by David Hammer, WWL-TV
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune The Advocate. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
This is Part III of an investigation into how Road Home, the federally funded program to rebuild Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, underpaid people in poor neighborhoods while giving those in wealthy ones more of what they needed to repair their homes. Read Part I: The Federal Program to Rebuild After Hurricane Katrina Shortchanged the Poor. New Data Proves It.
Rebuilding a home in a poor neighborhood can cost a lot more than the house is worth on paper. So after Hurricane Katrina, when the U.S. government decided that home values would factor into rebuilding grants, it left many Louisiana homeowners short.
Why the federal government required that has long been a mystery. It had rarely, if ever, allowed home values to be used to calculate rebuilding aid after a disaster. It doesn’t allow it anymore.
But it did for Katrina. That formula hurt poor neighborhoods, most of which in New Orleans were majority Black, according to an investigation published this week by WWL-TV, The Times-Picayune