Should New Orleans be rebuilt?

Hmm, not very conclusive:

Quote:

In a weird twist of fate, the storm could even extend the housing boom, which in recent weeks had seemed to be running out of steam. That is certainly true in places like Houston, Atlanta and Baton Rouge, La., which are experiencing a surge in rental and homebuying activity as a result of the storm and the exodus that followed.

As refugees from New Orleans poured into Baton Rouge last week, along with workers who expect to help with the rebuilding effort along the Gulf Coast, the local housing market, which up until now has plodded along at a stable pace, suddenly experienced the kind of frenzy that has been associated with New York, Miami or Silicon Valley in the last few years.

"I've never seen anything like this before," said Robert Cook, a real estate agent with Re/Max Elite in Denham Springs, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge. "It's sort of scary."

Mr. Cook said he represented five buyers in two days last week who made offers on homes, and fielded hundreds of calls and e-mail messages from others. On Friday, he said, he was with a couple from Picayune, Miss., who made offers on several houses only to discover they had already been sold.

In addition to refugees and workers, he said, "investors are coming in from out of state by the droves and trying to buy stuff."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/05build.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1126022563-A2GDu3fMY1XODcho0gd2eA

So people are definitely buying houses, but some of them are just opportunistic investors, and the rental market is booming, too (didn't see anything specific about comparison of rental market to buying market).

0 Replies

sozobe wrote:

Well, "temporary" in the sense of "until it's fit to move back" might be a really long time.

You mean, long enough to buy a house instead of renting one? Intuitively I wouldn't say so, but Germans are generally more reluctant than Americans when it comes to buying houses. They generally don't do it unless they plan to stick around for 10 years or longer.

0 Replies

Yeah, that's definitely not the case here. When we were house-hunting we kept talking about the importance of schools, and realtors and everyone else kept saying, "but your daughter won't be starting kindergarten for another two years anyway, you can get a starter house and then move before she starts school." Shocked

No, thanks.

0 Replies

well, heres the site, its a compilation of very recent NOAA pix;
http://www.weather.org

just go to the bottom left of the home page and there is an index of high res pix that cover the area. My old home was high and dry.

0 Replies

Great link, farmerman.

I could spend the rest of today looking at that site. Thanks!

0 Replies

blueveinedthrobber wrote:

I'm curious...what is it, since the Cuban missile crisis that Cuba has done that has hurt the USA?

Cuba was the conduit and supply point for Soviet instigation of the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Cuba provided the Soviet Union with a mercenary army for their attempts at intervention in civil wars in Namibia and other African countries. Throughout the Cold war Cuba was a base for Soviet intelligence collection activities.

Beyond that, the social and economic stagnation in Cuba that have been the product of a generation of enervating socialism will require a generation to pass before the rot is swept away by the passage of time. The examples of eastern Europe and Russia itself are apt here. The embargo is needed to prevent U.S. banks from lending the regime money and then requesting (and getting) government compensation when the inevitable default occurs. Our interest is best served by (1) honoring our 1963 commitment not to invade Cuba; and (2) doing everything else we can to speed the inevitable fall of a hostile, corrupt, and tyrannical regime. The Cuban people could quickly solve this problem by overthrowing the tyrant, however they have been rather passive in accepting it. Perhaps this is because the best, most intelligent, crative and ambitious Cubans left early and came to the United States.

0 Replies

so you'e saying for the last 40 years every cuban born has been a passive idiot?

0 Replies

Quote:

Forty years ago, an electric grid failure plunged New York and other northeastern cities into a long blackout. But law and order prevailed. Ordinary citizens went to intersections to direct traffic. People helped each other. After the blackout was over, this experience left many people with an upbeat spirit about their fellow human beings.

http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html

Quote:

Despite the confusion and disarray, New Yorkers spent the night in peace. There were no riots or widespread looting. Instead, New Yorkers helped each other. Some directed traffic. Others assisted the New York fire department as they rescued stranded subway passengers. In many cases, New Yorkers just shared extra candles and flashlights with neighbors, reveling in the opportunity to get to know the people who lived across the hall.

I remember that night, very well. My son was in nursery school. I was at work in Manhattan, and if I had not stopped to b.s. with another employee, I would have gotten to him on time.

Anyhow, I was on the "F" train in Queens, when all of a sudden, the train stopped, and the lights dimmed. We were stuck there about two hours. No one was panicked, and we just kept asking the conductors, as they came through the train, what was happening.

I finally had to walk out of the train, on the tracks, and to the street. As luck would have it, I was just a few blocks from where I had to be.

