MICKEY LANDRY was the principal of a private school in Colorado Springs when Katrina struck. After some of his evacuated relatives washed up there, Mr Landry decided he “just had to come back.” He had been away from New Orleans for 25 years; after the inadequate levees gave way on August 29th 2005, most of his hometown was under water. But he “was aching for the city.” He told his wife. She thought he was crazy.

They went back to New Orleans. Since 2007 Mr Landry has overseen the Choice Foundation, which now runs three charter schools in the city; one of them, Esperanza Charter School, was a chronically failing institution that has received an influx of Hispanic children, many of whose fathers came to work in post-hurricane reconstruction. These days around 65% of its pupils are Hispanic. The threat of deportation has been added to the litany of woes children in New Orleans often face: overcrowding (13% of pupils in the Choice Foundation’s schools are homeless), dead and imprisoned parents, gunshots in the night. Mr Landry says that “if 50 Martians turned up, we would create a programme for them.” Esperanza became one of the fastest improving schools in Louisiana.

Esperanza is a better emblem of the city’s improbable revival than the French Quarter’s latticed ironwork and fleshpot neon. Hurricane Katrina took around 1,800 lives and wrecked many thousands more, suffering that still wells up in stories of hardship and miraculous survival, and in barely sublimated ire towards obtuse bureaucrats and unfeeling politicians. Yet, indecent as it seems to acknowledge, ten years later New Orleans is, on many measures, more successful than it was before. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor since 2010, is frank: “New Orleans is a stronger and better city than before the storm”. Its revival demonstrates what grit and ingenuity—allied with the jolt of near-fatal calamity—can accomplish, and what they can’t.

Louisiana, Louisiana

People like Mr Landry—native professionals who repatriated, evidence of New Orleans’ magnetic pull—plus young graduates who arrived for the first time, have contributed to the resurrection. Their influence is visible in two big improvements that might never otherwise have happened. One is in the city’s schools. Before Katrina, 62% of childen attended failing schools. Now, after almost all of them were handed over to autonomous providers such as the Choice Foundation—the kind of instant, total reform only possible in an emergency—only 6% do. High-school graduation and college-enrolment rates are up (see chart).

The incomers have revamped the economy, too. As Michael Hecht of Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic-development agency, says, previously the city suffered from a local variant of the “resource curse”, living complacently from its Gulf-coast transit and oil revenues and the storied, hybrid culture that is its main natural asset. Tourism, with its low-paying jobs, is still a mainstay. But a mix of year-zero astringency and a regional infusion of around $140 billion (including federal funds, philanthropy and insurance pay-outs) has created a more diversified, less clannish economy. Mayor Landrieu says that after “the whole world came to our aid”, New Orleans became a much more open place.

And a more entrepreneurial one. In Katrina’s aftermath, “everyone became an entrepreneur” says Tim Williamson of Idea Village, a business-incubator that helped local firms rebound; “everyone had to start over”. The exigencies of the disaster seem to have reinforced the improvisational skills honed in Mardi Gras preparations. The region’s startup rate has more than doubled. Many of the new companies are tech firms, enticed partly by generous state tax-breaks: thus the boosterish moniker, “Silicon Bayou”. But many of the entrepreneurs are newcomers, who came to join the relief effort and stayed, or came later for the music, weather and cheap rents. The cost of office space is half New York’s, reckons Steven Kashishian, who went to university in New Orleans and, after he co-founded First Mile Geo, a geospatial software firm, and was able to work anywhere, came back.

This inflow has seen shock battalions of tattooed graphic artists overrun once-dicey neighbourhoods, as well as lots of new restaurant openings. But, as Esperanza suggests, another kind of immigrant has helped to rebuild the city. The region’s Hispanic population, mostly from Honduras and elsewhere in Central America, almost doubled between 2000 and 2013, according to the Data Centre in New Orleans (at 384,000 last summer, the total population of the city itself remained around 100,000 lower than in 2000). Many, such as Santos, a Honduran, came soon after the storm. “I had never lived here,” he says in the office of the Congress of Day Labourers, a support group; “but when I looked around and saw the destruction everywhere, I felt like crying.” “I am forever grateful to them,” says Georgette Ioup of the immigrants who renovated her home in the Gentilly neighbourhood—though the police, and unscrupulous contractors who sometimes filch workers’ wages, have been less hospitable. Alfredo, a Mexican who spent months stripping down contaminated houses and fishing out dead pets, says New Orleans reminds him of Mexico City: the craziness in the streets, the architecture, ubiquitous music, the gunshots.

