Progress For New Orleans

Putting this site together has reminded me of the stuff I was writing in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and how those thoughts have either remained the same or evolved over the past 4 years. This was a letter to Congress that I personally delivered to all of the Senator’s offices (and tried to deliver to the House offices before being kicked out) along with a pair of Mardi Gras beads, in October of 2005. I assume that the House members got the message but I never heard from any of them.

Rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast

Why should we help New Orleans?

Because New Orleans is still one of the most strategic cities in the country. Because New Orleans is the port by which the goods for the great mid section of the country go out to the world. Because it is the right thing to do. Because it is the economic engine which drives the economy of almost everything within a 100 miles of it. Because we have 400 miles of devastated coast from Ocean Springs, Mississippi to Orange, Texas and this is one of the largest natural disasters to hit the United States and if the Federal Government can’t or won’t respond then it will be seen as some sign of the United States ineffectiveness in dealing with its own problems. If you can’t do it for love of a great city and region, do it for pride in a great country

Is rebuilding the Gulf Coast something that the Federal Government should be involved in?

If not the U.S. Federal government then who? We are still part of the U.S. We still pay taxes. We live in a place that might be a little more hazardous, doing jobs that other folks might not want to do (like loading ships and refining oil) so that the country can trade with the world and have energy to operate.

One of the basic responsibilities of government is protection and mutual aid. If the Federal Government can’t even participate at that basic level then why be a country at all. If we have to assist other regions in their disasters and not get the same courtesy then why even be part of the U.S? If you weren’t going to help rebuild our city then why did you buy us from the French. The U.S. bought New Orleans and got Iowa (and 10 or so other states) for free. I’d say we were well worth the price and well worth fixing now that we have a bit of trouble.

But isn’t New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just one of those places that humans shouldn’t be living?

This country was built by people who lived in places where it was hard to live. If our forefathers hadn’t done the hard work of living in places that were hard to live in most of us would still be in Europe. There is no place in this country that is completely safe from natural disasters. San Francisco, Los Angeles and the west coast is awaiting an earthquake. No one suggested we write off Florida and return it to the Seminoles after the 4 hurricanes that swept through it last year. Oklahoma and other parts of tornado alleys have small town regularly wiped off the map. Even Nashville, TN, with some of the most benign weather in the country had a tornado hit its downtown a couple years ago.

We have the technology that the original settlers couldn’t have even imagined in protecting the places we live from natural disasters. We can rebuild the levee system, move the pumping stations to the lake for greater perimeter control and keep the city from storm surge flooding. They are doing it in the Netherlands. Are we less committed to one of the most strategic cities in the country than the Dutch are to their cities?

Can you put this in a way I can tell to my constituents that will make them realize how important New Orleans is to the nation?

If a tornado hits a small town and all that is destroyed is the bar then everyone breathes a sigh of relief and while there is some detoxing from the winos, life goes on. However, if that same tornado hits the general store, or the grocery store or the feed store or all three and the grain silo then people are in a world of hurt and everyone tries to figure out what they can do. I am frustrated that folks just think it hit the bar. The place where people go to have a good time and… well, they can go to Vegas instead. No! It hit the grain silo. The place where all those mid-western farmers that ship the grain down on barges to get loaded onto ocean going tankers bound for the rest of the world. It hit the general store. A large port that imported steel and rubber and other materials from around the world for US manufacturing. It hit the grocery store. New Orleans is one of the largest coffee ports in the country and had some of the largest roasting and packaging facilities. Gulfport, MS is one of the largest banana ports in the country. Everyone wants to focus on the French Quarter but there is so much more to the city than that.

Who are you and why are you doing this?

I’m Anthony Favre. Just a guy from New Orleans. Normally I work on Conventions in New Orleans. (Antonin Scalia might not remember me but I just did the sound and lights for the 5th Judicial Conference this spring at the Sheraton in New Orleans), but there aren’t many conventions in town and I was in the neighborhood and figured I’d let Congress know how important it was to get Rebuilding and Recovery money down to the Gulf Coast. I’m 4th Generation New Orleanian in ways that I count, Great Grandpa Ciaccio from Sicily, probably more than 4 in ways I don’t (like my grandfather’s mother was a Brunet, a French Family that has been around the city for centuries). On the Gulf Coast, one side of my dad’s family has been there since the French got off the boat and the other side, being Choctaw and all, was there before that. My dad grew up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and my cousins were living all over the coast.

