So what did we miss? The city was too corrupt in a state that was too corrupt. We let education get away from us; our kids were being educated in awful buildings, and they weren’t learning very much. Although crime and the murder rate continue to go down, it’s still way too high. Income inequality continues to plague us.

So if the city’s going to succeed like all great cities — Detroit’ll survive, Chicago, which was in a bad place in the ’60s, has come back — you need a good couple of generations of really good leadership. The city’s got a long way to go. It’s still one of the great cities of the world. But from an infrastructure perspective, we’re in a really bad situation.

MR. BAQUET Are there places that shouldn’t be rebuilt? I’m not just talking about New Orleans. I’ve spent six years in California — there are places where the wildfires are that people once didn’t live. Do you rebuild all of New Orleans East? Do you rebuild the parts of San Juan that are going to get whacked in the next storm?

MR. LANDRIEU We’re going to get hit by a lot of stuff. In the West, you’re going to continue to get wildfires; you’re going to get earthquakes. In the heartland, you’re going to get tornadoes. In the East,you’re going to get hurricanes. Eighty-five percent of the people in this country live in and around what we would call vulnerable areas.

If climate change continues to do what it does, in 30 or 40 years New Orleans is going to be an island protected by the $14.6 billion levee barrier that we have, and everything south of I-10 is going to be compromised.

If you back up a little bit — and don’t get too afraid — within 100 years, the parallel where Austin and Atlanta are, is going to be the southern part of the country. That requires you to do a lot of thinking about prevention, about where people can live, where to put massive infrastructure investments. And the country’s really not having an honest discussion about that.