I too believe that New Orleans will never return. By 2010...you will see a much smaller town. The Burbon street crowd will still continue to drive in and have a great weekend...with tourist dollars flowing in. But after that...other than port activity....this town will never be the same.
Baton Rouge will become the powerhouse of the state. Houston and Shreveport will increase in size because of the folks who never returned. I see all of this as positive. And it drives home the point that the feds really shouldn't throw $100 billion at this town in hopes of rebuilding it.
That's the big question. I was not in favor of a big Federal payout to the Twin Towers victims, either. It sets a wrong precedent and rewards the wrong things.
That's not to say that people made homeless shouldn't be helped -- they should. But infrastructure is a different story -- there was much more that the local government could and should have done to prevent damage to the levees. Instead they spent money on a gambling riverboat and the arena. Now the rest of the country will be assessed, in the form of national debt and higher insurance rates.