A new plan to help New Orleans could go dangerously wrong
AT THE Rock 'n' Bowl one recent evening, as the ancient but brilliant Snooks Eaglin played blues guitar and the smell of gumbo and crawfish filled the air, it was easy to believe that New Orleans was back. The legendary nightspot, famous for offering bowling and Zydeco bands under the same roof, was packed to the rafters. Its motto, “Rock 'n' Bowl will never die!” seemed that of the city too.
But don't be fooled. New Orleans is far from thriving. The short drive from the French Quarter out to the bowling alley reveals block after block of devastation. Even the strip mall in which Rock 'n' Bowl sits is now empty. Many locals have held back from rebuilding, waiting for word of the official redevelopment plan.
Rumours swirling in March suggested that the levees would not be rebuilt to protect the whole city, and that people would be prevented from rebuilding their low-lying homes. Now salvation appears to have come from the unlikeliest source—the Bush administration, which bungled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. On April 12th, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued long-awaited guidelines on how houses in the area must be rebuilt if they are to qualify for money from state and federal programmes.
Those guidelines, as it turns out, are remarkably unstringent. They could allow most residents to return to most parts of the city and receive government money with only modest upgrades (raising houses only three feet in many cases, not ten or more as anticipated). The federal government also promises that most of the region's flood walls will be replaced and its levees strengthened. The first phase of repairs is to finish by June, and the whole job by 2010.
The plan has gone down extremely well with locals, but their celebrations may be premature. For one thing, these new, non-binding guidelines are not FEMA's final “flood maps”, which are not expected until later this year. Also, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce (IPET), a panel of experts commended by the army's own corps of engineers, will not be producing its final report on what went wrong with the city's defences until June—and may yet scotch all plans to rebuild the city's lower-lying wards. If the boffins suggest that those wards cannot be defended economically, it would once again be mostly poor and black residents who would be affected.
Why would federal officials announce such lenient rules before the scientific work is finished? Some see election-year politics at work. By issuing “preliminary” guidelines that prove to be wildly popular, goes this argument, the Bush administration can at last appear to be helping New Orleans back on its feet—and if the IPET report is damning, it can simply blame the boffins.
One federal official offers a more honourable interpretation: “We wanted to kick-start the redevelopment here.” That sounds helpful, but it may be folly to rebuild large parts of the city. The levees, even if built properly this time, will not offer adequate protection for all districts against the flooding that is likely to accompany the most powerful hurricanes. John McIlwain of the Urban Land Institute, a think-tank, argues that it would be much safer and cheaper to rebuild a smaller, denser city for all returning residents in the higher neighbourhoods.
In the end, argues Oliver Houck of Tulane Law School, the new guidelines are “a compromise based on politics, not science. When the flood comes, New Orleans will regret it—but until then, it is great for the economy.” That was ever the city's attitude to life, and death.