With housing scarce and recovery dollars flowing, Champagne and Fearn are now looking at a hot housing market. “Everything that we've got in subdivisions has been sold out. We're still in construction, but it's all sold,” says Fearn. Costs are running about 35 percent above pre-Katrina levels, reports Fearn, but his subcontractor relationships are all intact. “We don't take the attitude that we're whupped,” he says. “We take the attitude, ‘Let's move on.' ”
LITTLE CHANGE: A June photo snapped by a volunteer shows a house in St. Bernard Parish sitting atop a crushed truck, exactly where floodwaters left it nearly a year before. Of some 26,000 houses in the parish ruined by floodwaters, most still await gutting or demolition.