The Wrong Ending for the New Orleans Story

The risk that New Orleans might not recover from Katrina was always there.

Even before the levees ever gave way, the city had horrific problems, and they’ve been magnified exponentially in the last 18 months. According to the NY Times, people in today’s New Orleans are getting overwhelmed — by the crime, the spiralling costs of far-too-little available housing, a lack of planning, unbelievable red tape, inexcusible funding bottlenecks, pathetic leadership at all levels, the unimproved levees…

Of course they are.

Their reasons include high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress. In other words: yes, it is still bad down here. But more damning is what many of them describe as a dissipating sense of possibility, a dwindling chance at redemption for a great city that, even before the storm, cried out for great improvement.

“The window of opportunity is closing,� Ms. Larsen said, “before more people like us give up and say it’s too little, too late.�

[snip]

For every household that, like this one, has given up, there is another on the verge.

New Orleans is a city that inspires great passion — an almost painful love that’s impossible to explain, deny, or (for the uninitiated) understand. Certainly it called to me after the storm, and I still don’t know how I managed to stay away, or if I did the right thing, ultimately, for my heart and soul.

So I understand those who stayed through the storm and those who went back after, those who came home from North Dakota or Austin to give their hearts and souls to the city… and those who find themselves making different decisions today.

But it doesn’t make this story any less heart-breaking.

It’s not too late yet, and certainly everyone isn’t leaving — but this is nevertheless a terrible, devastating glimpse of a possible conclusion to the New Orleans story.

Someone needs to get busy writing a different ending for this horrible American tale. I do not like the way this one is going.