Post Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey recovery may be slow until the health of our residential real estate market improves.

Our area still has almost a thousand displaced people living in hotels, the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported recently. Our Beaumont-Port Arthur housing market has about 2.9 months of available housing where four to six months is considered healthy.

On any given day, an agent told us, a motivated home shopper might find a handful of available homes in our end of the county — and if you don’t buy quickly, they’ll be gone. That’s what happens when a catastrophic flood comes to town.

Of 400 housing markets in the U.S., a data-based Nationwide study showed the Beaumont-Port Arthur market ranked No. 397. Only Sherman-Denison, Texas; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Victoria, Texas trailed us for market health.

The study used such “drivers” as employment, demographics, mortgage market and home prices as factors for measuring market health. Consider that Beaumont-Port Arthur has high unemployment — joblessness here is fourth-worst among 27 metropolitan statistical areas in Texas — and that most of the homes in the county were damaged by Harvey, and you have the wrong ingredients for market health. That’s us — now.

There’s more: limited housing is driving up prices; delinquent payments are increasing; new flood maps are due, and may create additional market upheaval.

“It’s really a seller’s market,” one agent told us. “I listed one home last week and had three offers that day.”

Nationwide calls the market “overheated”: Prices are climbing faster than incomes. Markets like this one have shrinking affordability because of that combination of climbing prices and falling credit performance. That’s true — now.

Where some see problems, others see opportunities. One agent told us prohibitive pricing at one end of the market has awakened interest in the other end of the market.

She said all-but-abandoned homes are finding some new interest for investors, who are polishing up worn properties and living there or selling them. Call it gentrification but call those properties revamped, too, if they are done well. Call those neighborhoods revitalized, if good neighbors move in and care for the properties.

Other buyers are looking twice where they’ve never looked before, considering moves to Orange County, to some previously overlooked Port Arthur neighborhoods and even to areas that flooded in Groves for the first time last year. The reasonable risk takers might consider this: Harvey would have inundated anyone. It won’t happen again. Maybe.

Frankly, we admire such glass-half-full people. If our region is going to rebound, it will need optimistic people, problem solvers committed to the area who will make the best of difficult situations. It’s easy to see a market that’s down. It’s visionary to see and effect a market’s recovery.