Driving around New Orleans, it's easy to notice the graceful bent of the city, the intricate architecture, the inherent beauty of the city's lush greenery. But it's also hard not to see some of the problems that face the Crescent City as a major urban center in a struggling economy: vacant downtown shops; a prison that's bursting at the seams with inmates who are victims of poverty, ill education and drug abuse; blank ugly walls of institutional buildings.

But if one looks a bit further, t...