Overshadowed by the Unified New Orleans Plan, the NOLANRP commissioned by the city council and headed by Paul Lambert Associates went forward anyway. Completed in October 2006 it identified $4.4 billion in projects  needed to rebuild New Orleans flooded neighborhoods.( click here to read the final report )

Big ticket items in the highly detailed plan include street repair, drainage improvement, street lighting policing and commercial revitalization. An innovative "Lot Next Door" program is integral to this plan. Lot Next Door gives returning residents the first right of refusal on purchasing adjacent abandoned properties. The plan seems tied to the city's implicit and impractical "Rebuild Everywhere First" policy that assures little will actually be done.

Summary
The Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan addresses redevelopment needs at the neighborhood level and planning-district level for those neighborhoods that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina. The plans provide an assessment of what is required to return neighborhoods to the state that existed prior to Hurricane Katrina or to a level of revitalization beyond where the community was prior to Hurricane Katrina. This enhanced revitalization goal is particularly true for those neighborhoods with a high degree of blight, public facilities in poor condition, and generally where population and housing values were decreasing at a slow but steady pace over the past several decades.

Not addressed in the Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan, but required for the functional restoration of the flooded areas of the City are:

• Flood protection and flood mitigation planning being addressed by the federal government.

• Industry-specific recovery strategies associated with the major private employment and service categories in Orleans Parish, such as; health care, hospitality, retail and restaurants. These industries have broadly struggled since the storm due, partially, to a lack of employees, but also because of the shift in markets. They are so central to the Parish economy that they deserve their own recovery plan at the City as opposed to regional level.

• The reconstruction needs of the utility systems including water, sewer, electricity, telecommunications, and cable television.

• Large scale transit or airport improvements, to the extent that C. Boundaries of Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan these improvements were directly noted by individual neighborhoods.

• Although the Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan addresses individual school issues at the neighborhood level, there is no detailed overall school redevelopment/revitalization plan that addresses the phasing, relocation, funding, and school standard issues provided as part of these reports.

• A plan for the reconstruction of the major public housing properties, including resident relocation and accommodation issues.

• Detailed analysis of economic development project gap funding needs. Although the Neighborhood Rebuilding Plan highlights where there may be prime opportunities for public / private partnerships associated with the redevelopment of the City, the plan does not provide an estimate of the cost to the public sector for these projects. The plan only refers these projects for further study.

• While the plans do address land regulating and zoning to some extent in specific cases, the plans are not a comprehensive land use plan or zoning policy statement in any sense.

Overall, the Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan provides the basis for directing much of the funding from the state and federal funding agencies, however, the plan was bounded by constraints of scope, time, and objective.