Few if any of the people displaced by hurricane Katrina will get training or jobs in the rebuilding of New Orleans and other effected areas in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Mortgage companies will foreclose on properties when the displaced people miss their mortgage payments, then the mortgage companies will clear the area and build high-rise apartment buildings, the rent for apartments in these new high-rise apartment buildings will be so high that the displaced people will not be able to afford them - the displaced people will be displaced forever.
For some reason I can't get the following melody out of my mind; "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" - Joan Baez
Fred
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't backstitch to emailjust stitchit. If you are on thin ice you might as well dance!
Can that really happen, Fred? Over here it`s always a condition of being granted a mortgage that the property is fully insured - usually through the mortgage company.
Which may pay off what's left on the mortgage to the lender, with whatever equity, if any, going to the homeowners. And don't forget there's often a huge difference in insured value and replacement value.
With no job to go to, how will the homeowners have the money to rebuild, and where will they stay in the meanwhile?
See the thread in misc.consumers for a discussion on home insurance in NO. The gist is unless the owners also had a special rider for *flood* insurance, standard homeowners will only pay for hurricane wind damage, NOT for what they deem to be caused by flooding.
It's a mess and going to get messier as the paperwork starts to flow and people realize that insurnace doesn't cover what they thought it did.
Nyssa, who has been through major hurricanes and knows whereof she speaks
I should have added that our insurance takes that into account - as is usual here, to insure against removal of rubble etc. and the cost of rebuilding. It certainly pays to check out exactly what your police DOES cover, though!
The thing that irritates me, is that although there is absolutely NO way our house could ever be flooded, the insurance companies make no reduction in our premiums for that fact!
When we had our major flood in 1953, with a surge down the North Sea which, as well as coming in from the beach, broke through the river walls and attacked us from behind, we had very little if any trouble with looters. Human nature being what it is, there must have been the odd one or two looters, but most people were just far more concerned with helping the victims. I hope it would be the same today, although one wonders. I remember spending days retrieving M.I.L`s treasures and cleaning the filth from them - and nothing at all had been stolen. Disasters really bring out the best - and, sadly, sometimes the worst in people.
You can still see the flood level in the lower part of town - the bricks up to just above the ground floor windows are cleaner than the rest! My parents-in-law were in that one, with John`s 3 day old brother and I well remember the devastation. The Fire brigades pumped the houses out as fast as they could, then the authorities provided loads of fan heaters and generators. It was quite surprising how quickly the houses became habitable again. Of course not many houses here have basements.
A lot of people were drowned, particularly those in the pre-fabricated bungalows which had been put up just after the war. Something like those would be an ideal solution for your homeless families, in a suitable area away from a flood plain (obviously) I would think. Ours were actually excellent and, in fact, a few are still in use after all that time!
Yes, but most mortgage companies will require flood insurance unless the house is about the hundred year flood line, so I would imagine that many of the houses in NO had flood insurance. That's pure speculation on my part, though.
I had to send pictures of my roof and an estimate from a roofer and every other kind of contractor I needed, down to a handyman to do some small things, and I spent hours and days arguing about every single item that needed fixing. I have full replacement value on my home but that didn't seem to make any difference. Apparently I was one of the luckier victims of the hurricane because many of those people who lost everything are still not in a new house.
I can't even imagine what kind of problems there will be with this kind of devastation.
When I was in Shad Bay it used to irritate me no end that I had to include the garden shed in the policy. If it had dropped in the sea, I could not have cared about it, but no, pay more for a shed I didn't want. It carefully said in the policy though, it was not insured against the most likely reasons it might have been down, tides, hurricanes etc.
There are still some prefabs in Halifax. They are gussied up now, they have been raised and basements put in underneath and they go for a very good price, small though they are by todays standards. They will be laughing (the prefab owners) this winter, bet they are inexpensive to heat being compact. It's all these monster homes, owned by younger couples, with their SUVs in the driveway who are about to learn a very nasty lesson lol Well that is, unless something changes very fast as regards barrells of oil and I doubt that.
There is (in some states) a provision that once your equity in the property exceeds a certain percentage, you may choose to drop the insurance.
Someone I know worked for an insurance agency. A bank in her area required anyone within X feet of water to have flood insurance to get a mortgage. One of their clients was buying a house on a cliff, ohhh, about 100 feet above the water level of a stream. But his house fell within the green zone on the map, so there was no arguing with the bank that Noah would be back before this fellow needed flood insurance. Solution: they found him a policy which would allow him to pay premiums monthly instead of a full year in advance. He paid for one month, got his mortgage, and didn't pay another premium. The mortgage company never checked to see that he'd kept the policy in force.
My friend in Florida is reporting that houses in her area have almost doubled in price since their hurricane last year destroyed so many of them. Supply and demand. So, even if you get paid the full value of your house as of August 2005, there is no guarantee that that will be enough to buy a similar house when you get the check in October 2005.
When I was pricing insurance, the flood insurance portion cost about as much as the regular policy. No telling how much more expensive it would be in the hurricane zone. So I'm sure there are people who chose not to pay that much.
I don't know about hurricane insurance, since that wasn't a part of the policy that I was likely to need, but with my earthquake insurance, my deductible is 10% of the value of the house. In other words, even with insurance, I've got to pay five figures before the California Earthquake Authority chips in a cent. Frankly, I'm not sure I could come up with that much cash, but that's the standard policy -- can't get a lower deductible.
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