What has happened down here

Unlike the residents of other cities, Katrina forced every New Orleanian to make a conscious choice to live in theirs. Many have a proprietorial pride in the survival of a place some outsiders thought should be abandoned, and in their roles in salvaging it. The pride is especially justified because of the grave problems that once seemed to doom New Orleans to gradual, perpetual decline, and which might have been expected to nobble its recovery. They didn’t, but nor were they cleansed. New Orleans, insists Mr Landrieu (its first white mayor since his father left office in 1978), is “essentially the beautiful city that it was before the storm.” And it bears the same scars.

First, crime. Michael Harrison, the city’s police chief, points out that this year’s spike in murders follows a 40-year low in 2014. Yet both the violent-crime and incarceration rates are over double the national average. Police numbers remain lower than before the hurricane; the force’s reputation is still bruised by the gothic abuses exposed after it. Alongside the crime is deep, widespread poverty—more grinding than ever as rents now rise—and a cavernous racial income divide. The median income of black households is less than half that of white ones, a bigger gap than in the country overall; black families in New Orleans are poorer than the American average. On one count fewer than half of working-age black men are employed.

The poverty of black New Orleanians partly explains why there are around 100,000 fewer of them now than before the storm (though the city still has a black majority). For many the path home was blocked by recalcitrant insurers, lenders who called in mortgages and crooked contractors for whom the disaster was a chance for fraud—as it proved for the previous mayor, Ray Nagin, now serving a ten-year prison term. (“We don’t need the mafia,” comments one world-weary local, “we have our politicians.”) But perhaps the biggest obstacle was the original formula used in the federally funded homeowner-compensation programme, which relied on the pre-Katrina market value of homes—which tended to be lower in predominantly black areas.

Theodore Watson, for example, is still trying to rebuild the house his 85-year-old father bought 50 years ago in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighbourhood isolated by canals that, since its schools were desegregated, has been overwhelmingly black. In 2005 it became the epitome of post-Katrina devastation and the focus of onlookers’ outrage. The mortgage had to be paid off, and the family has bled money in rent: the Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association, a group that tries to match residual public funds with people still trying to return, is lobbying for a rule-change that would compensate such costs. What is left of the family’s pay-out is insufficient, Mr Watson says. He is “hoping for somebody to show some compassion…the last thing I want is for [my father to die] without being back in his home.”

Even in the Lower Ninth Ward, some things have improved. Make it Right, an outfit founded by Brad Pitt, has built over 100 zany, subsidised eco-homes, designed by architects including Frank Gehry, an enlightened project that has attracted needless, star-knocking criticism. There is a new school and a community centre. But bitterness persists. “We down here living like dogs,” alleges one resident. The neighbourhood has only 37% of the households it contained before the storm, far fewer than the city overall. Parts of it are eerie, in-town wastelands, where “For Sale” signs stand among overgrown reeds on vacant lots.

The winds have changed

New Orleans, like other port cities, has always felt enticingly semi-detached from America, cultivating its own rhythms and calendar. Hurricane Katrina, a near-death trauma of a kind few cities ever suffer, lent this exceptionalism a macabre new dimension. Ten years ago, though, bedraggled New Orleans became, for many, a symbol of wider pathologies in American society: the rancour of politics and the enduring rift of race, plus the fragility of civilisation, and of life itself, in the world’s richest country.

Its comeback has been starkly symbolic too, above all of the resourcefulness, resilience and civic-mindedness that Americans can muster, even or especially when their government goes missing. But it also exemplifies some of the new fissures in 21st-century America—a country in which many cities are reviving, albeit less dramatically, but where lopsided gentrification renders some unaffordable to the people who work or grew up in them; a nation in which immigrants and footloose companies flourish, but so does inequality. The tragedy of Katrina has an unpredictably upbeat ending, just not for everyone.