That article was in the Sunday January 15, 2006
The Observer and is itself an excerpt from Nik Cohn' book 'Triksta'

Here's another longish excerpt from that article, but IMO, the entire article is well worth reading and passing on to others:

"The French Quarter isn't feeling much pain. At the height of the storm, it shipped less than a foot of water. A couple of bars on Bourbon Street never closed. All that's missing are the tourists. There's bitter irony in this, because tourism is the primary reason that New Orleans sold its soul. Before the 1980s, visitors were expected to adjust to native customs. Then the local economy ran aground. The oil boom of the Seventies collapsed, and big business, driven off by Louisiana's punitive taxes, left town. Even the port, the city's primary source of income, was diminished. That left the tourist dollar. The French Quarter, previously ramshackle, was transformed into a creole Disneyland. Shopping malls, convention centres, casinos and theme parks sprang up, enriching a power elite. Old white money and new black money thrived. The populace at large was left to rot.

In recent decades, the mayors and the majority of the city council have been African-Americans, which merely proves that black rip-off artists can be as voracious as white. Pre-Katrina, tourism generated $1 million a day but not a dime ever seemed to reach the streets. And this was deliberate. Tourists need service - menial labour to clean their tables and make their beds, hose away their vomit on Bourbon Street. To provide it, the city adopted a policy of malign neglect. The old black neighbourhoods, rich in history and culture, were allowed to sink into ruin and the school system to founder. Without education, there was no way out. Many who refused to submit to grunt work in the Quarter became criminals, most often drug dealers. The public-housing projects that ringed the city's centre became armed camps, where killing was seen as proof of manhood. By 2000, New Orleans was America's murder capital, eight times as deadly as New York.

For tourists, this was an invisible world. If they ventured beyond the Quarter at all, they took the streetcar past the mansions on St Charles Avenue or joined a walking tour of the Garden District, and few troubled to inquire what paid for such luxury. The only white faces seen in the projects belonged to social workers and drug-trawlers. The city was more deeply segregated than at any time in its history. Almost every project family lost someone to violence or jail. A culture of hopelessness took hold.

These were the people herded into the Superdome and Convention Centre, the people on rooftops and overpasses, waiting to be rescued, and the people branded as looters, even though most took only what they needed to stay alive. If one small good has come out of Katrina it is that they're invisible no longer. That doesn't mean they now have a voice or will be treated better. In the Quarter, they already seem forgotten. About half the hotels and restaurants have reopened, catering to an army of relief workers. Many have the same habits as the tourists they've replaced. As a race, they're gigantic - huge pink slabs of beef, bellies, legs like tree-trunks in floppy shorts - and they drive SUVs to match. New Orleans, shadowy and mysterious, birthplace of jazz, has been taken over by behemoths, blasting country and western on their car stereos."