What fascinates me about Boyd Blundell's withering denunciation of my comments on New Orleans is that he doesn't actually respond to my concerns in any practical manner. He thinks I'm sort of a dick, to be sure, but he doesn't deem it necessary to actually articulate why the federal government, given their record, should be trusted to protect the poor residents of a region that's going to get hit by more, and more powerful, versions of Katrina. He's very angry that I'd dare believe those exiled by mother nature will build houses in other cities, but he gives me no reason to believe their houses will be rebuilt in their original city. He's not sure why a more affluent and mobile population would be less endangered, but he is sure that New Orleans will be restructured in a technically sound and safe manner. Would that I were as sanguine.
My whole perspective on this is risk management. If, as Blundell believes, we need something of a port in New Orleans, that's fine. The idea that we should have a bustling city with a concentrated underclass living beneath sea level in a region known for its hurricanes is foolish enough, to restore it after a hurricane displaced them is worse. The weather's only going to get worse and America, for her part, isn't likely to get more serious about the poor. I may well be a dick, but my position is the result of well-founded pessimism, not some misplaced glee at the city's demise.
It's also relevant that concentrated pockets of poverty are just about the worst thing for the poor, both because of ghetto pathologies and the inevitable flight of business and capital. The seemingly unstoppable deterioration of the black urban poor is in great part the result of urban impoverishment's effects, and anything that breaks up such communities tends to have better outcomes. Indeed, one reason welfare reform largely worked is it forced a certain amount of dispersion, which brought with it its normal benefits. New Orleans was urban poverty on an advanced scale and Katrina exposed, in part, how insulated and entrenched its effects had become.