A woman I worked for at Blue Cross Blue Shield was married to one of the guys who was running the clean up in New Orleans, and I learned something from her you never heard in the media.
Remember when the media kept showing pictures and video of all those empty houses and buildings that needed to be repaired so the residents could move back in, and all the whining about the need for federal and insurance money to fix all those buildings being the reason they were still uninhabitable? The truth was after the hurricane, the New Orleans government changed the zoning laws for the whole area, and made it so anyone could build just about anything. As a result, land developers swooped in and bought up most of those buildings and houses with plans to demolish them and put up condos, hotels, shopping complexes, or whatever else they wanted once the market was right.
The reason all those places sat vacant and falling down was because the old owners sold out to the developers right after the storm, and the developers had no use for the houses and let them sit until plans could be finalized to demolish them, but that didn't stop politicians and other interest groups from misleading us into thinking more money had to be spent to get people, who were long gone, back into those houses.
