PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "After Katrina, Part Two"

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After Katrina, Part Two

WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg and thank you for joining us for the second of two special episodes of Think Tank.
Last summer, Hurricane Katrina flooded over 80 percent of the city of New Orleans. President George W. Bush proclaimed a call to action. But since then the only progress seems to be a confusing patchwork of regulations, plans, and programs, and little action. Can government help make New Orleans whole again? If not, then who?
To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by Jack Davis, publisher of the Hartford Current, and John McIlwain, Senior Resident Fellow at the Urban Land Institute. The topic before the house; After Katrina: Part II. This week on Think Tank.
NARRATION: Almost one year after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, over half the population has yet to return. Local, state, and federal officials struggle to create plans that address the magnitude of reconstruction.
Reed Crowloff (ph.) is a member of the Bring New Orleans Back Committee, a diverse group of local leaders who devised controversial plans to rebuild the city.
REED: We’re talking about not only rebuilding physical infrastructure, we’re talking about not only rebuilding the economy, we’re talking not only about rebuilding the schools, not only about rebuilding the health care system, or any other measure. But we’re talking about building the fundamental soul and spirit of a city. No one has ever done that.
NARRATION: In the mid-city neighborhood of New Orleans, Vera Warren Williams owns a bookstore that sustained severe damage.
VERA: This is one of the heaviest hit of roof damage here, and directly underneath it was our check out counter which had our computer system, copier, fax, scanner, cash registers; all of that was destroyed by the water damage from the roof.
This neighborhood was up and coming business corridor. We have begun to do neighborhood and commercial revitalization. After Katrina, the state of the neighborhood is a mess. There are a lot of businesses that have not been allowed to begin renovations, to begin rebuilding. A lot of the residents have not returned, thus, no business because there’s no people to do business with.

NARRATION: Even businesses that escaped damage from Katrina face challenges. New Orleans Times Picayune managing editor, Peter Kovacs explains:
PETER: The American economy is pretty amazing and one of the things it does is sort of provide the right amount of all the stuff you might want wherever you live. And I would say for people in New Orleans, that’s been completely lost. There’s not really the right amount of anything. There’s not the right amount of workers reconstructing homes, teachers, doctors, you know, grocery stores, cleaners, fast food restaurants.
NARRATION: Workers who want to return face a critical shortage of housing according to Dr. Norman Francis, Chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
DR. NORMAN: People are not going to come back if they don’t have a home or a house to come back to, and they’re not going to come back if they don’t have a job. And the reason you’re not having the workers, is the workers don’t have the homes. What’s you’re first, and second, third priority? Well, they were all the same. Levies, levies, levies, levies. And after that it was housing, housing, housing. And now we’re talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, as well as economic development, which comes back to the small business owner. And in every urban center the small business owner has been with others, the backbone of a community.
VERA: My family is in a difficult position because we’re caught in the middle. We do have some minimum income based upon my husband’s pension, which does not allow us to qualify for public assistance, but it’s not enough either for us to quality either for an SBA loan. However, I do believe in self-determination, and I think that if you’re going to rebuild, you’re going to have to do it yourself. You can’t depend upon the government or anyone else to help you in that.
NARRATION: The Bring New Orleans Back Committee presented Mayor Ray Nagin with a plan to rebuild. But implementing any plan in the current political climate will be difficult.
REED: The Mayor endorsed some of what we proposed and not other parts. And then it moved into a second phase which was who -– in which the question became, who was going to do the planning for the city of New Orleans? And that’s where things began to get pretty murky. And they remain murky. There the Louisiana Recovery Authority had its ideas, the Mayor’s office had its ideas, the city council had their ideas; all of a sudden it’s a very busy kitchen. We like a lot of cooking in New Orleans but even in New Orleans we know when too many cooks are in the kitchen.
NARRATION: When government officials continued to clash, residents struggle to move ahead on their own.
DR. NORMAN: There are people who are rebuilding right now, their own blood, sweat, and tears, and I think New Orleans have learned that sometimes you’ve got to do some things for yourself.
VERA: It’s far from over. It’s actually just beginning for some people and the nightmare has really not begun for the people who have not returned.
REED: And American city that’s wiped out deserves to be rebuilt.
PETER: This is a chance to rebuild an American city and some of the greatest minds in urban planning have come and have seen that vision. And they want to participate in that. And if you’re in that business, I guess, you know, this is the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge you could have would be to figure out how to do that.
WATTENBERG: Welcome to Think Tank. John McIlwain and Jack Davis.
As we saw in an earlier set up piece, some neighborhoods in New Orleans are moving forward with their own rebuilding plans and it’s a year later. What on earth is taking so long?
