Urban Renewal To the Ex-"Tremé"

President Biden's infrastructure legislation includes efforts to address and correct so-called urban renewal projects in the United States that had the opposite effect of their stated intentions by turning vibrant city neighborhoods into urban wastelands, mainly with multilane express highways.  And while coming from New Jersey may make me qualified to talk about the damage Interstate 280 in Essex County did to Newark and neighboring East Orange, the Exhibit A of wrong-headed highway development in the national media right now appears to be the Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans.

Tremé was and is a black neighborhood and the focus of black Creole culture in New Orleans where jazz is said to have first taken root in the city.  It was the commercial center of the city's black population.  Between the World Wars it had a thriving black middle class and become renowned for the rows of oak trees and azalea bushes that grew proudly along the wide median that ran down the neighborhood's main drag, Claiborne Avenue.   

Thanks to a lamebrained compromise on transportation legislation in the 1950s that provided highway transportation funding to big cities with no mass transit funding available, the Interstate Highway System was developed with the idea to run the highways directly through cities - over the objections of President Eisenhower, who championed the Interstate Highway System but, taking a page from the autobahns built in Germany, wanted the highways to go around, not through, the cities.  New Orleans's Tremé neighborhood bore the brunt of urban freeway development when construction on Interstate 10 - called the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans - began in February 1968.  Many of Tremé's historic houses, as well as all of the oak trees on Claiborne Avenue, were brutally taken out and replaced with the new highway, which runs on a viaduct over the landscape. 

The result was a loss of ratables, the loss of prosperous businesses and many middle-class households, devalued real estate properties, and sharply decreased investment in the area that turned Tremé into a slum.  The slumscape also begat a pathological ghetto culture that was once damned by mainstream America but is now perversely celebrated as  "hip-hop."

Urbanist Amy Stelly, a resident of Tremé and a community activist, was pleased to hear that President Biden's plan to repair urban-development inequities cited Interstate 10 in Tremé as an example of what he hopes to fix by reconnecting urban neighborhoods affected by expressways.  Stelly says that not only has the highway generated social dislocation in Tremé, it's also an environmental hazard, with heavy rain collecting on I-10 and running off into the neighborhood below, carrying with it dirt and road salts thanks to the wearing-out of the original waterproofing. Not to mention the noise pollution from the vehicles passing over the neighborhood.  As Stelly herself has said, New Orleans is a destination city, and it's pointless to have a highway go through it.  Which is precisely why crosstown highways proposed by Robert Moses in Manhattan were never built. 

Stelly would like nothing better than to tear out the Claiborne Expressway and bring about a true reconnection of the Tremé neighborhood.  But that might be too costly, so mitigation efforts that preserve the expressway are more likely in order, which would involve taking out entrance and exit ramps for the highway in Tremé and, possibly later, sound barriers along the viaduct to shield the residents below from highway noise.  Another reason the highway may stay in place is this - the local business establishment (that is, the white business establishment) is afraid of the backup of commercial vehicles in New Orleans trying to access the city's port (though rail access would involve less land use and be more energy-efficient).

No, I think taking out I-10 - as well as I-610, one of those three-digit local spurs that go through or around cities - can be done.  Interstate 610 in New Orleans (there's another one in Houston) not only goes through similar neighborhoods, it also cuts through New Orleans City Park.  (Can you imagine a freeway going through New York's Central Park? Not two-lane transverse roads, which were part of Central Park's original design to accommodate horse-drawn vehicles, but a goddamned six-lane freeway?) 

Below is a map of southern Louisiana as it is today. 

As you can see (click on the map to get a closer view), Interstate 10 diverts from its general east-west trajectory across the nation's southern tier between Baton Rouge and Slidell in order to go through New Orleans; the interstate highway connecting Baton Rouge and Slidell directly on the northern side of Lake Pontchartrain is Interstate 12.  Two mainline north-south interstates, Interstates 55 and 59, approach New Orleans but stop short of it.  In addition to Interstate 10 through New Orleans and its spur Interstate 610, there are two north-south spurs, Interstates 310 and 510. And in addition to all that. there is the Pontchartrain Expressway (not to be confused with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway that goes across the lake itself) that connects I-10 with the Port of New Orleans in the Mississippi River (indicated by the red dot on the map).

