safety crisis.”

“Our city’s future depends on our ability to confront violence in our communities today. Our public safety crisis puts our families needlessly in danger, keeps our city from moving forward and attracting more and better jobs. Confronting violence will not be easy, but as we proved many times before, we are resilient, we are strong, and together, we are capable of fixing our public safety crisis.”

“I thank God that no one was injured, and I ask him for continued strength in our campaign to bring safety to our city’s streets. But make no mistake, even a hail of gunfire on the sidewalk outside of my campaign headquarters will not discourage me from my mission to become Mayor and make our city safe. In fact, it strengthens my resolve to fight for this city and its future so that we can finally have the New Orleans we all deserve, not the New Orleans we have today.”

At 5:20pm a fierce gun battle occurred in front of the James Perry for Mayor Headquarters located at 2547 Palmyra Street in New Orleans, LA. Perry and his entire campaign were inside the office as approximately 20-30 shots rang out. No one was injured and the New Orleans Police Department is currently on the scene.

OH! So That's How Gravity Works

Was anybody else similarly enlightened by the gigantic front page graphic in the Times-Picayune this morning illustrating what happens when a car drives off a roof?



Maybe the most bush-league front page I've ever seen.

Phelps

I love the Yellow Blog's latest.

Ahead of the story

Don't know if you read the Times-Pic over the weekend but you didn't have to if you'd been keeping up on your trusty We Could Be Famous.

This is why you should cancel your subscription to the Times-Picayune and instead:

1. The weekly Saturday politics column totally bit off WCBF's Thursday post on the difference between Chicago's vanguard integrated crime camera system and New Orleans' reckless camera contract funnel scheme, down to one of the articles I cited as evidence. All the T-P did was get a spokeswoman from the City of Chicago to say that Mayor Daley was out of the office.

2. Bill Barrow's Saturday look at the LSU/VA latest cites a FEMA report which WCBF discussed extensively all the way back on Monday.


That's right, you've got your own one man news team right here at We Could Be Famous - ya know - dot blogspot dot com.

Bias Watch

Admittedly, I've been very sensitive to the Times-Picayune's coverage of the LSU/VA and Charity Hospital controversies. Today's article, by Bill Barrow, isn't the worst example I've ever seen but it isn't exactly a shining achievement in objective journalism either. This is how it starts:

Addressing several hundred New Orleans business and community leaders last month, representatives from the Louisiana State University System and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spoke definitively about their plans for a $2 billion investment in a joint medical teaching facility near downtown.

VA construction manager Don Orndorff promised a new federal hospital would be opened in early 2013. Dr. Larry Hollier, chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, was less certain about a possible opening date for his school's portion of the project. But he was no less matter-of-fact about the imminence of a project that proponents pitch as the largest economic development undertaking in New Orleans history and a necessary linchpin in the positioning the city's medical enterprise to compete with those in Houston and Birmingham, Ala.

Now I think that's quite the lede. I'm an amateur so I don't know but it would seem to me that you'd want to start a new story by mentioning why the hospitals are in the news this week. For instance, you might want to mention that RMJM Hillier architects had come to town to testify about their alternative plan to restore Charity before the House Appropriations Committee in Baton Rouge. Or you might want to start the article mentioning the big event that occurred last night where preservationists and architects spoke to a packed house of hundreds of influential New Orleanians instead of an LSU/VA event from last month.

In fact, the Times-Picayune does not mention the VCPORA presentation anywhere in their article, which is curious given that WDSU and WWLTV considered it significant enough to merit coverage.

The Times-Picayune piece is quite long and does delve into many of the relevant details. It also includes maps and a timeline. But the manner in which those critical details got buried behind a loaded lede is indicative of the Times-Picayune's pattern of lackluster coverage of matters related to Charity and the LSU/VA redevelopment scheme.

Update: I should also mention that today's Times-Picayune also included an op-ed in support of the RMJM Hillier plan to rebuild Charity. It's by Jack Davis of Smart Growth Louisiana and it's a good read. Link

Must Read Editorial

Yes it does.

