"There's a reason, though, why such cold, hard logic hasn't yet prevailed in this most hard hit of New Orleans neighborhoods: It's all too easy to be won over by the spirit of the Lower Ninth, the passion of the people who did return. It may not be the most efficient use of public resources, and no amount of trying may bring in the kind of retail amenities that make places comfortable to live. Lower Niners, however, have a different kind of attachment to their ancestral land—for the black families who've lived there for decades, it's often the first property they were able to own. And it's not like they had a wealth of public or commercial infrastructure before the storm either. For those who were going to move back no matter what the city told them, perhaps they at least deserve enough basic public services to hang on.Michelle Thompson, an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who runs a data project to map property conditions and ownership, came down from Cornell University to help with relief efforts after Katrina, had subscribed to Buki's logic that the Lower Ninth would never emerge a better place than it was before Katrina.But then, something changed."When you're here, and you talk to people, you're like, this is generations of families. This is more than bricks and mortar. Who's to say which neighborhood is more valuable than another?" she says. "There's a lot of constraints and reasons why not to do it, and that's why we should. Everything people think can't be done, New Orleans puts it on its head, and makes it happen... You look at the Lower Nine and say 'why.' And now I say 'why not?'"