Hope, reality collide in post-Katrina New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Shelia Phillips doesn’t see the New Orleans that Mayor Ray Nagin talks about, the one on its way to having just as many people and a more diverse economy than it did before Hurricane Katrina. How could she?

From the front porch of her house in the devastated Lower 9th Ward, it’s hard to see past the vegetation slowly swallowing the property across the way. Nearby homes are boarded up or still bear the fading tattoos left by search and rescue teams nearly four years ago. The fence around a playground a few blocks down is padlocked.

“I just want to see people again,” she said recently, swatting bugs in the muggy heat.

On paper, the city’s economy appears to be thriving, with relatively low unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. But in post-Katrina New Orleans, residents’ perceptions of their city’s recovery tends to depend on where they live, their vantage point of it. Swaths of some neighborhoods are sparsely populated, even desolate, and federal rebuilding dollars have provided much of the economic resilience.

While the recovery has been “stronger than anticipated,” the city “will still face challenges to long-term stability and prosperity,” according to a report released Tuesday by GCR & Associates Inc., an urban planning and consulting firm.

New Orleans’s economy is among the healthiest of major metro areas, according to The Associated Press Economic Stress Index, which assigns counties a score of 1 to 100 based on unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy data.

The seven-parish New Orleans region scores 8.6 through June, the most recent month for which figures are available. That’s considerably lower than the national average of 10.6 and means the average New Orleans resident has felt far less relative economic pain than people in Los Angeles (15.07), Chicago’s Cook County (15.11) or Florida’s Miami-Dade County (16.06).

There are other causes for optimism: the overhaul of New Orleans’ long-dismal public school system, an influx of college- educated residents, the greening of neighborhoods as they rebuild, and the elevating of homes to help protect them from flooding.

After Katrina, the mayor started talking about a new New Orleans. What he meant, he said recently, is a “better New Orleans; an updated New Orleans, one where we basically updated all of our critical assets but respected our history.”

Some analysts believe the economic resilience powered by tens of billions in federal rebuilding aid is unsustainable. Once the money is spent, they say, the tourism-based economy and lower-wage jobs that dominated before Katrina are likely to re-emerge.

The flow of returning residents has slowed, the cost of living has spiked and blight is rampant. Public investment in neighborhoods has been uneven, much like the pattern of Katrina’s devastation.

Water driven by the Aug. 29, 2005, storm flooded 80 percent of the city and essentially destroyed St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Other areas were spared the worst of the damage, and have rebounded more quickly.