Mission Accomplished

Re-imagineers develop the city they've always said they wanted.

The New Orleans metropolitan area is continuing to grow more diverse, with suburban parishes particularly seeing large increases in the size of their black and Hispanic communities in the years since Hurricane Katrina while the black population in Orleans Parish is shrinking, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Those shifts are largely in line with national demographic trends.

New Orleans’ black community is still 30 percent smaller than it was before the levees failed and is making up a slowly shrinking portion of the city’s population, according to the new estimates.

This week’s release is a follow-up to estimates earlier this year that found the region was still recovering some of the population it lost after Katrina, but that New Orleans and other parishes were no longer seeing the same dramatic growth rate as in the years after the storm as residents returned to their homes.

Those estimates put New Orleans’ population at 384,320, or about 79 percent of the population it had in 2000, and the seven-parish region at about 93.5 percent of its 2000 level.

Smaller, whiter, more compact. Housing sector dominated by part-time residents and tourism. It's easy to pretend it's a thing that just kinda happened. But, when the decision-makers are on record as saying this was the point it's a different story.

Also, if you grew up here, you will have inherently understood the political agenda... but it seems like almost nobody telling this story nowadays has that kind of experience.