By Frank Gruber, The Santa Monica Lookout News
“When Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the flood control system destroyed New Orleans the event became a lens through which to examine the continuing fundamental dysfunctions of America 400 years after European colonization.
If that statement seems an exaggeration, consider these factors that combined to destroy a great city:
- Ecological destruction resulting from extreme exploitation of the natural environment;
- The legacies of slavery, including racism and endemic poverty and all that they entail;
- An anti-urban bias going back at least to Jefferson, which in the 20th century led to public policies that subsidized the abandonment of cities by the middle-class;
- Political philosophies that scorn collective action which, in the late 20th century when those philosophies were ascendant, resulted in a decline in public investment; and
- An ambivalent attitude towards government and public service, and — the flipside of that ambivalence — a close relationship between politics and wealth.
All of these factors contributed to the destruction of New Orleans. It’s not surprising that these themes are also intertwined in the paths to towards recovery that New Orleans has taken since September 2005.
Those paths are the subjects of Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans, a book written by Robert B. Olshansky and Laurie A. Johnson and published this year by the American Planning Association.” READ MORE >>
via The Huffington Post.
Led by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the city’s Fight the Blight Day on Saturday, December 11 was an unqualified success! More than 70 volunteers covered much of the Holy Cross Neighborhood – removing litter and conducting property assessments to target blight throughout the Lower Ninth Ward as an integral part of the community’s recovery and rebuilding efforts.
