Check out Harry Shearer’s recent piece in the Huffington Post, highlighting some of the progress in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans despite the lack of federal effort to help jumpstart the renovation and rebuilding of rental units in the city.

I’ve been amazed and inspired by the area’s signs of life. But it took this week’s tour, courtesy of the Preservation Resource Center, for me to realize just how false is the national media’s depiction of the Lower 9 as dead, derelict and devastated. There are streets — like the two blocks of Egania Street I happened onto last fall — and neighborhoods — like Holy Cross, where PRC is concentrating much of its restoration and rebuilding effort — that astonish with rebuilt, re-landscaped and re-occupied little (and not so little) homes, mostly restored in the vernacular styles of the area. The Lower 9 shares with districts as undevastated as the French Quarter the curse of streets badly in need of repair (a major road-repair program in the city was announced just this week, nearly three years after the floodwaters were pumped out)… Yet the recovery by homeowners, assisted by dedicated organizations like the PRC, continues, blessed, as I tell my friends there, by the absence of the illusion of leadership.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Lower Ninth Ward, housing, new orleans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.