By JAMES FINN, BEN MYERS, SOPHIE KASAKOVE and JONI HESS | Staff writers
New Orleans' population is shrinking again after years of steady recovery from Hurricane Katrina. A lack of affordable housing is making life unbearable for some.
At the same time, residents are taking home bigger incomes than eight years ago, when Mayor LaToya Cantrell was running for the city's top office. And despite a surge in killings in 2022, crime later plummeted, and 2025 is on pace to finish as the city's least-deadly year on record.
A swath of economic, housing, demographic and crime data reviewed by The Times-Picayune paints a complex portrait of the city the next mayor will inherit when Cantrell leaves office in January. New Orleans has made strides in key areas over her eight-year term, a period when the city weathered several punishing hurricanes and a global pandemic. But its leaders have struggled mightily to enact meaningful progress on other entrenched challenges.
The next mayor, who voters will select in a pivotal municipal election this fall, will face immediate pressure to show improvement on the challenges that will land in their lap -- some within their immediate control, some not.
They also must pierce a cloud of voter disillusionment with the city's political class that enveloped Cantrell's second term, which was colored by a series of scandals and a now-sputtering investigation by federal prosecutors.
Ahead of an official qualifying period in July, three major candidates have emerged: City Council member Oliver Thomas; City Council Vice President Helena Moreno; and retired judge Arthur Hunter. Former 911 call center manager Tyrell Morris, counselor Ricky Twiggs and business owner Renada Collins are also running.
Cantrell's office did not respond to multiple requests to interview the mayor and senior administration officials about the data reviewed for this story and what it shows about her administration's performance.
Her office in recent months has touted its ambitious effort to curtail homelessness by moving unhoused people into long-term living units, its hiring of civilian workers to carry out certain public safety duties in the face of a shortage of NOPD officers and its role on shepherding the city through Super Bowl LIX in moving New Orleans forward. The administration has also highlighted investment in youth programs, maternal and child health, and early childhood education.
"We're doing it from the grassroots level in your city of New Orleans, from investing in (ages) zero to three, investing in our families, no matter who they are, who they love," Cantrell said at a news conference this month. "I hope you're connecting the dots that we're building future of the city of New Orleans every single day by connecting (young people) to these programs."
Interactive graphic by DAN SWENSON | THE ADVOCATE
A shrinking population
Dean Bigbee, 44, had planned to stay in New Orleans.
But when Bigbee began looking to buy a home in 2015 after renting since 2010, there were few affordable options. As Bigbee continued to save for a down payment, skyrocketing homeowners' insurance became a new complication. And the flooding, termites and roof damage that plagued past rentals made Bigbee question if buying locally would even be a worthy investment.
In 2023, Bigbee moved to Cincinnati. "I love New Orleans, I miss it, I would love to have kept living there," said Bigbee. "But I sadly have stopped being a believer in its long-term stability."
Bigbee isn't alone. Nearly 30,000 people have left New Orleans since 2016, amounting to a 7% decline.
In 2018, departing Mayor Mitch Landrieu left behind a city that had grown during his mayoral tenure by over 50,000 people -- a stunning comeback from Hurricane Katrina's devastation.
New Orleans' shriveling population reflects its intertwined challenges with job opportunity, housing affordability, quality of life and political leadership, said Michael Hecht, chief executive of Greater New Orleans, Inc., a leading local business group.
Hecht said the next administration should focus on securing the working and middle class as climate threats drive up housing costs. Leaders should focus on reforming building codes to bring down home insurance premiums and investing in drainage infrastructure, he said.
"It's very important to make the distinction between resistant and resilient, because resilience has almost become a cliché or an excuse for poor planning, and that's not acceptable," he said.
The Cantrell administration wants to help calm the home insurance crisis by requiring permits for new roofs to verify they are built to code, with the hope it will encourage insurers to lower premiums.
The City Council adopted the new rules in February, though some builders are worried that the city's notoriously slow permitting department won't be able to efficiently grant permits for urgently needed roofing repairs.
The administration this month sought to calm those concerns by promising to complete all roofing permit reviews within four days, and to allow geotagged photos to substitute for in-person inspections.
Mixed bag
While the population declines, economic data paints a complicated picture of those who remain.
New Orleans' ethnic demographics shifted slightly during Cantrell's tenure. The city remains majority Black, but the proportion of Black residents dipped from nearly 60% in 2017 to 56% last year. The share of White residents also dipped, from 34% to 31%, while the proportion of Hispanic residents rose from 6% to 8%. People reporting two or more races increased from 2.1% to 9%.
