By definition, a catastrophe beggars the imagination. If the catastrophe is a hurricane, it stirs up almost as much falsehood and fantasy as flotsam and jetsam.

Hurricane Katrina—August 29, 2005—was a full-tilt catastrophe, even after it weakened from a Category 5 storm and plowed ashore near New Orleans at Category 3 strength. 

The disaster left 80% of the city underwater (a flood zone six times the size of Manhattan), killed more than a thousand people, and triggered what has been called, after Chernobyl, the second-worst engineering failure in human history: the collapse of the levee system that encircled the city. 

As Katrina struck, I was on vacation in Mexico with my wife and our sons. Eighteen hours later, after flying to Houston and renting a car, I stepped out into the parking lot of the half empty strip mall in Baton Rouge, where my dislocated colleagues were attempting to put out The Times-Picayune.

One of our more skillful editors rushed up, threw his arms around me, and offered condolences. My house was under 9 feet of water, he told me. In hindsight, I am still struck by the precision of that misinformation: not 10 feet, not 8; 9 feet on the nose. I had to see it for myself, if only to salvage what I could—old family photos in the attic, perhaps. 

New Orleans was a no-go zone, officially off-limits, but the City That Care Forgot has always had a casual attitude toward the law. Getting around the National Guard checkpoints took a little nipping and tucking on back streets, and then, a block off Burgundy Street, there it was: Home! No water, no gas, no electricity, some slate missing from the roof. But still standing! And no flood line, not at 10 feet, or 9 feet, or 8. Like most of the French Quarter, our block had not flooded at all.

I emptied the refrigerator of edibles only just beginning to stink, put them in a bag, and set them out on the curb, as if sanitation trucks would come by in hours, not weeks, to haul them away. By Thanksgiving, as other folks returned, the streets of New Orleans would be lined not with bagged rot but with the reeking refrigerators themselves. They were everywhere, bringing to mind white tombstones in a city-sized graveyard. If New Orleans was not already dead, it seemed uncertain to me that it would ever survive. 

Falsehoods uglier than the depths to which our house had (or hadn’t) flooded were soon in wide circulation: that the city, including the shelters set up in the Superdome and the convention center, had been swept by murderous gunplay and an epidemic of rape; that the levees had been deliberately blown up by the city’s elite in a bid to wash away “undesirables” and restore white political dominance; that cops had seized the moment of chaos to track down and slaughter bad guys, stack their corpses on rafts, and float them out into the Gulf. Major media, including the Times-Pic, had duly reported the rumors and, to their credit, later took pains to separate fact from the often-racist misinformation, but by then weeks had passed.

And then there was the overarching question: who to blame for what had gone so wrong. Had the mayor and the governor been tardy in not ordering an evacuation more quickly? (Well, maybe so, but bear in mind that it was the largest evacuation since the Civil War, and that has to count for something.) Was the levee failure the result of multiple levels of administrative failure, as the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded in an exhaustive report a year after the catastrophe, or could blame be laid on engineering failures by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers?

The corps was a convenient villain, and villains are always wanted in sorting out failures as complex and sweeping as Katrina. The corps had managed construction of the flood control system. But the ASCE’s study pointed a finger at uncoordinated involvement by agencies ranging from Congress (ever quick to cut funding) to local levee boards (which were meant to maintain the levee system and, among other failures, allowed trees to grow on the earthen embankments). 

Recovery visions could be fanciful. So, too, the punditry that disaster inspires. The Canadian writer Naomi Klein warned that New Orleans would soon be in the clutches of what she called “disaster capitalism.” Public services would be privatized by free-marketers in thrall to University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate. He died at 94, a year after Katrina, but his influence did not die with him. 

Some of it seemed to be coming true. The Wall Street Journal caught up with one plutocrat and quoted him saying that if his peers didn’t seize the disaster as an opportunity to offload a good part of the city’s sizable underclass—that is, poor blacks—he wasn’t coming back. 

Fortunately, reality delivered neither Klein’s vision of full-bore disaster capitalism nor the racial cleansing the plutocrat yearned for. 

Another buzzword: “Disneyfication.” The rampant worry was that, in its zeal to revive the matchless culture of the city’s streets and music scene, New Orleans would contrive a faked-up version of itself. In place of impromptu brass bands, Mardi Gras parades, sketch artists, and freelance tarot card readers, were we going to get stage-managed voodoo queens and, in a tip of the hat to Jean Lafitte, Donald Duck costumed as a pirate? 

