center. >> changing the city one block at a time. >> i'm out here to encourage them, to tell them there's a better way. have a great weekend. >> the pictures haven't lost their power to shock. dead bodies in the terrible heat. vast neighborhoods under ten feet of water. ten years ago, hurricane katrina stomped ashore on the gulf coast bringing death and destruction on a scale lard to comprehend. knees.

can you call the area recovered? katrina after the storm, it's the "inside story." welcome to "inside story." i'm ray suarez. new orleans is still deeply scarred by hurricane katrina. it's easy to see if you stray far beyond the central business district or the french quarter. but the city is undoubtedly rebounding. the question is how? is the city not just back to where it was before the storm but transformed by it? al jazeera's jonathan betz is in new orleans with more of the changing face of the city. >> ray, new orleans is growing into something very new and very different. it's attracting a lot of young people, from the natural

disaster and the ruins of that they saw opportunity. but with that comes change that many fear is not welcoming at all. for generations henry and emanuel's family have called new orleans home. she can't believe how different the city and the people look. >> i hope a lot of the black people come back. >> this city will be chocolate at the end of the day. >> how to make sure some people aren't left behind in the boom of rebuilding. >> i think the issue that is near and dear to my heart is to make sure that those individuals who are naturally born new orleanians, are brought back. >> reporter: new orleans is still mostly black but where it used to be 60% black, it's now dropped to 58% and the percentage of white has grown

slightly. >> many anecdotally are white. many have the feeling la it's a whiter city. >> a new creative class is emerging. some drawn by adventure, others from opportunity. lauren arrived to sell tee shirts from her living room. her store grew four stores. >> in new orleans you just get to be you and that's what i love about being here. >> lured by tax credits and a thriving culture leaders say people of all colors are coming for opportunities hard to find anyplace else. >> before katrina i thought there was a closed insular network that was scared of change so now it's open to new people, new ideas and really the sense of possibility. >> people like patrick who moved from new york to new orleans and started a digital company. >> how many times do one of the most important cities in america go through a complete renewal and you're invited to

participate in that process? that's a once in a generation opportunity. >> but many worry that change is keeping others out. >> is new orleans now is a lot more affluent than it was prior to the storm. disproportionately you have more blacks who can't come back because of the economic situation in the city of new orleans. >> it's as complicated, still as many living in poverty and many african americans prefer to move to the suburbs. the assumption is that it was the rich that could only return and rebuild and you're saying -- >> i'm saying that there were a lot of people who chose not to return. >> reporter: it did not matter how much money you had? >> that's right. a lot of people -- a lot of people may have had the means to return and chose not to. >> for he

hen rieta emanuel. >> it's been growing every year, and now new orleans is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. ray. >> that's our jonathan betz reporting from new orleans. joining us is jacques mauriel, welcome to the program. what's measurable about the well-being of the people who live in new orleans today, how years? >> good evening ray. folks in new orleans, you know have struggled over the last ten years and some have been more successful at recovering than others. more affluent people are more likely to be successful and white new

orleanians are likely to be more successful. there is a great disparity between affluent white people and black people. >> were you affluen a unemployed before the storm are you likely to be unemployed today? >> you are more likely to be unemployed. 52% of new orleans black men are without work, that's up 10% from prekatrina levels. household incomes amongst african american families is stagnant. household incomes among whites have increased more than 20%. so there is a vast disparity. >> jacques i got to tell you that unemployment number is a little hard to comprehend. there was so much work to be done in the months and years after the storm.

how come that opportunity was not extended? in construction, in laboring in service industries, how come black men have done so badly? >> well, there are a variety of reasons. some are not unique to new orleans. but there was never any leadership or commitment to reserve, preserve or target job opportunities, in the recovery, to local people black or white. and many of the people who actually worked in construction in the recovery were not from new orleans and not even from louisiana or the gulf coast. >> so what happens now? the city has come this far, in this amount of time. from your vantage point what's job 1? >> well, i think job 1 is to really use this ten year anniversary to pause and recalibrate this recovery. so the next ten years do not leave behind the most vulnerable

people. i think we need policies and programs that support job training, they give preference to local hires, and we need programs that increase wages. the city of new orleans recently passed a living wage ordinance and the mayor signed it. but it applies only to city contractors and those who get incentives from city government. we need a higher minimum wage. and we need real job training programs that connect the more than 20,000 young people between 16 and 24 who are not in school and not working. >> so what do you say to the rest of the country? you don't want to sound like you're still helpless and hopeless. but at the same time you don't want to give the message that everything's done and we've slain all our dragons. what's the best way to pitch new orleans as the way it is in 2015 to the rest of america?

