Houston Texas Real Estate Daily

Freddie Mac is suspending foreclosure sales in federally declared disaster areas hit by Hurricane Ike, including Houston.

The suspension includes properties with Freddie Mac-owned mortgages in Texas and Louisiana.

Hurricane damage has made it difficult for servicers to get information or give help to homeowners, according to the company.

A search on Freddie Mac’s HomeSteps site yielded 77 homes for sale in Harris County.

The McLean, Va.-based company is one of the nation’s largest investors in residential mortgages.

The suspension will run through Dec. 31, the company said, and includes mortgages in default prior to the hurricane.

Credits: Biz Journals

TEXAS NEEDS at least one more national research university, according to Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas-Austin, one of only two such tier one public higher education entities in the state.

Why not Texas Tech as the third tier-one school?

To qualify as tier one, a school needs to spend $100 million on research. Texas Tech needs $49 million to reach that threshold.

Texas A&M is the other tier-one public university. In contrast, California has nine national research universities, New York has eight.

After initial state contributions to the university as seed money, additional funding is drawn from federal and private grants.

Also, investment in research and development yields a 20 to 30 percent rate of return to the state in terms of jobs and economic stimulus, according to The Texas Legislative Study Group, a public policy group chaired by state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston.

An investment of $188 million in state funds could bring four schools to tier-one status (Texas Tech, the University of Houston, the University of Texas-Dallas and the University of Texas-El Paso). An investment of $405 million could yield seven additional tier-one schools in Texas, bringing the total to nine.

Given a choice, students prefer to attend a university with a top-tier reputation, noted the LSG report. Instead of taking steps to curtail the number of students who are admitted to top-tier universities, the state should be taking steps to expand the number of top-tier universities, according to recommendations by Rep. Coleman’s study group.

We are a rapidly growing state, and UT-Austin, A&M and Rice (a private tier one school) can’t perform all the needed research, and they can’t begin to accommodate all our young people who want to attend a national research university, as Mr. Powers points out.

Some 10,000 high school graduates are leaving Texas each year to attend doctoral degree-granting universities elsewhere, while only about 4,000 students from other states come to Texas to enroll at similar institutions, he says. “That’s a potential brain drain of about 6,000 of our best and brightest students.”

If the head Longhorn gets the concept, shouldn’t everyone else?

Editorials represent the opinion of The Avalanche-Journal Editorial Board, which consists of Publisher Stephen A. Beasley, Editor Terry Greenberg, Editorial Page Editor Joe Hughes, editorial writer Joe Gulick, in addition to input provided by community advisory board members Adrienne Cozart, Anna Sterling and Irasema Velasquez.

Credits: Lub Bock Online

The tight credit market for new real estate projects isn’t stopping Hansen Partners from shopping a new office building to prospective tenants.

“If we get that lead tenant, we can probably get it off the ground,” said Ryan Haley of Montrose-based Hansen Partners. “But no question, it’s more difficult than it has been in the last couple of years.”

Haley said the company is talking with a few regional banks to finance the nine-story, 85,000-square-foot structure at the northeast corner of Montrose Boulevard and the Southwest Freeway. Houston-based Archimage designed the building, which will sit on 35,000 square feet in the 4500 block of Montrose Boulevard.

While many large banks have redlined real estate lending after being hit by huge losses from defaulting borrowers, the regional players have been less affected.

“They’re the ones that know the market and that the fundamentals of Houston are really strong,” Haley said.

Still, those that are lending now require higher levels of preleasing and more equity from developers.

The company said it may need to have as much as 40 percent of the building preleased before it can get the money to build it.

Including land, the project’s cost will run about $20 million, partner John Andell estimated.

The company’s other buildings were all built on spec — or without any preleasing.

“This is a new environment,” Andell said.

The proposed building would be the company’s sixth in its Campanile complex.

The development includes properties on both sides of Montrose north of Richmond.

The office buildings house mostly small tenants of 2,000 square feet or less.

“Our market here is really strong,” Andell said.

“We’re out of space,” he added.

Hansen Partners is the same developer that sold the Montrose retail center that houses the Black Labrador Pub to the University of St. Thomas last year.

At the time, the university said it bought the property for future expansion, and there were no immediate plans for it. The acquisition also included two office buildings and a parking garage.

