Walking through the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans on a Sunday afternoon two years ago, you would have seen people everywhere. Last Sunday you would have seen one or two couples, cleaning up a little, doing what they could to start making some progress towards restoration.Just before Katrina hit, the population of New Orleans was approximately 444,000. Now it is roughly 191,000.

Hurricane Katrina left thousands of New Orleans citizens displaced, the majority of whom were the poorest of the poor. Due to the slow recovery process, a lack of housing and jobs, and the extreme economic and social problems existing before the disaster, the population of New Orleans may never revive.

According to The New York Times, most of the blame for the lagging repopulation has been placed on these pre-Katrina problems. The city experienced a racial and economic rift long before this disaster, but the slow return of evacuees highlights that situation.

Just north of New Orleans, the situation is similar. Max Carter, campus ministry coordinator, led a group of Guilford volunteers down to the town of Bogalusa three times last year as part of the North Carolina Friends Disaster Service.

“What we certainly saw in Bogalusa was that there’s a racial divide that goes deep and that the black community is literally on the other side of the tracks on the worst land there,” Carter said. “You could tell that their community and their homes had been devastated long before Katrina.”

Another huge factor in the stunted re-growth of the New Orleans area is that efforts to rebuild and introduce public services to places like the Lower Ninth Ward have been unenthusiastic and minimal.

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin expressed his disappointment with the federal government’s lack of recovery effort at a Jan. 29 hearing with three U.S. senators.

“The tragedy of Katrina has lingered for so long, I just don’t see the will to really fix it,” Nagin said, according to The New York Times.

However, some progress may be made soon on the public works aspect of rebuilding. On Jan. 30, the Unified New Orleans Plan was introduced to the City Planning Commission.

The plan involves putting $14 billion towards public services such as libraries, schools, and health care. Planners hope that the consequence of this redevelopment will be an increased repopulation of places like the Lower Ninth Ward, according to The New York Times.

Despite having taken so long for the plan to come about, it still must undergo scrutiny from different governmental sectors before implementation. These sectors include the City Council, the mayor’s administration, and The Louisiana Recovery Authority, according to the New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

Public works is not the only problem, and some doubt whether that alone will encourage much growth.

Richard Koritz, Greensboro local and publisher of “Face to Face with Katrina Survivors: A First Responder’s Tribute,” experienced the emptiness of the Lower Ninth Ward in person. He could not believe the extent of the devastation, the extreme destruction of so many houses, and the absence of life 17 months after the disaster.

To remedy the situation, Koritz believes the best way to bring people back to the Lower Ninth Ward’s barren streets is to provide job opportunities and housing.

“(New Orleans needs) a jobs program,” Koritz said. “The people that are doing the reconstruction work should be, first and foremost, the people that lived there prior to the storm. It should be jobs that are living wage. (Then) they actually have a job which is probably on par with addressing the more important thing, the housing.