News
Of Leaders and Opportunists
Apr 17 2007
Our recovery from the levee failures of 2005 has benefitted enormously from the skill and dedication of our leaders.
No, not our inept mayor and moribund City Council. Not our leading lights of big business and their developer friends. We are talking about the real leaders of the recovery—the people who didn’t even know they were leaders until the folks who were supposed to be leading ducked and ran.
Who are these leaders? They are members of the Vietnamese community planning their long-term recovery. They are the residents of Broadmoor organizing their neighborhood. They are the residents of Holy Cross dedicating themselves to becoming the most carbon neutral community in the nation. They are the residents of Mid-City creating a vision of a vibrant and sustainable neighborhood. They are the Friends of Lafitte Corridor securing substantial funding to begin construction of a bike and pedestrian greenway connecting many neighborhoods. They are the more than 650 locally-owned businesses — retailers, wholesalers, professional service providers, and artists — who have come together as Stay Local! to demonstrate a vision of a vibrant and sustainable economy for New Orleans. They are all the others across the city who stepped up when our so-called leaders abdicated their responsibilities.
Unfortunately, the hard work and sound wisdom of our real leaders continues to be undermined by the opportunistic tendencies of our elected officials and their big development friends.
Because they lack faith in our local business owners and our local entrepreneurs, they argue that we must entice national chains to come and save us.
Because they lack knowledge of national best practices, they strive to aggregate large tracts of land and provide them to national housing developers rather than allow local contractors to access the land in smaller groupings. Small, diverse contractors building homes scattered throughout our neighborhoods support the existing urban fabric. This approach is time-tested and continues an historic tradition of urban housing construction that gives New Orleans neighborhoods their unique power. Large areas developed by a single corporate builder tend to be suburban, boring, and lacking in true urban character. The more organic approach also reduces the risk of bad outcomes: Two bad houses on a block are unfortunate; twenty-two blocks of bad houses destroy an entire community.
Because our traditional leaders don’t actually believe in the unique beauty and power of New Orleans (some of them live in Prairieville and Dallas) they feel compelled to give away millions of dollars in incentives to lure outsiders here. Why else would they come? Investing here is so risky (they tell us) we have to give them money.
Because they have no vision of their own, they jump at any opportunity that comes along no matter the long-term negative consequences for the city.
When tough decisions needed to be made in the fall of 2005, the mayor ducked and ran. The City Council didn’t notice because they were too busy ducking and running. And so it goes down to today.
Fortunately for the city a vibrant and visionary group of leaders working on diverse issues emerged organically across the city. The role of the mayor, the City Council, and the business community should now be to show humility and to use every resource available to them to support the visions and strategies developed by our true leaders.
Filed under: Editorials | Rebuilding New Orleans
Replies
Wendy King said:
Great commentary! In outlying communities, such as New Orleans East, and parts of the city past the Industrial Canal, the prescription for “saving” the city’s more devastated parts is “clustering” homes around green spaces (but only if people in the neighborhhod agree to move to one block), and avoiding the “jack-o’lantern” effect of a few occupied homes in a “sea” of dark, abandoned houses and vacant lots. Mayor Nagin and the NORA are pushing the Lot Next Door program, so that people who have rebuilt their homes can buy the abandoned lot next to them, presumably to either demolish the derelict house on it, fix up the house for their own use or rental, or to sell it, or, if the lot has no house on it, to build a new one, or to expand their own yards.
Apr 18 2007
8:11 AM
David Yeargin said:
Bravo! I hope to see this commentary on the editorial pages of the Picayune.
Even as the floodwaters were streaming through the broken canal walls, “experts” were coming out of the woodwork with their grand ideas of what should come next. To them, New Orleans was a blank slate on which to write their theories of urban design. It was, or would be, a bare patch of ground on which to build their modern utopia. Their intent was not to repair New Orleans, but to replace it with something shiny, new, grand, and different. Where we needed a mop, they offered a monorail.
While the experts battled among themselves, using up precious public funds in the process, the citizens set about the hard task of drying out, cleaning up, and moving on.
I applaud the small projects that meet the needs of neighborhoods. For instance, I think sprinkling the city with hundreds of neighborhood parks or neighborhood gardens is a great way to put vacant lots to use until the population rebuilds. But the politicians seem incapable of thinking small. They seem incapable of looking past their legacy to the people that made New Orleans what it is. The only bright spot, as the UC editorial points out, is that the bureaucracy is so cumbersome that the people may yet gain a foothold before the bulldozers sweep in to destroy their city in order to “save” it.
Urban Conservancy, keep fighting the good fight, and get your message heard!
Apr 18 2007
9:08 AM
Tim said:
Outstanding!
Humility is extinct in our elected officials, especially the ones who challenge state police officers with, “Don’t you know who I am?”
I’m going to post a link to my blog and encourage all to read.
Peace,
Tim
Apr 18 2007
12:29 PM
Schroeder said:
A courageous editorial for a non-profit. Thanks! You lend respectability and support to citizens who have been hollering the same thing ever since Hurricane Katrina. Local officials should lead or get out of the way.
May 17 2007
11:02 AM