Economy
March 2, 2007
Almost a year and a half after hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew through Louisiana's woodlands, less than 15 percent of the downed timber has been harvested. And while it remains to be seen how much of that can ultimately be saved, the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center has begun working on a plan to make sure the timber industry is better prepared to handle the aftermath of another devastating storm, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The plan, funded by $55,000 from the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, should be ready in a couple of years, said Richard Vlosky, a forest products specialist with the LSU Agricultural Center.
February 26, 2007
This week, a contractor plans to begin the federally funded demolition of downtown buildings in Bayou La Batre, Ala. damaged by Hurricane Katrina. That includes the mom-and-pop strip that constituted the town's commercial center from the 1920s until the local economy went south in the late 1970s. Crushing arms of heavy machinery will eventually claim whole blocks of buildings and houses that represent much of the Bayou's past — an experience not uncommon in coastal cities still clearing out Katrina's wreckage, reports The (Mobile) Press-Register.
February 16, 2007
The cash-strapped city of New Orleans, which has borrowed heavily to continue operating after Hurricane Katrina, is turning to text-messaged donations in an effort to defray the costs of Mardi Gras, its premier cultural event, reports The Associated Press. City officials are working with PayPal, a money-transfer Web site, to raise cash via text-message and online giving. Costs of the Carnival celebration, which concludes Tuesday, include $4 million to $5 million for police overtime, trash pickup on parade routes and other public expenses.
February 15, 2007
Roughly a year-and-a-half after the one-two punch of hurricanes Katrina and Rita wracked the coast, a composite picture in economist Loren Scott's latest chronicle of Gulf Coast recovery crystallizes what's working and what's not. In short, recovery is robust in some coastal locales, but New Orleans battles higher hurdles, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Among New Orleans' higher hurdles are the completion of $5.5 billion in levee system work through 2010 and replacing more than 200,000 badly damaged residences.
January 24, 2007
State Farm has agreed to pay thousands of Mississippi homeowners hit by Hurricane Katrina likely hundreds of millions of dollars in a landmark settlement that's expected to reverberate across the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast, reports USA TODAY. The company agreed to a deal under which it will reopen thousands of homeowners' claims and is likely to pay as much as $500 million, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced Tuesday. In a related development, State Farm will settle more than 600 individual Mississippi homeowners' Katrina claims for roughly $80 million, according to a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations who didn't want to be named because the settlement is confidential.
A bold plan put forward by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — and currently being discussed in the new Congress — would build a semipermeable "Great Wall of Louisiana" from the Mississippi River to Texas to block the advancing Gulf of Mexico and, at the same time, do the opposite of what a levee is supposed to do: Allow water through to keep marshlands from drowning in the kind of brackish backwaters that are killing off Louisiana's signature swamps at the rate of more than 30 acres a year. For some 120,000 people along Louisiana's blue-collar coast, the "Morganza-to-the-Gulf" levee is seen as salvation, especially since the 2005 storms, reports The Christian Science Monitor. But critics say that such a "leaky levee" is a false hope, a taxpayer-funded Louisiana hay wagon that is scientifically unproven and even detrimental to both the region's ecology and economy.
See Christian Science Monitor article
January 22, 2007
Some economists and demographers are beginning to wonder whether New Orleans will top out at about half its pre-storm population of about 444,000, already in a steep decline from its peak of 627,525 in the 1960 Census. At the moment, the population is well below half, and future gains are likely to be small. In this view, the storm was merely a grim exclamation point to conditions decades in the making. Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that, reports The New York Times.
The New Orleans Saints' loss to the Chicago Bears on Sunday ended an improbable run for the team, one that many had begun to regard as the sort of divine comeback story that seems to have eluded the struggling city itself. Nothing since Katrina monopolized this city's attention as did the Saints' success.This was partly, many said, because it was the only hopeful news the city's residents could latch onto, reports The Washington Post.
January 18, 2007
Sixteen months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' liveliest, most exuberant neighborhood — the French Quarter — is in a funk, reports The Associated Press. The Quarter still has its characters — palm readers, magicians, street musicians, mimes. But the cheap fun is largely confined to the weekends these days, and seven-day-a-week stores, restaurants and clubs such as Preservation Hall are cutting back on their hours. The nonstop party is no more.
January 10, 2007
Tim Zagat, chief executive of the nationally recognized Zagat Survey LLC, on Wednesday released the results of his first survey of the city since Hurricane Katrina, reports The Associated Press. This year's guide, based on responses from 3,637 New Orleans area residents, includes reviews of 390 restaurants, 94 night clubs and bars, 29 other tourist attractions and 18 leading hotels. The businesses that have reopened since Katrina primarily are located in the city's French Quarter, downtown and the historic Garden District, Zagat said. He said that while there are many restaurants to mourn, he's pleased that so many places voted the best in previous surveys are back in business and still doing well.
January 8, 2007
In New Orleans, homes in move-in condition — those left unscathed by Hurricane Katrina as well as those that are fully repaired — sold for premium prices in 2006, fetching sums that were on average 19 percent higher than before the storm. Prices of properties damaged in the August 2005 hurricane and still awaiting repairs plunged by 42 percent from pre-Katrina levels, reports The Times-Picayune. The figures, compiled by Wade Ragas of Real Property Associates and released by the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors, are the first to quantify Katrina's effect on home prices.
January 4, 2007
As the Road Home rebuilding aid program for homeowners continues to grind through bureaucratic delays, a similar program targeting the small-time landlords who have long dominated the New Orleans rental market hasn't paid anyone and won't for months to come, reports The Times-Picayune. Landlords owning properties with one to four rental units ultimately will be able to tap into $869 million in rebuilding grants, less than an eighth of the $7.5 billion devoted to help owners of damaged homes through the Road Home program, which to date has paid only about 100 of more than 90,000 applicants. And the Louisiana rental property aid program will be managed by the same cast of officials: the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the state Office of Community Development and privately contracted manager ICF International.
January 2, 2007
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality is trying to partner with local governments to dispose of more than 10,000 flooded vehicles collected after the 2005 hurricane season. Still, the project will not be completed before Louisiana begins bearing at least part of the cost for storing the abandoned vehicles under an existing contract and then getting rid of them under a deal that's pending, according to The Associated Press.
December 18, 2006
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, the aftershocks rippled all the way to Iowa. Grain shipments down the Mississippi River were shut down and the price of corn plunged, reports The Des Moines Register. What resulted was a virtually unprecedented flood of government cash to Iowa's farmers, triggered by the drop in prices. Iowa growers and landowners collected $2.24 billion in subsidies last year, up from $1.25 billion in 2004, and more than 10 percent of the total payments distributed nationwide, according to data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based advocacy organization that tracks farm payments.
See Des Moines Register article
The destruction from Hurricane Katrina is still evident in New Orleans, and while its total rebuilding remains a far-off goal, the locals are hoping football, fans and the NFL can play some role in its recovery. The Saints have been the league's feel-good story a season after the storm ravaged this area, clinching the NFC South title despite Sunday's 16-10 loss to the Redskins and bringing weekly attention to the problems in the city, reports The Washington Post.
December 15, 2006
Hundreds of college students from all over the country are expected to descend on the Gulf Coast in January to witness firsthand the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and try to do something about it, according to The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. From Jan. 14-20, students will participate in "Louisiana Winter" to help remind the rest of the nation about the social and emotional impact of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi and the Bayou State. Students also will work to garner support for the Gulf Coast Civics Work Project, federal legislation that will provide resources to hire 100,000 Gulf Coast residents to rebuild Mississippi and Louisiana.
December 12, 2006
In New Orleans, musicians have been helping other musicians in the aftermath of the disaster that tossed the city's soul — its music scene — into limbo, reports Reuters. More than a year and 110 gutted homes later, the Arabi Wrecking Krewe has attracted dozens of volunteers to get jazz, R&B and brass band players on track to rebuild their houses by ripping out nearly everything but the studs free of charge. Luminaries such as soul singer Irma Thomas, trumpeter Leroy Jones and bandleader and clarinetist Dr. Michael White have all had work done by the "krewe" — the spelling used by groups that put on Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans.
December 8, 2006
Standing in front of a crumpled, flood-damaged Honda on Thursday, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott and other lawmakers said they're pushing to end "title washing," in which cars with troubled histories are sold to unsuspecting consumers. The Mississippi Republican said about 500,000 cars were damaged by Hurricane Katrina — including the one he used to drive — and many have been cleaned up and resold, reports The Clarion-Ledger. Lott and the other lawmakers said they will press the new Congress to approve legislation that would require insurance companies and others who take possession of totaled or heavily damaged cars to disclose that the vehicles are rebuilt wrecks.
December 6, 2006
More than a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability, reports The New York Times. About 102,000 families are still living in government trailers scattered around the region, and an additional 33,000 are living in apartments paid for by FEMA. What trauma victims need most, stability, is just what has proved most elusive.
A Coast-wide business group is rallying local politicians to press Mississippi lawmakers to address the wind-pool insurance crisis, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The wind pool was created after Hurricane Camille to provide wind coverage in hurricane-prone areas where companies don't want to write standard policies. When damage exceeds premiums, the more-than-500 insurance companies that do business in the state have to pay the difference. Insurers had to pay more than $545 million in wind-pool losses from Katrina. After Katrina, state Insurance Commissioner George Dale approved a 268 percent rate increase for businesses and a 90 percent boost for homeowners. But as more people flock to the wind pool, its problems are compounded, and it threatens to drive away the private insurance market.
November 27, 2006
The emptiness of New Orleans turns out to be perversely beneficial for visitors — the city of exuberant indulgence has almost overnight become even more affordable, reports The New York Times. It's a strange kind of affordability, though: Because tourists have yet to return en masse, the budget options sit wide out in the open, just waiting to be picked. Although rates have actually risen slightly, hotel deals still abound, last-minute reservations at hot restaurants are a phone call away and curbside parking actually exists.
November 20, 2006
Public officials are wondering whether insurers might come back to Louisiana if the government took over the task of providing reinsurance — essentially insurance for insurance companies — and limited losses beyond a certain level through a system of federal and/or state catastrophe funds, reports The Times-Picayune. Some say it could rescue the state from its insurance crisis by providing a powerful incentive for insurers to set up shop in Louisiana. Others argue that it transfers the cost of the worst catastrophe risk from private business to taxpayers.
November 15, 2006
Bookings on Carnival Cruise Line's Fantasy are healthy but a spokesman for Miami-based Carnival said the line still has work to do in getting the word out that New Orleans has returned to its status as a destination city, according to The Associated Press. Two weeks ago the ship became the second home-ported cruise ship to sail from the Port of New Orleans in more than a year. Before Katrina, New Orleans was on pace to become the fifth-largest cruise port in the country, port President and Chief Executive Gary LaGrange said. Cruise lines often touted New Orleans as a prime port because the tourist-friendly city had the advantage of offering two vacations in one.
