Don't Buy the Bubble Talk

By Lisa Scherzer
December 29, 2005

JUST BECAUSE THE HOUSING market has been on fire for several years, doesn't mean homeowners are about to get burned. In fact, housing costs are now only a bit above historic norms, and are not extreme even in boomtowns like Miami and San Diego, according to Todd Sinai.

Tell that to someone on the market for a new home and they'll think you've been renting an apartment on Mars for the past five years. But Sinai makes his academic home at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he is an associate professor of real estate.

Sinai says home buyers should look at the annual cost of owning a house, not its price, when considering a purchase. And based on a recent study1 he did with Chris Mayer of Columbia Business School and Charles Himmelberg of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Sinai says homeownership costs are near the long-term average, relative to rents and incomes.

How does he figure? Traditional measures of housing values, such as the rate of appreciation, or the house-price-to-rent ratio, are misleading, Sinai says.

The study by Sinai and his colleagues examined 46 housing markets from 1980 to 2004, estimating the true one-year cost of owning a house and comparing it to rental costs and income levels. Naturally, the low interest rates of recent years have offset high prices by keeping mortgage payments down. Variable and interest-rate-only mortgages have also lowered the annual dues of homeownership.

That's why the most expensive U.S. markets are especially sensitive to changes in interest rates. In any city, the faster prices appreciate, the more they'll drop if mortgage rates rise. "The so-called bubble markets really are more sensitive to changes in interest rates, because they are markets where people are buying the right to live there in future years," says Sinai.

Although Sinai believes today's house prices are justifiable, he does see a slowdown ahead, especially if interest rates continue to increase.

SmartMoney.com spoke with Sinai about the state of the housing market and similarities between San Francisco real estate and growth stocks.

SmartMoney.com: Why did you look at the annual cost to live in a house in your study, rather than the price of the house itself?

Todd Sinai: We look at the difference between the cost to own vs. the cost to buy. The typical way people look at pricing of the housing market has been the cost to buy a house. What is the price to buy a house? I was having lunch with a colleague this morning, and she said, "Do you ever in your life think about buying a house for $1 million? To which my response was, "Do you ever in your life think you'd buy a stock for $50 a share?" It's an asset; assets have prices. But it has nothing to do with the return of the asset; I mean it's not an indicator of it, anyway.

The cost to buy is the sticker price. The cost to buy a car, say, an entry-level Mercedes may be $38,000. But the cost to own it may be monthly lease payments. The cost to own can be low relative to the cost to buy. As an example, we see higher-end cars on the roads now. It could be because people have more money. It could be lower financing costs. In the housing market we think the right thing to think about is what is the cost to own the house for a year. That's much different than what's the cost to buy the thing. Over the course of the year, maybe the initial price was $1 million and you sold it for $1 million. You let someone else own it... Looking at the price is somewhat misleading. Looking at cost, you compare it to how much it would cost to rent a house for a year. That's apples to apples. [If] housing is expensive relative to renting, then you really want to annualize the cost. It's important to look at the annual cost to own a house.

SM: What factors do you include to figure out the cost per year?

TS: [You figure out] the annual cost of financing. Take out a mortgage, pay real interest costs in the mortgage. Also you put equity into that house; you're giving that up to tie it into the house. So that should be counted. Then there's the usual tax benefit offset to that.... You may or may not get a tax deduction. Also property taxes and maintenance. There's a risk adjustment you want to put into that. And what capital gains you could expect. By analogy to that, what's my return on a stock? Dividend plus capital gain. In housing, the dividend is you get to live there, and there's appreciation in the course of a year. What is a reasonable long-run price appreciation I would get in that market? You basically say, how much would it cost to buy $1 worth of house? In Philadelphia, it's something like six cents for one year. If you're buying a $600,000 house, it costs $6,000 for a year.

SM: In what kind of case would a potential home buyer be willing to pay more for a house than they would initially?

TS: You can immediately see what affects that. If interest rates are lower, the cost is lower. If you're in a market where the house appreciation is higher, the capital gains are higher, and you're more likely to sell your $1 million house for $1.1 million later...

