Las Urbanistas

In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric.

Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront.

The design of the riverfront project has yet to be finished; even the developer concedes that it would take years to build under the best conditions. And construction of the park would probably require the cooperation of city, state and federal agencies — an almost laughable notion, based on recent experience.

Still, the scope and creative ambition of these projects suggest how architecture could someday be vital to the city’s physical and social healing. Both seek to transform dead urban areas into lively public forums, employing powerful architectural expressions of a democratic ideal.

The proposed Jazz Center, designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis in Santa Monica, Calif., is conceived as a great social mixing chamber, with music embedded in its core. For architects, its form may bring to mind early-1960s “Walking Cities” fantasies by the British firm Archigram: gigantic nomadic machines that could carry entire urban settlements in their bellies.

The center, however, is firmly rooted in the postwar context of downtown New Orleans. Situated on the corner of Poydras Street and Loyola Avenue, it would be flanked by cool glass towers. An elevated section of Interstate 10 cuts through the city just to the west; the imposing form of the Superdome, its broad crisscrossing ramps extending from the street right through the structure, stands just a block away.

Like the Superdome, the Jazz Center would be a piece of urban infrastructure: big, tilting columns raise one end so that street life slips directly underneath the building. Visitors enter by a grand staircase set beneath the bowl of a performance hall. From there, they may continue into a large exhibition space and cafe or climb another staircase to glass-encased foyers suspended above the sidewalk.

The curvaceous walls of the 820-seat performance hall suggest a womb floating within the city’s fabric. A 350-seat “black box” hall sits to one side, separated by a vertical slot of glass — the last glimpse of the outside world before entering the shared intimacy of the halls.

The design reflects longstanding themes in Mr. Mayne’s work. Like many architects of his generation, raised in the postwar optimism that made large-scale civic projects seem possible, he sees the post-industrial city as a work in progress; for him, private buildings, public space and urban infrastructure form a fluid, seamless whole.

Mr. Mayne, more than most, imbues his designs with the progressive postwar social values. His goal is to build better, more refined machines — an especially resonant metaphor in a city suffering because of its neglected, aging infrastructure.

The same impulse infuses the design of Mr. Mayne’s park. On a three-block-long site across Poydras Street from the Jazz Center, the park would require the demolition of the current City Hall, an undistinguished 1950s structure with minor flood damage. A new city hall would rise in its place, flanked by a new state office building and district court house. The existing public library designed in 1959 by Curtis & Davis, the city’s pre-eminent Modernist firm, stands at the park’s northern edge.

This project, an effort to jumpstart downtown development, is still in its nascent stages. Conceived by Strategic Hotels and Resorts (which owns the neighboring Hyatt Hotel), it has yet to receive serious attention from the three levels of government that would pay for most of the construction.

Yet it is possible to discern the architect’s intent. The park is anchored by a great lawn at one end and by a more formal landscape at the other. A series of small band shells, for informal outdoor performances, are embedded in an undulating landscape that frames the park’s outer edge. The band shells are covered by inflatable roofs that help tie the composition together while adding a sense of intimacy.

The results are strikingly different from the unimaginative mix of tourist-friendly casinos, convention centers, retail malls and sports complexes — often with faux historical themes — that transform many urban centers into soulless adult theme parks. Mr. Mayne’s design is based on the classical notion of the city as a vibrant democratic forum: gathering places for a vibrant intellectual and social mix.

The same democratic spirit imbues the waterfront proposal. The stretch of riverfront property near downtown received minimal damage during the storm. But since the 1980s, much of it has been cut off from the city by a warren of ersatz piazzas, retail malls, chain restaurants and a sprawling convention center.

Commissioned by Sean Cummings, a local developer, the plan would give back some dignity to the downtown riverfront. A series of terraces and parks reconnect the city with the waterfront. The cheesy food kiosks at the foot of Canal Street, for example, would be swept away to create a vast plaza stepping down to the water. A reconfigured ferry terminal would bend down to meet the water’s edge.

Farther downstream, the architects propose a vast public park at the end of Poland Street, a main thoroughfare, and a public amphitheater overlooking the water. At the park’s other end, a series of glittering towers would act as a counterpoint to the downtown skyline, visually connecting the eastern and western parts of the city.

In some respects the riverfront proposal reflects the willingness to turn over large segments of the public domain to private interests. The “towers in the park” could be seen as reinforcing class stratification: an enclave of luxurious glass towers overlooking the poverty-stricken neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. Yet the notion of the riverfront as a cohesive element in a fractured city is powerful, especially because it avoids the banal historicism threatening to engulf what’s left of the authentic city.

The problem all three projects face is that they are dependent upon government and private interests mobilizing for the public good. So far, those in charge of the rebuilding efforts have been practicing a form of benign neglect. These new architectural visions will not become reality if business interests are left to rebuild the tourist city while the public realm is ignored.

ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina’s — arguably the most famous musical haunt in a city famous for its music — is eerily quiet. This ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas won’t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage.

But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals; others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about who has found gigs and who is still struggling.

Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of Tipitina’s three cooperative music offices. “I go in sometimes and all I’m doing is checking my e-mails,” says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues singer.

For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists, grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The Tipitina’s Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5 million in aid; in all, Tipitina’s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster the music business here.

But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans’s most important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country’s most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz Fest, is a mainstay of the city’s tourism business.

In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business sector, including the energy industry.

Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three.

Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70 percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9 billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004.

Compounding the music scene’s slow revival is the challenge of tracking musicians — who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs — in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is building what it describes as a “musicians’ village” in the Ninth Ward, initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants — just one instance of relief for artists failing to meet its mark.