St. Thomas won’t begin using the properties for another 15 or 20 years, Andell said. Hansen Partners still manages the portfolio.

Electricity — for free

Buy a new house from Lanterra Homes and you can run your hair dryer as long as you like — at least for the first year.

The Houston builder is offering a year of free electricity to buyers at The Gillespie, a gated patio home development east of downtown.

It’s the latest gimmick being thrown at prospective home buyers shopping in today’s slumping housing market.

Area home sales have fallen each of the past 12 months, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.

The U.S. financial crisis is expected to prolong the trend.

At any rate, the promotion is timely.

Houstonians may be facing higher electric bills in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

The average monthly electric bill in Houston is already at $332, the builder said, citing Whitefence.com.

The perk is being offered to anyone who buys a Lanterra home before Dec. 31. It’s limited to a $4,000 stipend that’s paid to the buyer at closing.

On top of the free electricity, the builder is also offering price specials plus $5,500 toward closing costs when the buyer uses its preferred lender.

Three-bedroom patio homes in The Gillespie start in the $160,000s. The model home park is at 3204 Cline.

Dallas company’s move

The slowdown in home building is allowing a Dallas shopping center developer to make inroads into the Houston market.

Hopkins Commercial Real Estate has purchased 56 acres at the southeast corner of Kuykendahl and Spring Stuebner in the path of the future Grand Parkway.

The company bought more than half of the north Harris County tract from a developer that scrapped plans to build a residential development there.

“Some of these locations, especially in the Harris County area, had been planned for homes. But they can still work for retail or other uses,” said Steve Gregory, president of Hopkins.

The company said it will develop a retail center on the land, but it could take several years.

The slowing economy and tight lending environment could delay things.

“You’re definitely seeing a lot of pushback from retailers,” Gregory said. “But in Texas, we’re still seeing very good things — good job growth, good relocations and solid sales from retailers.”

Credits: Chron

Power outages that darkened parts of Houston for more than two weeks after Hurricane Ike were more than just an inconvenience. For many homeowners and business owners, they were also a significant financial burden.

The cost of the outages could surpass $6 billion once the bills are tallied for lost economic activity, repairs to electricity infrastructure and residential losses like spoiled food in refrigerators, according to a rough Houston Chronicle estimate based on figures from power companies and other sources.

The estimate is unscientific and does not account for insurance money that eventually may help recover some of the losses or the surge in spending that often follows a hurricane, spurred by delayed purchases or property repairs.

Given such variables, some experts and insurers say it is impossible to calculate the cost of a widespread power failure. It is also why these costs often fall through the cracks in official estimates of a storm’s economic impact.

But there is consensus on one point — that even a temporary interruption in electricity service in the nation’s fourth-largest city can have sweeping economic consequences.

“All the time the cost of these kinds of disruptions are going up because our society is more and more dependent on electricity,” said Peter Hartley, an economics professor at Rice University.

Ike, which hit the Texas coast Sept. 13, initially knocked out power to more than 2 million homes and businesses in the Houston area.

A week later, about half of those customers were still in the dark. At the 10-day mark, it dropped to roughly half a million.

It wasn’t until late last week that the restoration was essentially done.

The economic activity lost to power outages — from closing down factories, stores and other businesses — was about $5.1 billion, said Ignacio San Martin, an economist in The Woodlands with Madrid, Spain-based BBVA, a global financial services giant.

He came up with the rough estimate — more than one-quarter of what he estimates was Ike’s total $19.1 billion economic impact on Texas — by assuming a total loss of productivity for five days in metro Houston, an area that includes 5.6 million residents.

Apart from that, San Martin estimated, Houston-area households likely spent $250 million more just to replace food spoiled in refrigerators during the blackouts. To make the estimate, he calculated that Houston’s 2.08 million households, each with an average of just under three people, spent about $120 apiece to restock refrigerators.

Yet that still may be only part of Ike’s bill to homeowners.

Doubting reimbursement

Ted Imperato, 37, a lawyer, said his family of five racked up nearly $1,000 in out-of-pocket costs when his Kingwood home lost power for 14 days. The costs include groceries, gasoline to power a generator and many trips to restaurants, he said.

“The kids just got sick of eating hot dogs on the grill and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he said.

