Edie Lush

After Katrina: houses are still empty, but the Big Easy weathers the latest storm

Edie Lush reports from New Orleans

Tourists in New Orleans’ French Quarter and Garden District would be hard pressed to see Hurricane Katrina damage if they didn’t go looking for it. On a recent visit to attend a wedding between a Glaswegian brewer and a Louisiana law professor, I ate gumbo, swayed to jazz and paraded behind a brass band between the ceremony and the reception. Not so different from a wedding I attended eight years ago in the same town. But you don’t have to venture far to see the lasting impact of the storm.

Four years after Katrina flooded most of New Orleans, killed 1,464 people and caused billions of dollars in damage, about 75 per cent of the 454,000 residents who were there before Katrina have returned. The areas that have not recovered are also the poorest. Houses in those areas — the Lower 9th Ward, for example — are away from most tourists’ eyes and many still remain largely empty. The scars of the hurricane are apparent in the form of boarded-up, mouldy houses, padlocked playgrounds and fading red ‘X’s sprayed on the doors of abandoned homes by the search and rescue teams passing through after the hurricane as they looked for survivors.

But it isn’t all bad news. Barack Obama’s recession stimulus package means that New Orleans has arguably weathered the recession better than many other American cities. On top of money to rebuild after Katrina, the city received an additional $50 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The unemployment rate is 7.3 per cent, compared to a national average of 9.7 per cent. Cynics point out that there are fewer unemployed here because the poor who left after the storm haven’t come back. That’s true, but because the stimulus package has created jobs in engineering, project management and social work, New Orleans is also attracting a lot of recent college graduates: in fact, this is now the fastest-growing big city in the US.

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