Progress For New Orleans

Ok, so I got a little irritated.

Apparently a magazine voted New Orleans people “America’s strangest people”  http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/americas-strangest-people/1

I don’t get it. Or maybe they are just slow.

For me it’s just simple. New Orleans people like doing what they want to do, are friendly (mostly), don’t have a problem if you have a good time (mostly), likes a bargain, wants you to ask nicely, works hard, plays harder, and will generally tell you just what’s on their mind whether you asked them or not.

You didn’t ask me about who I think are stranger people than New Orleanians but I’m gonna tell you anyway.  And I present this a little carefully cause people I know and love are living in some of these cities, and are some of these people. But it’s strange to me.

So, here we go: The Top 5 Places with the Strangest People In America.

5) Philadelphia – They got a jail at the football stadium. They pelted Santa Claus with snowballs. There is clearly an anger management issue here. Or even if it was all alcohol induced then no one should be getting that violent just cause they’re drinking. Hell, fighting cause you’re drinking is just crazy.

4) Utah – Maybe it’s them, maybe it’s me. Utah has always seemed to me like something out of a David Lynch movie where everything seems hyper-normal but there is a horrible secret that no one is talking about.

3) New York City – Seriously, I love New Yorkers, LOVE THEM. But New Yorkers walk around as two people every day. Outside New Yorkers and Inside New Yorkers. Outside New Yorkers, there on the streets of the city are rude, gruff, focused and ready to run you over. Once you get them inside and they become Inside New Yorkers they transform into friendly, nice, helpful and funny people. It’s strange to me and makes me think they are all sort of suffering under some bipolar disease they get from eating pizza & riding in the subway.

2) San Fransisco – OK. I know there are a lot of different San Franciscans. And I’m not talking about Mission taqueria employees or Chinatown dumpling cooks. And I know a LOT of San Franciscans and I like the ones I know but I still think, as a group, they are a little strange.  There is a certain mix of self-righteousness and naivete that can be either charming, amusing, irritating or infuriating depending upon whether you are a target of their wrath or just a bystander. My initial takes on the people from my visits were that 1)Half the folks were working a scam and the other half were naively hoping the first half weren’t working a scam (ok so I exited the BART in the Tenderloin) And 2) They would stand in the longer line just to prove that they were somehow “better” than you. (I wasn’t sure what they thought this proved, that they were more patient, willing to endure more suffering? so altruistic that  they were willing to forgo ANY advantage? )  And there also seems to be a lot of working very hard to try to “be unique” and a level of busy-bodyness that would make Ms. Kravitz from “Bewitched” seem laid back.

1) The bible -belt south.  OK. This is gonna be a laundry list of strangeness to me. Dry Counties when you know most folks drink (Hello Lynchburg Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels), Criteria for dating that includes mandatory church attendance. Saying “Bless your heart” when what you really mean “My god, are you an idiot?” A sense of entitlement based upon church attendance (or even in some cases a passing familiarity with the Bible). It’s all very strange to me.

Now, this isn’t intended to hurt anyone’s feelings. This is all stranger to me than anything I see in New Orleans.

Oh, and the runners up are:

San Diego – Cause even the homeless people look like they came out of a Land’s End Catalog so you don’t know they are crazy until they are right there on top of you.  And

Portland – This is based mostly on the folks who have come to New Orleans from Portland who seem to try to project all the “do good” spirit they can but also seem to have a lot of contempt for the folks they think they are “doing good” for. I suspect this is also how it operates in Portland itself.  And hearing about their zoning code I tend to think they just like making things difficult for themselves.

Well, that’s about it. 5 places that a New Orleanian thinks have the strangest people in the country.

Like everyone in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding affected my thinking about my city and my relationship with it.

Prior to the storm I had very little interest in local politics and the policies and personalities which ran the city. I was more focused on national issues.

But you can’t see your city in ruins, your fellow citizens either suffering or running wild in the streets, on national television for a couple of weeks without thinking that we must have been doing something seriously wrong to get us to this point. So, while the levee failures were the engineering failure that wrecked havoc on the physical infrastructure, we had economic and social failures that stretched for years and decades prior that had wrecked havoc on the lives of the citizens..

I started to look at Katrina through the lens of our economic decline and how that played into the problems before, during and after the storm. How lack of economic opportunity left folks vulnerable because they lacked the resources to choose their own path, how the lack of good jobs slowed the recovery and still continues to slow the recovery.

It is a big change for a self-identified “art guy”. I’ve gone from writing screenplays to thinking about zoning policy. The drive towards making up stories has been supplanted by the need to attempt to do the things needed to ensure New Orleans’ economic sustainability. If you had told me 10 years ago I’d be this “pro-development” I would have laughed. But things change and it changes you.

Central to this is the idea that people need jobs, in general, and good jobs, in particular in order to put their lives back together. They need economic opportunity and a good shot at career advancement to meet their obligations to their families and have the resources to enhance their lives and their community. And if they don’t find it in New Orleans they will leave to find it somewhere else.

As a result of this I have become extraordinarily sensitive to anyone who stands in the way of our city’s economic development. It is a “jobs first” outlook. It has made me very sympathetic to those who are bringing jobs to the city and fairly hostile to those attempting to obstruct those who are bringing business and jobs to the city.

Put simply- I will generally support those who are doing something and oppose those who look to stop them. To borrow a baseball rule, the tie goes to the runner.

New Orleans can only survive in a meaningful way if we work diligently to make its economy strong. Not just for its own purpose but because it allows its the city to retain and attract its population, it allows it to access the resources from the nation it needs to protect itself from hazards when it can demonstrate it is economically important to the nation. It allows the citizens to maintain themselves and be in a position to make their own choices.

And this is why I am working towards a future for New Orleans. Not just one that is a whisper or pale reflection of the past, but one that finds us, once again a world economic center.