The Real Super Bowl Winner
Why New Orleans has come back better after Katrina
The Super Bowl makes its tenth stop in New Orleans on Sunday, but only the first since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For once the Big Easy has earned this excuse to party, coming back to life better than ever.
New Orleans has patented no magic sauce. Katrina created the opening for different policies to turn around what was one of the worst-run and most politically calcified places in America. Other troubled cities and Washington, take note.
When the levees broke and flood waters sent half the town fleeing, the Crescent City was a study in urban dysfunction. Obvious to everyone was the incompetence and rot at City Hall, in the police department, on the levee board and in the schools. There were doubts about the wisdom, much less the cost, of rebuilding.
Entergy, ETR +0.37% the city's lone Fortune 500 firm, considered moving its headquarters to Little Rock. Many Katrina evacuees stayed away, and the city's population—somewhere above the 360,740 counted as of 2011—isn't back to its pre-storm level of 455,000.
Yet Katrina offered the people who wanted to save New Orleans something rare—a do-over. Consensus over the necessary fixes quickly gelled in a city long polarized by race and class.
The schools, a national embarrassment, were closed for six months and restarted from scratch. The system was turned over to charter operators, who got the leeway to hire new teachers and have been held accountable by strong schools commissioners. Before the storm, three in five students attended a failing school; now fewer than a fifth do.
This education experiment gave people the confidence to push an overhaul of policing, city procurement and other public services. The business community, which had holed up in the city's higher-ground residential areas or across Lake Pontchartrain, re-engaged in civic life.
Political change has followed. Mayor Ray Nagin—who blamed the feds for the city's catastrophic response to Katrina—was replaced three years ago by another Democrat, Mitch Landrieu. Mr. Nagin was indicted last month on 21 corruption counts. Mr. Landrieu enjoys approval ratings in the seventies. The budget was balanced. He upgraded the airport and opened a new street car line along Loyola Avenue in time for the Super Bowl.
Relatively low state and local taxes and cost of living are helping to make New Orleans a magnet for business start-ups and young college graduates—what Seattle or Austin were in other recent decades. Energy and hospitality are doing well. The jobless rate of 4.7% is lower even than in that other American boomtown, Washington, D.C., but for reasons other than a growing government.
Such progress is not guaranteed and problems remain. School test scores and graduation rates are improving but still aren't great. New Orleans remains the nation's murder capital, with three times Chicago's homicide rate, and the police have to earn public trust. The relative racial comity of the city's politics is recent and perhaps not enduring.
Yet—whether during Super Bowl week, Mardi Gras or any other party time—the city's energy and optimism are unmistakable. Americans are in a self-doubting mood these days, and not without cause. But the revival of New Orleans shows what self-government can accomplish when enough citizens choose to break up the corrupt status quo.
New Orleans has patented no magic sauce. Katrina created the opening for different policies to turn around what was one of the worst-run and most politically calcified places in America. Other troubled cities and Washington, take note.
When the levees broke and flood waters sent half the town fleeing, the Crescent City was a study in urban dysfunction. Obvious to everyone was the incompetence and rot at City Hall, in the police department, on the levee board and in the schools. There were doubts about the wisdom, much less the cost, of rebuilding.
Entergy, ETR +0.37% the city's lone Fortune 500 firm, considered moving its headquarters to Little Rock. Many Katrina evacuees stayed away, and the city's population—somewhere above the 360,740 counted as of 2011—isn't back to its pre-storm level of 455,000.
Yet Katrina offered the people who wanted to save New Orleans something rare—a do-over. Consensus over the necessary fixes quickly gelled in a city long polarized by race and class.
The schools, a national embarrassment, were closed for six months and restarted from scratch. The system was turned over to charter operators, who got the leeway to hire new teachers and have been held accountable by strong schools commissioners. Before the storm, three in five students attended a failing school; now fewer than a fifth do.
This education experiment gave people the confidence to push an overhaul of policing, city procurement and other public services. The business community, which had holed up in the city's higher-ground residential areas or across Lake Pontchartrain, re-engaged in civic life.
Political change has followed. Mayor Ray Nagin—who blamed the feds for the city's catastrophic response to Katrina—was replaced three years ago by another Democrat, Mitch Landrieu. Mr. Nagin was indicted last month on 21 corruption counts. Mr. Landrieu enjoys approval ratings in the seventies. The budget was balanced. He upgraded the airport and opened a new street car line along Loyola Avenue in time for the Super Bowl.
Relatively low state and local taxes and cost of living are helping to make New Orleans a magnet for business start-ups and young college graduates—what Seattle or Austin were in other recent decades. Energy and hospitality are doing well. The jobless rate of 4.7% is lower even than in that other American boomtown, Washington, D.C., but for reasons other than a growing government.
Such progress is not guaranteed and problems remain. School test scores and graduation rates are improving but still aren't great. New Orleans remains the nation's murder capital, with three times Chicago's homicide rate, and the police have to earn public trust. The relative racial comity of the city's politics is recent and perhaps not enduring.
Yet—whether during Super Bowl week, Mardi Gras or any other party time—the city's energy and optimism are unmistakable. Americans are in a self-doubting mood these days, and not without cause. But the revival of New Orleans shows what self-government can accomplish when enough citizens choose to break up the corrupt status quo.
A version of this article appeared February 2, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Real Super Bowl Winner.
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