A Quiet Progress in New Orleans

At night, Genevieve Bellow's house is a lantern on a lonely block. After sitting under 3 feet of water from Hurricane Katrina, her modern two-story home in the affluent African-American neighborhood of New Orleans East has been gutted and put back together with new wood floors and a pool shimmering in the backyard. But while Bellow's house is back, her neighborhood is not. From her window, Bellow looks out at boarded-up homes and weeds bristling in the yards. Most area stores are shuttered. Debris chokes drainage canals, raising anew the fear of water.

Throughout much of New Orleans, recovery from Katrina has been hindered by the city's many prestorm weaknesses and delayed by false starts. Doors to ruined homes still creak in the breeze. Whole city blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward closest to the Industrial Canal breach are now a field of prairie grass pockmarked with concrete-slab foundations and driveways ending in wildflowers. Community anchors are boarded up or abandoned, and in the case of Gentilly's Provincial House convent, scarred by fire and rotting from water.

All this and more has people like Bellow wondering when, or if, evacuees still in cities like Houston and Atlanta will return and what will happen to all the empty shells that dot New Orleans.

Now, almost three years after Katrina, the answers are starting to come—and with them, a glimmer of promise. The federally funded Road Home program, the largest housing recovery program in U.S. history, has doled out $6.4 billion to storm victims looking to sell or rebuild their homes. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will begin acquiring rights to as many as 7,000 properties that homeowners sold, often at a loss, to the program. Armed with these property rights, the city can now begin the emotionally fraught and painstaking process of weaving the properties back into the tattered fabric of New Orleans. Some will be kept for parks, community centers, and the like. Others will be sold to neighbors, new homeowners, or developers—largely distrusted here—to bundle together for large projects.

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