Post-Katrina block may price out tenants

[deadparrot]

NEW ORLEANS - Gloria Cauldfield looked down the littered street to where workers were busily restoring three flooded rental houses — adding new kitchens, baths, central air and heat, fresh paint.

Nice places. Much nicer than they were before Hurricane Katrina ripped off their roofs and sent floodwaters surging through them last August.

Cauldfield, who's lived on Broadway Street for 26 years and knew everyone on the block in this working-class neighborhood, is pretty sure she won't know the people who move into them.

"People are waiting to see if they can move back. But they only paid $225 for rent before. Somebody in the block had said they're going to be $600 or $700 a month," Cauldfield said. "From $225, that's a big jump."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/katrina_one_neighborhood

[gorbal]

1. They need to have some sort of rent control in place

This is disgusting, a person can't even afford to live in their own home-town anymore.

[pitohui]

15. try reading the article

the 71 year old landlady they quote is not profiting on the increased rents, it will prob. be years before she's out of the hole

i'll retain my skepticism as to the claim that rents were ever $225 a month, maybe in 1978

if you can't afford a modest $600 a month for rent, yes, don't come back here, it would be ridiculous, how are you going to buy food and medicine, since grocery costs have gone thru the roof and there is now no public hospital?

i'm sure if you look around, you can find houses renting for $225 from some DUer who can afford to rent her house at a loss -- right? right? or is it just other people far away who are supposed to lose money on their houses?

what do you people pay for rent in other cities, hmmm? i know it's a thousands a month in manhattan and boston

only in new orleans are we supposed to have nothing forever

[BrklynLiberal]

2. That was the plan from day 1. These guys are buying up this land for

pennies on the dollar and are going to "gentrify" every neighborhood they can. It will become the Disneyland version of New Orleans if they have their way. You can be sure that everyone who had their finger in this pot is a Bush crony

[rodeodance]

4. yes. the idea NOT to have the 'under'class back in.

[DocSavage]

7. having

lived there, I will bet that the politicians are republican and dem. There is no lack of corruption in either party in that state.

And there is absolutly nothing stoping the previous residents for also paying pennies on the dollar for property.

[cornermouse]

8. There is absolutely nothing stopping the previous residents for

also paying pennies on the dollar for property...except the fact that if they can only afford, what was it, $250 a month for rent they aren't likely to have enough money to make a down payment and they aren't likely to be able to get a loan to buy said property.

[DocSavage]

12. I am not sure

that there is a way to even offer a reply without being flamed and screamed at. Having lived in NO, I will offer this. The apperance of lack of money does not mean that someone does not have money. While people may have been paying 250 a month rent, the car payment for the car in the yard was more than that.

I will also offer this. Many of the properties were and are owned by slum lords. Both black and white. There was no incentive to repair the houses befor the hurricaine, now there is. The people that were displaced could come back and get propety for pennies on the dollar, and they could build a new home (there is federal and state money coming up out of the ground). The opportunity is there. One cannot fault the people that take up that opportunity.

And finally, you are not going to hear a peep of objection from the Mayor, Parish President, or Govenor over what is happening, because all of this new building to going to provide more tax revenue. More for them to spend. I wish that I still had my house down there, because since the storm, it has appreciated almost 25%.

[cornermouse]

14. Eeeek! Flame! Eeeek! Flame!

:crazy:

[FlavaKreemSnak]

3. Is anybody surprised by this?

Is there anybody that has not seen the same thing happen where you live, that they will tear down a poor area and put in expensive apartments or condos? This is the same thing, just on a bigger scale, and started by the hurricane, so the developers have this opportunity to make it all more upscale.

[billyoc]

5. Where do all these rich people come from?

I've seen many neighborhoods razed to build expensive condominiums. Who's buying them all? :shrug:

[skids]

9. They aren't rich. They just think they are.

They are living off loans and leveraging. The day looms when they have to pay the piper.

[EFerrari]

6. 200% jump in rents? Nice. We had the Reagan homeless,

welcome to the Bush homeless.

Someone fax Nagin a clue about how expensive that winds up being.

Never mind. Maybe there's no one in the office. :mad:

[pitohui]

16. nagin? maybe you can fax him in dallas!

you scored a "hole in one" on "maybe there's no one in the office" with that man

[Acadia Blue]

10. Oh Yea, they plan to make the city unaffordable to former tenants

so they can make it the white city the republicans have always wanted.

[bainz]

17. Only "Whites" can afford $600 or $700? Nice touch. n/t

[Trillo]

11. I never visited New Orleans, but always meant to one day...

...but not during Mardi Gras (because I personally don't care for crowded locales).

It seems that the new New Orleans is likely to be the same as anywhere in the US. In other words, Generic Corporateville, USA, with all the typical corporateville problems.

I hope the leaders will have some way of getting all of New Orlean's prior residents back who want to live there, and make monetary allowances of some kind so the poor people who were born there can continue to live in the same locale where their family's roots will always be.

Unfortunately, knowing how corporate does business isn't reassuring in the above regards.

This touches so intimately on property values. I cannot afford to live where I was born, so perhaps this is one of the true human sicknesses of our current corporatist society. We see in many areas of the world warfare forcing people to move. In the United States, lack-of-money regularly forces people to move.

Perhaps the magic of the old New Orleans is now gone forever, because part of that magic was the poor descendants of families who had lived there since the 1700s. Corporate is unlikely to choose the necessary compromises to insure that prior truth continues in the future.

[Anita Garcia]

13. More data

<http://www.brook.edu/metro/pubs/200512_katrinaindex.htm>
Excerpts:
Rents in the New Orleans region have shot up 39 percent in the past year.
. . . .
The proportion of open public schools (66 percent), operational buses (17 percent), public transportation routes (49 percent), and operational hospitals (55 percent) in the New Orleans region have remained unchanged over the last few months.
. . . .
In general, 64 percent of both hotels and B&Bs and 43 percent of restaurants are in operation, the same proportion since May.
. . . .
The unemployment rate for the New Orleans region and the state of Louisiana worsened over the past month while it continued to improve in Mississippi.
...