Below is my proposal of how to redo the highway system in southern Louisiana:

• First, do the obvious.  Tear down the Claiborne Expressway and the rest of I-10 within the New Orleans city limits.  Keep the stretch of I-10 between the city's western boundary and LaPlace, where I-10 meets I-55.  Since I-10 is a white man's freeway, I'm sure the lily-white suburban communities in Kenner and Metairie will be pleased.
• Renumber I-12 as I-10.
• Make the part of I-10 from New Orleans' western boundary to LaPlace part of I-55.
• Tear up I-610; no one should have a freeway going through their municipal park.   The railroad line that goes through it is hardly a nuisance, since its right of way is narrower and because trains don't run every minute of the day.
• Tear up I-310; it's only twelve miles long and connects the New Orleans suburbs to rural St. Charles Parish.  Where's the rationale for that?  Besides, it was supposed to be part of a southerly beltway around the city that never got built.  Well, keep the Hale Boggs Bridge across the river, because people still have to cross the river from time to time. 
• Keep I-510 in place, but make it and the stretch of I-10 that goes from New Orleans' eastern boundary to Slidell part of I-59. 
• The stretch of I-10 between Baton Rouge and LaPlace?  Tear out the whole damn thing.  Good grief, part of it goes through ecologically sensitive wetlands!  Motorists coming from the west can always access New Orleans by getting on I-55 south at Hammond.  If there must be a direct link between Baton Rouge and LaPlace, give it a new three-digit interstate number signifying it as a spur of I-10.
• Finally, replace the decked Pontchartrain Expressway with a street-level boulevard so that trucks can access the port.  Keep the speed limits low, and provide easy access across the boulevard for pedestrians and cyclists.  Make it similar to the transformation of the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx into Sheridan Boulevard.

And this is the result of my suggestions: the map of southern Louisiana as it should be - and should always have been!  (Again, the Port of New Orleans is indicated by a red dot.  Click on the map to make it bigger.)

I kept the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, if only because . . . well, it must be pretty cool to cross a large lake like that in your car! 

As for all of my changes, well . . . I know full well that such a radical redo of the highway network in southern Louisiana is never going to happen.  But in the unlikely event that we start contracting the Interstate Highway System and focus more on a transportation network that serves people instead of disrupting their lives (*cough cough*, Amtrak, *cough cough*), Amy Stelly's call for tearing down I-10 through Tremé would be an excellent start.

Not Another Hurricane!

Hurricane fatigue is quickly replacing COVID fatigue in America.  The latest tropical cyclone to form is Zeta, expected to be a hurricane or a strong tropical storm when it makes landfall this week . . . in Louisiana, a state that has already seen four tropical systems make landfall there his year.

If Biden is elected President, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards should become his FEMA administrator.  He already has the experience.

This storm will be a repeat of Delta, which hit Louisiana and ended up causing a lot of rain for New Jersey.  Zeta will follow the same course.

And that's not all.  The Global Forecast System, you may recall, predicted a hurricane that would affect the New York area today, October 26.  That isn't happening, of course, but it's been stubbornly predicting that some sort of tropical system will affect the East Coast in the first half of November.  One projection showed a storm hitting the New York City area with bull's-eye precision on Saturday, November 7.  Subsequent runs have taken that off the table, but they have still been showing a storm coming out of the Caribbean and possibly affecting Florida before going either out to sea or moving up the I-95 corridor into the Carolinas by November 10, suggesting that the storm could affect the Northeast in time for Veterans' Day.  Funny, though, how the GFS is always projecting a hurricane affecting the East Coat sixteen days from whenever I look at it . . .  

Ten tropical cyclones will have made landfall in the U.S. this year, a new record - four of them, as noted, in Louisiana.  Zeta will make it five and eleven, respectively.  Zeta is the 27th named storm of 2020, bringing it behind only the 2005 season, which had 28 named storms.  (I might have said on this blog that the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season had 26 named storms.  I was wrong, but not as wrong as we will be if we guess that this season won't tie or break that record. 😨 )

Louisiana 2019

After being forced into a runoff by Donald Trump and state and national Republicans when he failed to win a majority in Louisiana's nonpartisan open primary, incumbent Democratic governor John Bel Edwards won a second term.  And because his Republican challenger (I could tell you his name, but that's irrelevant) was his only opponent, that means that Edwards was re-elected with a majority.

