Armed with a $3.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greater New Orleans Foundation has chosen 15 planning teams who will develop designs for the various neighborhoods. The groups of neighborhood residents, many of them still displaced, met directly with the teams for five hours last Tuesday to get a sense of which ones they may want to work with. (Not surprisingly, the more affluent neighborhoods have been the best organized.)

Eventually the proposals will be woven into a single citywide master plan. What is stunning is the lack of comprehensive guidelines. Basic zoning requirements remain exactly the same as before the storm. In the areas of the city that experienced the worst flooding, the required elevation above sea level for each building follows guidelines set in the mid-1980’s. Proposals to shrink the city’s footprint to bring it into line with ecological realities — global warming, the rising sea level, the need to restore wetlands — were dropped months ago because it implied the elimination of some poor neighborhoods, a politically fraught issue. In the face of all of this, the city’s planning department has been reduced from 24 people to 9 since the storm.