Less than half will return

A 2theadvocate.com survey indicates that most Katrina evacuees will not return to Louisiana. Many have job, or have put down roots, or simply find it too expensive to move back. It's sad, but the road home turned out to be the I-10 to Houston. Newq Orleans needs visionary leadership or it will become a forgotten, quaint curiosity. And it's not just the tax base that suffers; there's a human cost too:

The LSU survey of more than 300 displaced Louisiana residents living in 10 FEMA trailer parks, including three in Baton Rouge and four in Lafayette, found that nearly three-quarters of the residents were employed before the storms but only a third have jobs today. The survey also revealed a “significant level of depressive symptoms’’ among the trailer park residents,
LSU sociologist Joachim Singelmann said.

“That is something you don’t find in the general population,’’ he said.