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?9.6bn to jazz up New Orleans
A SWEEPING blueprint for rebuilding New Orleans would give residents just four months to save the most devastated neighbourhoods from being abandoned.
The Bring Back New Orleans commission, created by Ray Nagin, the Mayor, revealed an ambitious $17 billion plan yesterday to re-create a long-gone jazz district near the French Quarter, build a network of commuter railways and close a shipping canal blamed for much of the flooding in Hurricane Katrina.
But most residents were focused on controversial plans to Óshrink the footprintÔ of the city by abandoning hard-hit neighbourhoods.
The commissionÒs report said that 108,731 households, or about half the homes in the city, were deluged by more than 4ft of floodwater after Hurricane Katrina in August.
The report estimates that only 247,000 people, about half the pre-Katrina population, will have returned to the city by September 2008.
A proposal in December that the city should focus on rebuilding on higher ground provoked an outcry, particularly among residents of the predominantly black, low-lying areas.
Officials responded by suggesting a three-year window for residents to prove their neighbourhoodÒs viability. But that timeframe has now reportedly been reduced to just four months, with the clock starting when the plan is approved as early as the end of this month.
Officials do not say how many residents will have to move back in order to save a neighbourhood, but members of the commission told The Times-Picayune newspaper that they favoured a requirement that well over half the residents of an area would have to signal their intention to return.
Residents of neighbourhoods that are condemned would receive a generous buyout by the Government, which accounts for $12 billion of the $17 billion budget. A new authority, dubbed The Crescent City Redevelopment Corp, would be established with broad powers to seize and condemn property.
The rebuilding blueprint would also re-create a jazz district in the old Storyville section, north of the French Quarter, which operated as a city-backed red-light district for two decades until it was closed down in 1917. Many jazz pioneers, including Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Manuel Perez, played in the districtÒs bordellos. But the area was razed after it fell into disrepair.
The tentative plans, which must be approved by the Mayor, also call for a new $3.3 billion light railway, with new development concentrated around its stops. The blueprint also calls for the closure of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, which channelled much of the water that flooded the city.
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