NEW ORLEANS — On one side of what’s left of the Grand Theater is graffiti, broken glass and boarded-up windows. On the other, there’s a massive mural that says: “We got work to do.”

Around the corner, dollar stores, fast-food joints and mostly empty strip malls have sprouted in the vast commercial lots cleared by Hurricane Katrina. There are no coffee shops, no full-service restaurants. A grocery store and the hospital only recently returned.

This is New Orleans East, once the “promised land” for the city’s black middle class. Ten years after the storm, its prosperous, professional residents have come back in large numbers, but their neighborhood has been forgotten, they say, left out of the city’s broader economic revival.

“We’ve been red-lined,” said Stella Jones, 72, a retired doctor who lives in an immaculately restored five-bedroom home. “They say the city is back, but we’re not part of the city.”

The failure of the East to return to its pre-storm standard of living has puzzled residents, especially given the billions of dollars in economic development and hurricane recovery funds that have rained down on the region. Unlike the poorer Lower Ninth Ward, where barely a third of residents have returned, the East has drawn back about 83 percent of residents. And while the East was heavily damaged by catastrophic flooding, so was Lakeview, a mostly white community whose bustling main street is now lined with restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

Residents blame the slow recovery on a variety of factors, including a controversial proposal under former Mayor Ray Nagin to forget about rebuilding parts of the East and the Lower Ninth and turn them instead into green space.

“That plan slowed down the momentum and created a specter of doubt around whether these neighborhoods would be rebuilt,” said Marc H. Morial, another former mayor who is now president of the National Urban League. “It also sent a signal to many of the retailers: Don’t come back.”

But the East’s failure to attract investment also highlights a broader disparity in post-Katrina New Orleans, where blacks have fallen steadily behind. In a report released last week, the Urban League found that black unemployment in the city is double that of whites and the gap between black and white incomes has widened since the storm.

“There is a false impression that somehow New Orleans East is a neighborhood of criminals and thugs,” Morial said. People “don’t realize that New Orleans East is a neighborhood of homeowners.”