Let’s give up on New Orleans.
Sustainability is not a popular topic in the United States. The overwhelming majority of houses are built quickly and cheaply, designed to last for a couple of decades, no more. Commercial real estate is built to last 27.5 years, 39 years tops — just long enough to depreciate fully, and then give up on. Millions of people call the desert southwest home, ignoring that the area is fast leaving the wet spell that it’s been in for the past century. Thousands of homes dot the Outer Banks, where many are wiped out every decade or two by the hurricanes that have presumably been routine there since long before man walked the earth. Thousands of million-dollar-homes are perched on the cliffs of Southern California, where a good rain is all it takes to wash them into the ocean. And down in Louisiana, well over a million people live on a chunk of land situated between a lake, the nation’s largest river, and the Gulf of Mexico, where they’ve watched for decades as the wetlands were destroyed and, that buffer gone, the ocean has steadily eaten away at miles and miles of shore. The whole of southern Louisiana is slowly sinking into the ground.
In New Orleans, as I write this, the homes of hundreds of thousands of people are gone, either reduced to splinters by Hurricane Katrina or washed away by the ever-worsening flooding. As the nation now well knows, the city of New Orleans exists at the whim of nature. With the slap of a hurricane or the drum of a few weeks’ heavy rain upriver, the city could disappear. And now it appears that it has.
What now? Easy: The federal government is going to swoop in. They — we — will pay people to rebuild. (Or the insurance companies will, and the federal government will end up bailing them out, since neither they nor their reinsurers can afford the pay out.) With all of the righteous indignation due them, the residents of New Orleans will declare that they’re fighting back against inevitability, and they’ll take that money and spend billions constructing more sandcastles just beyond the waves. When the tide comes in and they’re destroyed again, we’ll pay them to do it again.
Stop it. This isn’t just unsustainable, it’s illogical. It’s foolish. It’s wasteful. A city 17′ below sea level surrounded by a lake, a river, an ocean and millions of acres of swampland that tends to get hit by hurricanes is a bad idea. It should never have been there in the first place. This thoroughly-predicted tragedy is also an opportunity to make sure that this never happens again.
Insurance companies should declare that they’ll no longer provide property or casualty coverage for the area. The federal government should declare that they’ll no longer provide flood coverage, either. People who lived there should be paid to rebuild…elsewhere. Anybody who wants to rebuild in New Orleans gets nothing.
There’s just no sense in throwing good money after bad.
33 Comments