Though some insurance policies reimburse property owners for such expenses, others do not. Imperato is not optimistic he will be repaid.

“I’m probably going to eat it,” he said.

Whether business owners are reimbursed for blackout-related costs also depends on the policies they hold, which can be murky.

Joni, a women’s clothing store near Rice University, has business interruption insurance coverage but won’t recover anything from 10 days of lost sales while the power was out, owner Joan Ryman said.

Though sales will be off 80 percent this month, the insurance only applies if her property suffers physical damage, she said.

Two weeks without power also cut into sales for Kegg’s Candy in Meyerland, said manager Stephanie Biffle. Worse still, it put the store behind schedule.

“We were really hoping to ramp up production for the holidays, getting Halloween candies made and ordering boxes and ribbons and other dry goods that we couldn’t get shipments of,” Biffle said, “so our production is delayed by two weeks.”

Employees are working extra hours to make up for the lost time, she said.

Large companies also took hits because of the power failure.

Houston’s U.S. Physical Therapy told investors last week that 40 of its 365 physical therapy clinics had been affected by Hurricane Ike, reducing patient visits and costing $180,000 in lost revenue.

“This is not reimbursable stuff for us,” said Larry McAfee, chief financial officer, who attributed most of the impact to extended power outages.

A mixed bag for refineries

Meantime, Houston-based oil giant ConocoPhillips warned investors that third-quarter earnings could be affected by hurricane-related downtime at its Gulf Coast refineries.

But interruptions at oil refineries underscore why calculating the cost of power outages can be so difficult.

More than a dozen refineries shut down ahead of the storm, and several were delayed in restarting because of a lack of power. Though the cost of the lost fuel production was surely massive, the downtime also tightened supplies nationwide, boosting the price of fuel higher than it would have been without a hurricane. The price increase might help offset the negative effects of the lost production.

Because power-specific calculations are so slippery, companies that estimate the costs of storm damage tend to focus on property damage from high winds and flooding and other concrete metrics.

Equecat, a risk-modeling firm in Oakland, Calif., said onshore losses from Ike could reach $8 billion to $12 billion, the bulk of which pertains to property damage. But the firm has been re-examining its storm-modeling process after Ike.

“We didn’t expect as deep a power outage,” said Tom Lenard, a senior vice president with Equecat.

CenterPoint and Entergy have estimated their combined costs to repair power infrastructure damaged by Ike likely will top $1 billion.

Yet it may be a while before other economic ripple effects of the power outage are fully known.

Data falls behind

Sales tax revenue, which slipped after Hurricane Rita in 2005 but rebounded shortly thereafter, does not yet reflect a decline because of a two-month lag in the data, officials with the Texas Comptroller’s Office said.

Employment statistics, too, are likely to fall before recovering, said Bill Gilmer, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

One early measure came last week.

A post-storm decline in water usage, partly because of power outages at wells that require electricity, put the city of Houston $4 million short of its $62 million projection for water fee collections in September, said Alvin Wright, spokesman for the city’s public works department. Higher-than-expected water usage earlier this summer should help offset the loss, he said.

But nothing will offset all the costs that many homes and businesses incurred when the storm left them in the dark.

Credits: Chron

Tracie Staten has everything she needs to buy a house: a down payment, great credit and a job. But with the nation’s economy in turmoil, she lacks the one thing required to move forward — confidence.

“I don’t want to get this house and all of a sudden things go downhill in our economy,” said Staten, a 25-year-old insurance adjuster. “I don’t know what the next few months will hold.”

The government’s struggle to reach an agreement on a $700 billion bailout package, a tightening credit market and lingering effects of Hurricane Ike are adding to the woes of Houston’s already softening real estate market.

“Right now there’s a general pervasive attitude that everything is going down: ‘I don’t want to buy a home now because prices may go down. I don’t want to invest my money because all my friends just lost thousands of dollars in their 401(k) yesterday,’ ” said Jim Gaines, an economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

Houston-area home sales have fallen each of the past 12 months, making their biggest drop in August when they plunged 20 percent. September figures are still being tallied.

Housing experts said the failure of Congress to complete a financial bailout has only worsened the problem.

Sellers have begun pulling homes off the market as they wonder if it is the right time to sell, said Steve Barnes, president and chief operating officer for the Houston region of Coldwell Banker United, Realtors.

