Housing was a big part of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, whose five-year anniversary has just been soberly noted. It would be a great thing if housing could also speed up the recovery from a devastating one-two punch of natural and manmade catastrophe.
Some 200,000 homes were destroyed or damaged just in Louisiana by the monster storm and defective levees that left 80% of New Orleans under water. Five years later, too much remains to be done.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said recently that for all the nonprofit housing developers trying to make an impact on the New Orleans recovery, just 5,000 units have been built by the private sector in the past five years. Of course, there have been efforts by the state and federal governments, which have built or rehabbed many thousands more, but still the housing recovery lags.
Katrina was a stunning event on many levels. A major United States city was practically leveled by the force of nature combined with levees that did not hold. The United States military performed valiantly in rescuing tens of thousands of residents from the floodwaters. And after that there was the horrifying spectacle of a city abandoned for days, as people, mostly people of color, waited for relief amid the bodies of those who had succumbed to the heat and the lack of food and water.
Housing nationwide is currently in the doldrums of declining starts and home sales, both new and existing. New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi are in need of many thousands of housing units. Perhaps there is a synergy there that could do well for both the affected area and the nation as a whole.
Public-private partnerships perhaps could produce a good bit of the existing need, reinvigorating homebuilders and construction workers, providing selling opportunities for Realtors and finance opportunities for banks, mortgage banks, credit unions, insurers and others.
Doing the math, 100,000 homes at $150,000 each to construct would come to $15 billion. That’s a lot of money, but also not a lot of money compared to other national priorities like rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure, for instance. It could be done, if there was the spirit and the will to do it. And the financial stimulus it would create would carry much farther than just the Gulf states.