What about corruption and incompetence?

You want oversight? I want oversight. I think we have a couple of people in our current governor and mayor who aren’t out to enrich themselves and are working as hard as they can to make it right. Also, don’t you think we learned a powerful lesson with this storm that the state of our local government matters? Don’t you think we will be watching out for what officials do at all levels of government? But, if it makes you feel better to have someone trustworthy and respected doing the auditing of the funds, then it’s alright with me.

But your representatives put in things like alligator farms in their bill. What about that?

At least we didn’t ask for something really silly like a snow shoe repair facility or a ski lift. Yeah, it’s a little extreme but, I know it seems exotic but an alligator farm in Louisiana is something that people actually do for a living. And everyone knows that if you don’t ask for something in Congress you will not get it. Don’t be irritated at us for asking. And if this seems a little excessive to you, don’t fund it. We still have many, many other things that were destroyed in our 400 miles of storm ravaged coast.

Oh, and your (governor, mayor, paper) said bad things about our (FEMA director, admiral, president) and we are irritated…

People get frustrated when they are in a desperate, life and death, situation. They say things they probably shouldn’t. It would be extremely petty to hold that against an entire region.

What are you gonna do if we don’t help you out?

We are going to do what we can. We will try to fix our houses and move on with our lives. But it will be tough. And without the money to fix the flood protection and the coastal erosion it is going to be tougher still to get anyone interested in helping us rebuild.

How do we pay for this?

A couple of years ago, back when there was a surplus, Congress passed a bill that provided tax cuts to people getting dividends and capital gains. Well, now that a lot of things are going on the National Credit Card, it might be time to look again and see if that was such a good idea

What kind of things do you think would help?

A Category 5 levee system built in 5 years. The extension of Interstate 49 speeded up to help with evacuations. Some help with paying the NOPD and other police forces in the region. Coastal erosion help.

Anything else you want to tell us?

Yes.. Please hurry. The entire tax base of Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquamines Parish, as well as Hancock County, Mississippi has been destroyed. These folks can’t meet payroll for essential public services. We need some short term help and long term rebuilding, and we need to start this process as soon as we can.

Also.. it’s my home and I love it. Don’t make me move from my home. I might be really irritated and end up in your district.

Prior to Katrina New Orleans had a housing crisis.

It may not have seemed like a housing crisis but it was. And it all related to our population numbers and our economy.

At the peak of our population we were close to 650,000 people. This was prior to most of New Orleans East being developed. Since those times in the early 1960s we have continually lost population and in the meantime we built probably a third more houses and apartments in the 1970s and 80s.

Add to this a form of housing, the shotgun, that dominates many older neighborhoods, that has proven itself extremely unpopular with a modern American family that wants bedroom doors that close. Finally moving out of a shotgun house was for many lower middle class New Orleans families proof that you could sustain yourself in some fairly comfortable manner.

The rents, pre-Katrina, were fairly cheap and based upon two things:  An owner who didn’t need to pay off a mortgage but didn’t really spend that much on upkeep and tenants who couldn’t afford much working in the low wage, tourism based economy.

The storm, and the subsequent housing shortage in the immediate aftermath, drove up rents, but we also saw wages rise to meet the new financial reality.

Now both wages and rents are falling.

More and more apartment complexes are coming online, many of them financed by disaster recovery funds.  This in turn is driving down rents for the small landlord.

The small landlord, in contrast, has new debt and new and prohibitively expensive insurance. If the rents reach pre-Katrina levels, and in many places they are approaching that, there will be no incentive to maintain these houses.

Meanwhile, the population has not kept pace with the growth in housing and the economy  is failing to produce the jobs for the citizens so that they can afford rent.

The growth in new housing development undercuts the need to save any marginal old houses that dot our city streets with blight.

