Darth Sidious
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Eight Years After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Has Been Resurrected
Writer Jason Berry marks the eighth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by looking at the triumphs and failures of New Orleans today, as chronicled in a handful of recent books on the Big Easy.
Eight years after the Katrina floodwaters soaked 80 percent of New Orleans, the holy city where jazz began has risen from the muck, a blue-town floorshow in the deep-red South.
New Orleans has 100,000 fewer people and 500 more restaurants than on August 29, 2005. The city that sank on global television has a booming film industry, thriving music economy, Mardi Gras, Bowl games, and festivals that have spawned a grassroots entertainment mecca.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...cane-katrina-new-orleans-has-resurrected.html
True, New Orleans pre-K had deep poverty and rolling corruption scandals. The city was also a strategic port, a cultural diamond, and nowhere near bankruptcy. The levees failed because of shoddy maintenance by a federal agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. President George W. Bush and enough Republicans joined Democrats in the $7.5-billion Road Home program to give under-insured homeowners and businesses a leg up. A class-action lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers lost on appeal; but the corps has spent $15 billion to date on a major upgrade of the levees.
What, then, did Americans get for their money?
A city better girded for storm surges, with miles of streets being repaved, low unemployment, and a school system remade by the charter movement. The gun culture and drug trade make homicide a nightly show on TV news. And yet, New Orleans has become a city of the young, a magnet not just for teachers and NGO workers, but entrepreneurs, developers, software scribes, website designers and urban planners. With more than 100 art galleries, New Orleans has a flourishing bohemia of artists and creative folk driving gentrification of the Upper Ninth Ward.
Writer Jason Berry marks the eighth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by looking at the triumphs and failures of New Orleans today, as chronicled in a handful of recent books on the Big Easy.
Eight years after the Katrina floodwaters soaked 80 percent of New Orleans, the holy city where jazz began has risen from the muck, a blue-town floorshow in the deep-red South.
New Orleans has 100,000 fewer people and 500 more restaurants than on August 29, 2005. The city that sank on global television has a booming film industry, thriving music economy, Mardi Gras, Bowl games, and festivals that have spawned a grassroots entertainment mecca.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...cane-katrina-new-orleans-has-resurrected.html
True, New Orleans pre-K had deep poverty and rolling corruption scandals. The city was also a strategic port, a cultural diamond, and nowhere near bankruptcy. The levees failed because of shoddy maintenance by a federal agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. President George W. Bush and enough Republicans joined Democrats in the $7.5-billion Road Home program to give under-insured homeowners and businesses a leg up. A class-action lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers lost on appeal; but the corps has spent $15 billion to date on a major upgrade of the levees.
What, then, did Americans get for their money?
A city better girded for storm surges, with miles of streets being repaved, low unemployment, and a school system remade by the charter movement. The gun culture and drug trade make homicide a nightly show on TV news. And yet, New Orleans has become a city of the young, a magnet not just for teachers and NGO workers, but entrepreneurs, developers, software scribes, website designers and urban planners. With more than 100 art galleries, New Orleans has a flourishing bohemia of artists and creative folk driving gentrification of the Upper Ninth Ward.
