Mark's Notebook


	And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. - Soren Kierkegaard

Mississippi's Post-Katrina Boom

Washington Post

Friday 10 March 2006, 11:38 am
Keywords: Katrina Hurricane Relief , News Articles

By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writer

BILOXI, Miss. -- On a recent Saturday night, traffic inching toward the 1,100-room Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino backed up for a mile on Interstate 110. Inside, gamblers jammed all 52 tables and 1,900 slot machines on the casino's three burgundy-carpeted floors.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina smashed through a fragile necklace of Mississippi coastal towns, the region is enjoying a post-storm boom. Fueled by insurance money, federal reconstruction aid and speculative capital, surviving hotels and restaurants are filled to overflowing, beachfront land prices are soaring, and developers are placing billion-dollar bets that shattered antebellum mansions will give rise to condominium resorts.

The guarded optimism is tempered by continued human suffering in one of the nation's poorest states, where 36,000 families remain housed in trailers and hundreds more live in plywood barracks and tents in the winter chill. To the west, the smaller towns of Waveland (population 7,100), Bay St. Louis (8,300) and Pass Christian (6,800) remain largely obliterated by Katrina.

"It's going to be a long journey -- we know that," said Pass Christian Mayor Billy McDonald, whose beach colony lost every business that generated sales taxes and 75 percent of its housing. Only about 2,000 residents remain. "First, we have to get cleaned up. Then we have to get people to come back. The hard part is in front of us."

But evidence of short-term recovery is everywhere in the cities President Bush visited this week. In Biloxi, a city of 50,000 that lost a quarter of its structures to Katrina, the three casinos that have reopened did $63 million of business in January -- close to the $83 million taken in by the city's nine gambling venues a year ago.

Brent Warr, mayor of neighboring Gulfport (population 72,000), said the nation's discovery of the area's 26 miles of white-sand beaches has boosted land prices along the devastated shoreline by 50 percent -- between $1 million and $2 million an acre. Investors are also seizing on federal post-storm tax legislation, which lets companies immediately write off half the cost of new investments.

Although the storm drew no distinctions between rich and poor, middle- and upper-class residents are rebuilding. But low-income people, fixed-income seniors and renters in poor, low-lying areas -- about 20 percent of the storm victims -- are being squeezed out by demolition and redevelopment, according to such groups as Oxfam America.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902151.
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