Slum Clearance, The Natural Way

Here's the thing about Katrina that few are talking about.

When the New Orleans basin is finally drained, and most of the ramshackle structures that make up the housing stock in the poorest areas are marked for demolition, does anyone in their right mind think that the majority of New Orleans citizens will have an opportunity to return?

No, when the rebuilding starts, it will not be for the actual citizens of New Orleans. It will instead be trumpeted as a developers bonanza, a tabula rasa, a slate wiped clean, a chance to begin again.

Robert Moses once drew lines around poor but thriving neighborhoods, called them slums, and wiped them off the map to build expressways and housing projects. He threw nearly a half-million New Yorkers from their homes and neighborhoods. Moses might well have liked the opportunity Katrina now presents.

New Orleans, when and if it is rebuilt, will rise again as an upper-middle class Disneyland caricature of itself (not that parts of the French Quarter aren't that already), with the kind of insidious development we see across American suburbia.

And the masses of Orleans citizens now taking refuge in shelters across the south will not be able to afford the admission to that party.

It will be a New Orleans not only wiped clean of its history, but of the people who made it.