Falling Apart

Let's try this:



1: An historic building is grandfathered in to a zoning change

2: The buiding changes owners

3: The building closes for needed renovations

4: The renovations take some time

5: During that time, the city removes the historic building's historic use

6: There is no other way to use the building

7: The city offers a longer, more tedious, and possibly less successful process to amend the zoning



For a city like New Orleans, where historic character is theoretically held in high esteem, this is ridiculous. It proves the lie behind what passes for historic preservation in this town, and the joke that is zoning here. This city is in such terrible condition in many ways because there are government regulations that force it to be this way.



And that's not just some sort of Tea Party "goverment = bad" rhetoric. Regulations are necessary, but you have to make sure they work for your city and don't kneecap your neighborhoods. You have to have a process where historic buildings can be purchased and updated and renovated so those properties can maintain value. If you require specific, specialized renovations, that work is going to take time. If that work takes time, you have to recognize that when it comes to zoning issues.



Most importantly, some aspect of reality must be factored into your decision-making process. Who the F wants to buy a 14 unit aparment building off the current owners and renovate it again for one or two family living?



Here's a few scenarios:



A: This will artificially drive down the value of the property for the current owners, who have already sunk money into the project. Some well connected individual can come along and buy the property so the current owners take a loss, then use their connections to get the zoning fixed and make bigger profits.



B: This will artificially drive down the value of the property for the current owners, who have already sunk money into the project. Some very wealthy individual comes along and buys the property, tears down the historic building, and constructs something more realistic to reflect the zoning.



C: This will artificially drive down the value of the property for the current owners, so they let the property deteriorate. It won't appraise for as much, but what is their incentive to keep up a property they cannot use? As a St. Charles Avenue home, this isn't likely to happen, but anywhere else this could contribute to blight.



You'll notice that "make a reality-based decision about the property; charge the owners a small fine for being late on the renovations; allow the property to go back into commerce and increase the city's property tax base, historical character, and housing stock" are not a part of the viable scenarios here. That would be to "win-win-win" for a city like New Orleans.



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Convicting the Victim

(HT: Alli)

At least there was enough intelligence from the bench to allow a retrial in this case: a mother convicted of vehicular homicide because someone else ran down and killed her 4 year old with their car.

People looking at this case will say "but, Pat, she was jaywalking with her 4 year old." I guess that's the conclusion you'd reach if you only read the AJC, the Wall Street Journal, or watched CNN. There's more to this story, and yes, city planning is just as culpable if not moreso.

This is what people are talking about when they say roads are not safe for pedestrians.

She was jaywalking. Correct. And, Lord knows, I ain't no fan of jaywalking moms with kids on busy roads. But I "jaywalked" every time I went to a friend's house growing up on St. Simons Island, because their house was on the other side of the road from the bike path. I grew up in a small town, but people still got hit crossing Frederica Road, to be sure. Two lanes are easier to cross than 5, after all, but when resurfacing came through Island City, they installed a half dozen new pedestrian crossings. Why would they do that? Why would a place like Glynn County consider pedestrian crossings important enough to spend money on them?

The answer is simple: St. Simons prioritizes pedestrian and bicycle safety as part of its design as a tourist destination. Cobb County prioritizes cars to move people quickly from one exurb to the next. Such decisions have real world, sometimes life-and-death consequences.

She was jaywalking because she was traveling by foot in a car dominated area.

That's because her bus stop lets her out on the other side of Austell Road from her apartment complex, where the closest crosswalk is 3/10ths of a mile away. That's more than half a mile round trip, on foot, with three kids carrying full shopping bags, at night, after already waiting an hour for the bus. Not everybody owns a car. Not everybody can park that car in a garage or a driveway and watch the kids pile out into the house.

Half a mile in the dark with kids next to a busy highway or cross five lanes (75 feet?) of highway? What's your choice, tired mother of three? There aren't any good ones available.

And that's before you add in the driver, allegedly inebriated because in a car-centric world, the bars are located in "commercially zoned" areas and linked to "residential areas" by roads with no pedestrian or bicycle infrastructure.

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Pro-Free Enterprise

Ask and ye shall recieve. In response to a comment I made last week on WalMart subsidies, Owen Courreges at Uptown Messenger examines the difference between being "pro-business" and being "pro-free enterprise."

Pro-business being another term I associate with "business friendliness," the turn of phrase preferred by so very many Southern Chambers of Commerce as they pick the pockets of some businesses to put cash in the pockets of their more invested interests.

