Where and how to house the urban poor remains a controversial issue. Public housing residents are particularly vulnerable. Issues of race, class and gender intersect in their lives. Public-private partnerships in urban redevelopment projects and a focus on issues that arise from concentrated poverty gave rise to HOPE VI policy aimed at deconcentrating poverty via public housing demolition and redevelopment. In New Orleans, the effects of Hurricane Katrina further complicate this contested process. The purpose of this case study is to understand how residents experienced and framed the process of displacement brought on by disaster and the redevelopment of the Magnolia projects, comparing those who returned to the revitalized project to those who did not. The data I collected are 4 semi-structured interviews and one focus group with residents, 56 newspaper articles, and 60 photos. Doing so uncovered nuanced resident narratives often left out of public housing redevelopment decisions.