It's getting more difficult to hide the truth about this place.
New Orleans and its suburbs have lost population at a faster rate than any other large metropolitan area in the country since 2020, according to new Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.
It's the second year in a row the New Orleans area has topped the list of fastest shrinking large metros.
The New Orleans area lost more than 39,000 people between 2020 and 2024, a decline off nearly 3.9%.
I suppose 2020 can be considered a turning point for many things. And it's fair to think of that as a transitional moment from a rapidly gentrifying Post-Katrina New Orleans, where the communities washed away by the flood were replaced by vacation rental amusements, to the Post-Covid ghost town where it just feels like the the wiring is being stripped out of everything.
But, really, there is a consistent narrative flowing through both of these phases. As always, the root causes of the current hellscape trace back to what came before it. In our case, that's a long story about a city's ruling class and the deliberate choices it made in the wake of a disaster to change the city "demographically, geographically and politically," as one prominent member of the Rex Organization said at the time. We've watched that process fairly closely over the years. The archives of this blog should show that farily well. I have no idea if any of that mattered, though.
In any case, the stated aim of the gentry, then, was to build a smaller, whiter, city with fewer poor people. Congratulations to them on their success.