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EAST BILOXI, Miss. -- Engineers have a saying: "If you want to know how a system works, observe it under stress." In 2005, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the nation's inability to cope with major natural disasters. Since then, reconstruction efforts here have shown that America has once again failed Katrina's victims, especially the poor.

The initial post-Katrina images that so shocked the world -- communities reduced to piles of twisted rubble -- have largely been cleared away. Cement slabs dotting vacant lots are the only reminders of the houses that once stood in East Biloxi.

"Two and a half years later," said James Crowell, director of the Biloxi NAACP, who had 4 feet of water in his house after Katrina, "we are still not halfway there."

This failure to recover is not for lack of resources. The federal government gave Mississippi $5.4 billion in aid in the wake of the hurricane. Community activists complain, however, that far too much of that money has been diverted to businesses for economic development and far too little has gone into low-income housing.

On August 29, 2005, when Katrina stormed ashore with surges of 30 feet and winds in excess of 120 miles per hour, it struck an already vulnerable community. One in four people were living in poverty, many in substandard housing in low-lying areas. Half of the residents were renters, who were more likely to be poor and more likely to be black than the homeowners. It is little wonder that Katrina took 126 lives in Biloxi's Harrison County.

Local officials estimate that 80 percent of the housing stock in East Biloxi was either lost or so damaged that it was uninhabitable, including two-thirds of Biloxi's public housing units. Renters' insurance covers only damage to personal property, and government-sponsored disaster assistance programs, such as Small Business Administration loans or Mississippi homeowner grants, are designed for homeowners, not renters. For those displaced by Katrina, the loss of a significant portion of the rental stock and the 20 percent increase in rents since Katrina have stymied recovery.

Rand's Gulf States Policy Institute, in a study completed late last year, stated, "Alleviating this problem is important not just to the recovery of the housing market but also to economic recovery more generally."

Federal aid to Mississippi -- in the form of a Community Development Block Grant -- was intended to get people back into their homes. Typically 70 percent of such money is earmarked for low-income citizens. But the then-GOP-controlled Congress lowered that threshold to 50 percent. The Bush administration has subsequently waived even that requirement for the vast majority of the Mississippi recovery aid. Only 23 percent of the money is now slated to go to lower-income Gulf Coast residents. To add insult to injury, the pro-business, Republican governor, Haley Barbour, an old friend of President Bush's, recently took $600 million of the federal money to expand the Port of Gulfport.

"As long as Mississippi can conduct this recovery program without any oversight," said Bill Stallworth, executive director of the East Biloxi Coordination, Relief, and Redevelopment Agency, "there will be no justice."

The House Financial Services Committee may hold an oversight hearing on Katrina recovery spending in March. But the horse has already left the barn. The Katrina aid cannot be recouped. At best, the committee can draft stricter guidelines for future assistance.

The post-Katrina Mississippi experience demonstrates that administrative discretion in the hands of those who favor the business establishment over the disadvantaged is a prescription for discrimination. The thousands of people still living in government-supplied trailers here -- who must be moved yet again because formaldehyde has been found in the trailers -- are a stark illustration of how the poor are politically marginalized. Plans to allow Mississippi's casinos to further encroach on this neighborhood and onerous federal requirements that new housing be built on stilts are evidence, the locals say, that developers are using Katrina as an excuse to gentrify East Biloxi.

The Katrina story is no longer about a storm or about preparedness. It is about power -- who has it and who doesn't. It took 40 years for some minority neighborhoods to recover from the 1968 riots in Washington, where the whole world was watching. How long will it take even poorer communities, such as East Biloxi, to rebuild, and what will they look like?