Here in Harris County, pretty bad.

Hurricane Ike damaged almost half the homes in Harris County and left more than 18,000 dwellings uninhabitable, according to a detailed assessment by the Harris County Housing Authority.

Hardest hit was the small Galveston Bay community of Shoreacres, an all-residential town where 58.6 percent of the homes were destroyed or suffered greater than 50 percent damage, according to the assessment provided to the Houston Chronicle Tuesday.

The report, based on inspections of 774,000 of the county’s 994,000 residential units from Sept. 23 through Nov. 13, is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the destruction caused by Ike, although it’s limited to residential damage in Harris County.

As someone still out of my house due to the storm, I know how true this really is. My house stayed in the “minor damage” category – but that means that we were less than 50% damaged by the storm. Put my home at about 40-45% damaged – but a good number of my neighbors were not as lucky.

El Lago, a southeast Harris County town of about 4,100 people, was a distant second to Shoreacres in major damage, with 12.6 percent of its homes destroyed or sustaining greater than 50 percent damage. Next were Seabrook, 11.4 percent, and Nassau Bay, 10.1 percent.

I see that every day as I go by the house to check out the progress of my contractor on getting us back in – hopefully about 5 weeks from now. And since we share a zip code with El Lago, you can imagine what the damage to the area is really like. But the recurrent theme you hear around the area is "we will be back, better than ever."