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 thesis draws on this case extensively: 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 thesis’s 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.