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11/13/2005:

"After Katrina, a Trickle of Returnees"

People fled, and some have returned. Others have arrived for the first time from near and wide to tend the sick and haul debris, to patch roofs and, perhaps, strike it rich from the rebuilding. It is obvious from walking the streets in New Orleans - many barren, a few bustling - that the populace has changed. But what is the current population?

Will the population of New Orleans return to pre-Katrina levels?
The city had 460,000 residents before the hurricane, but with many neighborhoods uninhabitable, some officials speculate that there are no more than 100,000 people now.

The best data may be from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found that nonfarm jobs in the city and surrounding parishes dropped to 378,400 in September, from 615,600 in August. (The bureau does not break out figures for New Orleans alone.)

Looking at the city itself, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a nonprofit group, determined that 135,000 people lived in areas that were not flooded. Most left under an evacuation order, and it is not clear how many have returned.

The local power company, Entergy New Orleans, said that less than 30 percent of its customers were drawing power. Change-of-address forms have been filed by nearly two-thirds of the postal customers in New Orleans and a section of neighboring Jefferson Parish, according to an analysis by the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

Beyond the permanent residents, no one has even tried to determine the number of transient workers who have arrived.

Matt Fellowes of the Brookings Institution in Washington, which will soon begin publishing a Katrina Index on the rebuilding effort, said it had been easier gathering data for Iraq than for New Orleans.

"There is more of a focus, frankly, on the rebuilding effort in Iraq," he said. "Because it's become politically important, there is a lot of data generated there."
nytimes.com