Saturday regional zeitgeist selection

- Property owners and other residents have finally been allowed back into New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. What's left of it. And for some, aid still doesn't come. While the Bayou Buzz notes that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has just formally sent Congress her side of the story. [LATER: Mayor Nagin pleads with New Orleanians in Atlanta to come home.][MORE 12/4: As the NYT reports, Gov. Blanco has also made available a huge archive of state documents both to Congress and to news reporters. Instructions for members of the press who wish to request access are available here.][AND YET MORE: Here's the Post writeup on the document release.]

- I don't generally link to HUDUSER's steady trickle of regional market analysis reports but there's an interesting one this week on the Vallejo-Fairfield area outside San Francisco, which is one of the main places renters go when they get priced out of the region's better-known cities.

- An unfavorable audit of the Atlanta HOME program. Hard to tell if this is an OIG report or what. If so, it's not posted in the Georgia section yet.

- Possibly interesting: a First Circuit federal appeals court decision, Vistamar, Inc. v. Fagundo-Fagundo, has just dismissed a Puerto Rican property owner's Sec. 1983 civil rights lawsuit over an eminent domain action. The dismissal was on statute-of-limitations grounds, but the circumstances of the case are interesting in light of Kelo etc.: Vistamar alleged its property was taken, with compensation paid, in the 1970s, on the understanding it was to be used for an expressway -- but the expressway was never built and the property ended up in the hands of other private owners who refused to sell it back.