[StBernard] 62% of St. Bernard, N.O. homes being rebuilt

[Westley Annis]

62% of St. Bernard, N.O. homes being rebuilt
UNO study finds solid increase compared with last year's survey Tuesday,
July 08, 2008By Katy Reckdahl
Of the flooded areas in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes, 62 percent of
homes have been rebuilt or are under renovation, according to a University
of New Orleans study released Monday. 

That's a jump from UNO's 2007 flood zone survey, which found 35 percent of
homes had been renovated or work was in progress. 

"It's encouraging," said Peter Yaukey, the study's director, noting that
UNO's survey in the spring of 2006 found only about 15 percent of houses
being rebuilt. 

The most recent survey found the highest percentage of intact houses in a
segment of the Carrollton neighborhood, where 95 percent of homes were
renovated or being worked on. On Monday, Jamal Brown, 14, rode his bike near
a part of Dante Street in that neighborhood. 

"Up here, it seems like Katrina never happened," he said. 


>From her dining room, Carrollton resident Tracy Belott had a full view of a

Dante Street four-plex where workmen carrying hammers scurried on ladders
and others scraped paint behind a three-story blue tarp. 

It's one of the last houses in the area to be repaired, she said. "In our
little Uptown world, things seem pretty good," she said, noting that she and
several of her neighbors returned in October 2005 and immediately began to
seek bids from contractors. 

The least-renovated areas were in the 9th Ward and Meraux, the study found.
In the Lower 9th Ward, the survey counted houses in the 1700 and 1800 blocks
of Delery and Tricou streets, where 26 percent of houses were being redone,
23 percent had been demolished and 51 percent were marked "derelict": gutted
but nothing more. 

In the two parishes overall, the survey declared 27 percent of houses
derelict, a noteworthy decrease from 57 percent one year ago. 

In Meraux, progress was also slow, but the land largely had been cleared. In
the 1800 to 1850 blocks of Alexandria Avenue and the 1900 to 1930 blocks of
Benjamin Street, the survey found that 87 percent of houses had been
demolished, 10 percent were being rebuilt and 3 percent were derelict. 

For the UNO survey, researchers picked 36 random U.S. Census block groups
within the flooded parts of Orleans and St. Bernard, then tallied the
progress of about 40 houses in each block group. Because the nearly 2,500
homes surveyed were chosen at random, the results should apply to the entire
flood zone, Yaukey said. 

Nearly two-thirds of the study's 36 selected sections ranged from 40 percent
to 69 percent renovated. 

One middle-of-the-road block cluster was located in the 6th Ward, near the
intersection of Orleans Avenue and North Broad Street. In the section --
which includes a few blocks each of North Dorgenois, North Rocheblave and
Dumaine streets -- 56 percent of houses were being renovated, 38 percent
were derelict and 6 percent had been demolished. 

"The renovations are accelerating," Yaukey said. "On the other hand, I don't
know if I would've come back if you'd told me that three years after the
storm, only 62 percent of the flood zone would've been renovated." 

. . . . . . . 

Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl at timespicayune.com or 504.826.3396.