“It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” says Roland von Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina’s with his wife, Mary. “New Orleans musicians are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it’s not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.”

Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise the efforts of Tipitina’s at a time when governmental resources are strained. “With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we’ve got to find a way to get people back to work,” says Lynn Ourso, executive director of the Louisiana Music Commission. “They’re putting these musicians to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute — they’re teaching job skills.”

MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of Tipitina’s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed for a year in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with Tipitina’s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club, facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000.

He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run Tipitina’s properly — especially because he was a morning person. “It’s a different routine,” he says. “It’s working nights, and it just wasn’t very practical.”

Intrigued by the club’s history and its intense following, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do with Tipitina’s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina’s Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale for holding on to Tipitina’s, even if it only broke even, and marked a return to the club’s early purpose of supporting the local music scene.

Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La., opened later.)

The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina’s devastation. Many of the city’s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina’s suffered only limited wind damage, and the foundation’s services were in demand. Many musicians lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager savings accounts were obliterated.

After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation’s work. By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright issues and licensing agreements became a popular service.

“Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,” says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. “You could see the look in people’s eyes: ‘This is all I have, this is my career, and I’m going to do everything I can to protect it.’ “

For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina’s, which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians, into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina’s operates on razor-thin margins: he says the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000.

Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized performances. The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund, a charity started by the former dB’s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new instruments.

For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable.

Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded. Determined to stay, she found other housing — for twice what she paid pre-Katrina — went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the Tipitina’s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest.

Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for her to depend on it for her livelihood. “You just get into as many projects as you can,” Ms. Perez says. “I’m in, like, five different bands and that’s kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.”

Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans and daiquiri cups, musicians say they’re not seeing their incomes rebound. Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson Square, says the situation is still “as bad as it was after 9/11,” with his tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales.

“They’ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so desperate they’d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,” says Kim Foreman, secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr. Foreman says.

Katrina left as many as half of the city’s roughly 5,000 working musicians marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians.

“A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can’t get from A to B,” Mr. Hirsch says.

Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here, despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy’s cultural stew. “Right now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,” says the Hot 8 Brass Band trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for gigs and band business.

IT’S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an indelible part of the city’s appeal. But the city and state historically haven’t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural sector of the economy.

“People don’t think of artists as a category of workers,” says Maria-Rosario Jackson, director of the Urban Institute’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, which found that the city’s infrastructure for “cultural vitality” even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the country’s metropolitan areas.

Figuring how “to translate that authenticity to economic development has been the challenge for all these years,” says Scott Aiges, who headed the city’s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, which owns Jazz Fest.

Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy for developing what was described as the “cultural economy.” Since then, the state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived.

But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn’t fair to other working people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the commission’s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await financing.

New Orleans “needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,” says Holly Sidford, a principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations for the commission’s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “But without investment, really deliberate and coherent investment, that won’t happen.”

Ernest Collins, the city’s executive director for arts and entertainment, says of the commission’s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: “That was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don’t have that money.”

Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina’s say they are resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees, and put on a networking event for musicians during next year’s festival. Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians, which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses.

Next month, the Tipitina’s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in Spike Lee’s documentary film “When the Levees Broke,” is concentrating on touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad — even if that might mean missing Mardi Gras — so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band members, seem to value them more than their hometown.

“They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,” says Raymond Williams, a trumpeter for the band. “I feel like maybe the city should treat musicians in the same way.”

HOME AGAIN A Biloxi family is moving from a FEMA trailer into the first house built in a design-driven program for Katrina victims.

AFTER Hurricane Katrina destroyed Karen Parker’s house on Division Street two summers ago, her first instinct was to leave her storm-ravaged hometown of Biloxi, Miss., behind. But she couldn’t bring herself to abandon two generations of extended family there, any more than she could see living indefinitely with her six children in their 10-foot-wide FEMA trailer. So, a few weeks after the storm, Ms. Parker decided to rebuild on her street.

Lee Celano for The New York Times
Richard Tyler in his FEMA trailer.

Marlon Blackwell’s design for Mr. Tyler.

Lee Celano for The New York Times
The roof trellis on the Parker house.

She struggled for months to navigate the sluggish bureaucracy of government agencies in search of help, but was stymied, she said, until she met with a representative of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that specializes in post-disaster reconstruction. The group’s approach to her problems was more comprehensive and more personal, Ms. Parker said, than those of other organizations she had spoken with, and for the first time she felt hopeful about building a new house on Division Street.

On Aug. 15, Ms. Parker, a 43-year-old single mother and a day care worker at Keesler Air Force Base, will move into that house with her children. Designed by Brett Zamore, an architect in Houston, it has four bedrooms and stands exactly where her previous home did. It is the first of seven houses being built in the area as part of the architecture group’s Biloxi Model Home Program, a pilot effort that it hopes will lead to dozens more.

Given that thousands of Katrina victims remain homeless, Ms. Parker is well aware that she is among the lucky few.

“I followed the path” laid out by Architecture for Humanity, she said, “and it just got better and better.” The organization, which began life eight years ago with a design competition for housing in post-war Kosovo, has always been concerned with increasing the role of design in disaster relief. Cameron Sinclair, who was then a New York architect, founded the group with his wife, Kate Stohr, then a magazine editor, because they were “frustrated by the lack of opportunity for architects involved in humanitarian projects,” Mr. Sinclair said.

By 2002, the group they had founded was a full-time occupation for both Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Stohr. They organized more architectural competitions, like one for a mobile health clinic for AIDS patients in Africa that drew 1,400 submissions. After the Asian tsunami in 2004, the group had 4,665 volunteer designers in 104 countries, and was one of the few architectural nonprofits with people on the ground in India and Sri Lanka.

