New Blood, Old Blood: Who Left and Who Stayed in New Orleans

[SoCalDem]

http://www.good.is/post/new-blood-old-blood-who-left-and-who-stayed-in-new-orleans/

In the past five years, New Orleans has seen a massive demographic shuffle. Many people left, some came back, and other people arrived for the first time—and stayed. Here is a look at a changing city.

By Molly Reid.

Five years after Katrina, a former corporate event planner now runs a successful demolition service. A Mardi Gras Indian chief lives in Atlanta, but continues to perform with his tribe back home several times a year. A pair of first responders, neither of them from the city, found love, settled in New Orleans, and started a family. There are countless stories of the life-altering impact that the storm continues to have on people from the Gulf Coast, and they give a human perspective to the massive, hard-to-quantify changes the storm brought to the city as a whole. How many people left after Katrina and never returned? How many rebuilt their homes and stayed? What portion of the current population is made up of people who never would have considered living in New Orleans until after the disaster?

We don’t have precise answers to these questions, and there likely never will be. But here is what we do know: By July, 2006, the city’s population had dropped to 46 percent of its pre-Katrina total and by December, 2009, it was back up to 78 percent. The Greater New Orleans area, meanwhile, is already at 91 percent its pre-storm level. And as the city repopulates, it is changing. While New Orleans is still a majority-black city, the proportion of African-Americans has dropped to 61 percent, down from almost 68 percent before Katrina. It also is a wealthier city, with fewer adults lacking a high school diploma, fewer households with children, fewer households lacking vehicles, and a larger share of the population that is foreign-born.

These glimpses of the big picture describe a New Orleans that has held onto much of its pre-storm population while attracting a better-educated, wealthier pool of newcomers. Sometimes, though, the most compelling evidence of Katrina's influence is in the individual stories of New Orleanians old and new. Here's a look at how the 2005 levee breaches changed the lives of nine people.

New Orleans Then, New Orleans Now

Timolynn Sams

Age: 36
Native of: New Orleans
Lives in: New Orleans

After settling in Charlotte for two years after Katrina to secure a good education for her son, Sams resolved to return to New Orleans while at a business conference. Having endured one too many "You’re not going back there, are you?" inquiries from colleagues, she decided to return—if for no other reason, she says, than to tell the story of people who know and love New Orleans. In June, 2007, she bought a home in the city and signed on as executive director of a new nonprofit called the Neighborhoods Partnership Network, an umbrella group for 107 community organizations that effectively “fills the void that government wasn’t filling,” she says.


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