The city of New Orleans is still rebuilding and repairing homes that were damaged in the fallout from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
The storm flooded hundreds of thousands of homes in New Orleans, killed over 1,800 people and displaced millions. It remains the costliest tropical cyclone in U.S. history, with an estimated $201.3 billion in associated damages, adjusted for inflation.
After the storm, approximately one quarter of the city’s housing stock was abandoned.
“As people started to come back in and redevelop, property values shot up like crazy,” said Calvin Alexander, a long-term resident in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
Just one third of Lower Ninth Ward residents have returned to the neighborhood, according to Census Bureau records analyzed by The Data Center. The citywide population hasn’t fully recovered either, which adds to the municipal government’s financial issues.
Meanwhile, housing prices have skyrocketed in parts of the city with higher ground, such as the Holy Cross section of the Lower Ninth Ward, where Alexander resides. He told CNBC that the assessed value of his home has grown approximately 266% since 2005. In the same time frame, home prices across the metro area have increased nearly 71% and home prices nationwide have increased over 84%.
The federal and state governments spent over $9 billion to compensate homeowners who chose to either rebuild or abandon their properties. The so-called “Road Home Program” has been criticized for its complexity and the effects it had on low-income residents.
“Instead of basing settlements on damage to property and estimated cost to rebuild, they threw out all of that data and went with pre-storm property value instead” said Laura Paul, executive director of lowernine.org, a non-profit group which rebuilds and repairs homes in the area.
Paul noted that the use of pre-storm assessments left lower-income residents with fewer resources to rebuild. The city reports lower household income and higher poverty rates than those observed at the national level.
Many parts of the city remain exposed to risk that current insurance rates do not fully account for. In January, the Treasury Department warned that insurance premiums were spiking in disaster-prone areas like California, Florida and Louisiana.
The federal government, in association with the state of Louisiana, spent approximately $15 billion rebuilding a series of drainage canals, water pumping stations, and levees that attempt to protect local households from storms. Ironically, some aspects of these engineering systems may contribute to the region’s issue with land subsidence.
Still, the state sees a positive economic impact from the spending on storm protection. Particularly in a city with important cultural and commercial institutions, such as the Caesars Superdome and Port of New Orleans.
“We’re getting $7 of benefit for every dollar we spend on these hurricane protection systems,” said Glenn Ledet, executive director of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
The state is expected to spend $50 billion over the next 50 years in an effort to keep the hurricane and storm damage risk reduction system in a good state of repair. Officials have also set a goal to elevate some 4,000 homes across the state in coming years.
Watch the video above to learn more about how New Orleans is rebuilding in the face of future flood risk.