Nonprofit wants displaced to be 'NOLA Bound'

Ron Mott Correspondent

ATLANTA - Ever since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been drumming up tourist business all over the country, including sending a festive and colorful dance troupe this week to downtown Chicago. And, for a touch of nostalgia, they sent along one of the city’s famed streetcars. The one named Desire, naturally.    

“There's a sense of uncertainty about what's really going on in the city,” said Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. “And that's why our job is to get out and really let the world know that the historic New Orleans, the New Orleans they've fallen in love with all their lives is intact and thriving and doing well.”

More and more, though, that message of well-being is getting directed at the estimated 200,000 displaced residents scattered around the nation — part of an aggressive effort to woo them back home to New Orleans.

As the two-year anniversary of the storm approaches this summer, the city population is just slightly more than half its pre-Katrina size. About 255,000 are living in New Orleans today.

A nonprofit program called “NOLA Bound” is behind one of the biggest pushes to pull people in. Phones are ringing off the hook at its Baton Rouge call center, which has created what you might call customized roadmaps for some 5,000 families so far, to help them navigate through the myriad of potholes and stop signs that await their return.

“The purpose of the call center was to provide real information to people because there was a huge gap between people's awareness and the reality of their home, said Raymond A. Jetson, chief executive officer of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, which runs the outreach effort. “And so the purpose was to provide information for people, and to assist them in making plans based on their individual situations.”

The No. 1 issue? Housing. There isn’t enough of it, especially the more affordable variety.

“What we're finding from people is that they're concerned about the availability of housing, the availability of schools, and how they would enter their kids in school,” he said. “The great challenge that many people are facing is that they don’t have resources right now to fund a move back to New Orleans and then afford the life they would have to live once they returned.”

To reach these families, Jetson’s organization launched an all-out media blitz in dozens of cities, mostly in the South, through radio ads, direct mail, and a series of billboards with slogans like, “New Orleans is Coming Back. Will you?” and “Fort Worth took you in. New Orleans wants you back.”

But that blitz never quite reached the Simmons family in suburban Atlanta, who are wedged in the financial jam Jetson described. They’re desperate to return, but having lost it all to Katrina — including two rental properties — starting over is much more than just a matter of desire.

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