Thursday, April 12, 2007

Staging an intervention via the New York Times


This article is the talk of the town in The City That We Forgot. Basically, what has happened is New Orleans' city recovery czar -- wittingly or unwittingly, I can't say -- has staged an intervention for an entire city, if not an entire state.

It's said that the first step toward recovery -- whether you're a drunk or a doper, or whatever your poison be -- is to name the problem, take ownership of the dysfunction. And when you've hit bottom and still can't bring yourself to say "I am a (fill in the blank), and I need help," sometimes it takes somebody -- or somebodies -- to get in your damn face and make you face up to what's killing you.

It looks like -- maybe, just maybe -- that's what Dr. Edward J. Blakely, world-renowned disaster-recovery expert, has just done for the Crescent City. Here are the money grafs from the end of Tuesday's Times piece by Adam Nossiter:

The picture in its entirety is too daunting to be tackled completely. Most acutely, Dr. Blakely has found a polarized racial environment in New Orleans, very different from Oakland, that he says he must work around rather than try to change. Here, race is “the first thing in people’s minds,” said Dr. Blakely, who is black. “It’s a culture of domination rather than participation. So whatever group gets something, they try to dominate the whole turf.”

A second entrenched hurdle is the paper-thin economy. If it is not built up — essentially created wholesale, most promisingly on hopes of redeveloping a downtown medical and bioscience complex here — all of Dr. Blakely’s exercises could be for naught.

“We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts,” he said in a speech at the University of Sydney this week. “That is our major import and export.”

He sees the moribund economic infrastructure as the result, in part, of the city’s provincialism.

“It’s quite interesting how insular people are here,” Dr. Blakely said. “They don’t know people on Wall Street, they don’t know the big development firms, they’ve not been associated with the kind of urban planning expertise that I take for granted.”

The tone is clipped and California, different from the easygoing drawl of local officials. Dr. Blakely’s skepticism about New Orleans caused a stir last week when he suggested that the city’s prehurricane population levels might have been inflated. He later backed down and apologized after Mayor Nagin disagreed.

Still, the city has a few aces, and Dr. Blakely is banking on them, most notably a “very good” university network of five substantial institutions, and a way of life that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

Newcomers, pioneers willing to put up with the city’s present difficulties, could be the salvation of New Orleans and its future, Dr. Blakely suggested. New Orleans now is “a third-world country,” he said.

“If we get some people here, those 100 million new Americans, they’re going to come here without the same attitudes of the locals,” he said. “I think, if we create the right signals, they’re going to come here, and they’re going to say, ‘Who are these buffoons?’ I’m meeting some who are moving here, and they don’t have time for this stuff.”
AS A LOUISIANA NATIVE, I know what Blakely says is sadly true. As someone who's read the news coverage of that benighted city since Hurricane Katrina, you probably suspect it's true, too.

Pray God that New Orleanians recognize the truth when it slaps them in the face, and summon the courage to overcome their ugly reality.

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