Over Easy?

Jack Shafer makes the case against rebuilding.

Comments

[Jesse Walker]

I've been waiting to see who would be the first pundit to use the phrase "the legendary sunken city of New Orleans."

Hasn't happened yet, but Jack's "American Atlantis" comes close.

[JMoore]

Has anyone suggested the Venice solution yet?

[ed]

Common sense has become a refugee in this debate.
Am I allowed to say "refugee"?

[Ironchef]

It's also been over headlines as well.

To quote some anti-development activists in Columbia, SC in the past "It's a floodplain, stupid!".

Libertarian disclaimer: I don't care if you rebuild there or not. Just don't come crying to me for rebuilding money the next time.

[joe]

Allowing much of the flooded are to revert to wetlands will actually reduce the chance of flooding in higher and marginal locations.

Maybe create a new West New Orleans on the other side of the river.

[Yogi]

I agree completely Ironchef. There will be people that rebuild there, but they better do so with complete knowledge of what could happen. Just like most buildings in California are building to withstand very strong earthquakes and have insurance if the Big One does hit.

The only reason federal money should be spent in rebuilding levees would be what construction upriver from Louisana have done to the Mississippi. (Reduced sentiment flow, less flood plains, etc.) To me, local government can't be responsible for what's going on with the river in Illinois or Missouri.

[thoreau]

Mr. Nice Guy was telling me yesterday that, according to one report, Trent Lott's home was destroyed but he's going to rebuild.

I don't know Lott's situation, but I'm guessing he has the assets to buy land in an area less disaster prone. Then again, if he builds it out of the same material used to reinforce his hair, I have no doubt that the house could withstand a direct hit by a category 7 storm (do such storms even exist?).

[JMoore]

There are such things as stilts and floating houses and houseboats. Actually, houses on stilts are fairly common along parts of the Gulf Coast. Darn useful in a flood.

[[e-mail]]

thoreau,
I have heard that in the case a giant meteor they are planning on sending Trent Lott head first directly at it in in order to deflect.

[theCoach]

...but Michael Brown's other disaster preparation has not held up so well, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

[joe]

That's just silly. You'd want to send Senator Lott at towards the meteor at an acute angle, so as to change its trajectory.

Firing Senator Lott hair first directly into the meteor would simply cause it to shatter into multiple pieces, each more racist than the original meteor.

[Russ D]

thoreau, with Lott's money and what I think will be the low cost of the land, he'll probably rebuild a plantation there.

[JMoore]

I was only half-serious at first about stilts and such, but now that I think about it...why did such construction never occur to anyone in New Orleans? Loads of other people in hurricane-prone areas thought about elevating their homes, and they're not even below sea level. Granted, building up adds to the cost of a home, but doesn't it seem strange that nobody in this especially vulnerable city ever took this simple but effective measure?

I don't really have a point (I'm not calling NO people stupid or anything); it just strikes me as bizarre.

[joe]

The caption will read "Area Resident, identified only as Jennifer, demonstrates the use of her improvised water filtration system."

[joe]

oops, wrong thread.

[joe]

JMoore,

Most of New Orleans is quite old. Taking an existing building, jacking it up, removing the foundation, and installing a deck and stilts is a huge expense.

[Jeff P.]

Let the Japanese beta-test one of them fancy floating suburbs they've been deploying. If it works, we keep it. NOLA can become a series of floating platforms strung together, like The Raft from Snowcrash or the sea culture from Meiville's The Scar.

[Jennifer]

Which thread was that, Joe? I want to see what I"m missing.

[JMoore]

joe

yes, very true. But NOBODY? Ever? There had to be some new construction.

If they do rebuild, I do hope they consider safer construction. I'm serious...think Venice.

[Don Mynack]

Just remove the government mandated price controls for flood insurance, and see who actually wants to build or live there. If Harrah's wants to shell out for a 40 foot levee wall, let them. I suspect that they will do the sensible thing and move to higher ground. Hopefully the residents would follow.

