The Neutral Ground: How to reduce the cost of living, beautify New Orleans, and improve the quality of life all while fixing our water management crisis.
New Orleans Is sacred ground.
We are a cultural Mecca, and fighting a holy war driven by class inequality, politics, and branding. No one is interested in where the other side is coming from. If you are from here, you don’t care that Sarah and Jacob from across the street are fleeing California because Uncle Sam is literally curb-stomping their income. William from Pennsylvania might not think twice about his AIRBNB business substantially raising the tax assessments for Mrs. Maybell, potentially displacing her and her family, thus uprooting a part of the community.
But one thing that we all care about is this goddamn flooding.
“When we are all fucked no ones’ pointing guns at each other. The ship is leaking, everyone is busy patching holes!”
Anonymous
Gentrifiers and natives share an existential threat that endangers New Orleans and its people. The only question is … when will they realize before the ship has sunken too far past the point of no return.
These issues have a foundation in decades and centuries of intentional and racist environmental urban planning practices.
New Orleans’ human geography is foremost rooted in colonialism and the domestic slave economy.
After frenchman and colonialist Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville established the city of New Orleans , white-European settlers who has access to surveyor maps claimed higher elevated land in the early 18th century.
Native Americans and Free Blacks were pushed to flood-prone swampish geologies exposing them to environmental perils. Thus setting the stage 300 years layer for our current situation; where flood-zones, low-income and black neighborhoods all overlap, and high elevation, wealthy, white neighborhoods are one in the same.
Ironically the living situations for enslaved Africans, whose bondage contracts were being leased to other private entities for day work, were of higher elevation. New Orleans zoning ordinances mandated that enslaved Africans reside in slave quarters next to their enslavers (commonality known as the “Back Alley Pattern”) during the night after their jobs were ceased for the day. However after Jim Crow, blacks were forced out to the “ other side “ of the “Crescent City” and Canal St. became that dividing line for Anglo-Americans, and everyone else (French Creole, Black, Irish, Jewish, etc.).
More interestingly, our hidden federal de jure segregationist policies provided the canvas for poverty/extreme inequity, heightened environmental risk, redlining, disinvestment, white flight, and most recently climate gentrification, a phenomenon where lower-income residents are displaced by individuals fleeing coastal areas facing erosion and rising sea levels. Where do the people go?
The same racial architectures that we're used to subjugate our people can be used to understand the environmental disparity faced by communities of color in New Orleans.
If you take an old redline map of New Orleans, compare it to an elevation map, a real estate value map, a race map and gentrification map of New Orleans we see striking correlations that illustrate the bone deep damage that has been done to our communities through racist policies and practices.
This architecture is the schematic for understanding the conditions that colored folk experience in New Orleans. This is the layout for the inequity that weighs down on our city. This is the map for disparity for our kindred New Orleanian souls. But it could be a map for ingenuity and prosperity; it could be the foundation for moving our city forward.
As our climate has become more intense and unpredictable, a considerable push to improve and innovate our infrastructure has been initiated and relatively maintained (with some adversity).
Climate change, Green infrastructure, and sustainability have all become part of our commonplace vernacular, in the press almost daily, and slowly resting in the minds of everyday people.
Schools, summer internship programs, grant money, news coverage, and recurring community events are all gradually sparking change in our paradigm. This organic progress is how grassroots movements happen.
One grassroots movement in particular that has been at the helm of promoting a greener and more resilient New Orleans, is an organization called EBS Culture (Everything Business Social Culture) . This organization has taken the baton in specifically black neighborhoods, calling for a paradigm shift in our majority black city. For most people trying to make a GREEN change in community, black neighborhoods would seem an unlikely place to start, other problems ( like trying to make ends meet, gentrification, food desserts etc.) obviously at the core of concerns for black Americans.
Majority black areas harbor the most water , which implies that implementing management systems in these areas would reduce the lion’s share of our water infrastructure problems, while also providing a better quality of life to the marginalized citizens in these communities.
