A City's Changing Face

There is another post-storm fact of life that is even more maddening to former neighborhood residents. Just two blocks to the east of Delery Street -- where New Orleans Parish ends and St. Bernard Parish starts -- homeowners have been back for months. Their houses and their neighborhoods were ravaged by floodwaters to the same terrible degree as the Lower Ninth, but they have electricity, drinkable water and FEMA trailers.

Most of the residents across the parish line are white and, like many white residents of New Orleans, they tended not to have fled far from the metropolitan area. Many stayed with friends or relatives, and have exerted political pressure on officials in St. Bernard Parish to restore services to their ruined neighborhoods.

"I am not a conspiracy person," said William Quigley, a professor at Loyola University Law School in New Orleans and director of its Gillis Long Poverty Law Center, "but it is pretty hard to argue with the facts on the ground. If you are black in the Lower Ninth and you don't have electricity, water or a FEMA trailer and nobody is giving you a timeline when you will, that is a hell of a lot of conspiracy dots to connect."

City, state and federal officials have repeatedly said that they do indeed want residents of the Lower Ninth to come home and rebuild -- when the neighborhood is safe and when appropriate services are available.

But nearly nine months of delays in making the Lower Ninth safe and appropriate -- as similarly flood-damaged white neighborhoods are provided with a full complement of city services -- strikes Quigley as unfair.

"People in Lakeview have had the chance to decide whether to come home," he said. "People in the Lower Ninth have not yet had the choice. With every week that passes, it means they are less likely to come home. These delays are remaking the city."

Anna Valdery and her husband, David Stirgus, would like to go home to Delery Street.

They finally own their house, thanks to an $84,000 flood insurance payment that allowed them to pay off their mortgage and have $27,000 left over.

The brick house, part of what had been a highly successful project for low-income, first-time home buyers, is seven years old and, unlike most houses in the Lower Ninth, appears structurally sound.

But Stirgus, a retired truck driver, and his wife, a nursing-home aide, agree that returning is all but impossible. For one thing, their house on Delery is in the part of the Lower Ninth that remains closed to reconstruction. For another, they have only about $16,000 left in savings from the Katrina flood insurance settlement -- not nearly enough to rebuild their gutted house.

They live now in a FEMA trailer parked in a row of 52 identical white trailers lined up along a gravel road in Gonzales, La., a small town about 50 miles west of New Orleans. They arrived there after a seven-month multi-state post-Katrina evacuation that took them by helicopter, bus and airplane to Texas, Arizona and California.

In the past month, they have been back to New Orleans for a couple of short, depressing looks at their house and the moldering, abandoned neighborhood that surrounds it.

"The feeling I got when I went back to Delery Street was: Leave it alone, forget about it, go someplace else," Stirgus said.

Database editor Sarah Cohen in Washington contributed to this report.