[Jennifer]

Aren't houses on stilts more vulnerable to wind damage?

[Shannon Love]

I can see how the rebuilding of NO will occur.

Politically connected developers will swoop in and buy up uninsured properties for pennies on the dollar. Then they will get fat "development" grants and cheap loans by convincing the general public that the money is going to the small property owners who want to rebuild. The developers build on the public dime, sell for a big profit and then wait for the next disaster to cash in again.

[tonedeaf]

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. GW Bush, Sept. 2

[JMoore]

Jeff P.

The Dutch are doing the floating house thing, too. They've been dealing with flooding and levees (well, dykes) for centuries. Maybe the New NOLA should look to the other mecca of decadence for inspiration.

[JMoore]

Jennifer

They can be. I think it depends on the quality of stilts. Anyway, as we've seen, NOLA's biggest worry is water, not wind.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Gotta wonder how many people so long trapped in the New Orleans cycle of poverty are really going to want to head back to that. I notice on the news here this morning in Phoenix that some local firms are hiring hurricane victims who've been brought out here. Granted it was just a few so far but I don't find it hard to imagine that 50,000 of these people wouldn't be all that much for the southern half of the US to absorb into their economies.

[Rhywun]

None of the demographic statistics quoted in the linked article are at all unusual for any typical American city that has been largely abandoned by the white middle class. By his logic, I guess Shafer would be in favor of levelling Detroit, Newark, Buffalo and dozens of other cities, too. But that's OK; they're just ghettos.

[Evan Williams]

tonedeaf:

like it was before? Hey, yeah, excellent idea...just build it like it was before! And how is that "good news". If I smash your car with a bat, and then you have to go get it fixed, and afterwards, it looked "like it did before", is that "good news" for you? Just too stupid for words, he is.

[Isaac Bartram]

In the Florida Keys Houses are built on stilts. It accomplishes two things:

1) Elevates the house above the high water. Most of the Keys are at less than 5ft above sea level.

2) Presents less surface area to the force of the surge, thus making the structure less vulnerable.

The second was somewhat defeated when residents saw all that "waste space" under the house and closed it in. This was the mitigated when the code was revised to say the materials had to be "breakaway" and no living quarters would be permitted. Then Texas (which does the same thing on the coast) had a storm in the early 80s and they found that the "breakawy" material became torpedoes that knocked over the next house.

And, Jennifer, re wind. It is relatively easy to build a structure to resist wind loads, even though they are not that well understood even now. However most hurricane damage and casualties are from water, and even less is known by engineers about the way moving water behaves.

[Evan Williams]

"By his logic, I guess Shafer would be in favor of levelling Detroit, Newark, Buffalo and dozens of other cities, too.

Rhywun,

You're misrepresenting Shafer's position---quite terribly.

It's as if you don't understand the difference between "levelling a city" and "deciding not to pump hundreds of billions of dollars back into a crime-ridden sinkhole after it's been all but demolished by a natural disaster, with no guarantee that the same thing won't happen again".

Do you?

[JMoore]

cool...thanks for the info, Isaac. Lots to think about.

[kelley]

After a tsunami hit the island of Hawaii in 1960 and destroyed downtown Hilo, including a school, residents established a buffer zone between the ocean and the city. A developer unfamiliar with the local history would salivate at the opportunity to develop all the open space. Mother Nature ultimately wins. And I say this as someone who lives at the beach in L.A.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

The Trent Lott jokes on this thread are hilarious.

I read the other day (I'm too lazy to google) that Bush was trying to personalize the trajedy by explaining how poor ol' Trent lost his house. Bush then launches into a bizarre rant about how great it will be when Lott's house is finally rebuilt and how much he (Bush) is looking forward to sitting on Lott's fucking porch.

It's stuff like this, and Babs Bush's tone-deaf comments, that make my heart smile.

