If hurricane Katrina taught us anything, it is the price of doing "nothing." I use the word "nothing" advisedly. A category five hurricane (downgraded to a four) hits New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Region and sends economic ripples across the nation.

The cost to rebuild the city is estimated at $200 billion. My own estimate the actual cost will be several times greater. Why? Because the $200 billion will only return the city to a shadow of what it was.

New Orleans was one of America's most unique places, and it is that very uniqueness that is now under threat - but I will blog about that a bit later.

One of the first questions a business person asks is about profit. If your business is not making money, the IRS will call it a hobby - not-for-profit organizations not withstanding.

The interest rate is complex, but the rate is tied to profit.

There is a term, return on investment, which many of us have heard and which can be done on a massive scale - including for cities such as New Orleans - but they can also be done on the city and dwelling you live in. For example, there is some likelihood our home could be hit by a fire, or flood, or be burgled - so many of us take out homeowners or renters insurance. We might get money, but if some precious heirloom is lost, the "replacement," or the impossibility of it, goes beyond money. But we all know this and I make the point only to suggest that this kind of thinking is not alien to most people.

If a city such as New Orleans will be hit every hundred years by a hurricane carrying at least the power of Katrina, we know that every hundred years, or so, Americans will be revisiting the problem, and if not New Orleans, then in some other town or city. I was truly moved when I viewed Fatal Flood shown on "American Experience" series. The copyright says 2001, but it is a chilling parallel to what happens in the Delta. This was 1927 and led to a mass exodus of people, many of them black, to Chicago and elsewhere.

Destroy a city or region with flood waters and the displaced people move and send a ripple through the nation. Having a dust bowl that destroys once-fertile lands, and another migration begins.

I am amazed to hear there are voices that say let New Orleans die. Others predict a new New Orleans, New Orleans 2.0, I guess. Their vision is a shadow of the old one - part of the Disneyfication of America. I devote another blog to this, but the character of the city was due in large part to its ethnic composition and to shift that balance will mean the end of New Orleans, even if its successor is built on the same spot and bears the same name.

The fact remains that when a massive of people are displaced, they will seek shelter, jobs, and lives somewhere and all of American society will be affected.

I would say more, but will close on the example of the city of St. Louis. The Army Corp of Engineers predicted a hundred year flood of the Mississippi River that would effect St. Louis and they build a levy to withstand it. In recent years that levy was put to the test and had the river risen just one more foot, St. Louis would have been hit. Some called the original project a wasteful boondoggle, but when waters came to within a foot of the levy top, people wondered if it had been built high enough. St. Louis survives.

We can't protect all places against all things, but at the same time playing Russian roulette with cities and a shell game of shifting populations is not the only alternative.

Now is the time to invest in our cities and ourselves and though the people may seem far away, in our nation every more interconnected through the internet and other modern means, we come to know - they're just our neighbors and what happens to them happens to all of us.

We saw the banner after 9/11 "We're all New Yorkers, now." We need another banner and it should read, "We're all New Orleanians, now."

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