More on Subsidiarity and Katrina

My colleague Elizabeth Brown takes issue with my subsidiarity-driven endorsement of New Orleans' plan to allow residents to redevelop in any area of the city for a period of one year, subject to the city's right to close down sections that don't achieve a critical mass of redevelopment:

If the residents were assuming ALL of the costs for bringing back their neighborhoods, it would be a legitimate plan. The principle of subsidiarity holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. Subsidiarity only works when those at the local level not only have information about their own wants and needs but the means to implement their decisions when freed from top down constraints. That is not the case in New Orleans.

Unfortunately, citizens who build in flood plains (and the entire Ninth Ward is a flood plain) do not bear the entire costs for locating their homes and businesses there. The cost of the levies which have been constructed and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers is borne by a much wider group than the impoverished residents of the Ninth Ward.  It is borne by you and me and a significant portion of the population outside of Louisiana.  To build levies that could withstand a Level 5 Hurricane, which would be necessary to prevent the area from flooding again, would cost billions of dollars. It would be better to compensate the residents by buying their land now and having them resettle elsewhere than to continue to subsidize their precarious existence in the Ninth Ward.

My father, who served in the Army Corps of Engineers for 27 years and worked at the Waterways Experiment Station where the Corps attempts to devise plans to control the flooding of the Mississippi, frequently commented that it would be better for society if politicians stopped allowing people to build in flood plains because the costs of disaster relief when the inevitable flooding occurred and the costs of rebuilding was not borne by the people who lived there and that the benefits (a beautiful river view, flat land for farming, relatively cheap land for housing (as in the Ninth Ward), etc.), which were concentrated in the hands of few, did not exceed the costs.

The plan as outlined in the New York Times actually seems cruel because people could squander their funds trying to rebuild only to have the city close the area after a year.  I can guarantee you that the city will spend less compensating them a year from now than they would have to pay now. If they had to buy out the residents today, the residents would have a decent argument that they should be paid the pre-Katrina value of the land now in order to prevent them from trying to rebuild. If the city waits a year and then condemns the land after the residents have either abandoned it or failed to make a go of it, then the city will have to pay only then current value of the land, which would be considerably less then the pre-Katrina value.

These are all valid and valuable points, but I think subsidiarity would caution us against a straightforward cost-benefit analysis in this context, or at least encourage us to build into the cost side of the equation the cultural cost incurred by the Ninth Ward's demise. The Ninth Ward became culturally distinct, at least in part, because of our society's persistent disregard of poor blacks. This disregard may be exacerbated by ignoring the neighborhood's cultural distinctiveness and historical meaning -- we can't just bulldoze the community and scatter its inhabitants to the wind, government checks in hand.  Or at a minimum, we need to consider the loss of meaningful community that accompanies the physical destruction of a place, keeping in mind that lives unfold and relationships are built in neighborhoods that are by no means fungible.

Rob