Detroit, Baltimore... New Orleans, different only by degree

The burned-out, boarded-up boyhood home of Jerome Bettis stands abandoned in Detroit on Saturday, Jan. 28, 2006. The NFL's fifth-leading rusher will be the brightest star in the days leading up to the Super Bowl on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2006, because the charismatic, 13-year football veteran will likely end his career at Ford Field, about eight miles from his childhood home. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

This sounds unsympathetic, although it's not meant to be. I think that the failures in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland AND New Orleans are the "fault" of technology.

In New Orleans, man-made levees broke, devasting neighborhoods in seconds, killing as many as 2,000 people.

But driving around the devasted areas of New Orleans today, it didn't feel that much different to me from neighborhoods in Detroit, North Baltimore, etc.

A few years ago, I went to look at one of the streets that I lived on as a child, in Detroit. Every house on the block was gone. Nothing left. Everything demolished.

For cities like Detroit, abandonment came via the car, sprawl, and eventually deindustrialization.

The end result is no different.

The nation doesn't care too much about cities any more.

And that affects the perceptions and concern about New Orleans, as well as other traditional center cities that have declined over a period of decades.









Index Keywords: center-city-revitalization