Today the organization, based in San Francisco, has 10 full-time employees and a $1.9 million budget paid for by foundations and individual and corporate contributions.

The Biloxi Model Home Program is focusing on the low-income neighborhood of East Biloxi, where Ms. Parker lives and where the need for permanent housing was particularly dire because of the loss of 3,500 homes in a community of 12,000 residents.

There were various private and governmental programs in place to help, mostly through grants and loans, when the architecture group got involved a few weeks after the hurricane, but lack of coordination among them and contractors and architects presented problems — particularly given challenges like the need to rebuild above flood level, at heights exceeding 12 feet in some areas, and to determine which building materials would be not only safe but also insurer-approved.

“Everyone was trying to serve the residents with just one piece of the puzzle,” said Sherry-Lea Bloodworth, the Gulf Coast development director of Architecture for Humanity. “If you send someone out the door with a loan but nothing else, they are completely lost.”

So the group approached things differently, setting up a partnership with the East Biloxi Coordination, Relief and Redevelopment Agency, with which it established a loan fund that the agency will administer over the next 10 years.

The agency, meanwhile, established a community board to identify the neediest families and determine which of them would qualify for the Biloxi home program. Architecture for Humanity, after sending representatives out to canvass door to door and surveyors out to document every property in eastern Biloxi, took the lead in coordinating design efforts.

When Ms. Bloodworth met Ms. Parker in her FEMA trailer in November 2005 while canvassing the neighborhood, it was immediately clear that she was an ideal candidate for the program, given her family situation and limited income. Ms. Bloodworth’s description of how Architecture for Humanity could get Ms. Parker the home she wanted, where she wanted it, “sounded too good to be true,” she recalled, “except she kept calling and coming back to see me.” Ms. Bloodworth championed Ms. Parker’s cause with the reviewing board for the housing program.

In the spring of 2006, Architecture for Humanity invited 26 architects, chosen on the basis of geographical proximity and reputation, to design houses that were affordable and could conform to a labyrinthine set of structural requirements. The architects were to be given a stipend for expenses but provide their design services for free. Thirteen responded, and last August they presented their designs to the seven families and the town of Biloxi at an Architecture for Humanity-sponsored house fair held downtown in a Salvation Army Quonset hut. Each family was allowed to choose its architect (even if another family had chosen the same one), a highly unusual form of client empowerment in this kind of housing competition.

“It was like an architectural flea market,” said Marlon Blackwell, an architect from Fayetteville, Ark., whose design was chosen by Richard Tyler, a single father with two children. “We were essentially singing for our supper, promoting the virtues of our respective schemes.”

Ms. Parker and her children were drawn to the “Blox,” a design by Brett Zamore that reminded them of their old neighborhood, lost to the storm. “It looked cozy and comfortable, like something that would fit right into Biloxi,” Ms. Parker said. “And the porches! I’m an outside person. I love the porches.”

Later, when Mr. Zamore and Ms. Parker met to talk about how the design could be adapted to her particular site and situation, she was finally able to visualize moving out of the FEMA trailer and into a home, she said. During the course of their conversation, it emerged that Ms. Parker’s “main concern was the narrowness of the home — 16 feet,” Mr. Zamore said. “Living in a space that is 10 feet wide for over two years has been painful, and she didn’t want to feel as if she was still living in a FEMA trailer.”

“I promised her that this would not be the case,” he added, although “it was only during the construction that she realized her trust in me was worth it — her needs were first and foremost to me.”

Mr. Zamore’s simple design cost $115,000 to build, a figure covered by a loan from Architecture for Humanity in partnership with the East Biloxi Coordination, Relief and Redevelopment Agency that will be forgiven if Ms. Parker lives there for 10 years.

Unlike many post-Katrina rebuilding proposals that have focused on reproducing historical styles, Mr. Zamore’s design, which came out of a kit-house concept he had been working on for several years, evoked the past without resorting to nostalgia.

Its updated vernacular style recalls two Southern typologies — the shotgun, a narrow one-story dwelling with rooms lined up single file, and the dogtrot, two rooms linked by a covered breezeway — both of which allow ventilation and help the house adapt to the Gulf Coast climate, Mr. Zamore said.

By last October, Mr. Zamore had finished working with Ms. Parker on the plan; groundbreaking took place in February. The process of seeing her peak-roofed, light-filled house take shape and then go up over the last seven months has been “like watching a dream,” Ms. Parker said. Now it’s just a matter of finalizing details like tile work and the installation of interior doors before she and her family move in on Aug. 15.

She will not be alone in the neighborhood. Most of the houses on her street were only partially destroyed, and many have been rebuilt by residents aided by more than a dozen different charitable organizations. A block away, one of two Architecture for Humanity homes designed by the Houston firm of MC2 is nearing completion.

Last week, Mr. Blackwell’s “Porchdog,” designed for Mr. Tyler, broke ground. The remaining three Biloxi pilot-program houses are at various stages of development, and Architecture for Humanity is working with other groups and the state of Mississippi to get financing to build 40 to 60 more over the next three to five years.

“I’m glad I stayed around — things couldn’t have gotten any worse,” Ms. Parker said. “Knowing that you can deal with anything that happens to you is for the good.”

The emergency room at Charity Hospital was by far the busiest in New Orleans before floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients and staff members. Almost two years later, the building appears almost abandoned.

NEW ORLEANS — At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.

On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors’ offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.

Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.

“I’ve been telling people, don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,” said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs.

Of all the factors blocking the economic revival of New Orleans, the shattered health care system may be the most important — and perhaps the most intractable.