Though perceptions about the economy can be blamed for part of it, some is hurricane-related. Insurance companies are requiring buyers to have homes reappraised, reinspected and recertified.

“With Hurricane Ike, coupled with no bailout, consumer confidence has got to be at an all-time low,” Barnes said.

Despite the uncertainty, Houston could be in a better position to weather the storm.

The area housing market has outperformed many others because of energy-related job growth. While sales have been slipping, inventory hasn’t gotten out of whack, and prices have remained stable.

That’s not to say the credit crunch hasn’t affected Houstonians. For months, buyers have been subject to tougher lending standards from banks burned by defaulting borrowers.

Builders have scaled back, too, and some are having a hard time getting loans themselves.

There’s little or no money available for land development loans, also known as “ADC loans,” which stands for acquisition, development and construction, Gaines said.

For those who sell real estate for a living, volumes are down — hurting some more than others.

“Our business has just fallen off a cliff,” said Shad Bogany of ERA Bogany Properties. “We were doing OK until the bailout. It’s almost like the phones have stopped ringing.”

Though buyers are skittish and lenders more cautious, it hasn’t gotten so bad here that it’s halted mortgage lending.

“They’re still in business. And if nothing happens, they won’t make any money,” Gaines said about the lenders.

Complicating matters for would-be buyers, mortgage rates are up over the past week.

In Texas, rates for 30-year mortgages were 5.94 percent at the end of last week, up from 5.75 percent the week before, according to Zillow, a real estate Web site that tracks home prices and mortgage rates.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on an upward trend, said David Zugheri of First Houston Mortgage.

Rates went down when the government said it was taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he noted.

“The one thing we all know and can agree upon is the government is fully committed to the housing market,” he said.

Consumer sentiment should improve when the government agrees on a plan that’s expected to put more liquidity in the market, experts said.

Staten, while concerned about her taxes going to rescue banks, is craving some sort of solution. She’s been saving for more than a year and is ready to sign a contract on a three-bedroom Humble-area house.

“To at least have something in place, I would feel a little bit better,” she said.

Credits: Chron

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted on Wednesday a request by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to provide the Houston region, which covers eight counties, nine more years to solve its smog problem, which was reclassified to severe.

The EPA approval will extend Houston’s deadline to 2019. When the area’s smog was still classified as moderate, it had a 2010 deadline to lick the problem.

Following the reclassification, Houston is on equal footing with Los Angeles in California as the only two places with severe smog problem. Houston’s smog is the result of its dependence on the automobile, a large concentration of refineries and its location and weather in a zone with one of the longest smog seasons.

The governor had asked for more time to deal with the problem last year, although Perry said progress has already been made. While the Houston Ship Channel had been closed completely, it was not sufficient for the zone to comply with EPA standards.

Local officials, business leaders and environmentalists were surprised with Perry’s request since the EPA reclassification was two steps backward. In between the severe and moderate categories was the “serious” category.

According to a state analysis, 18 of Houston’s 22 air pollution indices could meet the EPA benchmark by 2010, but Bayland Park and Deer Park would benefit from the nine extra years extension.

Last week the EPA provided the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality a $295,320 grant to support ongoing state efforts to improve air quality throughout Texas. The money will be used mainly to retrofit school buses with control technology to curb their tailpipe emissions, one of the major causes of smog in Texas.

Credits: All Headline News

The cigarette Jim Aubel smoked barely covered the smell of all Hurricane Ike left behind.

“When I walked in I felt like somebody ransacked our house,” Aubel said, standing in his driveway under the hot Texas sun, a growing pile of debris rising waist-high beside him. “I walked in and I was devastated.”

The working-class neighborhood where Aubel, an elevator mechanic and his wife, Lisa, have lived for five years barely withstood the surge of seawater Ike pushed from the shoreline, just a few blocks away.

Hurricane Ike struck this island city, 60 miles from Houston, September 13 with 110-mph winds and a wall of sea water. As the ocean surge rose, it carried toxic chemicals, effluent and debris into thousands of living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens.

Aubel’s home is like most along Fairway Drive, where piles spill onto the roadway covered in dust and sand from the storm. Most residents here have returned and begun mucking out the spoil.

