When COVID-19 began its spread across the United States in early 2020, New Orleans was already vulnerable. The city’s economy was tightly tethered to tourism, live events, and hospitality, with many of its workers earning low wages and living without access to quality healthcare. What followed was a sharp unraveling of jobs, of small businesses, of housing stability, and of health outcomes that reshaped the city’s landscape in lasting ways. This marked the beginning of the COVID-19 impact New Orleans continues to feel today.
Economic Impact of COVID-19 on New Orleans
New Orleans experienced one of the steepest economic downturns in the nation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the New Orleans-Metairie metro area saw a greater than 20% decline in private employment between March and April 2020. That translated into tens of thousands of job losses, with the restaurant, entertainment, and tourism industries taking the biggest hit.
At the peak of the shutdown, hotels reported a 86.5% drop in revenue per available room, down to $20.02 — a catastrophic collapse for a city that welcomes over 19 million visitors annually.
Even by mid-2024, Louisiana still hadn’t regained all of the jobs lost during the pandemic. The state remained 1.5% below its pre-pandemic employment level, with the New Orleans-Metairie area lagging further behind with about roughly 26,000 jobs short, or about 4% below its former total.
Housing Market Shifts During the Pandemic
Housing trends during the pandemic were shaped by two simultaneous forces: a temporary slowdown in real estate activity and a rapid rise in home prices driven by low interest rates and limited supply. For renters and working-class homeowners in New Orleans, it became harder to keep up.
In 2025, Louisiana’s statewide median home price climbed to $248,600, up approximately slightly more than 2% from the year before, matching 2022 prices. Yet affordability remained a serious concern for New Orleans residents, especially with rising property taxes and insurance premiums that added to the financial strain.
The City of New Orleans responded early by establishing a rental assistance program in March 2020, funded initially with $1.5 million from a local millage. This set the groundwork for later implementation of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), helping many renters avoid eviction during the worst of the crisis.
The Color of a Pandemic: A Racial Reckoning
In March 2020, Big Easy Magazine published a report titled “The Color of a Pandemic” that warned of the unequal impact COVID-19 would have on Black residents in New Orleans. At the time, 25% of the city’s population lived in poverty, and the burden fell hardest on Black families. Many were employed in hospitality, healthcare support, and other frontline roles that couldn’t transition to remote work and often without benefits or paid leave.
As the weeks unfolded, the disparities became tragically clear. According to the Data Center, in New Orleans, by mid-2020, Black residents made up 77% of COVID-19 deaths, even though they represented about 59% of the city’s population. The virus moved fastest through neighborhoods already suffering from lack of access to medical care, chronic health conditions like asthma and diabetes, and overcrowded housing.
By 2021, while targeted health outreach and mobile vaccination efforts helped narrow the racial gap in COVID-related deaths, the underlying inequities persisted. The Data Center reported that Black residents continued to face lower vaccination rates and more severe health outcomes even as the city re-opened.
The story that began in 2020 shed light on the compounding effects of poverty and systemic racism that shaped who lived, who suffered, and who survived.
Small Businesses in Crisis
New Orleans’ small business sector is filled with family-owned restaurants, corner stores, and artists that saw immediate and prolonged disruption. A 2020 state survey found that more than 61.5% of small businesses in Louisiana lost 75% or more of their revenue after the pandemic began.
Federal lifelines like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) offered relief, and businesses in New Orleans actually received higher-than-average support — about $53,962 per employee, compared to a national average of $33,619. However, access to these funds wasn’t equal. Many Black-owned businesses struggled to secure loans from traditional banks. Rashida Ferdinand, a community leader and small business owner in the Lower Ninth Ward, told WIRED that she was repeatedly denied funding until she turned to Hope Credit Union, a Black-led financial institution.
Although these disparities weren’t new, COVID-19 made them impossible to ignore.
The Collapse of the Cultural Economy
From second-line parades to Jazz Fest, New Orleans’ cultural economy was brought to a standstill. In 2021, Mardi Gras was cancelled, wiping out an economic windfall and dimming the spirits of locals who rely on the season to survive. Street performers, brass bands, Mardi Gras Indians, and float builders found themselves suddenly out of work.
Organizations like the Jazz & Heritage Foundation helped soften the blow by providing emergency grants to over 2,500 artists and musicians. But the shutdown exposed the precariousness of relying on an informal cultural economy without health insurance, stable wages, or safety nets.
By 2023, parades returned to full length and tourism began to rebound. Still, many of the workers who powered the cultural economy had already left the industry or the city altogether.
A City Still Rebuilding
While New Orleans avoided the healthcare collapse seen in some other cities, the economic, housing, and racial effects of COVID-19 have continued to shape daily life. Unemployment has improved but not fully recovered. Housing costs remain a concern, especially for renters. Black New Orleanians continue to bear the heaviest burdens, just as Big Easy Magazine warned in 2020.
In addition to the pandemic being a social and economic crisis, it was a mirror that revealed the fragility of a city known for its strength and resilience; and it showed who had access to recovery, and who was left waiting.
What comes next for New Orleans depends on whether the lessons of COVID-19 are used to rebuild equitably or simply ignored once the parades come back.