November 7, 2006
Saying New Orleans must diversify its tourism-dependent economy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin announced the formation Monday of a committee that will act as a liaison between city government and the technology community and as an adviser on technology-related issues. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that the nine-member steering committee will be a joint initiative between the city and the New Orleans-based Louisiana Technology Council, formerly known as the New Orleans Technology Council. Nagin said the venture marks a "new direction'' for the city.
November 6, 2006
National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern said there is no question about the Hornets' full-time return to New Orleans in the short term, but that long-term concerns about the city's recovery and corporate support for pro basketball need to be resolved sooner than later. The Associated Press reports that Sunday night's game was the first of six the Hornets will play in New Orleans this season. The rest, including any playoff home games, will be played in Oklahoma City as part of a two-year agreement following Hurricane Katrina.
November 1, 2006
Two dozen damaged streetcars will be rebuilt and more than 200 flooded city buses will be replaced thanks to $43 million in post-Katrina funding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Tuesday for the Regional Transit Authority of New Orleans. Jim Stark, director of FEMA's Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office, said half of the money will be used to rebuild the fleet of 24 red Canal Street streetcars heavily flooded at RTA's headquarters in Mid City, according to The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The remainder will be used to replace the 200-plus buses that sat in more than 5 feet of water for several weeks after the storm, Stark said.
October 31, 2006
New Orleans is paying dearly for a Metairie company to inspect electrical work at renovated homes across the city as City Hall's permit department remains a skeleton crew 14 months after Hurricane Katrina, city officials said Monday. Still, nothing ensures that every electrical contractor is obeying the codes while working to rebuild neighborhoods in a city where construction jobs remain a cash cow for anyone with a license, City Council members were told at a Housing Committee meeting, according to The Times-Picayune.
October 30, 2006
Parts of New Orleans that suffered minor damage during Hurricane Katrina and thus have the heaviest concentration of residents and open businesses should be given priority as limited money is directed to repair utilities and other infrastructure, most participants in a citywide planning meeting said Saturday. The Times-Picayune reports that nearly half of respondents also said it matters little or not at all whether the city remains "the same physical size," perhaps addressing the question of whether its footprint should shrink to exclude some of the worst-flooded areas, which tend to have more black and poor residents. About 75 percent of the roughly 350 participants were white and 40 percent had an annual household income of more than $75,000. Before Katrina, the city was 67 percent black and 54 percent of households earned less than $29,000 — only 2 percent earned $75,000 or more.
It's a lean year for Louisiana oysters, and that means holiday stuffing made from mollusks this Thanksgiving or Christmas won't be cheap, people in the business say. The Associated Press reports that Mike Voisin, owner of Motivatit Seafoods Inc. and chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, estimated the likely cost of a pint of oysters at $9 to $10, up from about $8 a year ago. He said Louisiana provides 30 percent to 40 percent of the nation's annual oyster harvest, and its oyster reefs still are feeling the effects of last year's hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
October 27, 2006
The commissioner of internal revenue has ordered his agency to delay collecting back taxes from Hurricane Katrina victims until after the Nov. 7 elections and the holiday season, saying he did so in part to avoid negative publicity. According to The New York Times, Mark W. Everson, who has close ties to the White House, said in an interview that postponing collections until after the midterm elections was a routine effort to avoid casting the Internal Revenue Service in a bad light. But four former I.R.S. commissioners, who served under presidents of both parties, said that doing so because of an election was improper and indefensible.
The Gentilly commercial corridor in New Orleans is more than a cluster of stores and businesses along a busy road. It also serves as an economic barometer for the neighborhood and a harbinger of residential and commercial growth. Like many of the neighborhood retail hubs scattered throughout the metro area, the resumption of business along the Gentilly stretch promises to provide momentum to a community struggling to rebuild. A revived business district also offers optimism to residents contemplating their own return, The Times-Picayune reports. "It's a vote of confidence in the city when a business opens," City Council member Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said. "It's a big shot in the arm."
October 26, 2006
Jimmie Fore, the president of New Orleans' Ernest N. Morial Convention Center said Wednesday he does not want the giant riverfront hall to be used as the main staging area for evacuating people during hurricane threats after this year, according to The Times-Picayune. The plan for the 2006 storm season announced in May by Mayor Ray Nagin called for using Regional Transit Authority buses to transport residents unable to evacuate on their own to a site behind the convention center; once there, they would be put on intercity buses that would take them to shelters out of the hurricane's path. The plan was strongly endorsed by Convention Center board Chairman Warren Reuther, but board member Ralph Brennan objected, saying the facility could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it showed up again on TV screens as a hurricane shelter.
While most of today's Gulf Coast is about surfing and beachwear, the day in Bayou La Batre, Ala., starts with shrimpers loading ice and supplies for their trips to the fishing grounds. According to The Christian Science Monitor, the plight of this Cajun fishing village has become a test of whether it's possible for a Gulf Coast town to remain true to its roots. Before Hurricane Katrina, developers prepared to turn the town into a themed development featuring a "historic fishing resort" that would leave little room for actual fishermen. But following last year's hurricanes, as development pressure eased off and the economy improved, locals saw an different answer: By respecting the bayou's gritty past, they could maybe save their traditional wharf jobs and shape development that would fit the working waterfront.
See Christian Science Monitor article
October 24, 2006
After being blown to Houston in 2006 in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, the Essence Music Festival will return to New Orleans under a new deal struck Monday that includes more marketing money from the state, according to The Times-Picayune. The New Orleans tourism industry and publisher Essence Communications Inc. today are to officially announce the agreement for the city to play host to the contemporary urban music festival known as "the party with a purpose" for the next three years. In reaching the deal, New Orleans overcame Houston's attempts to lure the July event away permanently.
Early Friday afternoon in Port Sulphur, La., Highway 23 was shut down for a stretch of two and a half miles by the wail of sirens and flashing lights, for a parade celebrating the first football game played in the lower end of Plaquemines Parish since Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times reports. "We need this like New Orleans needs Mardi Gras," Stanley Gaudet, the principal at South Plaquemines High, said. Homecoming was meant to celebrate the resilience of not one devastated town but three — Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice.
October 20, 2006
New Orleans, notorious for having one of the worst public school systems in the country, has emerged from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an experiment in education: Privately run charter schools, relatively limited before last year's storm, now outnumber government-run public schools, reports The Associated Press. And the numbers could rise as the demand for quality schools grows in this still-recovering city, state education officials predict.
Throughout southeast Louisiana, owners of 460 camps and homes on water in places such as Bayou Segnette, the Wagon Wheel and parts of Chalmette have received contracts from Entergy Louisiana asking them to pay a portion of the $24 million it will cost to restore power to their sites in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to The Times-Picayune. While the $2,600-a-month example is extreme, others are being asked to pay several hundred dollars extra each month.
October 18, 2006
More than a year after Hurricane Katrina hit, five of the General Services Administration's Gulf Coast properties remain closed, reports Federal Times. One government-owned building — the U.S. Customs House in downtown New Orleans — is awaiting a new roof. And four leased properties were "completely flattened," or are still in need of major repairs, said Dean McCauley, director of GSA's Office of Emergency Management. But in retrospect, McCauley said, the federal government fared well in Katrina's wake.
October 16, 2006
Pinched for nurses since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area hospitals have increased wages to capture a share of the local talent pool and in some cases have left beds empty for want of caregivers. Now, several hospitals are looking abroad for help, according to The Times-Picayune. Rather than scrimmage for nurses in the tight local market, East Jefferson General Hospital dispatched its chief operating officer in August to the Philippines, a former U.S. territory that annually sends thousands of English-speaking nurses overseas. Sixty-one Filipino nurses have agreed to trade in their meager wages for life in a struggling foreign city.
Insurance companies are expecting record profits in 2006 after predictions of another year of devastating hurricanes have so far come to naught. The New York Times reports that industry experts are estimating that profits may reach $60 billion, on a combination of higher premiums along the coasts, no major payouts for natural disasters and strong investment returns. The record profits expected this year come after a terrible 2005, when insurers paid out $61 billion for damage from Hurricane Katrina and other storms. Even so, the insurers ended up with a profit of $43 billion for the year because of exceptionally good results on investments, declining claims on policies on homes away from the coast and profits on other lines of coverage.
Six of the seven musicians lost their homes to the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. A year after the storm, only two of the seven have been able to move back to New Orleans. Yet compared to many other New Orleans musicians, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band are the fortunate ones. They have work, reports The Boston Globe. The band is the touring outfit of Preservation Hall, a 45-year-old New Orleans institution devoted to nurturing and promoting the city's musical tradition. The hall, a tiny, unpretentious venue in the French Quarter, only reopened in May. But the band has been touring all along, bringing to its regular circuit of prestige theaters not just the music of New Orleans, but testimonial to the Crescent City's perseverance and hurt.
October 6, 2006
Fewer than 190,000 people are living in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina, according to a door-to-door survey released Thursday. The population of 187,525 is about 41 percent of the 454,000 people estimated to be living in Orleans Parish before the storm hit Aug. 29, 2005. The survey was conducted for the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals by the Louisiana Public Health Institute, reports The Associated Press. Mayor C. Ray Nagin has cited a slightly higher figure, and last month said he believed the city was on track to reach 300,000 people by year's end. (See Government Data for link to survey reports.)
October 5, 2006
Louisiana will use $38 million in federal funds to train workers for jobs in high demand after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Wednesday. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that the money is part of the $10.4 billion in federal aid, called community development block grants, that Louisiana has landed since the storms of 2005. The funds will be used to train workers for jobs in health care, transportation, construction, advanced manufacturing, oil and gas and the cultural sector, such as music and book stores, performing arts and spectator sports.
October 2, 2006
A model home in Mississippi that gives Katrina's displaced an alternative to trailer living is starting to take the country by storm, reports The Christian Science Monitor. The Katrina cottage — with living quarters about the size of a McMansion bathroom — is now appealing to people well beyond the flood plain. Californians want to build one in their backyards to use for rental income to help with the mortgage payment. Modestly paid kayakers in Colorado see it as a way to finally afford a house. Elsewhere, people envision building one so a parent can live nearby.
See Christian Science Monitor article
September 20, 2006
New Orleans-area tourism agencies will lead the pack of statewide programs receiving portions of $28.5 million in federal money to promote tourism and help reverse the decline in visitors after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, state officials announced Tuesday. The Times-Picayune reports that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the financing for the Louisiana Tourism Marketing Program. The Louisiana Department of Culture and Tourism estimated that the state lost 7 million tourism and convention visitors and $2.2 billion in tourism spending last year due to the hurricanes. Recently, the New Orleans region has been losing an average $15.2 million per day.
September 8, 2006
Houston may be hot, unfriendly and frustratingly difficult to navigate, but more than two-thirds of the poorest New Orleans evacuees who fled to the city after Hurricane Katrina plan to stay, a Rice University survey released today shows. Almost 69 percent of the 1,081 people queried in the National Science Foundation-funded study conducted in July by political science professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein said they likely will remain in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. Wilson and Stein say their findings reflect the view of 35,000 to 40,000 evacuees, about one-fourth of the displaced New Orleanians thought to be living in the city.
