Baton Rouge a Booming Haven for the Displaced

By Thomas S. Mulligan and Richard Fausset

Sept. 7, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

BATON ROUGE, La. —

After decades of living in New Orleans’ shadow as Louisiana’s second city, Baton Rouge is uneasily trying on a new identity: boomtown.

Amid an inflow of hurricane evacuees that has doubled the capital city’s population overnight, hotels are full, apartments are hard to come by and houses that had languished on the market for months are getting all-cash offers at the asking price, or higher.

George Neely, a management professor at Xavier University in New Orleans who was forced to flee to Baton Rouge, said his wife was appalled two days ago when a real estate agent showed her a 700-square-foot home with broken windows that was renting for $1,000 a month -- a high price even for roomier properties here.

“If I could reach that guy now, I’d sign the contract in a minute,” Neely said Tuesday, after another frustrating day of house hunting.

The effects of the migration are hard to escape in this town of around 228,000, a little more than 75 miles northwest of New Orleans. Traffic has slowed to a crawl as the flood of cars overwhelms the local road system. Demand for consumer products is surging, with shortages of items such as fast food and gasoline, street maps and ice.

But it’s an odd sort of boom. In many cases, people have arrived with no jobs in the offing, causing what Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce President Stephen Moret described as “an absorption problem.”

Although Moret doesn’t doubt that the city will see permanent growth in jobs and businesses, the influx is straining Baton Rouge’s law enforcement, transportation and educational resources.

A local Catholic high school, for example, has added a 4-to-9:30 p.m. night shift to accommodate displaced students from a Catholic high school in New Orleans.

City officials have a hard time assessing how many hurricane evacuees they have absorbed because so many from New Orleans are staying with friends or family. But they are guessing that the population of East Baton Rouge Parish, which includes the city, has doubled from 425,000 to about 850,000 in the last week, said Dennis McCain, a spokesman for the city and parish.

He said it was too early to tell how many of the newcomers would stay permanently, but city officials estimated that about half of them would make Baton Rouge their home.

Some residents worry that the jarring changes in store for Baton Rouge will alter the character of a place that historically has ceded the spotlight to New Orleans.

Although discovered by French explorers in 1699, Baton Rouge was probably settled by them in 1718 -- and only as a fort to protect New Orleans travelers heading to points north. Relations between New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana have long been tense -- Crescent City politicians have typically fared poorly in statewide races, for instance -- while Baton Rouge was routinely eclipsed by New Orleans in economic growth, tourism and cultural novelty.

And many people here think that’s just fine.

“People in New Orleans are like fast, fast, fast, and this city is like slow, slow, slow,” said Dale Sonnier, 48, a driver for Domino’s Pizza in Baton Rouge.

But even Sonnier has felt the change coming. As he and the manager closed the pizza shop Monday night, they realized they had taken in nearly $2,400 for the day, more than double their take on the same day last year.

Since the hurricane, evacuees have radically changed Baton Rouge’s real estate market. Judy Burkett, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Assn. of Realtors, said that before the storm, the area had 3,626 homes listed. Today it has about 2,500 officially for sale, but Burkett estimated that 75% of those homes have been sold already. The sales have not been recorded because of poor phone communications in the wake of the hurricane, which grazed Baton Rouge on its way up the Mississippi Valley.

Home prices have risen 20% since the storm, she said.

People staying in hotels with no idea when they can return home -- or if they have a home to return to -- aren’t especially picky.

“The families go out to them and they’ll just snap them up -- they’ll just snap up anything they can,” Burkett said.

In a phenomenon familiar to Southern California’s housing market, prices are rising not so much because sellers are gouging, but because buyers are bidding up the prices. Burkett gave a typical example: a four-bedroom house she recently listed for $137,000. It sat around awhile before the storm. The other day it went into escrow at $147,000.

To handle the shortage, Burkett said, slow-moving plans to put up new subdivisions are suddenly in high gear.