Once you realize that's what's going on with cost per dollar...what do people do? If there's a lower cost of ownership, are they willing to bid more for a house? People are willing to pay a higher price for a house, on a lower cost-per-dollar basis... That happens a lot in markets where it's not easy to build new housing. But in markets like Houston and Dallas, where it's easy to build, you can acquire land, and the cost per dollar goes down. People aren't going to bid higher. They can just get another house at a lower cost. [The lower cost per dollar] goes on in markets with lower supply.

The reason it's important is because there's a huge run-up in price but not in the cost of owning a house, because the cost per dollar is going down. Multiply the cost of the house by cost per dollar gets you the annual cost. Annual costs are not growing as rapidly as house prices. The reason is because interest rates are plummeting.

SM: Explain how some cities are more, as you say, "sensitive" to interest rate changes than others.

TS: Say real interest rates fell by three cents a dollar. So you go from 10 cents per dollar to seven cents. Then they fall again from seven cents to four cents a dollar. Going from seven to four cents, I'm willing to pay almost twice as much for the house and still have the same annual costs. You're operating on a much lower base. It's a bigger percentage change in house price.

One thing we've seen over the last 20 years is a linear decline in real interest rates (interest rates after inflation). But because each change is operating off an ever-lower base, it's an accelerating percentage decline in real interest rates. That means we should get an accelerated operating increase in house prices. There are two sides to that coin: What real interest rates giveth, real interest rates can taketh away. A small increase in real interest rates can change house prices a lot because you're operating off a smaller base.

Another thing that's been going on, another way you get a low annual cost of housing is if you expect the market to have high capital gains, high future price growth. You'd expect the price of rent to go up. If you have a higher expected capital gain, that total annual cost will be lower. What markets are like that? In San Francisco, over the last 60 years, real annual house price growth was 3.5% per year. The national average is about 1.5%. There are a handful of other places like that: San Diego, New York City, Boston... If you compound that over 60 years, it's huge... In markets like San Francisco, people should be willing to pay a higher initial price [for a house] because they expect to get more of the value back on paper.

As an analogy, San Francisco is like a growth stock because more of the value comes in the future. Whereas Philadelphia is like a value stock: The value is not going to go much higher.

SM: So, because of the real interest rates, house prices in markets like San Francisco are justified?

TS: In those markets like San Francisco, any given interest rate change is going to matter more there; it's going to have a bigger bite. San Francisco is starting at, I think, a cost per dollar of 2.5 cents; Philadelphia is at five cents. Suppose real interest rates go down by 50 basis points. In San Francisco it's now two cents. The same change in Philadelphia would bring you from five cents per dollar to 4.5 cents per dollar. That affects the annual cost of owning a house more in San Francisco than it does in Philadelphia.

The so-called bubble markets really are more sensitive to changes in interest rates, because they are markets where people are buying the right to live there in future years...

In San Francisco, because the value of housing is expected to go up more every year than in a place like Philadelphia, more of the value of owning the house comes from the fact that you get to live there in future. In Philadelphia you don't have to pay rent this year, and you don't have to pay rent in the future, but those rents aren't expected to go up much. The discount rate is going to go up more in the future... San Francisco is more susceptible to changes in interest rates. As with a stock, if interest rates go down, stocks' price-to-earnings ratio should go up.

The punch line is that at the end of 2004, when we did our study, we found that while prices have gone off the charts (relative to rent and incomes), the annual cost of owning relative to rents and owning did not. They were just at about their 20-year historical average. The reasons: There's been rental growth and income growth in a lot of these markets... The big thing that's going on is declines in real interest rates are offsetting increases in house prices. That offset was biggest in markets where price rises were the highest. Since then real interest rates have not gone down further.

SM: So you think all the talk of bubbles is unwarranted?

TS: It's not a bubble. People are having unreasonable expectations for future capital gains. I expect things to slow down. I would've expected price growth to slow down last year; since they didn't, they really should slow down now.

At the end of 2004 house prices are at levels they should be at. I think they should level out unless rents and incomes keep rising or real interest rates go down... In the nine months since then, house prices have grown in excess of rents and income and real interest rates haven't changed. So I don't think house prices [would be much higher]. It would make me uncomfortable if they kept rising. Then the cost of renting to owning would be higher.

Since the end of 2004, prices have been going up, rents have gone up a bit and real interest rates haven't really done anything. The cost per dollar really hasn't changed, and prices have gone up. So the annual price has gone up since the end of 2004; it's gone up faster than rent and incomes. They're above historical averages...

