ABSTRACT
The repopulation of postdiluvian New Orleans defies easy measure. Residents living between places, repairing their homes during the day, for example, and returning nightly to apartments or relatives' houses in neighboring areas, plus temporarily broken-up families, transient workers, homeless people, and incoming rebuilding professionals all conspire to make the city's post-Katrina population and demographics hotly contested numbers. The level of flood damage and pre-Katrina socioeconomics generally drove the geography of recovery. Affluent, unflooded areas saw nearly all their residents return by early 2006, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, poor, severely flooded areas remained only 10 to 20 percent repopulated into 2009. Four years after Katrina, that lakeward, eastward trend had reversed for the first time in the city's history. The 2009 centroid moved six blocks closer to the river and three blocks westward, to the intersection of North Miro and Dumaine streets in Treme.
