Joe Peters, New Orleans entrepreneur

Gallier Hall is in the Central Business District. Head just three miles northeast and the neighborhood begins to change. Paralleling the bend in the Mississippi, St. Claude Avenue leads into the Bywater. At the intersection with Louisa Street sits St. Claude Used Tires. Out front sits Joe Peter.

He’s an entrepreneur and a small businessman; his business is the tires stacked tall and long, crowding around him. He sits on a chair worn down to the foam, shaded by a large wooden awning. A hand-lettered sign on the building lists his fees: "Patch $20.00" and below that, "Labor $5.00." And nearby: "No cash refunds." A printed sign reads, "Beware of dog" — there’s a pitbull roaming the yard. During the rescue efforts following Hurricane Katrina, searchers left behind X-codes, the now-iconic markings indicating what they’d found inside. In Peters’ neighborhood, some houses bore the spray-painted X-codes for years afterward. Some still wear them today.

But cities do have character, and that character can change

He used to work at the shipyards, but he’s been working at the tire shop off and on since 1975. When the orders came to evacuate, Peters stayed. He survived the storm. The receding waters revealed a ground strewn with nails and other debris; in the days after the deluge, Peters and his crew handled 30 flat tires a day. He charged the media, reasoning that reporters with expense accounts wouldn’t suffer, but allowed police and city workers IOUs, figuring they’d settle up later. He took money for his work, but when he looked around at the damage wrought to his neighborhood, he told The New York Times, he often wonders "where I'm going to spend it at?"

A woman approaches and asks Peters to borrow $10. Her grandkids are sick. She already owes him $60; he takes a ten from his pocket and gives it to her. "You got a little money, people wanna borrow a little money," he says. "Most of ‘em pay back." When another man asks for a loan, Peters refuses — the man has failed to pay back before.

Seeing a reporter taking notes on a cellphone, he says, "I know, all you kids got smartphones." He remembers penmanship. "A lot of things are gonna be lost because we don’t use them. Everyone wanna get bigger and faster. But some things take time. Like a good bottle of wine. Everything takes time." Later he says, "Eventually there won’t be no need for us," in a voice that suggests he’s all at once talking about the tires, the man who changes the tires, and something much bigger than both.

To Tim Williamson, that might sound like the kind of resignation he heard among local business leaders — an acquiescence to whatever might come, even a blithe fatalism about the future. But this too is New Orleans, still sometimes known as "The City That Care Forgot." A complicated city, from the historic mansions of the Garden District, to the carefully wrought, tourist-friendly nostalgia of the Quarter, to the Treme’s Congo Square, where hundreds of slaves once gathered to sing, dance, and make music. Walker Percy, among its most insightful chroniclers, wrote that, "it is as if Marseilles had been plucked up off the Midi, monkeyed with by Robert Moses and Hugh Hefner, and set down off John O'Groats in Scotland." No, that wasn’t quite it, he decided: "Actually the city is a most peculiar concoction of exotic and American ingredients, a gumbo of stray chunks of the South, of Latin and Negro oddments, German and Irish morsels, all swimming in a fairly standard American soup. What is interesting is that none of the ingredients has overpowered the gumbo yet each has flavored the others and been flavored."

Inevitable, that gumbo metaphor, and clear-eyed Percy didn’t overlook Nawlins’ tendency toward self-mythologizing. New Orleans, the city of performers, tended to perform, to strut and swagger, to draw attention to its quaintness and its potential for mischief, its careful embrace of vice. In short, it’s a place easy to romanticize, because the city has long romanticized itself.

But cities do have character. And that character can change, often before we realize how or why. Joshua Long, a professor of environmental studies at Southwestern University, wrote Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance, detailing how Austin, Texas, became a new tech boomtown, thanks to cooperation among the local Chamber of Commerce, the University of Texas, and companies like Dell. Through the 1990s, Long says, Austin experienced a disorienting degree of growth and change, and went from a mid-size college town to a city with an international reputation.

The character of the area changed; driven mostly by good intentions, the local identity became something else. As New Orleans is doing today, Austin set out to attract the best and brightest: Florida’s creative class, among them the tech workers looking for not just middle-class jobs, but upper middle-class jobs. They’d grow the tax base and, in Florida’s formulation, other businesses would follow them. Unlike some industries — say, natural gas extraction — tech was relatively clean, with little worry of environmental damage. Among cities increasingly in competition with one another, courting technology companies and their employees wasn’t just an option, it was an inevitability. Austin was no different.

"But you can’t really separate the economic and cultural relationship here," says Long; money changes things. An in-demand knowledge worker might move from the Bay Area or San Jose or San Francisco, or even from Washington, DC, or Boston, selling a house for $1.4 million. An equally attractive house in Austin could cost a third of that. "The positives are that suddenly you have an influx of money in your urban economy," Long says. "On the other hand, they start pricing everyone else out. And even though you’ve given them a more livable city, it’s become livable for a select few."

Long sees a similar trajectory in New Orleans. After the storm, investors saw opportunities in the city. Much of the inflowing money has gone to the kind of white collar, knowledge-worker businesses that appealed to Austin. "What happens," Long says, "is you start getting two NOLAs. One is still recovering from Katrina: the working class individuals who provide services to the new creative class." Artists and musicians, beloved in Florida’s theorizing, can't afford to move in. The ripple effect of all that new money reshapes neighborhoods; people are forced to leave certain parts of the cities. "Many of the jobs that are left, if you're not college educated or in that specific group, youʼre the service class, or retail workers," Long says. "You end up polarizing your city." (This might sound familiar to San Franciscans who’ve noticed the private shuttles operated by companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, which offer employees air-conditioned commutes while avoiding the city’s less-than-stellar public transportation system.)

"People are attracted to real places, " Long says, "but they almost have to bring with them the things that are necessary to our lifestyle now." For young techies that might mean laptops, and coffee shops in which to use them — a particular kind of coffee shop, even, one aesthetically pleasing and conducive to long work sessions, with free Wi-Fi. Tulane geographer Richard Campanella has documented the new style of eateries arriving in the Bywater, which he finds interchangeable with similar restaurants in Austin, Portland, or Brooklyn, "from the artisanal food on the menus to the statement art on the walls to the progressive worldview of the patrons." Long sees that cultural change as virtually inevitable: "We bring that to a city. Do we do that to a place that displaces the current working culture, which may not rely at all on those things and care at all about those things? How do you keep both?"