Because Mayor Nagin is not seeing the kind of numbers of black former residents willing to return to New Orleans, where crime has never been worse, and it takes work and resources to rebuild before there is anything to return to, he does the most irresponsible thing he could possibly do. Throw down the race card and suggest there is a conspiracy to keep blacks away.
I get the impression that the mayor really doesn’t want people to return to rebuild anew but rather to have someone else rebuild the old.  Either that or he refuses to accept the notion that those who have not returned just don’t want to and prefer to start anew right where they are, in the communities that took them in.Â
The mayor also needs to consider that he isn’t going to be seeing those residents, however many there were, who were on public assistance and in public housing to return to rebuild when they did not have the resources and/or motivation to get out in the first place. And in this instance, the mayor has no one to blame but himself and state legislators who accepted that as normal for decades.
