February 15, 2006

	Images of Mildred Bennett's house in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans. She plans to move back in shortly.
	Images courtesy Mary Fitzpatrick, Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans

Many Katrina-evacuated homeowners who thought they’d lost everything are finding their homes are salvageable, especially older ones.

Last Thanksgiving, for example, volunteers from the New Orleans Preservation Resource Center (PRC) cleaned out an 1884 shotgun house in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans, a less-damaged part of the notorious Lower Ninth Ward. The removals revealed streaked warm orange and blue board-and-batten walls and the sturdy wood floors. Built of dense pine and cypress, they’ve come through the flooding unscathed. The work was sponsored by the PRC, and supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, to show that some of the city’s oldest houses are rehab candidates. According to spokeswoman Sue Sperry, PRC with a combination of paid and volunteer labor, should be able to get 82-year-old Mildred Bennett back into her home for $40,000. Progress now only awaits the restoration of electricity and reliable supplies of water to the neighborhood.

For the many homes that have not suffered significant structural damage, a cottage industry of contractors and volunteers has grown around “gutting out” houses: ripping out water-soaked linoleum, carpet, plywood floors and fiberboard cabinets; tearing down sheetrock (to above the mold line anyway), and often throwing out doors and windows to dry out moldy studs, which rarely suffer from flooding alone.

These now-see-through houses are ready for rebuilding, but homeowners often must battle with insurers about wind damage (generally covered) versus flood damage (either not covered or only partly covered). Others have to fight “red tagging,” which denotes that damage is greater than 50 percent, and means they cannot rebuild except above FEMA-mapped flood levels. Unfortunately FEMA has yet to produce the maps.

Another cottage industry has built up around getting the damage estimates reduced to below the 50-percent threshold that requires compliance with whatever those new flood elevations turn out to be. The red-tagging, says PRC’s Sperry, was often cursory, done in drive-by visual inspections by nonprofessionals—barbers, mailmen—pressed into service when few professionals were in town. PRC, in fact, has resurveyed houses in historic districts, which cover most of the city. A bulging wall or a tree through a roof was often enough to get a house red-tagged, she said. But such damage is often repaired for less than apparently-intact homes that had been flooded to the point that ceilings collapsed. “Only a structural engineer and an architect can assess some of these problems,” she says.

For many homeowners insurance isn’t enough. Only volunteer labor can bridge the cost gap. Sheri-Lea Bloodworth, through architect-run aid group Architecture for Humanity, helps coordinate 30-some volunteer groups out of a church in Biloxi. Teams head out daily to help residents clean, gut, and treat their homes for mold. (The low-tech method is a mixture of tri-sodium phosphate and household bleach applied with garden sprayers.) Licensed plumbers and electricians, who are usually paid, follow on, and then volunteers return to redo finishes. Labor, volunteer and otherwise, remains scarce, although those willing to sleep in tents or drive an hour and a half each way every day (as the Biloxi sheetrock-hangers did) are attracting undying gratitude.

James Russell

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