Ups and downs thinking about the Gulf Coast...

Workers put the final touches on the FEMA trailer city in Baker, La., on Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, in preparation for the arrival of evacuees from New Orleans and the surrounding areas. The camp has nearly 600 trailers that will each house up to four people. (AP Photo/The Times, Shane Bevel)

I am alternatively uplifted and saddened about the prospects for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. This USA Today article, "Vision: Rebuild 'new urban' Mississippi coast" is about the Mississippi Renewal effort spearheaded by new urbanists and Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi (who'd a thunk it...).

Of course, there are some quotes in the USA Today article that raise troublesome issues--trailer parks?

One of the big problems with trailers-mobile home parks is that they don't appreciate much. Since houses likely comprise the greatest proportion of family household wealth, it is important that people obtain housing assets that if not appreciating, at least don't depreciate. If the results of the Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods program in Louisville are to be believed, greater adoption of the shotgun house and its variant types could be a solution to the seemingly insolvable affordable housing problem.

Casinos as foundations for community? From the article: "Are you telling me they're going to do a new urbanist village when the center of the economy is vice?" asks Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "Casinos in Mississippi were such a pariah land use that they were not even on land. Now they're going to be the basis of a traditional community?"

Then there is this article from the Christian Science Monitor, "Many big visions for new Big Easy," which discusses the issues in New Orleans, and the creation of various task forces of developers and the well-connected to lead the rebuilding efforts. Because earlier in the year Mayor Nagin proposed a demolition-heavy "Neighborhood Tranformation Initiative" modeled after Philadelphia's initiative of the same name, I have some serious fears that more Wal Marts and the like are to come...

From the article: Between 140,000 and 160,000 homes may need to be razed because of hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding. Some estimates put the rebuilding cost at $200 billion. And that's with a host of questions unanswered: Which houses will need to be torn down? Will the city shrink because some neighborhoods become uninsurable and therefore unbuildable?

"This is a city that's had a terrible tragedy, but there's an opportunity to build it back and build it back better," says Ed McMahon, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute and a former New Orleans resident. "It could become a city that integrates rather than isolates, a city that inspires, a city that celebrates history and diversity and culture and people."

The most disheartening article I've read yet is this one from yesterday's New York Times, "Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate." Not just because I am a "liberal," but because the discussion on community development and what I call the "urban agenda" is so bankrupt.

The article quotes a Heritage Foundation official as saying how the Democrats have offered no original policies, while groups like the Heritage Foundation have--

"This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill. While the right has proposed alternatives including tax-free zones for businesses and school vouchers for students, Mr. Butler said, "the left has just talked up the old paradigm: 'let's expand what's failed before.' "

Here's what they offer as innovative policy:

1. Suspending affirmative action requirements (note in many of the rebuilding efforts, employees are not from Louisiana or Mississippi);
2. Suspending requirements for payment of prevailing and higher wages (it's innovative to pay people little money so they can't afford to buy anything or live in decent housing?);
3. Providing school vouchers (it's better to degrade the success of public institutions in favor of privately-funded alternatives with little substantive oversight by the public?);
4. More tax free zones for business (the reality is such zones mostly just displace business from non-tax free zones to tax free zones).

This is innovative? NO it's pathetic. This is the best we can do for urban and community development policy?

There are plenty of lessons of what works and what doesn't and why. What is also pathetic is that most everybody, Democrats and Republicans, are studiously avoiding these lessons. What is it about public policy that divorces research, logic, and understanding from policy "development?"

As this editorial from the Houston Chronicle says "Let's all imagine a new and very livable Gulf Coast: Success in rebuilding starts with asking right questions." (The title is better than the actual writing... or at least, I don't like some of his questions.)

I fear, as I wrote about last week, that reconstruction will merely be another opportunity for big corporations to wine and dine on the public dime. Big contracts, big money, harmful effects. Hopefully, the Mississippi Renewal effort can show another way.

Then again, there is this op-ed in today's Post "Losing Hope in Louisiana."