New Orleans Is Broken And Crumbling.

holy Adventure right we're out on the Louisiana bayous and it's the first day of spring Gators and swamps and mud and critters there's really nowhere like this in the entire country and we're only 10 miles from downtown New Orleans one day they think this is how all of New Orleans look it's sinking into the sea or the sea is taken over they've already lost Coastline the size of Rhode Island I read Southeast Louisiana loses a football field worth of land every hour to erosion and that is a shame you can move things but you can't replace history all the churches and cemeteries and culture this stuff goes back really long time you can't recreate any of this again [Applause] what a better place to start a deep south Adventure than New Orleans Louisiana it's equally amazing and terrible fun and depressing historic and collapsing happy and abysmal it's a perplexing Place New Orleans is and that's why I chose to start here New Orleans is the Crown Jewel of the most complicated region in the country I'm gonna spend quite a few days here in New Orleans then we're going to see parts of Louisiana Arkansas Alabama and Mississippi it's going to be almost a month we're going to meet a lot of interesting people and see things we've never seen before and it's early spring what a great time to be in the South because if you know you know I'm gonna begin this trip with a Happy video I could come down here to the Deep South and begin with some stuff that really lays it on thick oh don't worry all the bad stuff is coming that's what you people want but why start off this adventure with so much negative [Music] foreign [Music] New Orleans is a great place to come to uh come to New Orleans enjoy enjoy the sights and scenes and uh enjoy the food New Orleans has a lot of fantastic things you can see and do just remember just remember safety first you got that right mister New Orleans Louisiana you could travel the whole country and never find a place that's more different than the rest of us than Louisiana you may not know it but this was the country's third biggest city 150 years ago today it's not considered very big New Orleans is like a giant overwhelming town There's 376 000 people now and it's trickling down every year hurricanes and crime will do that to a place New Orleans is n't feedback kind of place I'll tell you that I mean sure it's all laid back in an anything goes kind of way but isn't relaxing or anything you don't come here to chill and the people who live here aren't chill there is a lot of energy here it's definitely not uninteresting the energy here can kind of Eat You Alive there's Temptations everywhere you go if you have an addictive personality stuff like booze and drugs and gambling can really change your life since it's all over the place and so easy to get you can drink in public and I don't think they enforce too many drug laws here some people can handle it and Thrive some people fall victim to it and wither it can take people a long time to adapt here tourists learn that lesson pretty fast there's all kinds of ways you can divide up New Orleans this is a pretty easy way to do it it kind of gives you an idea on what the place is like we're going to begin up here in the French Quarter it's really just a large neighborhood with a bunch of bars and restaurants and weird shopping places mixed in and there's nothing like the quarter no um there's a lot of history here in the corner for the first 70 years of this City's existence this was all there was to New Orleans it has a French and Spanish influence very neat architecture indeed of course everybody knows about Bourbon Street that's here in the French Quarter here there's bars open 24 7. Dairy laissez-faire it's Extremely Loud and in her face it can be a lot of fun if you're into drinking a lot it's messy and crowded and tight and very overwhelming at times [Applause] this is the heartbeat of the craziness of New Orleans it's full of drunks and bombs and people who were out there let me tell you most of the people wandering around or the tourists and the locals trying to get as much money out of them as they can they sure are creative in figuring out a way to make a buck they really do earn your money we met Wayne earlier he had a sign that said pay me to take a picture with me cool guy what made you pick dinosaur for your costume well everybody thinks it's a dinosaur it's an actual alligator but it's because it's a Louisiana a Louisiana uh outfit there's some pretty darn good mishmash bands all over town that's a good way to make some extra dough [Music] you can eat and drink to your heart's content in the French Quarter a lot of the restaurants here cater to tourists with our own versions of toned down Cajun food but I'll tell you what there's an obsession with the odd here there's lots of fortune tellers in town I didn't have my fortune told because I already know what it'll be I got my fortune read when we were there Nick she told me next year would be unusually bumpy and to expect the unexpected Oh you mean like this there's all kinds of places to buy interesting stuff in the French Quarter the fashion here could probably influence you if you've had too much booze although I don't think I could ever wear those or maybe I could a lot of over-the-top does well here I don't think there's a normal place to