Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.

Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to
feed and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes
and businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
(getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
properties for a fat profit.


--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email:

Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

Jesse Jackson will rise up and smite these heretics.... By the way, does
J.J. have a job?

Arne

------------------------------------

A couple of takes on the looting and anarchy in New Orleans.

From a black academic



"In 1966, however, a group of white academics in New York developed a plan
to bring as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible. Across the
country, poor blacks especially were taught to apply for living on the dole
even when they had been working for a living, and by 1970 there were 169%
more people on welfare nationwide than in 1960.

This was the first time that whites or blacks had taught black people not to
work as a form of civil rights. Politicians and bureaucrats jumped on the
new opportunity for political patronage and votes, and welfare quickly
became a program that essentially paid young women to have children.

Only in 1996 was welfare limited to five years and focused on training for
work. But by then generations of poor blacks had grown up in neighborhoods
where there was no requirement that fathers support their children. Few grew
up watching their primary parent work for a living. Most people paid nominal
subsidies as rent and were thus less inclined to treat their living spaces
well.

The multigenerational welfare family with grandmothers in their forties
became typical: young women had babies in their teens because there was no
reason not to with welfare waiting to pick up the tab.

This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or
knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare
reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are
mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole.
But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old
regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where
they are. Poor black neighborhoods are not what they were at the height of
the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.

The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with
us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50
have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world
within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention
it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.

What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture
matters - even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence.
Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of
economic downturns and plenty more racism."

From Steyn:



"Readers may recall my words from a week ago on the approaching Katrina: "We
relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And on the whole we do. Oh,
to be sure, there are always folks who panic or loot. But most
people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily
improvised heroism." What the hell was I thinking? I should be fired for
that. Well, someone should be fired. I say that in the spirit of the Mayor
of
New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows
where to point the finger.
As General Blum said at Saturday's Defense Department briefing: "No one
anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force
in New Orleans."
Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are
reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a
lovely "Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" for hurricanes. The only
flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is
the mayor. And he didn't...
But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that
act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is
symptomatic of a broader failure.
I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in
Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg
to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief,
he decided that this time he'd pass. "I'd had it up to here," he wrote,
"with the passivity, the whining, and the
when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game."...
Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school
buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into
the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that
each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot
could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most
vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested fecal hell of the Superdome, New
Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost
everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.
Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about
school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools
transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the
individual
bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially
useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves.
So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas
was one that had been abandoned on a city street. A party of sodden
citizens, ranging from the elderly to an
eight-day-old baby, were desperate to get out, hopped aboard and got
teenager Jabbor Gibson to drive them 13 hours non-stop to Houston. He'd
never driven a bus before, and the authorities back
in New Orleans may yet prosecute him. For rescuing people without a
permit?...
My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the
great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!"
Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called
Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to
the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's
an opportunity to get back at society."
Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honor
of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone
claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the
"oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each
arm.
Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the
state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and
resourcefulness.
New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many
parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll
always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis
Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it
Means to Miss New Orleans? But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would."

..
..

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:43:47 GMT, "Steven L."
<> wrote:

>One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
>it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
>willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.
>
>Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
>Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to
>feed and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes
>and businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
>(getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
>Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
>becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
>properties for a fat profit.
>
>
>--
>Steven D. Litvintchouk
>Email:
>
>Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.


Great bloodsucking idea, Steve. I've got a better idea. Invest the
money we're blowing in the middle east every day, every week, every
month and every year and rebuild New Orleans.

If we can't rebuild America, we've got no business playing Santa
Clause in the Middle East

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

> >One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
> >it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
> >willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.
> >
> >Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
> >Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to
> >feed and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes
> >and businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
> >(getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
> >Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
> >becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
> >properties for a fat profit.

> Great bloodsucking idea, Steve.

The bloodsuckers here are the federal government. Would you insure your home
and simultaneously refuse to provide adequate hurricane and flood
protection, as the Federal Government did with NOLA, despite repeated strong
warnings that your area was among the top to be ripe for a hurricane/flood
disaster?

