After the Storm

What do you think? Click here to e-mail us your feedback, and be sure to include your contact information and the subject line, 'Market Pulse' with your message.

NEW ORLEANS, LA — It has been nearly eight months since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and swaths of destruction still remain.

Throughout the region, once-spirited neighborhoods are now either abandoned, or existing with minimal utilities and only a handful of people. Houses are gone entirely, or so badly damaged as to be completely unlivable. In southern Mississippi, for example, the latest estimates figure more than 65,000 homes were destroyed, with nearly $125 billion in damages. Here, in New Orleans, the aftermath is strikingly similar, with only a small percentage of schools, businesses and restaurants reopened.

Among those affected are four local kitchen dealers whose homes and businesses experienced varying degrees of damage – but whose love for the city remains firmly intact.

Katrina – the worst natural disaster in U.S. history – left these four, and so many of their counterparts along the Gulf Coast, with the same daunting prospect: Rebuild their own lives, and the lives and homes of countless others.

To date, the storm has displaced some 770,000 residents and made uninhabitable some 300,000 houses throughout the region. In St. Bernard Parish, LA, for instance, where some 45,000 homes once existed, only 50 inhabitable homes remain, with most of those who have chosen to stay now living in shelters, hotels or FEMA trailers.

“We are talking to a lot of people who are rebuilding their homes and then putting them up for sale, and other people who are just selling the houses as they are. They are not coming back. They don’t want to go through this again,” remarks Leo Licciardi, owner of

Marchand Creative Kitchens. But whether they’re looking to rebuild their homes to their own specifications, or simply fix them up enough to make them saleable, the end result is the same: a nearly insurmountable task for those in the remodeling industry who are trying to rebuild not only thousands of homes, but often their own businesses and personal residences, as well.

Compounding this task is the mass exodus that has caused a major labor shortage throughout metropolitan New Orleans. This has led to an influx of day laborers from outlining cities and states, which has created another problem – perpetual gridlock.

Indeed, in post-Katrina New Orleans, simple luxuries – such as receiving mail, recycling and sanitation service, or driving to a fast-food restaurant for lunch – are now, at best, uncertainties.

The new reality is one of sporadic postal service, virtually non-existent recycling and sanitation service and few open restaurants, all of which typically require at least an hour wait.

But, the main problem, says Leslie Lomont-Relayson, designer for Cabinets by Design, is that kitchen dealerships are simply being inundated with work.

“Everyone in our area is fighting the turmoil of having people come in and trying to be as fair as possible. [It’s hard] having to tell people every day that we haven’t been able to get to their job as quickly as we would have hoped,” she explains.

Christine Hillery, office manager for Cabinets by Design, concurs: “There’s a huge labor shortage, and we could desperately use 10 people in here, but there’s just not a lot of qualified people back in town.”

The labor shortage is so severe that, in many quarters, no rebuilding is happening at all. As Michael Singer, v.p. of Metairie, LA-based Singer Kitchens, says: “What we’ve seen in the months since the storm hit is that [rebuilding in] New Orleans really hasn’t kicked in yet.”

Indeed, the conditions in which some of the people are living are deplorable.