Except for tourism and retailing, health care was the city’s biggest private employer, and it paid much higher wages than hotels or stores. But there are now 16,800 fewer medical jobs than before the storm, down 27 percent, in part because nurses and other workers are in short supply.

Only one of the city’s seven general hospitals is operating at its pre-hurricane level; two more are partially open, and four remain closed. The number of hospital beds in New Orleans has dropped by two-thirds. In the suburbs, half a dozen hospitals in adjacent Jefferson Parish are open — but are packed.

Fixing the city’s health care system “is critical both for the short and the long term,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “Short-term, having confidence that the health care residents need will be available and accessible is vital for folks who are returning,” Mr. Kopplin said. “Long-term, it’s important for employers — and health care is a huge business in New Orleans.”

Studies suggest that hundreds of doctors never returned. And some of those who did, especially specialists and young physicians, are leaving, said Dr. Ricardo Febry, president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, which has lost more than 200 of its 650 members. The exodus has “been a steady trickle,” Dr. Febry said.

The city’s mortality rate appears to have risen sharply in 2006, although state and local officials disagree about the level and persistence of the increase.

With the stress of life in the flood-ravaged city, the limited health care and insurance, the lingering mold and the discomfort of living in trailers, doctors report that the patients they see are often far sicker than those they treated before the storm. And even residents with health insurance can have a difficult time finding someone to treat them.

Government officials and civic leaders are floating plans for the future of the city’s medical system, for a state-of-the-art hospital, for a cutting-edge system to cover the uninsured, even for a “bio-innovation center” that would be an engine for economic growth. The question is what will happen in the meantime, which is likely to be many years long.

“We have to find a way to survive to that point, to provide care, or our city will collapse,” said John J. Finn, president of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans.

Waiting for Care

The problems with health care hit hardest on the poor and the newly uninsured, but they also affect doctors and patients, politicians and entrepreneurs, the displaced and the returned — and everyone at any level who has the misfortune to turn up in a jam-packed emergency room.

Consider the case of Bernadine R. Fields, 50, who learned firsthand how far people have to go for major medical care. A supervisor of city 911 dispatchers, Ms. Fields was among the many laid off after the storm.

The money she had saved for her retirement went for repairs to her house in New Orleans East. By last July, she could no longer afford the $367 a month it cost to continue her health insurance, or all the medicines she needed to treat her high blood pressure, or the $250 it would cost to see a doctor.

So she kept ending up in one of the few open emergency rooms, waiting for hours. After one of these episodes in April, she was told she needed transfusions to treat anemia — but there was not a bed available in New Orleans for an uninsured patient.

Ms. Fields finally got the treatment she needed — but only after an ambulance took her to the state-run hospital in Baton Rouge, 80 miles from her home and family. She stayed there four days.

“I devoted 15 years of my life to serving the public,” she said, “and when I need to be served, there is no one to count on.”

Ms. Fields’s neighborhood in the eastern section of the city, like other stretches of town, cannot recover unless medical care becomes available there, officials say, and neither can large sections of the economy. Doctors and hospitals, though, are reluctant to return unless the population does.

“I’m just hoping and praying nobody dies,” said Frederick C. Young Jr., president of the Methodist Health System Foundation, which is working with the city to try to reopen a hospital there.

The sharp contraction in the health care industry has economic effects, too, for coffee shops and florists and medical-supply companies. Marshall F. Gerson, whose family has owned the Ellgee Uniform Shop downtown for almost 70 years, said sales of scrubs and other medical uniforms had fallen to about half their pre-storm level.

“At this time of day when times were good, it was bustle-bustle here,” said Mr. Gerson, 63, standing in his shop late one recent afternoon. Now, “the foot traffic is almost nil.”

By working harder and selling more industrial and restaurant uniforms, Mr. Gerson has kept his business going but, he said, “I’m not a happy person when I get home.”

An Era’s End

The future of Mr. Gerson’s shop — and in many ways the future of health care in New Orleans — is bound up in the thorny question of what if anything will replace the hospital known as Big Charity.

Since it opened in 1939, Charity Hospital’s imposing building downtown has provided basically all the medical care — emergency, acute and basic — for the city’s poor, and served as a training ground for generations of doctors.

Despite some community protests, Louisiana State University, which ran the hospital, closed it permanently after the storm, saying it was too damaged by basement flooding. The state plans to replace it with a $1.2 billion complex that officials believe will attract insured patients as well as the poor, will also care for veterans and will serve as an economic catalyst for the city. But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground.

The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured.

On a positive note, the city’s trauma center, which treats gunshot wounds and other serious emergencies, reopened in February at University Hospital downtown, which like Charity is part of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. But the number of beds at University remains limited, and the building is so outdated that it will eventually have to be replaced, said Dr. Cathi Fontenot, the medical director.

In the meantime, the sick have to go somewhere. Often, that somewhere is Ochsner Medical Center, a huge private hospital complex in the western suburb of Metairie that looks like a mall, with a computerized grand piano that entertains patrons in a sunny atrium.

Before Hurricane Katrina, patients waited just 20 minutes to be seen, said Dr. Joseph Guarisco, chairman of emergency services at Ochsner, and surveys found that 99 percent were satisfied with their care.

After the storm, the number of people coming to the emergency room jumped, on some days reaching nearly twice the pre-hurricane volume. The number of psychiatric patients soared.

The uninsured, who had made up a small percentage of emergency patients at Ochsner, began accounting for more than a quarter of emergency room patients. Waiting times routinely topped an hour. The patient satisfaction rate fell to 34 percent.

This year, Dr. Guarisco reorganized the emergency room and cut the waiting time back to about 20 minutes.

