How are we doing?

He said:

President Bush’s top man in charge of the Gulf Coast recovery said that 18 months after Katrina, conditions in New Orleans are ‘better than he thought’ they would be.

In an interview with Eyewitness News’ Lee Zurik, Powell traversed a Gentilly neighborhood and praised the progress he said he saw and heard.

“You hear hammers. You see construction trucks,” he said. “That’s good.”

She said:

Out of the 1.3 million people who used live in the greater New Orleans area pre-Katrina, economists at the University of New Orleans said that 250,000 of them still have not returned to the seven parishes that make up greater New Orleans. And while that may sound promising, the UNO economists said they thought things would look better for the city at this point.

Janet Speyrer, a professor of economics at UNO, said Mardi Gras proved the city is recovering.

“New Orleans was still in the top ten as a place that people recognize as a good place to visit,” she said, adding that the tourism industry has fueled the city’s economy these days.

There are 31,000 hotel rooms in the city post-Katrina, almost 82% of the pre-Katrina total.

“Those 31,000 hotel rooms have had the same occupancy rate as we had in the 38,000 hotel rooms that were open pre-Katrina,” Speyrer said.

Still, she said it’s a double-edged sword: for those around the nation who haven't been here, they still think the city is in bad shape overall from old and overused footage of New Orleans during the storm.

“We do have this problem that people don't understand the difference between the pictures that they saw on the media that were really old pictures of when New Orleans was covered in water from Katrina and the pictures that they see now of New Orleans present day,” Speyrer said.

That’s why Speyrer believes a portion of the federal recovery money should go toward televised tourism campaign.

Actually they're both full of shit. Powell is just plain ol' Washington liar full of shit, but the UNO team's take is ultimately more damaging as it amounts to little more than the same As-Hilton-goes-so-goes-New Orleans line we've been hearing for decades.

It's amusing to me that the same folks who push the idea that we have a "blank slate" and need to completely rethink (read: eliminate) public housing, indigent health care, and public schools are quite happy to go right back to the plantation-tourist economy that insults and exploits the cultural heritage of the city in order to generate big profits off the backs of underpaid service workers.