shop in the entire quarter and Voodoo and Witchcraft and anything about ghosts or big sellers I think every building here is haunted there's a weird fetish with death in New Orleans I think that's because of the history of the place this is not where you shop at Costco or eat at Applebee's I don't think they even have that here but there's plenty of places to buy booze you just walk in and out of one of the liquor stores or bars and you take your drinks wherever you want to go I don't think there's really any rules here except don't steal and don't punch anyone people openly consume drugs and do sexual things to one another and nobody cares but most people come in to take the food and music because this place has soul Frenchman streets part of the French Quarter where all the good music joints are at over on Bourbon Street it's all terrible cover bands but not here on Frenchman Street huh and the music just spills out into the streets here super neat place to hear really good jazz music and I'm not even a jazz music kind of guy [Music] [Laughter] [Music] but it's a dirty place the French Quarter is the whole place smells like piss and trash and weed and mold there's a lot of roaches and muggings and puke but it's fun I guess they power wash the sidewalks just about every day but it doesn't really seem to help much and the whole City's sinking that's because it was built on sediment along the Mississippi River and that sediment is well settling they need to rebuild the entire quarter but they can't do that so it's kind of a patchwork job trying to fix all the sewer lines would be a massive undertaking the roads and sidewalks let me tell you those are some of the worst of any downtown I've ever seen all over this part of town There's potholes two feet deep and cracks in sidewalks so wide people use them for trash cans that's beer can of course this is where they have Mardi Gras every year and you think the quarter looks filthy now you should see it during Mardi Gras talk about a messy sloppy neighborhood and look there's still beads in the trees everywhere and Mardi Gras took place a month before I was even here you're probably wondering are there homeless here of course this is America you'll see a lot of homeless people in small doses but nothing like what you see in California just a few random people sleeping on random blocks somebody told me when I was there we have a bad homeless problem in New Orleans did you see them all under the bridge I was like uh that's not bad you need to see California if you think that's bad you can do an entire video about the French Quarter maybe one day I will [Music] thank you there's a lot more to New Orleans in the French Quarter they have a little downtown area that has some high rises and condos with Office Buildings there's really not a lot going on here except for the well-known Magazine Street which has all the trendy places to eat and Shop I didn't really think Magazine Street was very exciting kind of blah but some people like it I suppose the less adventurous tourists Maybe you don't really hear a lot about people moving to New Orleans for good jobs there's a lot of jobs that pay well in energy I mean this is Louisiana but a lot of people who live here work in tourism and Retail like bartenders and hotel workers downtown along the water is very nice and clean except for the areas where all the homeless people hang out over here is where a lot of the tourists hang out who don't get bombed on booze all day you know the old people it's over here with a cruise ship stock it's also over here with the casinos and the fancy shopping places are located so they have to keep this area nice and quiet where the old timers won't come back anymore just let them have their own little peaceful corner of the city I guess [Music] it's hit and miss for supplies in downtown New Orleans here's what it looked like inside of a Walgreens that I ducked into those shelves sure are empty as a tourist you really got to plan ahead when you come here this is you get away from downtown it's pretty much a crap shoot as to what kind of hood you'll find from what I could tell most of the nicer neighborhoods are somewhere near Saint Charles Street on the south side of town all this stuff along St Charles Street was built in sometime around the late 1800s so these homes are well more than 100 years old a lot of them Creak many are haunted I think they call this Queen Anne style you can drive throughout the city and every neighborhood feels different some of them are beautifully restored just like this one where you can really see how they've built things with style New Orleans is one of the few places in the country that's Progressive but not diverse at least racially yeah the culture and experiences are all very different and it's very diverse in viewpoints I mean if you're weird or Fringe nobody cares because they are too but racially it's a very black and white place it's 60 black 34 white and just a teeny bit of Asian sometimes neighborhoods are just random like there will be a few blocks of old restored mansions and then you turn a corner and it's crack houses you're a millionaire and you're shopping on the same local market as the local hood rats I love that I think that's neat and then of course you have some of the most dangerous and run-down neighborhoods you've ever seen and there