Contributors

Monday, August 10, 2015

Just Let the Lower Ninth Ward Go...

For years there have been articles (like this one) about how poor neighborhoods in New Orleans have not come back after Hurricane Katrina. The implication is that society doesn't care about poor people and revitalizing the places where they live.

There might be some truth to that. But the bigger truth is that people should never have lived in those places to begin with. The elevation of the Lower Ninth Ward is zero -- it's at sea level -- and some parts are four feet below sea level.

Lots of New Orleans is below sea level. That part of Louisiana is basically a gigantic swamp built up by silt in the Mississippi delta over millennia. No amount of money spent on Army Corps of Engineer projects will ever make the Lower Ninth a safe place to build homes.

As climate change causes sea level to rise, places like New Orleans and Florida are going to get flooded more and more frequently (high tides now threaten major flooding in Miami Beach). The Lower Ninth Ward was one of the last areas developed in New Orleans because it's a stupid place to build. The poorest people are victimized because they could only afford cheap (and unsafe) land.

But it's sheer stupidity to compound these travesties by bemoaning the fact that few people are moving back and encourage them "return home." On the contrary, everyone should be moving out. Turn the whole place into a big park designed to survive flooding.

I'm not just picking on the Lower Ninth Ward. In 1997 the Red River flooded, destroying thousands of homes and businesses in North Dakota. Fifty thousand people were evacuated. And lots of them wanted to rebuild in exactly the same place. It's sheer idiocy, as shown by the 2009 flooding of the Red River.

It's stupid and dangerous to build in the Lower Ninth Ward, on Florida's eroding beaches and in the flood plains of the Red River and the Mississippi. The federal government should help out the victims of natural disasters, but they shouldn't subsidize greedy developers and local politicians who blindly focus on growth and build on land that will be under water when the next hurricane or spring thaw hits.

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