“Those who have returned to the city live in a range of housing circumstances,” Henrici tells GlobeSt. “The new housing units cannot replace public housing one-to-one and finding low- income housing is still a struggle for those families.”

At the time the city flooded, the Housing Authority of New Orleans managed 7,379 rental public housing units and 5,146 of them were occupied. Most of the traditional public housing was comprised of multi-storied apartment complexes known locally as “The Big Four”: B.W. Cooper, St. Bernard, C.J. Peete and Lafitte. The Big Four accounted for 3,077 occupied apartment units pre-Katrina.

Since 2007, all but a few of the buildings within the former Big Four housing developments have been torn down and are in the process of redesign and new construction as mixed-income multi-family units.

Part of the reason for the shift is federal policy, Henrici notes. Federal guidelines require public housing, known as section 8 voucher housing, to be integrated into neighborhoods to reduce the concentration of poverty and crime.

The B.W. Cooper housing development, for example, originally consisted of 1,550 public housing units. In October 2008, 1,200 units were demolished with plans to build 740 units of mixed-income housing, including both affordable rental homes and market-rate rentals. The new development will be constructed in phases, with 410 projected units to be completed in the first phase. Of the original public housing stock, a total of 303 occupied units remain.

Of equal importance is where the new housing stock will be located, Henrici says. “There are other aspects related to housing beyond one-to-one replacement – it’s also about where and how the housing is located in respect to jobs," she explains. "The women who used to live in these apartments could walk their children to school and take the buses to work and to go shopping. One of the things they talked about during our interviews was how difficult it is for them to get around.”