SM: What's your forecast for the housing market for next year?

TS: The only forecast I'd care to make is that if real interest rates go up significantly, then we should have relatively less price growth in markets most sensitive to interest rates. And we should have declines in prices in those markets... What we're seeing now, is that the market — by the measures I use — finally got to the point where annual costs are above its long-term average. That means the market was overpriced. It's tricky; economists think about bubbles differently from how lay people think about bubbles. [Rapidly increasing prices] is not the definition of a bubble... You could have a big price change without it having been a bubble. It's a bit of a fine distinction.

Links in this article:
1http://rider.wharton.upenn.edu/~sinai/papers/Housing-Bubble-Himmelberg-Mayer-Sinai-wp-09-07-2005.pdf

URL for this article:
http://www.smartmoney.com/theproshop/index.cfm?story=20051229

Houston's housing voucher program is still drawing evacuees

Some families come after looking into opportunities in other cities
By CYNTHIA LEONOR GARZA
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

It was only three days ago that Maria Laborda found out from an aunt about Houston's generous housing voucher program for evacuees.

After months of drifting among family members in various cities — including, most recently, a trip back to their storm-damaged home in Kenner, La. — the prospect of a year of paid housing and utilities in a major city with plenty of job opportunities was just what Laborda and her family needed to get back on their feet. After securing a place to live, she said, "we plan to get our jobs and go on with our lives."

Sitting with her two children at the Greater Houston Area Disaster Recovery Center's housing section on Tuesday as she waited for her husband to fill out housing forms, Laborda admitted that Houston "wasn't my first choice."

"Austin was my first choice," she said, "but Houston is offering these vouchers."

In recent weeks, those vouchers have drawn to Houston hundreds of out-of-town evacuee families who have already checked out the services and job opportunities in other host cities. Being close to the Gulf Coast and thousands of other families who have a shared evacuee experience also makes Houston alluring.

Other evacuees, unaware that Mayor Bill White had just announced he was halting the voucher program after today, considered themselves lucky to have arrived when they did. Disaster Recovery Center spokesman Tom Kennedy said he is expecting a big crowd today.

Also at the center on Tuesday, Sherald Daniels, 45, said she didn't even know about Houston's voucher program until she and her husband came to Houston from Seguin, just east of San Antonio, two days ago.

"We came here to look for work and look for an apartment," said Daniels, who also signed up for the housing program after finding out about it.

Finding work similar to what her husband did in New Orleans as a maintenance supervisor — a liaison between the Orleans Parish school board and contractors — has been impossible.

"The town we live in is really nice, but we just really need to start working," said Daniels, a nurse.

Looking around the Disaster Recovery Center at the number of people still signing up for services in Houston surprised Daniels, who added, "I thought this part was over, really."

HOMESICK IN HOUSTON

For many evacuees, the Bayou City holds the promise of a better life. But it's the Bayou State that holds their hearts.

Monday, December 05, 2005
By Michelle Krupa
West Bank bureau

HOUSTON -- In a hotel suite about 350 miles from home, Karen Williams flipped through snapshots of her October visit to New Orleans.

She looked at her second-floor apartment in the St. Bernard public housing complex, complete with an orange "X" spray-painted by rescue workers and a grimy line near the balcony marking the floodwaters' height. Another photo showed her husband maneuvering around their sedan, which was caked with white silt from the brackish water that covered it for weeks.

Williams said she wept when she returned to New Orleans to see whether Hurricane Katrina had spared any of her family's belongings. She found hardly a thing, except a vacant place laced with stinking garbage. "It's an echo," she recalled in late November. "It's like a ghost town."

In Houston, Williams has found charity, from generous local residents and through federal hurricane assistance programs that offered meals, clothes, linens, rides to church and 12-month apartment vouchers to people like her who left home by boat with hardly anything in hand.

But even with plans to move after Thanksgiving into an apartment subsidized by FEMA, Williams wanted nothing more than to return to her hometown, nestled precariously on low ground between a vast lake and a mighty river.

"Right now, I feel like I'm an alien in another country," she said, sitting on a couch in Room 515 at the Hampton Inn & Suites near the Astrodome. "I want to go back home."

