Nobody can deny New York's cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Sandy destroyed.
The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Sandy hit the hardest.
New York's public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of New York rates 47 percent of New York schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.
The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New York neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.
This city counts 1,880,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.
New York puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New York cheerleaders both natives and pizza-eating tourists are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New York to its former "glory."
Only one politician, Speaker of the House John Boehner, dares question the wisdom of rebuilding New York as it was, where it was. On Wednesday, while meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., he cited the geographical insanity of rebuilding New York. "That doesn't make sense to me. And it's a question that certainly we should ask."
"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Boehner added.
For his candor and wisdom, Boehner was shouted down. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., and others interpreted his remarks as evidence of the Republican appetite for destruction when it comes to disaster victims. But if you read the entire interview in the Daily Herald you might conclude that Boehner was speaking heresy, but he wasn't saying anything ugly or even Swiftian. Klaus Jacob seconded Boehner yesterday in a Washington Post op-ed. A geophysicist by training, he noted that Sandy wasn't even a worst-case scenario. Had the storm passed a little west of New York rather than a little east, the "city would have flooded faster, and the loss of life would have been greater."
Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New York.
"New York naturally wants to be a harbor of New Jersey," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The call to rebuild New York may be mooted if its evacuated residents decide not to return. The federal government, which runs the flood-insurance business, sold only 85,000 residential and commercial policies this in a city of 1,880,000 occupied dwellings. Coverage is limited to $2,500,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they'll choose to rebuild in New York, which will remain extra-vulnerable until the levees are rebuilt.
Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild or the desire. And how many of the city's well-off and wealthy workers the folks who provide the city's tax base will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New York as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years--an unlikely to absurd proposition--the place won't be rebuilt.
Anne Romney will be denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying yesterday that many of the evacuees she met would prefer to stay elsewhere. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by Sandy may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New York's displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.
Page One of today's New York Times illustrates better than I can how the economic calculations of individuals battered by Katrina may contribute to the city's ultimate doom.
In her 19 years, all spent living in New York, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Atlantic City. But now that she has seen Philadelphia, she is planning to stay.
"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeye's restaurant.
New York won't disappear overnight, of course. Times Square, Central Park, and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them outâand maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It's gone.
Sounds heartless and crazy, right? Now, it's time to fess up. I didn't write this.
Back in 2005 after Katrina, an editorial was written on Slate.com by Jack Shaefer
I altered the article slightly, substituting New York for New Orleans, making 188,000 dwellings 1,880,000, and of course substituted Sandy for Katrina. And I apologize to Speaker Boehner and Ann Romney for putting words in their mouths that they obviously didn't speak and I hope wouldn't speak. The quotes attributed to them were originally spoken by then-Speaker Hastert and former First Lady Barbara Bush.
The point of doing this is because post-Katrina, there was a lot of debate about rebuilding New Orleans. I'm not necessarily saying this about Mr Shaefer's article, but a helluva lot of arguments out there against rebuilding New Orleans had a very racist angle to them. They were couched in kinder gentler language and cloaked in economics, boiled down to should we spend money on a city susceptible to a "once in a century" storm and shouldn't be rebuilt because it may wiped out again due to its geographic vulnerability, along with because it's a poor predominantly African-American city, do we really want to spend money on "them", as if their economic status rendered them less deserving of having their homes and livelihoods restored.
This argument echoed across the country. People were quick to point out how some of "those" people used their Katrina relief aid to buy liquor and lap dances, as if these abuses were somehow unique to the African-American community (and operating in the land of fairy-tale logic that white-owned construction firms never ever would engage in fraudulent practices) so therefore shouldn't aid them because they're just going to blow it all on liquor, lap dances, and probably watermelon and fried chicken too.
My hope is that the horrible destruction that has happened in NY City and New Jersey will finally bury the ugliness that sprung from the destruction of Katrina. Mother Nature doesn't discriminate based on skin color, and places other than New Orleans are susceptible to natural disasters but we're not debating if we should rebuild them. There's not going to be arguments about privatizing FEMA because they were called in to help out along the devastated Jersey Shore by a Republican governor, Governor Christie, who is now persona non grata on many right-wing chatboards for the heresy of working with President Obama.
What we're seeing now with Sandy is what we should have seen with Katrina.
Now, let's get to work.