Mardi GrasFollow

And what do you do with them in the meantime?

Yeah, my brother in Houston tells me it's been quite eventful.

I'll have to dig up the link for it, but I read a news article about thousands of house trailers that were bought, as in paid for, by FEMA to serve as temporary housing... but they can't get approval to move them to New Orleans because it's a flood plain. So they're sitting in Nebraska or Kansas or someplace, no doubt waiting for a tornado to wipe them out. It's funny in a kill-me-now sort of way. What a boondoggle.

They are actually in Hope, AR (about 2 hours from where I live) and there has been all kinds of uproar over them. Some people claim they are sitting in a field and have already suffered some flood damage, but FEMA claims there are no problems.

Some of my wife's family saw them on their way up from Louisianna a couple of weeks ago but they couldn't tell from the highway if any if them had been damaged or not.

How many does he have?!?!?!

Actually when a hurricane came near Houston, where many of the refugees were kept, I heard a lot of the refugees went to some other state. Though a fair number are still around it seems.

There have been a few times where some of the ex-Louisiana residents in Houston who were going to school in the public education system seemed to instigated some violence on a number of occasions. You'd think that they'd be a bit more relaxed about the situation possibly considering that the area is probably going to be their home for a while and such things would probably just make things harder on themselves. Though I suppose that's the sort of short sightedness that might've lead to delays to updating the levee system.

Edited, Mon Feb 27 17:41:51 2006 by Vensuvio

Ding ding ding! There's your answer right there.

The rebuilding in the upper class areas will be done based on those living there choosing to put their own money on the line to rebuild. They are footing the bulk of the bill and they are taking the risk should another flood come along and wash their homes away.

The rebuilding in the poorer areas are based on those living there wanting the government (ie: us) to pay for their homes to be rebuilt. The bulk of the cost burden is not on those who's homes will be rebuilt, but the rest of the taxpayers.

We can debate whether there's sufficient social benefit to using public funds to rebuild homes for these people in a spot likely to flood again, but it's a valid debate to have since it's "our" money being spent to do it.

Well, since Katarine is a she, I'd guess two. At least.

I'm not a city planner for New Orleans but wouldn't it make sense to try to work a mixed income program into the areas that were previously slums, tentaments and otherwise undesirable housing?

As far as poor people complaining about the rebuilding and rich people putting their money on the line, most of the ruined poor housing is going to fall into one of three catagories:
(1) Rental housing. Either apartments or else single family homes but the owners had no claim on the real estate itself and can't do anything to rebuild on the spot because it's not their patch of dirt.

(2) Mortgaged properties. Most likely in foreclosure at this point or close to it. Assuming they don't have the funds to pay off the debt, the bank owns the patch of dirt and, again, there's nothing the "owners" can do to rebuild on it.

(3) Paid-off properties. In this case, it may be a question of whether or not the owners can afford to build a new home there, but no one else is going to be building a rich person's home there either since it's your patch of land. The government might condemn the building and turn it into a vacant lot but it's unlikely that a sweeping eminent domain program is going to take your neighborhood and turn it into condos any time soon.

It is in the region's best interests to get affordable housing available down there as soon as possible since one of the largest issues right now is the labor shortage. A friend of my mother's just accepted a job near New Orleans and when I was talking to him this weekend he mentioned things like Burger King offering a $5,000 signing bonus (I'm sure there's conditions on that) simply because there's no one around to man the counters. Likewise, there are hotels with hundreds of rooms "available" but no where near the staff to clean and maintain them. The "rich" people may have come back and been rebuilding but those who are staying away because they have nothing to come back to are the ones who'd be cooking the burgers, busing tables, changing the hotel linen, etc. The company he's going to work for is one of five or six of its type in the area but the only one even partially operational, partially because no one else has staff.

In Fresno, California they are planing to hold a Mardi Gras...


Ghetto!

All of that makes sense, except that if I was a homeowner or simply building rental properties, there is no way I would rebuild there. When I say that I am for the government helping to rebuild, I suppose I am really saying to fix the levees. There are people in the 9th Ward who are worried that they are going to bulldoze and not allow people to move there anymore instead of doing an expensive levee fix, hence the "do not bulldoze" signs everywhere. I have been heavily considering Tulane law school, and I would certainly make sure I was renting in an area that had not previously flooded until some sort of fix has been put in place.

I am really suprised to see so many people rebuilding in Lake View, considering hurricane season isn't exactly far away.

And now for your useless fact of the day..




Mardi Gras (French) translates directly to "Fat Tuesday".





This has been a useless public service announcement.