NEW ORLEANS — "It's crushing and we live here with faint hope — if any."

Sadly, that assessment from a group of this city's most committed residents — people lured for lifetimes by New Orleans' amazing sense of place, its history, its magical culture, music and cuisine — didn't come as a surprise.

I'd just completed a three-hour drive touching every major section of town, arranged by "Ladies of the Storm," a group of civic activists determined to stimulate outsiders' support for their storm-crushed city.

What one sees, eight months after Katrina engulfed 80 percent of New Orleans, is neighborhood after neighborhood overwhelmed by mountains of debris, wrecked homes, buildings knocked off foundations, watermarks up to roof lines, holes in roofs where people chopped their way out. There are even lingering "Possible Body" signs.

And the destruction isn't just in the Lower Ninth Ward, which has received most national attention; even sections such as Lakewood, with million-dollar homes, were heavily damaged.

There is a semblance of normalcy in Uptown areas, the higher ground called "the sliver by the river" that escaped flooding. And scattered across the ravaged neighborhoods, in a kind of Jack-O-Lantern effect, one spots scatterings of brave returnees trying to restore and reinhabit their homes.

But the Rand Corp. estimates that barely 50 percent of New Orleans' people are likely to be back in town by 2008. And there's a real question: Will a city government on the verge of bankruptcy be able to assure water, sewer and electric services to neighborhoods with just a scattering of occupied houses? The federal government is repairing the broken levees, but relying on levees in an intensifying hurricane cycle is a crapshoot at best.

A big uncertainty was supposedly resolved April 12 when FEMA issued its long-awaited "base flood elevations" — guides to where, and under what conditions, homeowners will be eligible for inexpensive federally backed flood insurance.

But the elevations "are a total cop-out," asserts Oliver Houck, Tulane University Law School professor and system critic. FEMA is using the same elevation figures it issued in 1984, even though the city has subsided up to 2 feet since then. The guidelines are so loose that virtually 100 percent of New Orleans, even areas flooded up to 15 feet, will be eligible.

FEMA is stipulating that houses in low-lying areas that were over 50 percent damaged be rebuilt 3 feet above the ground. But many owners are able to bypass that requirement by convincing accommodating city bureaucrats that their homes were less than 50 percent damaged.

All this sells well in a town where the rallying call is "Right to Return" to wherever one lived before Katrina. Race tensions, from two centuries of slavery followed by segregation, still crackle. Many blacks believe neighborhood-altering planning is a code word for eviction; many whites equate it with godless communism. Not a single one of the mayoral candidates in this spring's election has supported the thoughtful proposal of the Bring Back New Orleans Commission to focus redevelopment on safer higher-ground locations.

Yet it's precisely such a strategy — rebuild where it's safe, leave the low land to nature and parks — that represents New Orleans' only true long-term hope. Built up by eons of Mississippi River flooding, the French Quarter, Garden District and other close-to-the-river areas are up to 8 feet above sea level. Virtually all settlement was on high land until the early 1900s, when massive new pumps and drainage ditches triggered a housing development boom on former swampland — territory almost totally flooded by Katrina.

There's plenty of resettlement space. Denser housing could go into and between Uptown historic areas.

What's more, says Houck, there could be a big swap — turning expansive park areas now on high elevations into housing, converting flood-ravaged lower-lying areas into parks.

The tragedy is this: With quality, imaginative planning, and the courage to make tough decisions, a grander-than-ever, truly sustainable New Orleans could emerge. And despite race and class suspicions, neighborhoods could, as reformers suggest, be given a role in planning their future on fresh and drier ground.

Right now, the politics are moving in the opposite direction — restoration on flood-prone land, a drenched future and eventual loss of national support.

"We seem headed for a string of very bad years," one local realist told me. "Nobody can say it, but everyone knows it."

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times.

© 2006 The Seattle Times

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