Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

Even as we cannot gainsay the pessimistic view of the New New Orleans, we know that the city will come back, its tourist attractions separated from its container port.  What will be New New Orleans’ future?  Consider another city that once was a port and is now something else:

 

Vaporetto, the floating bus, heading toward San Marco

 

Venice, like Genoa, rose to late-Renaissance power on the strength of its trade, shipping, and fleet.  (The world’s first Arsenal was the Venetian top-secret military laboratory out of which sailed the great galleons that won the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.)  Like Old New Orleans, no one thinking long-term would have built Venice where it is, amid a lagoon, on the siltiest, flattest, and softest of marsh basins:

 

Torcello, five kilometers into the lagoon

 

Disease was rife, plague common.  After one such bout, the Venetians built Il Redentore (the Redeemer) (1577), celebrating the city’s delivery from the plague.

 

 

It didn’t work, and the plague returned:

 

In October of 1630, after nearly a third of Venice’s 150,000 citizens had been killed by plague, the Venetian Senate made an offer to God: “Stop the plague, and we’ll build a church to honor the Virgin Mary.”

 

And they did, starting in 1631, completing in 1667.  On the point of the Dorsoduro across from Piazza San Marco now stands Santa Maria della Salute, Holy Mary of Health.

 

 

Meanwhile, plague or no, palazzi sank and had to be shored up.

 

 

Since everything had to move by water, building costs were exorbitant.  The city could support only the highest-end of manufacturing — glass-blowing — and soon even that too moved, off Venice to the nearby islands of Murano and Burano.  Then even the cemetery had to move, to its own island of San Michele.  The industrial base vanished. 

 

So too the port, as the lagoon silted up, and Venice’s port moved to Mestre, today a hideous grim greasy smokestack blur from the Autostrada. 

 

Venetians have been saying for thirty years that their city is nothing more than a museum. The flow of commuters demonstrates this. Before the 1970s, Venetian workers commuted daily across the lagoon to Mestre and Porto Marghera on the mainland, where they had industrial jobs, mostly in chemical plants. By the mid-1970s, they could no longer afford city rents; then heavy industry began to decline. Now Venetian workers live on the mainland and commute back to Venice every day for jobs in the tourist industry.

 

 

For a long time Venice was a banking center and a political capital,

 

 

Sir, the United States of America in Congress assembled, judging that an intercourse between the said United States and the Most serene Republic of Venice founded on the principles of equality reciprocity and friendship, may be of mutual advantage to both nations … have now the honour to inform your Excellency … that we are ready to enter negotiation whenever a full power from the said Most serene Republic of Venice shall appear for the purpose.
J. Adams, B. Franklin, Th. Jefferson

 

but during the eighteenth century both dwindled, Venice losing out to Milan on finance and Rome on politics.

 

Left behind was narcissistic Venice, the Serenissima, a city with a wealth of heritage, a city endlessly fascinated by its own reflection,

 

 

a city good for only one thing: tourism.  Indeed, tourism has been its salvation, so much that the Italian government is proposing to protect Venice with locks in the lagoon. 

 

Though it draws tourism year-round, among the city’s main events is carnivale, whose high point is Martedi Grasso.

 

Does this sound like any American city you know?

 

 

 

The more complex the mind, said the host of the amusement planet in a great Star Trek episode, Shore Leave, the greater its need for play … and for complex play.

 

Torn tunics optional, sir!

 

As homo urbanis’s need for leisure grows, so too grow the leisure cities.  Sin City West is Las Vegas, which continues to boom amid the trackless desert.  Atlantic City is Sin City East.  Gambling fever has broken out across America, and except for Branson, Missouri (please!), in between there is nowhere comparable.  Except Sin City South, the Big Easy.  A playground for adults, be their pleasures adult, adolescent, child-like, or childish.  Why float up and down the Mississippi to gamble when you can step aboard a moored paddle-wheeler?

 

I have seen the future, and it has bad taste.

 

In Superdome did Donald Trump

A garish gaming hall decree

Where big the muddy river ran

As drawn on a rebuilding plan

Down through strong new levees

 

Casinos are good for city government, and they generate pots of revenue.  They’re not good for civitas, but their presence does mean a huge low-wage employment base, and a corresponding need for an enormous amount of sustainable affordable housing.

 

Indeed, even in Venice, there’s a need for affordable housing.  Today no one except the very rich really lives in Venice; for that you commute to the Lido.  Venice today is of the tourist, by the tourist, and for the tourist.  Venetian affordable housing is in Mestre or on Burano …

 

New construction affordable housing, Burano, Italy

 

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