Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

As Joseph Schumpeter said, in one of the most famous passages about capitalism:

 

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.

 

Schumpeter in Harvard Yard, 1940: “Nice church, maybe we knock it down?”

 

[…]

 

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

 

[…]

 

The same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

Cities, especially American ones, are always being destroyed and rebuilt

 

As to the wisdom of rebuilding willy-nilly, consider this report:

 

Parts of New Orleans sank rapidly in the three years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, which might have made the already low-lying city even more vulnerable, a new study found.

 

The study, released Wednesday by the journal Nature, found that some areas subsided 1 1/8 inch per year (28.6 millimeters) between 2002 and 2005. The average decrease was about a quarter inch (5.6 millimeters).

 

That’s a staggering rate.  In Future Boston, a shared-universe science fiction mosaic novel I edited, we opted to sink the area four inches a year, roughly a hundredfold increase.  The result was dying, unsalvageable cities, as I had a character say:

 

As the town of Hull sank, its houses had fallen to the Atlantic, singly or in whole streets. These rich proud windward oceanfronts, unshielded from the open sea, were the first to go. Black asphalt shingles had been torn from their roofs and walls by many storms. Porches sagged or collapsed entirely. Broken windows and doors were covered with Cambodian territorial chop signs of the Ngor, Pran, and Kim waterkid gangs. Some homes had been burned out, the soot rising from their empty window frames like the petals of black flowers.

 

“I could have told you folks,” Ethel addressed the ghosts of the departed owners. “You don’t stop the sea.”

 

New Orleans, September, 2005

 

Back in the real world:

 

“What we found is that some of the levee failure in New Orleans were places where subsidence was highest,” University of Miami professor Tim Dixon said in a news release from the school. “These levees were built over 40 years ago, and in some cases, the ground had subsided a minimum of 3 feet which probably put them lower than their design level.”

 

Study co-author Shimon Wdowinski said that some places, including the Lakeview and Kenner areas, would continue to sink about an inch per year over the next 10 years but that the average would be a fraction of that.

 

“We need to think long term, think of what will happen in the city in 50 or 100 years,” Wdowinski said. “Some areas will continue to subside, the sea level will continue to rise. Places like the Lower Ninth Ward will be 10 feet below sea level.”

 

He said the findings raise serious concerns as officials work to rebuild the city.

 

“I don’t think anybody wants to live in a place like that. It’s just not a good idea.”

 

Not to go all Biblical on my readers, but as Matthew 7:24-27 puts it:

 

A wise man built his house upon a rock.  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. 

 

And a foolish man built his house upon the sand.  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

 

Katrina was a tragedy, but the demolition of 5,000 moribund and deteriorated public housing apartments from Old New Orleans needs to be seen not as destruction but creation. 

 

Would you rehab this?

A Lower Ninth Ward apartment complex open to residents.  (October 2005)

 

Katrina’s aftermath has given New New Orleans several billion dollars’ worth of opportunity to remake comprehensively a public housing inventory into a more diversified, stronger, more successful community.

 

We must build New New Orleans upon the rock, not on sand. 

Send post as PDF to