The following is an excerpt from our September issue:

By Jonathan Lindberg

It’s Saturday night in New Orleans and Rosie’s Diner is out of gumbo soup. Not a good sign for a restaurant in the French Quarter, famous for its gumbo soup. “We only have one cook in the kitchen tonight,” the waiter explains. “He just hasn’t had time to get around to preparing the soup. We haven’t had gumbo for days.”

Though the restaurant is large, there are only two waiters working the floor. They hurry among tables, balancing orders along with apologies for the slow cook time. When the tables begin to thin, the waiter stops to tell me they have been running crazy like this all day long. I ask him about the crowds I had seen on Canal and Bourbon Streets, in the heart of the French Quarter. “A lot of tourists have come back,” he says. A good sign to be sure. “So things are looking up? Nothing has changed?” He looks at me for a moment. “No. Everything has changed.”

He leaves it at that.

Two years have passed since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, and New Orleans is still struggling with recovery. To date, only 22% of the federal funds that Washington had set aside to rebuild Louisiana have been spent. Entire sectors of the city still remain in disrepair. But beyond the visible signs of damage, evidenced by vacant lots and slumped houses and piles of rubble still clinging to curbs, are the deeper problems New Orleans now faces, basic economics, housing and workforce woes, government gridlock frustrating the rebuilding effort, political scandals, and the fundamental question every city official is hoping to solve – how do you rebuild a city that was already worn at the seams?

Two years and only 60% of the population has returned to New Orleans. The remaining 40% have been absorbed into surrounding metropolitan areas such as Houston, Memphis, and Atlanta. Many of these 40% have assimilated to life outside New Orleans and show little signs of moving back. What this means is that neighborhoods throughout the Ninth Ward and along the Gulf Coast have either washed away or become ghost towns – vacant houses, barren concrete slabs, remnants of what had been.

Though New Orleans is working hard to become that vibrant destination it once was, the city is having to do so with 100,000 less workers, or minus 20% the workforce that existed pre-Katrina. The process has been tough. Ambitious housing and commercial projects are being scrapped, in part due to skittish investors frustrated by inactivity, and in part due to missing basic components, such as a scarcity of adequate plumbers.

Much of the workforce strain in New Orleans is being felt among the tourist industry, which is seeing the crowds return, but unable to find adequate workers to service those crowds. Still, finding enough cooks to be able to prepare gumbo is the least of New Orleans’ the problem. Four of the seven general hospitals are still closed, 13,000 families are still living in trailers, and just last month, the Jefferson Public School System announced they are nearly 100 teachers short for the current school year.

Two years and New Orleans is still weighed down by the problems of Katrina. Even more, the city is struggling with the preexisting problems Katrina only exacerbated. In many ways, Katrina could be seen as a giant finger picking off the social scabs that New Orleans had learned to deal, or rather tolerate.

Just one-half-mile from the French Quarter, only now coming alive with building projects, restaurants and hotels, resides the other half of New Orleans – broke-down neighborhoods that stretch not for blocks, but zip codes. In the shadow of the Superdome, which looms over the city, a ghost of things still-not-passed, are neighborhoods of damaged and boarded-up homes, collapsed roofs and broken sidewalks, piles of wreckage and garbage still stagnant on the corners, indicators in red spay paint signaling the places where dead bodies were found after the storm, and people, mostly African-American, still standing along the cracked sidewalks with that shell-shocked look as if Katrina has just happened. Two years later and these neighborhoods remain in disrepair. Here, there are no cranes or ladders. Here, no building projects are taking place.

Even if the rest of the country has moved on past Katrina, to presidential politics and collapsing bridges, New Orleans has not moved on, not in the least bit. Spend a few days on the Gulf Coast and you will be confronted by Katrina at every turn, in every conversation, with every page. For those who remain, two years later, Katrina is still a part of daily life.

For Jeff and Belinda Tipton of Long Beach, Mississippi, the long road to Katrina recovery turned the page just eight weeks ago, when they were finally able to move out of their FEMA trailer and into a new home.

After Katrina, the Jeff and Belinda spent eighteen months wrestling and clawing with their insurance company for even a partial compensation for their house which was completely destroyed, not one brick left on top of another. “We were in a very dark place for a long time,” the couple told me, still visibly frustrated with the recovery process they were forced to endure. “It was hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.”

