New Orleans Mayor Beseeches Residents To Return to Their CityTo graft, and corruption, to a levee system you'll never be sure of again, to high unemployment and crappy housing... to a place where dead men vote to make sure the Dems stay in power (zombie power!) - and everything is promised but nothing changes.ATLANTA, Dec. 3 -- Standing in a borrowed auditorium 425 miles from home, the mayor of New Orleans implored displaced constituents Saturday to keep faith, put pressure on Washington policymakers and come home soon.
"I miss y'all," Mayor C. Ray Nagin told more than 2,200 people temporarily living in the Atlanta area. "I want y'all back in the city of New Orleans. Red beans and rice just ain't the same without you. I want you back."
But in a three-hour session marked by tears and outbursts, the response was not encouraging. "Come home?" many yelled back. "To what?"
Damn, doesn't it just sound like a wife-beater trying to get the woman who abandoned him back to cook his red beans and rice and do his laundry? He'll promise everyhting - but in the end, it'll be the same old thing again.
J.
Comments (6)
To be fair, As much as I love New Orleans as a city, the fact is most of what made it's culture was the interesting mix of those who were there, and that mix won't ever return in those numbers, so even fully rebuilt, the city will never be the same.
So, with that in mind, I say we just abandon the whole thing. No aid for them. Nothing. Hell, get rid of the levees altogether and let the river come back to its natural levels. Then build ONLY on ground thats ABOVE WATER. None of this drain-the-swamp-and-build-houses crap.
Posted by rawb | December 4, 2005 2:36 PM
Posted on December 4, 2005 14:36
Wouldn't disagree with you much there, Rawb. They need to truck in a cubic mile or so of fill dirt, tamp it all down and get that entire area 50 feet or more above sea level.
Won't happen, of course, but it'd solve the problem...
J.
Posted by JLawson | December 5, 2005 3:23 PM
Posted on December 5, 2005 15:23
Well the only reason the area was drained and built on anyway was as a give-away to the housing industry. They begged and pleaded for more land to put the working class. And the state legislators gave in.
Posted by rawb | December 6, 2005 9:00 AM
Posted on December 6, 2005 09:00
Oddly enough, a large city requires housing. As New Orleans grew, they didn't have much of a choice. Of course, you could always postulate that the folks who grew the city should have known better - but try convincing them 100 years back that they shouldn't expand into areas prone to flooding. They'd have laughed. No upside to it, big downside (as far as they were concerned) so why not dike, drain, and build?
J.
Posted by JLawson | December 6, 2005 10:10 AM
Posted on December 6, 2005 10:10
There's many different ways to grow a city. You could get trains and public transportation, so that if you must sprawl, you can do so cheaply. Or you can build UP. This whole fighting-nature thing... ... I'm not digging it.
Posted by rawb | December 6, 2005 3:09 PM
Posted on December 6, 2005 15:09
Well, they tried the building up bit. Read what happened in St. Louis - http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html - it didn't work very well. As far as sprawl goes - well, you've still got to build fairly far above seal level, and there's just not that much around there that'll suffice.
No easy solutions, I'm afraid.
J.
Posted by JLawson | December 6, 2005 4:15 PM
Posted on December 6, 2005 16:15