Missing the familiar

Yearning for New Orleans is not uncommon in Texas' largest city, where an estimated quarter-million evacuees found shelter in the days after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita tore across the Gulf Coast. In any corner of the sprawling metropolis, it is not hard to find southeast Louisiana residents who want to go back.

Back to where bus drivers know every nook of each neighborhood. Back to where cashiers call shoppers "dawlin' " and "baby." Back to block parties, costume balls and drinking beer out on the sidewalk. Back to streetcars. Back to crawfish. Back to shelves stocked with Bunny Bread and Blue Plate mayonnaise.

Going home, however, is a wish more easily made than granted. Back home, there are uninhabitable houses and long waits for a trailer. A fractured levee system that poses a frightening threat. Uncertain employment. Shuttered schools. Environmental hazards.

Indeed, some residents acknowledge that life is better in Houston, with secure jobs, high-quality schools and a fraction of the violent crime that recently seemed to seep into New Orleans' safest neighborhoods.

But to varying degrees, Louisiana evacuees said they are willing to turn their backs on freshly forged Texan security to return home to an unpredictable future because Houston, simply put, is just not New Orleans.

"I just don't feel like there's any soul," said Erika Hahne, a Mid-City mother of three who fled Katrina with her husband to a rented house on Houston's northern edge. "There's no soul. There's no flavor."

Creative itch

Hanging in Hahne's new family room are pieces of laminated artwork of purple and pink and blue hues spattered with silver splotches. They were made by her daughter and son, ages 9 and 7, at Lusher Elementary, a coveted public magnet school in the Carrollton neighborhood.

Besides comprising the few vestiges of New Orleans life that survived the 6 feet of flooding in their Mid-City home, the pictures represent a free-thinking, creative culture that the children's Houston school, Deerwood Elementary, has failed to replicate, Hahne said.

"There's no art here," she said, noting that Texas school days consist of basic academic subjects such as math, English and science. At Lusher, each day began with a song.

Further, most students at Deerwood, unlike at Lusher, are white, like the Hahne children. "I like diversity; I seek it out for my children," Hahne said. "I'm not a suburban dweller. I don't own an SUV. I didn't vote for George Bush. . . . Here, it's just a bunch of strip malls and chain restaurants."

Other Louisiana evacuees complain that Houston is too big: a metropolitan area of eight counties stretching 640 square miles, with seven major highways and more than 4 million people. Some said it is hard to navigate the sprawl, with taxi fares running into triple digits for a ride across town and city workers unwilling or unable to help newcomers navigate the complicated transit system.

Daisy Davis, an evacuee from the 7th Ward, said one bus driver told her he could not advise her on getting to her destination. "How you don't know? It's your town," she said. "It's not like that in New Orleans. New Orleans people know where everything's at."

Others bemoaned Houston as lacking that indefinable New Orleans character that makes Halloween a holiday for costumed adults and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival a perfectly acceptable excuse to miss a workday in early May.

"It's like, in New Orleans, if you would see a man dressed as a woman, you wouldn't think nothing. Here, you would stare," said Brian Colletti, who evacuated from Chalmette to Houston when his wife's employer transferred her job as a nuclear medicine and X-ray technician.

'It's safer' in Houston

Michael Miller, stepfather of Daisy Davis' two teenagers, admitted that his family's opportunities might be better in Houston: more job choices, less violent crime and a smaller risk of catastrophic hurricanes.

"It's not as bad as some parts of New Orleans," Miller said. "They don't kill like they did in New Orleans. It's safer than the St. Bernard" public housing complex, where the family lived. "And we're doing better than we were in New Orleans, living month to month."

A poll completed in October found that more than 70 percent of those displaced by Katrina intended to seek employment in Houston, with 40 percent planning to stay permanently. The latter figure fell to 24 percent among Rita evacuees, according to the survey by the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast and the Houston Downtown Management District.

More than 150,000 displaced residents still were thought to be living in Houston last month, the bulk of them from Louisiana, said Frank Michel, a spokesman for Mayor Bill White.

But among many New Orleanians still in exile, the sentiment is strong for leaving the Lone Star State and heading back to the Crescent City, even as its future remains cloaked in uncertainty and some of its neighborhoods still lack drinkable water and electricity more than three months after the Aug. 29 storm.

"I still want to go back to New Orleans," Miller said. "It's my home. It's my heritage."

