Big Easy makes way for new recovery czar

"The planning job here is relatively easy," says Blakely in a phone interview, "because the city pretty much shows you how to plan it. But what's happened is fragmentary leadership and ad hoc [planning] well before Katrina killed the opportunity structure. It has lost its structural identity and that's what has to be restored. This city has great bones, but you forget that she had a great face."

So what should be done now? "We have to go to scale – I have to start building 1,000 houses a day," he says.

Since hurricane Katrina bowled over the Gulf Coast and sunk most of New Orleans under the surface of Lake Pontchartrain, recovery is piecemeal, contested and, some say, myopic. Only half the residents of New Orleans, perhaps 200,000, have returned.

Much of the problem lies with sunken neighborhoods, where pockets of people have come back to a rotting wasteland of homes from Gentilly Woods to the Lower Ninth Ward. Plans to discourage people from returning to the lowest-lying areas failed after Mayor Ray Nagin put forth a "laissez-faire" rebuilding effort in his campaign for reelection last year. The concept was to leave things alone for a year and see which neighborhoods came back and which didn't. But the city is growing restive.

Elvira Robertson is one of the 20 percent of people who returned to Pontchartrain Park, the city's first black suburban-style subdivision. It was soaked by breaches in both the London Canal and Industrial Canal after Katrina hit. Now, in the middle of a residential wasteland, she has created an oasis of green lawn and flowers, a feeble attempt to not only create normalcy but also urge others to return. "We need people; we need a lot of people," she says.

Her frustration is widespread, observers say. "New Orleans has lacked leadership on these issues. People have had it with the let's see what happens, and let's muddle through approach," says Mr. Yaro.

It's the kind postdisaster malaise that Blakely handled in New York. As part of the Civic Alliance, he envisioned a Lower Manhattan as a better place than it was before 9/11. Similarly, Katrina has given New Orleans an opportunity to become a wealthier and less provincial city, experts say.

From rebuilding housing to establishing services, Blakely can help "to bring the public and private sectors together, to leverage resources and to paint a vision of hope for the future that's realistic and uplifting," says Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) of Louisiana, in an e-mail.

But unlike in New York after 9/11, there is no "unified politics" behind New Orleans's struggle. Divisiveness still rules at City Hall, a situation that will test Blakely's skills, critics say.

"He's just an appointee; he's not the mayor," says John McIlwain, of the Urban Land Institute in Washington. "As smart as he is, he's not smarter than the hundreds of planners who have been talking about this. Ed can give the right recommendations, but will the city back him up? Nobody knows."

"We'll be watching him very closely," says Mary Louise Johnson, one of the returnees to Pontachartrain Park. "Right now, he's our best hope."

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