The collapse of the levees and the flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina caused enormous damage and disruption to the city, its people, and its economy. Recovering from a disaster of this magnitude poses a major challenge to the city, the state, and the nation. The complexity of this challenge is compounded by the fact that New Orleans’s population and economy had been lagging for more than a decade before Katrina.¹ Although recovery is under way, it has been proceeding more slowly than the city, its residents, and public and private leaders had hoped.²

In response...

Given the importance of a healthy economy to the welfare of a city’s residents and municipal revenues and services, most large urban communities devote a combination of public and private resources to promoting their areas’ economies. Indeed, in the face of a changing global economy and increasing competition for business, many areas have boosted their economic development functions in an effort to support the growth of local firms and attract new firms—especially high-technology firms—to their regions.

This chapter examines the economic development activities of 17 urban regions to draw lessons from their experiences that might be applied to...

The successful application of these lessons from other cities to New Orleans requires familiarity with New Orleans’s pre- and post-Katrina economic situation and the organizational ecology of the city’s economic development efforts.¹ Correspondingly, we reviewed selected studies of three different topics: pre- and post-Katrina studies of economic development plans for the city and the region, assessments of the damage done by the storm to the city’s economic infrastructure and the progress it has made toward recovery, and reviews of the city’s prior economic development efforts.² This chapter combines the findings from this review with the lessons from other cities’ economic...

This chapter summarizes our key findings and highlights the principal recommendations of this report. The discussion of findings and recommendations is grouped into four sections. The first relates to the overall architecture of the city’s development program, and the following three relate to the different components of that architecture (the design, organization, and implementation components). In each section, we begin by summarizing our key findings to provide a rationale for the recommendations that follow.

Our review of the experience of a range of different metropolitan regions suggests that effective economic development programs consist of three components: The first involves designing...