As a Southern Liberal, I can justify subsidies and tax breaks and infrastructure investments that stand to augment all businesses in a place. The Tennessee Valley Authority made a lot of people rich while taking a lot of other people's land. It also provided power for millions. The Port of New Orleans and the Port of Savannah allow any businesses to ship their goods by sea. Farm subsidies can be gamed to make millions for agribusiness, but they've also helped stabilize food prices. There are trade offs, and the people must be vigilant and informed of where their tax dollars are going, who is using them, and who stands to benefit the most.

That's because the free enterprise system requires rules and a just playing field in order for the true market competition to work. On the other hand, using tax revenues generated by some businesses to support their competition is when the government - and their well-connected interests - violate the free market to choose the winners and the losers in unfair competition. That may be "pro-(specific)-businesses" or "business friendly," in name, but it is more akin to feudalism in practice.

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Development & Density?

No thanks. By failing to approve a new mixed use, high density urban development, the "preservationists" would rather keep Canal Street's "historical character" of boarded up buildings, shut down hotels, shoe shops, and faux-voodoo tourist kitsch.

That's a shame for a streetscape that should be one of the bustling, dynamic, walkable commerical avenues of the Southeastern United States.

Wide streets can be fronted by tall buildings, that's one of the way urban design is supposed to work. I find the complaints of this building's height to be baseless. There are plenty of other buildings on that streetscape of that height, and they work because they front Canal.

Historical character? The building design does look "modern" in the aspect that it appears to use state of the art building design and materials. While this may not fit perfectly with the rest of the street towards the river, it isn't like this is some concrete-block monstrosity or post-modern experiment going in on that street.

As for the building it is replacing, it is a ramshackle low rise with a boarded up first floor covered in graffiti and posters. There is a need here to balance historical character with needed economic expansion. You'll be more able to preserve the historical character of other buildings and this part of the city as a whole if it is part of a working, dynamic downtown economy.

In other words, the Saenger Theatre, the Lowe's Theatre, and the Broadway South concept for that intersection isn't going to work if the theatres have no economic support nearby. If the University Medical Center ever does get built, people who work there could live in this building and walk to work, increasing the value of properties between this location going up Canal Street - an area that desperately needs commerical dollars.

And the folks making these decisions need to look up the definition of "leverage." They have some leverage in that a location like this on Canal Street should be quite valuable. But that knowledge needs to temptered with the reality that a location like this on Canal Street currently isn't as valuable as it could be, because of a lack of developers willing to take a risk of locating there.

Because, while the location has the potential to be very valuable based on the proximity of planned theatres and hospitals, those planned theatres and hospitals aren't yet done deals. Going ahead with developments of this nature assist the critical mass required for those projects to be successful. Otherwise, you'll end up stuck with the street the way it is now.

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Bipartisan Government Spending

I guess it is OK to make a case for government investment in infrastructure if the cities you help are in Georgia.

Those of us who have lived in New Orleans for the past many years know how easily that line of thinking gets turned on its head.

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Glow, Baby, Glow!

I guess the right-wing energy "experts" were right - nuclear power is just as safe as oil production in this country!

When are we going to have a serious national conversation about the dangers of our high energy consumption? It would be one thing if policy could be discussed with a deep national understanding that fossil fuel and nuclear energy production came with serious human and environmental costs, and the subsidies we make available to providers of cheap energy.

It is another thing entirely to have that conversation with blinders on, which is our current state of affairs.

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Unique Homeownership Opportunity

Located near the interection of Real Estate Oversupply Avenue and Spend At Least an Hour on Your Commute to Atlanta Highway, this incredible deal puts you in a mass produced cookie-cutter home just minutes away from not one, but TWO scenic Exurban Traffic-Choked Strip Malls. Fall asleep at night to the constant noise of jumbo jets approaching one of the world's busiest airports as you contemplate the multiple car notes you have to pay just so you and your spouse can get the kids to soccer practice on any number of winding non-grid surface streets. The area is zoned specifically to discourage foot and bicycle traffic, so you won't even be tempted to use alternative modes of transportation or interact with your pesky neighbors to form "community."

And with such a desireable place at such a reasonable price, you can afford the gasoline you'll need to use in order to live in a place like this!

What isn't to like?


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Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Mayor Landrieu makes the case for building the University Medical Center in New Olreans. This is a response to those who would seek to take the knees out from under the project and benefit their special interests under the cloak of "fiscal conservatism." All at the last minute, once an entire neighborhood has been destroyed and families have been uprooted.

In the larger context, Landrieu's rebuttal exposes the way individuals who play "conservative" on television willingly misrepresent tax figures as a means of providing for their own pork projects and protecting their own clients' subsidies.