is a lot of that here I tell you we're on the Lower Ninth Ward about two miles from downtown I'm sure you've heard of this place before it's more dangerous here than just about any other place in the country it's drugs guns poverty and down on your luck right now you could get an okay place here for about 250k but you could spend 10K if you wanted to but New Orleans hoods are no joke bad crime's the highest it's been in a long time now it's one of the most dangerous places in the country they say it's a lack of policing on the streets that makes things so bad here now nobody wants to be a cop here I mean can you blame them and policing is one of the many Essentials that are not reliable in this city they tried to recall their current mayor it didn't work and a lot of people weren't very happy about that but I'm going to do a complete dive into the bad side of New Orleans in another video a lot of this area still hasn't recovered from Katrina I mean this was all underwater 20 years ago when the hurricane hit and then another hurricane called Ida ripped through here and wrecked the place good the skyrocketing crime and the fear of future storms is sending longtime new orleansers to Texas and Beyond I think there's more New Orleans people in Texas now than there are in New Orleans and all those people leave and change the culture and demographics here one website is called 2050 Earth says this entire city is going to be underwater in less than 30 years I know hard to imagine the author of that site poses an interesting solution although no one knows for sure what the future holds we can still theorize and make predictions the author says maybe somebody will invent a large thick glass dome which will be placed on the ocean floor and then the water will be vacuumed out of this Dome into the ocean creating a large air pocket basically I can only imagine how well that'll go trapping all these people inside do yourself a favor and read up on what happened inside the Superdome when half the city hid inside it during Katrina for two days my word large Dome I can't imagine how much weed smoke would be inside that Dome and they would probably shoot a hole in the Dome the first day they put it up you're kind of right and then the whole class Dome would come crashing down onto everyone or the carjackers would just crash into the glass Dome I agree I'm happy it seems like there's a lot more to that idea that they haven't thought about yet huh and I sat by the way there's some parts of New Orleans that aren't just restored Mansions or Urban ghettos there's a middle class here most of the average folks are on the far western side of the city over here in places like Metairie and Kenner on the west side of town homes are in the quarter million dollar range it's a lot quieter and cleaner over here not nearly as much partying and gunshots you could even raise a family out this way or if you want the really upscale life you could take a very long bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to get to the more upper middle class in places like Madisonville and Mandeville homes around the 350 000 range kind of a low price for a nice looking area I have to say this is where the successful people live who don't want to deal with a lot of drama across the lake it also doesn't flood here as often but again you never know this is south Louisiana well out and about I did a lot I mean I was in New Orleans for three whole days so when you come here you have two general areas to stay you either go downtown to boring land or you stay in the French Quarter I want to stay downtown when you have all this on your doorstep on my first night out I decided to try the tone down tourist version of Cajun food at a place called the French Market I ordered the Bayou platter with shrimp Maki and jambalaya I don't do crawfish anymore not after sucking them heads at that Bayou Place outside of Savannah Georgia no oh the bathrooms here are gross but that's New Orleans all the bathrooms are nasty in the French Quarter this is another bathroom at a random bar I stumbled into at 5 30 in the morning I had to stand outside the bathroom door to pee to avoid standing and all the piss on the floor some of the bar Cedar never close down I was up early one morning and I was gonna drive to the hood so I needed a coffee and well I hung out here for a minute nice people drunk at 5 30 in the morning and all cars get stolen a lot here that's a thing let me tell you I was walking around the corner that same morning and I saw this car with a patched window and a sign and they have a club on the car remember those I haven't seen a damn steering wheel Club since the 1980s I didn't think they still even made those but you got to do what you got to do here I guess on my second night in the quarter I went to another tourist trap a place called the gumbo house neat Place lots of tourists just like me inside and look at that menu with all the hard to pronounce French things to eat I got the chicken gumbo in a local turbo dog and a side of taters thanks Fernandez then I got wasted it's kind of hard to walk by bar after bar when you're trying to lay off this stuff so you can be clear and focused for your road trip I mean this was only night two and had a long road ahead but and you're there you kind of just get sucked in those are called Fire and Ice shots I