By Richard Wall
February 15, 2006—The first plan to rebuild New Orleans is virtually dead less than three weeks after being proposed. Thousands of heavily damaged homes haven't been torn down yet, and debris removal is still an uphill battle. The trickle of flood insurance payments to property owners from FEMA means precious little money for rebuilding. Electrical power in the hardest hit areas isn't reliable.
On the other hand, thousands of residents in flooded areas are defiantly rebuilding after appealing for—and receiving—reduced damage-percentage estimates by city building inspectors; work is being done in uptown areas of the city that were not heavily damaged; and there are other hot spots of activity, particularly commercial. But overall, the rebuilding of New Orleans is going slowly at best.
Rebuilding from the outside in
Outside the city limits is another story. "There are a lot of people with a lot of questions and no answers in the city of New Orleans," says Nick Castjohn, a partner in Renovation Inc. and chairman of the Remodelors Council of the Greater New Orleans Home Builders Association. "So we're working in the most accessible areas outside of the city. We normally work in New Orleans and within a 40-mile radius, but now we're down to a 10-mile radius outside the city. And I have a waiting list of 300-400 people."
Castjohn says that area builders and contractors would like things to move along more quickly in New Orleans, but even if the city did pick up the pace, local contractors couldn't take on that work now. They are already maxed out. An influx of outside companies spiked right after the storm, working mostly on debris removal, but Castjohn is not seeing as many out-of-town firms as he thought he would. That leaves a ton of work for locals in the suburbs and surrounding areas of New Orleans.
While it's nice to be so busy, all that volume brings a lot of stress for contractors. "I can see by the demeanor of people in line at Home Depot that they are on edge," says Larry Thibodeaux, owner of American Maintenance Specialists, a contracting firm in Gretna, La., just outside New Orleans. "If you have to go to the building supply store now, that takes half a day. When it takes you five times longer to get things done and you have five times more work to do, that takes a toll on you."
Shortages of everything but work
Materials are often in short supply, generating lines of anxious contractors. The labor pool, already shallow in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina, has been further drained by displaced workers who haven't returned to the area yet. Thibodeaux has kept his crew and is taking care of his existing customer base, resisting the urge to take on the barrage of offers he gets for even more work.
"My house was flooded and will probably be demolished," says Thibodeaux. "With that going on, working 24/7, not seeing my family, having no time for myself—only for work—I decided that I didn't want that kind of life. The money is good, but it's not worth all the stress to take on too much."
Both Thibodeaux and Castjohn say they jumped in after the storm and did a lot of debris removal and clean-up work, but they moved fairly quickly back to their core business. Castjohn, who is also a homebuilder through his Castjohn Homes company, has 20 years experience with insurance-restoration projects and will have a full plate for years to come. "A lot of people are starting to pull plans together for rebuilding houses," says Castjohn. "We're seeing that interest in subdivisions coming on line in outlying areas, but not in New Orleans."
Slowly, but most think surely, life for New Orleans contractors will settle down. "It's been six months now, and things are getting back to normal in an un-normal world," says Thibodeaux. "After a while, you forget what normal used to be."
Richard Wall is a building-industry writer who lives in St. Augustine, Florida.
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