Just when you thought things were getting better in New Orleans... (Oh, wait. You didn't think that? You must be following the news.)
New Orleans, the city I love so dearly, has a knack for taking bad situations and screwing them up further. The latest problem, with a nod to George Carlin, is NIMBY: the "not in my backyard" approach to infrastructure. While our city's economy wobbles uncertainly between "barely recognizable pulse" and "dead," some locals are fighting to keep the perceived rabble out.
More below
For those of you unfamiliar with NIMBY, it works roughly like this: people of a city decide that some unit is needed for the further development of the city, but then they put up mighty resistance to said element being placed in their own vicinity. This is most commonly associated with things like prisons ("We need more prisons, but not in my backyard!") You get the idea.
NIMBY's a bad enough way to approach city development, but coupled with the still-massive problems facing New Orleans' return to normalcy, it's outright poisonous. Today's The Times-Picayune has a searing editorial on the way that NIMBY is keeping us deep in the red:
As one Kenner resident put it opposing a trailer village for Loyola University employees, "Compassion is all right, but compassion can't be at the expense of my property."
Two things I want to point out. The first is that Kenner, the westernmost and least affected town within the New Orleans area, was primo location for the great white flight out of the city, so this kind of attitude doesn't surprise me, sadly. Second, this resident is protesting against Loyola University employees. Think about that. We're not even on the topic of the thousands of displaced citizens who are too poor to afford a place to live. We're talking about a resident who doesn't want to see university employees. Don't even ask about the rest, although the editorialist hints at this in the final paragraph (emphasis mine):
The local economy depends on the presence of workers at all wage levels - teachers and store cashiers, doctors and custodians, sanitation workers and refrigerator delivery people.
NIMBY is a way of life across America - in fact, it's the same mentality that feeds the great white flight - but this is depressing news for a city struggling so hard to bounce back. And it's bad enough coming from hotheaded residents, but we really shouldn't expect better of our politicians, either:
If Councilwoman Jacqueline Brecthel Clarkston doesn't want to see 1,000 trailers at Lakewood Country Club, the burden is on her to identify enough sites in her district - parking areas, vacant lots and other locations for 10, 15 or 20 trailers - to accommodate them all.
That's right: no trailer parks in my country club, although if you can relax at a country club in New Orleans at the moment, you have to be severely dissociated from reality. The T-P recognizes this, with brutal terseness:
The hell that so many evacuees endured should weigh on every resident of this metro area.
As long as this continues its stalemate, displaced residents will be prevented from returning, especially those who can't afford the increasingly steep prices for property. Why is property so expensive? Free-market capitalism, baby: hardly anything's livable, so you can charge top dollar with no conscience about it.
Price gouging in disaster areas is hardly a surprise, however. In fact, the T-P has a full front-page story on the way FEMA is dumping loads of money on multilayered, tiered operations that keep prices high:
Depending on the extent of damage and the size of the roof, the federal government is paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 to install a typical tarp. The cost to taxpayers to tack up a covering of blue vinyl is roughly the same, on a per-square-foot basis, as what a homeowner would pay to install a basic asphalt-shingle roof.
Yet the laborer putting nail to tarp typically earns only a fraction of that. The cost is driven up by layers of subcontractors, an expensive flowchart that sometimes produces the sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor, known in post-Katrina parlance as a "fifth-tier sub."
Naturally, the feds defend this arrangement, because "land mammoth contracts furnish resources and oversight smaller companies couldn't possibly match." In the meantime, we watch our federal disaster relief funds slowly trickle away.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume this is true. But there's a huge gulf between having a middleman and exploiting the existence of a middleman. Consider these numbers:
- Most contractors charge around $170 per square of tarp
- Their subcontractors receive about $30 per square of tarp
- Their subcontractors receive about $2 per square of tarp
Wave goodbye to your tax money. If you're in the mood to be sick for days, I recommend you read the whole article
here.
Not everything's sour down here for the holidays. I'd especially like to commend Common Ground, with whom I spent some time working the soup kitchen and sorting through clothes donations, as well as all the other volunteer groups, church groups, NGO's, and everyday people who are trying their hardest to keep their friends and neighbors and fellow human beings afloat. It's rough seas out there.
I'd like to close with a segment from another editorial, this time from staff writer Stephanie Grace, who penned a beautiful end-of-the-year summation of change in New Orleans.
This was the year when "you're doing a heck of a job," became an insult, not a compliment, even - perhaps especially - if your name was Mike Brown.
When we learned the difference between looting and commandeering - although the distinction was apparently lost on at least a few New Orleans cops.
When "upside down" became shorthand for holding a mortgage for more than a ruined home was now worth.
When the concept of a "right of return" hit a lot closer to home than the Middle East.
And when the annual tour of levees by the Army Corps of Engineers, the state Department of Transportation and the Orleans Levee Board gave new meaning to the term "out to lunch."
It was the year when FEMA became a four-letter word, and NIMBY, a five-letter word, best described the mindset of City Council members who had once howled loudly at FEMA to hurry up and deliver the trailers...
And when, no matter ho incompetent state and local government seemed, the feds were always there to one-up them...
When trailers stopped being trashy - in fact, you practically had to be a VIP, or know one, to get a trailer hooked up.
When the national media showed it understood New Orleans even less than we thought. Or perhaps about as well as we thought. Except now it really mattered.
Yeah. Happy New Year, everybody.