Nearly every yard is a catalog of life’s items, caked in toxic sludge. A broken coffee table. Still-wet clothes hanging out of a chest of drawers. More than a few survivors searched for mementos like photographs among refrigerators filled with rotting food. The stench is thick, carried around the city on top of the briny smell of the Gulf.

“It’s important people realize that walking into a flooded home without a protective mask and coveralls can make them sick,” said Church World Service Emergency Response Specialist Joann Hale, who is assessing damage and meeting with local partners to determine what support CWS can provide.

“We’ve seen a lot of people without the right equipment.”

Galveston officials still limit most residents to working on their homes only during daylight hours. Many residents are staying off the island in hotels or with friends. Shelters remain open here, and electricity is slowly returning. Police check identification to limit neighborhood traffic to residents only.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to set up mobile shelters to accommodate around 600 people in the interim. Other shelters remain open around the region, and hotel rooms from the coast to Houston and beyond are full of people displaced by the storm.

Houston also sustained damage from Hurricane Ike and is eligible for federal disaster assistance, along with nearly 30 other counties in coastal Texas.

The Houston area is still home to many families displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Following Katrina, FEMA extended housing benefits to displaced families from 18 to 36 months. Jennifer Postem, emergency preparedness director at Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston, said she’s worried survivors of Ike in the Houston area may react poorly if a similar exception isn’t made this time.

“We are proud of how we helped out in Katrina,” Postem said. “People here are going to see the lack of assistance and say ‘What are we, chopped liver?’”

In Houston and in Galveston, survivors are uncertain of what help will be available. A faith-based response is underway, including materials to help survivors in shelters and those cleaning out their homes.

A steady stream of cars lined up in front of Moody Memorial First United Methodist Church, where members handed out clean-up buckets and cases of drinking water.

“The need is here,” student ministries director Lowell Bagott said. “It’s been nonstop all day.”

While colorful, oceanfront homes line Galveston’s beaches, nearly one-quarter of the population here lives in poverty. More than 60 percent of Galveston’s children receive free or reduced lunches in Galveston’s schools, which remain closed.

As he loaded boxes of water into a waiting SUV, David Dunaway, director of evangelism and education at Moody Memorial First United Methodist Church, said he worries if help will be available to those in his community.

“Right now everyone’s still in shock,” Dunaway said. “FEMA has said they’ll give you housing, but there are no hotel rooms or housing to be had.”

Aubel and his wife are sleeping in a tent in their back yard. He is planning to stay no matter what is offered in the way of assistance.

“I like it here,” he said. “I keep thinking I’m gonna wake up and it’d just been a bad dream.”

Credits: Church World Service

Rescue crews pulled out of Galveston and the death toll climbed to 51 Wednesday as a broad swath of the country from the Gulf Coast to the upper Midwest reeled from the aftereffects of Hurricane Ike.

For millions living in the affected areas, there was no need to imagine anything worse than Ike’s 110-mph winds. More than 6 million people, including 2.5 million in Texas, lost power after the storm slammed ashore Saturday. Nearly 3.9 million remained without electricity Tuesday.

The death toll climbed to 51 Wednesday as another death was reported in Texas, including the first in Brazoria.

Search crews pulled out of Galveston on Wednesday after completing their sweep of the island for survivors. Thousands remained on the island despite authorities’ urging them to leave, and thousands more choked an interstate leading in.

The backlog of traffic frustrated transportation officials, who pointed out that among those idling in the choked interstate were emergency crews and trucks hauling resources badly needed on the island.”It’s not a good scenario,” said Raquelle Lewis, a Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman.

In Houston, residents again waited in line for hours Wednesday at oughly two dozen supply distribution centers for food, water and ice. Mayor Bill White complained FEMA wasn’t bringing in the supplies fast enough, and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett had personally taken over coordination of efforts to hand out relief supplies.

FEMA officials in Houston said they were refining glitches in the relief effort and delivering millions of meals and water every 24 hours.

President Bush, in his third trip in two weeks to survey Gulf Coast hurricane damage, inspected Ike’s wreckage during a helicopter tour. He called the destruction “a tough situation” and approved federal disaster aid.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was due back in Texas for a second time to check on recovery efforts Wednesday. He’ll first travel to Houston and meet with local officials before visiting Galveston.

