What's at stake in New Orleans

A new study from Brown University says New Orleans may lose 80 percent of its black population as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

Mayor Ray Nagin memorably promised that New Orleans will again be a "chocolate city," and politicians everywhere are ripping their garments in angst over the loss of what they like to call the "unique character" of the city.

Maybe everyone is insincere and these statements will vanish harmlessly into the atmosphere. But if they're serious, if this kind of thinking prevails and influences the recovery plans for New Orleans, here is what will happen.

Thirty years from now, the destroyed sections of New Orleans will still be fenced-off vacant lots covered in rubble.

The reason has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with freedom.

Freedom has three essential components, if you take the word of the 18th-century English legal scholars who influenced the U.S. Constitution. The fundamental rights of man are life, liberty and property.

Life, Sir William Blackstone wrote, means the right to personal security, the right to the legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of your life and limbs.

Liberty means the right to move freely from place to place.

Property means the right to the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all your acquisitions, "without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land."

It is possible that the laws of the land will be used to restrict property owners in New Orleans so that they cannot sell their devastated properties until everyone in the community approves of the plans for what is to be built there. It is possible that the fear of gentrification will utterly paralyze the rebuilding effort. Elected officials could attempt to pass laws requiring property owners to rebuild low-rent housing units in order to bring back renters who have fled the city.

In order to understand what's wrong with this idea, just do this one simple thing.

Imagine that it's your piece of property.

Suppose that before the storm, the property had small houses or an apartment building on it and you rented those housing units for whatever the market would bear, which wasn't much given the age and condition of the structures. But now, although you have to make a huge new investment in the property, you have the opportunity to build something new and perhaps to see much greater revenue.

Opposing your effort is a group of government officials elected by the majority of people who don't own a property like yours. They see the situation differently. They see a greedy landowner who is happy to take the government's aid grants and low-interest loans and tax breaks and then use them to build something well out of the price range of all the former residents.

Stand-off.

That's how you spend thirty years arguing about fenced-off rubble.

The solution -- good thing you're reading this blog because you won't hear it anywhere else -- is for landowners to assert their rights as property owners, to demand that the government get out of the way, to refuse to accept the government's money, to get private financing, and to start building. Put pressure on government officials to approve the projects, force them to play catch-up. It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

That's how you rebuild.


Copyright 2006

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