The humidity is immediately apparent. So, too, are the mounds of mangled drywall, stud walls, carpets, and furniture. Homes turned inside-out, their contents haphazardly arrayed on front lawns across entire neighborhoods. And the signs. Everywhere signs.
“Dry Out Experts.”
“Free Estimates.”
“Will Beat Any Price.”
“Call Now.”
But no people. These communities are empty.
This is Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 7, 2016.
Nigh a month after a massive two-day monsoon dumped 19 to 31 inches of rain on the region around this city, BUILDER traveled to Baton Rouge to meet with local builders, officials, and homeowners to talk to them about their cities and towns, their businesses, their families, their people.
One of the first topics to come up were those signs.
“There’s a sign every 4 feet,” says Todd Waguespack, managing partner at Level Homes, a Baton Rouge-based builder that ranked No. 118 on the most recent Builder 100/Next 100 list. He shakes his head. “It’s all guys from out of town.”
“You see the best and worst in people in a situation like this, unfortunately,” adds Ryan Engquist, Level’s division president in Baton Rouge.
It was for this reason, among many others, that local builders in the Baton Rouge area banded together to ensure that they had a say in redevelopment and to warn the population to beware of scammers.
The Louisiana Home Builders Association (LHBA) created a task force to coordinate efforts with local, state, and federal organizations. It selected Ken Jones, graduate master builder at Jones Design/Builders and a member of the State Licensing Board for Contractors, as its spokesman.
“The people that are going to be taxed with actually pulling this recovery together don’t even get invited to the meeting,” Jones says of past recovery efforts. “So being an informational source would give us a place at the table. If somebody wants to put together a federal grant on how to recover 156,000 homes, well, they better have some builders in the room because a lot of bureaucrats have never even done a home remodeling job and now you have to do it, under adverse conditions, 156,000 times.”
The job of monitoring contractors belongs to the State Licensing Board for Contractors, which Michael McDuff oversees as executive director. In the first few weeks after the flood, contractor license applications jumped about 300%, McDuff says, and that was expected to continue into the fall.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, the state issued conditional licenses to contractors that lacked them. That won’t be happening this time. While the idea of getting more people in the area to help rebuild was good 11 years ago, McDuff says, its long-term effect was not.
“We’re not waving any requirements for licensure,” he says emphatically. “We’re not opening up those gates because our point is we’ve got the [necessary] numbers of capable contractors, but we will not keep contractors from Louisiana that want to come in and do work, as long as they’re legal, legitimate, and playing by the same rules as everybody else.”
Often, flood victims are so focused on getting back in their homes that they don’t ask the right questions of their new contractor—like if he or she is licensed, for one.
“They’re not so much concerned about the license and the regulation, they want the cheapest,” McDuff says. “Our message is sometimes the cheapest price isn’t always the best thing, and to be careful. If you’re not doing business with a licensed, regulated contractor, you’re at risk.”
Many of the signs in the areas hit by the flood tout mold remediation; some offer a certificate proving a home is mold-free. The trouble with that is “the State of Louisiana recognizes no person authorized to issue a mold-free certificate,” says Jones, who served as BUILDER’s tour guide.
The Flood
In the middle of a summer week, Jr. Shelton, mayor of Central, La., and his neighbors got word to expect heavy rainfall in the coming days. “It’s August in Louisiana,” he recalls thinking to himself. “Rain is to be expected.
Central, part of the East Baton Rouge Parish, is a few miles northwest of the state’s capital and is bordered on three sides by two rivers—the Amite and the Comite. Shelton, a tall man whose presence is quickly noted in any room, took a call early on Friday, Aug. 12 from his city’s fire chief. The chief needed him at the fire station. “We’re gonna be in trouble,” the chief said. He was right.
Of the city’s 11,000 residential structures, Shelton says about 9,000 were affected.
Roughly 30 miles south of Central, Ric Webre, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for Ascension Parish, was in his office in Gonzales, La., closely monitoring the levels of nearby rivers and watersheds. When an alarm went off alerting Webre and his staff that the Amite was a foot above historic levels in the Port Vincent neighborhood, he notified the parish’s drainage director. From there, the river rose higher, eventually to 17.5 feet, roughly 3 feet above the historic level set more than 30 years ago—the measurement for which the parish’s levee and pump system was built to handle.
As Webre monitored the gauges, the Amite converged with the Bayou Manchac river system, triggering a domino effect of inundation for communities south of the waterways. Webre took to the sky to assess the situation and saw that the water overtopped the parish’s lower-ridge levy. “It looked like it had whitecaps,” he says of the flowing water.
More than 15,000 homes and businesses in Ascension Parish flooded.
In late September, Congress appropriated $500 million in flood aid, most of which was earmarked for Louisiana. A few weeks prior, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, in a letter to President Barack Obama, said more than 150,000 households in the state were expected to apply for individual assistance and more than 80% of those were outside the 100-year flood plain and do not have flood insurance. Total estimated losses from the flooding, not including public infrastructure, exceeds $8.7 billion.
Establishing Trust
At Level Homes, the flood watch was on. Luckily, the firm’s active construction sites all stayed above water. Three sites at which Level bought finished lots and built homes did flood.
The company will gut and renovate more than 85 homes in the area, but it stopped adding clients to its list after a couple of weeks. “It’s not what we do,” says Waguespack.
