A new city council—voted in by an electorate consisting of mostly homeowners and those well-off enough to return—unanimously approved the demolition of public housing.

Four years after Katrina, the city of New Orleans can still break your heart. Not with the raw suffering of the hurricane and its aftermath, but with the stark exposure of an economic apartheid that keeps poor people of color locked out of the city’s political process, as well as its prospects for restored housing and renewed economic growth.

By some accounts, New Orleans’s recovery has made progress. The city’s population level reached 73.7 percent of its pre-Katrina number by the end of 2008, according to the January 2009 New Orleans Index released by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. (Updated figures will be available in August.) Because the region had already been literally “under water,” New Orleans pretty much bypassed the foreclosure crisis that is engulfing many parts of the country. And compared to the national unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent in March, New Orleans unemployment has hovered at about 5 percent since November 2008.

But this more prosperous picture may be the result of cropping out many of the city’s poor former residents—most of whom are Black—who have been blocked from returning.

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center’s demographic analysis, based on the latest available 2007 Census population estimates, concludes that the city’s lower poverty rate is a result of the “net outmigration of individuals with fewer resources.” This economically better-off population is also a little more white (going from 26.6 percent in 2000 to 31.2 percent in 2007) and a little less Black (from 66.7 percent to 60.2 percent), according to the Center.

There are still more than 4,600 displaced families living in FEMA trailers and another 17,000 families depending on vouchers from the Disaster Housing Assistance Program, according to March 2009 data from the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency.

With its housing crisis, New Orleans functions as a magnified microcosm for what is happening now to other cities that are facing a rise in homelessness—the arrival of tent cities in some places and heightened pressures on tenants with high rents, evictions and increased demand for affordable housing.

“There is a large homeless population, and it’s not by chance that most are Black.”

Despite the obstacles, many former residents are still trying to return.

“The recovery is not happening in the interests of low-income people, but they are coming back because of ties to culture and family,” said Saket Soni, director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.

Those who are returning are living with relatives or staying in shelters, abandoned homes or on the streets, according to Tamar McFarlane, who organized in New Orleans’s tent cities and shelters with the Workers’ Center.

Before Katrina, New Orleans was a city with a majority of renters and low-income residents. With more than half of rental units destroyed in the storm and rents doubling quickly, lack of affordable housing remains one of the main challenges for residents struggling with the “high rent-low wage squeeze,” as McFarlane put it.

It took William Perry, who is 36, a year of living in Baton Rouge with relatives before he landed a job at Wal-Mart and was able to find a place with his girlfriend and five children. They pay $1,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, which would have rented for about $600 before Katrina.

“We’re just getting to above water now,” Perry said. “I’m used to making a way out of no way, but if it happens again, I don’t have it in me to come back. Just gonna make my bed where I land next time. It’s too hard.”

Rents increased 4 percent between 2008 and 2009, and overall, rents are now 52-percent higher than before Hurricane Katrina, according to the New Orleans Index. A typical one-bedroom apartment now rents for about $881, compared to $578 in 2005.

Migrant workers are acutely affected by the housing crisis. According to local advocates, migrant workers usually live eight to 10 in an apartment, often in substandard conditions without utilities. When bosses don’t pay on time or withhold wages outright, an entire household of workers at a time can end up evicted and living under the bridge, out of cars or facing deportation.

The Census estimates a small rise in the population of Latinos, from 3 percent in 2000 to 4.5 percent in 2007, but this fails to account for many people who are afraid of identifying themselves to authorities or who live in transient and informal housing arrangements.

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