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The Netherlands probably knows more about engineering levees and other ways to protect land from the sea than any other western industrialized nation on the planet.
Which was my apparently missed point.
And how do you move a city? Everyone who used to live there before gets an equal sized portion of land? How do you decide who gets what? Where do you put it? What do you do with the French quarter and high rises that are still intact?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I think it's pretty apparent where I stand on this, but I believe in making informed decisions, so I offer this as evidence against rebuilding (from Slate).
quote:The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.
New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.
The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.
This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.
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I have never been to New Orleans, so I have no mental picture of how it is laid out..but..
what about if they just put the residential part of the city further inland (or is it already surrounded by suburbs?) And make the city itself mostly the seaport and businesses.
They have a chance here to almost rebuild from scratch and have a designed city --- much like Washington D.C. was designed before construction began...
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Washington DC does not look like it's original design at all except on those lovely tourist maps. It never did. The original designer wanted the entire city to be a diamond intersected by a circle with the white house at the top of the circle. It is. Unfortunately you can never see it that way because the government went "Hey what if the British come back!" and did the equivelant of having a small child take a crayon and make a picture to divide up the streets. There is no decent parking, it is difficult to travel in Washington DC unless you take the metro. With the new security measures in place from 9/11 it is even worse than it used to be. Thousands of people live in neighborhoods which are not safe. Washington DC is not a state, and does not have voting representation in Congress or the Senate. There has been talk for years of having the city reabsorbed back into the two states that originally donated the land for the independent city, Virginia and Maryland. The economic and social problems of dealing with the city are such that neither state is willing to even consider absorbing the city into their borders.
Washington DC may not have been the best example.
I know, I'm a former citizen of that area. It's a big pain.
Posts: 1214 | Registered: Aug 2005
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With New Orleans, there really isn't any more "inland". It's pretty much an island, with the Mississippi on 3 sides (hence the name Crescent City) and the lake on the fourth.
The only real direction they could go is up. Skyscrapers. But since Corporations have been leaving more than coming, I doubt if that will happen. I imagine that when it gets to the rebuilding point, there'll be a lot more room. Of the 490,000 residents, I wouldn't be surprised if 50-100,000 don't come back. That's just metro New Orleans, not greater New Orleans (including Metarie, Kenner, Gretna, and all that business).
Here's a map of New Orleans for those that don't know what it looks like.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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