But the other problems remain. “The hospital, post-Katrina, struggled financially,” Dr. Guarisco said, “and it still struggles to this day.”

Bad Time for a Fracture

No one thinks that emergency rooms are a good way to provide basic everyday health care, but government efforts to attract doctors and to open more neighborhood clinics have gotten off to a slow start.

Volunteers and nonprofit groups are trying to fill the breach, treating thousands of patients a month in more than a dozen low-cost clinics in the city. In many ways, the clinics have been a success for their patients, as they are elsewhere in the country, but they represent just a drop in the city’s ocean of medical need, health officials say.

Some were open before the storm but have expanded; others are new, like the Common Ground Health Clinic, which provides free medical care four days a week in an old corner store in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter. People wait outside in the heat for the clinic to open, and it is always jammed.

One recent Tuesday, the patients included a city employee with a neck problem, a college student with uncontrolled menstrual bleeding, a bartender with high blood pressure and glaucoma, and Nellie M. Lindsey, 54, a scrap hauler who was suffering from what she called “cancer stones.”

Before the storm, Ms. Lindsey said, she would have sought treatment at Charity, but she is so happy with the Common Ground clinic — despite the long waits — that she took her adult sons and daughter there for checkups.

Most of the people who come to the clinic hold at least one job, and many are working two, said Anne Mulle, a family nurse practitioner who came from California after the storm to help and ended up staying.

In addition to longstanding problems like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, most patients have anxiety, depression and stress, which are even harder to treat, the clinic staff says.

“We can take the health piece off your worry list,” said Dr. Ravi Vadlamudi, a Tulane University doctor who serves as the clinic’s volunteer medical director. “But we can’t get you a better job market or housing market; we can’t do anything about the schools; we can’t do much with police problems. I can’t do anything about most of what bothers you.”

For patients who need more complicated care, including mammograms, stress tests and vision treatments, the clinic can make referrals to St. Thomas Community Health Center, which Dr. Donald T. Erwin founded in 1987. The fact that clinics are now collaborating — and recently qualified for federal financing — is a new and welcome development in what can seem like a bleak medical landscape, Dr. Erwin said.

Another change he has seen, he said, is that even people with insurance are having a hard time finding doctors, getting tests and continuing prescriptions, so are turning up at his clinic, where they now make up about a quarter of the patients.

“Before the storm?” Dr. Erwin continued, and held a thumb and forefinger together to make a zero.

Counseling and mental health treatment are notoriously hard to find in New Orleans these days, and doctors say this is an especially bad time to break a leg, given the shortage of orthopedists.

Even patients with the means to pay and doctors who have returned can face long waits for treatment. Dr. Myers, the internist who used to practice in Mid-City, said recently that a new patient would probably have to wait two months for an appointment, though he would find a way to get existing patients in sooner. He estimates that 80 percent of those patients have returned.

Dr. Myers said he had been trying for months to lure another doctor to the area to join his practice.

“This is a great opportunity for people who have courage,” he said.

So far, he has found no takers.

Gwendolyn Marie Allen lives in a FEMA trailer near Baton Rouge with her son, who has schizophrenia, and her severely retarded brother, right.

CONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”

Their options whittled away by government inaction, they represent a sharp contrast to the promise made by President Bush in Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005.

“Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome,” Mr. Bush said. “We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons — because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love.”

As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears.

Thousands of families have moved off disaster aid. It is not clear how many evacuees have permanently settled into their new communities, but postal delivery data suggest that more than 56,000 people have returned to New Orleans in the last year.

Those still in trailers and FEMA apartments are the least equipped to start over. In Houston, according to a city-sponsored survey in February, a third of the people in those apartments were elderly or disabled, a third were employed in mostly low-wage jobs, and a third were still looking for work.

Hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt, in fact, and the local and federal governments have done almost nothing to make it possible for low-income renters like Ms. Cole, who has a ninth-grade education, to return. Because she was never a homeowner, she is not eligible for a federally financed Road Home grant to rebuild her house, destroyed in the hurricane’s floodwaters like the rest of her neighborhood.

With rents double or triple what they were before the storm, she could barely afford a studio apartment, much less anything like the little shotgun house she had, serenaded by brass band parades, on a street traditionally used by Mardi Gras Indians on carnival day.

Despite their longing, some evacuees are afraid to return; they must choose between formaldehyde-laced trailers and a city they view as contaminated, poorly protected from floods and more violent than ever before.

For those who do not plan to go back, or just want to sustain themselves until they can, government solutions like the trailer parks have turned out to be obstacles, especially for the many evacuees like Ms. Cole, who has no car and lost her job at Jack in the Box when she could no longer get a ride to work. At Sugar Hill, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket, the public bus stops only four times a week.

Into the Garbage Can

JoAnn Anderson needs a job.

She has filled out applications and taken drug tests. She has asked people who are already employed for help. A hotel housekeeper for 22 years in New Orleans, she has called every hotel and motel in the hotel and motel section of the Memphis Yellow Pages. They are not interested.

“I keep calling them back,” Ms. Anderson said. “Once I get started working, I know they would like me because I know I do my best and I do my job. I want to work. I don’t want to just sit around getting my bones all old and everything.”

Ms. Anderson, 53, and her longtime companion, Jeffery Evans, 52, are in the category of people for whom recovery is furthest from reach. Near the end of their working lives, unappealing to employers, yet financially unable to retire, many are on the brink of ruin — or will be when their federal disaster assistance runs out.

“I was born poor; I’m probably going to die poor; and before the storm came through I was doing pretty good,” Ms. Anderson said. She and Mr. Evans paid $325 a month for half a duplex in the Uptown section of New Orleans, with “a little porch watching the laundrymat,” she said, “and a backyard.” The streetcar took her right to her job at the Columns, an elegant 1883 hotel in the Garden District. Mr. Evans built cabinets and countertops.

