Arts & Ammo

The Bottom-Up Solution

Another report on the rebuilding of New Orleans emphasizes the success of small-scale neighborhood actions. Nicole Gelinas writes in The Dallas Morning News. The population of New Orleans now stands at 302,000, significantly higher than the 247,000 that was earlier projected for this time.

The early attempts to take a big-government approach, with central planning and appropriations that became the subject of political disputes, failed. Neighborhoods, churches, and local communities succeeded.

One of those citizens was Father Nguyen The Vien, a Roman Catholic priest in a Vietnamese-American enclave of flooded New Orleans East. Father Vien and his parishioners showed that after a disaster, neighborhood and church connections can mean the difference between reconstruction and abandonment.

The highest ground in New Orleans tends to be the older areas that were built close to the river, so many of the suburbs were hardest hit. The Lakeview area, for example, saw 7 feet of water in most areas.

Today, 44 percent of Lakeview’s population is back – a significant accomplishment because many residents were returning not to recoup the value of houses but to build from scratch.

When you compare this success to the early failure of Mayor Nagin’s plans and other government planning and to the ongoing lack of progress at ground zero in New York, there are clear lessons to be learned about what government can do and what it can’t.  People operate more efficiently at the local level where they are closer to the decision-making process.

This approach differs markedly from the reaction to the nation’s other recent large-scale disaster, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In New York, the state government, which had a long history of centrally planning huge projects, quickly monopolized control over rebuilding. Ground Zero, unfortunately, seemed the perfect opportunity for such an approach. The World Trade Center had been built as a government scheme 30 years before. Today, Ground Zero is still an early-stage construction site.

This report echoes the points made in our post from a few weeks ago.

May 15th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | one comment