Once again, Trump tried to make a state gubernatorial election about himself and his agenda, and once again the voters rejected him.  Trump's popularity in Louisiana actually made the election close, but enough of the voters realized that they shouldn't vote for a Republican for governor just to please Trump.  They'll gladly vote for a Democrat if they feel that the Democrat is on their side and is governing the state effectively.

Edwards is no liberal despite his party affiliation. He's pro-life, and he also supports gun rights, as do most Louisiana residents.  But he's also been a very effective governor, having expanded Medicaid and having been responsive to natural disasters such as hurricanes  which Trump's environmental policies will make common and more dangerous occurrences of in the Pelican State for decades to come.  This is how a Democrat wins an election - by being responsive to the people.  And though Louisianians are deeply conservative, the country at large is more politically balanced and more reasonable, and Democrats need a pragmatist presidential nominee who doesn't go too far in one direction or the other - especially when we're in no position to try any progressive, European-style social democratic experiments (again, we were in such a position in 2016, but not now) - and that bodes well for anyone who's running for President as a Democrat in 2020 who wants to take a more cautious approach.    

And we'll need a cautious approach, given the ongoing appeal of Trumpism. The victories of Edwards in Louisiana and Beshear in Kentucky merely treated symptoms of Trumpism.  The disease goes merrily on.

Louisiana: Support Charlie Melancon For U.S. Senate

So Louisianians know why they should vote against their current incumbent Republican U.S. Senator. But why vote for his Democratic opponent, Charlie Melancon? I have made the case for him already, but not in particularly good detail

Well, why don't I flesh out some of Mr. Melancon's stands on some of the issues? As a U.S. House member, he has seen too much federal spending go to various projects through out the country that aren't needed - how about that bridge to nowhere in Alaska? while Louisiana has gotten the short end of the the baton. Mr. Melancon has stood for lower taxes and less spending but believes in giving tax cuts to the people who need it - Louisiana's middle class. He wants to provide tax breaks and credit for businesses to create jobs, not to enrich the wealthy.

Mr. Melancon believes in federal spending - but the kind of federal spending that will make a difference. Ha wants get more federal aid for restoring coastal wetlands and preventing the erosion that has left properties and property values in the state sink.

While Republicans talk about cutting the deficit, Mr. Melancon has consistently supported balancing the budget. He has also been consistent on health care reform, keeping a hybrid private-public system in place but supporting regulations on insurance companies to keep them from denying insurance to those with pre-existing conditions.

Mr. Melancon has a principled stand on abortion - he's pro-life - and supports the right to bear arms, and while I do not personally agree with him on those issues, many Louisianians do, and this puts him in sync with the state's voters. Louisianians can trust him. Mr. Melancon - unlike his opponent has lived family values. He talks the talk and walks the walk.

That's why I am endorsing Mr. Charles Joseph Melancon for United States Senate.

Please note that the name of his opponent never came up in this post.

(More on Charlie: http://www.charliemelancon.com/ .)

More Politics As Usual

Some quick observations of what passes for political discourse in America these days. . . .

President Obama has started targeting House Republican leader John Boehner in his campaign speeches for the Democrats, now that it's finally become apparent that he can't just ignore Republicans in Washington the way they're ignored in Chicago. Some have criticized Obama for personalizing the midterm elections by trying to make Boehner that bad guy when you have folks in the House like Mike Pence of Indiana and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota who are beyond bad. But Boehner would be Speaker of the House if the Republicans were to take control, and he'd have more power than Pence or Bachmann, so what's Obama supposed to do - bash the underlings in the House Republican caucus and ignore the naysayer at the top? Obama's new strategy may not reverse Democratic losses, but it could stem them.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, Joe Sestak is learning how many voters are turned off by the liberal views he espouses, as polls show him consistently behind Republican Senate nominee Pat Toomey. Although Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, likes and respects Toomey, he know s that the "fruit loops" (to borrow one of his own phrases) in the Republican party will control the agenda if they take back the Senate, and as reasonable as Toomey is, a Senator Toomey wouldn't be effective in a Republican caucus guided by loonies. Rendell hopes to make this clear in his efforts to help Sestak, and he believes Sestak can win if a) enough voters realize the threat to their economic interests a Republican Senate would bear and b) turnout in the Philadelphia area is up tremendously. Voters in the central and northern parts of the state just aren't interested in Sestak's agenda.