September 6, 2006
The greatest U.S. cultural disaster, as the National Trust for Historic Preservation describes Hurricane Katrina, claimed a huge chunk of the Mississippi Coast's landmark identity. Venerable live oaks, charming waterfront neighborhoods and an architecture that reflected several centuries disappeared or were badly damaged and remain fragile a year later, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. Some landmarks remain — the Biloxi Lighthouse, Pascagoula's Old Spanish Fort, the Friendship Oak in Long Beach and the Hancock Bank in Bay St. Louis are standouts among them — but need repairs.
September 5, 2006
Liberty Bank and Trust Co. was the country's third-largest black-owned bank until Hurricane Katrina and floodwaters roared through New Orleans one year ago. The bank's chief executive and his staff count themselves among the fortunate, despite the general state of disrepair inside and outside their building, reports The New York Times. While their neighborhood wants for many basic amenities, including mail delivery and phone service, their company is one of the few enterprises back in business in the vast northeastern quadrant of New Orleans. And in a city where an estimated two in three businesses remain shuttered, Liberty is not only open but also turning a profit.
Fifty years ago the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, dubbed the world's longest bridge, opened as a 24-mile connection between a sparsely populated area just west of New Orleans and the pine belt of St. Tammany Parish on the lake's north shore. Bridge planners anticipated the baby boom-driven growth that spilled into the suburbs from New Orleans, but didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina when they cut a ceremonial ribbon on Aug. 30, 1956, reports The Associated Press. St. Tammany, which suffered less damage than parishes on the south shore, became a haven for evacuees, especially the more affluent, whose homes were destroyed by floodwaters. Before Katrina, St. Tammany had been fast-growing. Now it's exploiting perhaps its most important quality, one that New Orleans can't match: land. St. Tammany is 850 square miles, compared to New Orleans' 250 square miles — and, more importantly, is largely elevated out of the flood plain.
South Mississippi finds itself with strange combinations of help wanted signs on every corner and high unemployment rates, according to The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released metropolitan unemployment numbers last week that point to the Gulfport-Biloxi area as having the third-highest unemployment rate in the country at 11.6 percent. But the abundance of help wanted signs point to what Bill Gunther, an economics professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, says is a pre-existing labor shortage that has some workers unqualified or overqualified for available jobs compounded by the post-Katrina hardships. It will constrain how fast the area can grow, and that's evidenced by the businesses working abbreviated hours because of staffing issues.
August 25, 2006
A year after Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi's Gulf Coast residents mourn a way of life she blew away. They talk about what they miss but are always grateful to acknowledge what remains. Everyone misses the bridges that linked communities and entertainment and recreational venues on the waterfront. Those will be replaced, but a sense of security and history will be harder to rebuild, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. Historic mansions fell from state line to state line, along with a countless number of Live oaks, businesses, churches and homes.
August 7, 2006
Before Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, Louisiana was enjoying one of the nation's most remarkable booms in television and film production, reports the Los Angeles Times. Thanks to the state's aggressive tax incentives, which can shave as much as 20 percent off a film's budget, New Orleans was turning into the Hollywood of the South. Productions pumped millions into an impoverished economy and helped build a new and much-needed job base. But as soon as Katrina blew out of town, so did the movie business. Some productions relocated to other parts of the state while a few packed their bags and returned to Los Angeles. But as the region has recovered, producers have reconsidered. See Los Angeles Times article
July 24, 2006
To the list of daily aggravations in the new New Orleans, add one that augments the heat, spoils the food and drains the cash register: power failures. Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, the city still does not have a reliable electrical system, reports The New York Times. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of repairs are still needed on a system devastated by flooding, the local utility is in bankruptcy and less than half of pre-storm customers have returned. Entergy New Orleans wants to increase its rates 25 percent to help pay for part of what it says is $718 million in storm losses and revenue shortfalls. That would increase the average household bill by $45 a month.
July 6, 2006
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco will announce today a $200 million restoration of Jackson Barracks, a project expected spur redevelopment in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and Arabi areas, as well as enabling the Louisiana National Guard to return its state headquarters to the complex. The huge repair project, which will be in accordance with FEMA guidelines, will demonstrate to property owners how to repair shattered homes and build new ones according to new hurricane codes, Blanco said. The 100-acre historic base took on between 4 feet and 8 feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The flooding forced the Louisiana National Guard to temporarily move its state headquarters to Camp Beauregard, near Pineville.
June 14, 2006
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin visited Chicago as part of a national tour in which he's calling on "partners" to help rebuild his hurricane-ravaged city, a project he estimated could take seven to 10 years. During a speech at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's national conference in Rosemont, Ill., Nagin criticized the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and his state's handling of recent municipal elections, according to the Chicago Tribune.
June 13, 2006
In what may be the start of the New Orleans' development boom, the AFL-CIO plans to invest $1 billion to develop 10,000 affordable homes and a new downtown hotel, reports USA TODAY. The investment is the labor coalition's most ambitious funding project ever. It also is one of the largest yet for New Orleans and seeks to bring new housing to a city where Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 100,000 homes.
June 9, 2006
Before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans economy was sluggish. But things are about to change as billions of dollars in construction money pours into the area, University of New Orleans Chancellor Timothy Ryan said Thursday. In fact, the New Orleans economy over the next five years could climb out from the bottom of the heap and rise to be jewel of the south once again, The Times-Picayune reports.
June 7, 2006
They are the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction: workers who converge at dawn and wait to be picked up for 14-hour shifts of hauling debris, ripping out drywall and nailing walls. But because many are in the country illegally, immigrant workers rebuilding New Orleans are especially vulnerable to exploitation, according to a study released Tuesday by professors at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley, reports The Associated Press.
May 31, 2006
For companies in the post-disaster business, 2005 was a very good year, according to MSNBC. And if preseason predictions are correct, it could be the first in a series of profitable years for a rapidly growing industry that encompasses engineering firms, debris haulers and logistical specialists who rush in whenever disaster strikes. In addition to being the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina was a boon for companies that specialize in recovering from such devastation. It opened the spigot to billions of dollars in federal contracts to haul debris, make emergency repairs to damaged homes and buildings, and provide temporary housing and other structures. The growth of the sector is best illustrated by an emerging group of companies even more intensely focused on specialized aspects of post-disaster work. These firms, including Beck Disaster Recovery and AshBritt, typically spring into action after disasters strike by tapping networks of affiliated contractors to quickly dispatch personnel, heavy equipment and other specialized gear to the scene.
May 25, 2006
New Orleans, still down and out from last year's assault by Hurricane Katrina, is projected as the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force winds during the 2006 storm season, expert researchers said Wednesday. Reuters reports that the forecast offered by Chuck Watson of the Georgia risk assessment firm Kinetic Analysis Corp., and University of Central Florida statistics professor Mark Johnson gives New Orleans nearly a 30 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane and a 10 percent chance the storm will be a Category 3 or stronger, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour. "Given the state of the infrastructure down there and the levees, gosh, that's just not good news. But that's what the climate signals look like," Watson said, adding that they predict oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will be disrupted for a minimum of a week.
Plans to use the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as the main staging area for evacuating people from New Orleans by bus during hurricane threats this year came under strong attack Wednesday from board member, Ralph Brennan. At the monthly meeting of the Convention Center's board, Brennan, said the center could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it shows up again on TV screens this fall as a hurricane shelter, reports The Times-Picayune. The evacuation plan announced May 2 by Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls for using RTA buses to transport most residents who can't leave the city on their own to a site behind the Convention Center.
In St. Bernard Parish, La., Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding damaged or destroyed nearly all of the 26,000 single-family homes. Almost nine months later, the fate of its working-class and middle-class neighborhoods is clouded by unanswered questions, according to the Los Angeles Times. How many homeowners will choose to come back? Where will they work? What areas will be turned into floodplains? And how safe will it be when the next hurricane hits? Since the storm, residents eager to return have helped fuel a booming housing market in the unflooded sections of New Orleans. But, rather predictably, sales in St. Bernard Parish have been slow. According to the Gulf South Real Estate Information Network, real estate agents sold only eight single-family homes in the parish in the first seven months after Katrina. The average selling price for a house in the Multiple Listings Service has dropped to $59,500 from $111,500 before the storm.
May 19, 2006
For almost nine months, the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas has been closed to the public after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans. The aquarium is Louisiana's most popular destination, hosting 730,042 visitors last year — more people than attend Mardi Gras, according to USA TODAY. Now, the nonprofit Audubon Nature Institute, which operates it, is under immense financial pressure. The challenges it faces are symptomatic of struggles throughout the state's $9.9 billion hospitality industry.
May 17, 2006
New Orleans’ water board — with $408 million in debt, including $137 million due to investors in July — faces the threat of drowning, USA TODAY reports. Strapped with large fixed costs, heavy borrowings and massive new investment needs in a city whose population is 61 percent smaller than before the storm, the board is hard-pressed to cover its bills and provide basic services. Wall Street credit-rating firms view the water board as a gauge of how local governments across the Gulf Coast will weather a post-Katrina storm in public finance. The credit agencies have downgraded several dozen municipal borrowers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including some — such as the water board — to non-investment grade “junk” status. In Louisiana, the debt is $8 billion, only half of which is insured. Whether any of these local government borrowers eventually might have to seek federal bankruptcy court protection has not been discussed seriously. But the magnitude of the problems approaches the strains that preceded the large-scale collapses of New York City in 1975 and Orange County, Calif., in 1994.
May 16, 2006
A group of banks led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed Monday to extend New Orleans a $150 million line of credit over three years, helping shore up city finances ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, The Associated Press reports. Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is up for re-election on Saturday, said the money will be used primarily to ensure city services are maintained and to eliminate the threat of municipal bankruptcy. The city will have three years to repay the debt and anticipates being able to do so out of regular revenue, Nagin said.
May 15, 2006
For the first quarter of the year, sales of single-family homes in the greater New Orleans area zoomed to $826 million, a jump of 60 percent over the first quarter of 2005, when sales totaled $517 million, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors. A total of 3,829 residential units were sold, 960 more than the same period in 2005. Experts say there's nothing to be surprised about: One of the ironies of natural disasters is they're often good for real estate. It's a pattern real estate professionals witnessed in Florida after Hurricane Andrew and in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, according to The Associated Press.
May 10, 2006
Northrop Grumman's top shipbuilding executive on Tuesday defended asking for emergency supplemental appropriations to pay for ship repairs at the firm's Gulf Coast yards damaged by Hurricane Katrina, arguing that failure to do so would have serious repercussions for several Navy projects. If Congress does not appropriate the money, ship production could be delayed as long as a year, potentially driving up costs by as much as $500 million, Philip Teel, president of Northrop Grumman's Ship Systems business, told reporters at a news conference. The company estimates the storm caused $2.35 billion in ship and infrastructure damages at its Gulf Coast facilities, CongressDaily reports. Of that, Northrop Grumman would like to tap $200 million out of up to $2.7 billion in appropriated funds for the Navy for Katrina-related damage. But critics say the money amounts to corporate welfare and a bailout for one of the country's top defense contractors that could ultimately reach $500 million.
May 4, 2006
Questions are being raised about new contracts that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is awarding for hurricane work along the Gulf Coast, reports National Public Radio. The agency says it wants the money — up to $3.6 billion — to go to small and disadvantaged companies in the region. But some local firms have complained that too many winners are from out of state, and they question whether all of them are qualified. Federal investigators are reviewing some of the awards. The 36 contracts are huge — up to $100 million each — to take care of thousands of trailers and mobile homes now housing hurricane victims on the Gulf Coast. FEMA decided to make the awards after it was criticized for giving no-bid contracts to four large national firms in the hectic days right after the storm.
See, hear National Public Radio report
Usually, when Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez embarks on a trade mission, his destination is a foreign country seen as a promising new market. But today and Friday, Gutierrez will bring U.S. business leaders to the Gulf Coast, hoping to persuade them to invest in hurricane- and flood-damaged New Orleans and neighboring areas, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New Orleans, only about 2,000 of its 22,000 pre-storm business enterprises — most of them small — have returned, according to estimates by local officials.
May 1, 2006
New Orleans’ Lee Circle had been bustling with itinerant workers for several hours by the time police showed up. Contractors had already driven into the traffic roundabout and workers had charged after them, competing for jobs gutting, roofing and Sheetrocking houses, according to the Los Angeles Times. Residents say that before Hurricane Katrina, no one looked for work on the streets of New Orleans. Temporary employment agencies found laborers short-term jobs painting or unloading cruise ships. "The police said, 'Why don't y'all find an employment agency?'" said Jerry Ross, a local laborer who once used those agencies, as the police left the circle. "I said, 'This is the employment agency.'"
April 24, 2006
It was pretty tough to persuade someone to move to New Orleans for a job before Hurricane Katrina, recruiters and human resource specialists say. Since the storm, recruiting has become even harder as the area's problems, such as leadership and education, have been exacerbated, according to The Times-Picayune. Add to that the uncertainty of the levees and the coming hurricane season, and, well, recruiters say good luck finding someone from outside the area to fill that CEO, or even that RN, position.
April 21, 2006
The government's main program for helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild their homes and businesses, operated by the Small Business Administration, has been plagued by inadequate leadership and poor planning, federal investigators have told Congress. The New York Times reports that the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, has found that the agency was hampered in its hurricane response by its failure to participate in disaster drills and to prepare for a disaster of the hurricane's magnitude, according to written testimony and briefings it has given congressional committees.
April 17, 2006
Once the domain of government and charitable relief groups, hurricane response and preparedness are a booming billion-dollar business — from the self-heating food packets to the souped-up cellphone towers on wheels, reports The Associated Press. Call it Hurricanes Inc. "Private industry is the only way to go," said Joe Spraggins, emergency management chief for a Mississippi county hit hard by Katrina. The trend has been growing for a few years. But with 2004 when multiple storms struck Florida, and last year with Katrina, then Rita, it has accelerated.
April 13, 2006
The shrimpers, fishing captains and oystermen along the Gulf Coast seem to have been forgotten as the government funnels aid to a region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that very little of the $68 billion appropriated has found its way to the watermen of the Gulf or to rebuild onshore facilities. Meanwhile, massive amounts of debris have made shrimping dangerous in many areas and oysterbeds have been ruined by silt. As the Senate prepares to debate the latest Katrina aid bill, the watermen are pinning their hopes on an ambitious $1.1 billion aid plan by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
April 11, 2006
The Bush administration and members of Congress say they are concerned that taxpayers affected by Katrina and Rita could miss out on billions of dollars of disaster-targeted tax breaks simply because they are unaware of them, delaying the Gulf Coast's recovery, reports The Times-Picayune. "These are not automatic benefits. In many cases, people need to seek them out," said Donald Mains, deputy assistant secretary for economic development at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
April 10, 2006
More than a third of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who were still out of their homes were unemployed in March, a sharp jump from February, the federal Labor Department reported Friday. In addition, the civilian labor force figure that includes evacuees still residing out of state and those who have returned home was down, an indication that many stopped looking actively for work or saw their jobless benefits end, reports The Associated Press.
April 7, 2006
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, many small business owners around the country realized they could be vulnerable to the same kind of destruction that left thousands of companies paralyzed for weeks, months — and some indefinitely. The Associated Press reports that disaster preparedness is now more of a priority, but many of those implementing plans learn that the process has become more complicated post-Katrina. While backing up data and buying business interruption insurance are still critical, so are things like ensuring that employees can still communicate with one another despite a telecommunications outage and choosing a remote work location that could accommodate at least most of a company's staff for an extended period of time.
Race and class played important roles in shaping how Gulf Coast residents, particularly low-income blacks in New Orleans, responded to Hurricane Katrina, a Tulane University sociologist said Thursday. Using data from a Gallup telephone survey of 1,500 adult Katrina survivors, Tulane sociology Professor James Elliott and sociology graduate student Jeremy Pais found that low-income blacks — though not all black or low-income people generally — were most likely to stay in New Orleans through the disaster, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The survey also discovered that black people from New Orleans were nearly four times more likely to lose their pre-Katrina jobs than white workers.
April 6, 2006
Companies on the Gulf Coast that survived last year's devastating hurricanes face a dramatically smaller labor pool that has prompted more than a quarter to raise wages, said a study released on Wednesday, reports Reuters. A third of 119 companies surveyed also said they offered housing assistance, from free or subsidized shelter to home repair loans, according to the study by Salary.com, a Needham, Mass.-based compensation research and data company.
The pictures of destruction are all too familiar. Entire cities washed away by the powerful hurricanes that pummeled the Gulf Coast last fall. With so much lost to the storms, it would be easy to assume that property and casualty insurance companies — which insure homes and cars — took a big hit to their bottom lines in 2005, reports ABC News. But data compiled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners paints a surprising picture — one of record profitability for property and casualty insurers amid all the devastation. The group says insurance company filings with all 50 states show an unprecedented $44.8 billion in profits for 2005.
April 5, 2006
All the jobs lost in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina had been regained by February, according to a state profile from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. By contrast, only 17 percent of the 241,000 jobs lost in Louisiana had been regained, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The spring 2006 profile of Mississippi said casinos have refueled the state's recovery. It also said one impact of the hurricane won't be felt for several years — an expected increase in bankruptcies.
There are any number of signs signaling a steady but unsure recovery in New Orleans, from a vibrant nightlife in pockets of town to census estimates that suggest that the city is repopulating at a much faster pace than predicted a few months ago, reports The New York Times. Yet those signs of optimism only bring into sharp relief the alarmingly sluggish pace at which the city's economy is recovering. Before Katrina struck, New Orleans was home to 22,000 businesses, the vast majority of them small establishments with 99 or fewer employees. Today, barely 2,000 of those have reopened.
April 4, 2006
The future of New Orleans's flood-ravaged neighborhoods might depend upon buyers who are willing to purchase Katrina-damaged homes, according to The Washington Post. With many residents unwilling or unable to rebuild, scores of neighborhoods will need bargain seekers to invest and renovate. About half of the houses in New Orleans are still empty, waiting to be rebuilt or torn down. And though there are far more sellers than buyers these days, the fact that there are people willing to purchase and occupy a house in the vast abandoned swaths of this city comes as a welcome sign among those who worry that some areas might never come back.
As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina receded in September, roads filled with residents leaving New Orleans, their cars, SUVs and moving vans jammed with what they had salvaged of their lives. But another mass movement was taking place on the other sides of the highways, reports the Los Angeles Times. Thousands of men from Mexico and Central America were driving into the city. Word had spread throughout the Latino immigrant diaspora in America that the city had plenty of work, construction wages had doubled to $16 an hour and no one was asking for papers.
April 3, 2006
St. Tammany Parish along Lake Pontchartrain's north shore in Louisiana is the only parish hit by Hurricane Katrina to experience population growth, reports National Public Radio. Twenty percent of its houses were destroyed, but floodwaters receded quickly. Now many businesses are taking advantage of the influx, but face an uncertain future.
Hear National Public Radio report
March 31, 2006
The Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of rebuilding New Orleans's levees to federal standards has nearly tripled to $10 billion and that there may not be enough money to fully protect the entire region, reports The Washington Post. Donald E. Powell, the administration's rebuilding coordinator, said some areas may be left without the protection of levees strong enough to meet requirements of the national flood insurance program. Those areas probably would face enormous obstacles in attracting home buyers and investors willing to build there.
Much of New Orleans' rebirth from Hurricane Katrina hinges on factors beyond the government's control and could take up to a quarter-century to complete, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery chief, Don Powell, told The Associated Press Thursday. Powell said luring homeowners and businesses back to the hurricane-ravaged city "depends on a lot of factors that, I think, are out of our control." Issues with housing, public safety and private investment are largely being decided by local authorities who Powell said "will be in control of their destiny."
March 29, 2006
Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay, reports The Associated Press. Some submerged to their roofs in the black floodwaters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city's devastated school system.
March 28, 2006
The government has slowed down in deciding whether to approve hundreds of applications for federal loans to help small businesses recover from Hurricane Katrina, a senator said Monday. The Associated Press reports that earlier this year, the government was resolving 355 cases daily; that figure has dropped to 99 cases daily. The slowdown came as 682 disaster assistance employees left the Small Business Administration, said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate committee that oversees the agency.
A proposal to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to start a state loan program for people in Mississippi wiped out by Katrina is likely to die in the state Senate, lawmakers reported as the 2006 legislative session enters its final days. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that House leaders had proposed borrowing $250 million to create a zero-interest loan program that would offer loans of up to $25,000 each. In the Senate, Finance Committee Chairman Tommy Robertson, R-Moss Point, doubled the amount to $500 million, but also included a "repealer" that would rescind the bill before it could take effect, ensuring the House couldn't just agree to the $500 million without further debate.
March 27, 2006
It's the worst year for crawfish production in decades, because of a shortage caused by drought and saltwater intrusion from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to the Houston Chronicle. Bob Odom, Louisiana's commissioner of agriculture and forestry, said that in his 26 years in office, "This is probably the worst I've ever seen as far as crawfish production." Louisiana is at about 35 percent to 40 percent of its normal crawfish output, he said. Earlier in the season, he was forecasting a smaller output of 20 percent to 25 percent. His state produces 90 percent of the crawfish consumed in the United States.
March 22, 2006
Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their lives worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times. The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation and politicians in Washington have moved on.
