New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size

New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size
By Adam Nossiter

This article, which has been adapted for the Web, was originally published in the New York Times on January 21, 2007. Get the full text here.

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 20 — Is this what New Orleans has come to — a city half its old size?

But some economists and demographers are beginning to wonder whether New Orleans will top out at about half its prestorm population of about 444,000. At the moment, the population is well below half, and future gains are likely to be small.

“It will be a trickle based on what we know now,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a consultant and demographer based in Shreveport, La. “I would say we could start losing people, especially if the crime problem doesn’t get high visibility.”

The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood, but rather crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina.

Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that. The city was already losing people at the rate of perhaps 1.5 percent a year before the hurricane.

Political leaders, worried about the loss of clout and a Congressional seat, press for people to return. But a smaller New Orleans may not be bad, some economists say.

Large-scale concentrations of deep poverty — as was the case in New Orleans before the storm — are inherently harmful to cities. The smaller New Orleans is almost certain to wind up with a far higher percentage of its population working than before Hurricane Katrina.

“Where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can’t see a way out,” said William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University who has studied the city’s economy for decades. “Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.”

Others, however, worry that permanently losing so many people threatens the city’s culture.

“Culture is people,” said Richard Campanella, a Tulane geographer who has written extensively about the city’s neighborhoods. “If half the local people are dispersed and no longer living cohesively in those social networks, then half of local culture is gone.”

The low population figure, 191,000 was reported by the Louisiana Recovery Authority in November last year in the most credible survey to date.

“Our expectations were just wrong,” said James A. Richardson, an economist who directs the Public Administration Institute at Louisiana State University. “I don’t believe it will ever be 450,000 again.”

With no real place for the poorest of the evacuees in the economy before the storm, New Orleans may have permanently lost that part of its population. Supporting that notion is an unpublished analysis by Mr. Oakland, the former Tulane economist, which shows unusually low rates of participation in the labor force before Hurricane Katrina.

The statistics compare the number of people actually working with the total working-age population. Employment had dropped sharply in the city from 1969 to 1999, Mr. Oakland writes.

“The job mobility was very low among the poor, so they just stay where they are, and the social welfare system shored them up,” Mr. Oakland said.

Looking to the future, another 50,000 people might eventually be added to the city’s population, Mr. Oakland suggested, but there are no guarantees.

“The longer it lasts, the more likely it is that our population is plateauing, the longer the uncertainty continues,” said Janet Speyrer, an economist at the University of New Orleans.

As for the graphic to accompany the story, I would take the information removed about unemployment rates and put it into an informational chart or diagram so readers could see the effect over time. Another idea is that there could be a map of the city with unemployment rates and population rates over different neighborhoods so readers could make the connection between densely-populated areas and worsened unemployment. I would also include some photos of the devastation that still exists and compare to photos from before, so readers would have a basis for understanding why all those people were not returning to the city. Many of the statistics in the story would be understood more easily in chart or graph form, and it would be more likely to catch the readers' eye. If there are too many numbers in a story, readers skim right over them. If they are in an interesting or interactive graphic on the side, a reader might take an extra minute to read them over.