In Biloxi, the Recovery Is Quick -- For Some

BILOXI, Miss. -- If there is a booming recovery anywhere amid Hurricane Katrina's wreckage, it is here in this city of casinos, fishermen and beaches.

Seven of the city's nine gambling emporiums -- all of which were severely damaged or destroyed -- are scheduled to be open on the storm's first anniversary on Tuesday.

A Katrina memorial has been erected on the town green; a speedy project led by the television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," it went from conception to completion in two months.

Now plans for more than 10,000 condominiums in 26 projects are being reviewed, with many of them designed not for local residents but as vacation properties.

The "recovery from this unprecedented natural disaster will spawn the largest building boom ever seen in these parts," Mayor A.J. Holloway boasted in his recent State of the City message.

But here, as elsewhere on the Mississippi coast, the hurricane recovery is proceeding on two tracks, and while the casinos and condo developers have gained momentum, many others feel stuck. A block away from the waterfront and its high-rise gambling resorts, in the neighborhoods where Katrina damaged about 6,000 homes and businesses, very little rebuilding has happened.

In the year since the hurricane pushed a wall of water more than 20 feet high through much of this city, only 122 permits for rebuilding homes have been issued, city officials said. Other cities face a similar dearth of home rebuilding. Thousands of former residents are still living in trailers.

Scores of restaurants and shops remain closed, too, and along the beach road the only way to tell what used to be there is by the dozens of pole signs that withstood the storm's ravages: a Denny's, a beachwear shop, an Outback Steakhouse and so on down the beach strip.

"The town that we knew doesn't exist anymore," said David Kopszywa, 42, an electrician who is living in a trailer where his 120-year-old wood-frame house in east Biloxi used to stand.

"People are shocked that a year has passed," said Dennis Cowart, an architect in nearby Ocean Springs, Miss., who designed the Katrina memorial. "After it happened, some people here had a vision of where we would be a year out. But it's not like that. It's much slower."

The same hurricane caused the damage in Mississippi and the New Orleans area, of course, but its effect and its extent in the two places were much different. The geography of the disaster may have important ramifications for the recovery.

In New Orleans, the bursting of the levees flooded the bowl the city sits in, leaving most of it underwater for weeks.

Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by contrast, the damage was more complete but more geographically limited. A wall of water rushed ashore, often "slabbing" homes -- that is, leaving nothing but the concrete slabs they sat on.

But the water dissipated as it moved inland, and the extent of the damage was a relatively narrow sliver along the coast.

In the estimation of Gavin Smith, the director of the state's recovery, the storm led to the "virtual obliteration" of buildings on an 80-mile stretch of the coast, typically less than one mile deep.

"It's an area almost devoid of construction," he said.

The advantage for Mississippi is that the part that needs rebuilding -- the strip nearest the ocean -- is its most desirable location, and casino and condo developers are lining up at the opportunity for water views.

A state law passed after the storm also encouraged casino development by allowing them to be built on land, rather than on barges as before.

While Mississippi has earned praise for moving quickly to entice the casinos back -- in Biloxi, the industry employed 15,000 before the storm -- and for nearly completing its cleanup, well ahead of Louisiana, some have raised questions about the equity of its recovery.

Of the billions in federal housing aid available to the state, no grants have been committed to develop rental housing, said Amy Liu, a Brookings Institution researcher who has closely followed the rebuilding. About 34 percent of the homes that suffered major or severe damage in Mississippi were rental properties.

Even with money for homeowners coming, many residents who lived in the coastal areas have struggled to recover.

One particular challenge is that in places such as east Biloxi, where hundreds of homes were wiped out, new federal flood guidelines call for building homes between 4 feet and 21 feet above the ground. That makes rebuilding far more expensive, and the elevated homes may be unwieldy for some older residents.

These and other complications have led many homeowners to sell to developers and leave the areas where they and their families have lived for generations.

"We've had a bunch of offers," Kopszywa said, adding that he was considering them carefully. "What's been lost cannot be replaced."