Hurricane Katrina:Residents await payouts from FEMA before rebuilding begins

You go to almost any of the parishes. …There are thousands of essentially abandoned houses. It’s creepily quiet.A thousand houses and you [might] see one person. …. In St. Bernard Parish, they still don’t have electricity and water.

There’s almost no new construction going on. … The stuff that’s being built is stuff that was already in the pipeline.You don’t see builders. All you see is roofers.

I have to say there’s also this sense of impending doom. When you talk to builders, there’s a lot of wariness about even getting involved.

What they are all waiting for is the FEMA flood checks to come in. … I’d say that at least half of the houses were in the flood zone, so they were required to have FEMA flood insurance.So half of the houses will be getting a check up to $250,000. Up to. There were a lot of houses that were worth a lot more than that, and almost none of them had additional insurance. Even the wealthy, those who had $3 million houses -they lost that money, though they can probably absorb it better.

I talked to the president of the HBA – his name is Ronny Kyle. He’s saying that any potential building boom hasn’t started yet. It won’t happen until and if the checks come in. … The question is - will there be enough builders to handle any sort of boom? That’s a very debatable question.

There are tons of unanswered questions right now about the future. … It is looking more bleak than good.… Congress has gotten cold feet about funding, and if they don’t fund the levee reconstruction, then nothing’s going to happen. …That is talked about a lot down there. … Because if the levees aren’t rebuilt to sufficient strength, the businesses aren’t going to come back, and then nobody’s going to be crazy enough to build there.