A related and more realistic fear was that recovery would lead to modernization and overbuilding. The exigencies of disaster recovery would prevail over nuanced urban esthetics. This was the city that, in the 1930s, pioneered the cutting-edge tout ensemble approach to preservation. But not so many years before Katrina, New Orleans had come stunningly close to running an elevated superhighway through the French Quarter, a move backed by civic leaders and both daily newspapers. It would have decimated the historic neighborhood that to this day is the linchpin in an economy heavily dependent on tourism. The Black French Quarter, Treme, had already been gutted by a similar plan.

Well, if we couldn’t become highway-loving Los Angeles, how about Las Vegas? After Katrina, ignoring concerns that casinos would suck the life out of the city’s restaurants and music venues, Mayor Ray Nagin bet the recovery on permitting every downtown hotel to offer casino gambling.

Another of Nagin’s big ideas: Bulldoze what was left of the Lower 9th Ward, a working-class district that flooded heavily, and build a vast factory for the production of prefab housing to replace the tens of thousands of ruined residences across the city. 

The mayor was not the only guy with big ideas. Even before Katrina—about two weeks prior, to be precise—Nagin had been nothing short of giddy to announce that a New York developer with a weird haircut and a rich father was proposing to build a 70-story tower on Poydras Street, part hotel, part condos. It would be the city’s tallest building, Donald Trump crowed. Having declared bankruptcy three times in connection with his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump seemed ready to wager big money on New Orleans and hope for better luck.

Nagin’s delight was not hard to understand. Though it’s often overlooked in Katrina narratives, the catastrophic hurricane befell a city still recovering from an oil crash. In the 1980s and ’90s, the crash had triggered what economists declared to be the worst depression to have kneecapped a major U.S. city since the Big One in the 1930s. 

The storm provided a handy excuse to finally tear down or replace the city’s troubled public housing projects—and think of all the jobs that would create! Were the projects anything more than government-run ghettos rife with crime and suffering? Well, yes. They were also home to thousands of New Orleanians anxious to return.

Amid seething controversy, a year after Katrina, the City Council voted unanimously to accept millions in federal aid to redo the four biggest projects, containing some 5,000 units. Advocates for low-income tenants were outraged. It would mean refusing to immediately reopen the relatively sturdy brick buildings at a time when housing shortages were drastic, especially for low-income New Orleanians. 

Yes, private capital was given a role in the construction and management of the new developments. The overhaul was conducted under the Hope VI program, a Clinton-era confection that (1) strove to replace uniformly low- to no-income projects with mixed-income communities and (2) sought to do so through public-private partnerships. Disaster capitalism, the vision Klein foresaw and Friedman craved? Not quite. Private money seemed to need an awful lot of handholding by the nanny state.

Plans to reconstruct New Orleans were paired with plans to deconstruct it, to “shrink the city’s footprint,” in the jargon of the day. Key members of Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) Commission latched onto an idea attributed to the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, now referred to as the infamous “Green Dot Plan.” 

Parts of the city on reclaimed marsh should never have been built, the argument went. Let this acreage revert to wild land, or—an easier sell—turn it into parks and playgrounds. All well and good, perhaps especially to geologists and professors of urban planning.

But, needless to say, the idea kicked up more than a little fuss among the displaced residents of the former marshlands. “I don’t know you, but I hate you,” one Black member of a public meeting audience howled at Joe Canizaro, the prominent (white) real estate developer who served on Nagin’s BNOB Commission and had chaired the Urban Land Institute. Like people in dryer parts of the city, the marshland residents dreamed of returning home someday soon and had little faith in recovery czars promising to find them better places to live. (Like where? In a public housing project?) 

In any case, the idea died aborning, undone like other BNOB plans by a failure to grasp the city’s complex racial politics. Nagin, a Black man, soon began distancing himself from his own commission, and a plethora of rival boards and commissions stepped forward with foundation funding— Rockefeller, Ford, et al.—to develop recovery plans of their own. 

For example, there would always be the need for freight handling facilities at the mouth of the continent’s mightiest river system. But maybe the rebuild could be limited to warehouses and shipping services behind impregnable walls. The residential parts of the city? Let them wash away in the next storm or the one after that—no one in their right mind would be coming back to live here, the argument went. 

Another narrow-gauge vision was explained to me on a flight from Washington, D.C., with President George W. Bush’s recovery czar for the Gulf region, Don Powell. The idea: Housing in one of the marshland neighborhoods, Eastern New Orleans, should be consolidated in taller structures, with the residential units placed above three or four levels of garage space. Floodwaters could wash through the garage floors without damaging the homes above. Didn’t happen.

