Do you remember where you were when Hurricane Katrina hit? It's three years this week since New Orleans and a swathe of land around it the size of Britain were ravaged by two hurricanes and a series of official failures.

The city's iconic tourist quarter is back on its feet, and many residents are defiantly upbeat about their progress, but the town known as the Big Easy is still a long way off normal. Some neighbourhoods remain virtual wastelands where less than a fifth of pre-Katrina homes are inhabited, even though New Orleans' population has crept back up, albeit very slowly now.

A vicious circle of factors has put barriers in the way of many who might want to return. Others don't want to come back.

The shortage of housing has pushed rents up, making it hard for tenants to return or for owners to live anywhere affordable while they make repairs. A two-bedroom apartment that used to cost $676 a month is now about $990, according to the New Orleans Index, which is tracking the city's recovery.

Insurance companies have raised costs, inevitably, another burden for residents restarting lives in the city. Meanwhile, thousands of families have had trouble getting payouts from insurance companies, and thousands are still waiting for rehousing allowances even though billions of dollars was set aside for it.

About 65,000 properties are unusable or now just empty lots where houses used to be. And homelessness has doubled to unprecedented levels for a U.S. city - one in 25 residents, local charity Unity for Homelessness said in early 2008.

Out of 50 New Orleans neighbourhoods that were flooded, 16 still have less than half the households they did before the storm, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCD).

Based on records of which houses are actively receiving mail again, the neighbourhoods struggling most to get back up to size are mostly the poorest ones, like the badly damaged Lower Ninth Ward, where just 11 percent of pre-Katrina households are occupied now.

However, other badly flooded parts of town have more than 70 percent of their pre-Katrina populations back, and a sliver by the river that wasn't flooded now has more occupied households than before the storm.

There were heated debates in the storm's aftermath about what kind of town to rebuild, with some arguing it was the ideal time to do away with public housing developments that had become steeped in crime, and others arguing against what they saw as the privatisation and gentrification of the city.

The demographics of New Orleans changed, with the black population reduced, although white residents still make up less than half the city's people. Some African-Americans who previously lived in low-rent neighbourhoods have stayed away to make new lives in the places they were sent when evacuated. At the same time, Latinos have increased - including many with families - as they arrived looking for work during the clean-up operation and after.

The statistics on education enrolment - schools have 76 percent of the students they used to have - show that fewer residents with children have returned.

Employers have jobs to fill, and unemployment is at just 3.3 percent, well below the national rate of 5.5 percent. Before Katrina, unemployment was higher in New Orleans, at 5.6 percent when the national average was 5 percent.

But when people - many of them scattered in Houston and Dallas in Texas and Atlanta, Georgia - have been asked why they don't come back, they've said they're worried about the lack of buses to get to work, childcare facilities and hospitals.

A top concern is whether the town has enough police.

The Times-Picayune - the local New Orleans paper which saw its website hits rise from 700,000 page views to 30 million overnight - reports this week that St. Bernard parish - one of six districts in the wider area around the city - opened its first fire station to be renovated since the storm.

The station's dozen firefighters had been working out of a trailer while the building was repaired, after being flooded to the second floor during Katrina and flooded again several weeks later by Hurricane Rita.

Trailers have been heavily used as temporary homes too. By mid-2008, there were 16,000 occupied trailers in the state of Louisiana, down from a high of almost 77,000 in mid-2006, the New Orleans Index calculates.

The stress of crawling through Kafkaesque bureaucracy trying to sort out trailers to live in, new housing, or insurance claims has added an extra burden on Katrina survivors. New Orleans' survivors already suffered a higher mental health toll than many in natural disasters in which victims have reconciled themselves to inevitable acts of God.

In this case, residents were traumatised by the shock and insult of being abandoned during the storm, and the inhumanity and indignity of being sent across the country with no regard for their family or neighbourhood ties.

Surveys by the local media have found that increasing numbers of people in the town known as the Crescent City were thinking of leaving for good, Britain's Independent reports, citing increasing stress, poor health, crime and corruption as their reasons.

If you look at the statistics alone, this wasn't the biggest disaster in the world, and it didn't destroy the most homes or kill the most people - but it was an iconic moment in U.S. history.

Life for millions of people in the Gulf Coast will never be the same again. Katrina not only changed the way the rest of the world views one of the richest countries on the planet, it changed the way storm survivors think about their government.

Three years on, New Orleans is still a city in recovery.

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