Along the Mississippi coast, a post-Katrina skyline rises

. -- Some people in this tiny Katrina-ravaged town talk of Harry Hull’s modest, vinyl-clad home as if a spaceship had landed on the bayou.

It stands out not because it is built on land only 5 feet above sea level -- scores of people have rebuilt on low land -- but because it looms 18 feet above ground. It is raised so high on wooden pilings that Hull, 70, must climb 26 steps to get to his front door.

Yet the structure could offer a glimpse into the future of his city and other low-lying coastal areas nationwide: New flood elevation standards being devised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and pioneered in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina would require some houses on low coastal land be rebuilt 20 feet off the ground.

In Pass Christian, where only 500 of the city’s 8,000 homes survived the 2005 hurricane, city officials fear that the new maps will frustrate rebuilding. The agency’s highest required elevation in that city has gone up 6 to 26 feet above sea level.

And though officials in neighboring Bay St. Louis to the west have vowed to appeal the new maps, many on the east side of the bay worry that battling the federal government would be an absurd gamble. Already, Pass Christian is struggling to scrape together enough tax revenue from its 4,500 residents to pay its police officers.

“Everything we do now is about survival,” said Mayor Leo “Chipper” McDermott, adding that soaring insurance and construction costs have hampered recovery. “There are people who say -- and it’s true -- that if people in other states are going to pay to repair these homes, we have to do some things to prevent them from flooding. But let me tell you, they are not going to run people off the water.”

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Higher and higher

At just 30 feet above sea level at its highest point and 4 feet at its lowest, Pass Christian has required homes to be 13 feet above sea level since Hurricane Camille hit in 1969. After Katrina, the city raised the height to 16 feet. But now that the government has calculated flood risks with new airborne digital mapping technology, homes are expected to be 18 to 26 feet above sea level.

City officials are urging residents to rebuild soon, so their homes can be grandfathered in at the existing elevations.

When new maps are approved -- the city has until late April to appeal -- many who wish to rebuild in the city’s lowest neighborhoods will have little choice but to build their homes closer to the treetops: Although the historic section of town was built along a natural bluff, about 85% of it is now in a flood zone.

“Some people will move, and that’s the desired effect,” said Jeffrey Bounds, an engineer and urban planner who is working as a SmartCode planning consultant for Pass Christian. “But it’s not as direct as you would hope -- some people will actually build houses 20 feet off the ground. It would be more effective if FEMA just told people they can’t live in those areas.”

Many houses have been rebuilt higher, but local officials say they are unsure how much more hurricane-proof they are.

“OK, we might escape the water, but will our houses be as secure up in the treetops?” asked Philip Wittmann, the city’s alderman at large. “Surely that would increase the risk of wind damage?”

“FEMA’s got a one-track mind,” said Dayton Robinson, city Planning Commission chairman. “All they think about is height. What they need to think about is strength.”

Homeowners who want to rebuild after the new maps are approved could be eligible for assistance grants of $30,000, but most experts agree that money won’t cover the cost of elevating a house. According to local contractor Jim Schmitt, the cost of building a house rises about 25% when it is raised 10 feet in the air because workers have to use thicker pilings, build two foundations -- one on the ground and one in the air -- and work on scaffolding rather than stepladders.

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Curb appeal

Factor in the aesthetics -- “It’s very hard,” Schmitt said, “to make it look like anything other than a box in the air” -- and the practicality of climbing more than 20 steps a day, and Schmitt said many may choose to live elsewhere: “It’s not that it’s not doable. It’s more a question of what will it do to the fabric of community? Do people really want to live like that?”

To avoid a marshland sprawl of “McMansions on stilts,” Bounds, the urban planner, is pushing the concept of the treetop village: dense 8- to 15-foot-high communities of compact houses clustered on higher land and linked with communal boardwalks. Residents would be able to use common parking areas, elevators and stairwells, and the remaining low land could be converted to national parkland.

While Bounds said developers were expressing an interest in the treetop village, many locals seemed less than charmed. Librarian Sally James noted that Katrina unraveled the boardwalk along Pass Christian’s beach and sent the planks crashing against her home like battering rams.

Many worry that treetop living would be unsuitable for the elderly and the disabled.

About a month after volunteers built a three-bedroom home for Louise Hildegarde Spencer, 83, she continues to dwell in a cramped mobile home on the edge of her Grayson Avenue lot.

“I don’t feel like crawling up all those steps,” she said one recent morning as she stepped out of her mobile home and peered up at the 16 wooden steps leading up to her new front porch. Her old house, she noted, only had five steps. “It looks nice, but I’m satisfied down here.”

Amy Hardee, a Baptist minister from North Carolina who works out of the Gray Hut, a volunteer center that rebuilds homes for the elderly and the disabled, said that a couple of seniors who had taller houses rebuilt for them seemed apprehensive about moving. “Everything is so hard for them,” she said. “The height is just one more thing they don’t have any more control of.”

Some residents wanting to avoid steps have installed cargo lifts, but they range from $6,800 to $10,000, said Thomas Vice, owner of Mississippi Utility Lifts Inc., whose company has installed about 100 elevators here.

Because of the low safety requirements for cargo lifts, buyers must sign a form agreeing that they understand the equipment is not certified for passenger use.

Hull, a schoolteacher and the owner of Pass Christian’s tallest one-story home, has a lift, but does not mind walking up his stairs. Getting to his front door has become his daily exercise, he said, and his reward is stupendous views of pelicans and egrets flying across the bayou.

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jenny.jarvie@latimes.com