[thoreau]

I don't care what the demographic and economic profile of the city is. If the city is way below sea level and situated near a lake as well as the delta where a major river empties into the ocean, it's probably not a good idea to subsidize the rebuilding of low-lying areas after they're destroyed by water.

And before somebody says that it's awfully interesting that the areas in question mostly have a certain demographic profile, keep in mind that I've said the same thing when rich guys with cliff-side houses get their homes rebuilt by the feds. (See John Stossel's excellent Reason article from last year.) I said the same thing in the 1990's when flooding along the Midwestern parts of the Mississippi River destroyed areas with a somewhat different demograhic profile.

I'm not calling for the wholesale abandonment of NO. And if somebody is bound and determined to rebuild in a flood-prone area on his own dime, well, that fool and his money will be parted come the next flood. I'm just saying that it would be a bad idea to subsidize rebuilding in flood-prone areas.

And I am deliberately making consequentialist arguments rather than purist libertarian arguments here, because the choir already agrees. It's the rest of the country that needs persuading.

[JMoore]

Right on, thoreau.

And if any new construction is subsidized (and we know it will be), it should all be on stilts.

(I'm really getting hooked on stilts today. I've just learned that some poor bastards in Bangladesh have been living on stilts for generations. If one of the poorest countries in the world can do it, so can NOLA.)

[Rhywun]

with no guarantee that the same thing won't happen again

The same thing WON'T happen again, if the various entities who were responsible for this predicament by leaving New Orleans more vulnerable to storms were to take their responsibilities seriously this time around. I don't see how the "crime-ridden sinkhole" argument is relevant to this discussion.

[M1EK]

All y'all who are sure New Orleans won't be rebuilt need to read the paper by Friedman at stratfor. Short version: there has to be a city there, or we can't get our farm goods to market.

And as to "why didn't they build on stilts" - GMAFB. It's been a long time since houses were built assuming the first owners would be there longer than 5 years or so. The original homes in the area were in the French Quarter, which, coincidentally, was the high ground that didn't actually flood. Imagine that.

[thoreau]

M1EK-

Of course there will be a city there. I don't claim detailed knowledge of the topography, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that the lowest-lying points will be avoided during reconstruction.

[stubby]

FWIW - a lot of the people who've been evacuated here to Houston are pronouncing themselves pleasantly stunned by the city and its amenities, which makes sense when you compare it to NOLA, and they're saying that they do indeed want to stay here and take a chance on a new life. I don't think there's any way to overstate how bad the generations-long cycle of poverty in NOLA was, how bad the projects were, how hopeless and hopelessly permanent the circumstances of the poor folks was. Lots of evacuees in other parts of the country - even in Utah, which was not a familiar place to many of them - have said the same thing. What's there to go back to? Projects, poverty, hurricanes and the chance that next time you'll be left to die again? I listened to a young mother of two on the radio today - she was in Section 8 housing in NOLA and she's been given Section 8 housing here in Houston, and she was in tears because the apartment seemed like a "condo" compared to her apartment in NOLA. Even the subsidized housing was substandard.

Businesses have been deserting for years, and now there's really no reason to take a financial gamble on the city.

And it's just very likely that people whose lives have been disrupted and uprooted will, once they recover some sense of stability, want to stay where they will.

My guess? The city will be much smaller when all is said and done, and it might turn into some kind of boutique city - the FQ, uptown, Garden District, the old and original parts staying, other places more or less abandoned. No, that doesn't make a good future for the low income folks - in NOLA - but they didn't have a good future there before the storm...NOLA's financial existence depended on tourism and that didn't provide enough jobs to make the economy anything close to strong, which is one of the reasons the cycle of poverty was so endless.

[Dynamist]

Ooooh, Shafer discovers the GNOCDC and now he's an expert. Fucking Yankees.

