I spent the past two weeks in New Orleans working on stories leading up to the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. Coming down here always brings back memories of those dreadful days and every time I pass over the bridge leading into the Lower Ninth Ward I can’t help but think of the first time I crossed and gazed down at the colossal deluge.

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I returned to the projects a number of times and was pleased to see that more units have been re-opened, allowing some of the city’s poor to return home to affordable housing. I was joined by our new multimedia staff photographer Rick Gershon and we teamed up on pieces on a church functioning out of a tent in Mississippi, a couple still living without electricity or gas in the Lower Ninth and a short piece on the projects.

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I visited an elementary school in the Lower Ninth which finally re-opened and made a number of trips to the levees to document the slow rebuilding process.

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The Big Easy is back to about 65 percent of its pre-Katrina population. Tens of thousands are still living in trailers and the levees are not up to the point where they could protect against another Katrina-sized storm. Crime is a huge problem and the city is set to have one of the highest murder rates in the country again this year. To someone visiting for the first time, it remains a deeply shocking experience to pass through the still-devastated areas of the city.

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However, New Orleans is slowly but surely pulling itself up by its bootstraps, as many people have come to the conclusion that the government will never be coming to the rescue.

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Tonight I participated in the group slideshow “Eyes on Katrina” by SeenUnseen which was projected onto the levee wall in the Lower Ninth Ward. The show was curated by Jake Price and Jamie Wellford and featured work by a number of photographers including Stanley Greene, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Alan Chin, Yunghi Kim, Andy Levin and Anthony Suau, just to name a few. The turnout was low due to rain, but we were happy to be able to pull it off. The photo on the levee wall was taken by Kadir van Lohuizen.

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I spent the better part of last week documenting the few hundred Katrina refugees who have recently been allowed to return to the B.W. Cooper housing project in New Orleans. B.W. Cooper, or Calliope as it is popularly known, originally housed over 1,000 families yet now remains more than 80 percent empty. Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, some 10,000 former residents of the New Orleans housing projects have not been able to return home. Many of the projects have not been repaired following the storm, while others that appear to be habitable are sealed. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plans to tear down four of the major New Orleans housing projects and replace them with mixed income developments.

Affordable housing has become difficult to find in New Orleans as rents are significantly higher than before the hurricane struck. The projects were notoriously ruthless places plagued by gang warfare and drug abuse. Yet they were also a place that families called home for generations. Residents say the projects were a viable place to live for low income residents in the center of a great American city. Activists and many residents believe the HUD plan is simply a way to prevent poor urban African-Americans from returning to the city. Yet there is no doubt that the projects need improving, one way or another.

The place is usually teeming with some kind of activity, especially among the children and teenagers. There is no playground, so the kids often make do with makeshift games like practicing flips on mattresses or shooting hoops on the two beat up basketball courts. Many of the apartments remain closed, so you’ll see a boarded up apartment on the first floor with a family living in the apartment above. Some apartments remain unsealed with broken windows or ravaged by fire.

The lovely people in Calliope, while initially skeptical of my motives, have become increasingly welcoming and friendly. While their situations are far from ideal, many are delighted to be back in the place they call home among family and friends they’ve known all their lives. I feel privileged to be able to explore a side of New Orleans most people never get to see.