Coming Home to New Orleans: Neighborhood Rebuilding After Katrina

Karl Seidman’s Coming Home to New Orleans offers counterpoint to narratives of post-Katrina failure through the Broadmoor neighborhood, where resident-led planning achieved 90 percent return by 2015. The sequencing mattered. School reopening anchored family return; family return justified infrastructure repair; infrastructure repair enabled commercial recovery. Federal programs optimized for disbursement metrics could not produce this sequence. Community coordination could. The Broadmoor model informs the emphasis on schools as functional nodes — not because schools are symbolically important but because their operational requirements organize the population and infrastructure that recovery depends on.