Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a great French economist, said in his pamphlet "What is Seen and What is Not Seen": "There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen." What economists Chan and Woodward can see are the jobs and construction boom created by repairing hurricane destruction. What they can't see, and thus ignore, is what those resources would have been used for had there not been hurricane destruction.
I agree with Bastiat and therefore completely disagree with you, because you are ONLY looking at the "known" expenditures that you can "see," and I am expecting that entrepreneurs will NOT rebuild in the same ways, or in the same places; that bad businesses will have disappeared and more efficient businesses will appear; and that free foreign money will be used that previously was not available.
A few hundred thousand heads of human capital have recently been freed from a Democrat prison. Poor people in the inner cities live in multi-generational squalor and poverty, held captive by Democrat politicians and relatively small numbers of street criminals. In that environment, the chances that any of those people, or their younger children, will ever see any examples of a productive lifestyle are next to nil. I've seen two interviews of young NO escapees who swear they are never going back; they're going to start a new life somewhere else. There are probably many more, but the media wouldn't consider such newsworthy.
This is no different than corporations that reorganize constantly "just to shake things up" and keep everyone on their toes.
The criminal element will probably not change. They will melt into the same lifestyle in another city, and may or may not go back to NO after it is restored. But those who want a better life, will now have opportunities they would never have had in downtown NO.