ELYSIAN FIELDS LOST by Jeffrey Murrell

Well, all but these three or four units, which the city is apparently trying to rehab for future occupancy, have been razed to the ground. See the pretty new units behind them? Read on . . .

The three or four old buildings that are being rehabbed are surrounded by these beautiful, new public-housing units and new, private and single-family, public-housing developments as far as the eye can see where the ugly, old tenement buildings once scarred the cityscape. I got lost down there because the place has so drastically changed! I stopped and asked a couple of the new public-housing residents how they liked it, and their response was overwhelmingly positive and hopeful. Now, instead of being callously warehoused in rundown cold-storage tenements, public-housing residents here have lovely, pastel-colored homes that they can take pride in and which they appear to care for as if their own!

And, as of 2007, it looks like about ¾ of the city's old public housing units have been shut down and boarded up (amen)! The only major housing projects that look like they're still the crime-infested cesspools of anarchy that New Orleans public housing typically always was before Katrina are the notoriously crime-infested Bienville housing projects right next to the French Quarter which, like the rest of the area around the Quarter and the Central Business District downtown, sustained little damage from the storm. This lamentably means tourists will still have to go into the neighboring cemeteries in guided groups so they will be safe from the criminal parasites from next-door who sneak into the cemeteries, hide behind the tombs and carry out surprise hold-ups of unsuspecting visitors!

Far away from the St.Thomas housing projects, these lovely, little "Katrina" cottages are replacing lost/destroyed homes in the city's famous 9th Ward.

With most of the old riffraff out and rebuilding taking place all over the city, it looked at first as if there was a significant reduction in crime since Katrina disbursed so much of the criminal element far away from the city. But, alas, New Orleans returned once again to its usual-and-ordinary, criminally over-run state of anarchy by 2008.