How Are Things in New Orleans?
30 06 2007
I get this a lot. I talk to so many people all over the country in the line of work I do. An advertiser wrote me tonight and at the end of her email it said,
PS. If you have time, I’d be interested in hearing a post Katrina report.So tonight I took some time, and since so many people want to know, here was my response:
From the Second Most Likely Area To Flood Out Sacramento, CA.
As far as New Orleans goes, overall I’d say the city is doing well considering what happened during Katrina. The good part is that most parts of town are “back to normal” I guess one could say. The bad part is that the poorer parts of the city are still deserted and not making much progress. The people with the least resources are the ones that were hit the hardest. There’s this “Road Home” program that the State created to give out the federal funds that were allocated to help rebuild, and over the past few months people have just STARTED to get that money – 2 yrs. later. So you can imagine, what low income person, who has already settled down in another state, is going to get that money and want to come back to rebuild? New Orleans didn’t treat them that great. Only the ones who really loved it here will come back, and even for some of those, the thought of returning and not having their community here will be too discouraging.
We have a lot of migrant workers here helping rebuild now, so there’s been a big shift in the racial / ethnic makeup of the city. After a while, abandoned houses will be torn down and new ones built. Some areas of the city have already gotten “facelifts.” So there has been some good and there will be more to come of it. For tourists, everything good about New Orleans is still here, and one probably wouldn’t notice much difference. I love the city and I guess you have to take the good with the bad anywhere you live, but for me the good here, really outweighs the bad.
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The hardest part was that most of the businesses were not advertising. No budget allocation towards marketing or web sites. It seems with in the past week I have gotten more calls than ever. I think this is a good sign, more and more new businesses are opening and it will do the city a tremendous amount of good. We just have to straighten out our politics, and spend our (New Orleans’) money wisely.
Great blog, I hope to see you around the city.
Even the tram is back, sort of. It’ll start running from Napoleon from Nov as I heard.
Anyway, we came from Hungary in mid June and the city is in a lot better shape than we expected based on media reports. It’s good to find a strengthening online market here too. There are so huge opportunities to be grabbed and a lot of education of course for clients to understand what they can do, how and why.
Congrats on your blog.