Never say this column doesn’t offer global perspectives. OK, sometimes it comes in folksy Yorkshire parables — but a fortnight ago I was up close with Branson in Mumbai and today I’m speaking to you from the Louisiana Superdome. Yes, I’m standing right on the plastic turf of one of America’s most hallowed football fields, watching the New Orleans Saints warm up for a crunch game against the Atlanta Falcons. You might get weightier economic theories on the op-ed page of the FT, but you don’t get opening lines like that.
The proper name of this glitzy concrete bubble, by the way, is a parable of globalisation in itself: the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. But its place in modern American folklore was secured in August 2005 when it served as refuge for more than 20,000 New Orleanians displaced by floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The suffering of the trapped evacuees — under armed guard, without adequate food, water, sanitation or medical help for several days — was so shaming for America that many felt the storm-damaged stadium should be razed to the ground; the Saints, temporarily shifted to Texas, looked set to stay there.
Indeed, many commentators (including me) asked whether it was worth trying to revive the city at large, given that all but its most historic districts were built on sub–sea-level reclaimed land which the levees were clearly unable to defend. Wouldn’t it be better for the displaced to make new lives wherever they might find better schools and job prospects and lower murder rates? Isn’t migration a good thing when it leaves embedded deprivation behind? Go ahead and restore the heritage sites, we suggested unhelpfully from afar, but get real and abandon the ghettos.
Well, that wasn’t how the local folk saw it — or most of them. Around 100,000 of the city’s 450,000 inhabitants have never come back. But those who did, or who never left, have become part of a renaissance which is already wrapped in its own mythology. I’ve heard Katrina referred to as ‘a baptism’ and ‘a rebirth’. The trombonist Delfeayo -Marsalis (son of pianist Ellis) talks about the spiritual importance of music in the city’s refusal to be defeated.
This is officially ‘America’s fastest–growing city’ of its size. We’re told it’s a hot new hub for digital entrepreneurs; that tourism is booming like never before; that underperforming schools have been transformed; that corrupt local government is a thing of the past; that the city’s leading university, Tulane, is overwhelmed with undergraduate applications from all over the States; and the Saints, once such consistent losers they were known as the Ain’ts, won the 2010 Super Bowl to become the totem of reborn self-confidence.
As for the 2008 financial cataclysm, it was a mere tremor compared to what the hurricane had already wrought: ‘We didn’t have a subprime crisis because we didn’t have many houses left to mortgage,’ says one local. ‘We’re ahead of the game now because we’ve been recovering since 2005.’
It’s all about the future: no one’s talking about prosecutions and public enquiries to expunge the past. Fuelled by a mix of federal spending, large- and small-scale capitalism, charity and a change of mayor, all this offers a fascinating example of creative destruction, the concept adapted from Marx by Joseph Schumpeter that I happen to be here to discuss. Simplifying freely, it says that from the annihilation of a failing economic order, something more positive eventually emerges. That is what Katrina, so much more fearsome than last week’s Superstorm Sandy, seems to have brought about here.
Darker edges
The transformation is not without its darker edges. The influx of Yurps (young urban rebuilding professionals) and self-styled social entrepreneurs has not been universally welcomed. Brad Pitt’s designer-architect Make It Right homes project in the worst-afflicted Lower Ninth Ward looks (from a distance) too bright and shiny to be anything but tokenist, and my conference group can only view it from that distance because buses like ours have been banned from the Lower Ninth. Residents were tired of being gawped at by disaster tourists.
In adjacent wards, many houses remain broken and untouched — impossible to tell whether they’re still lived in — since they emerged from the receding waters displaying strange hieroglyphic marks left by army units checking for survivors and corpses. The Marsalis family name attaches to a new ‘musicians’ village’, but elsewhere only the little white churches speak of any kind of community life. Poor black families are still dirt poor, still badly housed, still at the bottom of America’s ladder of life chances, still at high risk of casual murder in their own neighbourhoods. A city that cannot account for 100,000 of its citizens, seven years after they fled, can’t be complacent about renewed prosperity.
Irrational spirit
But despite those caveats, what’s happened here is an illustration of the human spirit at its irrational best. Regeneration is far from complete and far from all-inclusive, but it has moved forward at a pace which no pundit would have dared predict in late 2005. We are repeatedly told that jazz, football and food (the cuisine is terrific, unlike anywhere else in America) are what made residents love this city so much they were never going to give up on it.
The things that make people happy in these seemingly non-essential ways are what also make them optimistic and determined. If only British provincial cities, not hurricane-hit but drizzled on by dismal economics these past five years, could harness that kind of energy. If only a hurricane could sweep the City of London and allow something better to emerge, though that’s a whole column for another week.
Meanwhile, I urge you to visit and see what I’m talking about; against the odds, the Saints beat the Falcons by 31 to 27.
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