Tag Archives: Rebuilding

YOUR MONEY: Renovating after a natural disaster? Planning is key

FILE PHOTO: Damage caused by Hurricane Michael is seen in Mexico Beach, Florida, U.S., October 16, 2018. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester/File Photo

By Beth Pinsker

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For the Parkers of Houston, Texas, there will be no summer vacation this year because they are still paying off the dent in their finances left by 2017’s Hurricane Harvey.

The couple joins a growing list of people forced to renovate or completely rebuild their homes after a natural disaster, as severe weather events wreak damage throughout the country and spending in their wake drags out over multiple years.

Fixing up homes after a natural disaster barely used to register in home renovation data. A new survey released June 5 by the home site Houzz.com shows that 6% of home renovators in 2018 were addressing damage from a natural disaster, which jumps to 12% for such renovations over the past five years.

Regionally, those numbers are continuing to climb, said Nino Sitchinava, Houzz principal economist, particularly for California, Texas and Florida.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University has also been looking into the impact of natural disasters on the home renovation market.

“We’ve been studying home improvement for 25 years and losses from national disasters haven’t been on the radar. Suddenly, we’re seeing this pop up as a significant share,” said Kermit Baker, director of the remodeling future program at the Harvard center.

In 2016-2017, the most recent year reported by the center, spending on disasters repairs exceeded $27 billion in the United States, against $14 billion in 1996-1997.

Preparing for a disaster is drastically different than paying for a planned kitchen makeover.

“You have to prepare, prepare, prepare. Whatever that means, to you – do it,” warned William Begal, an independent consultant based in the Washington, D.C. area who ran a renovation company for 18 years.

PAYING THE PRICE

The Parkers now know all of this first hand. When their house in the Linkwood neighborhood flooded, there were some things they needed to do right away, yet they are still spending two years later.

The presence of water means you have to move fast. They had to rip out carpet and drywall themselves, and then hire a crew out-of-pocket before any insurance adjustor came around.

They also could not live in their house while it was being fixed, so they forked out $3,000 a month for a rental.

Once the insurance kicked in, they received a small sum from an escrow account a few weeks after the flood, and then had to wait for the project to be 50% complete before they got more. They did not get the final payment until the project was done.

“It was key we had stashed away an emergency fund so we were not spiraling downward,” said Angie Parker, 38, who is a personal fitness trainer in the Houston area.

Parker said she spent many hours on the phone with the insurance company, crying sometimes, being aggressive when she had to be.

Luckily, the family had flood insurance, which was a requirement for their mortgage in a flood-prone neighborhood.

Most people, however, do not have flood insurance, and this further delays rebuilding efforts.

Yet, there were still issues. An inadvertently checked box on a form meant the contents of their house were not covered. So they were out more than $100,000 for furniture, clothing and housewares, and lost all their appeals to have those covered.  

Jerry Linebaugh, an investment advisor representative who owns JLine Financial near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had a similar experience when his office flooded after a rain event in 2018 that was not even a named storm – just heavy rain over three days.

“You have to have a cash reserve, you have to have your insurance in line, you have to do disaster drills,” said Linebaugh, who had planned for the worst ever since Hurricane Katrina hit nearby.

Linebaugh had a system set up to transfer his office lines to cell phones and keep his operations going from hotel rooms and his employees’ homes.

He had six months of operating expenses to float his business. And he needed all it, because he did not have flood insurance.

It was four months before Linebaugh won an appeal with his business insurance policy to cover losses based on an inland marine clause, which worked for him because the damage started with water coming in through a bathroom drain.

“Probably thousands of people didn’t get that claim check because they didn’t know about that,” said Linebaugh.

(Editing by Lauren Young and Bernadette Baum)

Houston still rebuilding from 2017 floods as new hurricane season arrives

A new home being constructed six feet above the ground to replace the one destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 is shown in the Meyerland neighborhood of Houston, Texas, May 16, 2018. Photo taken May 16, 2018. REUTERS/Ernest Scheyder

By Liz Hampton and Ernest Scheyder

HOUSTON (Reuters) – In an empty lot where Vincent Shields’ Houston home once stood, he points out properties whose owners were driven out after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region last summer.

