Risky Business
Trying to find a great, more permanent place for Adrianne and I to live in New Orleans is proving to be very difficult. New Orleans is a unique place. Sometimes, the reasons for that are wonderful. Sometimes, they can be frustrating.
The living situation here in New Orleans is vastly different that the one in Atlanta. The main reason is the fact that we are still dealing with post-Katrina New Orleans. Yes, a lot of progress has been made and a lot of the city is alive and kicking. But mixed in with all the positivity are the corpses of homes and businesses that are still unoccupied, boarded with plywood and spray painted by the National Guard. You've all seen the symbols, right? Here is a photo of what I mean:
After Katrina, when the city was evacuated, the National Guard literally went house by house and checked for survivors. The date of the search is at the top of the X. I am pretty sure the CBP stands for the National Guard unit that searched the house, but please correct me if I am wrong. The 0 at the bottom of the X stands for the number of bodies found in the house. It's pretty eerie. Granted, 98% of the symbols have a 0 at the bottom but knowing there is the potential to see a 1 (or a 3) is unnerving. The point of this information is that with all of these unoccupied homes, you have a what can be called a "lack of desirable inventory". In addition to a lack of inventory, you have areas where the bare minimum has been completed in order to restore occupancy. Someone moved back into their house. Yippee! But the street looks like Kosovo and there are seven other houses around it that need to be destroyed. I saw a FOR RENT sign yesterday and pulled down a side street to check it out. Yes, there was a nice home available and it was attractive. The rest of the street made me think that if I waited for the sun to go down, zombies would come pouring out of the buildings looking for human flesh. It can be creepy and I am rambling.
We all understand simple economics. What happens when you have very little inventory and a lot of people who need it? If you guessed high prices then you're a winner! The amount of money people are asking for rent here is much, much higher than we would have ever paid in Atlanta. This is also not relative economics because of the city's neighborhoods and their design. It would be easy to take a deep breath and say, "OK, we're going to pay a lot more but live in a nice place in a nice area." Any resident of New Orleans will tell you (it's almost a rehearsed speech) that when you find a nice place to live, there is no guarantee you will have great neighbors. You can literally see a $5 million mansion with rundown houses occupied by shady people just one block away. And even if you have great neighbors on either side, you might walk eight houses down the street while walking your dog, make a right, walk another five or six houses and suddenly feel very vulnerable and a little scared. There just isn't any rhyme or reason to the living situation here. If we wanted to get crazy ridiculous, we could find a place that was literally three times the cost of our mortgage in Atlanta and live safely and comfortable. We would also learn to live off of bread and water and probably not enjoy our new life here very much. It's complicated.
For those of you reading this that care about our safety and well being, it would be easy to read this post and be worried for us. Please don't be worried and I will tell you why.
Back in middle school, our family was heavily invested in orthodontics for me and my sister. I had braces and head gear and retainers and rubber bands and all this crazy stuff. For an airhead 13 year old kid, it was all very confusing and the responsibility that came with it was beyond my grasp. I mean, there were times when I missed the bus back in seventh grade because I could not find my shoes. We're talking like 12 or 13 times. I just could not keep up with anything. So anyway, one time we were at this restaurant and it was the kind of restaurant where your food was on a plastic tray. I took my $250 retainer out of my mouth to eat, ate my meal and then promptly threw my food scraps, napkin and $250 retainer into the trash. The family drove home and I announced what I had done right as we pulled into the driveway. Well, $250 was a lot of money (and still is) so my parents drove back to that restaurant and tried to ask about the retainer. The restaurant people probably pointed to the garbage cans and shrugged. My parents ended up digging through disgusting restaurant trash for about an hour trying to correct my mistake. And guess what? They found that retainer and everything was okay. It was nasty but they worked through it together and they persevered. And guess what? Adrianne and I will persevere, find a great place to live and everything will be okay. I hope my strange analogy makes sense for what we are dealing with here in New Orleans. We're going to have to dig and we're going to have to sort through some trash but we're going to find a great place and we're going to love it here.
This city has a hundred nicknames and they are all applicable. After talking to people about Katrina and what has been happening here since 2005, I have another nickname. The City of Perseverance. This place went through hell and there are some places that are still smoldering, but people are smiling and music is playing and birds are chirping. It's going to be okay. I think the lifelong residents of New Orleans have had to tell themselves that more than a lot of Americans. I live here now. Adrianne will live here soon. We will need to add that phrase to our repertoire.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment