Completing the Destruction of New Orleans

In the early 1980s, when I first moved to New York City, I colonized a friend's couch in the north Bronx for a couple of months. I have vivid memories of commuting to my midtown job past hundreds of abandoned apartment buildings in the borough. The city government had covered all those busted out windows with plywood painted to look like windows with curtains and potted plants. Why were all these buildings within a 30 minute subway ride of Lincoln Center, Macy's and Broadway empty? An economist once succinctly explained: "The Bronx was not devastated by an atomic bomb, but by rent control." Landlords simply abandoned their buildings when they could no longer make even enough money to repair them.

Now, the feckless mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, and some Louisiana legislators apparently want to finish the destruction of his city wrought by the Corps of Engineers and Katrina by imposing rent control (audio) on the apartments that remain. If rent controls are imposed, New Orleans landlord Edward Young points out that he and many other landlords would have to consider simply taking their insurance money and going somewhere else.

There is, however, a silver lining: Rent control is one way to make sure that the wetlands New Orleans used to occupy are restored.