Monday, November 05, 2007

FEMA: Putting the 'hell' in 'help'

If you were among the working poor and owned your own modest home in New Orleans prior to Aug. 29, 2005, chances are it's not there anymore. Or that it's ruined, and that Louisiana's "Road Home" program hasn't delivered any cash to un-ruin it.

IF YOU WERE
one of New Orleans' many working poor and rented a modest apartment before Aug. 29, 2005, chances are it's not there anymore. And that what apartments remain available might well be in a neighborhood so dangerous you dare not go there.

Or -- if there's somewhere you can hang your hat without a slug tearing through your head -- the rent is probably double what you can afford. Not a good situation for a city needing workers to drive its recovery from the Great Federal Flood, which other Americans remember as Hurricane Katrina.

In fact, a sane government might consider the lack of housing that workers can afford to be something of a crisis situation.


We are not governed by sane people.


IN FACT,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency has taken a different approach to the lack of affordable housing for the working poor. It's closing the FEMA-trailer sites in Orleans Parish and elsewhere along the ruined Gulf Coast and throwing residents, in effect, out into the streets.

Quite frankly, I'd say that was probably worth a good insurrection. But, also quite frankly, the folks being tossed out on their figurative ears probably are too tired and too beat down to even muster a good picket line.

Which is exactly what vermin like the GOP party hacks deadheading at the throttle of the Capitalismfodder Express count on. Not that the Democrats are any better, of course.


Down in Uz New Orleans, the Book of Job
Times-Picayune covers the outrage of the day:
Shirley Hitchens took a few deep breaths.

Sitting inside her FEMA trailer, worry consumed her. The walls started to close in. So she walked outside to get some fresh air. Her feet crunched on the gravel driveway of her trailer park. She took a seat on a well-worn kitchen chair just past the entrance.

Hitchens, 59, fretted because she doesn't know where she and her son will be living next month. Now they're living in Central City, at A.L. Davis Park at Washington Avenue and LaSalle Street. But in mid-October, she found a notice on her trailer door from FEMA headlined, "A.L. Davis Playground Temporary Housing Site Is Closing November 18, 2007."

Basically an eviction notice, it offered the services of a caseworker and two apartment-search Web sites, both of them nonfunctional.

Shifting to another FEMA park was not an option.

"It is recommended that your next move is into permanent housing since all parks will be closing," the note said.

Neither the city nor FEMA has publicly announced any park closures in New Orleans. But during the past few months, the agency has quietly delivered eviction notices to residents at nearly half the city's parks.

Since August, FEMA has mothballed more than 800 trailers in New Orleans. More than 550 more will be emptied in the current round of eviction notices. But the agency's efforts to phase out the trailer parks, always intended to be temporary housing for hurricane victims, might leave many departing residents in unstable living situations, largely because of the city's steep post-Katrina rents.

Typically, residents have been given between 30 and 60 days to find new housing, but they say that's often not enough time, given the acute shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans. Most people still in trailers are working-poor renters who have clung to the temporary solution for a lack of other viable options in their now high-rent hometown, where the $500 rents that were once the norm are now a rarity.

The low-key efforts to shutter New Orleans FEMA parks contrast starkly with neighboring areas. In St. Bernard and Jefferson, parish officials have loudly advocated the parks' closure, mostly for aesthetic reasons. In Mississippi, FEMA officials announced recently that they hope to close all of the state's so-called "group sites" by the end of this year.

But New Orleans officials said they aren't pressuring FEMA to close its remaining 38 sites, which hold 1,447 trailers and are home to about 3,000 residents.

"This was driven by FEMA mandate," said Anthony Faciane, deputy director of neighborhood stabilization for the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration. Faciane said the city's main concern was to see trailer occupants in stable housing once their parks were closed.

(snip)

Thomas said FEMA has no firm timeline to close all parks. "There is no set date," he said.

But even FEMA's in-house information on the closures seemed incomplete. The agency first listed 12 sites that had received notice recently. Then, when trailer occupants in other parks produced their eviction notices, FEMA added those parks to the list. In the end, Thomas said that within the past 45 days, FEMA had posted eviction notices at nearly half the city's remaining sites: 16 of 38 parks.

