Mission Accomplished

The long term policy goal in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina was always to end up with a smaller, more expensive city. This was evident and explicit from the very beginning.  We've spent a decade here pretty much watching it happen piece by piece but we've also reached a point where we're more or less in Mission Accomplished mode.

Nearly 10 years since flooding displaced hundreds of thousands of residents after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans region’s growth rate continues to slow as the initial surge that marked a returning population is giving way to more typical growth patterns, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

New Orleans was home to about 384,320 people last year and sat at the center of an eight-parish metro area with a combined population of more than 1.25 million, according to estimates released this week.

While New Orleans grew at a respectable rate of 1.4 percent between 2013 and 2014 and the larger region saw an 0.8 percent increase, the area is no longer putting up the high growth percentages it did as residents flocked back in the years immediately following Katrina.

The rest of the article puts a rosy spin on things, but really what's happened is we've removed enough of that "drag on the city's economy" underclass Pres Kabacoff told us we needed to shed that now we can get down to selling the rest of our formerly affordable housing to people who don't actually live here.

Not much left to do but start patting each other on the back and handing out Bernardos.