Quote of note:

Just as disparities between rich and poor were exposed in the days after Hurricane Katrina, class and wealth seem to be playing a significant role as elected officials struggle to determine which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which should revert to swampland, if not bulldozed and sold en masse to a developer. While Eastover is full of the sound of saws ripping wood and the pneumatic punch of nail guns, the sound of the Lower Ninth Ward is mainly silence.

On one level, the rebuilding plan approved in March by Mayor C. Ray Nagin appears to put every neighborhood on the same footing. That plan places responsibility on residents to determine who is moving back to their communities and to decide collectively on a vision for their neighborhood.

But not every community has the same resources to track down former neighbors and draft a plan that can provide for things as diverse as a local elementary school and a grocery store.

In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September.

The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back.

The group was so well organized and financed that it recently retained a professional planner to help respond to the city's requirement that devastated neighborhoods devise their own revival blueprints.

Elsewhere, in the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly black working-class community where some of New Orleans's poorest people lived, displaced residents voice that same steely resolve to rebuild. But they had no neighborhood association, at least until mid-February, when Charmaine L. Marchand, the area's state representative, took it upon herself to create one. "No one else was organizing," Ms. Marchand said, "so I felt it fell upon me as the only elected official from the Lower Ninth to do something."

So while other neighborhood organizations were trying to assemble enough residents to justify the deployment of precious city services, those behind the newly minted Lower Ninth Ward Homeowners Association were busy writing bylaws and selecting officers well into March.