A New New Orleans

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the city is still taking shape as a home of climate migrants.

by

It’s a Sunday morning in August, and I’m on my way to a Baptist service in New Orleans with Patrice Mitchell. Almost exactly twenty years prior, the flooding following Hurricane Katrina displaced her church in Gentilly for nearly a decade and reshaped the entire city. But she can still see the neighborhood as it once was.

“This was one of our projects,” she says as we approach an attractive row of balconied apartments with the name Columbia Parc carved across the stone entrance monument. For decades, the St. Bernard Development of 1,464 public housing units stood on this site—until it was flooded, and then quickly demolished and replaced. “You see that old building right there?” Mitchell points out a brick structure with green trim amid the others. “That’s how it used to look, but they then redid all of them.” Today, Columbia Parc’s mixed-income community offers just 229 units of public housing.

There are many lenses through which to view the disaster that changed New Orleans forever. Two decades and many climate-fueled storms later, Katrina is still recognized among the deadliest U.S. hurricanes, and the most destructive. But it also ranks as one of the largest rapid-onset mass displacement events in U.S. history. New Orleans, having since survived into its fourth century, is still taking shape as a home of climate migrants.

Virtually overnight in August 2005, New Orleans evacuated more than half of its population, nearly a quarter of a million people. Almost 70 percent of all occupied housing in the city was damaged in the disaster. Nearly one year later, the populace remained halved. Five years later, the majority-Black city had about 7 percent fewer Black people, and about 140,000 fewer people overall. By 2015, it had recovered roughly 80 percent of its pre-storm number—which has declined again in the decade since. In 2025, Census Bureau data showed that from July 2023 to July 2024 Orleans Parish (composed solely of New Orleans) lost more people than all but three other U.S. counties.

“I think we are quite far along in climate migration right now as a city, but it’s very rarely spoken about or called that,” Emmy-winning documentarian Rebecca Snedeker said at a screening in New Orleans of her 2007 film Land of Opportunity to commemorate the disaster’s twentieth anniversary. The documentary follows multiple families forcibly displaced during the early days of rebuilding the city, including some who called the St. Bernard Development home and protested its destruction.

New Orleans’s status as a shrinking city is a problem of its own design. In 2007—at a meeting during which Black residents were excluded from the room, restrained, and even tased on the chamber floor—the New Orleans City Council voted to demolish the so-called “Big Four” public housing projects in the city, including St. Bernard. Across the Big Four, and accounting for the mixed-use developments that replaced them, the city lost nearly 5,400 housing units that had served its poorest residents.

One 2014 study followed more than 300 low-income African American mothers displaced after Hurricane Katrina. The data indicated that in the first year and a half after the storm, homeowners in the group were more likely than the renters and public housing residents to have returned to their pre-disaster home. It also showed that public housing residents were 60 percent less likely than renters to have returned to their homes—many of which were uninhabitable until the city made repairs. Instead, New Orleans decided to tear its public housing down.

Columbia Parc, St. Bernard’s replacement, is like a city within a city. Amid the 683 wood-floored, granite-counter-topped units, a movie theater, and a playground with a splash pad, is also a 27,000-square-foot Educare New Orleans early learning center that offers early intervention school prep to the children who live there. Students are then funneled to KIPP Believe, a three-story $23.5 million charter school that opened in 2019, also within Columbia Parc. The housing development has received numerous design awards, platinum LEED certification, and visits from a number of luminaries, including President Barack Obama. 

The low-rise brick buildings of the St. Bernard Development public housing project had been a local feature of Gentilly since 1942. The community was tight-knit, producing notable figures in modern brass band and bounce music over the decades. Local officials have long claimed that the St. Bernard Development was demolished because it was too flood-damaged to inhabit. But that assertion was challenged by expert assessors, housing rights organizations, and resident activists, who argued that the St. Bernard buildings could have been repaired or more adequately replaced.

Just around the corner from Columbia Parc is the spot where storm surge waters burst through two thirty-foot sections of the London Avenue Canal floodwall and drowned Gentilly.

Decades later, Marceia Barabin still drives by the site often. Her house on Warrington Drive sat almost directly in front of the levee breach. Today, the now-empty lot is used by the city to stage construction equipment. Barabin and I meet one lot over at the Levee Exhibit Hall and Rain Garden, amid well-tended native plants and a covered wall of informational placards—the towering rebuilt levee looming over all of it.

