Alternatively, the industrial area north of Florida Avenue is sometimes included as part of the Lower 9th Ward, extending the boundary to the southern edge of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.

In Louisiana's colonial era, this area was developed as sugar cane plantations, with narrow tracts extending from river frontage that provided the transportation and shipping routes.

Multiple breaches in the levees of at least four canals resulted in catastrophic flooding in a majority of the city; see Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

This was largely due to the storm surge generated in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep-draft shipping channel built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1950s.

The construction destroyed tens of thousands of acres of protective coastal wetlands that once acted as a storm surge buffer for the community.

The storm surge was so great that even the highest portions of the Lower 9th were flooded; Holy Cross School, which had served as a dry refuge after Hurricane Betsy, was inundated.

Soon after, the Common Ground Collective opened the first distribution center in the area, in order to provide returning residents with water, food and other necessities.

Due to the great devastation and lack of population and services, the Lower Ninth Ward was the last area of the city still under a curfew half a year after the disaster.

[9] Officially, residents were allowed in during daylight hours to look, salvage possessions, and leave, although some few had already done extensive work gutting and repairing their damaged homes in preparation to move back.

By January 2006, the widespread damages and difficulties in restoring basic utilities and city services still prevented the official reopening of the Lower 9th Ward to residents who wished to return to live.

A Bring Back New Orleans Commission preliminary report suggested making this area in whole or part into park space because of the high risk of future flooding.

Most Lower 9th Ward residents have strongly objected to this proposal, but outsiders worry about the high risk of future flooding in the area.

[citation needed] In March 2006 a group of residents and Common Ground Collective volunteers broke into Martin Luther King Elementary School to begin cleanup efforts.

Similar actions to seize abandoned blighted property are in effect in other Louisiana parishes, as well as in Mississippi counties affected by the storm.

However, as hundreds of thousands of locals were still waiting for promised insurance or Road Home money, many of the poor lacked resources to work on their houses.

Work crews continued to remove debris and demolish unrepairable houses daily, but hundreds if not thousands were vacant and gutted.

On December 3, 2007, Make It Right Foundation, founded by the actor Brad Pitt, committed to rebuild 150 houses in the Lower Ninth Ward.

[10] Make It Right homes were designed by award-winning architects from New Orleans and around the world, including Frank Gehry, Shigeru Ban, Hitoshi Abe and Thom Mayne.

[12] In the spring of 2008, Build Now,[13] a local, non-profit homebuilder, began working to bring New Orleans families back home.

Build Now is in the process of bringing more than a dozen New Orleans families back home; nine houses are currently under construction in the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward areas, Lakeview and Gentilly.

[citation needed] As of September 2008, 3 years after Katrina, hundreds of houses have been rebuilt and renovated, and dozens of new homes have been constructed.

[12] In March 2012, the New York Times described what the area looked like almost seven years after Katrina: "The neighborhood has become a dumping ground for many kinds of unwanted things.

The houses have two notable design influences, the first being the steamboats of the period, the second being the Japanese exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition).