urban Shrinkage

"The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city’s failure to thrive." (from the New York Times)


beautiful image from the NYT

It seems that in order to understand post-Katrina New Orleans, we must understand pre-Katrina New Orleans. Widely unknown to most of the American population, NOLA was failing as a city long before the hurricane wiped it out. This is all the more reason to rebuild it better - and all the more reason to find a better solution than the neighborhoods of FEMA trailers. According to this article in the NYT, in 1960 there were 627,525 people living in metropolitan NOLA. Pre-Katrina NOLA is estimated to have housed only 444,000.


a FEMA ghetto in NOLA (courtesy GettyImages)

The last credible population survey (conducted last November) estimated the population to be at 191,000.

What were the problems causing the population of NOLA to disperse over the past 45 years before the storm? The Shrinking City research project seeks to examine the phenomenon of these fast reductions in populations. The project studies four cities and tries to find the main factor to cause their shrinkages: Detroit (suburbanization), Manchester/Liverpool (deindustrialization), Ivanovo, Russia (post-socialism), and Leipzig (a combination of these causes).

With focus on pre-Katrina NOLA, the next few posts will attempt to answer this question: Why were people leaving New Orleans?