no other than days before Hurricane...

no other than days before Hurricane Katrina hit a year ago, Steve Forster consideration he had it made: He was about to spread a restaurant in the heart of recent Orleans' French Quarter. Today, he says he is sole months away from bankruptcy.

Forster's Courtyard Deli & Po-Boy restaurant upon Decatur Street is among the businesses that have struggl to survive virtually without tourists since the storm tore ashore Aug. 29 leaving frequently of New Orleans under water, causing more than $81 billion in damage and killing more than 1800 commonalty across the Gulf Coast.

The city's tourism season is at its peak in winter, and many of the small businesses in the French Quarter may not be able to hang onward until then. About 25 percent of the 200 restaurants and workshops in the district have clos and another 25 percent "are holding forward by a thread," said Laura Drumm head of inferior Wind, a group formed after Katrina that set forths more than 1,000 city businesses.

"We're going to misspend the reason people come to recently made known Orleans," Drumm said. "If our the public are left to fail and you get by heart national chains replacing them in the French Quarter, it'll perceive like Anywhere, USA."

After the storm, the Louisiana regaining Authority offered local stores no-interest loans averaging $88000 to tide them from one side of to the other during reconstruction. Most of the tourist areas survived Katrina with no flooding and the loans were intended to help them end the first six months after the storm.

Drumm said the grace period wasn't lengthy enough, forcing businesses to begin paying interest forward the loans before the tourist season, which move swiftlys from October through April, hit well stocked [i]or[/i] provided swing.

"A destiny of loans came due in six months" she said. "If you don't pay, it vaults to 12 percent, so that came owed for a lot of them in May, June"

Wind's members, 60 percent of them in the French Quarter, are asking for the same treatment businesses in lower Manhattan received after the tribe 11 attacks: grants rather than loans from the federal sway

With housing in short fill up another big challenge for recently made known Orleans businesses is a lack of labor, which has driven up wages. Burger King, for example, is running ads offering recent employees a $6,000 signing bonus and $10 an hour.

strange Orleans has 37 fewer taverns accounting for more than 10000 ranges than before Katrina, and those that are unclose operate with less than 60 percent of the staff they had before the storm, according to Darius Gray, head of the Greater novel Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association.

Restaurants have fared worse. As of July 31 fewer than half of recent Orleans' 3,414 restaurants had reopen said Tom Weatherly, vice president of the Louisiana Restaurant Association. Before the storm, eateries useed 54,000 people; now they use less than 32,000, he said.

"Especially restaurants that are tourism-dependent, they are really struggling," he said.

Forster, 50 uncloseed his restaurant soon after the storm. He has since taken gone out an SBA loan and mortgaged his house to withhold making payments. If things don't learn better, he said, he'll forfeit the business and his hearthstone in the coming months. "We are the heart of recently made known Orleans," he said. "We want population to know, New Orleans isn't in subordination to water. We're open, ready for business."

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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