New Orleans's Failure to Develop a High-Wage Economy Around its Port: Are You Listening, New York City?

In a powerful short piece available to subscribers on New Republic Online, Katrina and Urban Liberalism: Left Behind, posted September 14, 2005, Joel Kotkin and David Friedman say one thing that is absurdly wrong, namely, that no one had devised a plan to move people with no cars out of New Orleans in an emergency. See, to the contrary, the BCBB post here. They also say a great deal that is right. Katrina's effects on New Orleans, they show, prove that both conservatives and liberals have failed.

Clearly, Katrina proves that conservative politicos who demanded porkbarrel projects for Louisiana instead of flood-control have failed. Katrina also shows, however, that liberals have failed. They

embraced an emphemeral tourist economy that caused enormous disparities of wealth and left most New Orleans citizens impoverished.

I think that readers in New York City should note that the elites in New York City, like those in New Orleans, like the tourist economy. You will search in vain for a recent article in The New York Times that praises the dirty old port that created New York City's wealth for more than a hundred years, right through the middle of the twentieth century. The elites here prefer to build bicycle paths along the shoreline, rather than factories. They want French restaurants with striped awnings, rather than docks for cargo. In fact, perhaps what Kotkin and Friedman say applies even more to New York City than to New Orleans. The Bloomberg administration's drive to build big box stores, the subject of this blog, goes along with its preference for scenic riverbanks over a working port. This preference for an ephemeral consumerist economy will continue to cause the same disparities of wealth in New York City as in New Orleans.

Kotkin and Friedman say that the proper economic focus of New Orleans, now, as in its earliest origins under the French, is its role as the largest port "at the intersection of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico." Yet for decades, as Kotkin and Friedman argue, "New Orleans leaders sought to attract conventions and the arts while failing to compete with Houston and other places around the Gulf in developing a high-wage economy around trade activities and related services."

Kotkin and Friedman hit their point home:

The problem is that while great restaurants and music appeal to the urban rich, the economics of tourism leave huge segments of the population behind. In contrast with jobs in trade, manufacturing, engineering, medicine, and finance, culture and tourism pay very low wages and permit little or no upward mobility. For example, a 2002 study for the AFL-CIO showed that nearly half of all full-time hotel workers could not earn enough to keep a family above the poverty line. Which is why cities that turn to elite culture to fuel their economies tend to generate unparalleled class disparities.

They say, "Tourism, edgy culture, the French Quarter--these things are nice, but the inevitable results of their elevation to the center of urban policy are the kind of gut-wrenching scenes of wealth disparity we have seen over and over again these past two weeks. . . ."

Here in New York City, yesterday, September 13, former City Council member Charles E.F. Millard, with whom I differ on Wal-Mart, showed a commendably clear sense of where the city's economic priorities should lie, in a New York Post op-ed called Real Issues. Complaining about the absence of debate in the mayorality race, he wrote:

What should have come out in this campaign? New York City needs a strategy for bringing more blue-collar jobs into the city. One way to achieve this is to expand the port on both sides of the harbor and to build a rail-freight tunnel that would create many thousands of jobs. Have you heard any discussion of this in the campaign?

Halleluiah. As everyone knows, Congressman Nadler has been one of many voices supporting the rail-freight tunnel and lamenting the gobbling up of manufacturing land. Note that Mr. Millard is talking about blue-collar jobs. The Bloomberg administration, meanwhile, is trying to train the city's schoolchildren for the Regents exams, with a view to their getting desk jobs in the FIRE industries. Blue-collar jobs are not on the Bloomberg agenda.

Meanwhile, moreover, the Bloomberg administration goes on turning what seems to be every square foot of New York City shoreline into condos. They will turn every dock not into a landing place for manufactured goods and harbor business, but into a drop-off spot for cruise ships. Kotkin and Friedman tell us what the tourist culture did to the economy of New Orleans. For New Yorkers, too, building the tourist culture and big box stores rather than the harbor industries will continue to mean a failing economy and enormous disparities of wealth.