This data includes individual-level records for all property owners who received grants from the Road Home program, which was set up after hurricanes Katrina and Rita to cover repair and rebuilding costs that exceeded insurance payouts or FEMA aid for owner-occupied properties in Louisiana.
The data, acquired through public records requests to the Louisiana Division of Administration, includes details on the four types of grants available through the rebuilding program:
Compensation grants, the main type of funding available to homeowners.
Additional compensation grants, which were made available to lower-income homeowners.
Elevation grants, meant to help raise homes to prevent future flooding.
Individual mitigation measure grants, which could be used toward other efforts to prevent future flooding.
The data also contains data on state-generated estimates of the pre-storm value of each home and the cost to repair or rebuild it. Additional fields indicate whether properties were insured and how much the property owner received from insurance, FEMA or other sources.
While this data does not contain the names of property owners or addresses, geographic identifiers (using U.S. Census Bureau geographies from 2000) are available down to the census block level.
Note that there are some idiosyncratic aspects of the data contained in this table. Users are strongly encouraged to read the attached field definitions carefully as they detail these issues.
The most important caveat is that the grant fields indicate the total amount disbursed to the property owner. However, a variety of circumstances may have resulted in property owners owing some of that money to the state. These include situations in which property owners received additional money from insurance after they got their Road Home funds and cases in which checks were reissued due to fraud. To get an accurate accounting of the net amount received by each property owner, calculations must be made to adjust the grant or insurance values. Certain records may need to be excluded using flags included in the data.
Field names in the data are as provided by the Louisiana Division of Administration.
Provided in collaboration with The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate and WWL-TV