Update: This is horrendous.

City Business Picks Up Slack

It is increasingly clear that the Times-Picayune has no interest in covering the LSU/VA and Charity Hospital.

City Business has two clutch articles out right now.

First, Richard Webster provides a little bit of context for those that say the residents of Lower Mid City should be forced out of their homes to make way for the new LSU/VA projects.

It’s for the greater good of the city.

Those are typically the last words a community hears before the bulldozers roll in and demolish homes and businesses, clearing a path for promised economic development.

The residents are told to take one for the team. They’re promised they’ll be taken care of, that they will be justly compensated for the loss of their home and their sacrifice will benefit all of New Orleans.

This is what the people who live in lower Mid-City on the footprint of the planned LSU-VA medical complex are being told. But given how the city and state have handled past economic development projects, it appears more likely that those standing in the way will be tossed to the side and forgotten all in the name of progress, said Bobbi Rogers, director of the Lower Mid-City Residents and Business Owners Association.

“There’s very little hope that the city will be fair in this matter to its citizens,” Rogers said. “Look what they’re doing to the public housing residents and what they did to the people who lived in St. Thomas or Treme when they built Armstrong Park. People have been led to believe that if you sacrifice, you’ll have financial gain. People tell me how much I’m going to make out. My response to them is, ‘Would you like to trade places and gamble on that?’”

He includes some words from Dave Dixon of Goody Clancy, the firm now doing the zoning master plan and a guy that's slowly earning some of my respect:

“The idea that people need to sacrifice for the greater good isn’t necessary. What it leads to ultimately is paralysis,” Dixon said. “Unless those sacrifices are somehow visibly spread across the entire community, those people will stand up and say, ‘It’s not fair. We’re the only ones being asked to sacrifice and we don’t share the benefits.’

“So they fight the process and it becomes much more difficult to create larger projects and attract investors because no ones likes to fund a controversial project in this day and age. New Orleans is in a position to attract a lot of investment, but it will be very hard to do in a city where people are constantly fighting over each proposal.”

That's not all from City Business, either.

Ariella Cohen wrote a sterling piece about "plans" to market the old Charity Hospital for some sort of condo redevelopment. State law ensures that it can't even hit the market for another two or three years because it has to be offered to other state agencies first. Even then, the condo market isn't exactly robust these days.

The best little nugget from this article comes from Downtown Development District President and CEO Kurt Weigle:

The building is so large that you could have luxury condos on top with a private entrance for the owners, students on the other side and seniors in another wing with none of them even knowing the other is there...

Yes, let's turn our Charity Hospital into a diorama of social stratification. It's going to look great in the December 2017 DDD e-newsletter.

African Americans 'Confused' About Election Day?

I have never preferred the analysis of UNO's Ed Chervenak.

His conclusions regarding Anh Cao's upset victory over William Jefferson drove the title and tenor of the Times-Picayune writeup and have contributed to a meme that seems to have been repeated in other blog posts and articles I've read about this election.

African Americans didn't show up at the polls because they were 'confused.'

The dearth of voters showing up at the polls Saturday likely owed to lack of awareness of the election, Chervenak said.

With Louisiana holding closed party primaries for the first time in 30 years, the winner-takes-all general election became the third race of the season, rather than the second, as under the previous system. Complicating matters, Hurricane Gustav forced the first contest to be postponed a month, pushing the general election into December, sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Call me crazy but hasn't the scheduling of New Orleans elections always been confusing? African Americans weren't confused on election day in October, when Jefferson barely slipped into the runoff with an anemic twentysomething percent of the vote. Chervenak is essentially suggesting that African Americans knew about the October date because it had been previously scheduled and didn't know about this date because it was making up for one postponed in early September. This sort of implies that voters go to the Secretary of State's website and writes down all election dates on the calender a year in advance and then don't ever look at the news after that. And this idea that it was confusing because there was a closed primary... it's ridiculous. You know there's an election coming by watching the news or taking notice of the fliers and signs everywhere.

