Isolation, decay greet some returning to New Orleans homes

NEW ORLEANS -- For blacks in New Orleans at the height of Jim Crow, there were few aspirations higher than owning one of the modest brick bungalows in Pontchartrain Park .

When postal workers and teachers and longshoremen wrote their last rent checks and moved into the newly developed subdivision, they crossed a portal into the middle class.

"It was something special," said Cherrylane Johnson, whose father, Thomas, bought a new four-bedroom house on Athis Court in 1962 for $18,000. "I remember as a child going to school, when another kid asked where you lived and you said, 'Pontchartrain Park,' that meant something."

Today, nearly 16 months after Hurricane Katrina submerged the neighborhood up to its rooflines, the Johnsons are the only residents back on their once-bustling block. As they wait for federal grants and rebuilding loans, 80-year-old Thomas, 56-year-old Cherrylane and her 22-year-old daughter, Taiese, reside in a pair of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers in the front yard on a cul-de-sac.

The squeals of bike-riding children are gone. There is no one to gossip with over the fence. Thomas Johnson, a retired postal worker, wards off isolation by maintaining his pre-Katrina routine, rising at 4:30 a.m., reading the newspaper over coffee, heading out for his morning walk, then returning to watch "Sanford and Son" reruns.

Cherrylane Johnson, a third-grade teacher, has voluntarily taken on extra duties at school, because they require her to stay late -- and away from Athis Court.

"You try to spend as much time as you can away from here," she said. "It's really pretty isolating, and rather scary."

This is how New Orleans's most devastated neighborhoods are being reclaimed -- one house at a time, a few on this block, perhaps none on the next, the resettlement driven by market forces with little government intervention. Despite the risk of future flooding, those returning to Pontchartrain Park want it this way. They didn't put their life's work and savings into this neighborhood only to have the city tell them they couldn't come home.

"People have a stake in the places where they lived," Cherrylane Johnson said. "If you owned your home, and this is where you lived and what you worked for, I don't think anyone should discourage you from living where you want."

Although the thwack of hammers suggests a neighborhood stirring to life, the revitalization of Pontchartrain Park has been halting. In the city planning district that includes the area, one-fourth of the pre-Katrina population had returned as of last summer, according to the city's most recent estimates. That was the third-lowest rate among the 13 districts.

Cherrylane Johnson and the others who have trickled back, usually to the purgatory of trailer life, recognize that their neighborhood may never be the same. Many neighbors -- often original owners now in their 70s and 80s -- have left town with no intention of returning. Their once-tidy houses are turning to blight. With yards unmowed and littered with sodden belongings, rodents roam where they please.

Urban planners assert that the cash-strapped city cannot provide basic services to a population that, although half its pre-Katrina size, is scattered across a large area.

In Pontchartrain Park, as in other neighborhoods, schools have closed and students must travel long distances. Garbage pickup has been cut to once a week. Makeshift street signs, painted on plywood in drippy letters, are propped up in medians.

This is the inevitable consequence, the planners say, of Mayor C. Ray Nagin's "laissez-faire" approach to the city's recovery.

Last year , a commission established by Nagin proposed that the city abandon some low-lying areas to green space, and identified Pontchartrain Park and other vulnerable neighborhoods as possible targets. Residents of those areas stormed City Hall meetings to voice their objections, and Nagin, who was facing re election, sided with them.

He has since embraced as his guiding principle the idea "that everyone should be allowed to come home." Nagin has pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild and improve the city's levees and floodgates, while acknowledging that New Orleans may not be adequately protected from flooding until 2010.

In fits and starts, Nagin has overseen a planning process to produce a detailed road map for neighborhood recovery. That plan may include financial incentives to encourage residents to cluster on higher ground. New federal regulations already require that some heavily damaged houses be elevated several feet when rebuilt.

The more essential debate -- whether the city should shrink its footprint by declaring entire neighborhoods off-limits -- has been decided by the free market. Residents are returning and rebuilding at their own risk, and once back they are not likely to be dislodged.