In Rebuilding,as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/us/25class.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

April 25, 2006
In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September.

The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back.

The group was so well organized and financed that it recently retained a professional planner to help respond to the city's requirement that devastated neighborhoods devise their own revival blueprints.

Elsewhere, in the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly black working-class community where some of New Orleans's poorest people lived, displaced residents voice that same steely resolve to rebuild. But they had no neighborhood association, at least until mid-February, when Charmaine L. Marchand, the area's state representative, took it upon herself to create one. "No one else was organizing," Ms. Marchand said, "so I felt it fell upon me as the only elected official from the Lower Ninth to do something."......