Keith Gaddie Finds New Orleans A Shattered, Desolate, Threatening, Dangerous City
By Keith Gaddie ~ I am just back from New Orleans. I had the chance to drive around the city and check some things out. To spend a day looking around New Orleans is to have your heart broken.
The city can be divided into four basic components, in terms of recovery and rehabilitation. First, the "west bank" portions of the city, such as Algiers Point, are nicely recovered and only suffered storm damage but not flooding. Second, the down-town CBD, French Quarter and immediately proximate areas are probably better developed than fifteen years ago and seem to suffer no ill-effects of the storm. However, close inspection reveals that many of the towering downtown structures still sport busted windows (and not just a broken window here or there, but entire sides of twenty story buildings lack any unbroken panes. Third, the uptown -- the part of the city that ran along the trolley car line -- at first blush seems untouched. But close examination reveals that there are busted and damaged trees that are untended or uncleared; felled traffic signals, power poles, and light posts; the wiring for the trolley line is unrepaired.
When I went running on the grassy median of St. Charles Avenue that carries the trolley lines, the tracks were still mudded over and need to be cleared before they can be used. The uptown, usually nicely lit, is largely dark at night except for a few business and restaurant districts. A friend who lives near Tulane reports his block is half rebuilt, half abandoned, and that he doesn't go outside without his dog.
The removal of the National Guard patrols has left residential neighborhoods quite dangerous at night.
Then there is the rest of the city -- about 70% of the city -- including the Lakefront, Central City, Gentilly, Desire, the Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East. Renovations are ongoing, but it seems that most of the population is still tucked into FEMA trailers, either single trailers next to devastated homes, or trailer parks.
The destruction witnessed by myself and a colleague driving the city is difficult to describe, so bear with me. First, I do not think that one fully appreciates the scope of destruction of the communities, in terms of the physical or social displacement or the scale, so I'll try to make an analogous comparison. The area of the devastated neighborhoods is about 46 square miles. I drove for eight miles through densely-packed neighborhoods that stretched to the limits of my eyes on either side of the interstate and saw mainly abandoned houses, and few recovered properties. Most of the major retail centers were abandoned (except for the Lowes, Home Depot, and a Ford dealership), and out in the suburban New Orleans East, a community roughly the size and density of south Oklahoma City, was utterly devastated and nearly abandoned. I cut through these areas on two angles to get a sense of the destruction, and it cut north to south and east to west.
Getting off the highway revealed works crews and activity, but the common denominator was houses not under repair rather than houses under repair. There are still damaged cars, roofless houses, houses off their piers, and repeatedly large stretches of scrapped foundations that reminded me of the last ground-scrapping tornado I saw in 1999.
Driving west through City Park on I-610 revealed a devastated wilderness. The trees of the park are busted and untended, the infrastructure looks abandoned, and around this once-glamorous neighborhood started a century ago as a southern rival to Central Park, there are broken, abandoned, and decaying homes.
The city is largely dark at night, and a lawless quality prevails outside the French Quarter, the CBD, and parts of Uptown. The Sugar Bowl crowd was lively and well-behaved, and the quarter rocked every night, but outside of the tourist quarters, New Orleans is a vast brown field of empty, busted houses, closed schools, empty store fronts, and spotty infrastructure.
Lawlessness is always near, and as was the case in New Orleans, one needed to be on guard at all times. As I drove with a colleague to look at the city, we headed out east to the edge of the east, and got off at the end of Michoud Boulevard at I-10. This dead-end overpass is on the edge of development in the east, and affords a view to east of the wetlands, which are still recovering from the storm, and to the west one can see the remnants of a once vast and vibrant suburban landscape. I stood with a colleague atop the overpass, looking around and reflecting on what we saw, with no other cars or people around. Then, I saw a late model luxury car storming up the off ramp toward our bridge, and the hairs on my neck stood up. We quickly jumped in my truck and sped down the other ramp, back onto I-10 and towards the city. A half mile later the same car blew past us, a late-model Coup DeVille driven by two menacing looking teenagers which passed us at 90 miles an hour. Perhaps it was nothing, but in New Orleans you don’t want to get caught out alone or exposed.
New Orleans, despite the glossy spin of its mayor, is dangerous, more dangerous than it ever was before. When I lived in New Orleans, 17,000 abandoned properties created pockets of operation for predatory criminals, and now those abandoned properties are grown dramatically, multiplied, and instead of pockets of abandoned property, there are pockets of habitability.
Much of New Orleans is shattered, but we won’t know it except to look. Why? It is difficult to appreciate the scales of destruction because it is minimized by the television camera. One can show damaged homes up close, or looking out a window, but the destruction is unremitting, thousands of city blocks of busted homes and lost neighborhoods. It is so huge as to be lost in the scale of the destruction.
This should stand as no surprise, though, because there is no place from which to start an intensive, large-scale reconstruction, and there are not sufficient hands and hammers to quickly rebuild tens of thousands of houses. Put simply, you can’t just put it back. If one assumes that it takes about 3200 man-hours to pull down a destroyed house and then raise a new one – a conservative estimate – then it would take the equivalent of a work force of 160,000 persons (possessed of all the requisite construction skills) a year working fulltime to put New Orleans back up, assuming availability of products and contractors who show up on time to do their jobs. This is just going to take time.
