New Orleans 2006

Update here. Observation here.

I'm from south Louisiana and have lived in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, so I've been mesmerized by the developments there this week. Although I guess you don't have to be from there to be paying attention.

I'm writing this because I haven't heard much commentary about the future of New Orleans. So let me posit that New Orleans doesn't have a future.

Let's talk first about the population. New Orleans had 500,000 people in it last week, with 1.2 million in the metro area. How many homes, now filled to the rafters with grotesquely contaminated water, will simply have to be bulldozed? Maybe 100,000, housing half the population? They won't be able to move back in to rebuilt homes for close to a year -- assuming the Army Corps of Engineers can pump the city dry in four months, which seems to be the prevailing estimate.

So what do you do if your property's a total loss? Rebuild? Or take your insurance check and move upriver? Especially considering that, second ...

The economy's been destroyed, and it wasn't a particularly great economy to start with. Consider that Cleveland and New Orleans are just about the same size. An advertiser database we use at WKA shows 30 companies in New Orleans that advertise -- and the biggest company that lists revenue is the electric utility Entergy, at $10.1 billion. The only other billion-dollar company is chemical manufacturer Freeport-McMoran. You've got a few banks on the list, naturally, insurance companies, media companies and so on.

Cleveland, a shade smaller than New Orleans, has 109 companies in this database, 13 of them with revenue exceeding $1 billion.

So what does New Orleans do? New Orleans does tourism. Restaurants, casinos, riverboats and so on. Fourteen of New Orleans' top 30 companies are engaged in some way with either food or tourism.

Now, it's easier to rebuild a restaurant than, say, a refinery. But if you shut down the entire tourist industry for a year, and I think that's probably the time frame, you can't just turn a key and expect to operate at 100%. This is not a high-paying industry. The workforce can't afford to sit around waiting for the grand re-opening. Those who survived will scatter, drawn either by opportunity or family. They'll start their lives over again and won't go back to New Orleans.

Third, there's the infrastructure. It's a mess, from the fractured Interstate 10 to the city's water and, I presume, wastewater systems.

Fourth are the city's red blood cells -- tourists -- and the oxygen they carry: cash. Gone completely for a year. Come September 2006, what will there be for tourists to do? Mr. Corporate Event Planner, are you going to send your convention to the Superdome so that your party-goers in their spare time can do ... just what exactly? Will there be a Commander's Palace? A Dixie Belle? Jazz clubs? Those famous above-ground cemeteries which may now be nothing more than empty fields?

Finally, there's the political debate. Is the federal government going to rebuild a ghost town for 500,000? Probably so, but I don't think it's a slam dunk. It's widely recognized that, despite all the Corps of Engineers' best efforts, the Mississippi River will someday decide to move. It's widely recognized that the state's coastal marsh is disappearing because of the levee system that makes the Louisiana boot's toe inabitable. I'll be disappointed if these issues aren't at least discussed.

I have few doubts that, in its stubborn ambition to declare nature conquered, Washington will rebuild New Orleans, pretty much from scratch, and in exactly the same spot. Then I think it will have to pass legislation offering people money to move there.

Postscript: I say this obviously with much sadness. But stories like this make the point. A lot of New Orleans tourism is centered around people and places that are no more. And this.

Update: At least one of those cemeteries seems intact. Thought I saw the photo at the Wall Street Journal. It doesn't seem to be there, but I did see it.

Update here. Observation here.