For those of you who live in more progress-prone parts of the nation, you may be scratching your head wondering why this has been so difficult for New Orleans. Jeffery puts it in local context:

Ever content to remain the richest club in a poor and shrinking city, New Orleans' socialites resist any and every effort to grow the economy. They dress this conservative agenda up as "preservation" but it's better described as ossification. What gets "preserved" are old buildings, staid pageantry, anything that might make easy packaging for a hotelier or a filmmaker to sell.

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How Not to Build Stuff

Maybe they should have thought of this, or something like it BEFORE they declared imminent domain and bulldozed the neighborhood that existed there before. You want to talk about government waste?

Step 1: Your city has a teaching hospital run by the public state university that treats a high volume of at-risk patients. The system has big problems, but the building is solid and would be viable given some serious renovations.

Step 2: Man-made disaster seriously damages the teaching hospital.

Step 3: Agents of the government attempt to repair the teaching hospital. It is a hospital in the middle of a disaster area. Such facilities tend to be useful.

Step 4: Agents of the public state university allegedly stop repairs and close the teaching hospital. They want to declare the old hospital a loss, collect insurance money, collect national disaster money and build a new teaching hospital.

Step 5A: Powers that be know where they would put a new hospital. Friends, family, and connections begin buying cheap land in and around that area. These properties are left to moulder because they'll all get torn down when the new teaching hospital gets built.

Step 5B: Regular citizens who live in that area move back into their homes, and use what little insurance and government disaster aid they can apply for to renovate their homes. They aren't informed by the powers that be that all of their properties will be seized by imminent domain and torn down to make way for a new teaching hospital.

Step 6: Argue in public over the option to renovate the old teaching hospital (for $600 million) or build a new teaching hospital (for $1.2 billion). Ignore homeowners and businesses and other government agencies who have sunk money into properties that will be demolished. Let several years go by without much action, because who really needs a public hospital in the middle of a disaster area to serve at-risk populations?

Step 7: Convince the US Department of Veterans Affairs that the new teaching hospital is a done deal, and that they should start building their new hospital nearby.

Step 8: Convince developers and investors that the new teaching hospital is a done deal, and that they should start building new retail and residential use facilities as if the new hospital is guaranteed to be built.

(Seriously, I have a friend in another city, and some NOLA booster organization gave them a sales pitch that this hospital would be ready to open this fall or winter, with 5,000 new professional jobs coming to town.)

Step 9: Win the argument despite divisive local opionion and viable, cheaper alternatives. A Shiny New Hospital Will Be Built! Begin declaring eminent domain and bulldozing buildings. Move a few historical buildings to shut up the most agitating homeowners and preservationists. Clear dozens of city blocks of structures.

Step 10: Have state and federal officials representing competing intereststs attempt to derail the project at the last minute under the name of hostage taking fiscal conservatism.

Because if you think anything above describes fiscal conservatism (or fiscal liberalism, for that matter) you watch too much cable network news and don't understand the definition.

As a whole, words just fail.

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Will Build Train for Water

High speed rail from Atlanta to Chattanooga (and later to Nashville). In exchange, Atlanta gets water from the Tennessee River. Sounds win, win to me.

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Getting Rid of Red-Light Cameras

And using the law to do it.

Option 1: Legally require municipalities to increase the amount of time a light spends on yellow. Cameras then become more of a drain on city budgets as their costs outpace their revenue generation.

Option 2: A judge in Florida just ruled that red light tickets violate the Equal Protection Clause because they allow two distinct punishments for the same crime. I can only believe this is the case here in Louisiana.

Though that one may backfire, as this state might make the cameras deliver the more punishing offense of getting points on your license.

Option 3: Have the state legislature ban the devices.

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Zombie Alert in Georgia

New Orleans has Treme shut down whole city blocks for filming. In Georgia, they shut down whole state highways in metro Atlanta to film their local drama The Walking Dead.

At least it isn't The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Though if they needed to shut down a highway for scenes, I'm wondering why they didn't use I-16 around Metter or US 441 around Irwinton. There would be far less traffic to divert either place.

But round McDonough? That's just zombnoxious.

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MOAR ROADS PLZ!

By passing a $0.01 sales tax referendum, voters in heavily conservative Cherokee County will get a lot of infrastructure improvements, mostly centered around widening their own roads.

Roads that will, of course, increase development opportunities, increasing residences, and increasing cars on the roads. Not to mention how badly it ties the exurban county to gasoline prices.

But whatever, it is their money and their time. If they want to spend that money on gasoline for their cars and they want to spend their time sitting in traffic, that's up to them.

Two things though:

I don't want to hear complaints from these folks when gasoline prices go up. Y'all chose where to live and how to live, and y'all chose those long commutes.

