The complaints started as soon as Louisiana launched its massive program to help homeowners rebuild after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Community leaders said the largest rebuilding program in U.S. history would be unfair to the state’s poorest residents. Activists and real estate experts spoke out at meetings of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which designed and ran the Road Home program. An attorney representing poor homeowners testified before Congress. A fair housing group sued the state and federal governments. State officials made tweaks and settled the lawsuit, but they never changed a core part of the formula that determined how much homeowners received. Now a groundbreaking analysis of nearly 92,000 rebuilding grants statewide shows critics were right all along: Road Home shortchanged people in poor neighborhoods while giving those in wealthy neighborhoods more of what they needed. People in the most impoverished areas in New Orleans — those with a median income of $15,000 or less — had to cover 30% of their rebuilding costs after Road Home grants, Federal Emergency Management Agency aid and insurance. In areas where the median income was more than $75,000, the shortfall was 20%, according to the analysis by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV.  Poverty tracks closely with race in New Orleans, so the shortfalls in the city disproportionately hurt Black people. Road Home also underpaid residents of St. Bernard Parish, a mostly white, working-class community devastated by the hurricane. Had properties in the lowest-income parts of New Orleans been covered at the same rate as the wealthiest, each of those households would have received about $18,000 more on average. Across the city, covering all homeowners’ repair costs at the rate of the highest earners would have resulted in another $349 million for rebuilding.