“On this street there’s probably less than 30 percent occupancy,” said Shields, who tore down his house after the city ruled damage exceeded half its value and it would have to be elevated before being repaired. He and his wife moved into an apartment and began planning a new, higher home at the same location.

It has been roughly nine months since Hurricane Harvey dumped trillions of gallons of water on the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 68 people and causing an estimated $125 billion in property damage.

Shields and some 25,000 Texas households are still displaced, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Nearly 80,000 homes across Texas had 18 inches of floodwater or more during Harvey.

In Houston, data on people still out of their homes and awaiting repairs are not available from the city. But U.S. Postal Service figures show 11,500 Houston homes became vacant between June 2017 and February 2018.

With the 2018 hurricane season beginning June 1, around 400 Houston households are still living in hotel rooms funded by FEMA, according to the agency’s latest data. Many others remain in temporary housing uncertain about their return home.

According to interviews with residents and neighborhood groups, many owners of flooded homes are still enmeshed in the emotionally fraught and expensive process of deciding whether to repair or elevate, or put their property up for sale.

Shields said the months since Harvey have been tough and fears that another major storm before the region fully recovers would be devastating.

“I can survive this once – health, wealth, physically – but I can’t do it again,” he said.

After three floods since 2014, local officials have added home-building restrictions and rules on rebuilding in flood-prone areas, giving owners of damaged homes costly new factors to consider.

Houston officials this year passed an ordinance requiring certain dwellings to be raised to the 500-year floodplain level plus two feet. Previously, only new homes had to start one foot above the 100-year level.

JACKED UP HOMES

The requirements have forced some owners to jack up existing homes to avoid the next flood.

Houston homes, typically built on slab foundations, can be mechanically raised for an average cost of $100,000 to $300,000 in a months-long project, said Wayne Fairley, a managing director at house elevating company Planet Three Elevation.

Fairley has tripled his workforce since Harvey to meet growing demand, he said. Subcontractors who once handled plumbing and electrical projects for the company now work for him full time.

“There were a lot of contracts signed post-Harvey,” said Fairley. About 5 to 10 percent of his clients are elevating their homes preemptively, and a large portion of his work is in Houston’s Meyerland neighborhood, which was hit by three major floods in recent years.

Nancy Wilson and her husband decided to tear down and build anew rather than spend the estimated $250,000 to raise and then remodel their 1950s home. The new house will be six feet higher than the old one, which got two feet of water during Harvey.

“I’m almost positive it will flood again,” said Wilson, a therapist, who hopes to move back by early next year. In the interim, the family is living a few miles away in a rental property.

“Honestly, I wish we were rebuilding higher,” said Wilson. “Six feet might not be high enough.”

STILL IN LIMBO

Gwen McGlory moved to west Houston’s Cinco Ranch neighborhood a decade ago for its good schools and gated subdivisions. Her house flooded after the city released water from a nearby reservoir to relieve stress on a dam, forcing her to find temporary housing.

Now, most mornings she drops her 14-year-old daughter off long before school has opened and picks her up hours after it has closed because the school system lacks funding to provide transportation from her current location.

“It’s concerning when I’m dropping her off at a dark school,” McGlory said, who is worried the transportation issues will continue into the next school year.

McGlory says she received $33,000 from FEMA after Harvey. Of that, $17,000 was earmarked for home repairs, despite bids from contractors pegging her damages closer to $70,000. The Red Cross worker recently was accepted to a rebuild and repair program run by a community group.

“I’m so overwhelmed. I am working and a single parent with two kids. I’ve never rebuilt a house before,” said McGlory, who had no flood insurance because her house was not in a floodplain.

While McGlory considered selling her property, an investor shortly after the storm offered $100,000 less than what she had paid for it.

