New Orleans population still cut by more than half

[UpInArms]

http://today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-11-29T201847Z_01_N29357330_RTRIDST_0_NEWORLEANS-POPULATION.XML

NEW ORLEANS, Nov 29 (Reuters) - New Orleans' population is still only 41 percent of its size before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city 15 months ago, according to a state survey that casts doubts on rosier predictions by the mayor.

In the most extensive population study since the deadly storm, the Louisiana Public Health Institute estimated 200,665 people live in Orleans Parish, which comprises the city proper, compared with a 2000 U.S. Census number of 484,674.

The metropolitan area, which also includes Jefferson and hard-hit St. Bernard parishes, has a population of 666,122, three-quarters of the pre-storm number, the survey estimates.

<snip>

The top concerns among the small sample of people surveyed are rising crime rates and the slow pace of government help.

...more...

[DavidDvorkin]

1. We're going to visit relatives in Baton Rouge in a few weeks

It'll be interesting to see how that city has changed.

[NOLADEM]

3. Baton Rouge has been a HUGE beneficiary of the storm

Yes, the traffic now REALLY sucks, but Baton Rouge was dying off, and now it is bustling. Neighborhoods that were emptying are now FULL, and prices are moving, which is allowing people who live there to realize some equity. Insurance money is flowing.

And as a Baton Rouge native I can say this. It still SUCKS. SUCKS. Food is better though because some New Orleans restaurants have relocated there or opened satellites. Other than that though, it is still a gross, Repuke city with nothing to do.

Come on down to New Orleans. We are doing great, and we could really use some visitors that aren't here to shoot someone.

[DavidDvorkin]

11. I've had some good meals in BR

My father-in-law says that the traffic is really awful now.

[Sabriel]

16. We're visiting during the holidays for that very reason

I never would've considered taking the family to NO before Katrina (we're not city folks), but we want to spend our vacation dollars where it might do some good.

[NOLADEM]

20. Thank you very much for doing so

You will have a great time.

Feel free to drop me a line if you need any referrals or assistance with your trip.

[KamaAina]

24. Looks like Jan. for Mom and me

after over fifteen years. Shame on us.

No referrals or assistance necessary; I'm a former resident, you see. An exception might be if somebody needs an amateur/dilettante planner; I've been feeding ideas to a new neighborhood organization all year but could always adopt another one!

[EFerrari]

2. Half a city disappeared.

:nuke:

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

6. And without any TerraTerraTerra

Amazing what incompetence can do

[EFerrari]

7. The public housing downtown never was flooded. Those people

are out by design, not by accident. The moneylenders have been trying to get their hands on that real estate for years.

Looks like they did it.

[waiting for hope]

4. I was online today

surfing for a site to order Pralines (mmmmmm) for Christmas and started poking around some NO sites. I saw a poll asking if things didn't get better (the poll stressed that it didn't matter what Parish you lived in), would you be moving out of the area in the next two years if the Government didn't step up and help more. It broke my heart to see a poll like that - it really shows the climate and thoughts of the area. I lived there for 13 years and I still get a tight chest every time I think of what has been lost.

[hughee99]

5. If you don't rebuild it, they won't come (back). n/t

[ripple]

8. This sickens me

I hope our new dem leaders are paying attention. A lot of people who lived there would like to come back, but the limited housing that exists now is simply unaffordable. My first visit to NO was the spring before Katrina and I fell in love...with the people, the architecture, the food, the music, and the magic. Without the people, the magic isn't there. Without the magic, it's like any other city with some old buildings, restaurants, and some venues for live bands.

I realize some people don't want to return to NO for reasons other than economic ones, but we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that those who want to return have a livable place to come home to.

[seriousstan]

9. A viable place to live would be one appreciably above sea level.

Even here in Ohio most people have enough sense to not live in the flood plains.

[ripple]

12. A viable place to live is the place we call home

That applies to all of us. No matter where we live, especially in the past 20 years or so, we are all subject to the threat of a natural disaster.

