Blight dims post-Katrina optimism

“I just want to see people again,’’ she said recently, swatting bugs in the muggy heat.

On paper, the city’s economy appears to be thriving, with relatively low rates of unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy. But in post-Katrina New Orleans, residents’ perceptions of their city’s recovery tends to depend on where they live, their vantage point of it. Swaths of some neighborhoods are sparsely populated, even desolate, and federal rebuilding dollars have provided much of the economic resilience.

While the recovery has been “stronger than anticipated,’’ the city “will still face challenges to long-term stability and prosperity,’’ according to a report released Tuesday by GCR & Associates Inc., an urban planning and consulting firm.

New Orleans’s economy is among the healthiest of major metro areas, according to the Associated Press Economic Stress Index, which assigns counties a score of 1 to 100 based on unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy data.

The seven-parish New Orleans region scores 8.6 through June, the most recent month for which figures are available. That’s considerably lower than the national average of 10.6 and means the average New Orleans resident has felt far less relative economic pain than people in Los Angeles (15.07), Chicago’s Cook County (15.11) or Florida’s Miami-Dade County (16.06).

There are other causes for optimism: the overhaul of New Orleans’s long-dismal public school system, an influx of college-educated residents, the greening of neighborhoods as they rebuild, and the elevating of more homes to help protect them from future flooding.

After Katrina, the mayor started talking about a new New Orleans. What he meant, he said recently, is a “better New Orleans; an updated New Orleans, one where we basically updated all of our critical assets but respected our history.’’

Some analysts believe the economic resilience powered by tens of billions in federal rebuilding aid is unsustainable. Once the money is spent, they say, the tourism-based economy and lower-wage jobs that dominated before Katrina are likely to reemerge.