A new New Orleans is the answer

By JOEL KOTKIN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Because the old New Orleans is no more, it could resurrect itself as the great new American city of the 21st century. Or as an impoverished tourist trap.
Founded by the French in 1718, site of the first U.S. mint in the Western United States, this one-time pride of the South, this one-time queen of the Gulf Coast, had been declining for decades, slowly becoming an antiquated museum.
Now New Orleans must decide how to be reborn. Its choices could foretell the future of urbanism.
The sheer human tragedy -- and the fact that the Gulf Coast is critical to the nation's economy as well as the Republican Party's base -- guarantee that there will be money to start the project. Private corporations, churches and nonprofits will pitch in with the government.
But what kind of city will the builders create on the sodden ruins?
The wrong approach would be to preserve a chimera of the past, producing a touristic faux New Orleans, a Cajun Disneyland.
Sadly, even before Hurricane Katrina's devastation, local leaders seemed convinced that being a "port of cool" should be the city's policy. Adopting a page from Richard Florida's "creative class" theory, city leaders held a conference just a month before the disaster promoting a cultural strategy as the primary way to bring in high-end industry.
This would be the easy, bankable way to go now: Reconstruct the French Quarter, Garden District and other historic areas while sprucing up the convention center and other tourist facilities. This, however, would squander a greater opportunity. A tourism-based economy is no way to generate a broadly successful economy.
For decades before this latest hurricane, public life, including the police force, were battered by corruption and eroded by inefficiency. Now Katrina has brought into public view the once-invisible masses of desperately poor people whom New Orleans' tourist economy and political system have so clearly failed.
Although the number of hotel rooms in the city has grown by about 50 percent over the last few years, tourism produces relatively few high-wage jobs.
Change course
New Orleans should take its destruction as an opportunity to change course. There is no law that says a Southern city must be forever undereducated, impoverished, corrupt and regressive. Instead of trying to refashion what wasn't working, New Orleans should craft a future for itself as a better, more progressive metropolis.
Look a few hundred miles to the west, at Houston -- a well-run city with a widely diversified economy. Without much in the way of old culture, charm or tradition, it has far outshone New Orleans as a beacon for enterprising migrants.
Houston has succeeded by sticking to the basics, by focusing on the practical aspects of urbanism rather than the glamorous. Under the inspired leadership of former Mayor Bob Lanier and the current chief executive, Bill White, the city has invested heavily in port facilities, drainage, sanitation, freeways and other infrastructure.
Giving priority to basic infrastructure may not appeal to those who would prefer to patch the structural problems and spend money on rebuilding New Orleans as a museum, or by adding splashy concert halls, art museums and other iconic cultural structures. Ultimately, the people of the New Orleans region will have to decide whether to focus on resuscitating the Big Easy zeitgeist -- which includes a wink-and-nod attitude toward corruption -- or to begin drawing upon inner resources of discipline, rigor and ingenuity.
X Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library, 2005).