Now they live in a monochrome apartment complex. An empty swimming pool bakes in the Memphis heat, and frayed ropes dangle where the swings should be. FEMA pays the rent. Their social life consists of church on Sundays. For the first time in their lives, they are on food stamps, and to make them stretch, Ms. Anderson shuns the nearby Kroger in favor of a distant Save-a-Lot. Without a car, she trudges home from the bus stop with frozen turkey legs in a canvas bag over one shoulder.

For months, they searched the unfamiliar city for work — she at hotels, he at temporary agencies and, when that failed, at fast-food restaurants. But being an evacuee seemed to be enough to tip the scales against them, perhaps, the couple said, because the evacuees who took jobs right after the storm were not in their right minds.

“I didn’t really ever think that I was going to get hired, for the simple reason that I have to show my Louisiana ID,” Mr. Evans said. “It was like, I give them an application, and from their hands to the garbage can.” At one business, he said, hurricane evacuees were required to take anger management tests.

Ms. Anderson said she applied at one hotel that never responded but, weeks later, was advertising for housekeepers again. She filled out another application.

In May, Mr. Evans finally found a warehouse job near downtown. The bus ride takes so long that he leaves the house at 5 a.m. to get there by 7. He earns $6 an hour.

But Mr. Evans is not complaining. “I’ve been trying to get a job forever,” he said, “so I’m very, very satisfied that I got a job like that.”

Closed Doors for Renters

What makes this couple’s situation all the more bitter is that New Orleans is desperate for workers like them. Luxury hotels are trying to recruit temporary employees from South America. Homeowners are desperate for craftsmen and builders.

But Ms. Anderson says the city is doing nothing to bring them back, pointing out that Charity Hospital, where the poor received heavily subsidized medical care, has not reopened.

“The places where poor people, poor black people lived at, they wasn’t trying to fix up any housing,” she said. “Everything was closed down.”

Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.

Despite pitched opposition, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.

At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.

And when the homeowner program faced a shortfall, one proposed solution was to transfer as much as $667 million from the rental program to cover it, said Broderick Bagert, an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, which advocates for renters. That idea died, but the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which controls the money, recently voted to transfer 5 percent of the budget for renters to the fund for homeowners.

Walter J. Leger Jr., the chairman of the authority, said the 5 percent transfer was temporary to satisfy Congressional demands. Washington will be asked to replace the money down the road, he said.

Mr. Leger said the state’s focus had been on homeowners in part because landlords were more likely to be insured, but he acknowledged the need to do more to replenish the city’s work force. “We’d like to get more money for the rental program, if Washington will help,” he said.

Poor renters, though, are not the only ones who need a hand. Terry Coggins, the coordinator of a consortium of aid groups in Memphis, said many middle-class people were only now asking for help.

“They’ve exhausted their savings,” Mr. Coggins said. “They’ve exhausted their insurance money. They’ve exhausted their ability to drive back and forth and check on their property.”

Barriers for Trailers

In many ways, evacuees have become the region’s new pariahs, shunned by towns and parishes who have erected a number of legal barriers to keep them out.

At least five jurisdictions in Louisiana and Mississippi — St. Bernard, St. John the Baptist, and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana and Pascagoula and Ocean Springs in Mississippi — have begun revoking permits for trailers or allowing their zoning exemptions to expire. Those moves affect families still living in 7,400 trailers across the Gulf Coast, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group based in Washington that has sued to stop the evictions.

Joseph D. Rich, project director for fair housing and community development with the committee, said some jurisdictions have complained about crime in the trailer parks, prompting FEMA to provide extra security. Mr. Rich said he believed there was another motivation for banning trailers.

“There are severe racial overtones to these actions,” he said. “Because there’s all this concern that black and low-income people will be coming into your neighborhood.”

Some local jurisdictions are also fighting to prevent the construction or repair of rental units. In Jefferson Parish, the suburb just west of New Orleans, officials blocked a 200-unit complex for the elderly in Terrytown, citing concerns that it would increase crime, and they are fighting a second complex for the elderly in Marrero. Westwego, also in Jefferson Parish, has placed a moratorium on multifamily buildings.

“You have some people that just lack any degree of civilization,” said Chris Roberts, a Jefferson Parish councilman who has fought to remove FEMA trailers and block subsidized housing developments. “I think low-income housing which is not properly run invites those people.”

Mr. Roberts complained that such residents were often idle, but many evacuees have burdens that prevent them from working.

Gwendolyn Marie Allen, 55, formerly of the Uptown section of New Orleans, now lives in Renaissance Village, a large FEMA trailer park near the Baton Rouge airport. Ms. Allen is the sole caretaker for a son, 20, who was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after a violent episode in the park, and a severely retarded brother, who huddled on the bottom bunk of a bed in their travel trailer, clad only in adult diapers. In an interview, Ms. Allen periodically shushed his wordless moans by waving a green flyswatter in his direction.

“I want to get out of here, baby, this is not no house,” she said. “I want something where he can move around.”

As proof of her resourcefulness, Ms. Allen opened the freezer of the trailer’s compact refrigerator where, to make room for bargain packs of meat from the supermarket, she had removed the shelves.

“The renters aren’t asking that much, just give us a start,” she said. “Put us there, and we could do what we have to do to survive. We could catch it from there.”

Lloyd Gonzalez stands in the front yard of the house he rebuilt at 4419 Annette Street in the Gentilly neighborhood. He still has a FEMA trailer in his yard.

NEW ORLEANS, July 1 — The sound of hammers and saws. New green grass. A few freshly painted facades. Birdsong piping from a young tree.

