One of Arthur Chrenkoff’s readers looks at the situation in harder-hit Mississippi vs. Louisiana.
An interesting point:
This was a good reminder that LA has for decades been our worst managed and most corrupt state. I briefly caught a bit of the News Hour last night, and David Brooks pointed that out; he also pointed out something that’s pretty obvious – for the most part, the South has been booming for the past 25 or so years. The major cities went from backwater jokes to leading cities – Atlanta, Raleigh, Dallas, all of Florida, etc. The “hole in the map” in all of this has been Louisiana – it’s like the last 25 or 30 years of southern growth have passed it right by. Get away from the gussified tourist areas and NO is a pretty awful city.
Placing the blame right now, before the facts are in, is really a rorschach game (yes, even when I do it). But there’s no denying the truth of this particular comment when you’ve actually lived there and seen it firsthand. Hurricane response aside, if New Orleans had had competent administration over the past 20-30 years, it could have had a share of that southern boom and we wouldn’t now be talking about the poverty in the city.