JACK: John was a planner at the early stages so maybe he should answer this, but the Urban Land Institute and the Mayor’s commission, Bring Back New Orleans, last November and last January polished off a really solid plan that was too good for the politicians to accept. And it called for distinctions to be made between neighborhoods that should be rebuilt and neighborhoods that shouldn’t. And the political climate in New Orleans over the last 11 months, there has not been the ability to go public with any kind of acknowledgment that not all the land can be reused.
WATTENBERG: The Urban Land Institute -– a very distinguished Institute -– but it has it’s own plans of greens (inaudible) and mass transit and all these kinds of wonderful things that planners seem to like. What is your plan for New Orleans?
JOHN: What we had recommended was that a neighborhood by neighborhood planning effort go on that would be coordinated on the city-wide level. And in fact, that’s beginning to take place. It’s been slow, it’s been messy, there has been a profound lack of leadership at the local level, political leadership, but in fact, there is a city-wide planning effort that is being sponsored by the greater New Orleans Foundation, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. And most of the local neighborhoods are in fact engaged in local neighborhood planning.
WATTENBERG: Is it plausible to you that many people will just decide, “I don’t want to live here anymore, I want to live somewhere else.”
JOHN: I think that’s very likely to happen.
WATTENBERG: And that happens all the time.
JOHN: It happens all the time.
JACK: Well, they’ve already said that. I mean, the city is missing 300,000 people and it’s not clear that they’ll ever come back. And people who, under the plan that is going to put the deciding power in the form of money in the hands of homeowners in the next six months, people will be able to take their money to higher ground or take it elsewhere in Louisiana, or leave the state.
JOHN: The federal government is now, to it’s credit, putting in ten billion plus dollars into Louisiana, and it’s being run with really virtually no government oversight. Just a contractor, series of independent contractors. The question is because the reigning philosophy in the government is to let the market decide and take the money straight down to the individuals, which is what is being proposed here, the result may well be ten billion dollars to essentially create an exodus from New Orleans, and leave the city without the ability to reconstruct itself as a smaller city, but a safer city.
WATTENBERG: Do you personally think that these low-lying areas should be redeveloped?
JOHN: The question is not should they be redeveloped, but how should they be redeveloped? They should be redeveloped where -- there are areas where there are higher ground on them, that could take some housing. Much of those areas need to be turned into parks and flood lands. And at the same time, the question is, how then do you redevelop the high ground? And you should redevelop the high ground to include all the people that were in the low ground and to make those areas affordable to them, and to make those new communities places where they can live successfully in a very changed environment. By that I mean hurricane season...
WATTENBERG: Is that something, you can provide an analog for us? That ever been done? I guess maybe the TVA or something?
JOHN: TVA has done things like that. Grand Forks, when they had the flooding there.
JACK: It’s important to point out that there’s plenty of land available on the high ground that was not flooded, where New Orleans existed up until the beginning of the 20th century. There’re vacant lots, there are empty buildings that can be rehabbed, historic buildings at that. There are warehouses and factories that are not longer being used, that can be rehabbed. There is abundant space to accommodate the population of New Orleans over the next couple years, and it’s a matter of the leadership saying “this makes more sense,” and providing information that allows people to say, “yes, we can take our federal grants and insurance money and transfer from these damaged areas into that.”
JOHN: And the only thing I would add to what Jack just said is, and there is the money to do it. So that everyone, even if they’re low income, can afford to move to those higher areas.
WATTENBERG: You know, I mean, what does rebuilding New Orleans really mean? I mean, how do you recreate the heart and soul of a city, or do you just say, “whatever happens, happens?”
JOHN: I think -– the question is, is there an opportunity, and I think there’s a really remarkable opportunity for the city still, today, despite all the delays and problems that have been there. And that is to redesign the city in an environmentally desirable fashion. It’ll be a smaller city; there’s no question. A lot of people aren’t going to come back. But in time, if it’s done right, new people may come back, and you may wind up with a new New Orleans. It may not have quite the same soul, the same flavor as the old one. But some things you can’t hold on to.
JACK: I agree with John. That you would have a different city, perhaps a more compact city, but I’m not gonna give up yet on the idea that you bring back a culture. As much as this was a human and physical catastrophe, it was a cultural catastrophe for the world and New Orleans, because New Orleans was still generating music, and food, and putting things together in new combinations. It was vital. It wasn’t just a museum of culture the way Venice or Florence were when they were saved from their floods.
WATTENBERG: New Orleans is a great city.
JACK: And so the way to bring back New Orleans is to concentrate on bringing back the culture, making it possible for musicians to live there. What I’m talking about is a continuous creative culture, that New Orleans has been. New Orleans music that was developed in the year 2005 was different from...