Barabin had moved to New Orleans from St. Mary Parish for college and ended up staying through her graduate studies at the University of New Orleans. The house here was her first, a little two-bedroom, one-bath fixer-upper with terrazzo floors, built-in shelves, and original fireplaces. Weekends, over the five years she owned it, were spent fixing it up with family members. But the best part, she says, was the neighborhood. Her son grew up with the local kids, regularly riding his bike down the street to play with friends. It reminded Barabin of her own rural upbringing near her grandparents and schoolmates.

“I think that sense of community is what I always looked for wherever I lived,” she says. “And that’s why I settled here, and that’s why I settled where I am now.”

Today, Barabin still lives in Gentilly, on the other side of the London Avenue Canal. But the impact of the old place on her family is evident. Barabin’s eldest son, Stephen Walker Jr., who used to ride his bike around the neighborhood, successfully pursued a career in civil structural engineering due to the early influence of their old neighbor on Warrington.

Most homes now standing in this middle-class corner of Gentilly are new construction, all elevated off the ground and some with steeply angled roofs. Just one block from Warrington Drive, Mitchell’s church was displaced from its mid-century, glass-fronted building for nine years. Services for much of that time took place at a wedding venue called the Crystal Palace, two wards and a bridge-crossing away. Yet the congregation never stopped fighting to return. Painted along the length of one hallway inside, a mural illustrates the church’s recovery: parishioners piling into motorboats atop floodwaters at one end; the bishop clutching a copy of the Liberty Bank loan for rebuilding at the other.

While the congregants of Beacon Light would return to their original building and Barabin would find another home in Gentilly, thousands of residents of the St. Bernard Development and others would not. Yet the whole neighborhood might have looked even more different today had the public not pushed back against the now-infamous Green Dot Map.

In the early months post-disaster, a commission appointed by then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin assembled an action plan containing rebuilding recommendations. One recommendation included a building moratorium in heavily damaged neighborhoods until May 2006, giving residents just a few months to demonstrate their area’s “viability.” A map of six dashed-lined circles surrounded some of the city’s low-lying and breach-adjacent areas that could at some point incorporate more parkland and stormwater drainage in the case of less rebuilding.

Upon the release of the plan in January 2006, The Times-Picayune published its own version of the map. This was a dramatic misrepresentation, according to geographer Richard Campanella, who helped draft the commission’s original map. Condensing several of the plan’s graphics into one map, the Times-Picayune map showed six solid green circles instead of dashed-line approximations. These circles labeled entire neighborhoods as areas “expected to become parks and greenspace.” One of the circles covered the area over Warrington Drive, Beacon Light church, and parts of what was then the St. Bernard Development. The newspaper headline read “FOUR MONTHS TO DECIDE” with a subhead noting “full buyouts for those forced to move.”

Communities were justifiably outraged. “ ‘If my house lies within those green dots,’ readers presumed, ‘it will be greenspaced into wetlands,’ ” explained Campanella in his 2015 breakdown of what came to be called “The Great Footprint Debate.” In it, he criticized much of the commission’s 2006 action plan as hasty and ill-conceived. Many of the neighborhoods sprang into a groundswell of activism to resist forced relocation of any kind. In addition, federal funds to purchase significantly damaged homes through buyouts didn’t quickly materialize. The Green Dot Map was never implemented in any form.

But the scandal surrounding the Green Dot Map, researchers have written, “is widely regarded as the major catalyst for transforming post-disaster planning in New Orleans from a top-down technocratic approach led by professional planners, to a bottom-up, community-driven approach as residents in heavily damaged areas mobilized to save their homes.”

By 2006, similar recommendations had been gaining steam across the country for more than a decade in response to flood damage. As Campanella told it at the time: “Planners, ecologists, and geographers, including me,” argued against hard infrastructure in favor of “the benefits of ‘softening’ the urban periphery with ‘multiple lines of defense.’ Tactics in that strategy included a vast ‘apron’ of wetlands integrated with ‘non-structural’ solutions, such as living in ‘higher density on higher ground’ and building on piers ‘above the grade.’ ”

This had been exactly the idea behind the relocation of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, in the 1970s, as I’ve previously reported in The Progressive. Back then, after yet another catastrophic riverine flood swept through town, Soldiers Grove faced rebuilding requirements it could not physically or financially afford. Instead, residents carried out a community-led plan to relocate its Main Street business district to land on a nearby bluff. Floodplain properties were bought out with federal funds, which allowed home and business owners to relocate. The former downtown in the floodplain was eventually made into a park that could flood safely. The effort quickly gained local and then national media attention. The relocation project was intriguing: It voluntarily moved residents and buildings out of harm’s way; it allowed the municipality to retain its tax base; and it allowed residents to remain not only local but mostly together as a community.

