NEW ORLEANS -- Block by block, this city is springing back to life.
Block by block, it is receding into the past tense.
With Hurricane Katrina nearly nine months gone and about 60 percent of New Orleans's pre-storm population still somewhere else, the rebirth and the wasting away are closely tracking neighborhood patterns of race and poverty.
Disparities in wealth and in the distance of evacuees from their ruined houses are dictating, in many cases, which neighborhoods will be part of New Orleans's future and which will be consigned to its history.
This is the third article in an occasional series that follows the fates of families from two streets in New Orleans -- one in a working-class black neighborhood, the other in an affluent white one -- after Hurricane Katrina.
The Gulf Coast was hit hard by two massive hurricanes in the fall of 2005.
For a city that was two-thirds black and nearly one-third poor before the storm, the uneven pilgrimage back to New Orleans has already changed voter turnout and seems certain to transform the culture and character of the city, making it substantially whiter, richer and less populous than before.
That point has clearly arrived for the 6500 block of Memphis Street in Lakeview, a white neighborhood hit hard by Katrina.
Like much of the Lower Ninth Ward, the block is empty and silent, with no electricity, no drinkable water, no gas, no FEMA trailers and no signs of rebuilding on a street where many families owned their homes for generations.
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