Adam Nossiter, writing in today's NYT, reports that plans unveiled a year ago to redevelop New Orleans and begin to move out of the post-Hurricane Katrina morass show few signs of being realized.

Billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and “cranes on the skyline” within months, the plan has produced little visible evidence that transformation is underway.

There is newly planted grass growing along St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans, but the school on the street remains abandoned. There are no cranes and certainly no Parisian boulevards.

Though Edward Blakely, the man in charge of the transformation, reminds Nossiter than it took 11 years to transform downtown Oakland, Nossiter concludes that "the growing frustration points up what has been a recurring theme in New Orleans’s sketchy, on-again, off-again recovery from Hurricane Katrina: grandiose official promises, apparently made to lift the public’s morale, that soon prove unrealistic."

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