What did happen? New Orleans had lost half its pre-storm population and might soon be expected to lose a lot more. And yet, right from the start of the recovery, the beleaguered city became a magnet for young people—most, but not all of them, white. Fresh-from-college professionals, Teach for America veterans, Habitat for Humanity volunteers, aspiring rock stars and basket weavers. They saw Katrina as only adding to New Orleans’ allure as an edgy place to spend a few years … or the rest of your life. Plodding off to law school or Wall Street or dad’s hardware store in Dubuque? That could wait. 

Bohemian inner-city neighborhoods—Marigny, Bywater, and much of Mid-City—exploded in trendiness. Rents and real estate prices exploded as well, to the dismay of longtime low-income residents, who could no longer afford to stay on in places they had called home all their lives. Within a decade the gentrification was intense, and it continues to this day. 

But a lot of things didn’t happen. The working waterfront was not studded with high-rise towers worthy of Dubai, as one developer had proposed. Indeed, coincident with the recovery, the downtown levees—empty but for piers and a railroad track—were turned into Crescent Park, the long, linear park that quickly gained favor with pedestrians, bench-sitters, dog-walkers, lovers out for a stroll, and children with kites. 

Much of New Orleans’ venerable and irreplaceable architecture remained intact, though the storm triggered two decades of neglect and worry about the fate of Charity Hospital. The Art Deco colossus on Tulane Avenue had once been the second-largest hospital in the U.S., providing specialty care to even the poorest New Orleanians. Heroically, it stayed open right through the hurricane, only to be closed down on orders from Gov. Kathleen Blanco as soon as possible.

Plans to clean out asbestos and reopen Charity as a judicial center or even as a replacement for City Hall went nowhere. By the 10-year anniversary of Katrina, a consortium of medical service providers, including the Veterans Administration and Louisiana State University’s medical school, had opened the brand new University Medical Center not many blocks away. The sprawling new hospital complex destroyed some 70 acres of classic New Orleans housing. Disaster capitalism run rampant? No. Like the levee rebuild, and the housing projects, this was a government job, however delighted private contractors may have been to get a piece of the action. 

The gorgeous building that was Charity still stands, empty and unused. But after two decades, plans are afoot for its revival as a combination center of research, teaching, and administration. Tulane University, the primary tenant, would occupy roughly a third of its million square feet. 

To a singular degree, corporate America was a no-show in the early going. New Orleans was home to two Fortune 500 companies in 2005. One of them was Entergy, the regional utility. The other was the mining consortium Freeport-McMoRan—which, within two years, moved its headquarters to Phoenix. Oil giant Chevron also beat a retreat from downtown. Alas, BP (British Petroleum) was still here when, five years after Katrina, its Deepwater Horizon platform blew out, greasing the gulf with an oil slick a few thousand square miles larger than England itself.  

Shell doubled down on New Orleans, remaining in its downtown tower and becoming a Medici of local arts and culture. In that capacity, Shell sponsored the 2006 Jazz Fest, amid doubts that the city would be possible to stage the annual extravaganza so quickly after Katrina. (Jazz Fest 2006 was a triumph that proved New Orleans could still make it.)

A vigorous charter school movement had flourished as post-Katrina public education in New Orleans was taken over by the state. But soon the charters had tucked themselves back under the wing of the elected Orleans Parish School Board, and the teachers union—at first sidelined by the charters—staged a partial comeback.

Trump? After jabbering for half a decade about his towering “condotel,” he did a flip-flop and sacked the plan in 2011.  

Disneyfication? The other Donald—not Trump, but Duck—also failed to make much of a mark on the reviving city’s culture. Musical dynasties—the Marsalis clan, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Andrews, the Barbarins—came home and still rule, with no direction whatsoever from Orlando or Anaheim.

A year after the storm, work began on the Louisiana film and studio complex in Treme. Tax incentives for music and theater productions premiered the year after that.

Also on the plus side, startups began to flourish in ways they hadn’t for a while. Even with the city’s 2025 population still off by a quarter, there are more restaurants in New Orleans today than before the storm. Magazine Street, once a miles-long parade of junk dealers and vacant storefronts, now buzzes with boutiques and galleries, financial services firms, and, inevitably, more restaurants.

Nagin’s vision of turning the Lower 9 into a factory for prefab housing? It gave way to a more intriguing idea, backed and heavily subsidized by no less a luminary than movie actor Brad Pitt, one of several celebrities (Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, and Ted Danson among them) who took a hands-on interest in recovery. 

Pitt’s idea was to invite architects near and far to contribute (occasionally fanciful) designs for houses that residents could then live in. Several blocks of the Lower 9 became a riff on architectural styles traditional to the city—updated shotgun singles and doubles predominant among them. Given how badly the area had flooded, the shrink-the-footprint crowd had opposed rebuilding the district at all. The returning Lower 9ers were delighted, at least initially; lawsuits would later argue that some of the houses were poorly constructed. Still, the “Pitt stop” became a regular feature of post-Katrina disaster tours. 