A Block Is Home to Only a Few The 1800 block of Brutus Street, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, is, like many blocks, a microcosm of the fragmentary efforts to repopulate the city’s working-class neighborhoods. 4740 Annette Street, at the corner of Brutus Street. Before Hurricane Katrina the home was occupied by an elderly brother and sister; the brother has died, the sister left and sold the house. The new owner put on a roof and gutted the interior, and is thought to be waiting for federal money. The house is empty.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

1928 Brutus Street The owner, Loma-Linda Boutney, a retired school teacher, is standing outside the FEMA trailer she occupies. She has gutted her house and recently received her grant from the Road Home program to begin reconstruction work in July.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

1920 Brutus Street Evelyn Davis, the elderly former occupant, moved in with her daughter in Kenner, La., after Hurricane Katrina and does not plan to return. Her grandson has gutted the house and plans to move in after he gets a Road Home grant. The house is empty.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

1916 Brutus Street The owner, Barbara Adams, a retired schoolteacher shown picking up her mail, moved back last August, the first on the block to return after Hurricane Katrina. She used insurance proceeds and her retirement fund to rebuild, and now lives in the house with her 92-year-old mother.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

1908 Brutus Street The owner, Stacy Bastian, a health professional who sells surgical supplies, returned to her house in May. She is waiting for FEMA to pick up the trailer in front of her home.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

1904 Brutus Street The owners, Kelan Barton, a pharmacist, and his wife, Dr. Lasandra Barton, moved to Slidell, La., after Hurricane Katrina. They have gutted the house and are trying to reconstruct it with the hope of renting it out or selling, but have encountered problems with contractors and receiving their government grants.

This is the Gentilly neighborhood today, once a backbone of New Orleans and all but given up for dead less than a year ago after flooding from Hurricane Katrina turned it brown and gray and silent in 2005.

Gentilly, home to about 47,000 people before the storm and a thin fraction of that now, is not dead. Haltingly, in disconnected pockets, this eight-square-mile quadrant north of the historic districts that line the Mississippi River is limping back to life, thanks to the struggles of its most determined former residents.

But they have had to do so largely on their own, because help from government at any level has been minimal, in their accounts. In recent weeks, some residents have reported getting checks from the state’s Road Home rebuilding program, but four-fifths of applicants have not.

Each block still contains only a handful of occupied houses. But a beachhead has been established here, a residential area critical to this city’s survival and one that before the storm was dominated by black homeowners, professionals and multigenerational citizens of New Orleans.

A similar story is unfolding in two other once-flooded family-centered neighborhoods, neither of them flashy but both equally important to this city’s future: Broadmoor, in central New Orleans, and Lakeview, in the northwestern corner, show signs of life here and there along the wounded streets. Neighbors, encouraged by the earliest post-Katrina pioneers, are moving back in.

All over the city, a giant slow-motion reconstruction project is taking place. It is unplanned, fragmentary and for the isolated individuals carrying it out, often overwhelming. Those with the fortitude to persevere — and only the hardiest even try — must battle the hopelessness brought on by a continuing sense of abandonment.

The selection process has been Darwinian, with a combination of drive, tenacity, luck and savings seeing the neo-colonizers through. New Sheetrock glimpsed through a window, often as not, was bought with scraped-together savings.

“I’m just keeping my head down,” said Albert Felton, 76, a retired mechanic who has exhausted his resources on his frame house on Brutus Street in Gentilly, near one of the levee breaks. He has done most of the Sheetrocking, painting and sanding alone, and the task remains unfinished. “You don’t see contractors out here,” Mr. Felton said. “We can’t afford them.”

Reluctantly, he admitted that discouragement sometimes got the better of him: “Some mornings, I just sit on the steps for two hours, and I go right back to Baton Rouge.” He is living in that city with his ailing wife and commuting over an hour each way to do the work on his house in Gentilly.

Essential residential New Orleans neighborhoods like Gentilly and Broadmoor, with their bungalows, Arts-and-Crafts and ranch-style houses, grew with the city over the course of the 20th century; their loss seemed to presage an abrupt reversion to the narrow port town along the river of the 1800s. Now, taken together, the rebuilding activity in the once-flooded neighborhoods points to a more hopeful future than might have been thought possible a year ago.

Statistics — fragmentary and loosely bandied about by civic boosters here — nonetheless support the idea of tentative rebirth. In Gentilly, a door-to-door survey by a Dartmouth College professor this spring found 31 percent of homes either renovated or occupied, and an additional 57 percent gutted or under construction. That meant that only 12 percent of the houses in the neighborhood had been abandoned; a year ago, block after block appeared forsaken and silent.

A few thousand hammers and nails, of course, go only so far in a city that remains stricken nearly two years after the Katrina floodwaters. With so many houses still empty, the effect of the rebuilding effort in much of New Orleans resembles a giant piece of Swiss cheese, with big gaps in settlement connected by thin strands of inhabitants. Though neighborhoods are shells of what they were, they have not disappeared.

At the same time, whole blocks in the Central Business District remain lifeless. The poorest districts, with tens of thousands of their inhabitants still stuck outside New Orleans, seem abandoned. The downtown complex of hospitals is moribund, as officials squabble over how to bring it back and as upstate legislators have plotted its relocation to another city.

The city’s port, the historic mainstay of the New Orleans economy, is years behind those in neighboring states in improvements, and shippers are complaining. The murder rate, the nation’s highest, is set to outpace last year’s, and the school system has barely begun to recover. Nearly a third of residents polled in a University of New Orleans survey released last month said it was very or somewhat likely they would leave the city in the next two years; the figure has dropped only slightly since last fall.

