The Economics of Return

Howard does not believe in white conspiracies, saying she has worked for too many "nice white people." Still, she remembers Betsy. "When she came through, they say the white man opened up the walls upon us."

Germaine Mills, too, is skeptical of conspiracy talk, but she says something is going on that is not right.

"I'm thinking they probably think less blacks, less crime," said Mills, who left her mother's house on the Sunday before the storm with only a change of clothes for herself and her family.

In Lakeview, which was recently described by a Times-Picayune headline as a decimated neighborhood where "Homes Are Sludge Pits With Little to Salvage," the notion of a hurricane conspiracy to remake the city strikes rebuilding residents as absurd.

"Why would you flood a whole city to run one set of residents out of town?" said Quaintance, 53, a retired policeman who plans to renovate the first floor of his Memphis Street house, doing most of the work himself. "It is just so ridiculous."

Officially Closed but Open

Robert Bouchon was one of the first residents to come back to Memphis Street. He tied a canoe to the front porch of his house on Sept. 13, two weeks after the storm. The city was officially closed to residents, but police and the National Guard were quietly allowing Lakeview residents in.

"It was very hot and very quiet," Bouchon said. "The tops of cypress trees were sticking out of the still water. There were no birds. It was pretty except for the fact that, you know, it was your neighborhood and it was underwater."

The front door was swollen shut, but he used a log to break down a side door, which opened onto the pantry.

"That's when it hit me," he said. "It was like a bad science experiment. The smell was just awful."

Furniture had floated from room to room. An antique mahogany dining table, which belonged to his wife's grandmother, had fallen to pieces. The water had risen high enough to take the paintings off the walls, which were bare and stained black from the flood. Mold had started to grow.

Boxes of brownie mix and bags of chips floated on the pantry floor. The Bouchons had long planned and hurriedly canceled a birthday party for Emma, their 12-year-old, for Saturday before the storm. In the refrigerator were 24 rotting hamburger patties that Bouchon and his wife had prepared for the party.

It was to have been the first chance for 15 kids from the neighborhood to swim in the Bouchon's new pool, completed just two weeks before Katrina.

After he drove back to Houston and told his wife, Cathy, about the house, she began waking up at all hours of the night.

"I would picture everything that I owned floating in that nasty water," she said. "Your mind can't stop. I was picturing the mold growing on my wedding dress."

A week later, Sept. 20, Robert returned home again. Memphis Street was impassible because of fallen trees, but it was dry. Lakeview was still officially closed, but authorities were letting many residents in.

In rubber boots and shorts, Bouchon slathered bleach on first-floor walls, found that nearly all the family photo albums had been ruined and rescued the kids' computer, which had been upstairs on the undamaged second flood and was fine. The children had begged him to fetch their video games.

Two weeks later, he hired a four-man crew that spent two days clearing out soggy sheetrock and dragging ruined kitchen appliances out to the front yard. As they worked, he found his wife's wedding dress, which had blackish-green tendrils of mold climbing up white satin, and hung it outside on the back porch.

As foul as the mess was, all the Bouchons wanted to do was go home.

"We miss our possessions, but mostly it is the neighborhood, our friends, the kids' friends," he said. "It was so close."

Memphis Street is in the heart of a neighborhood of middle-aged professionals and young families. Like the Bouchons, many had bought old houses in the past decade and rebuilt them with gourmet kitchens, wide-open family rooms and swimming pools out back.

Nearly all the children on the street went to St. Dominic Elementary School, just two blocks from the Bouchon's. Life on Memphis Street revolved around the school calendar, parish dinners and rotating Friday get-togethers at parents' houses.

Since Katrina, the Bouchons have been in constant contact with their scattered neighbors, by cell phone and by reading the St. Dominic Web site and its "Lakeview forum," on which there have been more than 1,330 postings.

As an engineer, Bouchon is certain that his house can safely be rebuilt. His quick decision to gut the first floor seems to have stopped the spread of mold. His flood insurance -- $180,000 for the house, $30,000 for its contents -- will probably not be enough to pay for the massive renovations needed to restore the house, which was worth about $650,000 before the flood, Bouchon said.

"Luckily, we have options," he said. "We had some savings."

He expects, too, that his business -- inspecting and designing foundations for residential and commercial buildings -- will boom in the rebuilding of New Orleans. He has already been asked to evaluate a number of damaged buildings.

But returning is not without its anxieties. What scares Bouchon and his wife is the levee -- just a half mile from their house -- that failed on the 17th Street Canal and deluged his neighborhood with outpouring from Lake Pontchartrain. A team of engineers from outside the city has concluded that floodwater did not overtop the levee; the barrier apparently gave way because of poor construction.