African Americans were not mobilized for this election, there's no doubt about it. It may be true to a certain extent that people were 'unaware' that polls were open, but I'd argue that people were not significantly more unaware than usual. From my experience, most people that follow politics generally learn when elections are being held and most people that don't, don't. Those in the latter category need to be mobilized. That's why campaigns are run.

This is every election.

Chervenak's rationale for why he thinks it was confusion is also interesting:

One school of thought holds that Jefferson was abandoned by voters who could no longer bear the weight of his legal difficulties. After FBI agents allegedly found $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer and linked him and several relatives to a wide-ranging bribery scheme, Jefferson was indicted on 16 counts of public corruption. His trial is expected early next year.

But in Chervenak's view, "People don't change their preferences that quickly in such a short period of time."

It seems implausible, he said, that "people would come to his defense and support him with their vote in two elections only to stay home for the election that would keep him in office."

Want to know what I think? I think that what Ed Chervenak believes amounts to 'demographics is political destiny.' Actually, I know it does. I've taken one of Professor Chervenak's political science courses. It was awful and there was a strange bipartisan student rebellion against him. (Ask me about this another time.) (Also, Oyster monitored use of the 'demographics is political destiny' theme during the Presidential race. Maybe he even coined that phrase.)

Chervenak inexplicably thinks it's 'implausible' for people to vote one way one time and then, after events occur, vote another way at a later time.

In 2004, President Bush was reelected. In 2006, his Presidency, party, and platform was repudiated by the same country that had just given him "a mandate" two years prior. Were white Republicans 'confused' about the date of the election in 2006?

Guess what? A lot of African Americans were 'confused,' but not by the date of the election.

I think a lot of African Americans were 'confused' by the actions of the African American political establishment.

I think a lot of my African American neighbors heard all sorts of stuff about how they needed to reelect people like Jefferson and Nagin in order to protect their communities only to watch those same politicians instead work to implement the same trickle-down recovery policy championed by the conservative establishment while their own neighborhoods are deprived of services and investment.

I think this confused African Americans enough that this time, many decided they'd rather stay at home or stay in Houston than mobilize for this corrupt Jefferson guy who doesn't seem all that interested in delivering for flooded black neighborhoods after all.

This isn't to say that had Jefferson had more money or actually done some campaign work, we wouldn't have seen a different outcome, but to suggest that African American confusion was a reason for Jefferson's defeat is a total cop-out.

The Times-Picayune needs to stop going to Chervenak for everything. At the very least, they need to stop publishing his analysis as fact by surveying a more diverse lineup of political analysts for articles like this one.

Bias Watch

I went and bought the Times-Picayune today because I wanted to see how they covered yesterday's illegal banishment of the public and the media at Charity Hospital.

It was one of the top stories of the day and was featured during in last night's WWL broadcast and displayed prominently on its website and that of WDSU.

I was wondering where the T-P might put its article and how it would be spun. I haven't been particularly impressed with recent pieces on the hospital that have read more like press releases than actual journalism, so I was very curious.

So how about page one?

Nah.

Okay how about page one of metro?

Oh, here's an article about a hospit -- oh it's about the one in St. Bernard. Anything about Charity?

Ah okay, on page A-2, an article written by the great "staff and wire reports"

The staffer was Jan Moller, whose major contribution appears to have been a reconfiguration of original AP publications in a manner that better reflects the LSU/VA perspective.

Observe the first paragraphs of the AP report as published on the WDSU website:

Opponents of LSU's plans to build a new public hospital in New Orleans, rather than renovate the hospital wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, were blocked from a legislative tour of the damaged facilities.

The move appears to violate Louisiana's public meetings law. Tuesday's tour had been advertised as a public meeting of a legislative health care subcommittee.

The executive vice chairwoman of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana and an architect who reviewed the condition of the hospital, known as Big Charity, for the foundation were barred from the building. Later, a local New Orleans television station also wasn't allowed on the tour.

Here is the first few lines of another AP report as published on the City Business website:

A legislative walking tour of Charity Hospital on Tuesday appeared to violate Louisiana's open meetings law when several people were barred from the tour.

