What would you do with $382,000?
If you decide to read the UNOP, the United New Orleans Plan, you will have to download fourteen PDFs, some over seventy pages long, and then struggle through hundreds of pages of overlapping plans and extensive tables. Now imagine that you only have a dialup connection at a school an unreliable bus ride away and you are functionally illiterate. If you still think you would read the plan, then you are the citizen the New Orleans planning board has imagined. If you don’t think you would read the plan, you are like most displaced New Orleans’s residents.
Since I have high-speed Internet, know how to read relatively well, and was assigned the five sections of UNOP as reading for an MIT urban planning class, I did read the UNOP. The plan is receiving $85 billion (UNOP Section 5) from the government to rebuild. By simply taking that number and dividing it by the number of displaced New Orleans residents (approximately 223,000 according to the 2006 US census, US census), I found that if the New Orleans community were to forgo rebuilding, each resident could receive $382,000. $382,000 is enough for any family to relocate and rebuild nearly anywhere they want—of course ruling out rebuilding in Aspen, the center of Luxembourg, or next to Central Park.
So my question is, are we really helping displaced New Orleans residents? Given the choice between $382,000 — which individuals could invest back into the American economy in general and even specific cities if encouragement was provided — or move back to New Orleans, a city that didn’t offer them good public services before the storm and cannot possible rebuild safely if global warming is taken into consideration, would they choose to move back? The residents of New Orleans barely have access to the plan to rebuild their city. And so I wonder if the enormous sum of money is really being spent on their behalf.
This question leads into the public versus private goods debate. In response to those who say the rebuilding of New Orleans is a “public good” (because it brings money into Louisiana, because it is a cultural and historic site) I would quote from the UNOP plan. The plan says as few as forty percent of residents are returning because they face a “lack of …information about future conditions, …of medical care, uncertain public school situation, job loss, fear of crime, and other family members unable to return,” (UNOP Section 1, 7). On top of simply rebuilding, the plan must provide incentives (UNOP Section 1, 7) for these residents to return. Are we as a nation willing to trade the public good of having New Orleans rebuilt at the cost of leaving 60% of the displaced residents unassisted? And if we are, do we really believe that the future economic profit New Orleans will create outweigh the cost of rebuilding today, keeping in mind that the future could only be only fifty years long before it floods again. And finally, the culture of New Orleans was a beautiful part of America, but it was also a hotbed of racism, poverty, and corruption. Might we give the people who created the good parts of that culture an opportunity to move elsewhere?
I hope to encourage discussion with this article, and not to offend anyone. Please, if you disagree, post your comment. I posed my ideas as questions because there are many different answers and these thoughts are neither perfectly informed nor ultimately correct.
