For months, New Orleans janitors, housewives, and policemen have met in church halls and tents trying to envision a city that could rise from the trauma of Katrina.

Their collected opinions became part of a $14 billion proposal, rolled out by planners and New Orleans officials on January 29, to avert abandonment of their hurricane-shrunken home. But this long-anticipated Unified New Orleans Plan, like others before it, lacks the vision and teeth to save the city.

The city has desperately needed a plan to set priorities and funnel aid, but the reason it has taken so long is evident in the low-lying, upscale neighborhood of Lakewood. Ranch houses that sat for weeks in rafter-high water are now boarded up and weed-fronted. One tilts drunkenly toward a bandbox-tidy rebuilt one.

Through generous incentives, the plan encourages citizens in these wettest neighborhoods to move to higher ground and cluster around rebuilt parks, schools, and other facilities. Who will tell the lowland owners that their homes, in which they have invested enormous faith as well as cash, will be left by themselves, probably without necessary infrastructure, as neighbors move to higher ground? More than half the city’s population has yet to return, hence the “jack-o’-lantern effect”: local shorthand for the blocks of abandoned homes where only two or three families have begun to rebuild. Seven separate, and competing, official plans have grappled with this dilemma, as well as dozens more “visioning” initiatives undertaken in the past 18 months by foundations, universities, and architecture schools around the country.

The UNOP was supposed to find consensus on such tough issues. Sponsored by the city and the Greater New Orleans Foundation and aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, Concordia, a local planning and architecture firm, put together 12 teams to create a single vision for the city. For the many neighborhoods less affluent than Lakewood, the plan offers a menu of aid to spur responsible rebuilding. But neither New Orleans nor Louisiana can afford what’s proposed, and the federal government isn’t likely to commit the funds needed.

Getting neighbors to trade properties so they can move to the highest ground can work, but it requires that they think of themselves as stewards of — and invested in — a neighborhood rather than owners of fixed parcels of land. That’s a tough sell anywhere.