NEW ORLEANS — This city is a rarity in 2009: a place full of hard hats and big building projects and subcontractors roaring around in pickup trucks. A city where home prices have dipped only slightly, and where the unemployment rate is 5.3% -- compared with 8.1% nationwide.
New Orleans, it seems, has largely dodged the Category 5 recession pummeling the rest of the country, thanks to its unique post-Katrina economy. For locals accustomed to bad luck and trouble, the good news can feel a little strange.
"It's totally bizarre, because normally, we're the worst in everything," said Brennan Manale, a clerk at Bella Rouge, a Magazine Street shoe boutique.
Jennifer Mansfield, a worker at a busy French Quarter gift store, put it this way: "I can't tell how bad it is in the rest of the country, because it's so normal here. Well, normal for New Orleans."
That qualification -- "normal for New Orleans" -- is a crucial one. The old cankers of crime, corruption and low wages still fester here, and neighborhoods remain choked with more than 68,000 vacant homes -- most of which have been moldering since the flood of August 2005.
But some aspects of New Orleans' "new normal" have resulted in an enviable economic picture compared with the broader global meltdown.
Many chronically unemployable locals moved away for good, keeping the unemployment rate low. Meanwhile, pre-Katrina residents have steadily trickled back to town with plans to fix up old homes, creating an ongoing demand for renovations.
Perhaps most important, the federal government has allocated $34.5 billion in rebuilding aid for the state, with $19 billion of that amount still to be spent, according to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. And that doesn't include the $3.8 billion headed to Louisiana under the federal stimulus package hammered out in February.
The recovery dollars are paying for projects large and small -- from an $800-million replacement of the damaged "twin span" bridges over Lake Pontchartrain to thousands of homes being fixed under the state-administered Road Home program.
The Army Corps of Engineers continues to use contractors to strengthen the levee system. And in working-class neighborhoods like the 9th Ward, laborers are still pounding away on small-scale renovations.
"Katrina was a horrible nightmare, but the reality is that for the construction industry, it's been a blessing," said Theresa Leger, a vice president of Landis Construction Co., a local firm that has remained busy since the hurricane.