With red flags flying high for the 2006 hurricane season, consumers who are thinking about sprucing up their homes this year may be better off adding a lifesaving "storm room" instead of that fancy whirlpool, reports CNNMoney.com. DuPont has been testing the market for pre-built storm rooms in the tornado-prone regions of Texas and Oklahoma for the past two years and later expanded the pilot test to hurricane-affected areas like Florida. DuPont may soon be joining forces with a major home-improvement retailer to market its pre-built storm rooms to shoppers nationwide as early as the third quarter, a company official said. According to DuPont, the room will resist winds up to 250 miles an hour; electricity and plumbing can be added and cell phones and radios should keep working even at the height of devastating storms like last year's hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
March 21, 2006
Interested in a piece of driftwood from Hurricane Katrina? How about bottled flood water, or maybe a prickly palm sea bean that washed ashore? Maybe your taste is more toward a flood-damaged dollar bill. The asking price is $2,900 for this piece of history. These are just some of the hundreds of Hurricane Katrina-related items — much of it rather mundane — being sold on eBay, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald.
March 20, 2006
Once the salt water is in your veins, Louisiana's coastal folk say, it's hard to give up the lifestyle of moonlit shrimping trips, the town ''fais do-do'' dances and afternoons spent on the bayous angling for catfish. But since last year's catastrophic hurricanes, this swampy land defined by Cajuns, cypress and tupelo gum forests, bayou-side saloons and, more recently, subdivisions, may have become too vulnerable for that lifestyle to continue, reports The Associated Press. Even before the devastation caused by Katrina, Louisiana's swampy coast had been sinking by as much as 2 inches a year. Along with that subsidence, the area is even more susceptible to flooding because last year's hurricanes damaged vast tracts of wetlands — already shrinking because of man's activities — that used to buffer the area from storms blowing in off the Gulf of Mexico.
March 15, 2006
A full three years after Hurricane Katrina scattered New Orleanians across the country, residents will have returned to areas that had little or no flooding, but less than half will have made it back to neighborhoods that took on 2 feet of water or more, a think tank hired by Mayor Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission estimates. According to The Times-Picayune, the think tank's report, released today by the RAND Corp., repeats projections released in January by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission that the city will have about 272,000 residents by Aug. 29, 2008, or just more than half its pre-Katrina population.
More home-loan borrowers are behind on their payments in the area hit last year by Hurricane Katrina than in any part of the country in more than three decades, according to a lending trade group. The Washington Post reports that about 12 percent of mortgage holders in Louisiana and 8 percent in Mississippi were more than 90 days late on their payments, according to the most recent quarterly survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Delinquency rates are higher for those with high-interest loans or loans insured by the federal government. But the foreclosure rate is lower than the national average because many lenders have voluntarily agreed not to begin proceedings to claim the properties while borrowers get back on their feet.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, mail delivery is limited and slow, even in the least-damaged New Orleans neighborhoods. The Associated Press reports that it is a source of frustration for people waiting for insurance checks, and a reminder of how badly the city's basic infrastructure was damaged by the Aug. 29 storm.
March 14, 2006
Everyone wants a Mississippi bridge destroyed in Hurricane Katrina rebuilt as soon as possible. But officials on one side of the bridge — those in Biloxi — favor a large, multi-lane structure that can accommodate casino workers and a new horde of gamblers. On the other side, in Ocean Springs, officials want to restore the four-lane drawbridge that once spanned the bay, hoping to keep their French-colonized, tree-lined town the definition of quaint, reports The New York Times. The debate over what should replace the Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridge in many ways illustrates the entire rebuilding effort along the Mississippi coast, where cities, drained of resources, infrastructure and people, struggle toward rebirth.
March 13, 2006
The Internal Revenue Service has used a fast-track approval process to grant tax exemptions to almost 400 new charities that said they planned to assist Hurricane Katrina victims, reports The New York Times. But one that distributes leather jackets to address the special needs of sadomasochists? Another that hands out new underwear? A spot check of the new charities shows that some have disappeared, while others are struggling to help storm victims or to broaden their mission after an initial spurt of activity. Over all, about $3.6 billion has been pledged to Katrina-related charities, with roughly 60 percent donated to the American Red Cross.
Around small Mississippi towns, scores of small farmers who normally would be harvesting blueberries, greens, squash, bell peppers and fresh-cut flowers through the mild winter are idle because Katrina washed out their normal New Orleans farmers market and Mississippi casino restaurant customers, reports The Washington Post. Across timber-rich southern Mississippi, the storm blew down or made impossible to machine harvest about $1 billion in old-growth hardwood and pine forest, wiping out wealth for 60,000 landowners that took generations to build. At Gulf of Mexico lookouts such as Point Cadet in Biloxi, 60 seafood processing and operations centers, and 500 shrimp boats employing 4,300 people, were knocked out, crippling an $800 million industry.
March 10, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina smashed through a fragile necklace of Mississippi coastal towns, the region is enjoying a post-storm boom, reports The Washington Post. Fueled by insurance money, federal reconstruction aid and speculative capital, surviving hotels and restaurants are filled to overflowing, beachfront land prices are soaring, and developers are placing billion-dollar bets that shattered antebellum mansions will give rise to condominium resorts.
March 8, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina, at least four of every five businesses in New Orleans are still shuttered, according to Don Hutchinson, the director of economic development for the city. About 60 percent of the downtown businesses have reopened, he said, but that statistic is deceptively high because many companies are moving back only part of their workforce, The New York Times reports. One company that did return was Shell Oil, which bought $32 million in residential properties in the area — 120 houses and condominiums in all — to lease to its employees. The company owned no residential property in the United States before the hurricane.
March 7, 2006
The words "Ninth Ward" have come to symbolize a ravaged New Orleans. But the damage to the city is widespread, not just in the poorest areas, and rebuilding efforts will take years, National Public Radio reports. One of the most important questions facing the Crescent City is whether homeowners, government and businesses will collaborate to rebuild the city — or compete for control.
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With Louisiana’s coffers flush with federal hurricane relief dollars and higher-than-expected tax revenue, Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s administration has proposed a record $20.3 billion state budget that spares most agencies from significant cuts and calls for hundreds of millions of dollars in new education spending. The Times-Picayune reports that the plan unveiled to a House-Senate budget committee would raise teacher pay by $1,500, double the state's spending on indigent defense and boost money to a variety of health care programs — a marked change from the doomsday predictions of deep spending cuts made in the wake of Katrina and Rita.
March 3, 2006
A number of businesses owe their livelihood to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, the reviled navigational shortcut between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico that many faulted for much of New Orleans’ devastation. The New York Times reports that the canal, referred to locally as “Mr. Go,” is widely considered an environmental disaster. Residents and officials in New Orleans say they want it shut down or at least bottled up. If the channel is closed, thousands of jobs could be lost unless the government spends $400 million to move the nine major businesses that currently depend on the channel directly to the banks of the Mississippi.
A Fairfax County, Va. service station accused of price gouging after Hurricane Katrina has agreed to set aside $3,000 for reimbursing customers and to donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross, Virginia's attorney general said Thursday. The Associated Press reports that Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell said the station more than doubled its prices after a state of emergency was declared on Sept. 2, 2005. The price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas soared as high as $5.90 that afternoon from $2.80 on Aug. 31.
March 2, 2006
With thousands of cars and trucks damaged by Hurricane Katrina entering the marketplace, Congress should create a federal database to track such vehicles to prevent them from being sold to unsuspecting consumers, industry officials said Wednesday. The Associated Press reports that auto dealers and consumer groups said varying car title laws across the country have allowed some unscrupulous dealers and wholesalers to sell flood-damaged vehicles that have corroded wiring as well as defective brakes and air bags. Katrina damaged nearly 600,000 vehicles, the groups estimated, and thousands have been refurbished and sold to consumers in recent months.
March 1, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina battered the gulf with 175-mile-an-hour winds and waves higher than eight-story buildings, more than a quarter of the region's oil output is still shut down. The New York Times reports that the shortages, amounting to 6 percent of the country's domestic production, have worsened a global picture of razor-thin margins of supply, playing a central part in keeping oil prices around $60 a barrel.
February 28, 2006
For some New Orleans residents still waiting to return home, this is going to be a pathetic Mardi Gras. To other refugees, however, the big parades in New Orleans seem almost grotesque, the Associated Press reports. They wonder whether the city has its priorities straight in throwing a party at a time when many homes lay in ruins.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is a city of revelry — and a city of despair, National Public Radio reports. It is a city where some neighborhoods are up and running, and others are a wasteland. It is a city where some have found a new calling, and some can no longer cope.
Hear National Public Radio report
With much of New Orleans still in ruins, Baton Rouge seems destined to become Louisiana's population and business center — even if it never comes close to New Orleans in art, food, music or tourism. The Los Angeles Times reports that Baton Rouge, or “BR” as it is sometimes called locally, has been growing in size and economic stature for more than a decade, while the Big Easy has been shrinking.
February 27, 2006
Even though New Orleans has already racked up $120 million in debt, officials are scrambling for loans of as much as $200 million more so that the city can continue to pay its bills through the end of the year. The New York Times reports that with its credit rating downgraded to junk-bond status, it is not clear how the city will even find the money to maintain its most critical services, like police and fire protection.
The lack of revelry on the Friday before Mardi Gras reflects the lack of people — New Orleans's black middle class is gone. The Washington Post reports that many African-Americans prosperous enough to pay dues to a social club and buy tuxedos and gowns for debutante balls lived in the predominantly black subdivisions of New Orleans East, a former marshland drained by canals that severely flooded after Hurricane Katrina. Mile after mile of suburban homes along its cul-de-sacs and man-made lakes as well as a similar neighborhood, Gentilly, are virtually empty. Those black professionals are scattered across the South, finding new jobs, establishing new medical and legal practices and businesses.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina struck — long after Mayor C. Ray Nagin estimated that residents would be able to return within 16 weeks and President Bush said he would do "whatever it takes" — New Orleans has become paralyzed with uncertainty. The Los Angeles Times reports that most everyone who once lived in Katrina's flood path has had their own confounding odyssey of tribulations and missteps that have kept them from coming home. In the meantime, vast stretches of the city — 100 square miles or more — are still abandoned and rotting.
February 24, 2006
Boone Pickens, the often controversial and always colorful Texas oilman-turned-investor, took advantage of a temporary tax break to make a gift that propelled him into the ranks of the nation's top philanthropists last year. At the end of the year, he gave $165 million to a tiny charity set up to benefit the golf program at Oklahoma State University, reaping him a tax deduction, The New York Times reports. Records show that the money spent less than an hour on Dec. 30 in the account of the university's charity, O.S.U. Cowboy Golf Inc., before it was invested in a hedge fund controlled by Pickens. By giving the money before 2005 expired, Pickens was able to take advantage of a provision in Hurricane Katrina relief legislation that allowed him a deduction for a charitable gift equal to 100 percent of his adjusted gross income, double the normal limit of 50 percent.
February 22, 2006
New Orleans doesn't want its poorest residents back — unless they agree to work. That was the message from three New Orleans City Council members who said government programs have "pampered" the city's residents for too long, the Houston Chronicle reports. The news that some New Orleans City Council members weren't keen on the city's poorest residents returning home added another layer of discomfort in Houston, where local residents and elected officials alike have stretched to meet the needs of thousands of Louisiana residents in the months after Hurricane Katrina.