I think that tying these folks' vote into the regional transportation plan is folly. If they don't want to pay for their new roads, let them not have new roads and put the funds elsewhere. It is time we start letting the suburbs and exurbs pay their own damn way in this country.

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If You Thought the Roads Were Bad...

Someone needs to remind Ron Paul that, as taxpaying citizens of the United States, the victims of the Mississippi River flood have built their own levees.

(HT: Library Chronicles)

This is where libertarianism fails for me as an effective government policy. The Mississippi River affects people from Montana to New York. It affects commerce all throughout the center of the country. When you dam the river to provide power for the cold nights in North Dakota, Louisiana loses coastal land; when heavy snows melt in the Midwest, people in Mississippi are flooded out of their homes.

All you have to do to see this won't work is to examine the dysfunction that accompanied the Georgia/Alabama/Florida water wars over the Chattahoochie River. Those states are still trying to work something out themselves, and will be back at one another's throats when the drought comes back.

You want to see a nighmare scenario on the Mississippi River? Let's throw that back to the states and tell them to figure it out themselves with their own budgets and their own contractors. Welcome back to the 19th Century of each state and each port having its own tax system for river traffic (driving up costs and corruption) and the killings that will go on as agents from each state go after each other's levees to relieve pressure on their own.

The Mississippi River is a national resource and trade network. River management is a national concern. The response to the USACoE's areas of insufficiency is to address those problems within the one agency, not to create a bunch of state agencies with the same insufficiencies and less resources to deal with it.

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Flood Panels (continued)

This weekend, decisions were made. In Louisiana, the US Army Corps of Engineers doesn't need to blow up levees along the Mississippi River, because there are already flood control structures in place to handle the overflow.

For the Bonne Carre spillway, this decision is easier made. Water flows from the River into Lake Pontchartrain. This might raise the level of the lake a few feet, causing some problems to those who live in low lying areas. It also affects the fisheries, as that much freshwater can change the habitats of lake and sea life very rapidly. When making the call between threatening the levees and industrial infrastructure downriver, that's not a difficult choice to make. The Bonne Carre has been open for some time now.

But those costs are minor ones compared to the opening of the Morganza. The Morganza spills Mississippi River water into the Atchafalaya River, and into communities that aren't as well-protected as Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The water is going to back up tributaries and bayous significantly (as it did on the Mississippi far upriver) and flood a lot of homes even far away from the banks of the river.

Hence the long wait to open Morganza. Not only did the USACoE have to give those people time to evacuate, or protect their property with sandbags, but it had to make a case that leaving the Mississippi River flowing at its current volume could do massive damage to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the nation's shipping and oil refining infrastructure. With a flood this big, it doesn't really matter how strong the levees are in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Those costs were weighed both ways, and the decision was made. Morganza opened this weekend. Acadiana is preparing for high water, again, and Louisiana is preparing to bear the brunt of high human costs associated with flooding.

The political implications boil my blood. Demagouges and populist sentiment won't wait long to point out that rural communities in "Real America" were sacrificed for cities and "elites" as if that makes any sort of sense in Louisiana's case. The same people would be screaming about the high price of gasoline if the refineries were allowed to flood for a month. There will - of course - be a racial undertone to it, as insidious as that is. I've already heard the phrase "President Obama Doesn't Care About White People," in reference to Kanye West's infamous response to flooding after Hurricane Katrina.

But what won't be talked about - again - is why this is happening. Why is the river flooding so badly up and down the Mississippi River? Why did decisions like this have to be made? How can our current infrastructure and zoning be made to more effectively mitigate this sort of thing? Why did most flooding come from tributaries? Why is the Louisiana coast disappearing? Why are areas so much more prone to flooding today?

Because - pay attention - this is what it looks like when the system we currently have works. This is the plan. This is our nation's cost of doing business the same way we always have. Two observations come from that:

One - if you think this cost too much, imagine if the system wasn't working as planned. I'll give you a hint, it would be 2005 flooding expensive.

Two - if you want a better flood control policy in this country, it is going to cost a lot of long term money. You have to weigh that against long-term costs.

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Disaster Politics

Unsurprisingly, there are a few individuals (mostly website comment trolls) who consider themselves on "the left," who are taking the opportunity of the Tornado disasters and Mississippi River flooding to oversimplify the political beliefs of Southerners and write us all off as Tea Partiers demanding smaller government. By virtue of our assumed collective hatred for TEH SOCIALIZMS of disaster recovery, they think we should live our values now and not ask for any Federal aid. Viewing the South through such a lens, they then descend into "blame the victim" territory so ably applied by their political rivals.

