 The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a new survey looking at the lives and attitudes of New Orleans residents. This comes five years after Hurricane Katrina and in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. I'm here with the Kaiser Family Foundation's Claudia Dean. Claudia tell me what is the most encouraging statistic that you found in this survey? I think the thing that speaks most to the optimism of people there is really the percent who say that the recovery and rebuilding process is going in the right direction because that's the key action that's trying to make the city you know become what it was before and hopefully even better they say and what we found is that in 2008 so two years ago 56% of the folks there said they thought that the recovery was going in the right direction and that's jumped to 70%. So that's a lot of agreement on a really central part of what's going on in New Orleans. Now is this cause for optimism is this a trend that you think you will continue to see moving upward in following surveys? Well I mean the good thing is the reason I think that we are seeing a trend towards optimism and again you can't control what happens I mean the oil spill showed that but across a number of measures we're finding more people saying that New Orleans is a good place to raise children we're finding more people saying that they personally feel recovered from the storm their day-to-day lives are back to normal so I'd say to that extent you know these numbers have been moving now over a five-year period we've measured them at three times and they continue to move upwards so that's a good basis for optimism. So that's the good news and the bad news what are New Orleans residents greatest concerns now? Well when you ask people what's on their mind the biggest problem facing the city itself overwhelmingly it's crime and in a time of a real economic recession nationally you can imagine that seeing crime jump up that high is sort of unusual for us who do survey research so that shows up in a lot of places there's a lot of mistrust of the police there's even mistrust of political leaders to the extent that they're worried about political corruption so there are real safety concerns there. And as for the Gulf oil spill how do New Orleans residents feel that will affect them as opposed to Katrina well when we were in the field it was during that time period when we didn't really know it was going to happen we knew something bad was going on a lot of oil was coming out didn't know if it was going to be capped or not so it's really a snapshot in time but at that time people were really concerned about the local environment and about the local economy what was what was it going to do to jobs people in the seafood industry and the oil industry so you saw a lot of concern about that it also was interesting we asked people which do you think is going to cut over the long-term cause more trouble Katrina or the Gulf oil spill and actually more people in New Orleans said the Gulf oil spill even than Katrina now there is a racial and a financial divide in New Orleans that you can see pretty clearly where did you see that illustrated most in your statistics well in New Orleans like in many of the big cities around the country you see race and class sort of overlapping overlying each other so you know starting from the very beginning when you look at income in New Orleans is disproportionately poor city and when you look at the percentage of people who are living sort of in low income households it's much much higher it's roughly six and ten among African-American households and much much lower among white households so you begin there and then you see other just racial differences in worries you see African-American parents much more worried about their children's education and schools they're able to go to you see a lot of concern just about neighborhood rebuilding is different and you just see a lot more anxiety about the level to which the city's recovered in the black community than you do among in the white community so what's a final takeaway you would really love for people to be paying attention to the city's recovery as well as the surveys released well I think for folks who are not in New Orleans and can't see what's going on there I think it's difficult to imagine until you hear the sort of the voices reflected through these numbers the extent to which people feel like they haven't recovered so even a third of the folks there still say their day to day lives are impact to normal even though the storm was five years ago most people say the city's not recovered and most people feel somewhat forgotten by the country so I think to the extent that people can show their interest and attention to the extent that news building there to the extent people can travel there and visit that would probably be the message the city might like folks to hear well thank you very much Claudia this is a survey people are going to be paying attention to