(Editor's Note: Keith Gaddie, now professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, formerly taught at Tulane in New Orleans. He filed this chilling report after a recent trip to the battered city.)
The city can be divided into four basic components, in terms of recovery and rehabilitation. First, the "west bank" portions of the city, such as Algiers Point, are nicely recovered and only suffered storm damage but not flooding. Second, the down-town CBD, French Quarter and immediately proximate areas are probably better developed than fifteen years ago and seem to suffer no ill-effects of the storm. However, close inspection reveals that many of the towering downtown structures still sport busted windows (and not just a broken window here or there, but entire sides of twenty story buildings lack any unbroken panes. Third, the uptown -- the part of the city that ran along the trolley car line -- at first blush seems untouched. But close examination reveals that there are busted and damaged trees that are untended or uncleared; felled traffic signals, power poles, and light posts; the wiring for the trolley line is unrepaired.
When I went running on the grassy median of St. Charles Avenue that carries the trolley lines, the tracks were still mudded over and need to be cleared before they can be used. The uptown, usually nicely lit, is largely dark at night except for a few business and restaurant districts. A friend who lives near Tulane reports his block is half rebuilt, half abandoned, and that he doesn't go outside without his dog.
The removal of the National Guard patrols has left residential neighborhoods quite dangerous at night.
Then there is the rest of the city -- about 70% of the city -- including the Lakefront, Central City, Gentilly, Desire, the Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East. Renovations are ongoing, but it seems that most of the population is still tucked into FEMA trailers, either single trailers next to devastated homes, or trailer parks.
The destruction witnessed by myself and a colleague driving the city is difficult to describe, so bear with me. First, I do not think that one fully appreciates the scope of destruction of the communities, in terms of the physical or social displacement or the scale, so I'll try to make an analogous comparison. The area of the devastated neighborhoods is about 46 square miles. I drove for eight miles through densely-packed neighborhoods that stretched to the limits of my eyes on either side of the interstate and saw mainly abandoned houses, and few recovered properties. Most of the major retail centers were abandoned (except for the Lowes, Home Depot, and a Ford dealership), and out in the suburban New Orleans East, a community roughly the size and density of south Oklahoma City, was utterly devastated and nearly abandoned. I cut through these areas on two angles to get a sense of the destruction, and it cut north to south and east to west.
Getting off the highway revealed works crews and activity, but the common denominator was houses not under repair rather than houses under repair. There are still damaged cars, roofless houses, houses off their piers, and repeatedly large stretches of scrapped foundations that reminded me of the last ground-scrapping tornado I saw in 1999.
Driving west through City Park on I-610 revealed a devastated wilderness. The trees of the park are busted and untended, the infrastructure looks abandoned, and around this once-glamorous neighborhood started a century ago as a southern rival to Central Park, there are broken, abandoned, and decaying homes.
The city is largely dark at night, and a lawless quality prevails outside the French Quarter, the CBD, and parts of Uptown. The Sugar Bowl crowd was lively and well-behaved, and the quarter rocked every night, but outside of the tourist quarters, New Orleans is a vast brown field of empty, busted houses, closed schools, empty store fronts, and spotty infrastructure.
Lawlessness is always near, and as was the case in New Orleans, one needed to be on guard at all times. As I drove with a colleague to look at the city, we headed out east to the edge of the east, and got off at the end of Michoud Boulevard at I-10. This dead-end overpass is on the edge of development in the east, and affords a view to east of the wetlands, which are still recovering from the storm, and to the west one can see the remnants of a once vast and vibrant suburban landscape. I stood with a colleague atop the overpass, looking around and reflecting on what we saw, with no other cars or people around. Then, I saw a late model luxury car storming up the off ramp toward our bridge, and the hairs on my neck stood up. We quickly jumped in my truck and sped down the other ramp, back onto I-10 and towards the city. A half mile later the same car blew past us, a late-model Coup DeVille driven by two menacing looking teenagers which passed us at 90 miles an hour. Perhaps it was nothing, but in New Orleans you don’t want to get caught out alone or exposed.
New Orleans, despite the glossy spin of its mayor, is dangerous, more dangerous than it ever was before. When I lived in New Orleans, 17,000 abandoned properties created pockets of operation for predatory criminals, and now those abandoned properties are grown dramatically, multiplied, and instead of pockets of abandoned property, there are pockets of habitability.
Much of New Orleans is shattered, but we won’t know it except to look. Why? It is difficult to appreciate the scales of destruction because it is minimized by the television camera. One can show damaged homes up close, or looking out a window, but the destruction is unremitting, thousands of city blocks of busted homes and lost neighborhoods. It is so huge as to be lost in the scale of the destruction.
This should stand as no surprise, though, because there is no place from which to start an intensive, large-scale reconstruction, and there are not sufficient hands and hammers to quickly rebuild tens of thousands of houses. Put simply, you can’t just put it back. If one assumes that it takes about 3200 man-hours to pull down a destroyed house and then raise a new one – a conservative estimate – then it would take the equivalent of a work force of 160,000 persons (possessed of all the requisite construction skills) a year working fulltime to put New Orleans back up, assuming availability of products and contractors who show up on time to do their jobs. This is just going to take time.
(Editor's Note: Keith Gaddie, now professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, formerly taught at Tulane in New Orleans. He filed this chilling report after a recent trip to the battered city.)
Labels: New Orleans
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