The smaller footprint: in New Orleans, higher rents destroyed public housing.

NEW ORLEANS' BROAD STREET used to be a major Black commercial district. Since the city's flooding, Broad Street's barber shops, clothing stores and restaurants have been replaced by a mile of shuttered stores and abandoned homes, while nearby public housing residents have been blocked from returning.

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Many visitors assume that flooding and other storm-related damage destroyed these homes and business. However, the main obstacle to these businesses opening is not structural damage. This neighborhood is a casualty of the dispossession of Black people from New Orleans, a city that was once 500,000 people and 70 percent Black, and is now estimated at fewer than 200,000 people, perhaps 45 percent Black.

The St. Bernard public housing development was relatively untouched by the storm. Its main problem was decades of neglect. "We've been having mold, mildew and backed-up sewers for years," said Pamela Mahogany, a St Bernard resident. "I've been here 42 years, and it's been a hazard the whole time. They never cared before. This is part of their goal to tear our development down."

Instead of repairing public housing after the storm, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, under the direction of the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, chose to allow the buildings to remain empty for a year, finally announcing just before the anniversary of Katrina that the homes would be torn down.

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker said shortly after Katrina. "We couldn't do it, but God did." A few months later, Oliver Thomas, New Orleans' City Council president, declared: "We don't need soap opera watchers right now," referring to public housing residents.

In New Orleans politics, no one is defending public housing residents, and few people are even advocating for renters. When speaking of public housing, planners, politicians and media use the racially coded language of "undesirable elements" and a "culture of poverty." The solution is said to be HOPE VI, a Federal program begun under Clinton in which public housing is replaced by so-called "mixed-income" neighborhoods.

In New Orleans, as in most major urban centers, HOPE VI has already been tried. A few years ago, the St. Thomas Development was redeveloped under the program. Despite promises of better housing for everyone, advocates claim less than 10 percent of the former residents were able to remain. The rest of the neighborhood was converted to market-rate housing and a Wal-Mart. Residents were scattered around the city, just as now New Orleans' poor have been scattered across the United States.

"We made this city," said Stephanie Mingo, a former St. Bernard resident. "We might have a little, small-paying job, but without us this city couldn't even function. You tell us we need a job; 90 percent of us had a job. Some of us had two."

With thousands of people kept out of the city by both federal and local government policy, the destruction of New Orleans continues. Rents throughout the city have gone up. A two-bedroom apartment that used to rent for $676 is now on the market for $940, according to the Brookings Institution. It's become a harder city to live in, and the attacks on New Orleans' most vulnerable have only made it worse.