The New Republic -
September 14, 2005
Katrina
and Urban Liberalism
Left
Behind
by Joel Kotkin & David Friedman
resident
Bush's inept response to the Katrina disaster has called into question whether
his brand of conservatism is capable of responding to national
emergencies--and rightly so. From the administration's pre-hurricane
reluctance to fund infrastructure upgrades to its appointment of political
cronies to crucial federal agencies, the last few weeks have showcased the
American political right at its very worst.
But if Katrina has laid bare the
shortcomings of Bush-style conservatism, it has also exposed problems with
contemporary urban liberalism. During the years preceding the hurricane, New
Orleans indulged many of the worst tendencies of urban liberal politics--and
on the day Katrina made landfall, it was the poorest residents of the city who
paid the price. Which is why it can be said that Katrina exposed the failures
of not one, but two, political philosophies: a national conservatism
unconcerned about urban centers; and an urban liberalism unconcerned about the
daily realities of the majority of urban dwellers. The media has largely
focused on the former failure. But the latter failure is no less real.
That the governments of New Orleans
and Louisiana, long dominated by Democrats, are corrupt and ineffective is of
course widely recognized. But the problems in New Orleans went beyond mere
corruption; the city's civic culture and public institutions have, for years,
been under siege. Among those public institutions was the criminal justice
system: Even as crime rates have fallen throughout the country, the number of
violent crimes in New Orleans was rising well before the storm. (This year
alone there had already been 192 homicides by mid-August. That's 23 more than
in mid-August 2004.) In recent years, a New Orleans resident was nearly ten
times more likely than the average American to be murdered. So it was no
surprise that many members of a police force long considered among the least
effective in the United States would desert their city in a time of crisis,
or, worse still, reportedly participate in the looting. Even before Katrina,
New Orleans residents were often reluctant to assist with prosecutions because
they feared retaliation and distrusted the local justice system.
Tragically, the hurricane
demonstrated that a similar rot had set in throughout the public sector. The
fact that 27 percent of the city's residents had no access to any form of
private transportation--almost 3 times the national rate--was widely
recognized. Yet apparently no one had devised a plan to move these citizens
out of town in the event of an emergency.
While these and other basic needs
went unmet, New Orleans politicians, like so many liberal leaders in cities
nationwide, focused on an elite-driven agenda designed to create an ephemeral
economy rather than a broad-based one. Their lack of proper economic focus
allowed what should have been a healthy city to fall largely into poverty and
decrepitude. From its earliest origins under the French, New Orleans's most
fundamental commercial advantages arose from its role as the largest port at
the intersection of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet for decades
New Orleans leaders sought to attract conventions and the arts while failing
to compete with Houston and other places around the Gulf in developing a
high-wage economy around trade activities and related services.
Despite being one of the nation's
premier entry points for grain and oil, New Orleans has proved remarkably
unable to stimulate production or wholesale trade jobs. Before the storm hit,
these two essential sectors accounted for 11 percent of the city's job base;
in Houston, where many of the Katrina refugees may end up staying, they
account for 14.2 percent. In addition, New Orleans relied upon the leisure and
hospitality sector to provide 13.3 percent of its jobs; in Houston, the
tourism industry has a hold on only 8.7 percent of the city's jobs. The
difference between the two cities' economies is perhaps best illustrated by
the fact that between 1994 and 2004, the number of jobs in New Orleans grew by
only 4.3 percent compared to 23.1 percent for Houston, in part because the
Texan metropolis has successfully attracted jobs connected to international
trade.
So if not in trade and commerce,
where did New Orleans place its bets for the future? Like many cities, its
leadership gambled that the arts, nightlife, and a tourist economy could build
prosperity, or at least a semblance of it. Just a month before Katrina hit,
the city hosted a major conference in which edgy culture and high-end-tourism
were touted as the key to its economic prospects. Other cities, of course,
have also embraced the disastrous idea that hipness, not economic
fundamentals, would lead to urban renewal. And in all of them--Detroit,
Baltimore, San Francisco--the cost of this strategy has been substantial.
Trying to foster a cool atmosphere has done little to stop Detroit's economic
decline. Baltimore struggles with rising crime and a tepid economy. And San
Francisco, despite all its natural advantages, has lost jobs and much of its
middle class, mutating into a playground for young, affluent liberals.
The problem is that while great
restaurants and music appeal to the urban rich, the economics of tourism leave
huge segments of the population behind. In contrast with jobs in trade,
manufacturing, engineering, medicine, and finance, culture and tourism pay
very low wages and permit little or no upward mobility. For example, a 2002
study for the AFL-CIO showed that nearly half of all full-time hotel workers
could not earn enough to keep a family above the poverty line.
Which is why cities that turn to
elite culture to fuel their economies tend to generate unparalleled class
disparities. Lost in the ghastly images of New Orleans's poor is the fact that
the city's whites, about 28 percent of the population, were actually wealthier
and more educated than whites nationwide. They, of course, welcomed the new
nightclubs and coffee shops that dotted the Big Easy's tonier neighborhoods.
Surrounding all this, however, was one of America's most impoverished black
communities. Almost 40 percent of New Orleans households, nearly all of them
black, earned less than $20,000 a year, twice the proportion in the rest of
the country. Whatever might have worked well for Garden District elites failed
the rest of the city's population on a staggering scale.
A great American city like New
Orleans deserved better--and still does. If the city is rebuilt, it should
focus less on tourism and more on those economic sectors that its geography
has naturally supported for centuries. Progressive mayors in neighboring
cities have exploited these same opportunities. Both former mayor Bob Lanier
and current mayor Bill White, for example, have helped transform Houston into
a regional economic powerhouse by concentrating on the basics--efficient
administration, roads, ports, sanitation, and other productive infrastructure.
Both understood that with a strong economy, Houston could afford to build its
cultural and artistic amenities--but that the arts could not sustain an urban
economy alone.
Tourism, edgy culture, the French
Quarter--these things are nice, but the inevitable results of their elevation
to the center of urban policy are the kind of gut-wrenching scenes of wealth
disparity we have seen over and over again these past two weeks. If New
Orleans had not been such an economically polarized city, perhaps more of its
residents would have been able to fend for themselves when disaster struck,
and would therefore be alive today. For that, contemporary urban liberalism
has to take its share of the blame.
* * *
David Friedman is a Senior
Fellow at the New America Foundation.
* * *
