This double issue invites readers to come to terms with how New Orleans has been remade in the interests of the investor class—a shifting constellation of local and national corporations, developers, government officials, think tanks, and pundits—even as they’ve leveraged authenticity and nostalgia to placate dissent, and how the battle for a more just city is yet to be won or even waged in any sustained way. As a collection of essays, written in response to recovery efforts over the last two decades, When the Investor Class Goes Marching In is addressed explicitly to questions of political economy, describing how a recovery project driven by propertied interests has fostered an extreme housing affordability crisis, and makes the case for why decommodification of housing should be the centerpiece of popular left politics in the Crescent City and beyond.
We still find it hard to believe that twenty years have passed and that there are many New Orleanians and Americans, for that matter, with little or no recollection of the disaster. This collection is intended as a primer for those unfamiliar with this catastrophic historic event and its manifold social and political impacts on the city and American life more generally.
Fundamentally, the agenda of the new urban right is about setting the ‘ground rules’ for appropriate behaviour in cities, largely modeled on middle-class norms; establishing the preconditions for economic growth, largely through the kinds of minimalist supply-side interventions metaphorically represented, in this case, by the cat-5 levee; and maintaining social order through ruthless application of the force of law, facilitated by zero-tolerance policing.
New Orleans demonstrated that Latino workers’ occupational risk resulted not only from contractors’ discriminatory work assignments but also from federal agency neglect whose outreach efforts focused on workers rather than on employers.
What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.
While the storm may have exposed the so-called invisible poor and the destitute living condition of America’s most poverty stricken and disrepaired major city, it in fact furthered the connection between the political economy of invisibility and economic dislocation.
The seductive notion that private-sector movements will rectify or redress and respond to the larger problem of disenfranchisement of the poor and the underrepresented in America is powerful, especially for those who see their participation in such movements as a radical alternative to conventional infrastructures of social inequality and who reap the rewards of such action.
This double issue invites readers to come to terms with how New Orleans has been remade in the interests of the investor class—a shifting constellation of local and national corporations, developers, government officials, think tanks, and pundits—even as they’ve leveraged authenticity and nostalgia to placate dissent, and how the battle for a more just city is yet to be won or even waged in any sustained way. As a collection of essays, written in response to recovery efforts over the last two decades, When the Investor Class Goes Marching In is addressed explicitly to questions of political economy, describing how a recovery project driven by propertied interests has fostered an extreme housing affordability crisis, and makes the case for why decommodification of housing should be the centerpiece of popular left politics in the Crescent City and beyond.
We still find it hard to believe that twenty years have passed and that there are many New Orleanians and Americans, for that matter, with little or no recollection of the disaster. This collection is intended as a primer for those unfamiliar with this catastrophic historic event and its manifold social and political impacts on the city and American life more generally.
Fundamentally, the agenda of the new urban right is about setting the ‘ground rules’ for appropriate behaviour in cities, largely modeled on middle-class norms; establishing the preconditions for economic growth, largely through the kinds of minimalist supply-side interventions metaphorically represented, in this case, by the cat-5 levee; and maintaining social order through ruthless application of the force of law, facilitated by zero-tolerance policing.
New Orleans demonstrated that Latino workers’ occupational risk resulted not only from contractors’ discriminatory work assignments but also from federal agency neglect whose outreach efforts focused on workers rather than on employers.
What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.
While the storm may have exposed the so-called invisible poor and the destitute living condition of America’s most poverty stricken and disrepaired major city, it in fact furthered the connection between the political economy of invisibility and economic dislocation.
The seductive notion that private-sector movements will rectify or redress and respond to the larger problem of disenfranchisement of the poor and the underrepresented in America is powerful, especially for those who see their participation in such movements as a radical alternative to conventional infrastructures of social inequality and who reap the rewards of such action.
nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities. nonsite.org is affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
