It is called willful neglect. I predicted this in the first few weeks after Katrina, it gives me no pleasure to be right.

In all seriousness, where do they expect these people to live? They have to live somewhere, it might as well be in their homes, not on the street and not in a strange city. Why shouldn't the American dream apply to them?

...is to make it someone else's problem. Where the Lousianna politicians expect the poor of New Orleans to live is wherever they happened to land after the disaster: Houston, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, etc. Brilliant, eh?

The American dream includes working hard and reaping the benefits of that hard work. Not relying on public assistance to support you.

These people should use this experience as a kick in the pants to better themselves. Not just expect to go back to the state-supported life that they knew pre-Katrina.

I know Salon is a left-slanting site, so I'm sure I'll get bashed for my opinion. But these people need to be responsible for themselves. Not have a fit because the state isn't supporting them in the manner in which they desire.

Those public housing developments should be bulldozed and the land used to build new, small, affordable housing that will be available for WORKING people.

It should be clear from the article that many of the people trying to return do in fact have jobs (or did). The city of New Orleans runs daily buses from Baton Rouge to bring in workers, because there is nowhere for them to live in New Orleans. Fast food restaurants are paying upwards of $10 an hour, plus signing bonuses and retention bonuses every paycheck. Thousands and thousands of houses sit in mold and debris because there aren't enough people to even do basic demolition.

Don't you just hate that? You're walking home from your steady job, on the way to bible study and then to volunteer at the soup kitchen, and someone shoots you?

I worked for HANO for 3 years and I worked in a public housing development until Katrina. I had no faith in Jackson from the beginning. He didn't care about the residents. He gave speeches in front of housing development residents praising President Bush, knowing that this administration hasn't been cognizant of the poor in the least. His management team was more concerned with getting contracts for their friends so they could all make lots of money on the backs of the residents and us employees. The place is rife with elitism and cliques that cater to their own and dismiss those who don't fit in. Good people got shoved aside and their buddies got all the benefits.

HUD should be doing more to bring people home, but Jackson said months ago that New Orleans wouldn't be as black as it was before and that statement showed the lack of concern and ill will for the (black) poor of the city. I hate to say it, but I believe they will gentrify New Orleans and the (poor) black people who lived there will be left out of the mix. (And I didn't hear the howls of protest like I heard when Ray Nagin made his "chocolate city" statement.) I didn't believe then that they were going to be brazen enough to try to box out the poor, but Katrina did it for them. I don't trust their motives at all now, and I fear for the residents.

I have a good relationship with the residents because they knew I was concerned with doing what I could to help them, not with myself. I still talk to many of them even though I don't live in New Orleans now and I have a different job. I understand their plight and I know the suffering many of them have had to endure. These people who sit in their homes, drive their big SUV's and get everything in life they think they want have no idea what it's like to be poor and have to depend on others for your very life. Many people in the housing developments only want what we all want, a decent home, a life, a job and opportunities for their families. Many can't get it for different reasons, economic and social, but they are entitled to have the best life they can manage to have. It's not fair to them to say they are all welfare queens and pimps, but I don't expect any less from Peggy Wilson. She is as out of touch as many others who have opinions but no facts.

To bashme, I guess you missed the part about where most of these people had leases? How about all that talk about keeping families together? That means an extended family. As I wrote after Katrina, if the poor couldn't read and write before the hurricane, they won't be able to write afterward unless something is done to break the cycle.

I had proposed using some of the military bases that were closing at the same time to house the families instead of breaking them up and shipping them off to distant states where they would never be able to afford to go back or even to see close family members without some type of help. If they didn't have a car to leave with, they don't have one now.

This is a problem that won't go away, is your intent to have them build tent cities for the poor? They have to live somewhere.

In the end, only 120 apartments [out of 1,600] were designated for public housing at River Garden, with only about 40 occupied by low-income tenants to date. Both Jackson and Mayor Ray Nagin have praised River Garden as a model of how public housing in New Orleans should be rebuilt.

Namely, without all those poor people.

"You all have the right to return," Jefferson told the crowd, calling on housing officials to reopen apartments that weren't flooded, as soon as possible.

I do not agree that people have a "right" to live in a certain place. A right to live, yes, and a right to live in a decent place, yes, but not a specific place. Especially a place that is prone to the same sort of disaster over and over again. As a resident of Sacramento, the next most likely place to flood, I don't expect that if my home is destroyed by flooding that I have some sort of Constitutional right to live in the exact same place. I am quite prepared to, if things are ever as bad here as they are in New Orleans, to walk away from my home, my extended family, and everything I've known for many years and start over somewhere else. Maybe we should forget about rebuilding New Orleans.