Fourteen lawmakers joined LSU officials and others to walk through the storm-damaged and shuttered public hospital that the university has decided against renovating in favor of constructing a new teaching facility nearby.

But several people who favor renovation over new hospital construction said they weren't allowed on the tour even though it was advertised as a public meeting of a legislative health care subcommittee.

State law requires meetings of public bodies to be open to the general public, with limited exceptions.

And now the T-P's version of the article plus Moller's contribution:

A legislative tour of the storm-damaged Charity Hospital on Tuesday may have violated Louisiana's open meetings law after a group that favors renovating the building instead of constructing a new teaching hospital was blocked from participating.

The tour had been advertised as a public meeting of the Subcommittee on Health and Human Services of the House Appropriations Committee. State law requires that such meetings be open to the general public if a majority of committee members are present, as they were.

But the law also makes exception for "chance meetings, social gatherings, or other gatherings at which only presentations are made to members of the legislature . . . if no vote or other action, including formal or informal polling of members, is taken."

I find it very very interesting that Moller would find it relevant to spell out the public meetings exception for "chance meetings and social gatherings" as if this was the intention of organizers when they very clearly advertised and announced the event as a public meeting. The additional line is both unnecessary and misleading. It does not provide any useful context whatsoever and merely delays getting to the meat of the matter, which was that LSU stooge Charles Zewe had architects wishing to present redevelopment plans for Charity barred from the meeting.

Zewe helped to organize the tour and then ensured that his client's perspective would be the only one legislators would be privileged enough to hear, in what may have been a violation of public records law.

That's the story.

Another interesting question is why the Jan Moller wasn't present at the tour or why the Times-Picayune had to rely on wire reports for their piece in the first place.

Today Moller is back in action, letting us know that Louisiana has just been ranked DEAD LAST in a state by state evaluation of overall public health. While he lists high rates of poverty, obesity, and infant mortality as contributing to the ranking, another factor which he fails to mention, is that we have not had a public hospital in the city of New Orleans for over three years. Maybe that'll make it into tomorrow's edition.

Where did all of this come from?

DeBerry has been on top of things lately.

Riley went on to talk about poverty and the city's history of god-awful public schools. That's a tried-and-true formula for increased criminal activity, and most rational people understand that. But just as we don't expect dentists to turn away patients who haven't flossed, and we don't expect firefighters to ignore flames caused by those who smoke in bed, we don't expect a police chief to cite bad schools and poverty as reasons to wash his hands of the crime problem.

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.

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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?

Further Nagin Notes

This aperitif nicely follows my latest "defense" of his administration.

First, make sure you've read Jarvis DeBerry's latest, one of his better columns in recent memory.

He brilliantly evokes the Daily Show's interview with the current Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, which I thought was the best Palin-related piece of journalism from the whole campaign cycle.

Note to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and everybody in his administration: Don't return any calls placed by "The Daily Show." That shouldn't be hard. The mayor's staff rarely calls back real journalists. So blowing off fake ones shouldn't be difficult.

Even so, those in the administration should take exceeding care not to sit down with anybody from "The Daily Show" lest they get thrown a hardball question like, "What do you do?"

Such a question would surely stump them, for as best as residents can tell, many folks in Nagin's administration don't do much of anything except fend off requests for information and come up with hotheaded responses to criticisms that they're do-nothings.

The rest of the piece hits all the same notes we've been hitting out here in the wild, wild Internet. Essentially he argues that the Mayor's defensiveness in the face of chronic incompetence on his own staff has become, not just indicative of but also a reason for, the larger inability to get anything done. (I have no idea how to punctuate that sentence, my apologies)

--

I'd also like to address some lingering thoughts from the "defense" post.

To highlight part of Cliff's comment:

"...not enough attention is given to the fact that he is really not doing anything that hasn't been done in city government since the beginning. This is the way New Orleans has always worked and the next mayor will be doing the same things unless there are some new ethics rules or a change in the city charter. This city was built on taking care of friends and allies. I think the support in the black community for ineffective leadership is overstated. I think the black community has given up on local government."

