Mary Ann and John Jacobs were the best kind of visitors to New Orleans. Beginning in the 1980s, the Tucson residents made the Crescent City a regular getaway, the city they "loved to visit and hated to leave," as Mary Ann says. They got to know the neighborhoods, the restaurants, the music clubs. In 2014, they bought a shotgun double in the Lower 9th Ward and leaned into doing volunteer work with lowernine.org , a nonprofit that has rebuilt scores of flood-wrecked homes since Hurricane Katrina.

Every time they went back to Arizona, they felt like they'd left a little piece of themselves behind. That became true in a literal sense when Mary Ann, now 90 years old, and John, 78, encountered health issues and had to sell their New Orleans home after the COVID pandemic.

For the long-distanc

See Full Page