Regarding the building of New New Orleans, Harvard’s Ed Glaeser weighs in with a cogent, well-reasoned [Oh, he agrees with you? — Ed.] short op-ed:

Professor Edward L. Glaeser

 

A smaller New Orleans

MUCH OF the discussion of the planned rebuilding of New Orleans has been mired in nostalgia and unrealistic expectations, and we are in danger of doing a far worse job rebuilding New Orleans than rebuilding Baghdad. The final report released by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission — the closest thing there is to an official reconstruction organization — provides us with a blueprint for a rebuilding process that is both wasteful and unfair.

The press surrounding the Bring New Orleans Back Commission report focused on the anger surrounding the commission’s admission that not all the city should be rebuilt.

 

To put it in context, look at the extent of the affected areas.

 

If courage is speaking truth to power (a horribly overused phrase), political courage is telling the voters what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear.

You can’t always get what you want

 

But this is the one thing the commission got right. Our obligation is to people, not places, and many residents of New Orleans would be better off with cash or portable housing, or education vouchers than with tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending.

I found myself nodding at this, but then asked myself:

Is our obligation to people in this case?

The population of Old New Orleans has been splashed all across America, and now — four full months after the impact — many of them are building new lives elsewhere, with new jobs, new schoolmates, new neighborhoods. They will not return to New New Orleans.

I’m not also sure they suffered equal damage. A renter can more readily restore the status quo ante — renting an apartment elsewhere — than a homeowner can regain the equity lost when a house is smashed.

 

Professor Glaeser is on much firmer ground with these criticisms:

 

1. The report requires neighborhoods to develop plans to justify their reconstruction, but it doesn’t elaborate on what criteria will be used to judge these plans. The absence of clear, well-justified rules that will determine rebuilding, hopefully based on cost-benefit analysis, will inevitably lead to claims of arbitrariness and political decisions.

Justify my reconstruction

 

Abdicating the decision to amputate and cauterize is a false compassion, and the report offers a useless compromise — refusing to do so directly, but asking neighborhoods to reach their own conclusions. This is a prescription for protracted inaction and the spread of economic gangrene.

 

2. The report provides no funds to those people, especially renters, who live in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt. Residents who lived in areas that won’t be rebuilt are entitled to insurance payments that are just as generous as those going to the people in areas that will receive the benefits of federal infrastructure spending.

 

Even presuming (as Professor Glaeser does) that Under New Orleans will not be rebuilt, he makes a good point that renters too have suffered losses, and are most likely still worse off than they were before the storm.

 

3. The weakest elements of the report are its actual spending recommendations.

 

This calls for a table:

Action Plan Funding Recommendations

Bring Bank New Orleans‘ Recommendation

Amount in

Source: Action Plan for New Orleans, The New American City (link in .pdf), slide 57

Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Urban Planning Committee, January 11, 2006

Prepared by Wallace Roberts & Todd, Master Planner

Bring New Orleans Back Spending Recommendations

We’ve got to make the pie higher!

Note the funding strategy: Federal, Federal, Federal, Federal, Federal, and Federal. Did I say Federal?

What would the Federalists have thought?

What about state or local funding?

The largest line item in the report is $12 billion for buying housing in New Orleans. Since the report strongly supports the Baker bill, I assume that this money is to be used along the lines suggested by that bill, which advocates federal spending that could top $50 billion in a poorly conceived scheme involving buying and rebuilding homes in the region.

The vision of the bill sponsored by Representative Richard Baker, a Baton Rouge Republican, is that houses will first be bought, then rehabilitated at federal expense, then sold back to the original residents or potentially someone else. Decades of public housing projects should have taught us that the federal government is not a good real estate developer.

 

Yes, the Federal government is probably the worst imaginable developer … but there’s many ways to use Federal credit enhancement without using direct Federal bureaucracy: FHA’s mortgage programs (such as 221d4 and 223f) work perfectly well, are actively in use now, and could be very efficiently deployed through individual FHA lenders and originators, and sold instantly via the GSEs.

 

Finally, and bizarrely, the report spends as much space on a light rail system as it does on levees. One could easily get the idea that the best protection against future hurricanes for the federal government to spend $5 billion on light rail in New Orleans.

Where your $5 billion would go

I believe that embedded within the master’s in city planning sheepskin is a dermatological agent imprinting a conviction unto faith as to the virtues of light rail. But elegant though they are, I know of none anywhere in the world that has proven an urban necessity. Either you go full underground subway (DC Metro, London Tube, Paris Metro), or you go low-emissions bus.

 

Light rail systems almost never cover their costs, and they are almost always dominated by high speed buses on dedicated lanes.

If you’re using a bus anyhow, why permanently fix its routes at all?

 

Given the uncertainty in New Orleans’s future, it seems foolish to lay down fixed rail lines, when speedy buses are readily available. After all, in the 2000 Census, 76% of New Orleans residents drove to work, more than 12% took a bus, and less than 1% had anything to do with streetcars or rail.

As is usual with light rail recommendations, it is not cheap, and sucks up economic oxygenated hemoglobin that could be better transfused elsewhere:

A nice light rail system, sir, and you’ll be back on your feet in no time.

The proposed spending on rail could provide more than $15,000 per adult on schooling or healthcare, which would surely help the disadvantaged of New Orleans far more than light rail.

 

New Orleans will remain a great city, but that great city can and should be much smaller than it has been in the past. The commission has made one big step by acknowledging that rebuilding will be incomplete, but in the future, the commission should rely more on cost-benefit analysis and less on the latest urban planning fads.

 

And, he might have added, less on the tugging of heart strings and more on sound development principles.

So much for the concept. For the depressing reality, tune in tomorrow in Part 2.

Send post as PDF to