Beyond the fact that their finger-wagging is an absolute failure of narrative building (at which they simply are not prepared to compete with the right), they end up running into other folks on "the left" who despise the concepts of collective blame, political marketing, and false equivalence.

Folks with more crediblity are ready to stop them in their tracks:

Hating on the South in the comments for voting Republican will get you banned, permanently. I'm in no mood.

Thanks for that.

It also got me thinking. Most importantly, disasters don't check your voter registration before they come crashing through the door. Anyone, anywhere. There but for the Grace of God go I.

But there are apparently plenty of folks who do concern themselves with the voting patterns of Southerners as it relates to the current state of disaster. Not that it should matter, but look at this map alongside the one of where flooding is the worst. Look at the 2008 election returns in Tuscaloosa and Jefferson Counties in Alabama.

Which way did the disaster victims vote, again? And, again, why does it matter?

I hesitate to bring that up. The chorus of "why do you live by a river" is already warming up in the national narrative, and I'm sure there are plenty of right wing elements who are going to use the "handouts" to flood victims and anecdotes of government ineffectiveness in their own states in order to raise some political capital for the next election. I'd expect the same demagougery from Democratic or "liberal" elements as well. Same as it ever was.

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Flood Panels

You remember "Death Panels?" They were fake.

But Flood Panels actually do exist, and they decide whose property gets flooded and whose doesn't. And they do it all with your tax dollars.

Maybe if the people who got all riled up about the fake Death Panels came back to reality for 5 minutes and thought about our nation's very real Flood Panels, we might actually get a sane flood control policy in this country.

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Streetcars & Cash Money

Owen Courreges at Uptown Messenger seems to think New Orleans is making unsound financial sense and living in the past by building new streetcars.

He uses Houston, TX as an example of how investing in light rail hasn't made a return on investment. Since folks who live in New Orleans seem almost contractually obligated to compare NOLA's decision making processes to those in Houston or Atlanta, I'll go with the devil I know and bring up the ATL. Here's part of my comment:

But when it comes to the capital costs of building and maintaining roads vs. streetcar lines, let us not kid ourselves – the fantasy land cost-benefit analyses come into play with roads.

Y’all may not be used to it in New Orleans, but I come from a place where no one ever saw a road project they didn’t like. In this land of massive concrete projects the pitiance of the gasoline tax doesn’t make a dent in the DOT budget – when a gasoline tax exists at all.

As far as streetcars are concerned, they will really provide the return on investment when gasoline runs up over $5 per gallon, and people are looking for alternatives.

Mass transit ridership increased 14% even in auto centric Atlanta the last time gas was over $4 a gallon. As prices continue to rise due to increased demand, you can expect more folks to ride transit, and buses to cost more.

You can also expect the politicians, fearing voter backlash over high gasoline prices, to gut road and transportation budgets as they fall over themselves lowering gas taxes so they can appear to be doing something about a problem they cannot control.

We can invest now and benefit, or we can invest later when it costs far more to do so.

You know what transportation budgets are often first to see the axe? Mass transit. You know what happens when you cut access to mass transit? Low ridership and less return on investment. The thing I don't understand is cutting back on transit precisely at the time it is needed most by American commuters.


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Flood History

It is a shame that with almost every problem that faces the United States, our nation has already dealt with a similar problem in the past. At some point between then and now, we've either willfully forgotten the lessons or fallen prey to the snake-oil salesmen who convinces us that his medicine works the best.

Has it occurred to anyone why we have problems with flooding in this country? John Barry penned a must-read Saturday Essay in the WSJ on April 30 to describe, in layman's terms, what is going on here. (HT: YRHT)

Some of the questions Barry takes a crack at:

1. Why do all these people live in danger of flooding, and can't they just move somewhere else?

2. When did this become the Federal government's problem? What group of socialists decided that the government should be in the flood control business?

3. When did African-Americans abandon the Republican Party?

4. How do decisions made in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota end up contributing to massive property damage in Louisiana?

5. What kind of person lives in flood-prone areas and doesn't have flood insurance?

6. If the USACoE know how to build better levees, why don't they do it?

Of course, you can find more detailed answers to most of these questions by reading Barry's book, Rising Tide, but actual US history may not be compatible with an already made-up mind.

Update: Oh, here are a few ideas.

(HT: EJ)

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The Flood

Jerz and I have often spoken of government waste over the years.

Is anyone ready to start questioning why the best plan available to the Midwest and South is to blow up the levees?

I mean, if you have to destroy something and cause a catastrophe in order to escape and even bigger catastrophe, what does that tell you?

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