Katrina in Review

MSNBC is surprised that while many homeowners are slow in repaying mortgage payments on homes that were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, the number of foreclosures is still quite small. Government programs and bank programs are working to keep the number of foreclosures low:

The rate of new foreclosures in the fourth quarter was only 0.16 percent in Louisiana and 0.26 percent, compared with the national rate of 0.42 percent. In both states, the rate was at least three times as high in the comparable year-earlier period.

In Louisiana, for example, lenders began foreclosure proceedings on only 657 homes in the fourth quarter, compared with nearly 2,400 in the second quarter, the last full quarter before Katrina, according to the MBA figures. In Mississippi lenders began foreclosing on 576 properties, compared with 1,400 in the second quarter.

All told there are about 630,000 properties with mortgages in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to MBA figures, of which 123,000 were at least 30 days delinquent. In the New Orleans area alone, at least 95,000 residential structures, or two-thirds of the total, suffered damage totaling $8 billion to $10 billion, according to a previous study by the mortgage bankers.

The Washington Post also covers the mortgage repayment situation, though its link on the WaPo website highlights not the fact that foreclosure rates are low, but that the mortgage payments are lagging.

Then, there's the issue of the levees as noted by Paul at Wizbang. Did the Army Corps of Engineers know that there were problems in the 1980s? Well, that would seem to depend on which news report you read, but the actual reports seem to indicate that they did know that the problems encountered as a result of Katrina were a concern to the Corps back in the 1980s.

Right Winged also takes the Corps to task. These were the experts on who President Bush and his advisors relied upon. They didn't think that collapse or levee failures were a concern, and that translated into how the Administration handled matters. One way to look at this is that we're witnessing the civil engineering failure equivalent to the Challenger or Columbia failures. We're witnessing government agencies/departments trying to spin out of the fact that they knew, or should have known, of failures or inadequacies in the systems they were managing and either failed to anticipate those failures or minimized the risks despite evidence suggesting that the risks were far greater.

Llama Butchers has a novel choice for who to blame for the levee failures.

And the New York Times wades into the fray with a discussion over the difficulties of rebuilding a bridge between Ocean Springs and Biloxi. Biloxi wants a bridge that is far larger than the one it replaces, while Ocean Springs wants to rebuild the bridge as it was - to preserve the smaller community's way of life. That tension exists throughout the Gulf Coast, and some of the concerns can be addressed by statewide or regional planning.

Everyone wants it rebuilt as soon as possible. But officials on one side of the bridge — those in Biloxi — favor a large, multilane structure that can accommodate casino workers and the new horde of gamblers. On the other side, in Ocean Springs, officials want to restore the four-lane drawbridge that once spanned the bay, hoping to keep their French-colonized, tree-lined town the definition of quaint.

The debate over what should replace the Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridge in many ways illustrates the entire rebuilding effort along the Mississippi coast, where cities, drained of resources, infrastructure and people, struggle toward rebirth.

People are also catching on to the idea of doing working vacations - assisting the rebuilding of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities doing charitable work instead of pure vacationing.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; kanye west; impeach bush; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.