The Play Area Bringing Music and Light to New Orleans's Lower Ninth

It’s been more than 11 years since Hurricane Katrina, and much of New Orleans is in pretty good shape. By 2015, more than half the city’s neighborhoods had regained 90 percent of their pre-storm populations. But in the Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, black neighborhood that experienced extensive flooding, only 37 percent of residents had returned.

Due to a variety of ill-advised government policies that tended to write off the Lower Ninth or favor other areas, the neighborhood’s damaged homes, schools, and businesses were left to founder. While the situation is improving—federal, state, and local forces have come together to open a new community center and high school in the past two years—the area is still rife with abandoned houses and empty lots, and suffers from a lack of services.