We're in Resolution Now

We are officially in Resolution with The Road Home now. That is completely different from an Appeal, which can only come after you've been totally rejected. I guess I have that to look forward to.

This was supposed to be posted last week before we got the report I posted a few days ago.

On January 18th we had our appointment. June 4th The Road Home sent us our Gold Letter. On June 11, we fired back a response as best we could considering the forms didn't really fit our situation.

A few weeks ago I called The Road Home and confirmed that they had indeed received our letter on June 15 and realized we were contesting nearly everything they had done. I was told to call back in a week to see what had happened.

Today (September 5) I spoke to a very nice bubbly woman from The Road Home. I wonder if they put happy juice in their coffee or something. We had a grand old time talking about how screwed up the evaluation of our application is. She confirmed that nothing appeared to have been done on our "resolution".

She readily agreed that the Deduction for FEMA emergency housing grant was incorrect and said she would email the person in charge of that area and she felt certain that it would be corrected promptly.

I advised her that we had, through a lawsuit, obtained more money from our Flood Insurance and that should be reflected in out application.

We also discovered that our Title Search had not only been done, it had been uploaded into the system 13 times, each one apparently identical to the next.

Then we got down to the serious matters.

Our Road Home appraisal was seriously low I found out why. A Company named First American Appraisal had done the appraisal on our home. One of the comparables they listed was on at least a mile away from our house on the east side of Elysian Fields, south of Robert E. Lee from our house. That may be a nice neighborhood but its not anything like comparable to the neighborhood I live in. On top of that the value assigned to my house was less than the comparable, in spite of the fact that my house is in a more expensive neighborhood and probably larger. My new best friend, the Case Support Specialist, agreed with me. I guess we should have hired local appraisers who might actually be familiar with our neighborhoods.

The final item was the cost of repair. I have a number of estimates. I have estimates from two insurance companies, from a contractor and comparables from other people. The Road Home didn't bother to share their estimate with us, not even the total. It is simply not listed on our Gold Letter.

That complicates things. It turns out the Case Support Specialists aren't authorized to tell you what the estimate is, even if The Road Home forgot to put it in your letter. I told her what I thought it should be and through a guessing game we determined that their estimate of the repairs to my house would be somewhat less than $50 per square foot. I can't imagine how they got that number.

As we spoke further a number of other facts came forward. If you house is damaged over 50% then The Road Home applies a fixed square footage amount. That is somewhere between $100-$130 per square foot. If however your estimate damage is below 50% then they do a component estimate. That seems reasonable, if the component costs are reasonable. I sorta knew that. They also do an estimate of the cost to raise you house. I didn't know that.

If you elect to raise your home then you can get a $30,000 additional grant. Their estimate of the cost to raise my house was $120,000.

I'm confused by these numbers. There seems to be a discontinuity between the cost of repair derived from the component cost estimate and value of the damage if your house has over 50% damaged. Part of that may be the requirement for any house damaged over 50% to be brought up to current code, including raising it if necessary. But if it costs $120,000 to raise my house and The Road Home will only give me $30,000 I'm not sure how that actually works to my advantage.

I could change a few things and my damage would be over 50%, the cost of repair would remain virtually unchanged and the Road Home would more than double my cost estimate. The only difference would be that we would be required to raise my house and that isn't included in the cost of my repairs.

They are supposed to be sending me something called a CAD report which details their estimate of the value of the damage. When I get the report I imagine that it will become clear.

What is a Home Worth?

Darren G. Mire		1st M.D.
Claude T. Mauberret		2nd M.D.
Erroll G. Williams		3rd M.D.
Betty Jefferson		4th M.D.
Thomas L. Arnold		5th M.D.
Nancy J. Marshall		6th M.D.
Henry F. Heaton		7th M.D.

Recently the reassessments and the mess at the assessors office have been much in the news.

I've generally lumped the problem into two major groups, those who apparently object to paying their fair share, since they never had to do it before, and serious errors and inequities.

I don't think that any person should be able to evade paying taxes because they say "can't afford it". On the other hand the assessment should be fairly and equitably determined. I heard one person on the radio who admitted to appealing his assessment because all of his neighbors did and he didn't want to pay more than they did. He even admitted he didn't think his assessment was unreasonable. That's squarely in the first group.

Most of my neighbors don't feel their assessments are unreasonable but all are worried that someone else will get their taxes reduced so that they will end up paying a disproportionate share.

As usual I ran some numbers.

Our house has been appraised a number of times. In 1999 when we bought it, in 2001 when we refinanced in 2005 for the Road Home and by the assessor just now. I decided to see if these values were in any way comparable, so I decide to apply the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Home Price Index (HPI). There are several such indexes but I decided to use this one because it was the one the Road Home uses.

Here are the numbers calculated using the most recent HPI.

	HPI	Price	Appraisal	Refinance	Road Home	Assessment
6/30/99	125.11	$195,000	$205,000
6/30/02	142.56	$222,198	$233,592	$237,000
6/30/05	175.93	$274,209	$288,271	$292,476	$238,000
3/31/07	213.32	$332,486	$349,537	$354,635	$288,581	$317,000

We always felt we got the house for a good price since the seller was "motivated" and the house didn't show well.

One interesting observation is that in the last two years the value of houses in New Orleans has risen 21%. I think Katrina has distorted that by limiting sales to the most desirable houses, although the value of damaged homes sold to speculators should also be included in the index as well.

The conclusions I draw are that;

1. My assessment is a little below market value, except my house if still gutted and I can't live in it.
   
   
2. The Road Home is incompetent.
   
   
3. The Assessor is incompetent.
   

I just can't let this one go by.

I've been writing about Road Home for months. I have been trying to take an objective view.

I've lost my objectivity. It's personal now. I want what has been promised and I ain't gettin it. The hillbilly in me is up.

C. B. Forgotston said it better than I could.

Governor Blanco’s Road Home follow-up.

It's been six weeks sent we sent them a certified letter and have yet to get any response.

In fact we have never gotten a response from Road Home. No one seems to have, without keeping in constant contact with them. Constant contact and political influence seem to result in no information but it does seem to move you to the top of the list.

I'd expect in the end we will need to file a law suit. I'd expect we won't be alone.

The (Long) Road Home - the First Steps

We procrastinate.

We are also pretty much convinced we will never collect anything from the Road Home so we put off filing our application.

We were concerned that we might need a lot of stuff we don't have. That turned out not to be the case.

Finally about a month ago we sent in our application.

Monday we got a letter saying we were qualified to apply, but that we needed to make an appointment. The earliest appointment is January 19th.

I don't think that's too bad.

I still don't think We'll get a nickle.

RFI - Road Home Program

Michael Homan (better known as Kalypso's dad) has recently posted some information about his Road Home Grant. The numbers doesn't seem to add up, based on my understanding of the Road Home Program. I posted my initial comments on his blog.

I've been looking for a source of the actual grant calculations.

Did they explain the calculation?

I was looking at your numbers and no combination I can see gives the result you reported.

I understand (but am not certain) that the grant is based on the lesser of the damage or the decrease in value, minus insurance and FEMA grants.

If you use their pre-K value ($146,154.00) and deduct the insurance they list ($77,036.67) you get $69,117,33.

That means they have valued your home at $5,000.33.

Got any ideas how the did their math?

For a while I have been looking for information on the Road Home Program but little detailed information seems to be available.

I'd like to ask bloggers or anyone else out there to post of email me any information you may have, especially actual examples. I know there have been relatively few, so I don't expect much, at least no right away.

As information becomes available I'll post information, conclusions and speculation about how it works.