Harry Connick Jr: renewing New Orleans...

Hurricane Katrina almost killed the New Orleans music scene. Now many of its players are coming back – to a musicians' village in the heart of the city. Angus Batey talks to its co-founder, Harry Connick Jr. Photographs by Misty Keasler

Harry Connick Jr sits on the front porch of his friend and mentor Bob French's new home and looks around him, grinning. As a six-year-old, the New Orleans-born piano player would sneak into gigs by French's band and demand a chance to play on a couple of songs. Today, French has a home because Connick made it happen. 'Man, never in a million years would I think I would be at this place, lookin' at these houses that I had somethin' to do with,' Connick says, as though the realisation of the difference he has made to the rejuvenation of his home town is only now sinking in. 'It's really overwhelming.'

French's new home is in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Though not as badly affected as its neighbour, the Lower Ninth, the Upper still felt the full force of Hurricane Katrina's near-miss on 29 August, 2005, and suffered considerably from the ravages of the flooding that followed, when the sunken city's levee system failed and the waters above and around New Orleans rushed in to its below-sea-level bowl.

Across the street are some houses that survived. One gleams with fresh paint, lovingly restored by its owners. Next door, renovation has yet to begin, but the occupiers have moved back, and are living in the driveway in a 'Fema trailer' – a caravan supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The house still bears the crude symbols spray-painted on by rescue workers as they conducted house-to-house searches after the flood. A large 'X' divides four pieces of information, the zero in the lower quadrant signifying that, here at least, no bodies were found.

To either side of where Connick sits, the picture changes dramatically. New homes, constructed in the same traditional wood-frame and clapboard style, have been put up. Each is raised on breeze-block foundations to above the level of the flood: each is painted, many in bright colours. The new buildings have transformed six adjacent blocks of the Upper Ninth. Today, the ground was 'broken' on a community centre that will sit at the heart of this new development, dozens more houses are under construction, and another 200 lots in the surrounding area have been acquired to extend the building programme beyond this core area.

The homes, built by the non-profit organisation Habitat for Humanity using volunteer labour, are being sold at cost to low-income owners on zero-rated mortgages. Post-Katrina, the average rent on a three-bedroom flat rose to more than $1,200 per month, but these homes attract a monthly fee of about half that, with insurance and property taxes included. The owners, whom Habitat refers to as 'partners', do not pay a deposit, but must complete 350 hours of 'sweat equity', working on their own and their new neighbours' homes. complete article