Rebuilding a Slum

The NO story is unfolding in a bizarre manner. Estimates of the costs of response to Katrina have risen to $300,000,000,000. That is 1/3 of a trillion dollars!.

Beyond all this none seems to have any sense as to what rebuilding might mean. NO was largely a slum. How do you rebuild a slum? Barracks? Public Housing? Is someone going to put aside money for rebuilding the (crucial) drug industry?

Has there EVER been a comparable problem? Responses to floods and tsunamis in the oceanic east have largely focused on rebuilding the homes of the coastal poor and, of course, the luxury hotels. Rebuilding the hotels is easy, but it is even easier to rebuild homes for people who are going to continue to live in a marginal culture. In contrast NO ONE believes that slum living is healthy.

What happened after WWII? Did we rebuild gypsy camps and impoverished areas of Germany or Japan? How did such areas do after the Marshall Plan?

Rebuilding a slum ain't easy. Of course you have to create some form of very low income housing. But what form and for who? Do single parent families qualify in the Bush era? Do gay partners have a right to a one bedroom apartment? And who is going to own this slum housing? Does anyone want to create the NO Soviet? Or do we have a raffle to decide which lucky person lives in the nelwy built ocrner apartment /c view and who lives in the basement?

Schools, food markets, banks, are all similar issues. The bottom line is that no amount of money can rebuild NO. Social decisions will have to be made and none of these are obvious or easy. Does NO become Venice West? ... a shell of a city maintained for tourists? Or does it become a corporate Kremin, antiseptically tied to big businesses and covnentions with little local housing?