US: Denis Staunton reports from Louisiana on how the state is coping after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina
New Orleans woke up to good news yesterday when it heard that the United States Senate had approved $29 billion in recovery aid for the region hit by Hurricane Katrina. Adding to the seasonal cheer, Mayor Ray Nagin lifted the 2 am curfew in most of the city, allowing bars to stay open all night and bands to continue playing until they ran out of tunes.
"The roar erupts from Bourbon Street," the mayor trumpeted.
The mayor also announced that a new analysis suggested that as many as 150,000 people may already have returned to New Orleans, twice the most recent estimate and one-third of the pre-hurricane population.
Few have returned to the most badly-damaged districts such as the lower Ninth Ward, which remains without electricity and other basic utilities. But many of the ward's former residents, among New Orleans' poorest, are refusing to abandon their homes altogether.
"This House is Not for Sale for Any $" reads a plywood sign nailed to the door of one house in a block which has been all but destroyed.
As the city government considers how to rebuild New Orleans, however, there is a growing chance that the Ninth Ward could disappear forever.
The mayor's Bring New Orleans Back Commission is looking at a plan which envisages a city half its previous size, with only the most viable districts being rebuilt.
Everyone would be allowed to return to their old neighbourhoods if they chose, and electricity, water and phone services would be available everywhere, although some districts could be without shops, schools and doctors.
After a year, the authorities would assess how strongly each neighbourhood was recovering, and if not enough people returned to a district, those who did would be bought out and resettled in a busier part of the city.
The mayor wants to avoid what planners call the "jack-o'-lantern" effect - a handful of occupied houses in a sea of abandoned properties.
But not everyone is impressed with the plan.
Blake Haney, who runs a graphic design and communications business in New Orleans, fears that it will deter people from coming back rather than encourage them. "I don't think it's going to work," he said.
When he returned to the city after Katrina, Haney set up "Rethinking New Orleans", an informal group of architects, community activists and others who meet for drinks at his studio every Friday to talk about the city's future.
"There's a really small group of people who have lots of influence and power and money and they want to turn New Orleans into a large real estate space where they can do what they want," he said.
Haney wants New Orleans to be rebuilt "smaller but better" and to retain the diversity and cultural identity which has made the city so attractive.
He says that New Orleans was "dying" before the hurricane hit and that the disaster could be an opportunity to fix what was wrong. "The schools were dying, the police force had issues, the infrastructure was screwed up, the politics were dirty - you had all these problems. Then Katrina comes through and just literally pushes things to the endgame."
New Orleans had some of the worst public schools in America, a legacy of the years after desegregation, when many white parents moved their children out of the city or enrolled them in private schools.
Poor schooling helped to keep the city's economy weak and fuelled a thug culture in some of the poorest black districts which left the most vulnerable terrorised by crime. There was little point in turning to the police for protection because the force was marked by corruption and incompetence.
The problem spills over into neighbouring districts: the police chief of nearby Lutcher pleaded guilty this week to selling 50 grams of crack cocaine to an undercover officer.
Louisiana's culture of political corruption is legendary and a former governor of the state, Edwin Edwards, is currently serving 10 years in prison for racketeering, extortion and fraud. A likeable rogue who could fit comfortably into some corners of Ireland's political culture, Edwards first hit the headlines in 1991 when he defeated former Ku Klux Klan leader David Dukes for the leadership after declaring: "The only way I could lose this race is if I was caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl."
The difficulty facing New Orleans' planners is how to escape from the corruption and deprivation of the past without destroying the unique demographic mix which gives the city its personality.
Working-class African-Americans are responsible for the city's best music, they form the social organisations which create the floats for Mardi Gras and they produce the Mardi Gras Indians, who work for months on their elaborate, feathered costumes and embody a living cultural tradition stretching back to the 19th century.
Haney says that everyone in New Orleans is waiting for leadership and for a concrete plan to take the city through the next few years. As an optimist, he cannot imagine how New Orleans will fail to survive. But, even if it descends into corporate blandness, he is staying around to see it.
Like most people in New Orleans, Haney has no idea what to expect over the next few years, but he has a clearer view than most of what a successful recovery would feel like.
"No one lives here because they've got a kick-ass job. I stay here because I can go to the corner store or a bar somewhere and everyone I see says hello, everyone's cool. And I can wear what I want and I can say what I want and I can do what I want and nobody's going to call me a commie or a weirdo or whatever. There's an embracement of life, you know, living in the moment. Success will be if that sense of living in the moment and of community and freedom we have here is sustained," he said.