More than 30,000 evacuees were in shelters Tuesday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to pay for some victims whose homes are inaccessible or unlivable to stay in hotels or motels until Oct. 14.

People weren’t the only ones left homeless. A tiger was missing from an exotic pets center in Crystal Beach, near Galveston, and a lion from the same center was trapped in the sanctuary of a Baptist church in Crystal Beach. Cows broke from fenced pastures and roamed rubble-strewn streets.

On the devastated Bolivar Peninsula, roughly 250 holdouts were told to leave this week. The Texas attorney general’s office considered how to force out stragglers even as military helicopters airlifted some of them.

In Galveston, officials initially allowed residents to visit the evacuated island during daylight hours under a “look and leave” policy, but they rescinded the order later in the day. “It just didn’t work. Traffic was backed up to Clear Lake,” city spokeswoman Mary Jo Naschke said, referring to a city about 30 miles away. “People were making fires in the street and barbecuing.”

Texas health commissioner David Lakey warned residents it was too soon to return to Galveston, where human waste mixed with floodwaters. “There is still a significant health risk,” he said.

Storm victims walked miles to distribution centers, where they waited hours for food and ice.

Even as they struggled to meet basic needs, residents along the Texas coast began putting back together the lives Ike tore apart.

Houston

In Houston, the power at Steve Jones’ house has been out since 4 a.m. Friday. Three trees rest on his electricity lines. There’s no water. And his yard “is just a swamp,” said Jones, 28.

Despite having so much to do at home, the mechanic was back to work at Kelso Automotive on Monday. He siphoned gas from junk cars to give to a woman whose car had broken down in front of his garage.

“We want to be able to help people. We can make some repairs even without electricity,” said Jones, as his boss, Steve Kelso, 46, looked on.

Jones has been relying on that ingenuity to get himself and his family through Ike’s aftermath.

He hooked a fan to a car battery and wedged it in a window to cool down a bedroom. He rigged up an old gas kitchen stove he had stored in his shed to the gas line of a clothes dryer, so his wife could cook.

“We ate burgers last night — hamburgers, fries and everything,” he says.

With no electricity, he’s had more time to play with his daughter, Ariana, who turns 6 Friday. He’s gotten to know his new neighbors since he’s been sitting outside and chatting to pass the time.

About two-thirds of Houston’s 2.2 million residents lacked power Tuesday, and Mayor Bill White recommended that everyone boil water before drinking it. There were signs of normalcy: The city began regular trash pickup, crews swept glass from downtown, city and county workers returned to their jobs and businesses began to open.

Police officer James Broussard spent his time directing vehicles, dispensing parking advice and trying to calm distressed residents at a Houston intersection where traffic was snarled.

“It’s chaos right now,” said Broussard, who had to maintain order at a church hall where supply trucks arrived two hours late Tuesday morning. “It’s creating a little bit of havoc, but we really haven’t had any problems. Everybody’s been fine.”

That does not mean life is easy. Broussard’s wife and 21-month-old daughter were staying with his in-laws after the hotel where they had taken refuge wouldn’t extend their reservation. He says it can be tough to deal with the city’s disaster by day and his own troubles at night.

He and other officers are “digging pretty deep” to put on a good face for residents. After all, “you don’t get anywhere with yelling and screaming.”

Chambers County

On the eastern side of Galveston Bay in Anahuac, Sarah Cerrone looked at the photos arrayed before her and couldn’t believe her eyes.

The former graphic artist-turned-economic development director for Chambers County saw whole neighborhoods wiped away. Roads blocked by muck. Downed power lines. Fallen trees. Dead animals.

“It was too big,” said Cerrone, 51. She got to work rebuilding her community of 26,000 people and its once-thriving crab and oyster industries.

She found generators, so pharmacies, convenience stores and other essential businesses could reopen. She called Wal-Mart to get toilet paper for employees working in the county’s emergency operations center. She made signs alerting residents to boil their water. She made sure there were police at reopened gas stations where motorists desperate for fuel formed long lines.

“We’re working to get the things people need to live every day back online,” she says. “Think about every facet of life and what we deal with every day. It was all turned upside down.”

Chambers County and the Bolivar Peninsula were among the hardest hit by Ike. The bayside towns of Oak Island and Smith Point were all but wiped off the map. Of about 700 houses there, perhaps five remain.

