Building cities like there’s no tomorrow

IT’S A GOOD THING that J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, makes his living in politics and not in show biz. Because his timing stinks.

A week ago -- while people across the Gulf Coast were drowning in their own streets and being washed off their own rooftops -- the speaker of the House remarked of New Orleans, “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Bulldozed? Given the cowardice-to-courage ratio we’ve seen this past week, I think more people would vote to bulldoze Washington than New Orleans.

Bulldozed? As they did to that famous ghost town, Chicago, after the great fire? To San Francisco after the 1906 quake? Still, I only said it was Hastert’s timing that stunk; the question he suggested in such stumblebum fashion will one day, and soon, have to be framed properly and posed about the Gulf Coast.

It’s a question that California is forced to ask itself every year, after our seasons of fire, flood, drought and quake, after Laguna Beach slides, after Malibu burns, after Paso Robles rattles and tumbles: Do we walk away from it for good? Build it again, fast and cheap? Build it again, slowly, expensively, safely?

Should we really be raising up cities in a bathtub, a fire zone, on a fault line?

Our state motto is a Greek word, “Eureka” -- I have found it. Maybe we should swap it for whatever the Greek word is for “I have lost it.”

Most of the places where Californians live are designed by a short-range, take-the-money-and-run business model that -- as somebody once said -- only plans as far ahead as the next quarter, not the next quarter-century. We seem to design cities the way we design healthcare: on the cheap, gambling that we can skimp on the front end and won’t get wiped out by big losses on the back end.

Sooner or later, the debt collector comes knocking. Last January, in Ventura County, a human-cut cliff behind the coastal town of La Conchita slid away for the second time in 10 years. It killed 10 people. It will slide again, and kill again.

Two days after the last slide, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up with the pep talk that Californians have heard so often they could probably write it. Talking about the latest fill-in-the-blank force of nature, Schwarzenegger said: “We have seen the power of nature to cause damage and despair. But we will match that power with our own resolve. The people [who] live here in this community are very strong.... One of the first things they said is, you know, ‘We’ll be back.’ ”

Only when he had retreated to Sacramento did his office say: No, the state can’t help unless the county asks. And the county -- which doesn’t have the money to do much -- doesn’t own much of the hillside in question anyway.

We get one huge, horrible California wildfire every 10 years because we build willy-nilly over the hillsides and thwart the natural, smaller, once-a-year fires. The nation gets one huge, horrible hurricane that does more damage to modern New Orleans than was ever done to old New Orleans because people wiped out the wetlands that used to absorb storm surges like a big sponge.

Hastert fretted about who would foot the bill for such a calculated rebuilding risk, but he allowed as how “we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild too. Stubbornness.”

What if we saved all that money by banning building on risky terrain altogether?

The country-- not just California -- would be empty. In one way or another, every part of the nation is uninhabitable. Tornadoes rip up the Bible Belt. Hurricanes tear the guts out of red states. Blizzards shut down the blue Northeast. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio rivers have washed away whole towns like nature’s Roto-Rooter. The “rugged individualists” of the Wild West would be sucking their water out of a cactus if it were not for vast, gajillion-dollar federal water and power projects.

Watching the suffering in New Orleans, Californians may have overlooked the local news over the holiday weekend -- we hear it so often, we probably tune it out. About 150 acres burned in San Diego, 2,500 acres in northern Los Angeles County and, the week before, about 5,000 acres in Riverside County.

Whether we should build and rebuild or not, we probably always will. The serious question then becomes how, and on whose terms. Our cities would look -- and live -- like entirely different places if they were designed exclusively by engineers, or by preservationists, or by insurance adjusters.

Most likely, they’ll be built, and rebuilt, as always, by graduates of the Dirty Harry College of Urban Planning, whose school motto is: “You’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”