Twenty years after Katrina, New Orleans still scarred by the hurricane

Twenty years ago, New Orleans was devastated by Katrina.

It was one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. In total, more than 1,800 people died on the Gulf Coast as a result of the hurricane.

Parts of the city, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, are still scarred by the disaster. Before the hurricane, the neighborhood had 15,000 residents; today, it has only 5,000.

“Nearly 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, driving through New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, you see boarded-up houses, empty lots overgrown with vegetation, and deserted blocks with few people and few houses,” notes NPR , the American public radio station.

“This is not a third-world country. This is New Orleans. We're only ten minutes from the French Quarter. And the people of the Lower Ninth Ward are still suffering today.”

This business owner on Fats Domino Avenue is one of the few businesses in the neighborhood to have opened after the hurricane.

But today, customers aren't rushing in. Colton isn't open every day, after all. "Any growth and rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward will have to come from newcomers. And it hasn't seen many people arrive," writes NPR.

“People have forgotten about the Lower Ninth Ward. I have to stay strong, positive. But sometimes it hurts. It hurts because when I drive here from my house, I remember there was a store here, a school there, a hospital here.

We had everything.”

Colton, a merchant, speaks to NPR

Before the hurricane, the Lower Ninth Ward was vibrant. New Orleans City Councilman Oliver Thomas grew up there in the 1960s.

According to him, the neighborhood was home to up to 20,000 people, becoming one of the largest African-American communities in the city, where 61% of residents owned their own homes.

Rashida Ferdinand, director of Sankofa, a non-profit organization that opened a fresh produce store in the neighborhood, believes a government plan is needed to rebuild the area.

“There is no investment here. The deterioration is constant, pervasive. There isn't even any planning data that has been created and assessed. So the first step is to develop a plan to build and redevelop a space.”

Today, the Port of New Orleans is the only institution interested in the Lower Ninth Ward. The plan: to build a terminal for grain, transported by rail through the neighborhood.

But the NPR website notes that “homeowners fear it will undermine their efforts to attract new residents to a neighborhood that has too often been neglected.”—