Median household income is up since Landrieu left office, far exceeding inflation, and the poverty rate is down. Rents have increased but fewer renters are considered burdened by their monthly bills.
Yet homelessness is up and homeownership costs are becoming impossible for some to bear.
The share of homeowners who are "cost burdened" -- those spending more than 30% of their income on housing -- rose from 32% in 2017 to 41.2% in 2023. Yet the share of renters who fall in that same category was 64% in 2017but down to about 59% in 2023.
Demographer Greg Rigamer said the data show signs of widening economic inequality. The per capita income, unlike the median, outperforms the state average and is comparable with the rest of the country, suggesting a few high earners bringing up the average.
"You have a professional class that does very well, and you have a working class that doesn't," said Rigamer, who is consulting for Moreno's campaign. "At one time, New Orleans had a very viable middle class, but the middle class is kind of hard to find these days."
Vauchell DeArmas, 33, hoped to achieve a level of stability as a homeowner that she never had as a renter. But shortly after she bought her Gentilly home, her insurance premium skyrocketed to $13,000 a year, she said.
DeArmas, who receives disability compensation from Veterans Affairs, managed to find a new policy for $6,000, but has had to cut back on other expenses to keep paying her bills. Though recent city policies have aimed to help people in her situation, she said more should be done.
"It's even more disheartening when you're born and raised here, wanting to put back into your own city, and the help isn't there when it comes to support from your city officials, mayor," said DeArmas, who had her roof replaced by a local nonprofit earlier this month in hopes of bringing her premium down.
Homelessness increased over the course of Cantrell's term, from 1,198 people on a single night in 2017 to 1,362 in 2024. But homelessness nationwide also increased dramatically during those years, noted Martha Kegel, director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans, which helps coordinate homeless outreach services.
Kegel said that Cantrell's efforts to expand the size of the city's low-barrier homeless shelter and use federal COVID relief funds to house vulnerable residents were effective. "She's not given enough credit for what she accomplished in reducing street homelessness and helping to ensure that homelessness has not spiraled upward as rapidly as it has elsewhere around the country," said Kegel.
Even so, the seemingly intractable issue will remain a problem for the next mayor, Kegel said, as "tremendous rent increases" and "the implosion of the reinsurance market" leave quick fixes out of reach.
Pressure to tackle the issue from residents, business leaders and state politicians including Gov. Jeff Landry, who cleared a series of encampments ahead of the Super Bowl in February, has also mounted.
Crime soared, then plunged
Despite a harrowing surge in violence following the pandemic, Cantrell is leaving the city safer than she found it: Nearly every statistical crime category is now lower than when she took office.
Her term contained both one of the city's most peaceful and one of its most violent years on record. And if 2025's historically low homicide rate keeps pace, Cantrell may leave office in January on the tail end of New Orleans' least-deadly year ever.
"We've been on something of a roller coaster where everything got much worse and now everything has gotten much better in the last few years," said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst with the firm AH Datalytics.
In 2022, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, a person was murdered in New Orleans, on average, nearly once every 36 hours.
Now, carjackings, murders, shooting incidents, vehicle burglaries and armed robberies are all less common than when Cantrell took over as mayor. Emergency and non-emergency 911 call times have improved, though they still lag U.S. cities of comparable size, said Asher, the crime data analyst.
There has also been a massive drop in vehicle thefts, which Asher said mirrors national trends.
Facing a persistent shortage of NOPD officers, Cantrell's administration notched wins by hiring civilians to respond to vehicle accidents in which no injuries are reported. The next mayor should continue that approach, Asher said.
Quality of life
Other signs of New Orleans' challenges appear in its public services. Ongoing downtown infrastructure projects, for instance, tear up the streets for days on end, disrupting the city's famous streetcar network. Regional Transit Authority ridership across bus, streetcar and ferry services have all struggled to regain their footing after taking significant dips during COVID.
Caught in the middle of New Orleans' scheme of challenges, its residents face tough choices.
Some of the issues that drove Bigbee from the city -- such as climate disasters -- are outside of the mayor's control, Bigbee said.
But Bigbee said staying in the city would feel like a safer bet if the city's leaders were "more serious about housing affordability, more serious about renters' rights, about ways to protect homeowners" and did more to "attract and keep jobs here."
"New Orleans is always a city of weighing the blessings with the hardness," said Bigbee. "For me personally, it became more hardness than blessing at some point."