WATTENBERG: A great center of...
JACK: And what you have to do is create neighborhoods and communities where the culture was public arts.
WATTENBERG: But the culture will create itself.
JACK: No, no, no, no.
WATTENBERG: You can’t impose a culture.
JACK: I think the communities create the culture that creates New Orleans.
JOHN: The point that Jack’s getting to, and I agree completely, is that’s only possible if you bring back communities, which means you bring back people. And it’s not just the middle income, and upper income white folks, or the upper income and middle income African American folks, it’s the whole range of the population. A lot of the musicians aren’t making a lot of money. A lot of the people who are cooking the food that’s part of the culture, an inherent part of the culture, all of that, are people who don’t make a lot of money. Thanks to the generosity of all of us as citizens of the U.S., the government has appropriated enough money, actually, to recreate housing in communities to let each of those people come back who wants to, in a home they can afford. And that’s an extraordinary opportunity that would allow what Jack’s talking about to actually happen. Bring the people back to create and continue that culture.
WATTENBERG: Jack, there’s an acronym, BOGSATT, bunch of guys, sitting around a table talking.
JACK: That’s us.
WATTENBERG: I haven’t finished my question yet. You’ve lived for a number of years in New Orleans, and you recent, I gather, organized a conference about rebuilding the city. What were the issues that came up?
JACK: Well, we’ve already covered some of them.
This was a conference organized by Tulane University and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Two organizations that have taken a lead role in rebuilding New Orleans. We were talking about this precise issue. How to rebuild the New Orleans culture so the culture could drive the rebuilding of the physical city. What we decided was, the outcomes of this was, we needed a plan, one city, one plan, that is an amalgam of lots of neighborhood plans. The second thing was for housing, which was exactly what John was saying. The place where the sub-chefs and the clarinet players live, ah, is destroyed now and needs to be brought back. And thirdly, we got a little more granular and we said, “New Orleans needs to have a program to fix, to encourage its music business.”
JOHN: That was a key component of the ULI Bring New Orleans Back program. And one of the – back in November, one of the sad things is that there have been very simple things that the local government could have been doing that would -- and they haven’t been done, but I think the important thing now is to look forward, the way you’re looking at and we’ve actually spent a lot of time. We were down in New Orleans working. We brought in some national folks and worked with the local folks. What would it take to rebuild the housing for all of these folks? And we came up with dollar figures for what it would cost. And it turns out the dollar figures are well within the amount of money that’s actually going to be available appropriated already by the federal government and on it’s way to New Orleans right now. The challenge though, Ben, is going to be when that plan comes out, whether it’s December, or March, or a year from now, whenever it is, who is going to implement that plan? A plan on the shelf as you know, is worthless.
WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question, just because we like to –- is there a liberal approach versus a conservative approach in this?
JOHN: There’s a pro-government and sort of a-government, or non-government approach. This has been a very interesting debate going on because my view, and I’m not alone -– the ULI people and other people will tell you –- in order to accomplish this kind of massive redevelopment, you need an organization -- Whether it’s a redevelopment authority, or whether it’s a non-profit development corporation that is empowered -– the white house philosophy is very clear about this. That they believe, and it’s been stated, that the money should go to the citizens, that the market should prevail, that creating new government entities or new other organizations is simply more bureaucracy that will get in the way, and so this ten billion dollars should simply go to the folks one on one and let them decide what to do with and let the market prevail. There are think tanks in Washington that have been generating this and it’s been -– there are people in the white house who are very much of this view. It’s a very different view, obviously, than I take on it. And it’s creating a problem for them.
There are two problems for them. One is they have a charge to make sure this money is being spent honestly and fairly. And you put ten billion dollars into Louisiana without a very carefully structured organization with clear accountability, and you do it anywhere you’ve got a problem, but you do it in Louisiana and New Orleans, you’ve got even more of a problem. Two years from now is when the stories of fraud would start to surface. That happens to be 2008.
The second problem they have is will it make things in New Orleans better, or worse? You put that kind of money –- lets say its six billion dollars that goes into New Orleans -– individual people get to choose whether they stay or leave. We’ve already talked about that. But let’s say the obvious happens, many people leave. A few people stay. But many people leave. The people who stay will be in neighborhoods where there’s nothing around. Their neighbors aren’t around, they’ve taken the money and chosen to stay, the store down at the corner is closed, the city hasn’t yet told them if they’re going to have a police station, whether that’ll be reopened, or the fire station will be reopened. You’ve got a devastated area with folks living all over that can’t be supported. A much worse situation. And if I’m in the White House, I’m worried about that.