That the federal government is now spending $500 million dollars each day on
restoring New Orleans, currently with no-bid contracts, in its same
location, with no consideration for alternate plans, at the peak of
hurricane season, is a stupendous risk and waste of money.

Screw 'em.

I'll take a piece of the action anyway I can. Otherwise, the federal
government is throwing away my hard-earned tax dollars through incompetence.

But would the politicans actually say now, "Hey, we need to refurbish the
nation's electrical grid. It's going to cost a fortune, but imagine how many
lives etc. we'll save if we invest in this now, instead of pay the piper
later."

Among other national infrastructure problems that are being neglected.

If one can't beat Halliburton et al., join 'em.

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals -Reuters Sat Sep 10,11:03 AM ET

;_ylt=AiTmNayRitmM.WRq3JcVDSe573QA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNl YwMlJVRPUCUl

Steven L. wrote:
>

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

So, you expected something different this time?

What big company in the US do you think Bush is not tied to? Where do you
think his r-election money comes from?

Arne
..
..
"Flasherly" <> wrote in message
news:
> Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals -Reuters Sat Sep 10,11:03 AM ET
>
> ;_ylt=AiTmNayRitmM.WRq3JcVDSe573QA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNl YwMlJVRPUCUl
>
> Steven L. wrote:
>>
>

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

Limbaugh Fart Detector wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:43:47 GMT, "Steven L."
> <> wrote:
>
>> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
>> it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
>> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.
>>
>> Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
>> Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to
>> feed and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes
>> and businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
>> (getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
>> Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
>> becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
>> properties for a fat profit.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Steven D. Litvintchouk
>> Email:
>>
>> Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
>
>
> Great bloodsucking idea, Steve. I've got a better idea. Invest the
> money we're blowing in the middle east every day, every week, every
> month and every year and rebuild New Orleans.
>
> If we can't rebuild America, we've got no business playing Santa
> Clause in the Middle East


Hey, at least Iraq is above sea level and not subject to hurricanes in a
punchbowl.

--


*********************************

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

"Steven L." <> wrote in message
news:nwWUe.8718$
> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that it
> might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.

How ghoulish of you - and yep I thought the same thing.

> Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
> Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to feed
> and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes and
> businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
> (getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
> Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
> becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
> properties for a fat profit.

Better guess right on how the government is gonna solve the problem. If one
buys up property in NO and the feds decide not to rebuild - well yer
screwed.
I'm betting one would get a inside track on knowing what's up if one is a
Republican contributor or has the last name "BUSH".

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 12:33:32 -0400, Bob <>
wrote:

>Limbaugh Fart Detector wrote:
>> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:43:47 GMT, "Steven L."
>> <> wrote:
>>
>>> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
>>> it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
>>> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.
>>>
>>> Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
>>> Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to
>>> feed and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes
>>> and businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
>>> (getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
>>> Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
>>> becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
>>> properties for a fat profit.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Steven D. Litvintchouk
>>> Email:
>>>
>>> Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
>>
>>
>> Great bloodsucking idea, Steve. I've got a better idea. Invest the
>> money we're blowing in the middle east every day, every week, every
>> month and every year and rebuild New Orleans.
>>
>> If we can't rebuild America, we've got no business playing Santa
>> Clause in the Middle East
>
>
>Hey, at least Iraq is above sea level and not subject to hurricanes in a
>punchbowl.
>
>--

at least New Orleans is the USA

>
>
>*********************************
>

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

Get it straight. There is no good news coming out of New Orleans. Everyone
wishes Katrina never happened. It will cost us Billions of tax payer dollars
and it probably won't be much improved unless the poverty stricken stay in
Houston.. an maybe the levees will be higher.... whoopee....

Because some individuals take advantage of the situation does not make it
good news.

Arne
..
..
"Bob" <> wrote in message
news:q%YUe.18001$
> Limbaugh Fart Detector wrote:
>> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:43:47 GMT, "Steven L."
>> <> wrote:
>>
>>> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that
>>> it might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
>>> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

This portrays which I saw when in New Orleans last October.....

Take away Mardi Gras and there isn't much else there..... of course, now,
there's even less.

Arne

---------------------------------------------



I could not agree with you more. The unbridled savagery of some of New
Orleans' residents probably delayed the rescue efforts at least 2-3 days.
Having worked as a policeman during the 1992 Los Angeles riots I can tell
you first hand that institutionalized welfare breeds slothfulness and
violence. Here's more in a similar vein:

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005


by Robert Tracinski

It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to
deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also
took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is
that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a
natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists-myself included-did not
expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about
rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has
gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an
emergency-indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying
that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what
we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to
keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an
enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than
waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a
hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had
gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as
impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large
ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives
and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and
rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in
to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas
National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she
said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know
how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary
and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle
through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people,
one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene
from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of
the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as
they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable
squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of
the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"-the informational
phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels-gave some
vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans
had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a
large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland
then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had
no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails-so they just
let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on
this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have
found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New
Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that
is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing
projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
deluge hit-but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two
groups: criminals-and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over
decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The
welfare wards were a mass of sheep-on whom the incompetent administration of
New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city
government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite
the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the
welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts
to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters-not to ensure a
lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for
failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an
adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the
Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on
American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos
was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the
difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a
disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are
going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do
they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way
of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that
other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at
those who come to rescue them-this is not just a description of the chaos at
the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare
state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state-and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
encourages-is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
..
..

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

I don't see why not, though within constraints of fair business
practises and certainly under the auspices of a domestic frontwatch.
He's simply letting them loose from where many politicians poll and eat
at the same bowl, the lobbyists' industry pool. Sweet enough, then
shouldn't be any such 1.5 billion accountability issues present present
in Iraq, is all I'm saying. Nothing more than a nice touch unless the
man has no sense of shame, which I doubt.

Arne wrote:
> So, you expected something different this time?
>
> What big company in the US do you think Bush is not tied to? Where do you
> think his r-election money comes from?
>
> Arne
> .
> .
> "Flasherly" <> wrote in message
> news:
> > Firms with Bush ties snag Katrina deals -Reuters Sat Sep 10,11:03 AM ET
> >
> > ;_ylt=AiTmNayRitmM.WRq3JcVDSe573QA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNl YwMlJVRPUCUl

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

I read an article in the economist many years back (5-10) about the cycle
that leads to economic development. It referenced the U.S.' efforts to
bring the bootleggers in from the cold so that they could become honest to
goodness taxpayers. At first the feds tried to destroy the stills, but the
bootleggers just moved further into the woods, rebuilt their stills and
worst of all brought their shotguns with them. So, instead of getting shot,
the feds decided to offer up the land in exchange for liquor derived (or
should I say distilled?) tax revenue. Very interesting article. I wish I
still had a copy.

Ultimately, the article highlighted the idea that the quality of the
opportunity related to the economic qualities of the people that moved to a
given town or city. Say...if you see a bunch of poor but creative artists
move into a given part of town, beautify it, attract monied interests that
invest their capital in the area, and so on.

Your land grab opportunity will depend in part on who moves there.

So...who are you going to sell your renovated property to? Do you plan on
riding the feds' renovation efforts?

"Steven L." <> wrote in message
news:nwWUe.8718$
> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that it
> might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.
>
> Right now, there are literally thousands of desperate refugees from New
> Orleans who have lost everything and need to raise cash in a hurry to feed
> and clothe their families. You could probably buy up their homes and
> businesses for pennies on the dollar, then fix up those properties
> (getting rid of mold infestation) and wait patiently for the Federal
> Government to rebuild the infrastructure of New Orleans so the city
> becomes viable again. Then you could turn around and sell those
> properties for a fat profit.
>
>
> --
> Steven D. Litvintchouk
> Email:
>
> Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

Re: Could New Orleans Be The Next Emerging Market?

"Steven L." <> wrote in message
news:nwWUe.8718$

> One piece of good news to come out of the New Orleans disaster is that it
> might represent a fabulous investment opportunity for anyone who is
> willing to invest in distressed real estate properties.

The term "Carpetbaggers" comes to mind. Sometimes the locals take a dim view
of that kind of opportunism, and with all the gunfire you hear about on the
news, there might be considerable risk in addition to financial risk.