think I had four I might final night out I went to the Napoleon House and got a muffle out of salad and gator sausage is this alligator cage free I kind of felt bad eating the alligator after spending the previous afternoon hanging out with them and all that was probably the highlight of the trip I'd say out in the swamps they have these Airboat Tours outside of town where you can get up and close with the swamp creatures there's a lot of airboat tourism but I'm glad Scott was our guide he's a good old Cajun with a lot of good stories oh come on let's go come on you see the chicken come on so here's how it works you pay like 30 bucks and they take you out into the swamps for a few miles so you get up and close to the Gators and I mean close like they were under the boat I asked Scott if I could touch one and he was like go ahead bet you might lose your arm but he was touching them all day that's because he knows these Gators very well it's just a lizard they all have names and they know their behaviors and where they live and who they mate with and what their diet preferences are you missed it there you go some Gators eat marshmallows but they all eat chicken Amos likes chicken [Music] it's early spring so the Gators have just come out of burying themselves in the mud for months at a time that's why they were a little slow and we even saw baby Gators that was neat hopefully I didn't eat baby gator the next day that would have sucked all this swamp is a mix of Mississippi River water and gulf water it was all really neat I'm glad it was the first day of spring though I can only imagine how hot and buggy and muggy it would have been in July that's a nope for me and then there's making fry now there's going to be a whole video on him later but I have to tell a little bit of his story right now making lives on The Bachelor that's basically the area of land between the mighty Mississippi and the levees and macon's house is on the dam River like on it on it there's only 12 of these homes left on The Bachelor and for a long time their livelihood's been threatened the city the feds even private landowners they've all tried to stake a claim here and run these people out but they won't leave because they don't have to anyway macon's an author and he wrote a book called they call us River Rats so these are the last of what were once uh thousands of homes on both sides of the river down here thousands and some of them were were like stilt houses like these and some of them were like floating homes Shanty boats you know not not to dignify it with houseboat but Shany boats and some of them were places where Shanny boats that had like grown legs been put up on stilts Harry sits and works on his house and stares out over the river every day he watches the barges go by and feeds his pet goats Inky and Dinky nice life I have to say there's gonna be a whole video about making down the road though New Orleans a city where decadence meets dangerous it's not for everyone but it's something that everyone needs to see there certainly is no place like it if you're into history and weird and energy you might come back more than once but for a lot of people they visit they get drunk they look around and kind of shrug people who live here a long time say you either love New Orleans or you hate it there's no in between I can't think of a real reason that a family would want to move here though it's far from perfect but the people here are very close they all know each other they're in this whole New Orleans thing together the question is will it still be here like this one day probably not and that's a bad thing [Music] thank you foreign talk to me about the New Orleans some of the challenges that New Orleans has right now well right now uh mainly since covid uh there's a lot of unemployed people in New Orleans um and places like fast food places can't hire enough employees to um to work the shifts and so you tend to find fast food places are closed at six o'clock in the evening when they would normally be open until 10 or midnight or whatever because they can't seem to hire people yet there's a lot of people that are unemployed and so I don't know I don't really understand why they're not able to fill the positions and that seems to be something that's going on more than just in New Orleans because I've run into it in other places as well so is it is the is it the economy here is there just not a lot of good jobs or is it just the people that want to work I think it's a combination of the two I mean if you don't consider fast food to be you know a good job because it pays What minimum wage ten dollars an hour whatever there's plenty of jobs that pay minimum wage but uh one of the things that hap that's happened in New Orleans over the last 20 years is all the oil companies are gone uh at one time we had five oil companies headquartered in New Orleans and now there's none um you know the iconic one shell square is no longer named for Shell Oil so that's something that's one thing that's really changed in New Orleans over the last 20 years so is the city trying to evolve its economy I don't really know what the city's trying to do uh the city Administration is kind of screwed up and it has been for several years uh if you look in the news they're trying to recall the mayor and and the city council is just always in turmoil I don't