February 21, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina, entire blocks of Pass Christian, Miss., have been bulldozed, leaving eerie empty spaces — like missing teeth — where quaint neighborhoods once stood. The Los Angeles Times reports that "The Pass," as everyone calls it, is a patchwork of FEMA trailers, RVs and pop-up tents. The town center is a field of drab-green Army tents used as dwellings and offices. City Hall is a double-wide trailer, as are the police station and library. But the spirit of a settlement founded in 1699 is stronger than ever.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco outlined a $7.5 billion rebuilding, relocation and buyout plan Monday for thousands of residents whose homes remain damaged or destroyed after last year's hurricanes, reports the Associated Press. It is Louisiana's first comprehensive housing proposal since Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast. Assistance would be capped at a maximum $150,000 per homeowner under the proposal. But direct relief is still months away, and homeowners receiving the aid could be taking on more debt to rebuild.
Thousands of Louisiana storm victims were offered grace periods, or forbearances, on their mortgages. But nearly six months after the storm hit, the breaks are coming to an end. And lenders are beginning to demand payment, The Times-Picayune reports. Lenders in Louisiana say 20 percent to 30 percent of their mortgages have not been paid on since Katrina, and several thousand borrowers remain unreachable.
February 17, 2006
The Mississippi House voted Thursday to let the state borrow money to help two electric companies recover some of their losses from repairs made after Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reports. Mississippi Power Co. and Entergy Mississippi are seeking state help with an implied promise that rate increases might not be as severe in the wake of Katrina. The bill would allow the state — instead of utility companies — to borrow money to pay those losses to take advantage of lower interest rates available to governments. Mississippi Power and Entergy had sought the help to cover the estimated $362 million in losses from the Aug. 29 storm.
February 15, 2006
From the French Quarter to the area near Tulane University, from the highest-end bistros to the tiniest neighborhood rice-and-bean joints, restaurants are leading the slow economic and spiritual revival of New Orleans, outpacing all other businesses but the ones that repair damaged homes. The New York Times reports that with many of the city's neighborhoods still in rubble and its population scattered across the nation, restaurants have been able to capitalize on their ability to provide three things that depleted local residents are still unable to get at home: calories, comfort and conversation. Of the 3,400 eating establishments across the New Orleans metropolitan area, 35 percent have been recertified to open, according to the Louisiana Restaurant Association.
U.S. construction added 46,000 jobs in January and accounted for a quarter of all of the nation’s job growth, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Associated General Contractors. With so much rebuilding to do in Louisiana in the aftermath of a devastating 2005 hurricane season — and with so many construction trucks driving around — Louisiana should be a major player in the national construction boom. But New Orleans City Business reports that according to industry officials, the state is still warming the bench.
See New Orleans City Business article
February 13, 2006
Unemployment benefits will run dry for thousands of displaced storm victims as their 26 weeks of eligibility come to an end next month, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. Eligibility ends for Katrina victims on March 4 and for Rita victims on March 30. Meanwhile, a federal program that acts as a safety net by extending benefits another 13 weeks likely will not be available by the cutoff dates because of a dramatic fall in the state’s jobless claims and, consequently, a drop in its unemployment rate.
Getting shrimp nets and oyster boats back into coastal waters was only one step in the storm-battered Alabama seafood industry's recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reports. With industry storm losses in the state at more than $112 million, according to a new Mobile study, a spokesman for seafood processors in Bayou La Batre says the next step is regaining market share and luring back displaced workers. But there are a lot of economic unknowns as bills are coming due.
February 10, 2006
The Small Business Administration, criticized for its slow pace in making disaster loans to victims of Hurricane Katrina, is asking Congress for an additional $1.1 billion in relief money, USA TODAY reports. Though the agency has approved $4.1 billion in loans, most of them to owners of storm-damaged homes, it has paid out just $326 million of that amount so far.
February 9, 2006
A deep unease has settled over the Big Easy with the approach of the first Mardi Gras since Hurricane Katrina and the disturbing juxtapositions that are certain to result, the Chicago Tribune reports. Floats soon will move down boulevards that just five months ago were under water. Drunken revelers will careen across the same sidewalks where ailing and elderly storm victims dropped dead in the late-summer heat. And only a few blocks from the colorful tourist havens in the French Quarter, the Garden District and downtown, endless brown vistas of flood-ruined houses still stretch as far as the eye can see.
A state housing trust would be in charge of doling out money for buyouts or reconstruction of flood-damaged homes under a plan by Gov. Kathleen Blanco, setting up a possible conflict with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's recovery commission. The Times-Picayune reports that while state officials say local planning processes will determine where people can rebuild, the governor's legislation makes it clear that she wants the state to retain the authority to dispense whatever grants or loans will be available to homeowners.
February 7, 2006
Taxpayers affected by Hurricane Katrina are a big question mark this year as tax preparers ranging from the nation's leader, H&R Block, to mom and pop accountants, gear up for this year's tax season. The Associated Press reports that some in the industry predict the hurricanes will create plenty of new clients as victims and those who contributed to recovery efforts wrestle with the myriad exemptions and refund programs put into place after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
February 3, 2006
A quiet but increasingly urgent conversation about New Orleans’ cultural survival consumes this city, both on its street corners and in its institutions, The Washington Post reports. The worry is that the curious and crazy that developed naturally here over time will be replaced by an artificial version of what once was, that a desperate attempt to resurrect New Orleans will turn it into a sanitized, charmless, soulless city.
January 31, 2006
Shell Exploration & Production Co. has announced it will return its 1,000 workers to hurricane-scrubbed New Orleans after the company toyed with the idea of leaving even before Katrina. The Christian Science Monitor reports that delighted city officials hope Shell's move will encourage companies still on the fence to return as well. Several key employers remain in the "undecided" category, and they appear to be watching how well political leaders plan the rebuilding - and how secure the levees can make the city - before committing to New Orleans.
See Christian Science Monitor article
January 27, 2006
Poor African American residents of New Orleans were disproportionately displaced by Hurricane Katrina, a study released Thursday confirmed. The Los Angeles Times reports that the demographic research by Brown University sociologist John Logan reinforced anecdotal observations and media images that showed the city's most socially vulnerable residents were hit hardest by the Aug. 29 storm and subsequent flooding. Examining the social differences among the city's 13 planning districts and 72 neighborhoods, Logan found that New Orleans was at risk of losing as much as 80% of its black population.
January 26, 2006
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration resumed its normal enforcement of job safety standards along the Gulf Coast on Wednesday, The Mobile Register reports. After Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma struck the Gulf region in 2005, OSHA relaxed some of its enforcement actions so it could divert resources to educating contractors about response and recovery hazards, according to the agency's office of public affairs.
January 25, 2006
It was touted as the congressional equivalent of a Christmas present: On Dec. 21, lawmakers approved $11.5 billion in rebuilding money for Alabama and the four other Gulf Coast states pummeled by hurricanes last year. Full delivery, however, may still be years away, The Mobile Register reports. According to congressional figures, the biggest chunk of that money isn't scheduled to come through until fiscal 2008.
January 24, 2006
Thousands of workers displaced by Hurricane Katrina are living in trailer parks set up by their employers to get production going again, The Washington Post reports. Union Carbide, Murphy Oil and Exxon Mobil have set up encampments for their workforces. The Folgers roasting facility in New Orleans set up 150 trailers but only for employees. Domino Sugar has about 200 trailers on-site for employees and their families.
January 20, 2006
A "dream team" of thinkers, researchers and urban planners will shape the rebuilding of Louisiana cities and towns after the destruction caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Thursday. The Associated Press reports that Blanco introduced a group that includes high-profile architects and planners, some of whom have been involved in figuring out how to rebuild Mississippi towns destroyed by Katrina.
January 18, 2006
Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans in shambles. But the storm also gave the business community something that didn't seem possible just six months ago: a clear shot at a new beginning. USA TODAY reports that business and community leaders plan to use the reconstruction effort to address a host of systemic problems, including racism, inferior schools, high crime and unemployment. They also hope to tackle a problem as old as New Orleans itself: corruption. It's a major deterrent to outside investors, who have long been repulsed by the city's grease-the-palms style.
There is a growing sense among many on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast that the catastrophic hurricane damage along the state’s 70-mile stretch of coastline is being treated as a mere footnote to the story in New Orleans, which was ravaged by flooding. Worse, the Associated Press reports, some say the lack of attention could hamper the recovery of an area that had experienced an economic renaissance in the past decade thanks to billions of dollars of investment by major casino and hotel companies.
January 17, 2006
Many look around and say New Orleans is far from recovery, especially with the next hurricane season five months away and the Army Corps of Engineers rushing to repair battered levees and broken floodwalls. But The Times-Picayune reports there is another camp, the glass-half-filled crowd, those who take note of a familiar restaurant opening here and there, the return of beloved neighbors, the reawakened streetlights and busy debris-removal crews. Is New Orleans turning the corner toward recovering from one of America's worst disasters? Will 2006 be better? So far, the evidence is mixed -- as are interpretations.
January 13, 2006
President Bush made his ninth visit to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina on Thursday and said he is encouraged by signs of the city's recovery, but Mayor Ray Nagin said he did not get the commitment he wanted on U.S. Rep. Richard Baker's proposal to form a federal corporation that would buy flood-ravaged properties in the city. The Times-Picayune reports that the president's trip appeared designed to reaffirm his commitment to rebuilding the flooded city, expressed most memorably during a nationally televised speech from Jackson Square several weeks after the hurricane. Aside from a few comments before a closed-door meeting with business leaders and elected officials, Bush did not speak publicly or take questions, and he did not, as he had on previous trips, tour any of the worst-hit areas of New Orleans.
The real French Quarter may still be shaking off the effects of Hurricane Katrina and struggling to lure tourists back, but the Disney World version has managed to avoid the devastation and has remained open for business since the hurricane struck four months ago. The New York Times reports that Disney officials would not say whether bookings were up or down since Katrina, but conversations with a dozen guests at the resort last week indicated that it has been bustling with New Orleans-lovers seeking a substitute for the real thing. What has been long regarded as a good-natured and slightly hokey theme has taken on a greater poignancy since late August.
January 12, 2006
Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city's recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt. The Washington Post reports that hundreds of residents packed into a hotel ballroom interrupted the presentation of the long-awaited proposal with shouts and taunts, booed its main architect and unrolled a litany of complaints.
Rebuilding Mississippi's hurricane-battered Gulf Coast to better serve its residents and take advantage of its economic potential will require bold moves in areas ranging from building codes to transportation, according to a report released Wednesday. According to the Associated Press, the report was drafted by the privately funded Gov.'s Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal Commission led by former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale. The commission was established by Gov. Haley Barbour in the dark days that followed the Aug. 29 killer hurricane.
January 11, 2006
Residents of New Orleans areas hardest-hit by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters would have four months to prove they can bring their neighborhoods back to life or face the prospect of having to sell out to a new and powerful redevelopment authority under a plan to be released today by a key panel of Mayor Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission. In perhaps its boldest recommendation, the panel says Nagin should impose a moratorium on building permits in shattered areas covering most of the city, while residents there meet to craft plans to revive their neighborhoods. The proposals are spelled out in the final report of the land-use committee of Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission, which was obtained by The Times-Picayune.
