My Urban Plan for New Orleans
Cafe Hayek points out that Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants to make sure that New Orleans is rebuilt with a strong urban planning vision. Since Mr. Blumenauer represents Portland, Oregon, the city beloved of planners that has been planned into having some of the highest priced housing and worst traffic of any city of its size in America, I presume he wants something similar for New Orleans (Portland was also the city that thought it had solved global warming).
Here is my urban plan for New Orleans: Every person who owns property can build whatever the hell they want on it. If other people want something else built on that property, and value this outcome enough, they can buy the property from its owner. This novel concept is called "private property rights" and falls under the broader category of what are called "constitutionally protected individual rights" or even more broadly, "freedom". It is a concept that used to be taken for granted in this country and but now is seldom even taught in schools.
For the property owned by the government, well, they are going to build whatever dumbshit thing they want to on it anyway, so I'll just root for their choice to be fairly inexpensive. We here in Phoenix built a half-billion dollar stadium for the for-god-sakes Arizona Cardinals that is used for its core purpose 3 hours a day for 8 days a year. It couldn't be worse, could it?