Yes, Nagin's popularity and legitimacy within the black community has always been overstated. He did not boast tremendous black support in 2002. But what is too rarely acknowledged or explained is why African Americans helped reelect him in 2006. I think it is too easy to say that they were won over by the chocolate city speech or some other nonsense. Rather, African Americans were willing, in general, to put Ray Nagin back over the top because of what was perceived as the alternative - a recovery ideology guided by the same green dot racists that had nearly planned their communities out of existence. Never mind for now that Mayor Nagin is now in bed with many of those same interests, he was the known evil and the "safe" choice during a time of trauma.

You can see evidence of this through an examination of Mayor Nagin's media strategy since that time, because it hasn't changed. His position is predicated on his own realization that he does not have credibility within the black community. What he understands and consistently attempts to take advantage of, is that some will begrudgingly prefer him to the unknown others he's been painting with such large strokes. He exploits fears of white/uptown/racism as a way of explaining himself. Clearly, it's not working very well even though it has bought him breathing room at times. It's a fairly common desperation tactic used by white and black politicians all over the country. (Though some of the fears have been pretty understandable, I should add.)

Obviously that oversimplifies and overgeneralizes some pretty complex interactions, but it's a helpful frame from which to examine the current political climate.

Cliff's larger point is that Nagin is just the latest in a long line of corrupt and ineffective mayors should also be noted. I know that I can sometimes get so caught up in the present that I lose sight of just how systemic this has always been. I was trying to think of that context when I used the phrase "aspired to adequacy" to describe the Mayor's first term. I wasn't trying to argue that he wasn't corrupt or didn't have terrible ideas, I think I was trying to get at the idea that Nagin's various first term foibles were not exactly exceptional when considering the historical context. Of course my larger point was that Mayor Nagin's second term has reached that transcendent level of ineffectually.

Nagin Endorses Historic Preservation?

Karen Gadbois highlights President-Elect (it feels so good) Barack Obama's policies on cities, affordable housing, and historic preservation:

The response of some to these statistics is to call for still more demolition, abandonment and neglect of older and historic neighborhoods. In the last three decades we lost from our national inventory of older and historic homes 6.3 million year-round housing units. Over 80 percent of those units were single-family residences. The vast majority of them were simply demolished – were thrown away as being worthless. These demolitions occurred at the very same time that the number of units of affordable to low-income households has fallen. In essence, America has been worrying about how to dismantle the barriers to affordable housing and the same time it has been dismantling the very homes that are, or could be, affordable.

For a variety of reasons, a better way is to revitalize our older and existing neighborhoods. For starters, studies show that repairing older homes, even those with moderate or server physical problems is a cost effective way to create housing. While rehabilitation isn’t the only solution to the affordable housing crises, there are as many as 3 million vacant older and historic housing units that could be brought back to use. These homes can be put back into service – either in homeownership or scattered site rental projects – through market forces and the wise use of CDBG and HOME funds as well as the enormously successful technique of twinning federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits.

Expect Mayor Nagin to announce tomorrow a total reversal of his entire recovery policy to this point in order to match the directives of the new Obama administration. After all, Ray Nagin wholeheartedly endorsed Barack Obama and his vision for revitalizing America's cities. He certainly wouldn't want to be an obstacle to change and progress by continuing policies antithetical to those for which Barack Obama stands. Also look for the Times-Picayune to more forcefully differentiate between Barack Obama's urban vision and that of the Nagin-Blakely syndicate in its articles and editorials. You'll recall that the Times-Picayune endorsed Barack Obama specifically because

He knows cities -- historic cities, gritty cities. He came by his knowledge pounding the streets of Chicago's South Side as an organizer, grappling with the needs of poor people. For our own great and complex city, we could use a national leader who appreciates that we are more than a sentimental memory of a college romp on Bourbon Street; that we are a culturally rich American treasure, filled with resilient citizens and worth protecting from the encroaching forces of nature.

Right? We can expect these things to happen, can't we?