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You have to remember that before Katrina, there were fair parts of New Orleans that didn't look all that good to begin with. Decades of corruption, widespread poverty / subsistance living, and a fairly soft economy have meant that much of New Orleans wasn't very strong to start with.
Many of the areas of greatest destruction were areas where people owned the house but had little or no insurance, and those that were insured were not covered for flooding. There are ongoing court cases attempting to get insurance companies to pay out because the flooding was the result of a hurricane, and so far those have been a mxed bag.
Most of those areas will required the houses to be rebuilt basically on stilts to be above the potential flooding the next time. I would suspect that many people are having a hard time getting any financing to build in these areas.
What amazes me is that the state / city hasn't just said "we are sending in the bulldozers, everything is declared a total loss" and at least start the process of starting over. Too much stuff just ain't ever going to get fixed, it is just going to rot.
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