Amid Lingering Chaos, Hope for New Orleans' Future

For many of us, the picture we still hold in our minds of New Orleans, two years after Katrina, is one of a flooded city — of desperate people on rooftops or at the Superdome, of mounds of garbage and debris. It's understandable, given the power of the images that were burned into our brains in the weeks after the most destructive storm in U.S. history laid waste to one of America's most distinctive cities.

In the months after Katrina, I covered the story in New Orleans. It's hard to recall exactly when, for me, despair about the city's future began to turn into hope. As urban planners converged on the city, as the Bring New Orleans Back commission began its work, as old residents and newcomers arrived, many of us began to see the devastation as an opportunity to create something better than what we had lost.

Because the fact is, long before Katrina, New Orleans — a unique gem, with its own architecture, food and musical styles — was in many ways a broken city.


Poverty was endemic, the schools were among the worst in the nation, public housing was a mess, streets and other infrastructure badly needed fixing, and political corruption was a fact of life that led many to believe things couldn't change for the better.

But all people—even reporters—need hope. It says something about the human spirit to recall how eagerly we read, and reported, each news story as a sign that out of the rubble, a better city would emerge.

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