Though the expansion will increase employment here, historically very few port jobs have gone to low-income residents.

Some critics contend that the main interest of state leaders in spending community development dollars is to help big businesses like shipbuilders and casinos and the port.

The state’s spending plan “moves business to the forefront and forgets about the people on the ground,” said Anthony Thompson, pastor at Tabernacle of Faith Ministries, whose spotless church (rebuilt by volunteers) is next to a moldering subsidized housing project that he says has not been touched since the storm.

In his mostly black neighborhood in west Gulfport, Mr. Thompson said, “I see a lot of people waiting on help; I see a lot of houses still damaged.”

State officials say that programs not limited to lower-income residents help them nevertheless.

The aid to utilities helped everyone on the coast, including renters, officials say. And almost a third of the families who got money from the state’s main housing compensation program were low-income, which in Gulfport would mean an annual income of less than $39,000 a year for a family of four.

The nature of that program helps explain the unhappiness in some neighborhoods. It provided grants of up to $150,000 to homeowners who lived outside of the federally defined flood plain and so did not have flood insurance to cover their losses when their houses were swamped by the storm surge.

Image Dorothy J. McClendon says she fears that no aid will reach her neighborhood in Gulfport, Miss. Credit... Lee Celano for The New York Times

To be eligible, families had to have carried regular homeowners’ insurance, so that, as the governor said when he was selling the plan to Congress, “we’re not bailing out irresponsible people.”