live in the city of New Orleans I don't vote there so I really don't have a whole lot of say in it but uh things are screwed up in New Orleans and things are going to continue to be screwed up in New Orleans until they get rid of everybody that's in the city of administration and start over from scratch and whether that's ever going to happen um remains to be seen the economy is not doing well the crime crime is skyrocketed mainly since covid I mean it's always been kind of a high crime city but uh with covid things were shut down for a long time and as things started to come back it it it's gotten worse and worse uh particularly since they started removing the covid restrictions and if you look at the crime stats the number of stolen cars in the City of New Orleans is just astronomical uh we're in the third month right now and there's been thousands of cars stolen and you know you can look up the exact statistics every day and see that number jumping up by a hundred or more it's just crazy how bad things are and most of it is probably petty crime I don't think violent crime is really up that much but the petty crime like I guess if you consider getting your car stolen as petty crime um that that bothers me that kind of thing bothers me I don't want somebody even pulling on the door handles and going through my car at night to steal the spare change and that's the kind of petty crime that we get in the suburbs uh but it's all just going way way up and anybody that tries to tell you crime is down is is not being truthful so why why is it so dangerous over there uh that's kind of hard to answer I guess it's it's something that you get in any Urban Inner City setting uh like you would get in in places in New York or Chicago New Orleans is a much smaller city than either of those but I think it's it's a similar thing is you got a lot of people concentrated into a small area and they don't really they may not have enough to do to occupy their time uh uh in a lot of cases with the young people it's the lack of parenting um either the parents aren't interested in being parents and teaching their kids right from wrong or they're so busy working you know desperately hustling trying to support their family that they can't they're absent they're not there to teach their kids right from wrong has New Orleans ever recovered from Katrina to some extent uh it it's the population has come back but uh uh there's a lot of stuff that's never going to be the same as it was before there's you know entire neighborhoods that are missing and people live in those neighborhoods but they don't have the the close-knit community that they once had and if you live in that kind of a situation I think that can cause psychological issues you know as far as just what something that's always been a certain way and it's just totally different now but now I mean it's it's 17 years since Katrina so we're moving on to another into another generation that doesn't even really remember Katrina so we're getting on into into a whole new a whole new set of population that that it doesn't really have that much effect on you know talking about what makes New Orleans unique I mean visually you could and culturally and I mean you can experience it when you're here and you can research it but there's something about just being there that feels like nowhere else I've ever been well it's definitely different from anywhere else you've ever been because in New Orleans it historically was kind of a Melting Pot of different um people of different backgrounds and ethnicities uh you know we had the Spanish and we had the French and uh we have a lot of uh Haitians and Caribbean Islanders uh that come here um historically and of course this is only dating back 50 years or so we had a large influx of Vietnamese people after the Vietnam War um later we had uh a lot of Spanish-speaking people come in and then after Hurricane Katrina we hit even more because they were looking for work and there was work to be done here so we've always had a wide variety of different different people from different backgrounds here in New Orleans and all that kind of goes together to create a unique atmosphere uh weather comes to the whether you're talking about the music the food uh it it's all not nothing is just specifically from one place what do you think people what keeps people in New Orleans why don't people leave with the crime issues jobs I mean I hear about you know the threat of hurricanes why do people why why do so many people live here and stay forever well I mean personally you know my family goes back to the 1850s in New Orleans um you can say that you got to worry about the Hurricanes well where are you gonna go you know you go anywhere else uh in this country and you got earthquakes you got tornadoes you got something like that to worry about flooding whatever it is there's no place you can go that's completely immune to natural disasters so ours just happens to be the hurricane the climate is part of it uh I wouldn't want to live anywhere where we'd have to deal with freezing weather uh it does get very hot here but I wouldn't want to go anywhere south of here where it gets even hotter uh everything you know as far as me it's for practical reasons trying to escape crime while I live in the suburbs so you know the crime isn't really that bad uh you can continue