I'm not willing to write off a city or region that is so important to our nation's heritage on the basis of "I told you so". The levees can be repaired to withstand a Category 5, just as buildings in Florida are built to withstand similar storms.

One storm doesn't kill an entire city unless we allow it to.

[waiting for hope]

19. Thank you for that rebuttal -

I don't hear people bitching about people in CA and earthquakes, or the Great Plains area and tornadoes. A category 5 could wipe out New York City in a heartbeat - how would the nation react if that happened?

[Sgent]

13. Eliminate California, and New York City

Both are equally subject to natural disaster.

Being below sea level isn't a fatal flaw -- Holland has done well. The trick is to get the politics out of the levee / US Army Corp / Flood Plain management system.

[Tesha]

15. When they are wiped out, we probably will.

> Eliminate California, and New York City
> Both are equally subject to natural disaster.

When they are wiped out, we probably will. But there's no
point preemptively abandoning anything.

I said it a year+ ago and I'll say it now: There's just
no point to building back most of NOLA; there isn't enough
time to amortize the required investment before the next
disaster wipes it all away again.

Over the decades, we'll all be moving inland, devastated
city by devastetd city. NOLA just got to go first.

Tesha

[intheflow]

14. The places that flooded were families' homes for generations.

And why did all those minorities live there for generations? It was the lowest, poorest quality land, so that's was available to the freed slaves. It was the 19th century version of environmental racism.

But it doesn't matter how your family started living on one kind of land or another. The important thing is that it's your family home. To say that people have no sense who want to return home after undergoing a major trauma is just not true. They have plenty of sense--sense of family and sense of selves.

[EFerrari]

17. You might want to inform The Netherlands so they can evacuate. nt

[Jcrowley]

10. An unnatural disaster

Criminal and impeachable

Predatory

Indecent

LA would've been

Rebuilt overnight

or

Sooner

Image over

Red Beans and Rice

Profit

Uber Alles

[garthranzz]

18. Poor Leadership drowned us, poor leadership continues to drown us

Facts first: Katrina itself didn't destroy the city. It was less than Category 3 when it made landfall, more than 25 miles from the levees. The Corps was underfunded for five years, recommendations were ignored, and politics - local but mainly state and federal - made a pork picnic out of the levee and wetland projects. But even after the levees broke, nothing was done to stop the flooding, or drain the city. The water sat for weeks. In places where the water drained within a few days, as in Jefferson Parish, structures, though not contents, were salvageable.

We have no leaders; those who can lead are in legislative, not executive positions. Nagin's a joke, Blanco's ineffective and Bush - criminally negligent is too kind. The city's broke, there's an entrenched power elite, racially divided - upper-class uptown Republicans put Nagin back in office, despite his blatantly racist campaign. The Blacks (especially a lot of the ministers) keep their power and patronage, and the Whites keep theirs.

Crime is back up, economic development turns into Wal-Marts and carpetbaggers and education - the public school system may yet turn things around, but not without parental involvement.

People who came back, determined to rebuild, are leaving. The middle class is getting squeezed out by lack of business and greater costs: utility bills have doubled.

The demographics have changed. Many of the poor Blacks won't or can't come back, and the Hispanics, many of them the illegal work force, are settling in. Some areas - like New Orleans East where my parents lived - are so devastated that only patches of people live there. In a sense those areas are worse off than they were thirty-forty years ago, as they began developing, because then they could build from scratch. Now there's a veneer of disintegration everywhere.

Yet there are those working hard, trying to not only recover but revise, to get past the old prejudices, the ingrained laziness (Mardi Gras over commerce, politics of and as entitlement, etc), and the drunken stupor (Bourbon Street is for tourists anyway). It's hard.

The federal government owes us - more than it owed NYC after 9/11. But without decent leadership, civic committment, oversight, accountability and transparency, etc. - well, why feed Haliburton again?

