A lack of leadership.

Byline: The Register-Guard

None of the front-runners among the 23 candidates running for mayor of New Orleans has seen fit to tell the city's displaced residents that they shouldn't automatically expect to rebuild in exactly the same spot they lived before Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes.

The candidates' silence on this crucial issue has become part of the central legacy of the official response to Katrina, a legacy that can be summed up as follows: No one did enough when it would have mattered most. The federal government didn't do enough. The elected leaders in Louisiana and in the city of New Orleans didn't do enough.

Now, the candidates who are vying to lead the recovery of New Orleans aren't doing enough to educate evacuees that the city must be smarter about how and where residents rebuild when they come home. Doing enough now, when it matters most, would require tough choices and political courage. Instead, in the run-up to Saturday's primary election, there was deafening silence.

Before the diaspora caused by Katrina, the population of New Orleans was almost 70 percent black. A great proportion of the tens of thousands forced by the floods to move out were the city's poorest African American residents. There are clear policy reasons why poor blacks bore the brunt of Katrina's fury. For decades, federal housing policies concentrated the poorest residents in the lowest-lying parts of the city.

Underneath the policies, racial politics and deep-seated mistrust have poisoned the debate about how best to rebuild New Orleans. The city's black residents who were forced to evacuate fear that the lofty talk of "smart rebuilding with a smaller footprint" is just code from white politicians and rich developers. Translated, many black New Orleanians hear this: You can't come back to your old neighborhood because the powers that be in New Orleans don't want you back. Why? Because you're black and poor.

But no one, least of all low-income black citizens, really wants to return to pre-Katrina New Orleans, with its deplorable schools, rampant crime and substandard housing. The city has an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of all its residents, but especially its most disadvantaged.

Things are finally falling into place that will allow evacuees to make realistic comparisons of the cost of renovating their homes, tearing them down to build new homes or taking a federally financed buyout and walking away. As important, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has committed to strengthening and improving levees to withstand even stronger storms.

What's needed is a concerted effort by New Orleans leaders - starting with the mayor - to educate residents about how and where they will be able to rebuild, and why some areas are off limits for homesites. Allowing residents to return willy-nilly to dangerous neighborhoods is a criminal abdication of civic and fiscal responsibility.

And yet, to listen to the mayoral candidates, every neighborhood is open for redevelopment without regard to risk. That's not even a bad policy, it's no policy at all.