A New Orleans entrepreneur helps guide the rebirth of his city after Katrina.

Sean Cummings doesn't think small. The New Orleans native, known for developing cutting-edge hotels and condos, has lately taken on one of the biggest challenges of his career. The massive redevelopment project he now heads, called Reinventing the Crescent, will rejuvenate six miles of riverfront property, including some just off the French Quarter. Cummings prides himself on bringing modern flair to his projects while preserving their historical roots. A graduate of Brown University with a degree in economics and urban studies, he won praise for a pair of boutique hotels he developed in New Orleans, International House and Loft 523. "Fourteen of the real estate development projects I've done have been adaptive reuses of historic buildings," says Cummings. "This sort of thing is almost second nature to me."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, what's happened in New Orleans that the media isn't reporting? What's been missed is an important underlying trend—that New Orleans is morphing into America's boutique city. And what a well-executed boutique hotel is to a fairly antiseptic traditional hotel, New Orleans is to the typical American city.

So what makes New Orleans special? The great cities in the world are less and less places where we must go for a job and increasingly places where we choose to visit or live because of the quality of life. And New Orleans is in the quality of life business. It's a geographically compact city where office space and housing are cheap, relatively speaking. It is ferreting out systemic public corruption. It's accomplished the most comprehensive overhaul of a public school system in the country. It's in the process of reinventing six miles of its riverfront. And it has playoff caliber NBA and NFL teams.

Plus there's the city's famous cultural heritage, right? Certainly. It's given us Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., and before them Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, and great chefs who have seeded the nation's kitchens, and artists who have populated the nation's performance halls. Today, the creative class is flocking to this city in numbers I've never seen before. The aftermath of Katrina is that New Orleans is reinventing itself as a more prosperous place by recruiting entrepreneurs. They love our restaurants and bars. Office space is cheaper than in New York, San Francisco, or Boston. We've got cheaper lofts and residences, so folks can have a high quality of life on a start-up wage. New Orleans is like a smaller Seattle, a great waterfront city with a terrific music scene and great artisan community.