New Orleans has some things to be happy about, and plenty to make you angry. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is bringing some of the top, top names in jazz, country and all kinds of music. And the basketball team - the Hornets - are back in the city full-time after basing themselves partly in Oklahoma City since Hurricane Katrina, having a good season with play-offs against the Dallas Mavericks.

But homelessness is up, rents are still high and the buses are nowhere near back to normal.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been moving people out of its trailers at quite a pace - nearly 10,000 families in the first quarter of 2008. That leaves just over 23,000 families still in trailers, down from a high of more than 73,000 in mid-2006, the New Orleans Index says, published by the Brookings Institute.

Not everyone has somewhere to go.

About 150 people are now living in tents under the I-10 overpass - the Pontchartrain Expressway that travels east-west through the city - according to New Orleans charity Unity for Homelessness, which says 31 percent of them are recently homeless because of losing federal rental assistance or being removed from temporary trailers. More than 60 percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina.

USA Today reported that Unity had found the homeless population of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina had reached unprecedented levels for a U.S. city - one in 25 residents. It estimates about 12,000 homeless in the city, which if the current population is 302,000, makes 4 percent of New Orleans homeless. That's nearly double the pre-Katrina homeless count, the group says.

Some of the homeless are out-of-town labourers who came to work in the post-Katrina building boom then lost their jobs. Many were low-income residents who lost apartments after Katrina because of rising rents.

The housing shortage pushed rents sky-high, and with insurance costs higher than ever, they haven't gone down. For example, the average two-bedroom place that would have cost $676 a month in 2005 now goes for $990, the New Orleans Index reports.

Returns to the city have slowed, but Orleans parish is back to more than 71 percent of the number of households it had before Katrina. If you take the six parishes that make up the whole New Orleans area, the population is back to almost 87 percent of the pre-Katrina number.

Unemployment is near a historic low - barely above 3 percent - and some employers are actually struggling to fill vacancies.

But it's hard for workers to come back until the public transport service is running again and there are enough childcare places. Just 19 percent of pre-Katrina buses are running, and 48 percent of the city's transit routes. Childcare centres are slowly re-opening, but there are still well below half the number there were before the storm.

In January, nearly two and a half years after the flood, the New Orleans Police Department's headquarters was repaired, although one district police station is still operating out of a FEMA trailer and two others that were destroyed by flooding work in offices donated by local philanthropists.

Judging by the percentages of ethnic groups in the public school system, it looks as if the rise in the city's Hispanic population, compared with black and white, has stayed one or two percentage points above what it was before the storm.

Some 100,000 Latino workers relocated to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and Latinos did about half the rebuilding work, according to a study by the Human Rights Centre and University of California, Berkeley.

Some 54 percent of the Latinos didn't have legal papers, and one in three of these undocumented reconstruction workers reported trouble getting paid for work thay managed to find.

A month after the disaster, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it sent 725 officers to the Gulf to detain and remove undocumented workers.

The injustices suffered by the undocumented workers are well told in Underground America, a collection of testimonies in an oral history series published by San Francisco-based McSweeney's, out in early May.

Polo, a 23-year-old Mexican who worked seven days a week clearing up after Katrina, sleeping in a guarded air hangar, was told at gunpoint to leave by soldiers who said his employers had left town without paying him.

"My idea was to get to Mississippi, to start working, to earn money to send to my family," he said. "I couldn't imagine this kind of humiliation."

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