to move further into the suburbs to get away from the crime but eventually the crime is going to catch up with you um but there is a certain thing about the culture of New Orleans that you know as I was saying it's Unique to hear that's what I'm used to and you go someplace else and you get something completely different and there's a certain degree of culture shock like going to New York City or something like that uh that is the closest thing I've ever experienced to culture shock was just because it was so different for New Orleans and I've been all over the country it's not like that's the only place I've been but uh it's so unique that you know in in my travels around the country I've always come back to New Orleans and I guess that's where I'll always end up being what do you think is most important to people in New Orleans what do you think they value the most uh I would say family because there's a lot of part of the New Orleans culture is is people tend to live really close by their relatives uh you know you can go into different parts of the city and walk down a block and everybody in that block is related to each other uh that's not the case with me but that's the case with a lot of people and I hear about it all the time you know people talk about that you know they're going right next door to her cousin's house or you know their grandma lives across the street and uh they don't go far from home but another teacher in New Orleans what do you think this place is going to be and in 50 years when you're about to be dead and gone what do you think is going to be going on here what do you think it's going to be like well if they don't improve something with the city Administration New Orleans is going to continue to decline and crumble uh I think I think it can be fixed but I think there's a lot that needs to be done uh in the city Administration and um another thing is you know there's always the threat of that hurricane that's going to come in and wash the whole Place away we've had in my lifetime we've had a couple of bad ones uh within 20 years of my lifetime there was a couple of other bad ones in everything's still here uh but you never know when that category 7 hurricane you know which they have to invent category seven in order to call it that but uh you never know when something like that's going to come in plus Louisiana's sinking and eventually um it's going to be even further below sea level and there's a possibility that this might all be beachfront property you know so it's really hard to guess at what the future of New Orleans is going to be like with so much working against it all right one more question what would you do if you were in charge what would what would be three things that you would do to fix New Orleans and get it back on the right path where I I wouldn't that's not a job that I would want because I know what needs to be done I mean every street in New Orleans needs to be repaved every water line and sewer line in New Orleans needs to be replaced but where do you get the money to do that kind of thing I'm not really I'm really the wrong person to ask you need to ask somebody that's gonna that's gonna be running for mayor you know and actually would have the know-how to do that kind of thing uh because that's the biggest problem is everything that needs to be done in New Orleans costs a fortune and you got a very poor tax base in New Orleans where's the money going to come from because the federal government's only going to give you so much you know um the state government's only going to give you so much and it's a it's a really major project just to overhaul the drainage and sewage system uh in New Orleans and you got to do that before you can fix the streets because the drainage and sewage all runs under the streets so as long as that's messed up the streets are going to continue to collapse into the sewers and and I wouldn't even try to guess at how to how to fix New Orleans are you looking to move and need advice I do Consulting that's right I'll sit down and talk about where the next perfect place for you and your family should be I do it all the time together let's find you a new home that's safe and checks all your boxes and I can also help you find your new house too email me and I'll work with you I'm not just helping you figure out where to move but I can help you find your perfect home too that's right I know awesome reliable agents all over the country and I'd love to connect you to somebody who can help you search for that perfect home hey guys if you learned something new about America or what it's like to live in America great you should think about subscribing and turning on your notifications you can also click one of these videos or playlists for more this this age next manager this has been a Corner House Entertainment production

Channel: Nick Johnson

Views: 351,735

Keywords: louisiana, new orleans, mardi gras, moving to louisiana, what is louisiana like, louisiana crime, new orleans travel, new orleans hotels, new orleans realtor, louisiana realtor, new orleans homes for sale, bourbon street, frenchman street, lower ninth ward, new orleans crime, alligators, is new orleans sinking, hurricanes, superdome, french quarter, kenner, cajun food

Id: Pw21HXzMB2s

Length: 41min 1sec (2461 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023