New Orleans ? Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina scattered them far and wide, the weary residents of New Orleans’ worst-hit neighborhood got a chance to glimpse their storm-ravaged homes for the first time on Wednesday.

Wearing boots, rubber gloves and paper dust masks, homeowners trickled back into the city’s lower Ninth Ward vowing to rebuild a community some have proposed bulldozing.

What they saw bore no resemblance to what they had left. Some houses had floated down the street and crumpled like matchsticks. Others stood intact, but exhaled a fetid breath of mold and decay when their doors were opened and residents cautiously peered inside.

But as they sifted through the chaos of toppled furniture and sodden mattresses to retrieve whatever valuables they could, many residents were simply happy to be home. And they chafed at media characterizations of the mostly-black Ninth Ward as a drug-ridden, irredeemable slum.

Tamyra Bacchus, left, and her son Terrell Bacchus, 11, salvage family keepsakes from their home in the Ninth Ward section of New Orleans. Wednesday was the first day for most residents of the flooded area to return to their homes.

“Everybody paints the picture of all black people as wanting drugs and welfare,” said Joyce Hagan, who raised five children in the neighborhood on a cook’s salary. “The only drugs I’m on is blood pressure medicine.”

The Ninth Ward poses many of the Crescent City’s thorniest questions. Businesses badly need the workers who live in the area both as employees and as consumers. And many are hoping to move their families home so they can begin to rebuild their lives. But with no housing, there’s no place to put them if they choose to return. And with the Ninth Ward utterly destroyed in many areas, it’s not even clear where to start to rebuild.

In an attempt to draw attention to the issue, Jesse Jackson on Tuesday bused some workers into the city. But until a hotel volunteered to put them up, they had no place to stay. City officials admit they have focused on getting neighborhoods that are in better shape up and running. But they insist they are also scrambling to find a way to put trailers in the city so residents can get back to their jobs.

“I know it’s difficult to be patient,” said Alberta Pate, Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s housing chief. “But we’re working on it.”