“It was important to us to maintain our core business, which is keeping the new construction going,” explains David Ray, director of land development for Level. “The renovation side of things; we’re trying to use an outside labor force that we weren’t using before so as not to slow down new construction.”
Both Level and Baton Rouge–based DSLD Homes, No.24 on this year’s Builder 100, are primarily focusing on new-home construction, and each says they should hit their delivery targets. CEO Saun Sullivan says DSLD probably lost 50 deliveries this year but was on track to beat its target before the flood. It expects to close about 2,450 homes in 2016, 750 of which are in Baton Rouge. Level should deliver 385 homes this year, 220 of them in Baton Rouge.
DSLD was not as lucky as Level during the flood. Its offices in Denham Springs, La., were completely flooded, but less than a month later a rebuild was underway.
At Lakes of Meadowbrook, a DSLD-built community nearby, the rebuild process hadn’t started yet. As Sullivan drives his SUV through its streets, the only signs of activity are a few residents dumping their home’s contents on the lawn. One man, in a surprisingly chipper mood, is filing a police report after chasing away looters. He’s not exactly sure why he’s doing this. “What are they gonna take?” he quips.
On the renovation side, Ray notes that Level is setting a fair price to customers that, he says, is well below what many contractors are quoting. “We live in the community, grew in the community, the last thing we need to do is ruin our reputation,” he says. “We’re looking to help people. We know what the real price should be.”
Unfortunately, there are many builders and contractors who do not take the same approach and instead look to take advantage of desperate people in uncertain times.
“They’re so darn creative,” says Shelton, scowling. In addition to phone scams soliciting Social Security numbers or people posing as Federal Emergency Management Agency employees, there are contractors who swoop into affected areas and charge astronomical prices for their labor.
To spread the word about mold certificate scams, among others, as well as to disseminate credible information to its members and the public, the LHBA is organizing community meetings and posting verified information sources on its Facebook page.
On Sept. 7, BUILDER gathered with members of the LHBA and Baton Rouge–based Capital Region Builders Association. LHBA president Jim Fine, sporting his LHBA polo, traveled four hours from Shreveport, La., to attend. After a meal of shrimp po’boys, eight Capital Region Builders Association and LHBA members said that although they escaped flood damage in their own homes, their lives have changed, too.
Phil Hoffman, a quick-witted New Orleans builder who says he worked seven days a week for 18 months after Katrina, is heading the new LHBA task force. Hoffman knows firsthand the pressure builders are put under after a natural disaster. “These people wouldn’t be remodeling if this didn’t happen,” he says. “They’re unwilling participants under a stressful situation.”
Robert Carroll, owner of Carroll Construction in Zachary, La., says he’ll be focused on nothing but flood repairs for the foreseeable future. “We’re just going to be repairing homes to [pay] bills,” he says. “That’s what the new normal is.”
As builders, Carroll adds, there’s an unspoken responsibility to get people back in their homes. “How do you tell somebody, or a family, ‘I can’t help you?” he asks. Carol Smith, president of Harvey Smith Construction in Baton Rouge, responds, “I can’t.”
When a homeowner finally secures a licensed builder or contractor, “It’s like having a glass of cold water in the desert,” says Hoffman.
Building Back
As Greg and DeEtte Brouillette stand in their moldering one-story home in Gonzales, La., three weeks after 15 inches of water breached their walls and stayed for two weeks before receding, they wonder when they’ll get back in their home of 15 years.
The couple thought they were in the clear after no water approached their home during the initial weekend surge. As the Brouillettes were busy helping friends and other community members, the water kept rising, finally reaching their home five days after the storm first hit.
Three weeks after water inundated their home, BUILDER toured its skeleton. Out the back door, a sign that reads “Bless This Home” hangs facing the backyard, and in that backyard is a pool of green, stagnant water with nowhere to go.
The Brouillettes have two children—one in college at Louisiana State University, and one married with a home nearby that did not flood, in which they’re currently living. Their home is in a flood zone and they have flood insurance, but in September, the Brouillettes were waiting on word from Ascension Parish, the local municipality, to see if they would have to elevate the home to get a permit to renovate. Homeowners in a flood zone who sustain damage that equates to more than 50% of their home’s assessed value are required to elevate in Ascension.
Greg Brouillette was set to start the rebuild process right away, but he heard Jones give an interview on behalf of the LHBA in which he urged flood victims to be patient and not pour any insurance or FEMA funds into their homes before all the information comes out.
“We have more than 50% damage,” Greg says acceptingly. “I don’t know what to do, honestly. I wish somebody had an answer.”
Uncertainty reigned around Baton Rouge at the time. Still though, most of the people BUILDER encountered seemed optimistic given the circumstances. Many say the recovery will take years, but also note that they are taking things one day at a time.
“Are they willing to take the chance to build back at the level that they were and not flood again, or are they willing to build someplace else in another city where this could still happen to them?” asks Shelton, Central’s mayor, who has worked with FEMA to reduce the number of homeowners who would be required to elevate their homes. “I think 99% will decide to build here.”
And although Smith is working longer hours at Harvey Smith Construction, she is taking the same approach many of her neighbors did after the flood.
“Nobody was crying and wallowing in self-pity, it was just put one foot in front of the other and gut,” she says.
“Louisianans are resilient folk,” says Jones.
So, too, are the state’s home builders.
