Greater New Orleans and Louisiana are experiencing a well-founded uptick in optimism these days.
For the first time in almost a decade, Louisiana’s population posted a year-over-year increase, and Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration’s laser focus on growing the state’s economy has netted an unprecedented $76 “billion with a ‘b’” of announced investments.
Here at home, New Orleans is safer than it’s been at any other point in my lifetime, and probably uncoincidentally, the state recently awarded Orleans Parish’s public school system the same letter grade it accorded the long-respected St. Tammany Parish system.
Even within an otherwise sobering account in January by The Times-Picayune of former Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s second term, it was noted that median household income in Orleans Parish soared by approximately $16,000 over the course of her eight years in office.
Last, but not least, my homeowner’s insurance is affordable again.
Like thousands of other New Orleanians, my ability to remain a homeowner has been sorely tested over the past four years. From 2021 to 2024, my annual homeowner’s premium almost quadrupled, from around $3,000 to over $11,000. I had just stopped patting myself on the back for refinancing at a historically low interest rate when my monthly mortgage note, in two breathtaking leaps, more than doubled.
In response, both state policymakers and I took steps. I installed a fortified roof, adjusted my coverage to a level insuring only the depreciated value of my house — which at present isn’t much less than its replacement cost — and made plans to conduct a wind survey.
Meanwhile, the legislature passed lawsuit reforms to bring Louisiana more in line with what prevails in neighboring states like Mississippi and Alabama. The requirement that my wind and hail insurer, Louisiana Citizens, charge a 10% premium over the market price was also suspended.
As a result, my annual homeowner’s premium has been almost halved from its peak, and my mortgage note has settled at just under $500 more than it was at the end of 2021. I am fortunate; this I can shoulder. However, I know I’m not alone in asking myself if I should continue to do so going forward. The best way to answer this question, I believe, is to assess what’s being done to make insuring risk in Greater New Orleans feasible into the future.
Whether or not we believe in anthropogenic climate change, insurance companies do — and they’re pricing their policies accordingly. But they don’t know the full story.
So, I am encouraged by the efforts of Commissioner of Insurance Tim Temple, who has been diligently educating London-based underwriters on our region’s unique risk mitigators, like the $14 billion Hurricane Storm Damage Risk Reduction System — something that coastal cities like Tampa, Miami, Boston and Charleston, South Carolina, lack. Kudos are also due to GNO, Inc., which has refuted the deeply flawed claims of New York City-based First Street’s report The Resilience Spread, published late last year, which argued that New Orleans will be more vulnerable to climate change than cities like Mogadishu and Beirut.
At a time when insurers are seeking objective, rigorous, independent analysis to aid them in pricing their policies — climate change having rendered obsolete their former reliance on historical loss rates — the need is greater than ever for us to explain, over and over, to insurers, to FEMA, to Congress, to potential private investors and new residents, and even to ourselves the several advantages Greater New Orleans possesses in this age of sea level rise and extreme weather.
Is Greater New Orleans mostly or entirely below sea level? No. Are we a coastal city? No. Do cities that are actually located on the coast possess the protection against storm surge that we do? No. Are there other American cities capable of harnessing the massive sediment load of the world’s fourth-longest river to build new land and keep ahead of sea level rise? No. Is moving elsewhere our only credible response to mounting climate threats? No.
Have we started to build infrastructure that will allow us to “live with water” and avoid flooding during extreme rain events? Yes. Will these investments slow the rate of subsidence that degrades our streets and threatens our buildings’ foundations? Yes. Are we hardening our electrical grid to arrive at a place where power is restored much faster in the wake of storms? Yes. Are we constructing “community lighthouses” and installing solar panels, batteries and generators in our homes to bridge the “no power” gap? Yes.
Should we be heartened instead of hopeless? Yes.Is there still much more to be done? Yes.
Frank Rabalais is a director and historic preservation specialist at Crescent Growth Capital.