The commission devising a blueprint to reconstruct the city will propose on Wednesday a complete reorganization of the troubled school system, the elimination of a 76-mile shipping channel that was a prime cause of flooding after Hurricane Katrina and the creation of a new jazz district downtown, The New York Times reports. The commission report, several members said, will also advocate building a 53-mile light-rail system crisscrossing the city, connecting neighborhoods with the airport, downtown and other commercial centers. That system would be in addition to a separate heavy-rail system that would link New Orleans with Baton Rouge and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
When talking about the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, economists often lump Alabama with Mississippi and Louisiana, but a new federal report indicates that the states' economic conditions are drastically different. The Mobile Register reports that in the third quarter of 2005, Mississippi had the highest unemployment rate in the country at 7.9 percent, followed by Louisiana at 7.6 percent. Alabama's figure was among the nation's lowest—just under 4 percent.
Some American cities have long been in the business of buying, packaging, reselling and redeveloping large tracts of real estate, but New Orleans isn't among them. The Times-Picayune reports that that will change radically if Mayor Ray Nagin follows the recommendation of the land-use panel of his Bring New Orleans Back commission, which today will recommend that a new authority be chartered "immediately" with broad power to seize and condemn property.
January 9, 2006
The city's official blueprint for redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina, to be released on Wednesday, will recommend that residents be allowed to return and rebuild anywhere they like, no matter how damaged or vulnerable the neighborhood, according to several members of the mayor's rebuilding commission. The New York Times reports that the proposal appears to put the city's rebuilding panel on a collision course with its state counterpart, which will control at least some of the flow of federal rebuilding money to the city.
A recent federal survey suggests that 21 percent of Katrina evacuees actively seeking work are still unemployed. The Los Angeles Times reports that the proportion could be higher in Houston, where the job market, so tied to energy production, remains tight. The city's unemployment rate, roughly 6 percent in November, has consistently hovered above the national average.
January 6, 2006
New Orleans kicks off the Carnival season leading to Mardi Gras today, hoping to draw tourists with fat wallets to party through Fat Tuesday—and gambling that the city can handle it. The Houston Chronicle reports that it’s a controversial party just months after flooding turned much of New Orleans into a silt-covered ghost town. Many displaced residents are frustrated by the city's decision to put on a jester's hat while so much of their broken community remains uninhabitable.
January 5, 2006
The Small Business Administration has been heavily criticized for its slow processing of low-interest-rate disaster-assistance loan applications from businesses and homeowners hurt by Hurricane Katrina, according to The Washington Post. Trying to fill the vacuum, Sens. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, and John F. Kerry, D-Mass., the chair and senior Democrat on the Senate Small Business Committee, tried without success to press the Bush administration into setting aside $450 million so the affected states could give out more "bridge" loans or grants to small businesses. Like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the SBA doesn't have a large permanent staff.
January 3, 2006
As they plan budgets for 2006, officials in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere are first calculating the costs of providing for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. They've come up with some daunting numbers—and questions, the Los Angeles Times reports. Although they expect reimbursement from the federal government for many expenses, officials say they aren't sure how much they will receive or when the money will arrive.
December 23, 2005
Gay neighborhoods in New Orleans were about the only areas that weren't severely damaged by massive flooding from burst levees after Hurricane Katrina. And more than three months later, the New Orleans gay scene appears to be bouncing back faster than the city in general, Southern Voice reports. Still, many gay residents didn't live in those neighborhoods of New Orleans, especially lesbians, African-Americans and men who don't frequent gay bars. The fact that most evacuees still haven't been able to come home also has thrown the Lesbian & Gay Community Center into dire financial straits.
December 21, 2005
Last-minute opposition from the Bush administration stalled legislation to create a federal corporation that would buy homes damaged or destroyed by Katrina and Rita, according to the bill's sponsor. But Rep. Richard Baker, R-Baton Rouge, said the administration is willing to move the bill forward early next year if some changes are made, The Times-Picayune reports.
December 20, 2005
Dozens of homeless Atlanta men have traveled to New Orleans to find work cleaning up the hurricane-battered city, along with cheap housing. There, Newsday reports, they have encountered the harsh reality of doing business in the post-Katrina environment - subcontracting and the problems it presents bit players, who went from being penniless in Atlanta to being penniless in New Orleans after working weeks without pay.
Almost four months after Hurricane Katrina pushed a 20-foot storm surge up Bayou Casotte that submerged the VT Halter Marine and Signal International shipyards, both Mississippi companies are back in business with ongoing projects and heavy backlogs of work. The Mississippi Press reports that the evidence of Katrina's assault on both shipyards is still visible as workers and contractors continue repairing tattered buildings and gnarled fixtures. But employees are also working on the ships, barges and offshore rigs — the staples keeping the companies in business.
December 19, 2005
Since Hurricane Katrina hit, billions of dollars in federal aid has poured into the devastated areas of Mississippi and Louisiana, primarily for the most critical emergency needs: providing temporary housing, restarting governments and cleaning up the mountains of debris. The New York Times reports that on Sunday, leaders in the House and Senate moved to switch from a relief effort to recovery, agreeing to appropriate large chunks of money to rebuild the region and, at least in part, to bail out some of the tens of thousands of people who were financially devastated by the storm. The recovery package allocates $11.5 billion in new grant money, mostly for Mississippi and Louisiana.
There may not be stoplights or gas stations in much of New Orleans, but there are plenty of jobs, reports The Christian Science Monitor. So many positions are going unfilled, in fact, that businesses are offering higher salaries and signing bonuses. Some are even going so far as to give free housing, transportation, and laundry services.
See Christian Science Monitor article
The U.S. Senate passed nearly $8 billion in tax breaks for Gulf Coast businesses on Friday, but denied federal help for casinos, liquor stores and golf courses, the Associated Press reports. Almost four months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed many area businesses, the Senate responded to President Bush's appeal for revitalizing the region with a special enterprise zone. The tax breaks for business investment are aimed at luring companies into the region and keeping those that are already there.
December 16, 2005
For $35 per person -- $28 for children -- a New Orleans company is offering bus tours of some of the city's most misery-stricken spots, including the Superdome, the Convention Center and neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, according to the Associated Press. Residents disagree over whether the tours are crass and morbid exploitation, or a good way to help people grasp the enormity of the disaster and keep public attention focused on New Orleans' plight.
Louisiana employers are having trouble bringing back workers who evacuated to Texas, despite a Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and Texas Workforce Commission partnership designed to aid the process, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. In the four weeks since the program was launched, 183 Louisiana employers have placed job orders, and the Texas Workforce Commission has made 2,066 referrals. That means 2,066 people have been called about jobs, spokeswoman Ann Hatchitt said. So far no one has been hired.
Despite opposition from some conservative Republicans, the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill Thursday that would establish a government-operated corporation to redevelop areas of Louisiana hit by Hurricane Katrina, CongressDaily reports. The measure also would direct the spending of $17 billion already appropriated for hurricane relief to rebuilding communities and providing temporary housing for evacuees.
December 15, 2005
New Orleans homeowners may have trouble rebuilding their houses for the amount of insurance money offered to them, reports The Times-Picayune. The president of the Homebuilders Association of Greater New Orleans estimates that building costs have climbed roughly 30 percent since the storm, while labor rates have jumped as much as 50 percent, and could go higher. Insurance companies work to incorporate building price fluctuations into their settlements, but it's often hard for them to keep pace with the very latest increases.
The drive to rebuild communities devastated by Katrina has slowed, hampered by congressional money worries, mixed signals from the White House and confusion about which of the region's problems to fix first. USA TODAY reports that President Bush's pledge to rebuild communities devastated by the hurricane is running into opposition in Congress over the cost.
Citing enormous backlogs and high rates of declined loans for hurricane victims, a House Democrat on Wednesday called on the head of the Small Business Administration to quit immediately. The Associated Press reports that Rep. Nydia Velazquez, the top Democrat on the House Small Business Committee, said that a flood of missteps by the SBA this year make it clear that Hector Barreto isn't capable of leading the agency. Velazquez said that since the hurricanes roared ashore in August and September, the agency has declined 80 percent of disaster loans related to Katrina and Rita and has a backlog of more than 200,000 requests for relief.
December 14, 2005
A plan to replace a Biloxi, Miss., bridge heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina with a bigger version is sparking a debate over how the Gulf Coast should be rebuilt, National Public Radio reports. Before Katrina struck in August, the 1.5-mile, four-lane Highway 90 bridge over Biloxi Bay carried 30,000 vehicles per day between Ocean Springs and Biloxi. The state's plans call for a new bridge with six lanes that could handle double that traffic volume. But critics say the bridge plan anticipates sprawling growth along the Gulf Coast even as the region's leaders say they want to change that pattern.
See National Public Radio article
The White House has declined to bail out Entergy Corp., New Orleans' bankrupt utility company, prompting dismay among local officials who see the decision as an indication that the Bush administration is not committed to rebuilding the city after Hurricane Katrina. The Los Angeles Times reports that officials in New Orleans said there was still a chance that assistance could come through congressional action or federal grants. But because Entergy is a regulated monopoly, they said, the decision makes it likely that the utility will be forced to pass on to the public the $350 million bill for its recovery.
December 13, 2005
An effort to create an agency to boost poor, predominantly black counties in the South is stuck in legislative limbo partly because of Hurricane Katrina, which further devastated many of those very areas, reports the Associated Press. Those pushing the legislation to aid the “Southern Black Belt” say the timing has never been more critical, yet they acknowledge its prospects of passage are dim in a financially strapped Congress — so much so that Alabama Democrat Rep. Artur Davis decided not to reintroduce his bill in the House this session. "I wish I could say I was optimistic about it," said former Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, the original Senate sponsor. "It's going to have to have somebody with some real clout. Maybe one of those presidential candidates will see the wisdom of doing this — not only the political wisdom, but also the cultural wisdom."
Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen, according to the Los Angeles Times. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes, postal records show. A Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane also highlights the metropolitan area's sharp distinctions of class and race.
December 12, 2005
After the winds, the floods, the deaths and the massive destruction, the battle over insurance claims has emerged as New Orleans' next great tribulation, according to the Chicago Tribune. State officials warn that four in every 10 Louisiana small businesses, starved for cash flow, face failure while waiting for their insurance claims to be settled. Emergency loans from the federal Small Business Administration are barely trickling in: Fewer than 8,000 had been approved by mid-November, out of more than 200,000 Katrina-related applications.
The homeless population in the Baton Rouge area has grown since Katrina hit, but social service agencies say that growth is just the beginning, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. An official with the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless says it probably won’t see the real effect until the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying hotel bills in January.
Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the nation's biggest cleanup continues with a determination fueled by billions of federal dollars. Orchestrating this huge street-by-street campaign through one hard-hit, 60-square-mile sector of New Orleans — and supervising 650 trucks hauling an average of 54,000 cubic yards of debris daily — is Phillips & Jordan Inc., a general and specialty contracting company based in Knoxville, Tenn., with division offices in Zephyrhills, Fla. The St. Petersburg Times reports that the company is a hidden giant in the huge cleanup industry and has quietly racked up riches over the past few decades by tapping into two particularly lucrative and timely lines of business: development and disasters.
See St. Petersburg Times article
December 8, 2005
Before Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast was well on its way to becoming a popular gambling destination. Now, for the gaming industry, a second storm — this one political — is brewing, reports the Los Angeles Times. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are split over whether taxpayers should help rebuild gambling establishments and other businesses objectionable to social conservatives.
December 6, 2005
A little-understood aspect of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans may be its salvation: Its 20,000 residents are poor but uncommonly entrenched, USA Today reports. The neighborhood is 97% black and has a per capita income of $10,300 — less than half the U.S. average of $21,587, according to the 2000 Census. But 54 percent of its homes are owner-occupied. That's higher than New Orleans' overall rate of 47 percent and exceeds the rates in thriving cities such as Denver, San Francisco and Washington.
December 5, 2005
Fears that insurers would turn their backs on victims of the worst U.S hurricane season ever have proved to be mostly unfounded. With property casualty insurance companies facing record payouts of more than $70 billion after Katrina, Rita and Wilma ravaged the Gulf Coast, concerns arose that insurers would come up short in their obligation to policyholders, or even go bankrupt, leaving damage claims unpaid. But Reuters reports that a survey of state regulators, realtors and hurricane victims shows that, in most cases, that insurers get "decent marks." There were some exceptions.
Hours after New Orleans officials announced last week that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said. The Washington Post reports that city officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring free high-speed Internet access to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition.
See the Center’s “Well Connected” report on the municipal wireless debate
Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid to Katrina victims is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own, the Los Angeles Times reports. Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided health care insurance, pensions and, recently, effective disaster relief, have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned, as they do in the case of Katrina.
The Federal Housing Administration is launching a program to pay the mortgages of up to 20,000 victims of Katrina, Rita and Wilma for as much as a year. The Associated Press reports that the unprecedented mortgage relief will be offered to people who own homes with FHA-insured mortgages in designated hurricane-ravaged parts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
December 2, 2005
A buzz of interest is growing around federal legislation to bail out thousands of Louisiana homeowners who have mortgages on houses that have been destroyed, according to The Times-Picayune. A bill by Rep. Richard Baker, R-Baton Rouge, would create the Louisiana Recovery Corp., which would use proceeds from the sale of federal government bonds over 10 years to buy up storm-damaged property and pay off the mortgages. Under the plan, no one would make a profit or receive the pre-Katrina value of their homes, but homeowners could at least avoid the poorhouse.
November 29, 2005
New Orleans will deploy the nation's first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users as part of an effort to jump start the city's recovery by making living and doing business there as attractive a proposition as possible, according to The Washington Post. Much of the equipment to run the network was donated by companies, but the city will own it and operate all of its components at the outset. The move is expected to stir an already roiling national debate over whether it makes sense for localities to launch their own systems, a subject that was recently the focus of a "Well Connected" report on the telecommunications industry by the Center for Public Integrity.
See related "Well Connected" report
November 28, 2005
As the insurance industry grapples with a record number of individual hurricane-related claims — 1.6 million from Katrina plus another 1 million from Rita and Wilma — policyholders are learning that the opportunity to get their lives back in order often depends on which company is processing the claim, The Washington Post reports. In many cases, homeowners living in areas that were equally flooded have had drastically different experiences — some have had claims already paid while others have had theirs denied — even though all flood claims are paid by the federal National Flood Insurance Program, which the insurance companies simply administer.
November 23, 2005
A bill establishing a statewide building code for homes and businesses that must be rebuilt in southern Louisiana has been sent to Gov. Kathleen Blanco, according to a report in The Times-Picayune. The bill would apply for structures rebuilt in the wake of Katrina and Rita and all buildings built or rebuilt statewide starting in 2007. Backers said its passage will help spur redevelopment, limit future hurricane destruction and hold down insurance costs. Opponents said the code will increase the cost of building homes.
Beefed-up La. building code passes
Louisiana lawmakers have voted down an effort to reshape the state's fragmented levee protection system, long criticized as a bastion of patronage, according to a report in The New York Times. The proposal, strongly backed by business interests in New Orleans who hoped to demonstrate the state's seriousness in rebuilding, would have consolidated a host of local boards in charge of maintaining levees. But the consolidation effort was not backed by the governor, who pushed a measure that some regard as weaker.
Criticized Levee Boards Survive in Louisiana
November 22, 2005
Louisiana officials worry that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight less than three months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, according to a report in The New York Times. They cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes — including measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured — that they say are crucial to rebuilding New Orleans and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return.
Louisiana Sees Faded Urgency in Relief Effort
November 21, 2005
The federal government has spent or obligated through contracts more than $18 billion in Katrina relief, meaning that storm recovery costs have already drawn even with the record spending package that the United States has been using to fund Iraq's reconstruction for the past two years, The Washington Post reports. But local, state and federal officials say that number pales in comparison to the ultimate price tag for rebuilding the Gulf Coast; the real big-ticket items, they say, will not come until months and years down the line as the government attempts to recreate a public infrastructure network — including roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, sewers, power lines, ports and levees — that was all but destroyed.
Costliest Part of Gulf Rebuilding Yet to Come
November 16, 2005
As of Tuesday, the Small Business Administration had approved only 1,082 small-business or economic injury loans to businesses in the hardest-hit areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, while denying 1,946 applications, according to a report in The New York Times. The SBA says 24,542 business-related loan applications are still being processed. Anger at the slow pace spilled over at a hearing last week before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/business/businessspecial/16olson.html
November 7, 2005
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has opened a 17-day legislative special session that will focus on post-Katrina rebuilding, but with a budget deficit expected to exceed $1 billion, state lawmakers will be limited in what they can do with the 77 hurricane-related items on the agenda, the New York Times reports. The governor's proposed legislation requiring that state officials disclose their business dealings with regard to recovery efforts is being criticized, reports New Orleans' Times-Picayune. Some argue that officials and their immediate family members should be barred from contention for federal government rebuilding and cleanup contracts.
Louisiana Lawmakers Begin Special Session on Rebuilding
November 4, 2005
President Bush on Thursday reinstated the wage protection law he suspended Sept. 8 after Hurricane Katrina, USA Today reports. The Davis-Bacon Act mandates that construction workers on federally financed projects be paid no less than the local minimum prevailing wage. The Chicago Tribune reports that some say the law's suspension contributed to the wave of illegal immigrants seeking Gulf Coast reconstruction jobs.
Bush reinstates wage laws after Katrina
Big Easy uneasy about migrant wave
November 1, 2005
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco issued wide-ranging 77-item call for a special legislative session in Baton Rouge to be held Nov. 6-22 to deal with hurricane-related problems, The Shreveport Times reports. "This is a substantial package of initiatives that will help our families, our businesses and our state recover from Katrina and Rita," Blanco said. "We will cut spending and restructure government to address a $1 billion drop in state revenues." The package includes legislation to rebuild the New Orleans school system, give tax breaks to citizens and businesses affected by the storms, create a new building code, build stronger levees, improve coastal protection and strengthen ethics laws so that elected officials and their families can't profit from recovery efforts.
Gov. issues broad call for session
Governor's Proclamation No. 62 KBB 2005
October 27, 2005
The White House has reinstated a law that guarantees the prevailing local wage to Hurricane Katrina recovery workers paid with federal money, reports the Washington Post. It had been waived to save the government money and hasten the rebuilding process, but bipartisan opposition to the move grew in Congress. The wage guarantee rule will go back into effect on Nov. 8 and will not apply retroactively.
Prevailing Wages to Be Paid Again On Gulf Coast
October 20, 2005
Thanks to a loophole in federal regulations, reports the Washington Post, the list of small businesses receiving Katrina-related contracts includes one of the country's largest debris-removal companies and a billion-dollar firm with a former vice president on its board of directors. The Small Business Administration is facing pressure to change its regulations, which consider a business small if it was small when it won its first government contract.
This week, FEMA announced that when awarding hurricane relief contracts it will look first to small, disadvantaged and local businesses in the Gulf Coast region, reports the Federal Times. The announcement came amid criticism that FEMA is shutting out small businesses in awarding Katrina-related contracts. It also comes just a few days after the Homeland Security Department announced new competitions for four contracts that had been awarded on a noncompetitive basis to Bechtel Corp., Fluor Corp., CH2M Hill and the Shaw Group.
Small businesses rise to top of FEMA contract priority list
October 18, 2005
The Times-Picayune reports that U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., struck a deal with the White House that overrules a federal directive requiring state and local governments to pay a share of the cost of rebuilding New Orleans-area levees to pre-Katrina levels. The agreement breaks a logjam that dealyed construction work and put about 15 design and construction contracts on hold. An estimated $400 million to $1.6 billion worth of work will be required to restore the area's levee system to pre-Katrina protection levels.
Deal ends levee contract logjam
October 13, 2005
USA Today examines some of the federal regulations that the government waived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to speed up the recovery effort. But critics and watchdog groups fear that the very measures that some federal officials think of as a means to increase efficiency are a dangerous rollback of federal protections. The moves in question include the Labor Department lifting affirmative action requirements for companies hired on reconstruction work, the Transportation Department allowing no-bid contracts until Dec. 1 on restoration projects, and President Bush waiving a law in parts of the four states most affected by Katrina that requires workers on federal construction projects to receive the prevailing or average minimum wage.
Some federal rules waived after Katrina
October 12, 2005
A day after federal officials vowed that they will give preference to local businesses in the contracting process, USA Today reports that a Department of Homeland Security business liaison tasked with helping local businesses resigned in frustration last week because he couldn't secure catering contracts for Louisiana vendors. DHS officials said the ex-official's proposal "skirted around" ruled of the process.
Louisianans get few post-Katrina contracts
In response to accusations of cronyism in the awarding of contracts, the federal government announced yesterday the creation of the Department of Commerce Hurricane Contracting Information Center to help U.S. businesses, especially minority- and women-owned companies, be better informed about contracting opportunities. The center includes a Web site where businesses can register with government agencies providing reconstruction and relief work.
Department of Commerce Hurricane Contracting Information Center
October 4, 2005
The Christian Science Monitor says that the Bush administration's decision to relax labor laws in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has reignited the immigration debate. Bush decided to suspend temporarily—in Katrina-hit states—sanctions against companies that hire undocumented workers.
Post-Katrina easing of labor laws stirs debate
October 3, 2005
A New York Times editorial criticizes the Department of Labor's decision to relieve new federal contractors of the obligation to have an affirmative action plan for Katrina-related projects:
September 23, 2005
Minorities say they've been shut out of contracting opportunities, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has a rundown of regulatory changes:
Minorities Say Katrina Work Flows to Others (subscription required)
September 20, 2005
The New York Times notes the suspension of affirmative action paperwork requirements for Katrina contractors: