New Orleans: Not Waiting for The Plan

While a gruesome quadruple murder in the historic Treme neighborhood is the New Orleans story probably getting the most attention this weekend, the NYT's Susan Saulny reports on a little (nationally) noticed but more important thread of the city's drama: the return of people who, beset by uncertainty, are still rolling up their sleeves and getting down to the business of rebuilding and restoring the city, house by house, block by block.

Drawkbacks: the piece repeats the hoary MSM meme that the Crescent City was laid low by Katrina (rather than by the catastrophic failure of poorly designed and built Army Corps of Engineers flood-control structures), and reporter Saulny quotes the "city's chief information officer Greg Meffert", who was actually the city's chief technology officer, and who in fact resigned weeks before this piece appeared.

But the overall story, which reports on the surprising (to city officials) upsurge in community organizations determined to plan and restore their neibhorhoods, is a welcome antidote to the continued emphasis on "victim" stories--what an earlier generation of journos would dismissively refer to as "sob stories"--that have dominated coverage of the disaster. Of course there are victims, hundreds of thousands of them, in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. But despite the cant of those who, for regional or racial reasons, want to see the folks down there as lazy parasites, it's clear to anyone who spends time in the city that there's a whole lot of bootstrappin' going on.