Newswire:

The Road To New Orleans Is Paved With Good Intentions

After the federal government shafted New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina, the Big Easy just can’t seem to get a break. First, trailers for evacuees were rotting from the inside out with toxic fumes. Then recently, ICF, the private contractor hired by FEMA to help Katrina victims, said it accidentally gave some homeowners too much money and is demanding families pay them back thousands of dollars. [New York Times] [Mic Check]

And yesterday, the New York Times reported that “There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of the city.”

In March of 2007, city officials “unveiled their plan to redevelop New Orleans and begin to move out of the post-Hurricane Katrina morass. It was billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and ‘cranes on the skyline’ within months.” Nothing, though, has come of it.

So, naturally, the blame game has begun. The city official in charge of the recovery effort, Edward J. Blakely, said the public’s frustration was understandable, but he suggested that bureaucratic hurdles had made moving faster impossible. Mr. Blakely said crucial federal money had only recently become available.

The growing frustration points up what has been a recurring theme in New Orleans’s sketchy, on-again, off-again recovery from Hurricane Katrina: grandiose official promises, apparently made to lift the public’s morale, that soon prove unrealistic.

Meanwhile, the repopulation of the city after the storm that emptied it has slowed notably. The Census Bureau’s latest estimate, 239,000, represents barely over half the former population — and well under what local officials and New Orleans demographers have been claiming for months.

The Big Easy has it hard.

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