We have a narrow window of opportunity, to recapture and expand. (Ironically, the major economic engines - tourism, the port, petrochemicals - were largely undamaged by Katrina. The French Quarter was almost unscathed.)

See my poem, The Magnolia Tree, and the soon to be posted, Algae in the Lagoon - which, a friend remarked, we may soon be if we don't grab this chance.

(By the way, there are many, many here - Black, White, rich, middle-class, poor - who do "get it" and are working very, very hard to revive New Orleans.)

And don't say "under sea level" - that's not the reason.

[pitohui]

21. supposedly 1/3 of people here want to move elsewhere in 2 years

they polled orleans and jefferson, in both parishes 1/3 said they wanted to leave

altho we live in an outer parish we'd like to leave ourselves, frankly, this is just a miserable situation, if you don't have a good job in one of the essential industries (obviously things like the port and the french quarter cannot be relocated) i have no idea why you would want to stay, i imagine that people who can get good jobs elsewhere are going to continue to flow out of the city just as they were doing in the 20 years pre-k

it is not a safe place for very old people or for very poor people and such should not be lured back only to be placed in danger again

but the crime, the inability for people who live here to park without being towed (so we can't actually enjoy the city ourselves, only tourists staying in the hotels get to do that), the danger from the storms -- there is just no quality of life here whatsoever for a middle class local

[KamaAina]

22. Was there a baseline figure for that from before the storm?

I distinctly recall many discussions, usually accompanied by a growing forest of empty Dixie longneck bottles, revolving around this very question: "I'm outta here. I can't take the (crime/poverty/hopelessness) anymore. I'm going to (Houston/Atlanta/North Carolina)..." "Yeah you right!"

And then the next such discussion would ensue, weeks or months later, and pretty much the same people would still be around... and that was back around 1990.

The point is that many who responded "somewhat likely to leave" to that poll may (one hopes) not actually pull the trigger and leave for good.

[pitohui]

25. no she says specifically the question never asked before

there is no baseline but i will say that i now know no one personally from my high school years, other than myself, my hubby, and the folks at his firm (a necessary industry) who are both functional AND still living in new orleans except for my closest friend and he is probably not really functional (probably i don't qualify either)

MANY of the folks i knew who were bright and ambitious got out in the reagan years

MOST of the rest left as a result of the recession/depression of the early 1990s -- the people you talked to who were bullshitting in 1990 were probably gone by 1992, the year of hitting bottom and 50,000 boarded up homes on auction by RTC, HUD, and various other gov't agencies

the few remaining who left because of katrina have discovered that, guess what, if you really have a skill, you would be paid more for it ANYWHERE else, even bumfuck alabama (yes, one couple moved to what the husband bitterly calls bumfuck alabama but said bumfuck has actually given him a job with real opportunity for the first time in his life)

i don't know what it even says about us that we're still here, people who have skills that are adaptable can get paid more and have a better life almost anywhere else

i don't blame anyone who leaves, there is nothing here now for the middle class, and what they had for the poor in terms of exceptional medical services has been destroyed

they seem to make a point of making it impossible for locals to enjoy the local "touristy" things, in other cities, they tow away the out of state license plates, here they make a point of preying on locals

at a low point i asked my husband to consider a contact in detroit for a job, he said it was impossible for political reasons, but if it were offered -- we'd take it. detroit!

if you can get out, get out, i would never blame anyone for leaving and i wish we could do the same

[KamaAina]

23. Reuters' math could use some work

(insert gratuitous N.O. schools joke here)

The metropolitan area, which also includes Jefferson and hard-hit St. Bernard parishes, has a population of 666,122, three-quarters of the pre-storm number, the survey estimates.

2000 numbers: Orleans 485,000 + Jefferson 455,000 + St. Bernard 67,000 = 1,007,000 tri-parish metro.

666,000 is slightly less than two-thirds of 1,007,000, not three-quarters as stated. Q.E.D. :dunce:

edit: two-thrids? (don't even ask; I went to school in Conn. :P )