Fearful of returning

Fulfilling that desire, however, is hampered for many by the myriad roadblocks Katrina erected when it blew in from the Gulf, driving at least 31,000 households to the Houston area, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

In a photo snapped in April, Colletti's back yard on Karen Drive near Val Reiss Park in Chalmette looked like a nature preserve, with a red fence shadowing a pond lined with a brooklike fountain and big, green ferns. In the post-Katrina pictures, cars lean up against nearby houses filthy with swamp grass and spilled oil.

In their corporate apartment in far west Houston, about 20 miles from downtown, Colletti and his wife, Stephanie, giggled with their 15-month-old daughter, Camryn.

The family's hopscotch evacuation from Chalmette eventually landed them in Texas, where the Veterans Administration relocated Stephanie Colletti to a local hospital. Brian Colletti, who had been learning to repair air conditioners and refrigerators with Local 60 of Metairie, stayed home to watch Camryn.

Despite a heartbreaking desire to return home -- "When I went on my honeymoon, I was homesick by the fifth day," Stephanie Colletti said -- the couple has agreed not to rebuild on their property for the sake of their daughter's health.

"I'm not even sure I'd go back to live there, with all the environmental concerns and the levees," Stephanie Colletti said. "What's going to happen in 20 years? I think there are a lot of people like us who want to go back so bad but are scared of the long-term effects."

'Death sentence'

Erika Hahne, too, was feeling stuck in Houston, even as she longed to be back at her house near Tad Gormley Stadium, in the same neighborhood as her parents.

The Hahnes ended up in Texas because her husband Matt's company, Intermarine, which manages ocean cargo transport, resettled there in Katrina's immediate wake. By Sept. 4, they had signed a $2,200-per-month lease for a furnished house with a backyard pool that they chose because of its location in the touted Houston Independent School District.

"It was like a bidding war to get this place against all the other New Orleans families," Hahne said as she played with her 20-month-old son, Jack.

If Intermarine makes its move permanent, Texas suburbia could become the family's new life, a move Erika Hahne has dubbed "the death sentence." But it would ensure financial security for the Hahnes, who have exhausted the $2,358 in FEMA rental assistance doled out to most Katrina evacuees, much of it during their flight from Houston before Hurricane Rita.

The family could not maintain its quality of life and rebuild a swamped house if Matt Hahne quit his job in Houston to return to New Orleans. Erika Hahne could go back to work as a part-time preschool teacher at Louise S. McGehee School in the Lower Garden District, but her husband might not find work in his field.

"What company's going to go back if the government is not going to guarantee that the levees are going to be safe?" she asked. "I'm in financial denial."

City of opportunity

Daisy Davis and Michael Miller were trying to temper their desire to return immediately to the 7th Ward, also because of family finances.

The couple, along with Davis' children, left the St. Bernard public housing complex by boat Sept. 1, then rode a bus to the Cajundome in Lafayette, where they were picked up by Miller's brother. They stayed a week with relatives in White Castle, but they could not manage to tap federal resources they heard were available to hurricane victims.

"We seen that on the news that FEMA was giving money away in Texas. So we thought: Houston. It come out for the better for us," Miller said.

Within hours of being dropped off by Miller's brother, the Davis family had a room at the Holiday Inn Express on Bell Street downtown and a pack of donated clothes and linens from the Reliant Center. They got a housing voucher, bought a used SUV and in a little more than a month had found a two-bedroom place off Tidwell Road on Houston's northwest edge, which FEMA will subsidize fully for one year.

Miller found work driving a forklift on a 3 a.m. shift, and Davis was hired as a bus driver for her son's charter school, relocated from New Orleans to Houston through next spring. But three months after Katrina, the pull of New Orleans, both on his heartstrings and his wallet, has altered Miller's plan.

With Davis and her children set up in Houston, Miller intends to begin splitting his time between the two cities, spending weekdays with his brother in a FEMA trailer in the 9th Ward and weekends with his family in Houston. Miller thinks he can double his Texas salary doing construction work, possibly to as much as $22 per hour.

"I'm going to go down there and work," he said. "We're going to help rebuild this city."

'Everyone's exhausted'

Despite a desperate craving for home, most evacuees called Houston a lovely town whose residents deserved perpetual thanks for opening their hearts, doors, closets and pantries to hurricane refugees. "Their hospitality is beautiful," Daisy Davis said.

