Certain areas are doing fine. Uptown, French Quarter, Garden district are all basically complete. Metairie is doing well. Kenner, where I live, is doing pretty well. I'm back in my house (about 2 months now). Now I just need to save up for my furniture. NEW Orleans east is still basically completely destroyed. Some parts still don't even have power. In the past few months, restaurants are finally beginning to stay open past 8:00PM. Businesses are still under a lot of pressure, unless you're in the construction or home furnishing business. The tourist trade is seriously struggling. Basically, any business that deal in luxury items are really hurting. People simply don't have money to spend on anything other than basics. Housing is still running about twice the usual cost, but it is sloooowly dropping as more units are becoming available.

So basically, if you're coming to New Orleans to have a good time, PLEASE come. Everything you would normally do is back up and running. Tourist areas are safer than ever, given the numbers of police assigned there. We really need the tourist trade to recover, and the quicker the better. People around the country are complaining that we're having Mardi Gras, as if nothing were wrong, but what they don't realize, is that Mardi Gras dumps over a billion dollars into New Orleans. Money that we desperately need. The party isn't for us, it's for everyone else.

On a personal note, I stated a year ago that I should probably be OK since I had double my houses value in insurance. Turns out that I now have about 60k in debt due to things that the insurance company decided they didn't want to cover. (Half my roof was damaged, so they only paid for half a roof. You can't get a roofer to install half a roof, so we had to come up with the difference, for example.) Building costs are close to double to what they had been pre-Katrina, but the insurance company would only pay fair-market value, regardless of what real-market value here was. Bastards. Over all, we've all learned to live with less, and it's OK. At least I'm not living in a FEMA trailer anymore.

If you have any specific questions, let me know.

Mason