Old worries may still plague new New Orleans

updated 7:40 p.m. ET Aug. 26, 2007

NEW ORLEANS - Two years after Hurricane Katrina, much of the “city that care forgot” still lies in ruins. But Otis Biggs’ task as he shuffles his Tarot deck this moist August day is to peer into the future to 2015, the storm’s 10th anniversary.

Rings of silver and turquoise flash as one card, then another flops onto a zodiac-patterned table in the incense-perfumed Bottom of the Cup Tea Room in the French Quarter, where the diminutive Biggs has been telling fortunes for 32 years.

An upside down tower — violent storms will hold off until levees are repaired.

The ace of cauldrons — money will flow.

The empress — stability, fruitful things.

Downtown, near the riverfront, Biggs sees a gleaming glass and steel tower rising, the tallest in the state. Elections will bring new blood and vision. Companies will feel safe to invest in the city, and most of those who fled will return.

“There’s hope,” Biggs says, his hazel eyes twinkling in light reflected through a crystal ball.

Hope, but no promises
There may be hope, but there are few assurances for the recovering Big Easy.

“For every positive that’s going on in New Orleans right now, there’s a negative, there’s a concern,” says Reed Kroloff, who until recently was dean of the school of architecture at Tulane University.

NBC video Aid effort in crisis Aug. 26: New Orleans continues to struggle with a housing crisis. CNBC’s Scott Cohn reports. Nightly News

The failure of federally funded, state-administered recovery programs to quickly take hold, and the city’s struggle to define and fund plans for neighborhood redevelopment, have shaken confidence about New Orleans’ short-term future. Mayor Ray Nagin favors a “market-driven” recovery of the city. Critics say he has not made the tough decisions necessary to get planning for the city’s future moving into high gear.

New Orleans still struggles with corruption. A congressman is under indictment, a senator has been implicated in a sex scandal and a city councilman thought to be a favorite as New Orleans’ next mayor pleaded guilty in August to federal bribery charges and resigned.

There are geophysical challenges ahead, too. By 2015, parts of New Orleans will have subsided nearly an additional 8 inches. The city filled up like a bowl when Katrina broke levees on Aug. 29, 2005. Roughly 240 more square miles of the eroding wetlands that protect the city from storm surge will be gone by 2015.

If the Army Corps of Engineers has its way, and billions in federal funds don’t get siphoned off by war or another natural disaster, those who remain should be better protected from flooding by 2015.

To the east, a massive levee-and-floodgate structure rising out of the brackish marsh should block the surge from the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO. To the north, new flood gates and pumping stations would prevent a surge from Lake Pontchartrain and prevent a repeat of the failures along the city’s drainage canals.

Population changes
The city’s population will be smaller a decade after the storm. A recent estimate pegs the current population at around 270,000 — about 60 percent of the pre-Katrina total.

Rich Campanella, an urban geographer at Tulane, predicts that by 2015, the city’s population will be somewhere around 350,000. Blacks will still outnumber whites, but the margin will be significantly less.

Alex Brandon / AP Rich Campanella, an urban geographer, predicts that by 2015, New Orleans' population will grow from 270,000 to around 350,000.

He and others agree the city’s residents will be somewhat more affluent, the poor possibly being squeezed out by the increased expense of living in a hurricane zone.

And New Orleans could be a city with a younger population.

“Not because there are more children,” says Campanella, associate director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier universities. “Being elderly and in need of health care in this city might inspire many older people to relocate.”

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