A game of monopoly: Black communities' struggle to return to New Orleans has national significance for an overdue debate on urban inequality.

ON A CHILLY AUTUMN NIGHT, Jocquelyn Marshall opened the door to her new home, an apartment tucked in a maze of quiet streets lined with townhouses south of downtown New Orleans. She'd been here only two weeks since making it back from Houston, and the newly-built, two-bedroom apartment was sparkling but almost completely bare. She sat on a milk crate in the middle of the hardwood living room floor, while her 12-year-old son, Justin, watched television on the white carpet in his bedroom.

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This was their third residence in an odyssey that began when the floodwaters washed over New Orleans. It took them from their home of more than 10 years--a public housing unit inherited from Jocquelyn's mother--to an overcrowded shelter in Mississippi, then an apartment shared with 14 other people in Houston, and finally to this eerily empty new place in their beloved city.

A round-faced, dark brown woman with her hair tucked into a soft black cap, Jocquelyn was about to turn 37 but looked much younger. She spoke in the unhurried, distinctive cadence of Black New Orleanians. She cried just once during our conversation, describing the hardships of a neighbor whose family had been stranded on a bridge after the hurricane, with only a box of crackers and a few bottles of water that the mother rationed in pieces and sips to her children.

"I know we're living in difficult times. People who don't understand that, they're not gonna survive," Jocquelyn said calmly. "You have to have faith, and that's basically what I'm living on day by day, faith. Me and my child, that's it."

She was among the few public-housing residents who counted themselves lucky enough to make it back to New Orleans. Most of her friends and neighbors remained scattered in Houston, Atlanta and other cities, living on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance with families often doubled or tripled up in apartments.

Jocquelyn grew up in the C.J. Peete projects, one of the "Big Four" that are at the center of a grassroots and policy battle over public housing and rebuilding in New Orleans. After thousands of public housing residents evacuated, housing authorities boarded up their apartments and announced plans to demolish 5,000 units in some of the largest developments--C.J. Peete, Lafitte, B.W. Cooper and St. Bernard.