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While Congress decides how to pay for reconstruction, officials
are debating how to best rebuild New Orleans and deal with the
poverty and racial divides that the storm revealed.
"We
have the opportunity, if we have the right principles and we have
the right tools to give many of those low income families the
ability to live in neighborhoods ... where they have access to
good schools, safe streets and quality jobs," said Bruce
Katz, who was chief of staff for the Department of Housing and
Urban Development in the Clinton administration.
"That did not exist in New Orleans before this hurricane.
And to some extent it didn't exist because the federal government
had created enclaves of poverty with public housing and subsidized
economy and so forth," he added.
And even though the broken levees will be fixed and strengthened,
geological experts fear that another strong hurricane could cause
a repeat of the recent floods.
We need a better plan for a huge storm such as Katrina and a
coastal restoration program, said Mark Schleifstein, an environmental
reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
"Both
of those are very, very expensive propositions that haven't been
addressed at all," he added.
Finally, local officials are also trying to figure out how to
lure people back to the devastated cities.
In a Washington Post/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey
of Katrina evacuees in Houston, 44 percent of respondents said
they would "permanently relocate" to somewhere other
than New Orleans.
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Compiled by Brian Wolly for NewsHour Extra
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