[StBernard] Repopulation rate slows, study says

[Westley Annis]

Repopulation rate slows, study says
Lack of services still keeping some away 
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer 

The New Orleans region's repopulation after Hurricane Katrina continues to
rise, but at a dramatically slower rate than one year ago despite an
improving local economy and a host of other strides, a report released
Wednesday said. 

Statistics suggest that the post-Katrina return of families to the area is
occurring much more slowly because of a lack of affordable housing, public
transportation and child care: all basic needs to attract and keep skilled
workers for recovery-related jobs. 

New Orleans households that are actively receiving mail rose by 1,061 from
September to November, only 15 percent of the growth during the same time
period in 2006, according to the report by the Greater New Orleans Community
Data Center. 

The six-parish area, comprising Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St.
Charles, St. John and St. Tammany, was home to 86 percent of its pre-Katrina
number of households as of November, a jump of merely 0.3 percent from
September 2007, the report said. 

In November 2007, 27 months after the levee failures followed Katrina's
wrath, New Orleans has about 318,780 residents, compared with 452,170 before
the storm, researchers said in "Tracking Recovery of New Orleans and the
Metro Area," the latest report by the GNOCDC and its partner, the Brookings
Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. 

"Nobody knows the exact number of people living here," said Allison Plyer,
deputy director of the GNOCDC, which used the mail delivery in its
methodology in counting households. "It is a perfectly valid approach to get
an estimate." 

The repopulation slowdown is the first since Katrina struck, the report
said. 

Throughout the metropolitan area, the highest post-Katrina repopulation has
been in St. Charles and St. Tammany parishes, the report found. St. Tammany
had 87,035 households receiving mail in November, compared with 83,467 in
July 2005. St. Charles had 15,539 in November, a slight jump from its
pre-Katrina number of 14,847 households. 

St. Bernard Parish, where only a few households escaped flooding during
Katrina, has recovered only 41 percent of its pre-Katrina population, with
10,568 families receiving mail in November, compared with 25,604 in July
2005. 

The full report is available online at www.gnocdc.org. 

Greg Rigamer, an analyst with GCR & Associates, isn't convinced that the New
Orleans region is experiencing a dramatic slowdown in repopulation. He said
the new report's findings simply show an "adjustment" in GNOCDC's
repopulation counts. 

"It was inflated to begin with," Rigamer said of the GNOCDC figures. "What
we're doing is measuring active utility accounts and how much is being used.
When we look at utility accounts through November, the rate of growth is
consistent." 

Rigamer agrees with Plyer's assessment that a lack of city services, namely
health care and public transportation, will eventually slow the rate of the
repopulation. 

In December, GCR reported that Orleans Parish had 295,448 residents, while
Jefferson Parish had more than 442,133. 


Heavy 'worker shortages' 

Plyer, who wrote the report with Amy Liu, a co-founder of Brookings, said
the report is like a warning sign for the region, which is enjoying economic
strides that include unemployment rates hitting a three-year low. 

"The good news is the economy," Plyer said. "Our unemployment rate is
dropping. That's astonishing and bodes well for the future. Compared to the
rest of the country, our economy is doing great." 

But "extreme worker shortages" exist for jobs that the region's recovery
might depend upon, the report found, from cooks and restaurant servers to
architects and construction workers. 

Plyer's findings reflect the struggles in New Orleans in spite of notable
progress since Katrina that includes a fully financed Road Home program, a
newly installed inspector general in New Orleans tasked with reducing waste
and corruption among city agencies, and the decision by the federal
government to invest about $700 million in rebuilding the city's aging
public housing complexes. 

The pace of home repairs in New Orleans slowed by year's end in 2007, the
report found, with permits slipping to 526 in December, down from 807 in
August. 

Brookings has been tracking New Orleans' recovery through numbers since
December 2005, publishing "The Katrina Index," which relies on about 40
factors. 

In 2007 the index became a collaboration between Brookings and the GNOCDC. 

. . . . . . . 

Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa at timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.