Diamonds are only created from substantial pressure. ~ ME
Every problem we face is an oppurtunity. Solutions are how the worlds largest enterprises have been built and I am a firm believer and ensuring everyones problems are considered.
The major opportunity is the neutral ground that will be created for everyone, a coalition not just between gentrifiers and natives, but city officials, business owners, and anyone with a stake in the New Orleans community. We all have something to lose, and at the end of the day, it’s each other. Most of us know we need to solve our environmental challenges, but the glaring question on everyone’s mind is how.
FIRST-PRINCIPLES.
government.
/ˈɡəvər(n)mənt/
The system of polity in a state; that form of fundamental rules and principles by which a nation or state is governed, or by which individual members of a body politic are to regulate their social actions; a constitution, either written or unwritten, by which the rights and duties of citizens and public officers are prescribed and defined, as a monarchical government, a republican government, etc. BLACKS LAW DICTIONARY
A government’s job is to maintain rule of law, establish order among its constituents and ensure the well-being of its people.
A government does its job via two primary vessels, laws and taxes.
Laws and taxes in an abstract sense are functions that incentivize or disincentivize specific actions from participating parties. For instance, consumer protection laws are created to ensure that consumers are not overly exploited by sellers.
Or Taxes can be manifested in two ways, tax incentives, credits, block grants, etc., or straight-up fines, income taxes, estate taxes, capital gains tax, etc. Corporations, for instance, are incentivized to create jobs, that’s why S- Corporation companies that have 500 more employees are taxed less than smaller businesses. These companies spur economic developments in regions and also create a tax base for the government.
Our establishment is used to doing this for industries like oil and gas, why not do this to the industry that is most pertinent to the city’s survival ?
The model is simple … (and still developing haha :) )
Use the affordable housing crisis as a vehicle to usher in green infrastructure.
If we look at home ownership in New Orleans we see many blacks who own their homes are older and on fixed income. In recent years, tax assessments for New Orleanians have risen anywhere from 50 to 300 percent in some areas.
These rises have put strain on residents, especially older folk living on fixed incomes, but what if the assessor’s office gave tax deductions based on the estimated stormwater collected from every cubic meter of volume rain gardens, bio-swales, etc?
We could quantify how much in estimated savings each collected volume of stormwater saves the city in repairs, maintenance and operational cost, and give it right back to tax-payers, making their lives easier.
We could even simulate this, soon I will do exactly that (hold me to it)!!!
We must demonstrate that we can reduce flooding in our most critical areas, and we must also demonstrate the economic advantage of doing so if we ever want the City of New Orleans fully on board.
Marginalized groups receive economic relief and a better quality of life, natives and gentrifiers mitigation of flood risk and beautification their real estate, the city reduction of maintenance costs while strengthening the infrastructure of the city helping create a more resilient and attractive city for development, and avoid losing subsidies from the federal government by reducing transient solids in the municipal water.
Thereby, enhancing the air quality of cities and the water quality of the surrounding areas.The great thing is we don’t just have to stop at the water! We could use first-principles to quantify problems and implement solutions that have a measurable impact by offering appropriate incentives.
Reducing the heat and the number of heat islands and lowering the cost of cooling buildings.Reducing crime by lowering the temperature in urban communities.And reducing the cost of living for long-term residents by offering tax incentives to residents who implement green infrastructure on their property.
Property taxes have been a notable concern to New Orleans natives who own their homes, the city of New Orleans has an opportunity to decrease the cost of living while improving the quality of life dramatically by incentivizing green infrastructure through property tax deductions, thereby costing the city no money upfront but rather forgoing a portion of tax revenue that will prove a wise investment in the near future.
Using this strategy, we create a win for everyone, by pushing our city to a more optimistic future, and a resilient landscape for its people and culture to thrive.
This article is still growing.
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