Historically, home values in hard-hit areas can fall between 7 and 20 percent immediately after a flood, said Ed Wolff, president of real estate firm Beth Wolff Realtors and governmental affairs chair for the Houston Association of Realtors.

“You see a rebound after 18 to 24 months. As we get further away from the event the memories fade,” said Wolff, who decided to elevate his Meyerland home by almost six feet after Harvey and returned in early May.

The devastation of Harvey has pushed local officials and agencies to expand efforts to mitigate the impact of floods. Last year, county officials authorized $20 million to buy out homes that have routinely flooded.

The Harris County Flood Control District, which established its own buyout program in 1985, recently submitted a grant for state funding to buy homes damaged by Harvey. It has also focused on repairs to drainage infrastructure and removing debris from Harvey that could block waterways before the next hurricane.

Officials across the nation are becoming more aware of the dangers of urban flooding, which is aggravated by unbridled development, said Sam Brody, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences and flooding expert at Texas A&M University in Galveston.

“Harvey exposed these underlying problems that cities such as Houston, Miami and Chicago face,” he said.

Texas is considering sweeping changes, including urging residents to buy flood insurance and raising the level of new homes, he said.

But the measures will take time to implement, Brody said. “There is a good likelihood we are going to get a major storm event before we are even partially recovered from this one.”

(Reporting by Liz Hampton and Ernest Scheyder in Houston and Jon Herskovitz in Austin; Editing by Gary McWilliams and Richard Chang)

Iraqis voting in first election since Islamic State

An Iraqi security member casts his vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

By Ahmed Aboulenein

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – For the first time since driving out Islamic State, Iraqis go to the polls on Saturday in an election that will shape attempts to heal the country’s deep divisions and could shift the regional balance of power.

Iraq’s three main ethnic and religious groups, the majority Shi’ite Arabs and the minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds, have been at loggerheads for decades and the sectarian rifts are as apparent as ever 15 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The election of a new prime minister and parliament also takes place the same week U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, raising tensions between Iraq’s two main allies: Tehran and Washington.

A female security member casts her vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

A female security member casts her vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

Whoever wins the May 12 election will face the challenge of rebuilding Iraq after four years of war with Islamic State, jump-starting a flagging economy, balancing the interests of powerful foreign patrons and maintaining the country’s fragile unity in the face of sectarian and separatist tensions.

“We want security. We have killings, theft, kidnappings. We never had this before. In the past 15 years the people have been destroyed,” said 29-year-old Khalid Radi, a laborer in Baghdad.

Incumbent Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is considered by analysts to be marginally ahead but victory is far from certain.

Even though he announced Islamic State’s defeat during his first four-year term, diffused sectarian tensions enflamed by his predecessor, and maintained Iraq’s unity in the face of a Kurdish independence bid, he faces a tough battle.

THREE-WAY RACE

Abadi has faced criticism about persistent government corruption, tough economic conditions and the austerity measures his cabinet introduced after the slide in global oil prices and to help pay for the fight against Islamic State.

He also cannot rely solely on votes from his community as the majority Shi’ite voter base is unusually split this year. Instead, he is looking to draw upon support from other groups.

Many, but not all, Sunnis see Abadi as a less sectarian alternative to his two main Shi’ite rivals and credit him with liberating their areas from Islamic State.

There’s bad blood between Abadi and the Kurds, however, after Baghdad imposed sanctions on the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region following its failed independence bid last year.

Even if Abadi’s Victory Alliance list wins the most seats he still has to navigate the long-winded and complicated backroom negotiations required to form a coalition government.

His two main challengers are his predecessor Nuri al-Maliki and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia commander Hadi al-Amiri.

Both have a more passionate voter base than Abadi, who is mostly appealing to more pragmatic voters who see him as having better relations with the outside world and a cross-sectarian appeal needed to avoid further bloodshed and attract investment.

Like Abadi, Amiri is running on a platform highlighting the victory against Islamic State, though the militia leader’s narrative is more compelling as he was a frontline commander and is viewed as war hero by many Shi’ites.

