Critics say the same governance problems that bungled the rapid response to the storm that flooded the city and stranded tens of thousands of people are now holding up repopulation efforts.

"Number-one problem, Katrina was the worst disaster in the history of the United States. Number two, the lack of leadership by the president, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), the governor and the mayor," said Ed Renwick, a pollster and political scientist at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Mayor Ray Nagin has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to come up with the best way to rebuild the city. Its recommendations are expected in January.

In the meantime, critics say, the city does not have a clear plan for recovering from the storm or for retrieving a population that has plunged to 80,000 from 460,000 since Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast on August 29.

The inability of government to grapple quickly with the hurricane's aftermath supports a pessimistic outlook for the new year, said Lawrence Powell, a professor of Southern history at Tulane University in New Orleans.

"We are slouching towards an uncertain future," he said. "The city is essentially telling small businesses and homeowners to 'make your own decision about the future.'"

Housing, the city's top post-Katrina priority, is the most recent example of the lack of coordination and communication among government officials, Powell said.

In November, both Nagin and the city council expressed frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's inability to deliver 30,000 trailer homes.

However, when FEMA officials recently announced the availability of the free mobile housing units, the mayor and the council began squabbling over where the trailers should go.

Unable to agree on a list of sites, the mayor and the council have resolved to try again in the new year, which leaves the 360,000 requests that FEMA has received for housing as of December 28 in limbo.

The government's failure to address the city's problems is a longstanding one, Powell said.

"None of the stars have lined up for us," he said. "We are a city in decline weakened by social Katrinas such as poverty and blighted housing, and the civic culture has never been strong."

The slow cleanup of storm debris and city designation of damaged homes and neighborhoods for demolition is also delaying reconstruction.

On Friday, mounds of storm debris lined both sides of Canal Street, the city's widest boulevard, as workers in the French Quarter prepared for New Year's Eve celebrations.

More than half of the city's 200,000 homes were badly damaged or destroyed, said John Fogarty, a debris removal expert with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps, which has taken over the city's sanitation functions, needs the city to produce a list of homes for demolition to speed up the sluggish debris removal process, Fogarty said.

The Nagin administration recently designated 2,500 wrecked homes for razing, nearly all in the flood-ravaged, impoverished Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. But housing advocates for the poor filed suit to block the city.

Fogarty says even without the demolished homes to clean up, the Corps could stay busy until September cleaning up storm debris that still lines city streets.

Nagin predicts the population will swell to 200,000 in January as more schools reopen and thousands of college students return to the city's eight colleges and universities for the first time since the disaster.

But with little help from the government, the city's recovery seems based on personal efforts and access to resources.

"Recovery is based on money and privilege," said social worker Amy Wilson, 49. Left jobless by the hurricane, Wilson borrowed money from her family to repair her home but noted that many of the people she worked with do not have the resources to rebuild.

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