>> the first thing i would say to the rest of america and the rest of the world is thank you because we would not have been able to come this far without the help and support and love from so many people all over. but i think new orleans is -- it's often called a laboratory for public policy experiments post-katrina and i think that there is an opportunity to really try and develop some policies that would be appropriate and helpful and perhaps successful in other communities that face some of the same challenges we do but perhaps not as stark. we have an education reform movement in new orleans with a mostly charter school system and that has seen mismed success. we need to just this ten year anniversary to really pause and if there's any time to be honest about both our successes and the challenges that remain, now is the time. >> public policy strategist

jacques moreal thank you very much for joining us. money poured into the days and weeks after the hurricane came in. katrina after the storm, it's e st >> the whole neighborhood was under 20 feet of water. >> a decade after hurricane katrina, soledad o'brien investigates new orleans divided recovery. >> white home owners and black home owners had a very large gap. >> the residents forced to flee. >> escorted onto a plane by gun point without someone telling me where i'm going. >> and the city's future. >> why should a business come here when this neglect has been allowed to go on? >> an america tonight special, katrina: after the storm.

>> you're watching "inside story." i'm ray suarez.

katrina after the storm. this time on the program, i spent a lot of time in new orleans in the weeks and months after katrina. a lot of the rebuilding i saw was smart strategic and effective, a lot of it was confused and bureaucratic. at the distance of a decade what was the result of alt those recovery efforts? joining us, tracy ross, and emily are chumley wright. george mason university. she's an author how we came back voices from post-katrina new orleans. emily let me start with you. money poured into new orleans a lot of it from the pockets of people who were trying to fix up their own lives. how do you measure what worked and how far we've come? >> one of the most important things for us to consider is how essential it is to tap the capacity within community to

rebound and to repild. rebuild. the public policy in new orleans was so clumsy directly after katrina was so clumsy, the attempt was to top down replan all of the recovery all at once from a kind of bureaucratic and political setting rather than removing barriers and allowing people to step into the process of rebuilding their homes and getting their communities back up and running. because of the policy environment getting in the way of that quick return that was one of the biggest barriers. >> it's true that a lot of people got tired of waiting for money that was due them and pitched right in and started working themselves. but surely that's not the optimal way of rebuilding a city damaged by a natural disaster. >> in fact i disagree, ray, that clearly you don't want everybody returning immediately after a disaster because some people

just aren't capable of taking care of themselves if they need to go to the hospital frequently for example you don't want those folks returning. but in fact there are early returnees who have the capacity to rebound an rebuild. it could be the neighbor down the street who has the wherewithal, or the neighbor who has the laundromat who helicopter the communities or the big box store. the early career moves that sends the right signal to those who have to wait on the sidelines that let them know that normal life in their community is going to be possible again. once they see those signals they start orienting their own behavior for an eventually return. if they don't see those early signs of rebound and rebuilding then they start orienting their own plan towards life in a new place. and so the most important predictor of long term recovery is what happened in the short

term recovery. >> tracy ross when you look at new orleans what do you see? going well and going badly? >> well i think there's a lot of people who are trying to take a victory lap right now and i think that we need to realize that as far as mark moreal said recently in an interview that we're at half time. there's a lot of progress that needs to be done particularly in the lower 9th ward. only 39% of people have returned who were originally from the area and i think part of it going back a bit to your earlier question to emily that you know we do want people to return, if that was their choice. but because of the way that money was allocated, a lot of people couldn't afford to be part of this recovery. so government aid was based off of property values. rather than the damage accrued to homes. so that meant that residents of lower 9th ward on average were short changed about $75,000. >> so the money that was due

them wouldn't make them whole or even make it possible to come back and rebuild? >> right. not only did they get shore changed but it was delayed. some families got their money recently in the past few years. so the recovery for many people it looks great. depending on your neighborhood. for communities of color and low income communities it's not so great. >> you heard jacques moreal talking about high levels of persistent unemployment. i came back at him a little bit because i'm puzzled with why with all the work that needed to be done, so little was offered to those people who had trouble getting work before the storm. >> absolutely. on a recent interview on my radio show, talk radio, described the dallas plan which was a plan by business leaders in texas coming up with ideas for the recovery.

