New Orleans is still a city in ruins a year after Katrina

NEW ORLEANS — If you haven't been here, you can't really understand what happened to this city one year ago. Both words and pictures are inadequate; no elegy is poignant enough, no lens able to capture the full breadth and depth. Spike Lee's film "When the Levees Broke" probably comes closest, but even after four hours you feel the movie has just sketched the outlines.

As the inevitable anniversary commemorations take place, the people of New Orleans can point to the progress they're making toward recovery, house by house, block by block. An occasional visitor like me, though, is struck by how much of the city remains in ruins and is saddened by how much of it seems gone forever.

It's not really fair to look at the year-old mounds of filthy, sodden debris and just slam the city government for not having an effective reconstruction plan. Mayor Ray Nagin might have been shooting from the lip when he pointed out that Manhattan still has a "hole in the ground" five years after 9/11, but he was telling the truth. You don't fix a whole city in a year.

And there is an emergent renewal plan. It's just not something people are ready to talk honestly about.

Last year, with most of the city still under water, President Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised to rebuild New Orleans. He could have made good on that promise — this is the United States of America, after all, and we undertake to rebuild entire countries (Afghanistan, Iraq) and even continents (Europe after World War II). The White House says it has earmarked $110 billion for Gulf Coast reconstruction, but less than half that money has actually been spent. Even assuming New Orleans gets its fair share, that's not enough to ever put this city back together again.

Call me cynical, but I didn't really expect this administration to come up with serious Marshall Plan money to rebuild a poor, mostly black city that was already in decline before Hurricane Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers administered the coup de grace. (They still toss in a lot of French words down here.)

So, as everyone understands but no one wants to plainly acknowledge, New Orleans will become a smaller, whiter city. The Big Easy once was home to more than 600,000 people and had around 450,000 residents as Katrina approached. Now the population is less than 200,000. A major city has become minor.