New Orleans...the next Sedona

[Atman]

First off, I LOVED my visit to Sedona, AZ. One of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. BUT...

Sedona is almost entirely "new." Virtually all of that town was built in the last ten years. As a result, it is almost TOO clean. Too "Disney-fied" with perfect shops, perfect roads, perfect multi-million homes. It is a place taken over by money and developers, and the original residents have been pushed aside to make the place a tourist paradise. No one but the seriously monied can afford to buy a home there. New Orleans will be re-built the same way, as a Disney-fied playground for transients, with all the local property converted to showcase homes and perfect touristy businesses. It will be a whorish shell of its former self, albeit a high-priced whore.

I am sure BushCo has already begun divvying up the best lots for his cronies. The developers and speculators are already on the teevee salivating at the prospect of making NO a "labratory" for city development.

In fact, due to its below-sea-level status, it is sheer folly to rebuild New Orleans at all. You can be sure the wealthy who move in will be pounding down the White House door the next time a hurricane floods the place out, demanding to have their private development re-built with public money. Oh well. Life goes on.

It's good to be a friend of The King.

[bribri16]

1. We used to go to Sedona every year back in the 70's. Beautiful!!

Peaceful. It's where we went to get away from it all. Looks like "all" has found and come to Sedona. As part Native American, my heart just aches.

[Atman]

3. We traveled through some Navajo reservation land

Ouch. That was my first big heartbreak; next came seeing the conditions in New Orleans. Hard to believe this America. I've heard there are beautiful reservations in AZ, but what we saw was nothing but depressing. Of course, all of the rest of Arizona we saw was stunningly beautiful. Much like New Orleans, the contrast between what is presented to the tourists, and what the "locals" have to endure, is just tragic.

[Inland]

2. My guess is actually worse.

I wouuldn't mind if New New Orleans was a playground for the rich, if it was truly a city. But what you recoginize as too clean is in fact, not a city at all.

If only because America hasn't built a truly URBAN center for, what, a hundred years?

The American trend has been to create sanitized, planned, PRIVATIZED spaces in the green lands. Essentially, open air shopping mall and residential complexes.

Think of Las Vegas's fake New York and fake Eiffel Tower. All the things people think of in the real cities as "must see" without the cities.

The true urban space, a public space, that is an accretion of a hundred years of activity by a hundred thousand people, block by block, corner by corner, church by store by building by fair by fire by .... The slow piling up of human activities where the residents know every stone...

Nobody wants that in America. Too messy. Too many poor people. Can't find parking.

[marions ghost]

5. EXCELLENT points, Inland

Thank You.
It would grieve me to see New Orleans rebuilt with a Disney mentality, but the OP is probably correct that it will veer towards that.

Disney Mentality = So "clean," so "beautiful," yet so soul-less, so devoid of imagination, so plastic.

[triguy46]

4. The New Orleans theme park and upscale gated community

Brought to you by Halliburton and Brown-Root. Where you can taste fun non-alcoholic drinks, kids can scramble for beads thrown by their favorite disney characters on the daily "mardi gras" parade and you are insured not to have any contact with someone from a lower caste except when they clean the condo...Brought to you by BUSHCO