Hurricane evacuee shelters face deadline

Sep 27, 2005, 06:58 PM

With new Hurricane evacuees lining up every morning at the Red Cross's Midtown Memphis headquarters, some still end up at local shelters.

"There's so many people coming in," said New Orleans evacuee Lawrence Galloway. "It's kind of hard to accommodate everybody, serve everybody with the volume of people coming in but they're doing their best."

They are tasked with finding food, places to live, and jobs for more than 9,500 families who've turned to the Mid-South Red Cross, after those families' were homes flooded by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Now, President Bush wants all evacuees out of shelters by October 15th.

"I think that's a very realistic goal," said William Hildebrandt at the American Red Cross. "It's something that we've been working on over the last several weeks."

The Red Cross reports 109 evacuees are still living at the Dunn Elementary School shelter. Galloway isn't convinced the deadline can be met.

"I don't think that's a realistic goal because it's only a few weeks away," he said. "We got a lot of people in this Dunn Street shelter as I speak now, and we constantly having people coming in."

But the signs outside church run shelters like Bellevue Baptist tell a more hopeful story, saying donations are no longer needed.

"We've been very fortunate," said Rev. Scotty Shows at Belleview, "to have a lot of folks step up, offer jobs and housing. Our folks have responded well."

Now, there just a handful of evacuees where there once were hundreds. Church officials say they expect to close the shelter by Friday.

As for the Dunn Avenue Shelter, Red Cross officials said Tuesday evacuees still there after the President's deadline won't be thrown out on the street, saying help will be there as long as necessary.

Housing market 11% below norm

By The Commercial Appeal
August 19, 2005

Are you feeling undervalued? Like you're missing out on the real estate boom?

According to the economics department of National City Corp., Memphis's housing market is one of the most undervalued in the United States.

NCC officials said the Memphis metro area was 11 percent below the norm.

The study finds Santa Barbara, Calif., to be the country's most overheated market at 69 percent above the norm, while College Station, Texas, is ranked the most undervalued at 19 percent below the norm.

For the study, price-to-income ratios are statistically explained by household population density, mortgage interest rates, relative income levels and characteristics unique to each metro area.

Renasant to move in

Renasant Bank executives and commercial lenders will move into the bank's new digs in East Memphis on Monday.

About 18 people will help occupy the 12,000 square feet the bank has on two floors at 5240 Poplar, about twice the space it had in its Germantown nest. A branch -- the bank's third in Shelby County -- will open there by Thursday, said Frank Cianciola, president and chief executive officer.

Renasant isn't giving up on its birthplace in Germantown -- about 15 employees, headed by Don Russell, executive vice president, will stay in Germantown.

With its acquisition last year by The Peoples Holding Co., of Tupelo, since renamed Renasant Corp., the Germantown-Memphis bank also had DeSoto County offices to manage, so the move gives it a more central location. The bank has a branch in Cordova and is building one in Collierville.

Sovereign in top 500

Sovereign Wealth Management of Memphis didn't grow as fast last year as in 2003, but the company still ranked among Bloomberg Wealth Manager magazine's top 500 wealth managers.

Sovereign stood at No. 121, based on the average amount of money managed for each client -- about $2.1 million. Last year, the firm was No. 94.

With $180 million under management, a 20 percent increase from 2003, Sovereign's growth didn't match the 216.4 percent that made it the fastest growing wealth management firm in the nation in 2003.

Today's numbers

One-third of business users blame Microsoft for the recent worm outbreak.

Thirty-five percent of respondents to an informal Web survey of customers by security company Sophos said the software maker was at fault for the recent rash of worms spawned by variants of Zotob. The results, released on Thursday, show 45 percent place the blame squarely on the virus writers, while 20 percent laid blame on their systems administrators for not patching systems fast enough.