Also gone: most of the oyster industry. Ben Nelson and his wife, Jeri, who own Jeri’s Seafood in Smith Point, say the storm may have wiped out most of the oyster beds in Galveston Bay, which accounts for 80% of the oyster harvest in Texas. They blame oil runoff, chemical spills and storm surge churning up the bottom of the bay for ruining most of this year’s harvest.

“Right now it’s a completely iffy deal,” says Ben Nelson, who lost equipment during the storm. His bigger worry is losing the 140 employees who work the boats. If his company is out of business for several months, he says, they’ll find jobs elsewhere.

“It’s going to be a long way back,” he says.

No one knows that as well as Cerrone, who says Hurricane Rita’s aftermath paled compared with Ike’s.

The full extent of the damage isn’t known, but Cerrone says the storm surge flooded hundreds of acres of pasture land with saltwater, making them unusable for at least three years for cattle grazing and rice cultivation. Ranchers counted dead cattle in their fields and prepared to sell surviving livestock they no longer had a place to keep.

By Tuesday, more than 500 electric company crews fanned across the county to restore power and help get oil refineries, chemical plants and retail distribution warehouses back in business.

As they worked, Cerrone saw to details large and small. More than 900 county residents lost their homes and need FEMA trailers and other assistance.

The county will need shade for the new homes she hopes rise here, so Cerrone ordered 750 seedlings to replace the 100-year-old trees toppled by Ike’s winds.

Cerrone isn’t sure what the months and even years ahead will bring.

Three years after Rita, the county had secured grants to rebuild just three homes. This time around, it will need a lot more help. “We’ll be dealing with the effects of this storm for years,” she says.

Galveston

In Galveston, where Joan Richardson has spent 34 years caring for newborns at the University of Texas Medical Branch, she considers the hospital “more my home than my home is.”

Since Ike hit Saturday, it really has been.

The hospital’s chief of pediatrics, who is one of two emergency preparedness officers, rode out the storm with 560 doctors, nurses and other essential personnel. They worked feverishly to move operating rooms, a pharmacy, a blood bank and other key facilities to higher floors as the floodwaters rose.

“We lost power, even emergency power, so we went up a lot of stairs,” said Richardson, 64, who helped prepare 51 babies in a neo-natal intensive care unit for transport to hospitals in San Antonio and Austin. About 450 patients were either evacuated or discharged.

During the storm, she helped set a cast on a patient’s broken arm because she couldn’t find another doctor to do it.

Most of the medical center’s 8,000 employees had been sent home. Richardson worked with other doctors to keep the emergency room open for residents who didn’t leave the island. Nearly 200 people sought treatment as Ike approached, including patients suffering heart attack symptoms and some needing dialysis. They were later evacuated.

Richardson helped reassign medical students and residents to other schools and hospitals and bucked up other hospital employees.

“You’re off,” Richardson told an exhausted Kelly Carmichael as she stopped the pediatric orthopedic surgeon and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “We have room in the tower. We have air conditioning. I want to get everybody out of the children’s hospital. So get yourself a room.”

He asked if that included a shower. Maybe Tuesday night, she replied, but it would be cold. A colleague needed a place to keep her kitten. Richardson said to take the kitten to her home on Galveston Bay, where her own two cats huddled upstairs as water flooded the first floor.

“That is my job,” Richardson said. “Take care of the people who are taking care of patients.”

Not that the hospital will be caring for patients anytime soon. About 300 staffers living there cleaned halls, sent patient records to other hospitals and cared for lab animals involved in research projects.

“We’re not going to be a hospital for a while,” Richardson said. Then she added, “I’m going to have this baby operating within four weeks. All we need is power and water.”

Credits: USA Today

What about life after Ike? Is it back to “business as usual,” waiting for the next hurricane, hoping that it will strike somewhere else? Or do we regroup, and start organizing and planning, for a different kind of Houston,  a city much more resilient to the forces of nature?

Urban experts agree that “sustainability” will define the great cities of the 21st century. Mother Nature has sent us a stern warning. In no uncertain terms, Ike, not really “the big one,” is serving to redefine “sustainability” — in local Houston terms the ability to stay in business after a major storm.

