…Though it is Saturday morning, on my friendÍs block no children play and no one is cutting the grass. Most of her neighborsÍ homes are still abandoned. Three older women neighbors have died since Katrina.

We are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the 23rd person found dead from the storm since March.

Over 200,000 people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, 13 percent have been re-connected to electricity.

The mass displacement of people has left New Orleans older, whiter and more affluent. African Americans, children and the poor have not made it back ? primarily because of severe shortages of affordable housing.

Thousands of homes remain just as they were when the floodwaters receded ? ghost-like houses with open doors, upturned furniture, and walls covered with growing mold.

Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50 percent of the billions to low and moderate income families.

Meanwhile, 70,000 families in Louisiana live in 240-square-foot FEMA trailers ? three on my friendÍs street. As homeowners, their trailer is in front of their own battered home. Renters are not so fortunate and are placed in gravel strewn FEMA-villes across the state. With rents skyrocketing, thousands have moved into houses without electricity.

Meanwhile, privatization of public services continues to accelerate.

Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nationÍs laboratory for charter schools ? publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools ? they now control 4. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters.
axisoflogic.com

Investors Lead Home Sale Boom in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS, July 8 „ In a market spurred by speculators and bargain hunters, an extraordinarily large number of houses in the flood-ravaged metropolitan area here are being sold, according to real estate analysts, who say volume and sales prices exceed levels before Hurricane Katrina.

The higher prices are largely due to an increase in value in suburban areas, many of which were not heavily flooded, or in dry areas of New Orleans. But flooded houses in the city are being bought as well, often at deep discounts of as much as $50 a square foot less than they would have sold for before the hurricane.

“We have a stronger housing market than before,” said Wade R. Ragas, professor emeritus of finance at the University of New Orleans and the president of a local consulting firm, Real Property Associates.

“There is renovation activity in every ZIP code of Orleans Parish,” Dr. Ragas added, “but the strongest buying activity is, in general, closest to where it did not flood or where there was under two feet of water.”

Across the nine-parish region that includes New Orleans, 7,506 single-family homes were sold between January and the end of last month, compared with 6,449 in the same period last year, according to statistics from the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors and the Gulf South Real Estate Information Network. The average price so far this year is $221,244, compared with $193,097 in the same period last year.

The interest in buying, selling and renovating has been a bright spot since the last months of 2005, and has confounded some people who thought the flooding would cripple the housing market for years. But it is just one of many counterintuitive contrasts that are defining the area and making easy predictions unreliable.

Sick sick sick…the Iraq privatization fantasy is not proceeding according to plan, so hell, NO is the next best thing…

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