Adapted (with intentional and extensive plagiarism) from "Don't Refloat, the case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans," a Sept. 7, 2005, article in Slate by Jack Shafer

[Note: Do not read if you are offended by satire in the face of human adversity.]

Nobody can deny New York's cultural and financial primacy or its historical importance. But before we rebuild the soon-to-be flooded city, before we think of spending hundreds of billions of dollars restoring waterfronts that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of tenements soon to be disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Irene may soon destroy.

New York City's world-class cachet is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 22 percent of the population living under the poverty line, and only 30 percent own their own homes. And it's a black, minority and foreign place, where 27 percent are Hispanic or Latino, 27 percent are African-American, 10% are Asian. 35 percent of New Yorkers are foreign born, and only 45 percent are white. 48 percent of New Yorkers do not speak the English language in their homes,  and females comprise the majority of the population.

The situation in New York City's public schools is even worse. Only 15 percent of the city's students are white, while 13 percent are Asian, 32 percent are black and 40 percent are Hispanic. How many of these students speak broken English or worse in their homes? New York's schools have failed their citizens. Science test scores of public school students in the city are abysmal. About 28 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

Police corruption in New York City is notorious. The former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik,  friend and ally of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and once touted to head up George Bush's new Department of Homeland Security, is currently serving four years in federal prison on 8 charges of fraud, perjury and accepting illegal gifts from an organized crime related organization.

Financial crime has enjoyed its headiest heyday since the Medici ran Florence and the Borgias stole Rome. The international rigged crap shoot organized by the great Wall Street families — Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and others — maneuvered unimaginable riches out of the pockets of ordinary people and into the offshore bank accounts of the wealthy. And, due to the corrupt relationship between the regulated and the regulators, the Wall Street families were given the go-ahead to award themselves obscene bonuses for successfully confiscating the financial future of the American people. Rebuilding the city that has been the proud home of these debauched families would be folly in the extreme.

This city counts 3,200,912 dwellings, with 70 percent occupied by renters. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 66 percent built in 1959 or earlier and less than 10 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). Many of the tenements likely to be flooded are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

Despite the corruption, crime, antiquated housing and congestion, New York City is the Number One most expensive place to live in the USA. Yet the per capita income of city residents in 2010 — $22,402 — was only 4 percent above the national average. 

New York puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, financial crime, cultural pretension and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New York's cheerleaders—both natives and bagel-eating tourists—will soon be advocating. They will predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New York to its former "glory."

Only one political party, led by hard-charging House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has questioned the wisdom of rebuilding the area damaged by Irene. In a preemptive strike against government do-good-ism on August 25, Cantor's spokesperson issued the following statement:

"We aren't going to speculate on damage before it happens, period. But, as you know, Eric has consistently said that additional funds for federal disaster relief ought to be offset with spending cuts." Given the economy, and ongoing talks about deficit reduction, it is absurd to speculate that Republicans would think the rebuilding of New York City would be worth the cost. 

The better alternative, of course, would be to bulldoze the place. 

For his candor and wisdom, Cantor was castigated by the liberal blogosphere. The Huffington Post labeled him "hypocritical and indifferent." The so-called Moderate Voice said "Consider the message he’s sending to the people along the east coast, in Irene’s path. We’ll help you but only if we can also weaken programs that help you. You get some disaster relief, but, otherwise, screw you," and The Week called him "callous." 

All this despite the obvious fact that Irene will be holding its punches when it hits New York Harbor in much weakened form, hovering between a tropical storm and the mildest category of hurricane. What in the world would New Yorkers do if the city were to be hit by a Camille, an Ivan or an Andrew?

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New York: that the east coast is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; that overbuilding of New York City, and especially Manhattan, have made the costs of disaster unthinkable; that the aggressive fortification of the waterfront has made it more vulnerable; that the Battery is especially likely to flood and that New York's skyscrapers amplify the velocity of the wind and their glass facades are designed to spray lethal shards everywhere.

Manhattan was a low-lying, modest, rural island, and that's what it wants to be again. With accelerating global warming, the threat to Manhattan is even greater, as sea levels rise and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes increases. Perhaps a city should never have been built there in the first place.

The call to rebuild New York will be difficult to resist, as it is the gaming center of many of the planet's wealthiest and most powerful people, despite the grinding poverty and low wages of the majority. 

If the wealthy want to rebuild, at their own risk and with their own dollars, they are welcome to do so. But few uninsured landlords and poor home owners will have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And one must wonder how many of the city's wealthy — the folks who provide the city's tax base, the job creators — will actually want to return after the evacuation? Will the bond daddies, the hedge fund hogs, the banksters wait for the city to rebuild, or will they immediately relocate to London, Zurich, Dubai or the Cayman Islands to be closer to their money and to continue the rape and pillage of the world's wealth without interruption? If they leave, will doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? Many businesses are likely to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New York as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won't be rebuilt.

Barbara Bush once was denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying that many of the New Orleans evacuees she met in the Astrodome after Katrina would prefer to stay in Texas, where they were temporarily relocated. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by disasters like Katrina, and soon Irene, may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of the twin cities' displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to de-concentrate some of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty and urban misery in the United States, and to accelerate the movement of financial crime offshore.