Creative destruction: lessons from New Orleans seven years after Katrina

Never say this column doesn’t offer global perspectives. OK, sometimes it comes in folksy Yorkshire parables — but a fortnight ago I was up close with Branson in Mumbai and today I’m speaking to you from the Louisiana Superdome. Yes, I’m standing right on the plastic turf of one of America’s most hallowed football fields, watching the New Orleans Saints warm up for a crunch game against the Atlanta Falcons. You might get weightier economic theories on the op-ed page of the FT, but you don’t get opening lines like that.

The proper name of this glitzy concrete bubble, by the way, is a parable of globalisation in itself: the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. But its place in modern American folklore was secured in August 2005 when it served as refuge for more than 20,000 New Orleanians displaced by floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The suffering of the trapped evacuees — under armed guard, without adequate food, water, sanitation or medical help for several days — was so shaming for America that many felt the storm-damaged stadium should be razed to the ground; the Saints, temporarily shifted to Texas, looked set to stay there.

Indeed, many commentators (including me) asked whether it was worth trying to revive the city at large, given that all but its most historic districts were built on sub–sea-level reclaimed land which the levees were clearly unable to defend. Wouldn’t it be better for the displaced to make new lives wherever they might find better schools and job prospects and lower murder rates? Isn’t migration a good thing when it leaves embedded deprivation behind? Go ahead and restore the heritage sites, we suggested unhelpfully from afar, but get real and abandon the ghettos.

Well, that wasn’t how the local folk saw it — or most of them. Around 100,000 of the city’s 450,000 inhabitants have never come back.