Following what came to be known as the Great Flood of 1993 along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, some leaders in flooded Midwestern towns reached out to former Soldiers Grove leaders for guidance. This included the then mayor of Valmeyer, Illinois, a town that eventually became a poster child for its own relocation effort. In 2020, Valmeyer was named a model by the U.S. Government Accountability Office for “a climate migration pilot program.”

Several other villages in the hilly, riverine region of Wisconsin known as the Driftless followed the example of Soldiers Grove—as I also covered in The Progressive—when climate-fueled precipitation escalated. After experiencing back-to-back floods in 2007 and 2008, the neighboring village of Gays Mills eventually opened a new hillside development nearby. Others, including La Farge, Viola, and Rock Springs, also later chose to relocate homes, businesses, and municipal buildings out of the floodplain following record 2018 floods in the area.

Locals in the Driftless area and other relocated Midwestern villages emphasize that relocation projects can only work as community-led efforts. Still, the process was and is often full of conflict. These relocation projects involved agonizing delays, tensions among leadership (one Soldiers Grove official resigned; another moved away), and name-calling at town meetings. Some residents simply left. Relocated towns still struggle to attract new private business and residents. Yet these communities did manage, in the face of such challenges, to survive in their new form.

As relocation projects proliferate across the country in response to the impacts of climate change, some have generated serious housing and other complications for community members—including recently in Newtok, Alaska, and in coastal Louisiana.

Several years ago, Climigration Network commissioned a Black- and Indigenous-led team of people who had worked with or were from climate-impacted communities to address the issue of what was called “managed retreat.” In 2021, the team issued a guidebook on the less alienating concept of “community-led climate migration.” The guide steered clear of rigid prescriptions in favor of outlining processes that could help communities to identify their own paths forward. Outsiders who bring in models and blueprints for recovery, Climigration Network director Kristin Marcell told me in 2022, can be “very offensive.”

To drive around some New Orleans neighborhoods today is to see just as many empty lots as occupied ones. That is the case in the infamously hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood previously known for its high rates of Black homeownership. There, I met with volunteers and staff at an old home repurposed into the office of the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development (CSED). Despite contractors eating up billions in recovery funds, the Lower Ninth Ward is still without a full-service grocery store or hospital.

“Our rebound effort wasn’t that great,” CSED senior graduate fellow Darrell Esnault tells me. “If you just go over there and take a look at the Lower Ninth and New Orleans East, it looks like Katrina happened just a few weeks ago.”

CSED has grown and planted thousands of bald cypress saplings to shore up the depleted wetlands around the Lower Ninth Ward that made the area so vulnerable to the storm surge in 2005. But continued pressures on the neighborhood—including a $4.7 billion project on the canal that flooded the Lower Ninth—make it tough to envision a prosperous future.

Just before the disaster’s twentieth anniversary, citizen watchdog group Levees.org called out the Army Corps of Engineers for not issuing its usual letter grade of the levee system in any of the previous five years. A couple of weeks earlier, the organization held an anniversary event featuring now retired Lieutenant General Russell Honoré, who coordinated military recovery efforts in New Orleans following the disaster.

“Be prepared to evacuate!” he repeated three times in his speech.

A section of Lower Ninth, like Gentilly, was one of the neighborhoods targeted in the Green Dot Map. The sort of top-down forced relocation represented in the newspaper graphic would have surely been catastrophic and unjust. There may be a day soon, however, when these communities decide to explore relocation projects of their own accord. In August, Taproot Earth, a climate justice organization rooted in the Gulf South, hosted the two-day Monarch Forum in New Orleans featuring talks recognizing that “climate migration should be seen as a story of solutions.”

Like other relocated communities, those in New Orleans might not move very far from their original sites. They might include long-overdue public infrastructure—like housing and hospitals—in their plans. They might find ways to remain in community, like Marceia Barabin’s family did, even as they move out of harm’s way.

Of course, the second Trump Administration has hobbled the federal funding pipelines at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that enabled relocation projects for decades. But perhaps in this time of exceptional political uncertainty, communities so inclined may find the space for deeply inventive “imagination work,” as one former Soldiers Grove official called it, to build a different future.

“To a certain degree, to live in New Orleans, you have to pretend that you don’t see issues,” says Rollin Black, CSED’s director of coastal and habitat restoration. “You have to pretend that you don’t know you’re three-quarters surrounded by water.”