But, even now we have two city agencies fighting over whether we keep blighted houses or remove them.  The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) has been continually stymied by the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee (NCDC) in demolishing houses.

So, here’s the question? Just when can we get rid of houses that no one wants to live in, that have been empty for years, when it is likely we won’t have a population to fill all of the houses we have unless we significantly remake our economy into one where people have the resources to take on expensive projects like renovations of blighted property?

It’s clear to me that we are going to have to reimagine a New Orleans that perhaps doesn’t have the street density it once had. Or one that mixes new construction and design in with older buildings. But we can look at a block that in the future has 10 stellar houses with side yards rather than 15  half fixed/half blighted houses.

We have to adjust our thinking. Vibrant cities change constantly. But unless we attract more people on the basis of economic development, there will be little reason and fewer resources to address blight by any other mechanism except demolition.

The proposal- Turn the old New Orleans Charity Hospital into a
biomedical business incubator.

The background – For a decade New Orleans has been looking to promote
the biomedical industry as a growth sector for its economy. As new
facilities for medical services are planned and come online there are
concerns about the disposition of legacy buildings. Amongst these is
the old New Orleans Charity Hospital. Concern about the fate of the
building is affecting discussions about the new modern,
state-of-the-art hospital facilities that are more suitable to the
practice of modern medicine than the Depression era, WPA inspired old
Hospital. This proposal seeks to, at once, provide and answer to that
question AND attract jobs and investment that are sorely needed in an
economically depressed and hurricane recovering New Orleans.

The plan – Use Old Charity Hospitals square footage as research space
for biomedical startups. Give over entire floors or wings to research
on a per square footage basis that starts at a very low cost and over
the course of a set term increases to market rate.

The mechanisms – A possible way this can be approached.

1 – An authority is set up to handle the building and research space
applications.  For sake of this exercise it is called the Old Charity
Biomedical Incubator Authority. (OCBIA)
OCBIA would be responsible for:
-       Basic building maintenance.
-       Processing applications for space
-       Tenant management
-       Building management.
This can be a city-state partnership, a private-state partnership, a
city-private partnership. But whomever the partners were they would be
responsible for restoring basic systems to the Old Charity Building.
The composition of the OCBIA board should be from the research and
financial sectors with a couple seats to represent city and state
interests.

2 – A biomedical start up would apply for space. – There would be a
form that would ask several questions to see if qualifying criteria
were met.
-       Type of research.
-       Committed funding sources. Grants, venture capitalist, private sources,
-       Projected square footage needed both at the beginning and at height
of research. To plan for future expansion of the research project.
-       Demonstration of ability to handle build out expenses and first
years lease payments.

A committee of researchers and financial administrators either would
evaluate the proposal on several criteria.
-       Long term prospects of success.
-       Added value to local economy of successful research.
-       Ability of the management team to see research through to conclusion.
-       Long term viability of the company.

3- Once chosen the start up would be responsible for:
-       The build out of their raw space
-       Lease payments
-       An annual report on progress of their research

The organization handling the process would be responsible for:
-       Providing a basic electric, water and sewerage service as well as
maintaining elevators and common areas.
-       Overseeing the build out of each research space to ensure there
weren’t permanent alterations to the building, or that any permanent
alterations didn’t undermine the building.
-       Managing tenants, contracting for shared services, like waste disposal.
-       Handling disputes between tenants.

4 – The start ups would be housed in the incubator for a set period of time.

After a suitable time, businesses would “graduate” from the incubator
to the local real estate market. This period can be 5 to 10 years.

A condition of participation in the incubator is that upon
graduation they would commit to continue to locate their business in
New Orleans.

The benefits-

New Orleans can be expected to reap several benefits from this proposal
-       Biomedical research jobs at good wages for an educated workforce.
-       The ability to attract and retain a college educated information workers.
-       A revitalized local real estate market for both research space and
market rate housing.
-       Enhanced economic positioning and increased economic diversity.
-       An adaptive reuse project for an outdated building.
-       A new industry built on a foundation of innovation.

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.