CROSS COUNTRY
Back to the Future
The new New Orleans, a land of opportunity.
BY JAMES K. GLASSMAN
Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

NEW ORLEANS--President Bush today makes his ninth trip here since Hurricane Katrina. He will find a tale of two cities--one almost back to normal, the other devastated. If you drive into New Orleans from the airport the back way, down Jefferson Highway to St. Charles Avenue, everything on the river side is as gorgeous and decadent as ever. Some live oaks have toppled, and many magnolias have died, but all the way to the French Quarter, the shops and restaurants are open, and people have come home.

There are crowds taking a number for po' boy sandwiches at Domilise's on Annunciation, locals lunching on shrimp remoulade and trout amandine at Galatoire's, and browsers examining the silver ice buckets at Lucullus Antiques on Chartres Street. The Camellia Club of New Orleans is holding its 66th annual show on Saturday; schools are opening; and plans are set for the Zulu and Rex parades on Mardi Gras, just seven weeks away. With supply short and demand strong, rents have soared. Real estate records are being set.

The city's great architectural heritage--comprising 18th- and 19th-century Greek Revival and Victorian houses, shops and warehouses--was built on high ground, hugging the river with its natural levees. While many of these buildings sustained serious wind damage, they avoided the flood that affected areas closer to Lake Pontchartrain. But drive north on Canal Street to the lake or east toward the Ninth Ward or St. Bernard Parish, and you will see block after block of ruination--gutted houses with water marks six feet off the ground, huge piles of soggy insulation and linoleum, and, on median strips (what Orleanians call the "neutral ground") little plastic signs advertising tree removal, stump grinding, mold mitigation, roof repair and, of course, lawyers for any suit you can think up.

There was controversy when a sightseeing firm last week launched a bus tour of destroyed neighborhoods. Profiting from ghoulish voyeurism? Actually, it's an education. Like the president, everyone should see firsthand what the worst natural disaster in American history has wrought--the destructive power of nature and the optimism of a city that, before this, was mainly known for its grandiose inertia.

There's no illusion that this will be the same place it was. It will be smaller and maybe better. The latest estimate places the current population at 135,000, compared with 462,000 before the storm. A consultant for the city forecasts 252,000 a year from now.

The big debate here today is whether the city should be smaller physically. In a blueprint made public yesterday, Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission gives residents of flood-damaged areas four months to devise plans to prove they can revive their neighborhoods; if not, they will be bought out. Some 108,000 houses--about half the city--took on more than four feet of water, and, as Joseph Canizaro, a member of the commission, said, "A lot of poor African-Americans had everything they own destroyed here."

In a time of high emotion, the commission's approach makes political sense. No family wants to be denied, by government fiat, the right to rebuild. But the truth is that the Lower Ninth Ward and other low-lying areas won't be resettled. The new New Orleans will almost surely look like New Orleans of 1878, which, as shown by the Times-Picayune in a remarkable map, had most of the city's 200,000 residents "clustered in a narrow swath along the Mississippi River." The neighborhoods flooded in 2005 were settled after the city's swampy interior was pumped dry in the early 1900s. Those areas should return to marshland.

Last week, the federal government released $3 billion to fix the levees so that they work as they were supposed to--ample protection for people living in what, in the real estate ads, are now referred to as "high and dry" places during Katrina. There's a lot of room for sensible commercial and residential development in these areas, as well as in midcity neighborhoods that were wet but not severely inundated.

The rebirth of New Orleans does, however, require a leap into the unknown. It can't be meticulously planned. Preserve the old buildings. Rope off the lowlands. But then let imagination takes its course. Unfortunately, Mr. Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans group is loaded with central planners prescribing a dream city built around such highlights as light-rail transport, a "jazz district" and a neuroscience center. Typical is Michael Cowan, head of the city's Human Relations Commission, who warned that "the alternative to a 'good-enough' plan for the future of our city is free-market chaos, also known ... as every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."

Actually, it was precisely this chaos that made New Orleans a great city in the first place. It was planning--specifically, the horrifying housing projects, largely destroyed in Katrina; the stultifying school system; the Superdome and other wasteful public-works projects--that held the city back.

But even as a project in free-market creativity, New Orleans needs a leader. The feds are providing the money, but the president, who promised in September that "there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans," has been reluctant to appoint a czar, a MacArthur, to oversee the resurrection. That's a mistake because the most visible alternative right now is Mr. Nagin himself, whose performance during and after the hurricane has been less than inspirational.

The only real leadership in New Orleans these past four months has been provided by the daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, whose editor, Jim Amoss, has both crusaded for the city's interests and battled the rumor mill (favorite Ninth Ward story: The levees were blown up in an act of racial cleansing) with a flood of bright and tough news stories.

When I was 24, I came to New Orleans to start a business and a family. I stayed for eight happy years. If I were 24 again, I would be packing my bags for New Orleans to be on the ground floor of a modern renaissance. Katrina was a tragedy, but its aftermath presents the most exciting urban opportunity since San Francisco in 1906. Pioneers, please apply.

Mr. Glassman