I was amazed at what I saw on the street. Everything was dark.................except for the flashlights. Private citizens were manned on street corners, directing traffic. The scene was peaceful, almost serene.

I picked up my son, and drove home, which was about 8 miles away. All along the route, I saw the folks with flashlights at the intersection. It was such a wonderful feeling that people cared enough to help one another in a pinch.

When I got home (I was single at the time) just about every guy that I had ever known called to check up on me, and see that I was all right.

0 Replies

sozobe wrote:

"but your daughter won't be starting kindergarten for another two years anyway, you can get a starter house and then move before she starts school." No, thanks.

I see. Perhaps you have German ancestors then. Cool

I'm not sure what Katrina will do to the housing bubble (excessive house prices compared to rents and interest rates), but it should certainly assure that the boom in the construction sector continues. It seems pretty obvious that there will be many houses to construct in America for a couple of years.

0 Replies

Cuba

Seems to me the Cubans are quite proud of Fidel. He could not have lasted this long without a fair deal of popular support. As for Cuba acting as a conduit for Soviet inspired revolution in Angola, Nicaragua El Salvador etc they may well have done. Whats that to do with the US? And if the primary purpose of the embargo is to prevent US banks lending money to a country they know will default thereby to claim compensation from the US govt. then the simplest solution would be to say the US govt. will not compensate US banks for their foolish investments. Finally as I asked before, anyone know how much damage Katrina did to the island before it hit the US?

Power cuts
Thanks for story Pheonix, I was at school then. I'm sure I heard some explanation that a workman had cut through a power line near Niagra Falls...complete bs of course, or was it? Any road up, does your experience then and now in New Orleans support the contention that society is more fragmented and violent now than in power cuts of 40 yrs ago?

0 Replies

Quote:

Thanks for story Pheonix, I was at school then. I'm sure I heard some explanation that a workman had cut through a power line near Niagra Falls...complete bs of course, or was it? Any road up, does your experience then and now in New Orleans support the contention that society is more fragmented and violent now than in power cuts of 40 yrs ago?

Steve- Absolutely. I don't think that our society had been exposed to the sorts of violence in those years that are all too common today.

I was brought up in the '50s. We had gangs then, but they stayed on their own "turf", and only beat up on one another. I started going to Manhattan from my home in Brooklyn, with my girfriends, from the time that I was 12 years old. There was never a worry that something untoward would happen.

I don't want to sound like an "old fart", but I think that in my young generation, people took more responsibility for themselves. I think that society, and its expectations, were more clear cut than they are today.

That is not to say that the world of Ozzie and Harriet was better than what we have today. I think that today's people have a lot more latitude in the ways that they can behave, and a lot more freedom of choice. The flip side, is that this easing of society's mores has caused an increasing amount of anomie.

I think that this instability is what is behind the attraction of people recently to fundamentalist religious groups. Some folks are looking for the structure that they do not find out in society today.

0 Replies

I think many people are looking for certainty in a world of moral ambiguity. So naturally they reject everything they have been brought up with and take up the first thing labelled 'truth' they come across, be it scientology, islam or magic mushrooms. What they do not understand is that truth itself is a relative term. We can use our God given powers of intellect to get nearer the truth, but there is no guarantee we will ever finally arrive. Alternatively we can guess that one or other of the various man-made religions is or must be the absolute truth and thereby attract justified derision imo.

0 Replies

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Alternatively we can guess that one or other of the various man-made religions is or must be the absolute truth and thereby attract justified derision imo.

I agree - as long as you include Marxism, and other secular humanist "religions" in the mix. In the last two centuries they have caused far more of this mischief than have traditional religions. One man's 'self-evident rational analysis' is often another's 'fanatical religion'. Best to judge them by their deeds.

0 Replies

georgeob1 wrote:

I agree - as long as you include Marxism, and other secular humanist "religions" in the mix.

Okay, let's add all the different political ideas then - some really have religious ideas about that when I read some posts here.

0 Replies

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Cuba

Seems to me the Cubans are quite proud of Fidel. He could not have lasted this long without a fair deal of popular support. As for Cuba acting as a conduit for Soviet inspired revolution in Angola, Nicaragua El Salvador etc they may well have done. Whats that to do with the US? And if the primary purpose of the embargo is to prevent US banks lending money to a country they know will default thereby to claim compensation from the US govt. then the simplest solution would be to say the US govt. will not compensate US banks for their foolish investments. Finally as I asked before, anyone know how much damage Katrina did to the island before it hit the US?

Even Canada has backed away from its commercial dealings with the corrupt, authoritarian government in Cuba. You can urge the UK to take their place if you wish.

