"Second Katrina"

Well that's a pleasant way of putting it.

The number of people being forced out of their homes due to rising costs is now causing displacement on a level almost comparable to a “second Katrina,” said Patrick Egan, executive vice president at Latter & Blum, who has been working with a team at the firm to come up with ways to spur more affordable housing development.

Williams' office is putting the final touches on the property assessments for the coming year. That starts with figuring out the average sales price in the city's various neighborhoods over the previous four years.

Oh good. Assessment season is always fun.  The lines at Erroll Williams's will probably be longer than ever this year. And of course the process always favors those who can afford to down there and deal with it.

Anyway, as many of us broken records have been saying for years, this is precisely what every policy choice since Katrina was deliberately intended to do. But oh well, they'll just write about those decisions as though they inscrutable "trends" because of course.

In many cases, the increases reflect trends that began during the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. In the years after the flood, younger residents from across the country have flocked to the city, particularly to neighborhoods in the historic core, said Egan.

That, combined with other factors — including low interest rates that have given buyers the ability to afford higher-priced homes and the proliferation of short-term rentals — put significant pressure on the market, he said.

All those factors have come at a time when there has been a huge loss of cheap housing, thanks to the storm — and yet relatively little new affordable stock created. A report in April by the affordable-housing group HousingNOLA found that while there’s a need for nearly 33,600 additional affordable homes in the city, only about 414 units had been made available between September 2018 and March. Even those making a decent living are now unable to afford many neighborhoods.

We really can't even start to talk about "second Katrina" when we're still sitting here in the middle of the first one.