In a recent essay, 1 widely circulated locally, the Tulane geographer Richard Campanella calculated that this group numbered in the low- to mid-four digits, and largely left the city after three or four years, when funding ran out. The first were city planners, environmentalists, educators, social workers, civil rights activists, and criminal justice reformers who came to help the city rebuild after Katrina. The new New Orleanians have arrived in two phases. A study by the Kaiser Foundation found that only one in nine New Orleanians had not lived in the city prior to Katrina, meaning that about 80 percent of the increase comes from the return of former residents displaced by the storm. A recent poll found that the highest proportion of the recent arrivals had moved from Mississippi, followed by Texas and Georgia. But the new citizens are not, despite appearances, New Yorkers. (The population remains lower than the pre-Katrina figure of 452,170, and significantly lower than its peak, reached in 1960, of 627,525.) Last year Forbes ranked New Orleans the fastest-growing city in the United States. Since Hurricane Katrina it has more than doubled from its lowest point of 158,353, to 378,715. The city’s population is undergoing a rapid expansion. Roch, forcing out longtime residents, particularly working-class African-Americans. It tends to elicit raised eyebrows because there is a general perception in New Orleans today that the city is being swarmed, occupied, and rendered unrecognizable by New Yorkers (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Angelenos).Īnecdotal evidence would include a surge in fawning depictions of the city in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine a handful of popular restaurants opening recently by former New Yorkers and, most significantly, the doubling and even tripling of property values in neighborhoods desirable to transplants, such as Bywater, Faubourg Treme, and St. It’s a loaded question, and I tend to answer it warily because I have a loaded answer: New York City. Whenever I meet a stranger in New Orleans, one of the first questions I’m asked is where I’m from. ‘Bourbon Street Jazz Bars’ illustration by Franklin McMahon