WATTENBERG: My experience is I understand that as an (inaudible) admittedly, the answer to those first few questions usually is both. You know. We do both and you can see it in foreign policy and domestic policy. I mean,
JOHN: And you know what that’s called? It’s called a public-private partnership, where you have a public entity partnering with the private market and giving it the necessary guidance, but staying out of its way. And there’s nobody there to do that now.
WATTENBERG: It has to do, in my judgment -– it isn’t even the constitution, it’s the culture.
JACK: I agree that leaving the individual creates all kinds of interesting and probably problematic results, but as of the end of August, money is going to be flowing into the hands of people in New Orleans and all the rest of Louisiana. And they’re not going to have a plan in New Orleans because the plan is not going to be done until December. So it seems to me that it’s urgently up to government really quickly to say -– to guide people into making decision about where they should spend their money. Exactly this point. We are not going to be able to have fire and police protection in New Orleans east or in Pontchartrain Park or in North Lakeview because we just don’t have that many policeman and besides, there’s not water pressure to run the fire hoses. If you call 911 –- you can go live there if you want, but if you call 911 you might not get a response. If people had that kind of information and they had feedback from insurance companies and mortgage brokers, they might take this money and invest it in a place where they can make a difference. On the high grounds in New Orleans. There’s lots of room there.
JOHN: There’s plenty of room for them to move to.
WATTENBERG: But they can live where they chose to.
JOHN: But the problem is, Ben, they can choose, but they don’t have the information. One of the things that’s important about a market is that markets are transparent and there’s information.
JACK: The government of New Orleans is saying, “come back and move anywhere you want. We don’t make any distinctions.” They are not being realistic about the constrained resources, the rapidly diminishing city finances. And they’re going to be encouraging people to spread out when they should actually be encouraging people to concentrate.
WATTENBERG: Not according to the people who are making the decisions.
JACK: That’s John’s point. If the people had the information about what’s realistic, that the neighborhood they’re going to be living in is more prone to the future floods, less able to get police protection, less likely to have park service and street cleaning, and if they found out fairly quickly that their insurance company isn’t going to buy the fact that they live there and that their mortgage is not going to be available to them, that’s the kind of information they can use to make a rational decision to (go back.)
WATTENBERG: Has this federal –- I’ve read a lot about this –- the federal flood insurance program, has that encouraged this sort of thing?
JACK: My answer? For New Orleans? No. Because it wasn’t a failure -– it wasn’t because of flood insurance that people lived where they lived in New Orleans, it was because the Army corps of engineers told them that we will protect you from water. And you know, that was a contact on the part of the government to the people of New Orleans…
JOHN: Let me add another fact that people don’t know about. Most people, because it hasn’t really been talked about. The levies. There’s been a lot of talk. They’re rebuilding levies. The levies are all fine now. No they’re not. The corps of engineers have said the levies won’t be built back to a one in a hundred year storm until 2010. That’s four years from now. So you’re sitting there exposed to –- Katrina wasn’t a one in a hundred year storm. It was a worst storm. It was a hundred fifty year storm. So in four years you’ll have the levies back. Good luck in the next four years with hurricane seasons. And when you do get back, you’ll still be vulnerable to Katrina.
JACK: They had a lot of hurricanes before that did a lot of damage in New Orleans. And in the nineteenth century the city was regularly flooded, and they learned how to build away from the places that were going to be flooded and they learned how to build high enough off the ground so that if it did flood, it wasn’t going to do any harm. And it was when they developed this, a hundred years of unusual good luck in the twentieth century and they had this false sense of security that they could build in to what had previously been swamps, that they created the makings of the Katrina disaster.
JOHN: And they were led into that by the corps of engineers building levies and saying its safe back here.
JACK: Now if the corps or engineers had been the government of the Netherlands and had actually been able to build competent flood control structures, then maybe that promise would have been valid.
WATTENBERG: Just to wrap this up; is it realistic to think that any one plan can solve this problem?
JOHN: There is going to be a plan, there has to be a plan, and it has to be implemented. Hopefully what will happen is it’ll be a plan that the neighborhoods have participated in designing their neighborhoods, that it rolls up into a city-wide plan, and that that plan is actually implemented by a political organization that has courage to make hard calls.
JACK: The neighborhood participation has already started. It was going even without the state and city frameworks, and I’m confident that those people, if given the opportunity that they’re going to be given, finally, over the next few months, can come up with good neighborhood plans that do, in fact, roll up to a good one city -- one plan.
WATTENBERG: On that note, thank you very much for joining us as panelists on Think Tank.
JACK: Thanks for having us.
JOHN: Thank you.
WATTENBERG: And thank you. Please remember to send us you’re comments via e-mail. We think it makes our program better.
For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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