"Look, I am an engineer and I know how these things should be put together," Bouchon said. "Before the flood, I had no reason to believe the levees wouldn't work. Now, I have questions. This was not a natural flood, in my opinion. It shouldn't have happened. If they just rebuild the levee the way it was, that's not good enough.

"We want the neighborhood to come back; we want the school to come back. We just have to answer all these questions, and that will take time."

The Bouchon children -- Emma, Owen, 9, and Patrick, 7 -- have seen pictures of their house, but their parents do not believe it would be good for them to visit.

"We won't take them there for a while," Bouchon said. "It would be so overwhelming."

'Not Much Hope'

Mayor Nagin toured shelters in Louisiana last week, telling people that in New Orleans crime was down, wages were up and jobs were abundant. He promised a FEMA mobile home for those willing to come back.

Joseph Williams, formerly of 2513 Delery Street, is not even tempted.

In a two-car caravan, with his wife Kesa, his two children and his parents, he left the Lower Ninth Ward on the Saturday before Katrina and lives now in a three-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Atlanta.

"The mayor doesn't get paid unless he has citizens in the city," said Williams, 32. "Right now, there is not enough progress to change my mind. There aren't enough people back there and not much hope."

A probation officer in Jefferson Parish, Williams said he will begin work this month in a similar position with the Georgia Department of Corrections, but with a $4,000 jump in salary over the $24,000 a year he was being paid back home.

His wife, 28, an accountant, has done even better. Within a week of arriving in Atlanta, she found an accounting job at a small engineering company starting at $40,000 a year, a $14,000 raise over her job in New Orleans.

"There are good things that came out of this hurricane," Williams said.

Their daughter, Kayla, 7, attends a public school in the suburb of Riverdale, and Williams says it is a major improvement over Martin Luther King Jr. elementary in the Lower Ninth Ward.

"They are putting pressure on her at school here," he said. "In the long run, it will make her better."

Williams is part of a huge, multi-generational New Orleans extended family that he said has about 200 members, most of whom lived in the Lower Ninth Ward but are now scattered across Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia.

His mother and her nine siblings talk endlessly about going back, if the Lower Ninth Ward becomes livable, Williams said. But he and his brother and his many cousins, Williams said, have been keeping in touch on cell phones over recent weeks and are agreed that they are through with life in a city vulnerable to floods.

"We don't want to be in the position again," he said. "We are not as stubborn or headstrong as our parents' generation."

Marcelle's Diary

Marcelle Martinez, age 10, is the self-selected voice of Memphis Street.

When her neighbors down the street, the Bouchons, got their new swimming pool in mid-August, Marcelle popped by, interviewed the family and wrote it up for her newsletter, the Memphis Street Times. Before the flood and with the help of her mother, Marcelle published five issues on the family computer (since ruined by the flood).

When her parents loaded her and her brother Evan, 11, into the family car and fled the storm for the Midwest, Marcelle wrote her reaction in her diary:

"Here we are in Indiana. SIGH In case you don't know Katrina is a stupid hurrican that has completely destroyed my life. Well at least an entire year of it."

Marcelle, like her parents, expects her exile is temporary.

"I'm sure we will go back," she said. "I want all my neighbors to come back, and I want everything to be like it was."

Marcelle's parents cashed out some of their 401(k) retirement plan two weeks ago and bought a $210,000 house in Destrehan, a town on the Mississippi River about 35 miles west of New Orleans. They've enrolled the children in Catholic school there.

It is a holding pattern, something they hope will stabilize family life until they can rebuild in Lakeview.

"Look, the best thing we did in our lives was move into this house," Cathy Martinez, 42, said recently, while standing on the water-buckled, oak floor of her 3,000-square-foot house on Memphis Street, which she and her husband had spent most of the past four years remodeling. "We have lost more than a house. We have lost a way of life -- the way life should be."

Before the flood, she said, her block on Memphis Street was "like the '50s." She and her children walked to school, to church, to the supermarket and to the library. Cathy Martinez said she was one of five professionally trained women on Memphis Street who had chosen to given up their careers to raise children. Her husband, Ron, 48, a partner in a small architecture firm, had a 15-minute drive to the office.

Soaked with sweat from carrying intact second-floor furniture out to a rental truck, Ron Martinez said his flood insurance, capped at $250,000, would not pay enough to rebuild the house, which he said was worth about $600,000 before the storm. His expects his architecture firm, however, to prosper, with more work than it could handle as New Orleans rebuilds.

"The people on this street were all in position in their professional lives where we could live where we wanted, and it was here," he said. "The thought of not being able to come back here kills us."

Marcelle has been daydreaming about her bed on Memphis Street.

"I used to lie on the bed like the wrong way, with my legs and my head hanging off the sides," she said. "It would be cool if I could do that again."