Conveniently he ignores the rich, white and flooded 'hoods of West End and Lakeview. Who cares about Ponchartrain Park? It was developed just to keep the darkies out of white country clubs, after all. And the Irish Channel, full of old, beautiful shotguns on nice flood-free high ground, is on the trailing edge of gentrification. There's still plenty of poor and black there. Shafer's never been to Indian practice. Is he channeling Byrd, "If we rebuild, then the niggers will come back."?

joe: The nearest westbank is already built out. The growth over the last decade is primarily in St. Tammany. You could build a wonderful hi-speed rail link for the north shore to all the jobs in the CBD, Metarie, and along the river. How much could that possibly cost?

Nearly everything built there before 1940 is on the equivalent of stilts. The levees turn a surge into a flood, mitigating the rush of water. River floods aren't of the same character either. Any of y'all know what a "raised basement" is?

[JMoore]

M1EK

I think the bank which accepts the house as collateral assumes it will be there for more than 5 years.

And the answer to the question "why didn't they?" is either "because they didn't think to" or "they never had before" or both. I was just indicating that it seemed rather odd no one ever thought of the idea. Just odd. I hope it will be a lesson learned.

[ATR]

During the Mississippi River flooding in the early 90s (was in 92 maybe?) weren't entire towns completely abandoned? Granted they were small and I suspect middle-of-nowhere communities, but it isn't that unheard of to completely abandon an area that Mother Nature has deemed unsuitable for human inhabitants.

I could make a Roanoke analogy, but I'm not feeling witty enough.

[JMoore]

Dynamist

good point about the raised basement...forgot about those...it's been a long time since I was in the old place

[M1EK]

"I think the bank which accepts the house as collateral assumes it will be there for more than 5 years."

You'd be surprised. Not in the market for the last twenty years or so, they haven't. And "there for 5 years" is different from "there for 100 years", which is how houses used to be built. (I'm in a 1923 model myself).

[M1EK]

thoreau,

Problem is that the high ground in New Orleans wasn't 'big enough' to support the population which supposedly needed to be there to support the shipping and oil activities which need to be there.

As pointed out in other blogs I've read, if the essential port/oil employees have to drive an hour to get a haircut or buy groceries because none of the 'support' economy came back to NO, the economy will suffer a lot, too, but it won't be as obvious.

[BobH]

"Most of New Orleans is quite old. Taking an existing building, jacking it up, removing the foundation, and installing a deck and stilts is a huge expense."

True, but it's exactly what was done to the entire city of Galveston after the 1900 hurricane. Actually, they went a step further and dredged sand from the Gulf to fill in under the houses (and churches, offices, etc). They raised the city about ten feet as I recall. Pictures of the process are fascinating.

[Shem]

Like it was before? Hey, yeah, excellent idea...just build it like it was before! And how is that "good news". If I smash your car with a bat, and then you have to go get it fixed, and afterwards, it looked "like it did before", is that "good news" for you? Just too stupid for words, he is.

Huh? You did see how he was directly quoting the President, didn't you? Why the vitriol? Unless you agree with the statement for some reason and I just don't grasp your use of irony.

[Russ D]

True, but it's exactly what was done to the entire city of Galveston

Chicago, too.

http://www.gapersblock.com/airbags/archives/city_streets_how_chicago_raised_itself_out_of_the_mud_and_astonished_the_world/

Then the place burnt to a crisp.

And I'm still here. Never underestimate the ingenuity and stupidity of humans.

[John]

You have to understand the layout of New Orleans. You have the refineries, port, and tourist areas that are on high ground. They largely survived. The rest of the city is spread out in the bowl behind the original cresent the city was built on. The rest of New Orleans, outside the tourist areas and the rich areas of the Garden district is one un-Godly poor ghetto. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, to house large numbers of poor people in a below sea-level bowl in a hurrican prone region and spend millions on levies to do so. Further, upper-class twits like Anne Rice can sit in their Garden District mansions and wax philospohical all of the "character" New Orleans has all they want, but for average or poor people living in New Orleans sucks. The government and police services are terrible, the crime rate is astronomical and the infrastructure is totally run down. That is why most of the people who could have long since moved well out of the city to the burbs. My guess is that most of the people displaced by the storm are going to look around Dallas or Houston or wherever they are now and say "this is lot better than New Orleans" and never return. Most of the poor areas which are way below sea-level will never and should never be rebuilt.

