The (Smaller Than It Ought Be) Easy

U.S. Census Bureau growth rates for select metropolitan areas, 2000-2004:

• Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas          10.3%
• Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.      7.1%
• Houston, Texas                            9.7%
• Atlanta, Ga.                                 10.7%
• Tampa-St. Pete, Fla.                   8.0%
• Charlotte, N.C.                              9.0%
• Orlando, Fla.                                13.2%
• San Antonio, Texas                     8.3%
• Nashville, Tenn.                            6.5%
• Raleigh-Durham, N.C.               11.6%
• Austin, Texas                               13.0%
• Jacksonville, Fla.                         9.1%
• New Orleans, La.                          0.2%

If you look just at the city, rather than the Metro area, New Orleans is actually on a decades-long streak of negative population growth. All this while the South as a whole has benefitted from the most massive demographic shift in U.S. history, with millions abandoning the Snow-and-Rust Belt of the industrial Northeast and Midwest for the corporate parks and gated condominium developments of the SunBelt, which also notably includes Vegas and Arizona.

What makes this especially strange, at first blush, is that New Orleans would seem to possess many of the qualities Yankees complain about missing in the New South. It is an historic city, with interesting architecture, and a diverse, international and cosmopolitan feel. Among Southern cities, only Miami can rival New Orleans for nightlife, or for the city's concentrations of Catholics and Jews. The city is also a culinary mecca, a literary haven, and arguably the central locus for all of American music. Yes, it's crime-ridden and a murder capital, but again...so is Miami.

So what's been keeping folks away from the Big Easy? Perhaps it was a little of that corruption the place is so famous for (on full display in Katrina's aftermath), which has served to raise the cost of doing business in all sorts of completely unnecessary ways.

But is Louisiana really as corrupt as all that? Haven't things gotten any better since the days of Huey Long?

I point you to Exhibit A: If J. Robert Wooley doesn't end his current stint as the state's Insurance Commissioner by going to prison (which remains to be seen), he'll be breaking a tradition carried on by his three immediate predecessors, Sherman Bernard, Doug Green and Jim Brown.

Comments

[Kevin O'Reilly]

But Jim Brown was innocent!!! Haven't you read his book yet? ;-)

[R.J. Lehmann]

I've actually never spoken to Brown, although I read some of his missives from jail. He stepped down at just around the time I started covering the industry.

Dennis Kelly, on the other hand, was pretty close with Brown. I don't know that he believed him to be innocent, but I do think he believed him to be, essentially, a decent guy.

[Kevin O'Reilly]

Here is my actual opinion, based on having interviewed him (after he got out of prison) and skimmed his book:

(1) He is a decent guy.
(2) Whether he was corrupt or not, the feds didn't prove it, nailing him instead on the ol' "lied to an agent" crapola they got Martha Stewart on with he said/she said evidence.
(3) His daughter, NBC TV newswer Campbell Brown, is a cutie.