- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
John McIlwain was a mortgage financier with Fannie Mae before working for the ULI. Same pack of moneymen and developers trying to buyout our neighborhood; I'm not surprised by his comments as a result.
We don't need to move our houses to higher ground. Our houses were here before the present levees were built. The ground level basement style of housing reflects the consideration of the lower geography: go west, right outside Broadmoor, and the houses are level to the street (not raised like in the picture), the streets crazy low, and there's no planned park. We didn't go off the slabs for the most part like in the Ninth Ward and in Lakeview, so while we flooded it's not fair to call the area unsafe or 'hardest hit' where that means demolish the lot of us. The timber used in our older housing stock is thicker than the post-Katrina construction guidelines recommended for new housing in hurricane areas.
The most important issue here is that we can reoccupy our homes in a city purportedly short of housing stock: faster than Lakeview, faster than Gentilly, faster than getting a FEMA trailer, we can live here. So why would you plan to displace people from existing homes to move them to pricier, more densely populated Uptown housing, when Uptown is not a mile away? Someone already mentioned the SELA drainage project. Kroloff of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission - who lives in the Lower Garden District, to check his statement - stated early on his desire to see condos 'at park's edge' with floodable parking. Hello? If we flood here because of the backwater from the closure of the temporary 17th street canal gates, so will Old Metairie in Jefferson Parish. Are they being bought out too?
I had a nice talk with a traveler at a party today; he is from the Hamptons, and he was telling me about the developers he knew personally in that area. They will say anything to gain land, and 'unsafe' is usually one of the first codes they try. Until they manage to make the land 'safe' again for developing.
80% of the city flooded, so only 20% is technically on 'higher ground', and a good portion of that is across the river in Algiers. If the proposed neighborhood model is to be developed anywhere in New Orleans - and it's not being proposed for Lakeview, where lots would have to be bought out to create the 'center', and Uptown is in no danger of being 'remodeled', and the east is too rural to support utility service (supposedly) - then the most valuable real estate for housing a 'smaller footprint' becomes right where I and the previous poster live.
I am not a whiner, not a native New Orleanian, not even a sentimentalist. I have a four year old child; I don't rightly know that I would build or rebuild by a levee. But if Broadmoor's not safe to live in, New Orleans is not safe to live in. The arguments for turning this area into greenspace are all fallacies.
