I can’t speak for other places, but in New Orleans most houses have been raised since Katrina. As a matter of fact, insurance companies won’t touch you if you have been in a flooded area and haven’t raised your home. There are entire regions outside of the levee protection and flood walls that are uninsured because they either aren’t raised, or are in such a bad spot insurers won’t touch them. So yes, many homes that experienced flooding in the last have been raised.

Regarding some of the buildings and older properties that have been destroyed (theres a picture circulating of an old building that Louis Armstrong used to work at that toppled over), those buildings can’t be raised. They should, but the historical district doesn’t want them altered from their natural state. They are asking for problems by enforcing that, but it is what it is, and I’m not crying over it. We love our history in New Orleans. From our culture to our historical sites, we want to preserve them as much as possible, sadly, in that process stupid stuff like the aforementioned happens and things fall apart. Cest la vie.

I kind of figured that was the case. It is hard to raise a 150 yro historical building. I am assuming most of the flood pictures are either in historical districts or poor areas of the city.

I am glad to hear that they making new structures raised. Of course we won't see those pictures because there is no damage and doesn't "make" the photo op.

Yeah, nobody writes stories about houses that aren’t on fire.

The one thing I will tell you though is that (similar to all the developing going on here in Houston), with all the development of levees and flood walls, that water has to go somewhere, and since we are protecting areas that were constantly being flooded the water is going to new areas. So you have areas now flooding that hadn’t flooded before. It’s a real mess.

The people who originally settled New Orleans settled in the French Quarter because that was the only place that wasn’t swamp area (New Orleans is predominantly built on swamp). Look up any map of New Orleans pre 1800, and put it up next to a map of places that flooded during Katrina, and you will see that only the areas developed post 1800 are the ones that flooded. It’s pretty wild.
The issue now is what to do about electricity. I’m not sure what you have in your area (monopoly or open competition), but here in New Orleans the Company (Entergy) is a regulated monopoly, and their transformers went down, so now the city has to a) rebuild or fix transformers and b) price out the value of putting lines underground (it’s not cheap). So those costs will roll downhill, and if citizens wants sustainable power (outside of AE) they will have to pony up the cash. We have powerlines underground in the French Quarter, but elsewhere it’s too expensive to justify the cost.