and that's the sort of things that were going on in the months after katrina hit whereas people were thinking about ways to -- was people were thinking about ways to rebuild, for some of their own self interest. they weren't necessarily thinking about rebuilding with an eye towards lifting all ships with them. >> well, emily, what happens now, given what's gone on in the last ten years, is there a foundation on which to build a new orleans that is once again as big as it was before or should we just understand that it's going to be a different kind of city from here on out ? >> one of the things that's so important in terms of the recovery story is people came back despite incredible odds. there are many people who didn't have flood insurance or the

financial where wal wherewithal, and that poses a bit of a struggle, why did they come back? two communities particularly the lower ninth ward, that had been dispairnlgd i disparaged in the local media, when we interviewed people following katrina and asked them why they returned we got a very, very different picture. it was people who were dislocated for a time. in that dislocation, hadn't realized it was in new orleans and in particular their specific neighborhood that they could find the good life. that they could find who they were again. and that powerful sense of place that drew people back, it's still there. and we can't underestimate the importance of those socially embedded, community-embedded resources that are a source of resilience immediately following storm but also can be the answer

of rebounding and rebuilding for the long haul. >> i want to thank you both, tracy ross and emily channelley wright, new orleans was trashed by the storm and its aftermath with extensive damage to vital infrastructure. is the city and its surrounding parishes rebuilt in a way that continues the foundation for recovery or were given recovery

>> welcome back to "inside story." i'm ray suarez. after any natural disaster people are forced to make choices, forces by circumstances to match resources to need. in the aftermath of hurricane katrina were decisions made that dictate the

patterns of the city, if so who won and who lost. dana aness, welcome to the program. this was clearly a civil engineering disaster. when you put money back to rebuild what kind of decisions dictate what the future's going to be like in a city like new orleans? >> it's a civil engineering disaster but civil engineering opportunity to end all civil engineering opportunities. the moment we pivoted, and i think katrina helps us to do that, face our greatest fear, the water surrounding the city, and embracing it for what it was, a hugely large untapped amenity, that's really when the story of new orleans future begins. >> you know a lot of people learned more than they ever knew about the geography of the

area, lake pontchartrain and a lot of the city below sea level. actually engineering a smaller new orleans then recoiled from that suggestion. is there still some merit to it? >> there -- that's absolutely true. that was the initial reaction. i think thankfully, shortly after katrina, some very wise people, senator mary landrieu among them, as well as david wagner a local architect, began to develop a strong relationship with the dutch government, and the dutch government reached out to us recognizing parallels between engineering feats that they've accomplished and things that they've learned to deal with, their own below sea level existence and help us understand better how we can't continue to try to engineer our way out of this problem. we can't continue to push the water out, which is what we've

successfully done for a long time. but that's led to subsidence. so i think there was you know, an initial recoimg and the recoa recognition of how we needed to completely change and radically change course. >> well, if we assume, and i think from what scientists say it's probably a good assumption, that there will be storms like this again, some day in the gulf of mexico, how do we build in more resilience to biloxi, to new orleans, to other places on the gulf coast? >> we need to recognize that there are really three very important pieces to our -- several pieces to our lines of defense. and different communities have slightly different lines of defense but we've come to talk in those terms. and this is part of this whole new vocabulary that we are wrapping our minds and our

mouths around in understanding our topography and hydrology. coastal defense, making strides around working more closely together and then beyond that beyond the municipal, the new orleans system the levee system is incredibly important. not just new orleans but that's an important part of the city's defense as well but then a third piece of that is really understanding that there is also the water that falls on us. and now that new orleans has become a very fortressed walled city the water that falls on the city, also needs to be managed in a way that is sustainable. and that's something that we're continuing to work on. we have -- when i say about our deeper understanding of our hydrology and topography, it wasn't until katrina i think that we really began to understand, as a community, that

our city is a city that is floating on water. we're an urban core on a deltaic plane. we have no granite substrata. there is no granite underneath. in terms of pumping and pumping and pumping the water out as fast as it comes in is really causing the city to sink. with rising sea levels and those challenges we also have the subsidence issue which is something we can learn to deal with better by learning to live with water rather than working against it. >> dana aness is the executive conservancy. thank you for joining us. i'll be back with a thought about this whole issue, stay with us, it's the "inside story."

>> as depressing as it was reporting from new orleans in the weeks and months after katrina it was also a revelation. there was a striking amount of

goodwill for the city and its future. people who had once spent a happy weekend there years before, people who had grown up there and long since moved away, even people who had never set foot in the city had an affection for it that was surprising touching and i thought useful for a place that was flat on its back. the extreme concentrations of poverty in many new orleans neighborhoods, meant many people you saw on teive in the weeks after the storm had nothing to start off from. they had to start from scratch but scratch was where they had been living before the storm. the suddenly suppressed market meant at a people who had money or were able to get their hands on some were able to take advantage of great opportunities. they did. when somebody tells you how different new orleans is from

other parts of america, the have, and have mors mean it isn't such a different place anymore. >> we see development in other areas of the city that are definitely not happening out there. >> discrimination in the housing market. >> we're trying to push forward into a more positive future. >> reply community. >> new orleans as everybody knows it. even in vietnam? >> sweet home. >> when you look back there and think it's been ten years how do you feel about it? >> not good.