A year ago in New Orleans, city officials announced a grand plan to rebuild the hurricane-torn city, with dreamy promises of "Parisian boulevards," new parks and playgrounds, and hard-at-work cranes on site within months. Knowing what we know about the way things have gone down in NOLA since Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city as we knew it back in 2005, none of those promises have been kept. Not in the 17 areas referred to in the plan as "target recovery zones." Not anywhere.

On their one-year anniversary, the designated “zones” have hardly budged.

“To my knowledge, I don’t think they’ve done anything to any of them,” said Cynthia Nolan, standing near a still-padlocked, derelict library in the once-flooded Broadmoor section, which is in the plan.

“I haven’t seen anything they’ve done to even initiate anything,” said Ms. Nolan, a manager in a state motor vehicles office who has painstakingly raised her house here nearly four feet. “It’s too long. A year later, and they still haven’t initiated anything they decided to do?”

The people in charge blame "bureaucratic hurdles," and defend themselves by saying, "It took us 11 years to do Oakland." Way to give the good people who stuck around hope, guys.