Maliki, who was sidelined after eight years in office in 2014 after losing a third of the country to Islamic State, is looking to make a political comeback.

In contrast to the cross-sectarian message of Abadi, Maliki is again posing as Iraq’s Shi’ite champion and is proposing to do away with the country’s unofficial power-sharing model in which all the main parties have cabinet representatives.

COALITION HORSE-TRADING

Ever since Saddam fell in 2003, ending decades of dominance by the Sunni minority, senior government positions have been unofficially split between the country’s main groups.

The post of prime minister has been reserved for a Shi’ite, the speaker for a Sunni, and the ceremonial presidency has gone to a Kurd – with all three being chosen by parliament.

More than 7,000 candidates in 18 provinces, or governorates, are running this year for 329 parliamentary seats.

The Iraqi constitution sets a 90-day deadline for forming a government after the election results are formally announced and the horse-trading can be protracted.

The new government will also have to cope with the simmering tension between the United States and Iran.

As prime minister, Abadi has won praise for his deft juggling of the competing and colliding interests of his two main backers. While his government maintains good relations with Iran, he is seen as balanced and Western diplomats say he would be the easiest candidate to work with.

Maliki, who pushed for U.S. troop withdrawals and Amiri, who speaks fluent Farsi and spent years in exile in Iran during the Saddam Hussein era, are both seen as much closer to Tehran.

DIVISIONS ALL ROUND

The election is also taking place in an atmosphere of division and disillusionment within Iraq’s three main groups.

The Shi’ite vote is split as many are unhappy with their leaders after 15 years in power that have only yielded violence and unemployment and left the country’s infrastructure crumbling.

But if the Shi’ites are split because they have too many leaders, Sunni Arabs are divided because they have none.

Sunnis are at their lowest point yet. Millions languish in displacement camps, many are out of pocket and trying to rebuild destroyed homes in cities reduced to rubble – and they feel collectively branded as Islamic State sympathizers.

The Sunni politicians that have held positions in government are largely discredited and there is no national Sunni leadership or party structure.

Iraq’s Kurds, meanwhile, blame their leaders for gambling away hard-won autonomy in the failed independence referendum and might punish them by voting for non-traditional parties, which in turn could undermine the historically unified Kurdish bloc’s position as kingmakers in parliament.

Voters go to the polls on Saturday, though security forces and Iraqis abroad started voting on Thursday. The electoral commission has said results will come “hours” after polls close.

Islamic State has threatened to attack polling stations amid a recent uptick in security incidents in areas retaken from the militants while many voters simply do not feel the election will bring any change.

“I propose the state just cancel parliament. Shake it and uproot it,” said 27-year-old mechanic Mustafa Tabbar using a popular Iraqi phrase meaning radical change.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; editing by David Clarke)

France pledges support to stabilize post-Islamic State Iraq

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (C) and French Defence Minister Florence Parly (L) meet with Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in Baghdad, Iraq August 26, 2017. REUTERS/Khalid al Mousily

By Maher Chmaytelli

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – France will help reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq as it emerges from the war against Islamic State, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Saturday after talks with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

France is a main partner in the U.S.-led coalition helping Baghdad fight the militants who seized parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The coalition provided key air and ground support to Iraqi forces in the nine-month campaign to take back Mosul, Islamic State’s capital in Iraq.

The city’s fall in July effectively marked the end of the “caliphate” declared by Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over parts of Iraq and Syria. Iraqi forces were close to taking back full control of IS’s northwestern stronghold of Tal Afar on Saturday.

“We are present in the war and we will be present in the peace,” Le Drian told a news conference in Baghdad with French Defence Minister Florence Parly and Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

“Even if our joint combat against Daesh is not finished, it is entering a phase of stabilization, of reconciliation, of reconstruction, a phase of peace,” Le Drian said, calling Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.

France will give a 430 million euro ($513 million) loan to Iraq before the end of the year, a French diplomatic source said.