[joe]

Dynamist (if that is your real name),

I wonder just how "built up" the west bank of the river is. Sprawly suburbs with strict zoning preventing infill development, tall buildings, and mixed use?

Here's reconstruction plan - designate infill zones in appropriate locations in the highland areas around New Orleans, limit the towns' ability to enforce restrictive zoning, and give the displaced vouchers.

I'd say that Police Chief who had his cops force people back across the bridge should get a couple hundred units of Single Room Occupancy housing in his back yard.

[Russ D]

Yippee!! I screwed up the page so you can't see the carpet humper on it!

[Isaac Bartram]

thoreau: I said the same thing in the 1990's when flooding along the Midwestern parts of the Mississippi River destroyed areas with a somewhat different demograhic profile.

ATR: During the Mississippi River flooding in the early 90s (was in 92 maybe?) weren't entire towns completely abandoned?

Many flooded towns were in fact abandoned.

There were also some meaningful reforms made in the Federal Flood Insurance program. Up until that time ther had been no limit to the number of times one could collect. Now there is a two loss limit. The second time you get paid off and I believe the feds will buy out the rest of your interest if you want to move. In some cases you have no choice, they won't let you rebuild even if you are willing to self-insure*.

*In view of the fact that Uncle Sugar finds himself on the hook for a lot of uninsured properties thats not a bad policy from a consequentialist viewpoint (one with which I generally have little trouble).

It is also harder to get new flood insurance policies written.

[Flyover Country]

If they can dredge to create islands, wouldn't be possible to dredge and raise the lowest parts of the city?

http://www.concretemonthly.com/monthly/art.php/1591

[John]

Flyover Country,

I think the problem is that the river comes and deposits silt and gradually raises itself. At the same time, any levees or structures you build on the silt gradually compact the silt and sink. Basically, anything you build in New Orleans is fighting a loosing battle agaisnt the river. The levees were built to withstand a catagory 3 hurricane but they are saying now that they couldn't have withstood a catagory 2, not because they were improperly built, but because the river had risen and they had sunk in the time since they were built. My guess is any kind of dredge and fill and build up would suffer the same fate.

[Isaac Bartram]

Flyover Country,

Unfortunately because of the underlying soil and many other problem the ground will probably settle over one meter in the next century. It's sunk roughly 2-3"* every decade up till now. Adding more fill on top might only make it worse.

There are of course many geotechnical remedies to such problems, but in the case of NO I doubt they'd meet any cost benefit analysis.

In any case, to fill you'd have to demolish whats there (highly likely for many structure anyway, of course).

*partly because of changing the floodplain which had several inches of new silt deposited each year. Now that silt goes out into the Gulf where according to some it creates all kinds of new problems by upsetting the nutrient cycles.

I notice Johhas replied while I wrote this. Yeah, what he said too.

[Isaac Bartram]

"Johhas" should read "John has"

[Flyover Country]

Isaac and John,

Thanks for the info.

Just heard on the radio that my US rep. Sensenbrenner voted against the aid package for New Orleans because if you're not allowed to build on a flood plain in Wisconsin, you shouldn't be allowed to build on a flood plain in Louisiana. I don't have a comment on his comments. Just wondering what others may think.

[Lost_In_Translation]

I see where he's coming from. If the swamp ever reclaims Washington, I'm definitely gonna be for letting that cesspool rot (Did I mention it has a worse crime rate than N.O.?)

hink people think that rebuilding means using government money to prop up the old shacks that reside in that city. I feel that rebuilding is more an issue of repairing public utilities (which were horribly outdated) and actually making more than a half assed attempt at fixing the levies. The truth is the port needs to be rebuilt because the infrastructure for transport is there. What redevelops around the port is a matter of economics, but the idiocy surrounding the arguments to simply pack up everyone and high tail it out is moronic at best.

