It's pretty amazing that we're going to live with a persistent narrative of post-Katrina New Orleans (the 2010s especially) as some kind of a boom period. In reality it was a straightforward process of gentrification and ethnic cleansing. The population took a big hit with in 2005 and never recovered. The next 20 years were a time of wealth consolidation. What were once neighborhoods were scooped up by asset speculators. Schools and family services were sold off. It wasn't just raw population numbers that got smaller, the scope of community, the social sphere itself shrunk. It was a truly awful time. But for some reason, it was accompanied by a media driven fantasy about a "new New Orleans" attracting scores of young hip people.
Anyway, it's all still happening. Only now we get to read about it minus the pretense.
And the New Orleans-Metairie metro area saw the steepest loss among large metros nationwide, with its population declining by 4.3%. The metro area had traditionally been able to count on fast-growing St. Tammany Parish to improve its standing, but that ended in 2020 when the suburban parish was made into its own metro area.
Even if the population growth St. Tammany saw since 2020 were added into the New Orleans-Metairie total, the metro area would still have seen the third steepest loss across U.S. metros.
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