Intro Blurb: New Orleans' lack of growth 17 months after Hurricane Katrina is worrying economists and demographers, prompting them to wonder if the city's population will ever grow again. [insert link]
Graphics suggestions:
- Line graph showing 1) population growth in New Orleans from 1997 to 2007, and 2) chart showing unemployment rate in New Orleans from 1997 to 2007.
- Slideshow showing pictures of current New Orleans with captions describing the scenes.
- A video interview with a current resident of New Orleans describing the situation.
- A list detailing the underlying characteristics of New Orleans before Katrina: 1) losing people at the rate of perhaps 1.5 percent a year before Hurricane Katrina, with a stagnant economy, 2) more than a quarter of the population living in poverty, and 3) a staggeringly high rate of unemployment, in which as many as one in five were jobless or not seeking work.
- Compare economic growth, population growth and crime rate to other cities affected by Katrina, including Houston and Biloxi, Miss.
The empty streets and abandoned houses prompt a gnawing question, nearly 17 months after Hurricane Katrina: Is this what New Orleans has come to -- a city half its old size?
The low population figure, 191,000, which was reported by the Louisiana Recovery Authority in November last year in the most credible survey to date, was about half the 444,000 count in a Census estimate before Hurricane Katrina.
The number was surprising, dashing expectations of a ''big return,'' as one economist put it, and was hotly disputed by local officials. Crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city's failure to thrive.
In New Orleans, before the storm, about 4 out of 10 men in the working-age population were out of a job or not looking for one, compared with less than 3 in 10 nationally.
''Where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can't see a way out,'' said William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University who has studied the city's economy for decades. ''Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.''
Others, however, worry that permanently losing so many people threatens the city's culture -- its unique way of talking, parading and eating.
''Culture is people,'' said Richard Campanella, a Tulane geographer who has written extensively about the city's neighborhoods. ''If half the local people are dispersed and no longer living cohesively in those social networks, then half of local culture is gone.''
Compounding the city's difficulties, and, in effect, helping to stem the population loss, was a secondary factor: the direness of the city's poverty, and its concentration. Those conditions helped make the city's poor population exceptionally immobile.
''The job mobility was very low among the poor, so they just stay where they are, and the social welfare system shored them up,'' Mr. Oakland said.
''It's not normal to have that level of nonparticipation in the labor force,'Mr. Oakland added.
Haunting the city's effort to repopulate, too, is the incalculable toll inflicted by ghosts from its past -- a political legacy of corruption and patronage, and a deep racial division with a far more distressing passage toward integration than was experienced, say, in Atlanta.
More than half of young black men ages 16 to 24 were not in the labor force. Unemployment rates among young blacks were above 25 percent. ''The data is showing New Orleans is really a basket case,'' Mr. Oakland said.
The new doubts also take into account the current barriers to repopulation, including the well-documented failure of the state's Road Home aid program for homeowners, the loss of tens of thousands of jobs since the storm, the crime problem and delays in rebuilding moderately priced housing.
Official efforts -- local, state and federal -- to rebuild the network of hospitals, schools and public housing projects that once served the city's huge poor population have been faltering.
''The longer it lasts, the more likely it is that our population is plateauing, the longer the uncertainty continues,'' said Janet Speyrer, an economist at the University of New Orleans.
--Edited for the web by Deepa Seetharaman. Original article published Jan. 21, 2007 in the New York Times. Link to original story: New Orleans of Future May Stay Half its Old Size, By Adam Nossiter.
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