In 1900, more than 90 percent of New Orleans residents lived above sea level. The city hugged its natural ridges — the French Quarter, the Garden District, Tremé, the Marigny — where the Mississippi had laid down higher ground over centuries of flooding. Behind those ridges, toward Lake Pontchartrain, was swamp.
By 1960 the city held 627,525 people, and only 48 percent lived above sea level. Roughly 321,000 residents occupied land at or below that line. A. Baldwin Wood's screw pumps, running by 1915, could move water out of the interior basins fast enough to keep them dry, and developers followed the pumps. Richard Campanella calculated population growth of roughly 350 percent in Lakeview during the 1920s alone, as much as 636 percent in parts of Gentilly, and 1,512 percent in Gert Town. Over the same decade the French Quarter lost a quarter of its residents and the Lee Circle area lost 43 percent. People were moving off the high ground.
The pumps explain how the land became available. They don't explain which families arrived on it, or which families were kept from it for another fifty years.
The first wave down
The New Orleans Land Company — incorporated originally as the New Orleans Swamp Land Reclamation Company — started building out Lakeview north of what is now I-610 around 1908. A Lakeview deed from 1913 bound purchasers to an agreement that "no lots are to be sold to negroes or colored people." Broadmoor came next. A January 1914 advertisement offered a raised bungalow near Napoleon and Broad with hardwood floors and a tile bath, and told readers to take the Napoleon Avenue streetcar out to see it. The ad was selling a modern house, utilities, and a ride to work. Elevation went unmentioned because in 1914 it was not yet something a buyer would have known to ask about.
Developers, streetcar companies, banks, and newspapers all took part in what Campanella calls the city's vertical migration, and the ordinary machinery of racial exclusion traveled with them. New Orleans passed racial-occupancy ordinances in 1912 and again in 1924. Craig Colten documented covenants that set a $3,000 minimum construction cost and barred non-Caucasian residents except live-in domestic servants. Deed restrictions, price floors, and subdivision rules stacked on top of one another.
So the first substantial wave onto drained ground was white and middle-class. Lakeview, among the lowest neighborhoods in the city, stayed prosperous and white from its founding until Katrina. Any account that treats the lowest land as a place the powerless were simply pushed into has to sit with that.
Credit and the federal role
FHA underwriting guidance, written in the 1930s, favored new, racially homogeneous subdivisions and treated racial "compatibility" as part of what made a mortgage safe. By 1950, FHA and VA insurance stood behind about half of all U.S. mortgages. In New Orleans that credit went to white buyers in the new subdivisions on drained land. Older mixed neighborhoods and Black applicants were largely left out.
The 1939 Home Owners' Loan Corporation survey preserves how local real-estate professionals sized up neighborhoods at the time. Area C-19, covering part of Gentilly Terrace, was recorded as middle-class, entirely white, with utilities and the Franklin Avenue streetcar. Area D-34 was described as the city's largest concentrated Black area, roughly 90 percent Black, with deteriorated property. Recent scholarship cautions against reading these maps as the instrument that set all later lending patterns; HOLC kept the detailed maps confidential and may have been less discriminatory than some private lenders of the period. What the descriptions do preserve is the set of assumptions about race that were built into how property got valued.
Pontchartrain Park
By mid-century the Housing Authority of New Orleans was operating openly segregated projects. White tenants went to Iberville, built on land cleared of the racially mixed Storyville district. Black households went to Lafitte, twelve blocks away. Across the city, Black projects tended to sit on lower back-of-town ground while white projects went higher.
Pontchartrain Park, dedicated in June 1955, is the clearest case of both access and its price. The city and the Crawford Corporation developed 210 acres of low ground next to Gentilly Woods, which the same builder was selling to white purchasers. Pontchartrain Park was set aside for Black buyers, and FHA backing came through only after the mayor gave assurances that it would stay segregated — a condition the NAACP opposed. The cheapest model listed at $9,725, with monthly payments of $55 to $59. One hundred forty-seven houses sold before completion, averaging $12,838.
Black professional families got modern suburban houses on newly drained land, through an arrangement that stayed exceptional within the federal mortgage system. One subdivision, one set of terms, and only for households that could carry close to $10,000 in 1955 dollars.
Forty years of turnover
The larger change in who occupied the lowest ground came afterward, through desegregation, white departure, and construction on land that kept sinking.
When court-ordered desegregation opened formerly white neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, white families moved out to Jefferson Parish and St. Tammany. Black middle-class households bought into Gentilly subdivisions that covenants and credit had closed to them a generation earlier. Lakeview stayed substantially white. The bigger shift was east. New Orleans East — tens of thousands of acres of drained marsh beyond the Industrial Canal — was built out through the 1960s and 1970s into one of the largest suburban developments in the South, on ground that had been open marsh within living memory. It came with new roads and shopping centers and was marketed on the same terms Broadmoor had used in 1914: a modern house, utilities, room. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Black families — teachers, civil servants, professionals — moved into New Orleans East in large numbers. By 2000 the area was predominantly Black and sat on some of the lowest ground in the city.
The Lower Ninth Ward reached a similar exposure by a different route. Cut off from the Upper Ninth by the Industrial Canal, it had long been a place where Black families could buy, in part because distance from the center and position below the canal kept land cheap. By 2005 it had unusually high Black homeownership for a low-income neighborhood, with many families three or four generations into the same house, behind levee walls along the canal that would fail when Katrina's surge arrived.
Underneath all of it the ground was moving. Neighborhoods that had been marginally above sea level when first subdivided sank once drainage pulled the water out of their organic soils. Broadmoor dropped to three to six feet below sea level. Parts of Lakeview and Gentilly fell five to eight feet below. New Orleans East went six to twelve feet below. The elevation people had bought was not the elevation they were living at.
The flood and the count
Campanella's overlay of the 2000 census onto the 2005 flood extent found that Black residents made up 76 percent of the people in flooded areas, against 67 percent of the city as a whole: 220,970 Black residents and 57,469 white residents in the water. A separate Brookings analysis put flooded New Orleans at 74.4 percent Black and 19.6 percent white, with dry areas at 47.5 percent Black and 44.6 percent white. The two sets of numbers rest on different boundaries and different definitions of flooded, and they don't have to agree to describe the same disparity.
That disparity was real, and it was not a topographic rule. Lakeview, white and comparatively well-off, flooded severely when the 17th Street Canal wall gave way. The Lower Ninth flooded when the Industrial Canal failed. People had settled where work and transit and available credit put them, not where elevation would have advised.
The pumps made the land available. The streetcar line, the deed covenant, the FHA appraisal form, and the segregated housing project determined who could reach it and how long they had to wait. A 1913 covenant is a public record, filed and searchable. The elevation of the lot it governed was not something either party to that sale had reason to write down.