Coastal Mississippi Towns Look To Start Over

GULFPORT, Miss. If the levees had held in New Orleans, the destruction wrought on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina would have been the most astonishing storm story of a generation.

Whole towns have been laid flat, thousands of houses washed away and, statewide, the deaths of 211 people have been blamed on the storm, a toll far higher than those from Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.

But as it is, Mississippi -- like the Pentagon after Sept. 11, 2001 -- is coping with an almost unimaginable catastrophe largely overshadowed in the media's attention and the national consciousness, in this case, by the disaster in New Orleans.

Today, President Bush is scheduled to make his third visit to the area since the storm hit. Two weeks since the hurricane, Gulfport and the neighboring city of Biloxi are no longer fighting for mere survival. Power has been restored to everyone who can receive it, gasoline is flowing at the stations and water is gradually beginning to trickle from faucets -- though it is still undrinkable. There is even a man in a pizza costume enticing customers to the local Papa John's.

But a tougher question is beginning to arise: Now what?

"It looks like we're going to have to build an economy from the ground up," said Connie Rockco, one of the five supervisors of Harrison County, where Gulfport and Biloxi are located.

Casinos employed thousands of people, but city and county officials said just as many were employed in businesses directly related to the casinos, such as spas, high-end restaurants, martini bars and pawn shops. About 30,000 people, they estimated, depended on the crowds that came to gamble.

"What are they going to do?" asked Rockco. "I mean, they're done."

In Biloxi, where most of the gambling business was, individual casinos were seven of the top 10 sources of local tax revenue in 2004, pumping $11.6 million into the city's general fund, and an additional $11.6 million into local school and public safety departments.

City revenue for Gulfport and Biloxi also are heavily dependent on the sales tax and property tax, neither of which is going to be pouring in while tourists are absent, residents are struggling to find money for basic needs, and thousands of homes are gone. Harrison County officials estimated that anywhere from a quarter to a third of the county's people are homeless. Most homeowners did not have flood insurance, the officials said.

Before the first floating casino opened in 1992, Biloxi and Gulfport were in decline. The seafood industry had been hurting for years because of cheap foreign imports, and the completion of Interstate 10 across southern Mississippi made it easier for tourists to bypass the Mississippi coast for the Florida beaches. By the end of the 1980s, Biloxi was losing people.

But in 1990 the state Legislature voted to allow riverboat gambling and the coast became addicted, quickly.

Tourists began flocking to the area, hotels began sprouting, and the local retail economy boomed. The seaside towns of Long Beach and Pass Christian -- both leveled by Katrina -- were flourishing as bedroom communities for people who worked in Gulfport and New Orleans. Tens of millions of dollars poured into the county and city budgets, and baseball fields and community centers began popping up.

Recently, as coastal real estate has been growing scarcer in Florida, a condominium boom was barreling toward Mississippi's coast. More than 50 condominium projects were awaiting permits before the hurricane hit, potentially representing thousands of new residents, Harrison County officials said.

The projects had been coming in so fast that several coastal towns had adopted building moratoriums, buying time to figure out how to handle the influx. Now a surplus of housing is not a problem.

"All the things people came to see us for are in disarray," said Pam Ulrich, the Harrison County administrator.

Chevis C. Swetman is the third-generation president of the Peoples Bank in Biloxi. He is sleeping on an air mattress in the bank's conference room. As city officials begin talking eagerly of rebuilding, Swetman, who lost six of his 16 branch banks, is less sanguine.

"After Hurricane Camille you had something to start with," he said. "You had a roof over your head."

Last week, Swetman and officials from other banks on the Gulf Coast had a conference call with William H. Losner, the president of First National Bank of South Florida. Homestead, where Losner's bank is based, was flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and he was consulted by the bankers as one who knows something about rebuilding.

"We thought it would take us three to five years to recover," Losner said he told the bankers. "It took us 11 years."

But already, local officials are excitedly talking about the hurricane as if it were, in some ways, a slapdash but effective urban redesigner, solving infrastructure problems the cities had been wrestling with for years.

The railroad tracks that run through the center of both cities -- carrying trains that were only on their way to some place else -- had become a nuisance and even a danger. Now that many of the bridges are down and some of the tracks are tied into pretzels, city officials are planning to lobby CSX, the owner of the tracks, to move them farther north. A CSX spokesman said it was too early for that to be considered.

Brent Warr, who has been mayor of Gulfport for two months, says his city will bounce back from Katrina.

"Property values are going to skyrocket here," Warr said. "All the unattractive stuff has been blown away. The attractive stuff has been blown away, too, but we can rebuild that."