The Big Easy has chosen the third path -- the hard path, and their struggle has revealed both the tantalizing allure, and the deep challenges, of reinventing a city.

'To Hell With It, We're Going Home'

Kenneth Purcell is evangelical about New Orleans. This makes him more or less like every other person you meet in New Orleans.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, the tech entrepreneur with shoulder-length hair watched from a high rise on Lafayette Square as the water overcame the streets. "Like every other good redneck, I said 'I'm not leaving,'" he told me.

Ten days later, he left.

Purcell moved his budding start-up to New York, where he stayed for the next two years building iSeatz,com, a service that lets shoppers book multiple travel arrangements on one website. But in the undertow of national fatalism about the city's future, Purcell found himself pulled back home. He wanted to prove a point, to make a stand.

"I got so pissed off at the headlines about the city, with company after company leaving, that I said, 'To hell with it, we're going home,'" he told me just blocks from Lafayette Square, at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (I attended and spoke at the conference last month). "And it was the best decision I ever made."

iSeatz has grown its platform from $8 million in gross bookings in 2005 to $2 billion in 2013. It's clearly one of the city's biggest homegrown tech breakthroughs. Then again, it is also one of the city's only homegrown tech breakthroughs.

Purcell is a member of New Orleans' boomerang generation -- a group of proud, young- to middle-aged reformers who came back to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to find the city flattened. The city didn't have the jobs they wanted. So they built their own. After 2005, the start-up rate in New Orleans doubled in just three years (this graph, and others, comes from data provided Greater New Orleans Community Data Center).

New Orleans needs more than start-up enthusiasm. It needs start-up success stories. Breakout success stories.

"How do we get from this nascent state of having a lot of bubbling petri dishes to seeing some things really culture out, and having a sustainable ecosystem to support them?" Purcell said. In other words, how does New Orleans, a great city to get away from business, become a great place to start one?

How to Build a City

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was drawn to the crescent city in the crook of the Mississippi River in 1718. He mistakenly believed the land, most of which is under sea level, to be properly shielded from the stormy Gulf tides. "Paris on a swamp." It was a good elevator pitch.

Nature's feedback was harsh. Four years after La Nouvelle-Orleans was founded, an inauspicious hurricane destroyed every home, shop, and makeshift chapel. A reasonable person might have relocated. Instead, Bienville rebuilt. One hundred years later, New Orleans was the largest city in the south.