Superblocks may look nice on a clean slate, but the New Orleanians who ache to return want to come back to someplace that looks, and feels, like the city they have missed for so long.
The sad comedy-drama of the FEMA trailers sent to the Gulf Coast, New Orleans and Mississippi alike, just got a new chapter.
A lot of the commenters who seem indisposed to sympathize with the plight of New Orleans call the citizens of that community dumb or careless for living in such a location.
New Orleans' "Small Rental Property Program," has become a Kafkaesque nightmare, teasing people with the illusion of almost enough assistance to begin rebuilding, while, in fact, giving them nothing.
The new gates and levee repairs by the US Army Corps of Engineers are, it now appears, giving almost no additional protection.
What is it the Presidential Debate Commission, and its associated pols, don't get about expressing solidarity with a city critically wounded by the malfeasance of the federal government?
Any reader of reports on New Orleans flooding disaster, has to have assumed a certain amount of tension between the independent engineers and the Army group.
I asked Anne Milling, of Women of the Storm (the non-profit organization which was the official proponent of the New Orleans debate) to clarify the issues involved.
Remember FEMA's pledge to test its trailers for formaldehyde fumes?
