Unequal Scenes - New Orleans

Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans.

The levees surrounding the Lower 9th Ward, which is below sea level, were breached in at least three locations during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This allowed water to raise past the highest point of the ward, trapping many on the roofs of their homes. 72 people drowned.

From the swollen bayous to the riverside levees, New Orleans and coastal Louisiana bear inequality carved into cities, land and water. Once the industrial heart of the Gulf, this region now reels from the flight of factories, the erosion of wetlands and flooding due to sea level rise and hurricanes, and the selective rebuilding that followed Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, the important cultural heritage of possibly America's most "unique" city is rapidly changing via policy, displacement and gentrification. What lies in store for this incredible city?

It was always an ambitious experiment - a trading post built at the mouth of the continent's largest river, a river still vital for trade, livelihoods, and power projection. The mix of French, Spanish, African, English, and Native American cultures make this feel very different than the rest of the USA, complete with its own music, accent and food. Through successive waves of economic prosperity, largely on the backs of slave and indentured African American labor up until the early 20th century, and especially with the development of the oil and gas industry centered on the refineries of "Cancer Alley" - Louisiana prospered at the expense of its people. Even today, as the share of oil and gas to the GDP of the state has plummeted, predominantly Black, low-income parishes live in the shadow of smokestacks, their air and soil carrying the cost of industrial progress. Fossil fuel producers have never had to fully account for the cost of the extraction and refinement of their products, and the true cost - which must be considered in terms of cleanup of soiled sites, air pollution and associated climate change impacts, health of the surrounding populations, and tax breaks - falls on government, citizens, and private industry to deal with.

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Discover other cities at risk from sea level rise such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Karachi.

Inequality Data created by the World Inequality Database.

Dumped tires along an abandoned road in New Orleans.

Snapped trees due to Hurricane Ida's Category 4 strength, in Grand Caillou.

Navigational channels criss-cross the bayou all over southern Louisiana, leaving interesting patterns to decipher from above.

A tattered US flag in Cocodrie, LA just after Hurricane Ida barrelled through in 2021.

Destroyed and damaged cities, many outside the levee system, south of Houma, which received the brunt of the storm. Many houses are now built on huge stilts, if the homeowner can afford it, preventing flooding from the storm surges which occasionally reach 6m (18ft). The photographer Virginia Hanusik has a great project on coastal Louisiana architecture documenting this.

A bucolic aerial image of New Orleans belies the fact that it has indisputably high crime rates and racial tensions.

In the years after Katrina, displacement fractured communities, and uneven rebuilding deepened racial divides. Wealth returned first to higher, whiter ground—Uptown, the Marigny, the Bywater—while working-class Black neighborhoods faced slower recovery, rising rents, and gentrification disguised as revitalization.

Outside the levee system at Shell Beach, looking out into the Gulf of Mexico. Many residents have built their homes here on tall stilts, anticipating the arrival of another catastrophic storm surge which is all but certain.

Chalmette, just to the east of New Orleans. in 2005, Hurricane Katrina inundated this neighborhood with up to 12 feet of water, causing up to 1m gallons of oil to leak out of a storage tank at the nearby Murphy Oil refinery. The ensuing oil spill spread throughout the neighborhood, affecting up to 10,000 homes and forcing the relocation of thousands of people. Eventually Murphy Oil settled for $330m in a class action lawsuit. The boundary of where the water affected the homes is easy to see, and the neighborhood immediately surrounding the refinery is now open fields.

Cruise passenger numbers hit an all-time high in April 2025, an industry that has been growing quickly, injecting tens of millions into city coffers.

At the interchange of Interstate 10 (I-10) and Michoud Boulevard in New Orleans East, an abandoned service road behind a subdivision has been used for the illegal dumping of thousands of tires.

The Mississippi River, downtown New Orleans.

Floodgate, Houma Navigation Channel.

Looking across the bridge toward downtown, the Lower Ninth Ward shows both ruin and renewal. New homes rise among the ghosts of flooded blocks, their bright roofs punctuating a landscape still marked by absence. The levee gleams, stronger now, but the skyline beyond feels distant—prosperity visible, yet unevenly shared.

The St. Roch Day of the Dead parade winds through city streets blending Mexican, Creole, and Catholic cultures into a beautiful celebration.

Months after Hurricane Ida ripped through New Orleans with 140mph winds in 2021, most homes still are covered in blue tarps with wind-damaged roofs.

Meanwhile, every storm, every inch of land lost to the Gulf, tightens the pressure on communities left with fewer options to retreat. The levees which were rebuilt post-Katrina are unfortunately a temporary solution to a city that will inevitably sink into the Gulf of Mexico. Many communities outside the levee system have already been abandoned from the inevitable encroachment of saltwater and regular, stronger hurricanes, which insurance companies cannot, and will not, insure. Most Americans, it must be said, have not yet seemed to realize this inevitability (and I say this as an American who also, potentially has not fully realized this inevitability, perhaps because it seems so dystopian), and their complicity in climate change through artificially low oil prices and profligate, consumer-driver lifestyles. The irony is brutal: the same fossil-fuel corridors that created Louisiana’s wealth carved canals through wetlands, letting saltwater in and land slip away. Tax breaks and state incentives enriched industry but left citizens to bear the cleanup, the cancers, and the cost of rebuilding.

Yet it will happen. And it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and displace many millions of people, not just here, but in other coastal cities such as New York and Miami.

In the interim, life persists along the water’s edge. The city of New Orleans is a city of music and refreshingly non-corporatized festivals, from the second line tradition, to Mardi Gras krewes, to a new vibrant Day of the Dead festival tradition thank in part to the massive influx of Mexicans to the city post-Katrina. In one of the world's great creolized cities, and also one of the world's most climatically vulnerable, dynamic realignment and resilience are keeping the city afloat.

Wrecked home, Grand Caillou.

Hurricane Katrina memorial, Shell Beach.

Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans lies the area known as Cancer Alley — an 85-mile industrial corridor where more than 150 petrochemical plants crowd the Mississippi River’s banks. In predominantly Black, low-income parishes, residents face some of the highest estimated cancer risks in the U.S., exposure to carcinogens far above accepted levels, and an unequal share of cleanup and health burdens.

Grand Caillou. Residents are still dealing with the effects from the raging winds of Hurricane Ida, which hit just two months before these photos were taken.

Floodgates along the Houma Navigation Channel.

Coastal Louisiana is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico. Sea level rise, subsidence, and hurricanes are projected to completely alter the landscape here without massive and costly intervention in the form of levees and other diversions. Fossil fuel companies all along the Gulf Coast, which are the prime contributors to this sea level rise, have effectively outsourced the true costs of their operations onto the surrounding population and state and federal governments. This area will most likely be completely underwater within a few decades.

The long road through the delta to Cocodrie.

After the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled along the Gulf Coast, and many entered the shrimping and fishing industry. Today, Vietnamese-American shrimpers are a vital part of Louisiana’s coastal economy.

They often run small, family-owned boats and have faced recurring challenges: hurricanes, pollution, industrial competition, and post–BP oil spill recovery. Despite that, they’ve maintained a strong community identity, blending Vietnamese culture with Cajun coastal life.

The Bubba Dove Floodgate, a crucial component of the hurricane protection system in coastal Louisiana, opened in 2022.