Ways and Means

I actually did download and watch.

Link.

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?

Obama, Cities, and This City

Yesterday I mentioned Barack Obama's plans for an office of urban policy.

Obama transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett mentioned it again later to NPR.

Block: "What would that office do that's not already being done by other departments already?"

Jarrett: "When you said 'other departments' you hit the nail on the head. . . It's really important that we take all of those different agencies and have a comprehensive approach to our urban development. And so having someone in the White House who going to be an advocate for cities and take all the variety of federal programs and target them in a logical and systematic way is part of what President Obama is trying to get at with this position. Those of us that have worked in city governments recognize how invaluable that person will be."

If it hadn't occurred to you yet because you were too preoccupied with obsessively checking poll numbers this whole time, we're actually going to have a President with ideas and initiative.

You might have even realized that of course Obama would be investing in our cities, but you have to admit it's difficult to truly imagine what actual federal investment looks or feels like. It's been a long time since we've had to think about practicalities - a President that cares about cities has always been more of a theoretical proposal.

So I think it might be useful to start considering how the new office of urban policy comes to interact with existing agencies and our priorities on the Gulf Coast.

Immediately, when I think "city" and "federal agency," I come up with HUD, the cabinet-level position governing housing and urban development. Would Barack Obama's urban policy department supersede HUD? Or would there be separate cabinet positions for a stripped down department of housing and a newly minted department of urban policy?

HUD in its current form has few fans. Not only was it turned into a patronage palace under George W. Bush and Alphonso Jackson, but many consider it to have acted as a marginal policy agency even during friendlier, more competent administrations. Conservatives, on the other hand, never really supported HUD in the fist place.

Thus, Obama's department of urban policy signals the death of HUD. It is unclear whether or not a new department would be created to just to handle housing or if housing would be a subdepartment within the new urban policy agency. I suspect the former scenario.

What about the recovery of the Gulf Coast? What about New Orleans?

New Orleans still qualifies as a city. Would the special help it needs become the responsibility of the department of urban policy? Or does Obama maintain the Gulf Coast Recovery Czar position as a separate cabinet-level coordinator?

I see how this can get complicated...

Now, HUD distributes Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money. It is pretty clear that that would fall under the purview of the theoretical urban policy department but how much say will that department have over how cities spend?

In my heart, cities would be able to spend CDBG money as they see fit on projects critical to neighborhood vitality and regional sustainability. In my head, I know that some cities aren't capable of distributing those funds responsibly or even determining which development projects are most important.

During those rare events when we're able to account for how Nagin and Blakely have spent some of New Orleans' CDBG money, you can't exactly be happy with our leadership's priorities.

Barack Obama's department of urban policy, therefore, needs to have the power to set and enforce rules on how development dollars are spent. Not only does it need to set up better monitors on the money so that it doesn't disappear, but it needs to be able to ensure it be used for progressive development policies. What's sad is that many other liberal cities have leaders capable of setting those priorities independent of federal intervention. The federal government, in those instances, would just need to sign the checks and let the city or the region implement.

New Orleans is not ready for that. Our administrative systems do not inspire public trust. Our leaders have not set sensible priorities.

So for New Orleans and for other cities with long histories of systemic corruption, incompetence, and undemocratic practice, Barack Obama's new urban department is going to need to be more proactive than just setting policy guidelines and operating the paper work machine - some cities will need more direct action from the feds.

This is one of them.

Harry Shearer suggests that Colin Powell would make a good Gulf Coast Recovery Czar under and Obama administration. The idea would be that Powell could redeem himself for lying us into the Iraq War by helping to get New Orleans back on track. General Powell could do this, I suppose, because his overflowing gravitas on both sides of the aisle would re-legitimize our plight in Congress while his national name recognition could help us win back the sympathies of our nation.

But I don't think it works like that. I don't think the Gulf Coast Recovery Czar can ever do anything truly productive because it's a just coordinator position. The way it is set up now (correct me if I'm wrong), the role of Recovery Czar is to make sure different federal, state, and city agencies are working together and to report back to the President. That's not much power. That's not much authority.

I don't think Colin Powell wants to be a hall monitor.

On the other hand, if you give Powell or whoever else the power of an agency, the power of a budget, the power to distribute grant monies - politicians understand the power of the purse.

How about scrapping the Gulf Coast Recovery Czar altogether and instead making our city and region's recovery a top priority for the Department of Urban Policy?

Obama, Cities, and This City

It's funny what happens when you elect a rational forward-thinking former community organizer to be President of the United States of America.

You get good ideas.

If you haven't started thinking about how the Obama administration can help the Gulf Coast to recover, well now is time to imagine and advocate.

Harry Shearer wants Colin Powell to be named next Gulf Coast Recovery Czar in some sort of fantastical redemption role play.

Please drop a line, I'd like to read what everyone else:

1. Desires in a best case scenario for cities and for New Orleans
2. Envisions more realistically

I'll add thoughts after several more cups of coffee