Burdens of Past Limit New Orleans's Future

A cable communications executive elected in 2002 partly because he had no political experience, Nagin is the fourth consecutive black mayor elected after generations of white control of City Hall. In a city in which political battles are often fought on racial grounds, Nagin faced the first post-storm squabble over race and rebuilding less than two weeks after the catastrophic floods.

The problems started when Nagin met informally in Dallas with 60 business and civil leaders, most of them white, to discuss the city's future. Hines, the former chamber chairman, said the session was "purely an ad hoc organizational meeting to have people to see each other for the first time after the storm."

But to black political leaders unaware of the meeting until it ended, the gathering was an affront. Some whites had spoken hopefully of a more prosperous New Orleans emerging from the flood because many impoverished evacuees might not return.

City Council President Oliver M. Thomas Jr., state Rep. Cedric L. Richmond and state Sen. Diana E. Bajoie later confronted Nagin. He told them not to worry "about this city being hijacked."

"They're fighting an awful lot of history," Morris said. "Blacks distrust whites, and vice versa. People in the state distrust the city."

A significant uncertainty is how large the city will be, and how many of its more than 450,000 residents will return, given an economic base that has been shrinking for years, especially since the oil and gas business migrated to Houston. The Port of New Orleans, for generations an economic engine, is so mechanized that it needs just 2,500 workers on an average day. New Orleans has one Fortune 500 company.

Analysts doubt that the largely unskilled workforce, even if it does come back, can sustain a prosperous modern economy. One in four adults has no high school diploma. The poverty rate in New Orleans is more than twice the national average, and the crime rate is among the nation's worst. Forty-six percent of Orleans Parish households bring home less than $25,000 per year.

It was symbolic of the city's troubles that after the storm, overmatched emergency workers turned to Blaine Kern, known as Mr. Mardi Gras for his role in staging the city's famous and lucrative annual festivities, for help.

They had lost power, the officers said. Could they borrow his generators, the ones normally used to animate parade floats?

"I said, 'Of course,' " Kern recalled, adding wryly: "Thank God for Mardi Gras."

Some have suggested that a reconstructed New Orleans could become a grander version of Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga. Hines, who chairs the United Way and the mayor's commission on homelessness, sees potential.

"It's up to the elected officials and the private sector how all this changes," Hines said. "If this federal money is put in the right way and [leaders] build new housing and good new schools and workforce training programs, people are going to come back because they choose to come back."

Pinsonat has his doubts.

"People are tired of sending money there, and it never goes for what it's intended. Outside New Orleans, they would bet the farm that it would be stolen or wasted," the Baton Rouge political analyst said. "A lot of people ask how Orleans Parish will be a better place based on what we've seen in the last 30 years."

Staff writers Manuel Roig-Franzia in New Orleans and Kari Lydersen in Chicago and research editor Lucy Shackelford in Washington contributed to this report.