NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Tangeyon Wall shivers, partly from anger and partly because it’s a chilly New Orleans morning and there’s no heat in her gutted home.There’s no electricity, gas, sewer service or drinkable water either.

It’s been months since Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, and Wall seethes that her city has barely begun to recover.

But she’s even madder that her neighbourhood, mostly black, is lagging far behind many others in getting its utilities back. And that other black neighbourhoods, among the worst hit by the flooding, seem to be getting the least help.

Very few people have returned to those places. And why would they?

Their neighbourhoods are wastelands. Most houses are uninhabitable. Sidewalks are piled with mouldy sofas and crumbling plywood. Plans to protect residents from another disaster are still fuzzy at best.

And buzzing through town is a city-commissioned report suggesting that some neighbourhoods, mostly black, not be rebuilt at all.

What’s happening now reminds blacks of the first days after the flood, when the city was drowning and so many were left to fend for themselves.

There is a growing feeling — despite official insistence to the contrary — that America has abandoned them. And many feel it’s happening because the city is mostly black and relatively poor.

“We have every right to the same privileges as in any other part of this city,” Wall said. “It’s reminding me of the civil rights days of old. The city, the state, the nation have shown us that we’re stepchildren. We’re not even in the house.”

Two weeks after the storm, President Bush stood in the city’s historic Jackson Square and vowed to do “whatever it takes” to rebuild.

“There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans,” he said. “And this great city will rise again.”

A lot of residents figured this meant the city would get as much help as it needed, and quickly. It hasn’t.

One simple measure is house trailers. The Federal Emergency Management Administration promised 120,000 of them for people who lost their homes to Katrina, but FEMA data show barely 26,000 are occupied in Louisiana, fewer than 4,000 of those in New Orleans.

Butch Kinerney, a FEMA spokesman, said his colleagues are “working tirelessly” for hurricane survivors, but the job is enormous. “It’s taking longer than anybody wants,” he acknowledged.

Costly proposals to do more for New Orleans are being considered by the administration and Congress, but people like Wall can’t help but wonder what’s taking so long.

Immediately after the hurricane, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said it would take up to 16 weeks for the city to rebound. That date has passed.

Barely one in four of the 400,000 people who fled the city have come back, demographers estimate. The city desperately needs more to come home, and many want to, vowing to spend years and their life savings rebuilding.

But it’s tough to get started without federal rebuilding loan guarantees, and a lot of people don’t have the income to qualify.

It’s also hard to get a loan if you can’t get flood insurance, and in some neighbourhoods that has become impossible.

To return, people also need somewhere to live while they rebuild. But those FEMA trailers are few, and some Orleanians in livable neighbourhoods are fighting plans to put clusters of trailers near their homes.

It’s also hard to come home if you are afraid. Katrina, after all, killed 1,321 people, and the fragile levee system that protects the city — most of it below sea level — is as vulnerable as ever.

Bush has promised $3.1 billion to repair the three collapsed levees, but Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary L. Landrieu called that “just the first step”.

Today, all over the city, brown high-water lines mark the divide between life before and after August 29.

In one home in City Park, a neighbourhood near the London Avenue levee break, kitchen shelves still hold tidy rows of cumin and pepper. Below it, shattered teacups are caked with dried mud.

But there’s another line in the city, the one that divides black and white.

Things are getting back to normal in the mostly white Garden District and the West Bank, which were battered by wind but did not flood.

There, restaurants like Byblos in Uptown juggle more customers, overwhelmingly white, than they can handle. Sassafras, a popular Creole restaurant in mostly black New Orleans East, sits empty with a shattered sign and parking lot full of garbage.

It’s true that not all predominantly white neighbourhoods are rebounding, and not all black areas are being left behind in the recovery. But black New Orleans, which was much harder hit by the hurricane, remains mostly devastated.

In the mostly black Ninth Ward, a wooden church has crumbled on itself; its black roof and steeple sit atop the collapsed walls. Down the street, a fishing boat rests on its side on a porch. A toddler’s blue plastic tricycle shows how deep the flood water was here. It’s stuck eight feet high on a chain-link fence.

Everywhere, sidewalks are packed with piles of rotting carpets, photo albums and stuffed animals awaiting trash collectors who have yet to show up.

Thousands of signs advertise cleanup help: “Got mould?” and “We Gut Homes.”

The hardest hit areas have no working street lights or functioning businesses. They are like unsettled frontiers, dusty and deserted.

“If you see New Orleans East by night, you will be afraid. There is not a single light until you get to the other side of Slidell” 25 miles away, said Darlene Kattan, who lived in the City Park area — between two levee breaches — and has been a nomad since the storm. “You cannot see your hand in front of your face. It’s eerie.”

Right after the hurricane, Nagin asked the Washington D.C.-based Urban Land Institute to study the disaster and propose a recovery plan. In December, it released a 75-page report that recommends grouping city neighbourhoods into three recovery zones: Least damaged areas in Zone C should rehabilitated first and heavily damaged Zone A should be redeveloped last — or not at all. It could return to marshland, or developed as public parks.

Zone A, dominated by New Orleans East and Mid-City, looks nearly identical to a demographic map of black New Orleans.

It makes blacks angry. While Katrina was a disaster unlike any other in our history, people can’t help but compare the government’s response to what happened in other disasters.

“You’ve never heard of the confusion and lack of urgency in responding to natural and unnatural disasters that we experienced here with Rita and Katrina,” said Danatas King, New Orleans’ NAACP president. “There’s a racial difference.”

New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas, who is black, thinks so too.

Without help, the city’s black middle class will shrink, he said. Like so many in New Orleans, he spends sleepless nights in a strange bed trying to accept that help may not come.

“When you feel like your country doesn’t care about you, it’s like being abandoned by your mother,” he said. “That’s a psychological pain that’s going to be with the people in this area for a long time.”

Today, a lot of the anger is focused on the Urban Land Institute’s plan. The city rebuilding commission has already endorsed it, although Mayor Nagin says he is still studying it.

Tangeyon Wall, her three sisters and many of their neighbours stormed public meetings held to discuss the plan and pummeled institute officials and the city with complaints.

One day recently, Tangeyon’s sister Talmadge Wall Mead stood in her bedroom, once painted in peach colour called shrimp creole but now caked with mud and mould. She pointed out to a grassy area beyond where her backyard fence once stood.

“They’re saying, ‘Let’s make this a beautiful park’. What! They think no one lives here?” she said. “It’s a conspiracy to snatch property from black middle-class homeowners in New Orleans East.”

One street away from Tangeyon Wall’s house, Auguster Cage stood in his gutted home next to a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. and stabbed his finger in the air: “We are being victimised. It’s not fair. We will not allow this.”

He and Wall are gathering petitions, holding weekly meetings and planning a lobbying trip to Washington.

Ed McMahon, who spent weeks in New Orleans working on the Urban Land Institute’s plan, said it was “based on a dispassionate look at geology, hydrology, and many other factors.”

Race, he insisted: “Played no role in our report.”

In mid-December, Nagin travelled to Washington to beg for more help. New Orleans, he declared in testimony before Congress, “being allowed to die as we speak”.

Thomas didn’t go to Washington, but he has a message for Congress, too: “You have men and women in Congress and Senators who feel we’re just southern folks down here. We’re not their kind of Americans.

“Let’s say we did everything wrong. We’re still on our knees and we need your help.”