Day 348: Long And Strange, But Where Does It Lead?

Sheboygan’s Sargento cheese workers win $210 million and beautiful ships roll into Sturgeon Bay. I’m obviously missing out on something.

Meanwhile, here in Debrisville, Oyster refers us to a concise review of New Orleans a year later, with stress on responsible levee rebuilding and political motivation as this city’s key requirements.

The following are excerpts from Charles Mann’s The Long, Strange Resurrection of New Orleans (emphasis mine).  Edit: Note that I don’t agree with him in believing that noblesse oblige doesn’t exist in this city, or that “it is wholly fitting that safeguarding New Orleans has fallen to its indigenous business class.” Safeguarding is a bad choice of words there; where were the indigenous business class before Katrina? But, I like how he succinctly offers some of this city’s biggest pitfalls.

As the first anniversary of Katrina approaches, the city has made progress … Nonetheless, the situation remains parlous. Hurricane season is racing to its peak, and New Orleans’ infrastructure is so weak another Katrina would finish it off. But even if no hurricanes strike the coast, the city and region must still navigate through three intertwined dilemmas.

The first comprises the obvious problems of deciding what areas will be rebuilt and ensuring that the city is protected by a new, stronger levee-and-pump network. Finishing that system will take many years, and until then, people and businesses will be reluctant to invest themselves in the area, slowing recovery.

Even as the city reconfigures itself, a second, still bigger reconstruction project must occur in the great wetlands to its south. New Orleans’ best defense against hurricanes is not its levees but this vast Delta swamp, which acts as a buffer against storm surges from the Gulf of Mexico.

… Those two projects – reconfiguring New Orleans and rehabilitating its ecosystem – are daunting enough, and working through them will require a stupendous force of political will, especially in Washington. Here is the third dilemma: That desperately needed political will is nowhere to be seen.

Mann also addresses the primary Catch-22 since Katrina and the flood displaced half of the city’s population: businesses will not re-enter New Orleans without workers and customers, while potential employees cannot return without the promise of jobs, affordable housing and schools for their kids.

Corporate America, so quick to respond to the immediate humanitarian crisis, has been slow to come back to New Orleans because of the obvious fear that it will have neither customers nor employees.

Lack of affordable and available housing has made the staffing problem only worse, Brenda Lockey of the Tenet hospital chain told Fortune in April. “We’re experiencing the same challenges as everyone here in bringing back services in a compromised infrastructure,” she said. Tenet has since announced plans to sell four of its five area hospitals, including the city’s Memorial Medical Center.

Partly because of the shortage of workers and worker housing, the number of jobs in education and health in the New Orleans area is down 42%, according to a July report by the Brookings Institution. Jobs in hospitality are down by 35%; trade and transportation, down 28%. Meanwhile, displaced New Orleanians are desperate for jobs: One out of four is unemployed.

He touches on everything but the insurance problem.

The troubles that face New Orleans and their solutions have been identified over and over again, and a handful of the dedicated persevere to save their city, despite the odds. But, as they say, “I truly don’t know if it’s enough.”