Embrace the Shiny.

With house-cleaning in New Orleans over we drove to Houston last weekend for a “Big City fix”. We lived in a large city once before (Boston), and it’s nice to get back to all of that energy and excitement every once and a while. We photographed buildings, visited the MFA Houston, did some shopping, and relaxed a bit.

Houston always amazes me in its ability to be ever changing. Houston seems to embrace change and the future, while my home town, New Orleans, utterly shuns it and clings to it’s past. I remember when I was a child, folks in New Orleans were always putting down Houston (“it’s what happens when you give oil-field trash too much money”, etc., etc…..), and wondering why companies would ever want to leave the Crescent City for Houston (which they did - in droves.)

Seeing Houston with post-Katrina New Orleans fresh on my mind really brought up the contrast between the two, and made me realize that in order to survive as anything more than a quaint tourist destination (or worse, a tropical Detroit), New Orleans will have to do something that Houston seems to do without thinking – change. And that is, to my mind, the crux of the ongoing problem with New Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery – New Orleans doesn’t know how to change. Or even know how to understand change. When your tomorrow has always looked like your yesterday - and you wanted it that way – it’s hard to think about other options.

A friend got me to join a listserv for a New Orleans preservation group right after Katrina, and I have been stunned by the amount of resistance the group’s posters have to even the slightest bit of change. ANY building built yesterday is better than one built today or tomorrow. I got excoriated by a poster when I suggested that if a building is too far gone to save the owner should be able remove it and rebuild, and that the City should be able to demolish properties that have been abandoned for years. No way. To remove a building, no matter how far gone it might be or how architecturally insignificant is might be, is tantamount to cultural treason in their way of thinking. The past must be preserved at all costs. This mindset is borders on a pathological romanticism and nostalgia, and will be the downfall of New Orleans ever recovering fully.

Should we preserve were we can? Yes. Should we hold on to the exceptional and the significant? Absolutely. But change is inevitable. And in the case of New Orleans today, it is essential. You don’t need a plan – it will happen if you let it. The old joke I heard about Houstonians was is “if it’s shiny, they want it.” To most New Orleanians, if it’s shiny they want nothing to do with it. That needs to end. New Orleans needs to quit living in, and living on, it’s past alone. New Orleans must want a little shiny if it is to truly recover and prosper.