The fate of New Orleans

The President visited the city again a few days ago, "Even in the handpicked audience for the president's Wednesday morning school appearance, some voiced skepticism mixed in with gratitude for Bush's show of support."  He can't even get a crowd of loyalists together, that pretty much says it all.

So what's the large[r] situation:

Still, only two-thirds of the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans has returned to the city, and storm damage remains visible. Only 40 percent of the city's public school students have returned, although sales tax receipts have climbed to 84 percent of pre-storm levels, according to a new Brookings Institution report.

Of those who haven't returned, some 86,000 are living in trailers that are making people sick.  So 66% of the people returned, 40% of the school students, and 84% of the tax base. In essence, this tells us that many of the poor haven't returned to New Orleans.  This gets to the "smaller footprint" issue, recently discussed in a Jonathon Yardley  review of a book on Katrina.

[The author] reverses gears and writes a sensible, unemotional chapter about the debate over whether New Orleans must remain a smaller city -- having a "smaller footprint," to use the vogue phrase -- in order to avoid having many of its citizens return to areas that cannot be fully protected against flooding and its consequences. One would expect Sothern to parrot the line that "a smaller footprint would prevent poor people and minorities from returning to their homes," but he comes out in agreement with Pierce Lewis, the author of New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (published originally in 1976), that "allowing people to return to homes in flood-prone areas [is] neither 'particularly humane' nor in accord with civil rights, when 'you know that they could drown there.' " Sothern says the real question is "whether it is possible to shrink the city . . . in a manner that achieves justice for the people displaced and a better, safer, more functional city for everyone," and he's right.

In essence, what's happening now is a de facto shrinking of New Orleans footprint without any sort of social justice for those displaced.  I tend to buy the argument that purchase of flood insurance should be mandatory (with a seller of last resort available from the Feds).  The alternative is temporarily ameliorating the housing of the poor by giving them an economic incentive to put their lives at risk from disasters.  The administration is using neglect, its favorite domestic policy tool, to force a smaller footprint without ever having to make the argument for what they feel should be done.  Thus it falls to the Dems to speak for the dispossessed, the articles shows they're trying, but time will tell whether they make a difference.

[Update: A typo fixed.]