Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
that on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, the population of New Orleans' city center was
about 452,000 inhabitants, having dropped below its 1930 population level.
The intensity of urban sprawl seems surprising at first, especially for a
metropolitan area whose population has increased very little since 1970. Urban
sprawl in New Orleans is explained by political and social cleavages that divide the
metropolitan area. Specialists in New Orleans urban affairs generally agree that
primary responsibility for white flight (the hasty departure of the white middle class
to the suburbs) lies with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the school
desegregation case brought by Brown against the Topeka Board of Education
(
Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education
in Lewis [LEW 03] and Bergel
et al.
[BRG 07]. At the heart of the Slave South, New Orleans and Louisiana were
dominated by racist politics until the 1950s. Unlike other cities, however, racial
tensions did not produce clear spatial segregation until 1940, due largely to the lack
of land suitable for residential construction prior to completion of the Lake
Pontchartrain levee system (1934) and the opening of the Lakeview and Gentilly
subdivisions. It is the combination of urban sprawl and white flight that allowed
segregation to build little by little, as described by Lewis [LEW 03] in the early
1970s. The white elites of New Orleans were not affected by the 1954 Supreme
Court ruling as they traditionally placed their children in Catholic schools. It was the
middle class who fled to Jefferson Parish, while blue-collar workers moved to St
Bernard Parish. In this way, the public schools of New Orleans were seriously
impoverished, precipitating yet new waves of white flight.
700,000
600,000
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
c. 1950
c. 1960
c. 1970
c. 1980
c. 1990
c. 2000
e. 2005
Afro-Americans
Other Communities
Figure 9.6.
New Orleans population trends
