Homes in Katrina Condition
Leaning in the doorway of a modest brick cottage, Arden Kilgore was the picture of a perfectly put-together real estate agent, with a lime-colored linen suit, off-white heels that matched her pearls, and hair just so.
“Well, it’s a cute little family dwelling, isn’t it?” she said, as her client poked around the interior.
It was one of those typically chipper comments real estate agents make when showing a house. But Kilgore uttered it with a sardonic touch that acknowledged the realities of the post-Katrina landscape here.
The house in question, like most every other house in St. Bernard Parish, had been ruined by the hurricane’s floodwaters, its insides stripped to the studs by its owners. The backyard was littered with debris from an obliterated storage shed. A spray-painted message remained on the front door, declaring, “DO NOT CLEAR ATTIC CONTENTS.”
Like many neighborhoods in the suburban stretches east of New Orleans, this one was a virtual dead zone, with block after block of boarded-up homes, browning yards and heaped piles of molding personal effects.
Yet Kilgore is still showing properties here in one of the most unpredictable, and surreal, housing markets in recent American history.
In St. Bernard Parish, the storm and subsequent flooding damaged or destroyed nearly all of the 26,000 single-family homes. Almost nine months later, the fate of its working-class and middle-class neighborhoods is clouded by unanswered questions. How many homeowners will choose to come back? Where will they work? What areas will be turned into floodplains? And how safe will it be when the next hurricane hits?
Since the storm, residents eager to return have helped fuel a booming housing market in the unflooded sections of New Orleans. But, rather predictably, sales in St. Bernard Parish have been slow. According to the Gulf South Real Estate Information Network, real estate agents sold only eight single-family homes in the parish in the first seven months after Katrina.
Kilgore, by her calculations, says the number of sales is about twice that, but still a fraction of the pre-Katrina market. “It’s still pathetic,” she says.
The average selling price for a house in the Multiple Listings Service has dropped to $59,500 from $111,500 before the storm. But prices are all over the map because Katrina washed away so many of the tangible aspects of community -- the schools, shopping centers and neighbors that lend a house its value.
Today, working in St. Bernard Parish involves traversing a landscape that many of Kilgore’s former clients have been forced to abandon. She recognizes houses she once sold, and wonders what became of their owners -- from young couples just starting out to retirees who said this would be the last house they would ever own.
Then there are her friends who stayed. “It’s heartbreaking to know a friend is living in a FEMA trailer,” Kilgore said. “To know she used to have this big, beautiful house, and now she and her five kids are in a trailer trying to cook.”
The basics of the job have changed radically: Like all successful real estate agents, Kilgore is skilled at seeing the possibilities in a room, a house, a neighborhood. But now she is painting just as many pictures of what used to be, and for an audience that is mostly in it for the money. Since the flood, the only people interested in buying in St. Bernard Parish have been investors looking for bargains amid the chaos.
“You’re not showing to families anymore, which I miss,” she said. “You know you’re not going to have that fun closing where you put the keys in people’s hands. Now it’s business. It’s cold. There’s no emotion anymore.”
On a recent Wednesday, Kilgore drove to the Home Depot in Chalmette to pick up Robin Fraser-Orr, a former antique dealer. Fraser-Orr, along with an investment partner, was looking to buy a house to fix up and flip.
“It’s not only to turn a profit,” said Fraser-Orr, a 15-year resident of New Orleans. “People are going to need housing here.”
Officials say that kind of interest is crucial to reviving the St. Bernard Parish that existed pre-Katrina: a string of proudly salty suburbs, home to the fishermen and builders and truck drivers who did the heavy lifting of an industrial metropolis largely unseen by tourists.
At 11 a.m., the parish’s main drag, Judge Perez Drive, was a dreary vision of shuttered strip malls and big-box stores gone dark. The Home Depot was undergoing renovation; in the meantime, it was selling a limited inventory out of its garden center.
The pair jumped into Kilgore’s immaculate Honda Accord. In the back seat, next to her laptop, was a can of Fix-A-Flat: Since she started showing homes again here in January, she has had three punctured tires from debris on the road. She merged onto Judge Perez, where broken traffic signals made for a fast and sometimes reckless parade of vans and pickups.
Before Katrina, Kilgore said, the homes they were about to tour would have ranged from $150,000 to about $400,000. She handed Fraser-Orr a handwritten list of homes that had sold recently. The cheapest was about $21,000, the most expensive about $150,000.
Kilgore, 46, and her husband haven’t decided what to do with their own four-bedroom house here. It was inundated with 14 feet of water; the couple have since moved to higher ground on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The flood also destroyed her company’s St. Bernard branch office, where she shared space with about 50 other full-time agents.
Kilgore is not a Louisiana native -- she was born in Pennsylvania -- and when she moved to the parish 17 years ago, it was difficult for her to crack its insular culture. But over time, she made good friends and developed a humming business. She learned to decipher the locals’ intense, Brooklyn-like accent, and she found that their working-class trappings often belied individual wealth that they were eager to invest in the local real estate market. She profited from the fact that many of them would never think of leaving the modest neighborhoods and oil refineries of “da parish.”
“I was still a Yankee, but everybody was really friendly,” Kilgore said. “It was its own little world. A nice, good little world, but a different little world. St. Bernard was like the Mayberry of New Orleans. We never locked our doors, ever.”
Over the course of their day together, Kilgore gave Fraser-Orr an unsparing account of the looming troubles St. Bernard Parish faced as it inched toward recovery.
