The way of Babylon?

The future of New Orleans

Sep 8th 2005 NEW ORLEANS
From The Economist print edition

What lies ahead for an irreplaceable city

THE question is awful, but will not go away. How much damage can a big American city suffer without going the way of Babylon? Or, for that matter, of Galveston, a boom town that never recovered from a hurricane in 1900?

The deputy police chief says that New Orleans has “completely been destroyed”. He exaggerates, but not greatly: around 140,000-160,000 houses have been submerged or ruined. The 10,000 or so people who, at mid-week, were still clinging on in their homes were ordered to leave, not least for their health; three people in the region had already died from drinking water seething with viruses and bacteria. If force did not work, money might: at the shelters in Texas and elsewhere, FEMA agents were handing out $2,000 debit cards.

If the city is abandoned, how quickly can it recover? It all depends on how quickly the city's drainage system takes water out, how efficiently the 60m-90m tons of raw sewage are cleaned up, and how soon the power comes back on. And on other, longer-term, calculations.

New Orleans was already losing people before Katrina; its population peaked, at almost 630,000, in 1960. At the last census count, in 2000, 485,000 people lived there. Officials now fear that as many as 250,000 will leave for good, and that dull-but-prosperous Baton Rouge will soon become Louisiana's economic centre. New Orleanians have long disdained their state's capital. But it stands on the first high ground along the Mississippi, and its population of about 230,000 has supposedly doubled in past days. Evacuees are already buying houses in its suburbs.

New Orleans officials are busy discussing how they might lure people back. They intend to set up centres in every area where the refugees have gone, telling them how the clean-up is progressing. They might pay the poor to go back, and offer incentives to the rich. Urgently, they are hunting round for “creative legislation and ideas”.

Until last week, New Orleans's usually sluggish economy was showing signs of life. Developers were turning decrepit commercial buildings into yuppie condominiums, film-makers were flocking in to profit from generous tax credits, and the city's two medical schools were hopeful of attracting researchers. They still might. Though Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has said spending federal money to restore New Orleans “doesn't make sense to me”, there could yet be a massive effort to strengthen the city's levees, to restore the coastal marshes that once protected it and to rebuild.

But tourism had been New Orleans's main growth industry. And while the French Quarter is largely intact, the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Centre, two key hubs for that industry, have become notorious the world over as monuments to misery.

Worse, the hurricane could well exacerbate the tensions that lurk in the city. Most of the richer white neighbourhoods lie on natural levees created over centuries. On lower ground are the poorest districts, whose residents are overwhelmingly black and, now, deeply resentful. Some rattled New Orleanians may never again feel safe after watching their city fall into anarchy.

Long before Katrina struck, the New Orleans Police Department was already having trouble keeping crime under control. Then around one-third of its officers disappeared from the force (perhaps quitting, perhaps drowned) in the days after the hurricane. Those that remain are to be sent on morale-raising trips to places that speak volumes about the city's woes. Some officers will get free tickets to Las Vegas, which in recent years has come to dominate the convention business that New Orleans craves. Others will go to Atlanta, the corporate hub that so many ex-New Orleanians now call home.

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