New Orleans repeating deadly levee mistakes

[peejay 327]

Call me heartless and crass, but I wouldn't really care if New Orleans didn't exist. Nor would I care if every "summer beach house" in the US was destroyed by flood, hurricane, locusts, or ravenous plagues of Mormons. Those things just don't fall in my "give a sh!t" category. Unless they want me to pay for them. Then I care enough to say "F##k you!"

You are heartless and crass.

But actually, that's a pretty terrible thing to say. How can you equate NOLA with beach houses? I don't think many of the people who lost their homes in Katrina had beach houses.

Those are two seperate rants. New Orleans and beach houses. Completely different things. Related only by flooding/hurricanes.

...and FEMA and / or other government agencies ready to help pick up the pieces. My point being that if people wish to build in locations with a high degree of vulnerability then let the private sector insurance or the property owner themselves take the inevitable financial hit. The government and the taxpayer really shouldn't be subsidizing this repeat lunacy. Everyone knows these are vulnerable places, but they build anyway.

Private developers build in prone areas, idiots buy them, and then the deep pockets of the government (aka: taxpayer) is supposed to bail them out.

We have the open beaches act here in TX and we just went through this scenario with eroded beaches landing these houses directly onto the public beach. Under the law these houses are now on public beaches and must be removed. Of course the property owners are suing for the state to buy their property. Tough sh*t! You gambled and lost.

I remember the government going in numerous times to buy flood prone houses that never should have been built. People may have the right to build where they want, but they don't have the right to expect the taxpayer to subsidize their foolishness. Government shouldn't be in the private sector risk management business with public money.

[peejay 327]

This article says crime went up 20%, but it's from 2006. I remember reading somewhere more recently that it was closer to 50%.

Texan Hosts Arm Against Crime Wave (Katrina - Houston)

Our mayor Bill White is a real humanitarian. He takes in the riff-raff from NO and maintains a sanctuary policy to attract 1/2 million illegal aliens into our city. Anything to fill the vacant rental property of his patrons in the business community and create more demand for the developers to build more cheap crack shack apartments. Built by illegal alien labor, of course.

For the rest of us common folk that don't live in gated communities with 24 hour rent-a-cop service...we can only fume at the gall of these pricks that are supposed to be working for our best interests (meaning the general public).

[PlatyPius 5]

[DeadPoolX 9]

Maybe to some people who have just lost everything, maintaining a house beautiful is not their main concern? Maybe even before that, they might just have a different lifestyle?

And even before Katrina...why is it such a bad thing for people not to care if they make crappy wages, and have enjoying life be a more important value? Oh, because it's different from what this dude values?

So murder and robbery is just a "different lifestyle"? I have nothing against poor people....hell, I'M poor; money-wise. I work at a "crappy" job too. I do it because I like the job more than I like money. We're not talking about people making a lifestyle choice here...we're talking about criminals and "trash". People who would rather have a satellite dish than food in their kids' stomachs. People who would trade their food stamps for crack rather than baby formula.

Not everyone in NO is like that, of course, but that sort make up a much larger part of the population there than most other places. Did you see what happened to Houston when they gave all of the NO people homes? Crime doubled. I don't know how much more of a blindingly obvious clue someone would need to see that the problem with NO isn't just a "different lifestyle"....

I lived in Houston during that time period and although none of the crime from our New Orleans "visitors" touched me, I knew some people who it had. Even if I hadn't, there were reports of such experiences everyday in the paper and on the news after we took in the NO refugees.

Unfortunately, crime did skyrocket. Houston didn't really need that. As the third or fourth largest city in the U.S. (depending whose statistics you use), we already had far more crime than we wanted, but even a 20% increase was more than the overworked HPD could handle, let alone a 70% jump (which was what violent crime reached at its peak). In 2005, 336 murders were committed and in 2006, 379 murders occurred again. There seems be a lack of data for 2007 and of course, 2008, at the moment.

The real problem isn't even all the crime (which is a serious issue), but the fact that many of the people Houston originally took in from New Orleans (on a temporarily basis) eventually decided to stay permanently. That was not in the game plan. As it is, we simply had too many people and to incorporate 35,000 more (which certainly wasn't all of NO, but more new residents than we ever anticipated to deal with at one time) was a drain on the city, especially when a sizable portion of these refugees overstayed their welcome by committing crimes and not going home.