Quick tour of the Lower 9th Ward

Start the video so that you can watch it out of the corner of your eye as you read this. The Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans was the area hardest hit by Katrina. It's a low, flat area next to the major canal that breached its levy. What you are seeing as of February 2009, 3-1/2 years after Katrina, is mainly overgrown vacant lots with empty cement slabs and driveways leading to houses that no longer exist. Sometimes you see cement steps sticking up out of the weeds, but the front doors are long gone. Occasionally you see a house still standing, and sometimes there's evidence that people are even working on it. Rarely, you can see really nice houses that people have painstakingly rebuilt.



Yet is seems unlikely that the neighborhood ever will come back. People lived here because it was cheap, priced as old, somewhat run down housing. If it were rebuilt, it would need to be priced as new housing, and it would be unaffordable. There's a proposal floating around to make the whole area a park, and that seems to me to make sense.

What do you think? Should this area somehow be repopulated, or is a park a good idea? Post your opinion here.