MADISONVILLE, La. — When she stares out her kitchen window here, Sheri Gioe sees Rachel Estopinal, the same neighbor she used to see before, when she lived in St. Bernard Parish.

Her sister lives around the corner, just like before. So do her parents, who still fuss around their home studio, dreaming up extravagant costumes of gilded Egyptian pharaohs and pretty Hawaiian princesses for some of New Orleans’s most esteemed Mardi Gras krewes.

Yet Ms. Gioe is now a long way from “Da Parish,” the parochial place next to New Orleans where she and most everyone she knew spent all their lives before Hurricane Katrina washed them away. Home is now Madison Farms, a recently built subdivision — about an hour away from her former neighborhood — on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish. Here, 35 of her 38 neighbors are also expatriate St. Bernardians from depleted towns such as Chalmette and Arabi.

Like Ms. Gioe and Ms. Estopinal, many live near friends and family members again on freshly paved streets and cul-de-sacs that seem like a microcosm of the mass movement of people reshaping Louisiana after the hurricane.

“We call it the migration of the Chalmatians,” Ms. Gioe, 51, said with a laugh. “Before the storm, my whole life was in a three-mile radius: school, church, work. Living here’s not the same. But it does seem familiar. A lady I used to see at church all the time is now my next-door neighbor.”

Katrina’s 25-foot storm surge breached the levees that were supposed to protect St. Bernard Parish. In a matter of minutes, the low-lying region, home to 67,000 people, was submerged in as much as 12 feet of water.

Only a handful of homes escaped the flood waters and the 1 million gallons of crude that spilled from the Murphy Oil refinery. So when displaced St. Bernardians heard that Randy Varuso, formerly of Arabi, was building brick homes — 25 feet above sea level — they quickly snapped up the lots.

Some friends and neighbors were reunited by coincidence. Others made sure they were together again.

Ms. Estopinal, 36, and her husband James, 35, who played running back on his high school football team, live kitty-corner from one of his best friends, the quarterback.

Jill Hogan bought her house before her husband even saw it, but he didn’t mind: His three closest pals were going to Madison Farms, and that was enough.

T.J. Nye and his wife moved to Madison Farms because their two favorite couples were relocating there. The six friends, all high school sweethearts, have been tight since childhood.

“After you lose everything, you want to be near your friends and family again,” said Ms. Nye, 27, whose St. Bernard house floated 330 feet from its foundation. “They’re all you got.”

Together, they’re starting over in a strange new land dotted with Shoney’s and Applebee’s chain restaurants instead of the po’ boy shacks and mom-and-pop Italian restaurants they knew.

The streets of Madison Farms, with equestrian names such as Secretariat Drive and Seabiscuit Loop, are deserted during the day. But when night falls on the sector of the development dominated by St. Bernardians, people come out to gossip on the streets, much as they did in their more urbanized old neighborhoods. Families walk from block to block, and some cruise around in golf carts to visit friends and relatives.