With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind

With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind
By Adam Nossiter
The New York Times

Tuesday 18 December 2007


Lake Charles, Louisiana - With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.

They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.

This vast diaspora - largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling - stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.

The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor's race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not - resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council - the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.

Now, they are adjusting to places where the pace is slower, restaurants are fewer, existence is centered on the home, and streets are lonely and deserted after 5 p.m., as in this city in southwest Louisiana. These exiles, still in semi-limbo and barely established in a routine, describe their new lives less in terms of what it now consists of than of what they left behind.

more...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121807G.shtml

indicate the New Orleans population has grown by an average of 5,000 people per month during the past year, and most of those are folks returning home. Very slow process but there are signs that living quarters are starting to catch up with demand although the costs have risen in a ridiculous fashion.

thanks again My Dear. 10 parts bad news, 8 parts good news and the Mississippi continues to meander southward.

(sigh) DU is the last place I would have thought would succumb to "Katrina fatigue"...

Our great city of New Orleans is hanging in there. Ray Nagin continues to be a dunderhead, but at least Eddie Jordan is history. The slaughter in the streets continue as do the arrivals of tourists and football fans. Ya just can't make this stuff up.

Interesting. Another brick in the wall of shameful journalism.

Alongside Washington Post's

"For one Family, a Happy Ending."

-- An article about a man who lost his whole family to the flood waters -- but got forcibly evacuated to Fayetteville, Ark, where he got to live and work among white people for the first time, resulting in a "happy ending" for all!