lolis: he just can't follow that.laughter] oliver: i am glad i did, and i think you want me to talk about the cultural aspect. people talk to good music and great food and all of those cultural things, but we also have a great selection of survivors in the history of the world. when people talk about the good old days in the school system, we have people who graduated, and when people talk about the -- good old days in the school system, we had fewer people who graduated, and when people talked about the incarceration system, we had more people who were incarcerated. if you really know new orleans, you know 12 all beef patties, special sauce, two slices of cheese, mcdonald's doesn't use that anymore, but i am so conditioned by it. it is not the truth about how everybody lives, but that is the burger that you are selling. in the jail system, per capita, we have more people than just about any other place in america. there is a struggle about the reality, but the existence for a lot of folks has always been not what the

lolis mentioned earlier, it was a very serious problem, who is teaching in this goals. there are all kinds of ramifications about that. if folks in the city can remember, in 1960, the city had 680,000 people in it. we were bigger than houston and bigger than atlanta. 1955 to 1960, the population went down. the night before the storm it was down to 465,000 people, and the storm hit. now we are the fastest growing city in america. cities have problems. some problems are shrinking, a shrinking tax base, nobody making money, everybody stressed. that's a problem to work through. now we are growing and other people are moving in and people are getting displaced. that's another common problem you have to work through. you can argue about which problem is better. i would rather have the growth problem than the shooting problem. in that regard, the city has 169 square miles in it, plenty of room to take care of a lot of people. one of the things we're doing right now through government action, zoning codes, rules, regulations, if we get tax incentives -- if we give tax incentive

lolis: thank you. wet is striking, when talk about the people who are come to katrina post-katrina has been tied to big companies who hired other big companies, and other big companies. there is a great story about how much money a company is being .aid to put a roof on the house the story is the approach of american capitalism. that the big people should make all the decisions. we tout all these great things done in education. the first thing that happened post-katrina was the firing of all the teachers. there attempting to improve lives of these children by firing their mothers, their ts, they'reeir aun almost hear the concept that it is possible to have these pronouncements on high to help is part ofe download the problem. it is skewed. when maddie, you were nine katrina hit. looking at it now, what do you see? that i willn say never own a house because i had to watch my parents move everything. i can say that i have been of voting age for more than one year, and i have not filled out my voter regis

anyway, we can come back to the indians if people are as fascinated with them as i am and lolis is. on another theme altogether, new orleans has been called the northernmost banana republic. it has also, and i think with equal relevance, been called the southernmost part of the rust belt. so you can liken us to detroit which is maybe the more immediate and/or current analogy -- >> and the westernmost mediterranean. >> uh-huh, that's right. we do have our share of -- >> and one of my favorite jokes about new orleans is that you have to go north of i-10 to get to the south. >> that's right. mississippi is deeply southern is, and new orleans is a caribbean port. it's very different. all of which is by way of prologue to say that new orleans had been hugely blighted in its detroit mode well before katrina and the levee perhaps. that was certainly not alleviated one bit by 230,000 housing units being destroyed in the flood. we have in our midst a very close scholar of blight and of the particularities of blight in new orleans, and i just thought karen could bring us up to speed on that w

lolis went into speak about the diaspora as we call it. >> one of the things i have heard most of peoplethat left the city after the flood have returned at least to the state. there are still isolated people who have gone hither and yonder and there's an interesting reason for that in implications for it. harry shira a part-time new orleans resident artist make the point saying they didn't ask whether or not you were a katrina evacuate unable to get back home which is to say the government didn't particularly care what happened to them. of course there are broad click locations that most of the books are thrown out were black and voting democratic and by not being there turned purple and perhaps even read. the implication in the early questions about closure. the city would have lost its culture but the truth is that he came to new orleans now there are a whole lot of things you would have gone to see and hear 15 or 20 years ago so in many ways even in the time we were exporting people all over central and south america to come and rebuild the city at the time of new orleans were not all