New Orleans Redux

To begin with, the New Orleans that tourists see -- the New Orleans that makes people visit -- has not been destroyed. In fact, the French Quarter was remarkably undamaged by the storm itself or the flooding afterwards. Probably the most damage that has been done to the French Quarter has been the loss of the tourists, who have for one reason or another not come to the city in the numbers they once had. The major tourist hotels surrounding Canal Street are fully functional, so it's not a question of room availability.



However, whole neighborhoods have been destroyed. The houses are there, but they're so heavily damaged that they're unliveable, and with the destruction of the neighborhoods there's been a ripple effect: the loss of population, the loss of small businesses set up to serve the local population, the loss of large retail to serve the local population, the loss of jobs that all those businesses provided, and on up. This mall is one example:


I didn't get a shot of it, but there was also a huge Wal*Mart building shuttered up, another victim of the storm and the devastation of the neighborhoods it served. You know it's bad when a vulture like Wal*Mart can't re-open.

Block after block, in section after section, homes are abandoned. Some are visibly damaged from the storm, but others look as if they're simply empty (except in many cases for the tell-tale sign of a high water mark on the siding or brick). Nearly all have the spray-paint marks familiar to those of us who watched the post-Katrina coverage. The spray-paint indicates the date it was searched, the agency searching, and the results of the search. Sometimes short messages are also painted on the houses.

But New Orleans is resilient, even with fewer people and fewer tourists. The population that's there dearly love their city, but they aren't terribly excited about the help they've gotten from federal or state agencies. We should also remember that one of the Bush Administration's most forceful steps in "rebuilding" the area was to suspend union work rules so that construction corporations could undercut the union wages and boost their profits -- this sort of corporate giveaway is the only sort of financial help Bush understands.