St. Bernard’s big employers, two major oil refineries and a sugar plant, have reopened, but many other businesses moved or remained closed. Kilgore pointed out a few signs of commerce: a couple of lunch trucks serving po’ boys and tamales, and a plucky tattoo and piercing parlor.
She didn’t have to tell Fraser-Orr about the lingering safety concerns -- they are the kind shared by nearly every south Louisiana resident. In St. Bernard, the levee system is being restored, and the U.S. Senate has approved development of a plan to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the artificial shipping channel some blame for delivering the destructive storm surge that wiped out the parish. But with warming waters and depleted coastal marshland, many doubt whether those changes would be enough.
About 19,000 people have returned to St. Bernard. But the absence of the other 48,000 residents was palpable on nearly every street. Still, Fraser-Orr was heartened to hear that 2,300 students were back in the public schools.
“Here?” he said incredulously, as they turned down their first blighted side street in Arabi, just east of the Lower 9th Ward. “Wonderful.”
That optimism was tested within seconds, when the route to the first property on their list was blocked by a house that had drifted off its foundation and into the middle of the street.
Kilgore started maneuvering the Honda around it, but the investor stopped her abruptly.
“No, no, this is way too much,” Fraser-Orr said. “It’s got to be in an area that people can move straight into.”
They drove back east, to Chalmette, and the little brick cottage.
“This is called Buccaneer South,” Kilgore said. “Before the storm it was a very nice subdivision.”
Fraser-Orr got out and looked the house over. The roof seemed OK. He paused near a rain-soaked pile of business files and a faded picture of what looked like a mother and child.
“God, this has got to be heartbreaking,” he said.
Inside, the uncovered studs offered only intimations of the floor plan. They couldn’t decide if it was a three- or four-bedroom cottage.
“That must have been the kitchen,” Fraser-Orr said. “Right?”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” Kilgore said. “That might have been the laundry room.”
The sellers were asking $54,500. Fraser-Orr figured it was worth less than half that.
The next house was also in Chalmette, on a street named Pirate Drive. It was a brick four-bedroom with a collapsed aboveground pool and a bashed-up storage shed tilting against a backyard fence. They called the owner and former occupant, Becky Cieutat, who drove over and met them. Fraser-Orr didn’t think the house was very pretty, but it was practical: He liked the floor plan, and the spaces where the big built-in closets had been. It was also two stories high.
Cieutat said she knew the neighborhood was prone to flooding, so she built it extra high, on a double slab.
“My whole theory was I’d build it high enough so it never got to the second floor,” she said, “but I’m going to show you, it got to the second floor.” She pointed to a muddy watermark high above her head on some remaining drywall.
“So you have no intention of moving back?” Fraser-Orr asked.
“Not here, specifically,” Cieutat said.
Cieutat wanted $68,000 for the house. Kilgore and Fraser-Orr thanked her and drove on.
For hours, they walked through skeletal houses. There was no need to call ahead, or ask for keys. They saw that a few houses had formal for-sale signs planted in the yard, with photos of well-coiffed listing agents smiling incongruously. Many other homes were for sale by owner, with the signs sometimes spray-painted on the shingles.
“4 SALE MeShell,” one message read, along with an asking price and phone number.
They drove past telephone poles tacked with advertisements for insurance attorneys, roofers and wildcat house-gutting services. They narrowly avoided a collision with a van that sped through an intersection at 60 mph.
Kilgore showed Fraser-Orr the first place she ever sold, a modest green home now without windows or a door and a sign that warned, “NO ENTRY.” She showed him her old Chalmette neighborhood, as barren as the rest.
Kilgore taught Fraser-Orr the best way she knew to divine a neighborhood’s fate: by counting the government-issued trailers. In other parts of the ravaged Gulf Coast, neighbors consider the flimsy white boxes a blight. Here, she said, they were a sign that the people had a stake, that they were coming back.
The tour stretched over a number of afternoons. But a few weeks later, Fraser-Orr said he and his investment partner were still not ready to buy a house.
One of the reasons he wanted to invest in St. Bernard Parish, he said, was because the people seemed so tied to the place. His mother-in-law had lived here; he had seen it firsthand. But it also appeared that residents’ attachment to their homes was preventing him from finding a good deal.
“People are giving up where they’ve been raising their families,” he said. “To them, the houses still have a value, but it’s not a fair market value.”
Eventually, he said, reality would sink in.
It seemed to be sinking in for Kilgore as well.
She has sold a couple of houses in St. Bernard, but much of her work is now focused on areas of New Orleans that were largely unharmed in the flood, such as the French Quarter and Bywater. Buyers snapping up homes in these areas along the Mississippi River’s east bank have helped push greater New Orleans’ home sales to $826 million for the first quarter of 2006, an increase of 60% over the first quarter of 2005.
Kilgore’s company opened its new office in St. Bernard a few months ago with about 10 agents. Kilgore stops by from time to time. But these days, she said, she is more likely to work out of her new home.
This month, work crews began tearing down the first of thousands of houses that were St. Bernard’s most hopeless cases, a bittersweet sign of progress.
Kilgore figures St. Bernard is bound to bounce back. It’s always been a bargain, and close to New Orleans. But a rebound might take a few years. But for now, she said, she would have to find other neighborhoods to specialize in.
“I hate to do it, because I’m so drawn to St. Bernard,” she said. “But I just need to face the fact that I can’t make a living there.”