[R C Dean]

Problem is that the high ground in New Orleans wasn't 'big enough' to support the population which supposedly needed to be there to support the shipping and oil activities which need to be there.

What, people can't commute?

[passingthru]

If you were poor in New Orleans, you'll be poor in Dallas or Houston, or any other city in the country. This was a welfare town, populated by people of give-me-stuff-for-nothing mentality. It makes no sense to pour billions into rebuilding when the population will destroy it anyway, if not the storms.

[Shannon Love]

A strong argument against the large-scale rebuilding of NO is that it is a physical and economic trap.

Physically, the city will always be vulnerable and forever fighting a losing battle against the river and sea. Hurricane activity will be elevated for the next 10 to 15 years. It will take five years at a minimum to raise the levees to resist a direct hit from a Cat 4 or higher. Even if the work is done there is no guarantee it will actually work. A freak event, like a barge knocking a hole in a levee, could reflood the whole town again no matter how much we spend on levees.

Economically, the city has nothing going for it but the port and tourism. Tourism produces only low skill, low paying service jobs. Port jobs pay better but there aren't enough to support the current population by a long shot.

New Orleans needs to shrink to something to a city that is both physically and economically sustainable.

[Mark Anderson]

"If you were poor in New Orleans, you'll be poor in Dallas or Houston, or any other city in the country. This was a welfare town, populated by people of give-me-stuff-for-nothing mentality. It makes no sense to pour billions into rebuilding when the population will destroy it anyway, if not the storms."

And if you are a whiny libertarian with NO rebuilt, you'll be a whiny libertarian if it isn't. I shouldn't respond to this, but with thousands dead, I'm glad someone is looking after my tax dollars. I'm glad your just passing through. How about passing through this country and go somewhere that didn't shell out tons of money to get you an education, job, and roads you drive on, etc.

[Dynamist]

joe: Highland areas around New Orleans? Hahahaha. Now pull the other one. Did you even look at a terrain map before you made your "enlightened" development prescription? The westbank is drained swamp and floodplain, just like where these geniuses don't want to rebuild upon.

Y'all are slipping back into confusing the river levees with the lake levees. When the wetland rebuilding gets underway, it simultaneously takes pressure off the river levees (providing diversionary flow). The lake levees could stand to be higher, and somebody will figure out that floodgates at the ends of outfall canals are worth looking into. Raising pumping stations are likely in the cards, and if you're a gambler, look for a crosstown levee, probably taking advantage of existing rail embankments. I expect more arguments about MR-GO, and many improvements to locks and bridges along the industrial canal (IHNC).

You're gonna discover that many of the "old shacks" are structurally better off than the new slab-on-grade crap that filled New Orleans East, tony Lakeview and the suburbs.

For those having more fun telling people half-assed reasons why the city should be abandoned, you're forgetting the Formosan termites that will eat whatever you build even if there's never another storm. The stinging caterpillars are real, but the Africanized bees are overhyped.

It's like watching a bunch of blindfolded engineers trying to rebuild an elephant. Keep after it y'all. Thanks for your donations.

[Dynamist]

Oh, yeah, dredge and fill works fine, if there's money to pay for it. Lakeshore, a new (1920s) fill project, is one of the highest areas of town, and although it's on the lake beside the 17th breach, it's dry. Same with the lakefront airport. There are current plans to develop a new neighborhood with an airport in the lake. All it takes is money.

[Thomas Paine's Goiter]

Raising pumping stations are likely in the cards,

This confuses me. Why not have a hydro-powered pumping system on a closed loop? The city is on a river, after all. And if the power goes out, the pumps won't.