“If there’s lots, we’re putting slabs on them as soon as possible,” she said.

Some of the newest construction in town has already been snapped up. Eric Etchison is the sales director for Southgate Towers, a new development of high-end condominiums and apartments near the city’s most revered patch of earth, Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium. A handful of Southgate’s 343 units were open before Katrina hit, but since then the vacancies have been filled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it continues to conduct rescue and cleanup efforts in New Orleans.

An additional 130 condominiums will soon go up, but Etchison has stopped taking down payments on them because he can’t predict what it will cost to build them -- no one knows what the added cost will be to get construction materials here, given the demand for them in New Orleans and the fact that ports on the lower Mississippi River have been closed to commercial traffic.

So Etchison spends much of his day turning away a steady stream of New Orleanians looking for homes. He has little to offer them other than advice.

“The closest high-rise living would be 3 1/2 hours away from here -- in Houston,” he said.

Some of the evacuees had no idea how tight the housing market was. Christal Pope, 22, a single, unemployed mother of three from New Orleans, is staying at Baton Rouge’s River Center auditorium. Her 5-year-old is already enrolled in the public school system, and she’s hoping to find a two-bedroom apartment or house to rent. The tight housing market was news to her.

“They haven’t told us anything,” she said.

In the commercial real estate market, agencies such as FEMA have been snagging scarce warehouse space and business relocations from New Orleans are adding to the crunch.

The law firm of Jones Walker, one of the biggest in New Orleans, is moving its administrative offices to Baton Rouge and shifting its New Orleans-based lawyers to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, La., Houston, Miami and Washington.

Jones Walker described the transfers as temporary, but some such moves have a way of becoming permanent. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, a number of Wall Street financial firms moved back-office, administrative functions to New Jersey or Connecticut. Top executives eventually moved back to Manhattan but many other workers stayed put.

To cope with the corporate influx, the Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce now has four people working full time updating the list of available office and industrial space.

“All the best stuff is gone” just a week since the levees burst, Moret, the Chamber president, said. “Buyers are now looking at class B and class C properties that hadn’t had a look in years.”

Some locals -- even in the real estate business -- are disquieted that their economic benefit comes from New Orleans’ pain.

“It’s not gleeful. It’s not joyful just because we’re selling properties,” Burkett said, “because it’s off of people’s bad luck.”

Baton Rouge residents also are ambivalent about the evacuees. They have proudly welcomed them. Public and private schools are accepting students. The River Center auditorium is housing 5,000 displaced people. The LSU basketball arena is being used as a triage center. The football team has moved Saturday’s home game against Arizona State to Tempe, Ariz.

But some grumble about 45-minute commutes that now take two hours. And there have been rumors about looting and other criminal acts committed by the new arrivals from the more licentious city to the southeast -- rumors McCain dismissed.

“We have not had any problems with the evacuees,” he said.

City officials are worried about how to accommodate all of these new people. McCain said that Baton Rouge Mayor Melvin L. “Kip” Holden met with President Bush on Monday and asked for aid money for new roads, schools, police and mass transit.

William Daniel, the acting director of public works for the city-parish government, said the city was falling behind on infrastructure projects before Katrina. Residents, he said, have not passed an infrastructure bond initiative since 1964 to accommodate growth in the region. Voters will consider a $500-million measure Oct. 15, and Daniel is hoping that the hurricane evacuees will make them realize how much it is needed.

McCain is optimistic that Baton Rouge will do right by New Orleans -- and its own surprising new destiny.

“We feel like we’re going to rise up to the occasion,” McCain said. “But it’s not something we had a chance to plan for -- it just happened.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Baton Rouge at a glance

Population: 227,818

(722,646 in metropolitan area), 80th largest U.S. city

Median home price: $135,400

Median income: $30,368

Percentage of population below poverty level: 24%

High school graduates: 80.1%

College graduates: 31.7%

Airport: Four airlines, 34 daily flights before storm, now up to 60, including cargo