The headline read “Enough is enough: New Orleans residents fed up with long stalled development projects.”
And WWL-TV ran a story on how the developers aren’t developing anything.
Let me help the writers restate this in correct terms: “Enough is enough: New Orleans residents fed up with a city that ignores economic realities resulting in failed development projects.”
During the heady times that existed in New Orleans from the 1960s and 1970s, development and growth was virtually everywhere. As young families flocked to our city, appealing as it was with jobs and opportunity, Downtown, New Orleans East, Metairie, and Kenner all exploded with growth. The business district expanded to Poydras St as new high rise commercial properties popped up like spring flowers. The population of the city proper peaked at more than 600,000 and the rest of the region grew in proportion.
New Orleans was as big as Atlanta. It was bigger than Charlotte or Austin.
In the ensuing decades as economic trends and bad policies went ignored by civic and business leaders, the commercial economic base evaporated. With little courageous civic leadership, decades of socialist/populist politicians ran amok ignoring the welfare of citizens as they instituted policies that were contrary to prosperity. By embracing social politics at the expense of infrastructure, crime, education, and the business climate, they turned us away from the fundamentals that make the difference between an economic success story and economic failure. Cementing decline, socialist/populist politicians continue to encourage our people with the twin anti-growth attitudes of fear and jealousy. Great at election time, not so great when the bill comes due.
For decades the result has been mass outmigration of people and businesses, exploding crime, declining neighborhoods, diminished wealth especially for lower- and middle-income citizens, and a sea of social ills directly linked to poverty. All of this is misunderstood by a population that has been guided away from the benefits that a booming economy offers to a city that once possessed such.
And with all those departing businesses went jobs. Jobs that supported all levels of income. Jobs that made housing affordable and put food on the table and clothes on children. Jobs that created demand for educated young people. Jobs that attracted other businesses, creating an upward spiral of growth and prosperity. Those jobs are gone, replaced to some extent by low paying tourism jobs true, but now the economic spiral is reversed.
I am an unabused adherent to the concept that a rising tide lifts all boats. As a state senator representing a portion of New Orleans, I experienced incredulities nearing on hysteria from others among the city’s elected officials whenever I tried to debate the realities of capitalist America and how we had once enjoyed the fruits of following its precepts. My suspicion was then, and is now, that having been buoyed by far-Left concepts of equity in place of opportunity and undefined social injustice, plus viewing their own political survival as wholly dependent upon making unfulfillable populist promises these leaders could not grasp the true injustice of what they had wrought. After all, even if for noble reasons nothing can be more unjust than keeping trusting citizens entrapped in poverty and social malaise and blinded to reality.
It is disappointing that the media fails to dig deep into the fundamental reasons that developers haven’t been able to and may never complete some projects. Ironically when noting how developers blame their failure on trouble getting Federal funding, the reporters have laid bare the raw truth of the consequences of an insipid economy. Sadly, though they have failed to correctly interpret the facts that they uncovered, to connect the dots if you will.
A well designed proforma for a real estate project in a strong economy doesn’t need Federal handouts to work. In fact, most developers will shun public money whenever possible because of all the ludicrous strings attached. In prosperous cities the benefits of free market economics assure that projects are profitable without being propped up by public funds.
In our city the economy is so weak and city government so intrusive that Federal infusions are often the only way to achieve the leanest of profitability. Private lenders will not lend to developers when the risk of failure is high and investor equity low, so in 21st century New Orleans traditional private lending is substantially unavailable to developers. The need to depend upon Federal money to overcome our economic swamp is the story, not that the projects lay fallow.
By connecting the dots, an observer can discern the roots of our problems. Decades of flirtation with populist policies, lets call them socially populist policies, by New Orleans’ leadership has utterly failed. In simple terms the governance of our once strong city is so contrarian to American capitalism that we are inevitably doomed to slow decline. The effects of decades of little opportunity impels poverty and social ills. Dot, dot, dot!
Instead of reporting on citizens’ dismay over non-profitable, stalled or abandoned development projects, the media should report on why such projects are that way. They should spend some time looking at a city whose leadership’s sole focus appears to be on applying Band-Aids over the open sores of economic malaise, while ignoring the root causes of that malaise. Ask the hard questions, what are the mayor and the council doing with our city resources to build a prosperous city in the future? Why haven’t the mayor and council inserted themselves into the failed education of New Orleans kids? What earthly good does it do to just succor the poor at the expense of prolonging poverty throughout? What makes anyone think that doing the same things over and over has any chance of better outcomes?
Ask the city’s legislators why, instead of focusing on feel good social issues, aren’t they leading the charge to reform state laws to make New Orleans attractive and prosperous? Why under a Democratic governor has New Orleans lost so much ground in the state Capital? How do any of our leaders plan to help the tide rise?
Let’s face reality. With only limited exception fueled in most cases by government giveaways, late in the 20th century private commercial development died in our city. Real estate developers don’t have to develop here, they will only develop when there is a reasonable expectation of profit. As long as the policies of our city make profitability an evil word then development and jobs will go elsewhere. If the goal is prosperity the city must be economically relevant, something we were and COULD be again.
The harsh reality is that New Orleans in economic and prosperity terms once the Queen City of the South, is fast becoming a cheap southern Tinseltown that people want to visit, but not one in which they want to invest. No investment, no growth. No growth, spiraling poverty and social ills. Dot, dot, dot!