New Orleans and Mississippi: Something in Common
It's been part of my shtick here over the past couple of years to try to hammer home the distinction between what happened to the Mississippi Gulf Coast -- a flattening by the winds of Hurricane Katrina -- and what happened virtually simultaneously to New Orleans -- a flooding caused by the catastrophic collapse of poorly designed and constructed levees and floodwalls. But the two disasters, or rather the two recoveries, do share at least one characteristic, according to a new Rand study: a shortfall (in Mississippi's case) and a crisis (in the city's case) of "affordable housing." This, even though Mississippi garnered a far higher per-damaged-property share of federal compensation money, and though New Orleanians have been lectured for months about the superiority of their neighbor's recovery. The facts cited in the Rand report on Mississippi echo, at a lower pitch, what's happening in the Crescent City: the recovery is being slowed by a lack of workers, created by the lack of any place for working people to live.
Posted October 7, 2007 | 03:55 AM (EST)