Michel, the mayor's spokesman, said his city was glad to host so many evacuees, especially in light of Houston's own risk of getting hit by monster storms. "There, but for the grace of God and the direction of the wind, go us," he said.

But Houston residents and New Orleanians alike said they were beginning to sense fatigue from the city called upon with hardly a warning as a refuge for tens of thousands of freshly homeless people who arrived in shell shock, not knowing even the day of the week.

At the La Quinta Inn Houston East about 10 miles from downtown, 47 of the hotel's 112 rooms were filled with residents who ran from the storm at the evacuation's peak, manager Cathy Thorsen said. In late November, about five weeks before the last day FEMA promised to pay evacuees' hotel bills, 20 rooms still housed hurricane victims.

"It's unusual for a hotel to run full for months at a time, so when it does, everyone's exhausted," Thorsen said, adding that her staff, though tired, was glad to help and had gotten to know many of the long-term guests. "A hotel is a nice place to stay, but I certainly wouldn't want to live in one, especially not with a family."

Scouring for place to live

Maurice Rendon said some Houston residents seemed reticent to hire or rent to New Orleanians because of fear that evacuees would transplant the city's abhorrent crime rates to Houston. He felt embarrassed by the few Louisiana evacuees who had been caught causing trouble in Houston. "I don't like telling people where I'm from," he said.

Rendon and his girlfriend, Sherry Stevens, also were staying at a hotel near the Astrodome, their fourth FEMA-paid hotel since the hurricane. Unlike other evacuees, they had caught nary a break in the Bayou City.

The couple rode out Katrina in the north shore town of Hickory. But when they realized New Orleans would be without water and power for weeks, or longer, they cashed their initial $2,000 check from FEMA and bought bus tickets to Houston, where they hoped to find interim jobs.

Riding toward Texas, Rendon knew what he was leaving. Since 2000, he had headed into disaster zones to drive dump trucks hauling storm debris to disposal sites. He earned hundreds of dollars daily in the places smashed by Hurricanes Fran, Opal and Dennis.

But those were temporary junkets, where housing was not so tight for relief workers as in New Orleans after Katrina, which swamped Rendon's basement apartment on St. Charles Avenue as well as his Toyota Camry.

"Ever since Katrina hit, everything's been up in arms," he said. "I'd be more than happy to go back if there was some place to go back to. Ain't much you can do without a car."

Added Stevens: "People don't want to hire you when you say you live in a hotel."

And an apartment proved harder to find than the couple expected. The challenge was still faced in mid-November by an estimated 19,000 evacuees in Houston, for whom FEMA would pay hotel bills through Jan. 7.

"We got a voucher for a two-bedroom apartment," Rendon said, "but they don't know where they will be able to give it to us. There's a lot of red tape to cut through."

With so many roadblocks, Rendon and Stevens hoped to find jobs and make some money to get back to New Orleans soon, even though housing and transportation in the city was uncertain. "I don't want to be here that long," Rendon said. "I want to go home."

And that sentiment, for all its subtlety, seemed to be at the core of post-Katrina exile for Rendon and so many New Orleanians still displaced in Houston.

'Can't help' bad attitude

Spanning the "master-planned community" of Kingwood, extolled as The Livable Forest, are subdivisions of manicured lawns where trash is collected twice weekly from bins near the houses so that garbage bags do not spoil the scenery.

Unlike in her New Orleans' neighborhood, Hahne cannot walk to the local market or a family-run restaurant. She likened her new neighborhood to the horror film locality of Stepford, Conn.

"We used to think that it was strange if we didn't talk to our neighbors every day," she said. "Here, I haven't even met our neighbors."

Admitting that her feelings toward Houston were disdainful, Hahne said, "I know I'm poisoning my children with my bad attitude, but I can't help it."

Even an attempt to conquer the Top 10 things to do with children in Houston left Hahne wishing for a visit to the Audubon Zoo.

But staying in Houston, with its Texas oysters and its franchise sprawl, would be a nightmare for the Hahnes, who may well move back to Mid-City without job security and with their house still in mold-ridden shambles.

"I just feel like life's going on without us," Hahne said. "I know it's bad, but I want to be one of the ones to bring it back. I'm hung up on missing (New Orleans) so much and comparing everything to it. There really is nothing else like it."