Word: lakeview
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...grimmest real estate market remains New Orleans East, where debris, rats and compromised water and sewer lines are making sales - and cleanup - difficult. But even in areas like middle-class Lakeview, where the sea of "For Sale" signs can be daunting (one in three houses, by some estimates), speculators are moving in to buy property - sometimes a whole block at a time - with the classically American conviction that this devastation is a buyer's market not to be missed. "It's the young crowd - 20-, 30- and 40-year-olds who are coming back and making things happen...
...Kurt Werling, for one, has had it with waiting. The 33-year-old construction company owner left his pregnant wife in Houston six weeks after Katrina and went home to Lakeview. He had his two-story house gutted, sanitized and treated for mold in October. His new lawn was in before Thanksgiving, but all around him were devastated houses. Neighbors said they were waiting for insurance money or a government handout, but mostly, he thinks, "it was just indecision." Intent on saving their subdivision, he and neighbor Al Petrie, 53, decided to form a limited liability company...
...houses, which took a couple feet of water, are already sold or renovated. Sales are up from last year, about 13% in July, by comparison with New Orleans itself, where sales are lagging behind last year - though only by 10%, surprisingly. In the middle-class bastions of Lakeview and New Orleans, houses "stripped to the studs" are going for land value only. "The older generation who had homes for 40 years, retired, saved and thought they would stay forever, have gone on," says Ragan. "There is so much work to do and they can't get out in the heat...
...school of architecture, urges caution to speculators, even locals. "It's foolhardy if they're buying up property in an area where the likelihood of them having a neighbor again is minimal," he argues. "New Orleans East has only 10% to 13% of its population because of power problems. Lakeview, the same. It will be very hard to regenerate their neighborhoods because so many people aren't coming back...
...that would have filled hotel rooms and restaurants. For months, the few casual tourists who showed up were almost exclusively families of FEMA contractors and construction workers. (Paradoxically, two of those neighborhoods that were hardest hit, and where few tourists ventured before the storm - the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview - have become popular destinations for out-of-town visitors...