Meanwhile, Ed Schultz is helping Republican David Vitter in his bid to win a second term as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana. How is the progressive Schultz doing this? Well, you see, every time Schultz announces on his show his intention to bring up the subject of Vitter's disgusting sex scandals, his idea is to address it in the Rapid Fire Response segment of his show, where he asks a liberal pundit and a conservative pundit for their opinions on the subjects. Twice he's meant to ask his panel about Vitter; twice he ran out of time before he had the chance because discussion on his other chosen topics for that segment ran too long. As much as I would like to hear right-wing pundits like Heidi Harris or John Feehery defend David Vitter in that segment, it's obvious that Schultz has to devote a longer, more detailed account of Vitter's crimes elsewhere in the show, even if this means no conservative commentary in Vitter's defense. Because sometimes, as Edward R. Murrow once said, there is no other side of the story. And no one can excuse Vitter for his sins. Note to Ed Schultz: Get Charlie Melancon back on your show immediately.

Deepwater Horizon Mark Two?

Not quite, but it was a close call, at least as far as safety is concerned.

A fire on a shallow-water production (not a drill) platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana caused the workers on board to make an emergency evacuation. All thirteen workers were rescued.

There have been unconfirmed reports about an oil sheen emanating from the Mariner Energy-owned platform. There have also been unconfirmed reports about no oil sheen emanating from the platform. If there is any environmental damage, I hope it's nothing serious.

Well, maybe just a little bit serious - some trifle that, I don't know, will cause David Vitter's poll ratings to drop twenty points!

David Vitter Must Go

I hate David Vitter.

I mean, I just don't dislike Louisiana's junior U.S. Senator. I detest him. I loathe him. I really, really hate him.

Hatred is a feeling normally reserved for places and things rather than people. But in the case of David Vitter, it's justified. He is without question the sorriest excuse for a U.S. Senator right now. James Carville, a veteran Democratic political consultant and a Louisiana native, knows of what he speaks when he calls Vitter the slimiest man in the U.S. Senate.

Here's the rundown. Vitter, a former House member, was elected the first Republican senator from Louisiana since Reconstruction in 2004 when he ran in a nonpartisan state primary. Louisiana had all interested candidates for office run in a primary, and a general election is held in November only if no candidate gets a majority. Vitter won the primary with 51 percent of the vote, getting elected to the U.S. Senate and replacing retiring Democrat John Breaux. Vitter was one of seven freshman Republicans elected to Congress in 2004, all but one of them replacing Democrats and whose victories were fueled by fears of gay marriage and terrorism (thank you, Ken Mehlman!).

As a senator, Vitter has been a more vocal apologist for the oil industry than his Democratic colleague Mary Landrieu. In fact, about a month after the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico began, Vitter asked for unanimous consent to pass legislation that would have limited BP's financial liabilities for oil spills (and coincidentally, the liabilities of other oil companies) to $150 million or the total of its last four quarters of profit, whichever would be higher. Under this proposal, guess who would have been primarily responsible for cleaning up the oil leak? The taxpayers!

Vitter's record in the House is equally offensive. While a House member, he proposed a bill limiting criminal liability of corporations responsible for oil spills and exempting oil companies except those specifically cover by the Oil Pollution Act, which was passed in 1990. For the record, neither of these odious bills were passed, and had Vitter's proposed legislation in the Senate made it to President Obama's desk, the President would most assuredly have vetoed it. It was, as many agreed, a BP bailout bill.

If Vitter were just another stooge for Big Oil, he'd wouldn't be worth hating. However, Vitter has a lot of problems with his record, both personal and professional, regarding women. In 2007, he was revealed to be involved in a Washington prostitution ring when his phone number surfaced in its records. Vitter -a defender of "family values" - was also accused by a former New Orleans prostitute of having conducted an affair with her. Vitter apologized with his wife standing by his side, but rather than suffering political damage from it, he got applauded by fellow Republicans - who apparently believed the scandal was a smear campaign by the "liberal media" - at a subsequent public appearance.

Can someone tell me what kind of a country we live in where a man of the people like Eliot Spitzer gets caught in a prostitution ring and is forced to resign the governorship of New York but a defender of the privileged and the powerful like David Vitter gets caught in a prostitution ring but keeps his Senate seat and gets a standing ovation?

But wait - there's more! Apparently Brent Furer, a Vitter aide, held a woman hostage, threatened to kill her, and slashed her neck with a knife. The senator continued to keep Furer on his payroll for more than two years after the incident.