Still, the citizen-driven rebound from conditions a year ago is palpable. The old neighborhoods that stayed dry along the river, including the French Quarter, are lively. Restaurants are reopening, music spills from bars and coffeehouses, and tourists are returning in large numbers.

A Tentative Rebirth

The geographic boundaries of New Orleans have not shrunk. Residents have returned to virtually every part of the city in significant numbers, with the exception of the northern part of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Maps of mail deliveries, prepared by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a local nonprofit group, show the strength of the revival. Last August, for instance, an insignificant number of households in the flooded areas were receiving mail. A map compiled this spring showed that postal customers per square mile in those neighborhoods had multiplied into the low thousands. If the overall population has also increased to about 62 percent of the pre-Katrina count — from 49.5 percent last July, as postal deliveries have — that means the city’s current population may be up to 250,000 to 260,000.

It is a long way from the prestorm population of 450,000, but the effect of the new residents is clear in block after block.

“All it would take would be a handful of people to maintain the neighborhood,” said Richard Campanella, an urban geographer at Tulane University — and this is what is happening.

Today, even on streets devoid of residents, most houses appear gutted, their sodden Sheetrock and floors ripped out in anticipation of renovation, and many are being worked on. Trailers jut from driveways. In Broadmoor, homes are literally up in the air — raised on concrete pilings to comply with federal flood insurance regulations — and there is new landscaping everywhere.

In Gentilly, neighbors can occasionally be seen greeting one another across the nearly treeless streets where the magnolias were felled by Hurricane Katrina. These residents are visibly proud to have made a comeback.

The homeowners themselves — those who have laboriously reclaimed their lives in Gentilly and elsewhere around the city — have no doubt that their neighborhoods are alive. “It’s going to come back, going to come back spotty,” said Robert Morrison, a 34-year-old film industry worker in the energetic final stages of fixing up his trim two-story cottage on Western Street. “A spot here, and a spot there,” Mr. Morrison said.

Mr. Felton said the change was recent. “You couldn’t see nobody, a year ago,” he said. “A year ago, you couldn’t find people.”

The optimism on the ground is measured, however, and for good reason. It is unclear how many people are actually living in Gentilly: a renovated home does not mean an inhabited one, and one possible conclusion from the Dartmouth survey, by Professor Quintus R. Jett, is that the area contains less than a third of its former inhabitants.

Gregory C. Rigamer, a local consultant who specializes in demographic estimates for government clients, puts the population in the Gentilly ZIP code at 37 percent of its prestorm total, with similar figures for Broadmoor and Lakeview. In the devastated ZIP codes of New Orleans East, Mr. Rigamer estimates the current population at just under one-third its level before Katrina.

At nights and on weekends, even blocks clearly on the rebound are silent, which suggests many of the rebuilt houses remain unoccupied. Crime, surprisingly, has stayed largely in the poor neighborhoods that did not flood as badly.

“It’s still really quiet,” said Sherry Snyder, a nurse who has rebuilt her house in Broadmoor. “It’s really kind of strange.”

Government’s Erratic Course

The debate about whether New Orleans should consciously try to reduce its boundaries, however, seems to be over. When Mayor C. Ray Nagin repeated his resistance to shrinking the city’s footprint in his annual State of the City speech in May, he drew approving roars and applause.

“Don’t talk to me about, ‘We need to be smaller,’ ” the mayor said. “That’s like somebody breaking into your house, and they mess up your whole house, and then you get a judgment that says, all we’re going to do is fix up the living room and the bathroom because that’s all you need. We want the whole city fixed.”

But the course the mayor has set has been erratic, with a belated $1.1 billion rebuilding plan still unfinanced nearly three months after it was unveiled. Its author, Edward J. Blakely, a specialist brought in by Mayor Nagin to great fanfare late last year, has been bickering with a city agency over who is to oversee the plan’s enactment — assuming money is eventually found for it.

Meanwhile, the state has discovered it will not have enough money for its federally financed $7.5 billion homeowners’ aid program, Road Home, despite earlier assurances that it would, and even though only about one in five applicants — most of them entitled to it — have actually received money.

Mr. Felton, the retired mechanic, smiled slowly and bent his index figure and thumb into a zero when asked how much he had received. The story was similar up and down Gentilly and in Broadmoor, though checks have begun to trickle in over the last few weeks.

When government has not been an obstacle to the rebuilders, it has rarely been a help.

“FEMA didn’t help me,” said Oscar Lewis, a 79-year-old retired merchant seaman who ran out of money trying to rebuild his brick two-story house in Gentilly. He waited month after month for a Road Home check. “I had to work and scrape on my own,” Mr. Lewis said. Finally, a few weeks ago, after months of work, he received a $76,000 check.

On Their Own

Harry Russell’s freshly painted white-columned home on Marigny Street is a shiny beacon of normalcy. Mr. Russell, who came back before his neighbors, emphasized that he knew his way around government, having worked at City Hall as director of the mayor’s office of health policy.

“For me, part of my sanity is my background,” he said.

Now a professor of social work at Southern University of New Orleans, Mr. Russell used a combination of savings, insurance money and a Small Business Administration loan to restore his house. When almost all the work was done, he received about $80,000 from Road Home a week ago. “That kind of picks us up and puts us back where we were,” he said.

Closer to the spot where the levee breached, on a street still dotted with empty houses, Oliver Delacroix, 86 and sturdy, emphasized two pieces of good fortune: his eight children, who helped him bring his trim little cottage back to life, and his background as a bricklayer and mason, which allowed him to picture the reconstructed house, even when it was in ruins.

“Oh, I knew it could be done,” he said. “I knew very well.”