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Detroit or Bust!
September 01, 2005
Bloggers, pundits and columnists across the country (probably across the world) are now considering what should be done with New Orleans (and the other disaster-stricken areas). The basic question - to rebuild, or to abandon? If the option of rebuilding is chosen, how, when, and where?
Answers range from “we will rebuild,” to “Abandon!” Speaker of the House Hastert is rightly questioning if, and how, to rebuild.
Murph mentions moving people to Detroit. He says he’s not really serious, but I would be. Why not? My mother’s point though, why move already extremely poor people to an area without jobs to begin with? Yeah… she’s got a point. Detroit needs jobs to support these people. The nice aspect of Detroit is that the infrastucture does already exist to house thousands of people. It’s definately a thought.
Other random thoughts:
I’m quite impressed by the colleges and universities offering free tuition to college students hurt by the disaster.
I’m sickened by the looters and the lawlessness that has followed. Absolutely sickened.
There are aspects of this many people aren’t even aware of. Not only are gasoline prices rising, but other oil-using products as well. Other petroleum products, plastics, asphalt, etc. - all of their prices are rising incredibly. Can we say inflation? And, besides oil prices, lumber prices are already known to increase by over 20% following a normal hurricane - what will happen now?
Posted by paul at September 1, 2005 06:40 PM
Comments
Murph said on September 2, 2005 07:26 PMI've been pretty loudly attacked by a few people for that idea - which is why the clarification. I'm not serious about transplanting the population of New Orleans north to Detroit entirely, but I do think that it would be better for New Orleans to live again as enclaves in a dozen major American cities than to try to put it back together. I mean, if Detroit can (could) support Corktown, Poletown, Mexicantown, Greektown, and Iraqi, Chaldean, Bosnian, etc populations - why not a population of New Orleanders? I mean, Houston's clearly going to have a New Orleander neighborhood 20 years from now, of people who were evac'd to the Astrodome and never went back - I think we ought to be making the choice to start over somewhere else easy for everybody.
And somebody just informed me today that New Orleans was the #1 port for importation of steel, rubber, and plywood - not just oil. So, yeah. This isn't just something that's going to make commuting painful for a little while.
Paul said on September 3, 2005 02:37 PMOne thing I've also realized... Houston is far from safe when considering future hurricanes. Wouldn't it be prudent to start thinking about that area, and the other major ports and refineries on the Texas coast?