Did I happen to mention that Furer is the senator's women's outreach coordinator?

What's really depressing about all this is that Vitter is still a favorite for re-election. The reasons for this are numerous. First, it's likely to be a good night for Republicans on Election Day. Secondly, Louisiana is identified as having the tenth largest base of conservative voters in the nation. Thirdly, Vitter has spun his support for the oil industry as an effort to preserve jobs in Louisiana and is likely to be rewarded for his distortion of the facts. Fourth, he's from Louisiana. The former Louisiana House member Billy Tauzin may very well have been right when he said that half of the state is under water and the other half is under indictment, but you know what? Louisianians love roguishness in their politicians. This is what allowed them to elect flamboyantly corrupt politicians like Edwin Edwards as governor, and they love libidinous politicians as well - as the movie Blaze (about governor Earl Long and his mistress) made clear.

Oh yeah, Vitter just won his party's primary for a second Senate term. Fortunately Charlie Melancon, a Louisiana congressman won the Democratic primary for the Senate. Melancon, whose district has been adversely affected by the BP oil spill, has been fighting the petroleum monolith since the leak began and hasn't let up. He has a strong reputation for bipartisanship and fairness, and although Louisianians have been disappointed with Washington's handling of the crisis - good grief, a recent poll suggest that Louisiana voters were more satisfied with Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina than Obama's handling of the BP disaster! - such cynicism can hardly be applied to Melancon. He's bee across the state, talking to the people, and listening to their concerns. And he sure has hack hasn't been supporting any lawsuits brought against Preisdent Obama to show his birth certificate, as Vitter has. The choice is clear: Charlie Melancon should be Louisiana's next U.S. Senator.

I have to take a nice long shower after having posted this. Writing about David Vitter at length makes me feel so unclean. Maybe that's why I put it off for so long.

Go to Mr. Melancon's campaign Web site for more information. Please.

Burn On, Big Gulf, Burn On

If the mere threat of an oil rig accident in the Atlantic Ocean from offshore drilling wasn't enough to convince supporters of noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin's energy policy - which was co-opted by President Obama earlier this month - to change their minds, then the real accident in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast should.

A BP oil derrick recently exploded, killing eighteen people and causing an underwater pipe to emit oil - now up to 42,000 gallons a day - into the the Gulf of Mexico. The oil slick is slowly making its way toward the shore, threatening several marshes and estuaries in Louisiana and possibly Mississippi. For a region still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, this man-made disaster maybe too much. Commercial fishing interests and environmentally sensitive areas alike are threatened, and no one knows what's going to happen. It could affect areas like Chandeleur Sound, just south of Gulfport, Mississippi, and western Mississippi Sound. Barrier islands that shield those waters, CNN reports, were devastated by Katrina in 2005 and haven't fully recovered.

Ironically, this is all happening as the Interior Department took a step in the right direction in energy policy - approving a wind turbine farm five miles off the coast of Nantucket.

The government plans to set fire to as much of the slick as possible to burn it out and prevent much of it from reaching the shore. So, "drill, baby, drill" has become, "burn, baby, burn."

That's why there's still no offshore drilling off the California coast. No one wants a "Frisco inferno."

Here's The Story Of a Man Named Bobby

Bobby Jindal makes me nervous.

I found it disturbing that the Louisiana governor, a "Brady Bunch" fan as a boy, got his nickname from identifying with Bobby, the youngest Brady brother. Anyone who remembers the original "Brady Bunch" series, in addition to knowing how badly people dressed in the seventies, know that while Greg was the thoughtful, intellectual Brady brother and Peter was the clever, inventive one, Bobby was the devious bullcrap artist who got himself into more trouble than necessary. In one episode, he did just that, when he was a crossing guard, and ruined his good suit. Bobby said he learned three things from his experience - never to abuse your authority, always listen to the other side of the story, and the most important thing of all - never put a whole box of laundry detergent in a washing machine! :-O

I shudder at the idea of such a person - Jindal - with the nuclear missile codes. He even demonstrated his inability to understand the importance of government and science when he ridiculed spending on volcano monitoring - even as, as Keith Olbermann noted, Mount Redoubt near Anchorage, Alaska is in an ongoing state of eruption right now, spewing rock that could hit a car several miles away.

I hope it doesn't blow like Carol Brady's washing machine.

I wonder if Alaska's governor, noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin, can see that from her house? :-D