Gaus, a law student at Tulane University in New Orleans, is the founder and director of Dogs of the 9th Ward, which rescues stray, abandoned and feral dogs in the devastated, storm-stricken community.

After receiving approval in April, demolition of homes began this week to pave the way for new medical centers in downtown New Orleans, and although the biomedical corridor is expected to generate thousands of jobs, it will also displace hundreds of residents and many businesses in a historic district.

Reforming the New Orleans Police Department is a lot like rebuilding a home after Katrina, said Mary Howell, 60, a civil rights attorney in New Orleans for over 30 years.

After the largest environmental catastrophe since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a New Orleans environmental organization has stepped up to prepare workers for the hazards of oil spill clean-up.

Louisiana experts are disputing newly published findings that high concentrations of lead in the poorest and oldest parts of New Orleans posed significant risks to residents, even before hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Since Katrina closed their local Winn-Dixie, Thomas and thousands of other residents of the Lower Ninth Ward have not had a single grocery store or supermarket in walking distance. This lack of access to fresh produce and foods has turned the neighborhood into what socio-economists call a “food desert. Today, efforts on several fronts are under way to bring healthy food to the Lower Ninth.

Three years later, the Smith family can find before and after photographs of their home along the Williams Gallery walls as part of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s recently opened exhibition, “Katrina +5: Documenting Disaster.”

Five years post-Katrina, the neighborhood known to many as New Orleans’ “black Mayberry” remains a “jack o’ lantern” neighborhood with well-kept renovated homes alternating, more often than not, with blight.

In a small area of the Lower Ninth Ward, uncertainty about whether residents will rebuild the hundreds of homes destroyed during Hurricane Katrina has morphed into a debate over how it should be done.

Evidence of Hurricane Katrina lingers across New Orleans through the thousands of abandoned homes still standing nearly five years after the disaster. Homes that have yet to be renovated are running out of time. Without intervention, they will collapse in another three to five years.