Dubya’s performance through all this fell somewhere between lackluster and inert. There was the famous photo op in which, rather than touch down near the devastated city, the president peered at it from the window of the plane taking him back to D.C. from a vacation on his Texas ranch. He was a Republican, after all, and New Orleans was a city of Democrats, most of them Black. 

That said, the feds finally did come through with some cash. They picked up the $14.5 billion cost of rebuilding the levees, if only to withstand the Category 3 storms it was supposed to have stood up to all along. And the feds threw in another $10 billion to piece together the city’s roughly 100,000 ruined residences. 

But lethargy and denial persisted. The risks ahead were foretold by Katrina. In 2005, the Army Corps and local levee boards were 13 years behind their own deadline to update the rickety and poorly engineered flood-control system.  

Today’s great meteorological threat is, of course, much more comprehensive: carbon pollution and a warming planet, with worsening hurricanes spinning each summer across rising seas. And efforts to address it are not only more belated, they are being reversed. 

Pandering shamelessly to his “base” and its scorn of environmentalists, Trump has quit the Paris climate accord and vowed to log the national forests, a huge carbon sink. He has cut federal support for electric vehicles, solar collectors, and windmills—evidently unconcerned that America is yielding the cutting edge in those industries to other countries, with China leading the pack. 

Louisiana’s mini-MAGA governor, Jeff Landry, has traipsed along in Trump’s wake, gleefully rubbing his hands in the hope that the president’s campaign-trail cry—“Drill, baby, drill!”—will goose oil and gas extraction and refining, which are big deals in Louisiana. Come the next climate catastrophe, any of us still alive can argue over how much the collapse of American leadership in the Trump years contributed to it. 

Meanwhile, for all the warnings and predictions of doom, 20 years after Katrina, New Orleans remains a gloriously shambolic place—“the northernmost banana republic,” as it has long been called. It still draws millions of tourists a year, in search of cultural delights, conventions, or a roaring inebriated time. Its 11 universities educate 50,000 students at a whack. It handles millions of tons of freight and remains a global capital of music and great food.  

For all the cheerleading by Friedman and the warnings from Klein, the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism did not displace the messier mix of public and private initiatives that has kept New Orleans bumbling along since slavery was abolished. (Before the Civil War, New Orleans was the richest city, per capita, in the U.S.) 

Yes, parts of town have been swept by gentrification, but much of New Orleans remains remarkably as it was before Katrina. 

And for all the coded messages about purging the city of its large indigent population, New Orleans is still majority Black. Add to that a freshly minted working class of color that arrived with Katrina. A low-cost army of mostly undocumented Latinos, they were eager to make a buck by re-roofing the city, building back its housing stock, and reviving its ravaged lawns and oak-lined avenues. Come the next storm, the mind reels in trying to imagine how badly off New Orleans would be if Trump manages to wall off this episodic invasion of immigrant “storm chasers,” as they are called—disrespectfully, perhaps, but not without deep gratitude for their work. 

One selling point of the overhaul was that de-ghettoizing the poor would mitigate the city’s crime problem. It hasn’t. Drug dealing and killings remain rife in New Orleans. The murder rate—intermittently the highest in the nation—has bobbed up and down over the years, and a recent downturn is being greeted with cheers. Those cheers will be louder if it stays down or, better yet, continues to fall.

Political corruption, another of New Orleans’ signature industries, also persists, as witnessed by the indictment of the city’s current mayor earlier this month. Nagin took his own stab at recovery profiteering, only to wind up in jail. In 2014, four years after the end of his mayoralty, he was slapped with a 10-year federal sentence and pricey fines for wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and filing false tax returns. 

Disaster provides an opportunity to look back and look ahead. Anniversaries of disaster are an occasion to see how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. One big takeaway may be this: For all the doomsaying, all the wise or zany ideas for recovery that Katrina inspired, a real comeback would not have been a city transformed. Instead, a disaster-struck city as fragile and antique as New Orleans had to first rediscover and renew what it’s been all along. As much as anything, New Orleans survived Katrina by remaining stubbornly, irredeemably itself. 

We’ll see if that works with the disasters to come. 

This piece is reprinted courtesy of the Common Edge Collaborative, which is dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design to the broader public. Jed Horne was city editor of the Pulitzer Prize winning Times-Picayune when Katrina struck. His book about the storm, “Breach of Faith,” (Random House 2006) was declared the “best of the Katrina books” on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” These days, Horne rides out the hurricane season at his home in the Mexican Sierra, elevation 7,000 feet.