The French ministers were also due to meet Iraqi Kurdish leaders in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region, whose Peshmerga fighters have played a prominent role in the fight against Islamic State.

France and other western countries are worried that the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) plan to hold an independence referendum next month could ignite fresh conflict with Baghdad and neighboring states with sizeable Kurdish communities, mainly Iran and Turkey.

A diplomat familiar with French policy said Le Drian and Parly will convey to KRG President Massoud Barzani the French position in favor of an autonomous Kurdistan that remains part of the Iraqi state.

The French ministers and Jaafari did not mention the fate of families of French citizens who fought with Islamic State, found in Mosul and other areas taken back from the militants. Several hundreds French nationals are believed to have joined the group.

($1 = 0.8386 euros)

(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; Editing by Andrew Bolton and Helen Popper)

Five years, billions of dollars needed to rebuild Mosul: officials

Iraqis workers repair sewage line in eastern Mosul, Iraq May 2, 2017. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Ahmed Aboulenein

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Mosul’s wrecked roads, bridges and broader economy will take at least five years to repair and need billions of dollars of development that Iraq’s government will struggle to afford, officials returning to the battle-scarred city said.

The airport, railway station and university were all destroyed in the long fight to dislodge Islamic State militants from their main Iraqi stronghold.

Iraqi government forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition have now retaken the eastern half of the city – letting regional councillors return for the first time in 2-1/2 years to survey the damage.

“After Mosul is fully liberated, we need a working plan to restore things to the way they were before 2014 when Islamic State took over,” Noureldin Qablan, deputy chairman of the council covering the surrounding Nineveh province, told Reuters.

He sat back in his office in the heart of Mosul, the province’s regional capital, an unremarkable building apart from its new concrete fortifications and the teams of armed guards surrounding it.

A gun lay on his desk, next to his phone and piles of paperwork.

Outside, bustling markets have sprung back into life on the eastern banks of the Tigris river. Over on the other side of the river, Islamic State fighters are holed in, defending the densely-populated Old City with snipers and suicide bombers.

At the heart of their territory sits the medieval Grand al-Nuri Mosque and its famous leaning minaret, where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate in July 2014. Experts fear the fragile brick structure could still succumb to the fighting raging around it.

Iraq’s army has said it expects to expel Islamic State from the rest of the city by May.

“WE ARE NOT GETTING ENOUGH SUPPORT”

The 34 Nineveh councillors, who have been meeting in other cities during the occupation, have already started drawing up plans to rebuild Mosul, though they are still were not sure where the money will come from, said Qablan.

For the first six months, local authorities would focus on restoring security, water, electricity and fuel, and on the return of those displaced by the war.

Under the plan, there would then be a two-year period of reconstruction and the initiation of a reconciliation process followed by 30 months focused on attracting investment and developing the economy.

Some of the early repair work could cost as little as $5,000 a house, Qablan said.

But even that would strain budgets that he said were under-funded by the central government in Baghdad.

“Honestly, we are not getting enough support. What has been allocated to Nineveh in 2017 was 52 billion Iraqi dinars ($44.5 million) which is a very small sum for a province this size,” Qablan said.

“In 2013 we were allocated 738 billion dinars, yet after all this destruction we get just 52. It is very hard to reach our goals with this sum, so we are counting on foreign grants.”

Council officials are in talks with the United Nations, international aid groups and friendly states, he said. Italy was already helping rebuild a hospital.

Outside on the eastern side of the river, foreign investment was already flowing back in, in the form of market stalls heaving with Turkish and Iranian fruit and vegetables, replacing the less plentiful Syrian produce that had dominated under Islamic State.

Tobacco shops, banned by the ultra-hardline Sunni Muslim group, have reopened.

Dozens of men sipped coffee or tea inside The Golden Cafe, looking at their phones and surfing the web – activities that Islamic State had limited to monitored internet centers.

“We are happy and comfortable. Life is good,” said one customer Emad, smoking hookah outside. “I feel out of this world.”

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Maher Chmaytelli and Andrew Heavens)