In August 2005, the levees protecting the city of New Orleans from the high water which almost everywhere surrounds it failed. The resulting flood was among the worst disasters in American history as measured by property damage and population dislocation.
The focus on Katrina, however, should not obscure the larger truth. Long before the 2005 hurricane New Orleans had been in long term decline. At the beginning of the American Civil War it was among the five most important cities in the United States. At the beginning of the twentieth century it remained the largest and most important city in the south. In 2012, it does not rank among the nation’s fifty largest cities, and a cynic might say that it is not much more than a suburb of Houston.
New Orleans has suffered from three problems unrelated to geography or climate. The first is crime. All American cities have been dangerous. But the Crescent City has long been on a different level. In 2011, for example, its homicide rate was more than seven times that of New York City.
Second, New Orleans has been victimized by a pattern of political and private corruption that goes well beyond other American cities. There, corruption is not the exception, it is the expectation.
Finally, New Orleans has the most closed social elite in the United States, one that is based not on achievement, but on birth. As a result, there is no incentive for charitable action, and no New Orleans cultural institution can be said to be in the first rank (an exception would be the World War II museum, but that is not what most people would consider a cultural institution). Neither do wealthy or ambitious persons remain in Louisiana. Most corporate headquarters long ago decamped for Houston.
See more of: AHA Sessions