Houstonians have been tested, not just by the fury of Ike and its physical devastation, but as a civic community. We have united in a vast civic recovery effort, to reclaim our families, homes, streets, neighborhoods and lifelihoods. I have witnessed this — neighbors teaming up to clean their streets, volunteers calling in and flocking to our crowded PODs. Our incredible human spirit has prevailed.

My experience in many aspects of this recovery tells me that we must start planning for “life after Ike.” We may rush to patch roofs and shore up those utility poles to get back to normal, but a “Band-Aid” approach is not sufficient. Whis is not just a cleanup operation — instead, we are challenged to retrofit, repair and rebuild parts of our city.

Wherever possible, this should be a local effort, not farmed out to big outside contractors. Rebuilding can be an economic shor in the arm to our local entrepreneurs, especially small and minority businesses. With perhaps billions in disaster assistance coming our way, a transformative vision of Houston as a sustainable coastal city can begin to take shape.

The first step is to fix our outmoded, poorly built, highly vulnerable grid of overhead utilities. This tangle of poles and wires, “litter on a stick,” is as well a debilitating visual blight on our city.

The cost of a massive power outage, a shutdown of the nation’s fourth largest city, is enormous — in human terms and in lost work time and productivity. Think about the huge financial losses from closed stores, schools and businesses; the expenses of restoring power to homes and businesses, and the cost of massive repairs and rebuilding.

And it could be worse: A direct CAT 4 hurricane hit on the Houston Ship Channel would likely uproot 800,000 jobs, shut down 25 percent of the nation’s oil refining capacity and sap $130 billion from the Texas economy. Our image in the world economy is also at stake.

Yet with the same vision and fortitude that built the Houston Ship Channel we can become like Amsterdam — a city recognized for its bold actions to overcome its vulnerability to flooding and storms.

To ensure this future as a thriving coastal city, we must make three major investments — in flood control, more stringent building standards and in a “hurricane-ready” electrical power distribution network. Let me elaborate:

• Flood control — Recent restrictions on building in the floodplain and floodways must be followed by expanding our storage and conveyance capacity, with designated regional detention areas, more parks and green space, and expanded floodway corridors.
What about an innovative canal network, or a levee system such as Texas City has? Flooding requires a regional solution, based on intergovernmental agreements for common standards as part of a comprehensive storm water management plan.

• Better building codes — Our building codes should meet coastal area hurricane criteria, to withstand 130-150-mph winds and severe flooding. This means additional structural requirements for walls and roof assemblies, raising the minimum floor elevations in certain areas, the prohibition of flat gravel roofs that cause window damage and wind-resistant glass.
We have learned from Ike that emergency generators in key locations — clinics, schools, supermarkets, pharmacies and gasoline service stations — could expand significantly a functioning network of precertified distribution sites and emergency shelters.

It is impractical to send everyone out of town or to PODs. Generators at service stations and supermarkets, for example, would help with the availability of food, water and ice, and reduce gasoline shortages.

• Retrofitting the city’s electrical infrastructure. Our electrical power distribution system, operated by CenterPoint Energy, needs to be modernized. In a very real sense, we are trying to run a modern, 21st century city with an outmoded 19th century infrastructure of overhead poles, transformers and wires. To modernize and protect our city, we need:
• Power lines placed underground in all new street construction and reconstruction projects.
• Antiquated power poles in poor condition replaced by new “structural” poles, relocated in ample rear lot and alley easements, ideal for above-ground utilities.
The city of Houston and CenterPoint Energy should begin a long-range ( 25- to 30-year) program to bury overhead power lines using dedicated sources of funding, such as tax-increment set asides and local/state/federal disaster recovery fund allocations.

Houston can follow the successful financial and regulatory models of other cities. We cannot afford not to secure our utility lines.

Ike is a wake-up call to retrofit our infrastructure, as part of a long-range urban plan for a truly “sustainable city.”

Sound emergency management is not just about bailing out a leaking ship — it is about fixing the leaks in the first place. The time to plan is before the next big storm.

The city of Houston, Harris County, CenterPoint Energy, the Greater Houston Partnership, community representatives and our talented planners and engineers should craft a transformative vision for our future and move forward with a 21st century “sustainable Houston” agenda.

It will take creativity, innovation and “best practices.”

A good place to start is to bury and secure our overhead utility lines — out of harm’s way.

Credits: Chron