Just from the geography we can conclude that Katrina did very little damage to Cuba. The storm passed well to the north of Cuba, meaning that the island was always on the relatively benign left hand side of its trajectory where the circulating and translating winds cancel and where there is no accumulating tidal surge.

0 Replies

If you want opinions on Cuba, you should check with fbaezer. He seems familiar with the situation in some detail.

0 Replies

Many pages back, some posters expressed an interest in hearing about the perspectives of New Orleans natives on coming back and rebuilding. Today's New York Times has an article whose author has interviewed a few people, and she finds that the spectrum of perspecives is very broad. It reaches from immediately growing roots in the new city:

Quote:

In her 19 years, all spent living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.

"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes restaurant.

to passionate devotion to the old place:

Quote:

"I'm going home even if it comes down to walking to New Orleans," Mr. Andrews said. "It's my life, and I prefer to be in Louisiana, period. And it doesn't matter what's left there. I'm going to rebuild even if I have to hold a shovel and a horn at the same time."

Source

There appears to be a great deal of worry that too many evacuated people stay gone once the flooding is over. The worry is that that's bad for the city. But I don't understand the argument why fewer people are worse for a city than more people. I have seen many small cities that seem prosperous, attractive, and happy with themselves. Why shouldn't Orleans become one of them?

0 Replies

It appears that the most devastated area is around Metarie , the central city is relatively dry and cosmetics can fix most of that.
Just like the earthquakes keep a strong home building market going in California, this too, will be a stimulus to the NO area. The only thing is that we can no longer duck and divert money from the lake levees projects . I also think that many of the LSU proposals for delta nourishment will need to go from pilot to full scale operations.

0 Replies

farmerman wrote:

Just like the earthquakes keep a strong home building market going in California, this too, will be a stimulus to the NO area. The only thing is that we can no longer duck and divert money from the lake levees projects . I also think that many of the LSU proposals for delta nourishment will need to go from pilot to full scale operations.

I agree with the econoimic estimate above. Such major activitties spur economic activity that would otherwise not occur.

I'm not familiar with the LSU plan for the resumed nourishment of the Delta. However I do know that nearly all of the flood and flow control measures taken over the last sixty years throughout the length of the Mississippi have had the side effect of reducing the deposit of nourishing silt in the delta. There are difficult tradeoffs here involving; land use and the protection of cities adjacent to the river; floodplain management; commercial barge traffic on the river; etc. No easy choices. Previous floods in the upriver floodplains have spurred the Federal government to restrict future disaster aid for habitations in areas of frequent flooding.

The Corps of Engineers put forward a plan about two years ago for a new approach to the management of the river from the northern plains to the Gulf. It is more or less like their plan for the Everglades -- many billions of dollars to undo everything they have done for the past sixty years.

The State and its local governmenrt have always had the primary responsibility (and sole authority) for land use management. The worst hit areas of New Orleans were the areas of recent expansion of the city on the North side towards the lake. Some of them should not be rebuilt, levee project or no levee project.

0 Replies

Several correspondents in the New Orleans-related threads have offered an ideological explanation for the unacceptable federal response to Katrina. Bluntly put, they say it was bad because tax-cutting, beast-starving Republicans deprived FEMA of revenue. To test this opinion, I looked into the Statistical Abstract of the United States and opened the chapter about "federal government finances and employment". Then I checked the federal outlays for FEMA in the 2002 Abstract, as well as for "emergency preparedness and response" in the 2004/2005 abstract, the latest one there is on the Web. I am assuming that "emergency preparedness and response" is FEMA after it was dissolved in the Department of Homeland Security, although I couldn't find an explicit statement that it is. Here are the expenditures in billions of dollars:

1980: 1.2; 1990: 2.2; 1995: 3.1; 1999: 4.0; 2000: 3.1; 2001: 4.4; 2002 (est.) 5.8;
2003: 3.873 enacted, 2.272 supplemental; 2004: 7.132; 2005 (req.) 8.802

These numbers are consistent with the assertion that FEMA has invested too much money in pork and too little in essentials. They are mute on whether FEMA has spent too much money on preparing for terrorist attacks, and too little on preparing for natural disasters. They do not contradict, they even indicate, that there might have been a little beast-starving by the Gingrich Congress during the Clinton presidency. (But not by the Democratic Congress during the Bush I and Clinton presidencies.) They say nothing about FEMA's top management being staffed with incompetent Bush cronies. But they flatly refute that the Bush administration has starved FEMA of revenue. The contrary is true: its budget has exploded.

Just thought some of you might find this interesting. Smile

0 Replies

Should New Orleans be rebuilt?

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know