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New Orleans population falls 30% in 10 years
Hurricane Katrina's lasting impact on US city revealed in demographic changes

  a.. 
  a.. Ed Pilkington in New York 
  b.. guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 February 2011 18.12 GMT 
  c.. Article history
 Poor areas of New Orleans have sharply depleted populations, with neighbourhoods such as the Lower Ninth ward largely boarded up. Photograph: David Rae Morris/EPA 
The scale of the long-term devastation inflicted on New Orleans has been revealed by the 2010 US census, which found that the city's population has collapsed by almost a third over the past decade.

Figures released this week show that there are 343,839 residents of New Orleans, down 29% from the previous count of 485,000 in 2000. The current population is also substantially depleted from the 455,000 people believed to have been living in the city just before hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.

The powerful storm overpowered the city's levees and caused flooding that forced about 200,000 residents to flee.

Families relocated to makeshift camps elsewhere in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. No one knows what has happened to those people — the census records current location but does not show the movement of individuals between counts — but it is evident that many have never returned.

The detailed breakdown of the figures underline the enormous structural and demographic changes that the hurricane has imposed on New Orleans into the longer term. The first shift that leaps out is that the city's racial composition has altered dramatically.

Before Katrina, New Orleans was famously an overwhelmingly black city, with African Americans making up 67% of the population. That figure has dropped to 60% in the 2010 census, which reveals 118,000 fewer black residents.

That is likely to skew the dynamics of New Orleans in subtle and less subtle ways. The city last year elected its first white mayor since 1978, though Mitch Landrieu won the ballot with the support of 64% of the black voters.








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