Casino towns and communities like Long Beach, Gulfport, and Biloxi took on the full brunt force of Katrina and had their maps completely rewritten. Whole neighborhoods and residential blocks that were once thriving developments were left nothing more than paved roads, overgrown brush, and concrete slabs.

Though the casinos have been rebuilt and are operating today, many of the people living along the Gulf Coast are still only left with that concrete slab and ongoing mortgage payments. Legal wrangling and holding patters, two sides arguing over a spin on the age-old question of the chicken and the egg – which came first, the wind or the water.

Belinda can still remember visiting the trailer her insurance company had set up along the Gulf Coast. “The first question they asked was whether we had flood insurance.” Like so many residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the Tipton’s did not live in a designated flood zone and had no flood insurance. They did have wind insurance to protect against hurricane destruction, the kind that wiped out their house. “I remember that agent punching our street address into the computer and telling me point blank that we would not be getting a thing. Just like that, no compassion, no feeling. Nothing.”

Insurance companies, sensing impending doom, decided to argue that flooding, not wind had destroyed the homes along the Gulf Coast. Since neither side was present when Katrina hit, the argument was batted back-and-forth and eventually ended up in the hands of lawyers and the slow complication of litigation.

“We each took turns breaking down,” Belinda told me, speaking of herself and her family. It was the Long Beach community that came together to help each other through the frustrating process. The FEMA trailer the Tipton’s lived in was placed behind their local church. Dinner was cooked and served in the church cafeteria for fifty to sixty people a night. Residents would share stories and exchange tips on how to combat the insurance companies.

“In the end, it was the pictures that broke the insurance companies,” Belinda told me. She showed me a thick binder with images of wreckage and desolation. The pictures were placed in chronological order and were hard to argue with. Still, the argument lasted two years. Two years, and the greatest struggle of their lives.

Now the Tipton’s are starting all over again.

During the final week of August, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast conducted a number of memorial gatherings to mark the two year passing of Katrina. At 9:28 AM, the time the 17th Street Levees were breached, bells tolled throughout New Orleans for two minutes. A public ceremony with Mayor Ray Nagin was held at the Charity Hospital Cemetery, where 100 unclaimed or unidentified bodies still remained.

On August 28, a Day of Service was held. Civil Rights, justice and faith groups gathered together and pledged the day to volunteer in helping rebuild the city. The one-hundred unidentified and unclaimed bodies were laid to rest at the Charity Hospital Cemetery.

Remembering Katrina, the shock and impact, has been a permanent mindset for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hurricanes are embedded into the fabric of the region. In Gulfport, Mississippi, a battered fishing boat with the words, Camille 1969, still rests along the main road leading into town. Remembering Katrina has not been the problem, it’s forgetting. One long-time New Orleans resident put it like this, “People still talk about Katrina, like it just happened yesterday.”

The fact that poor and corrupt leadership has worked to stifle the rebuilding effort only frustrates the healing process.

On July 30, 2005, Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) who represents New Orleans was videotaped by the FBI receiving $100,000 in a leather briefcase. Four days later, $90,000 in cash was found in the freezer of his congressional office. Despite the implications, Congressman Jefferson was re-elected by the people of New Orleans just one year later.

On August 6, 2006, City Councilman Oliver Thomas, Vice President of the New Orleans City Council and potential mayoral candidate, resigned over charges of accepting $15,000 in bribes from an owner of parking lot facilities in the French Quarter.

Thomas and Jefferson are only the latest two to join the growing list of public and elected officials, including former FEMA Director Michael Brown, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, former New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, that have come under fierce criticism and public pressure in regards to their leadership following Katrina.

For now, New Orleans grasps toward any sign of progress. Donald Trump is still moving ahead with plans to build a sixty-nine story condominium downtown, plans that were made before Katrina hit. Strategic Hotels & Resorts, owners of the ravaged Hyatt Regency Hotel on Canal Street revealed plans earlier this year to develop a twenty-acre site that would include a new hotel and a jazz museum. For now, those plans have been put on hold.

As New Orleans reaches for hope, the parties involved play the waiting game – commerce waiting on housing, housing waiting on insurance, insurance waiting on local government, local government waiting on state government, state government waiting on federal government, and federal government waiting on commerce and housing and insurance and local and state government.

And while they all wait, the City of New Orleans suffers. Everyone seems to be waiting for a new day.