Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina: Here's How the City Is Doing

Millennials have little faith in the government, the media, and the American justice system. Anyone who remembers Hurricane Katrina and FEMA's incompetence can understand why.

This week marks ten years after Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. During the hurricane, a faulty levee system bucked and flooded 80 percent of New Orleans with water, leaving thousands of people without homes.  

Mainstream media showed survivors climbing on rooftops to stay above water and revealed the squalid conditions of the Superdome where so many went for food and shelter. The citizens in one of America's greatest cities had been reduced to live in Third World conditions. 

Now, ten years later, The Daily Beast reports that the health and well-being of New Orleans is finally being restored. According to the article,  

• New Orleans is a robust city with a booming $800 million film industry, 
• The city has a burgeoning digital economy, rising real estate values and a solid growth curve. 
• The population is approaching 90 percent of the 457,000 people who lived there when the place nearly drowned on international television, starting August 29, 2005.

To see how New Orleans has bounced back from the hurricane, you can view "Then and Now" photos at The NY Daily News. 

According to The Daily Beast here is a sample of how much it cost to rebuild an American city:

• Washington saved New Orleans with a financial lifeline, at least $19.5 billion from FEMA alone
• The Rockefeller Foundation contributed $6.5 million for citywide planning. 
• Congress allocated $9 billion to assist under-insured residential owners in the Road Home program, a grant process that became a byzantine scandal.
• Congress also set aside an initial $7.5 billion appropriation to help under-insured homeowners rebuild.
• Former presidents Bush and Clinton spearheaded a Katrina fund that raised $90 million in the first three months to assist the rebuilding of schools, faith-based organizations, and community projects.
  
• The emir of Qatar donated $100 million for Katrina repairs in the Gulf South, of which Xavier University in New Orleans, which was heavily damaged, received $17.5 million for rebuilding.

Although the city is thriving, The Atlantic reports New Orleans still has a long way to go. But thanks to the amazing people like local musicians who have salvaged communities and put neighborhoods back together, New Orleans will always have its identity and the culture it's so famous for. 

What do you remember about Hurricane Katrina? Sound off below.