A.L. Davis Park was one of them.

At first, said Hitchens, some A.L. Davis residents didn't take FEMA's deadline seriously. Since Hurricane Katrina, the agency has continually delayed housing deadlines, sometimes on its own, sometimes upon court order.

In April, federal officials, including Powell, announced that on March 1, 2008, Gulf Coast trailer residents would begin paying rent. So trailer residents assumed that the parks would continue through at least March.

Hitchens said that her son had been looking for apartments, but he hadn't yet found anything suitable. "Do you think FEMA will throw us out if we don't find a place?" she asked.

Maybe.

Ask the municipal employee who used to live in a Gentilly FEMA trailer, near the Elysian Fields overpass on what used to be the city-run Perry Roehm Stadium. Before the storm, he and some co-workers had helped groom the park's ball field.

But on Tuesday morning, he drove away from it in a car piled high with his belongings. The apartment he had rented wasn't available until Nov. 6, he said, and his extended family was still in Houston. So he might rent a motel room. Or he might end up sleeping in his car.

He couldn't stay in his trailer. His FEMA caseworkers told him no, he said.

The man didn't want his name used because he didn't know what role his employer, the city, played in emptying the trailer park.

Thomas, the FEMA spokesman, said the mayor's office had "a specific desire to see those sites occupying playground and recreational areas to be deactivated as soon as possible," a contention city officials deny.

As FEMA decommissioned its trailer sites, the city asked the agency to put municipally owned parks at the top of the list so that recreational programs could reopen, said Faciane from the Office of Recovery Development and Administration. But the city didn't instruct FEMA to vacate the park land within any specific time frame, he said.

Two Perry Roehm residents, Wayne Williams, 45, and his neighbor Vickie Thomas, 34, met up last week at the trailer park's metal mailboxes for the last time. All of their belongings were packed up, they said, and the trailer keys were on the counters. Both of them are moving in with relatives, a common scenario for departing trailer-park residents.

Williams, a longshoreman, was one of the vital workers brought back to New Orleans about a year ago and housed in a trailer. He said he wished he could return to his home on Tennessee Street in the Lower 9th Ward. But he's still waiting for money from the Road Home program.

Thomas said FEMA officials believed that it was time for Gulf Coast families to "take full advantage of the resources being offered," including rental referrals and an offer to relocate trailers to occupants' own lots.

"The time is now, and we, FEMA, will be here to assist," he said.

Williams said he had tried to tap into that offer of transitional help. He told his FEMA caseworker that his home wasn't ready yet and that his lot was too small to accommodate a trailer. So his caseworker said he could get into another trailer -- in LaPlace.

"Too far," Williams said.

So he looked at the FEMA-referred apartments. But the places he could afford were in what he considered sketchy blocks in Central City and eastern New Orleans, where he said he would "have to sleep with one eye open."

Other rentals were in poor condition.

"There are apartments, and then there are apartments," he said.

Instead, Williams will be staying with family, sleeping on a couch.

"I'm just living day by day, and waiting for a door to open," he said.

Vickie Thomas and her 65-year-old mother are moving to her uncle's house. The two of them have been rehabbing the family house near the London Avenue Canal levee break with the help of Road Home money received in May. Thomas, who works in Tulane's ophthalmology clinic, estimates that the house will be habitable in about two months. But every apartment they looked at required a six-month lease.

Also, she said that most "decent" one-bedroom apartments are renting for at least $1,000 -- too much, on top of the flooded house's mortgage and insurance, which they're still paying.

"People think we're living here for free," she said. "But they don't think about those payments."

At first, Thomas hoped that maybe they could stay the extra two months. She explained their situation to FEMA staff, hoping they would extend their deadline. "They were not budging," she said.

Across the street from the A.L. Davis trailer park at the Friendly Super Market, longtime store employee Mike Pilot has heard endless fretting about the park's closing.

"A lot of people don't know what they're going to do or where they're going to go," he said as he stocked a cooler with soft drinks.

Pilot said he doesn't blame Road Home for his neighbors' current situation. "Most of them are not homeowners, only renters. They're making the same little money they're always made, but now they're up against high, high rents," he said.

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