Homeless again in New Orleans

Feb. 7, 2006 | NEW ORLEANS -- Without having a lot of money, it's almost impossible to find a place to live in New Orleans. People who came here after Hurricane Katrina, seeking rebuilding jobs, figured they could rent apartments or cheap rooms. But there's little housing to be had in Crescent City, and what is available rents for double what it cost before.

With nowhere to go, dozens of people have taken up residence in New Orleans City Park, sleeping in tents or under jury-rigged blue tarps. A group of Apache Indians from Arizona has even set up a teepee. Seeking to impose some sort of order, the city contracted with an Alabama firm called Storm Force, which has corralled people into a few manageable fields and started charging $300 a month for muddy plots big enough for four or five tents, huddled close together. Showers are available for $5.

Although famous restaurants are reopening in the French Quarter, and a trickle of tourists has returned, much of New Orleans remains apocalyptic. Streets are lined with empty, rotting houses, ugly yellow-brown stripes on the walls marking the floodwater line. A dead dog decomposes in a cage in the middle of a road in Gentilly, the devastated middle-class neighborhood that served as the setting for Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." The trees and grass are brown and dead, killed by the flood's chemical stew.

Officials say New Orleans can't handle an influx of traumatized, homeless families, but that may be what it is about to get. Five months after Hurricane Katrina, many of the storm's victims are facing a second crisis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is ending its hotel subsidy program despite the fact that thousands of Katrina victims have nowhere else to go. Thousands of evacuees will be cut off Feb. 7, and almost all will lose their hotel rooms by early March. Advocates for Katrina evacuees are terrified about what will happen next.

If FEMA deadlines aren't extended, "you're going to see folks homeless -- truly homeless and out on the street," says Mary Joseph, director of the Children's Defense Fund's Katrina Relief and Recovery for Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. None of New Orleans' homeless shelters are in operation and so all the city can offer is a patch of expensive, rain-soaked parkland. "I am scared," says Tracie Washington, a local civil rights lawyer who has represented Katrina evacuees facing eviction from their hotels. "Every indication says to me that we are headed for a catastrophe if we don't do something quickly."

On Feb. 6, FEMA held a press conference to brief reporters on the impending end of the hotel program. Little was said that would ease Washington's fears. "We have spent more than $529 million on this emergency sheltering program," said Libby Turner, head of FEMA's transitional housing program for hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "It is not long-term housing assistance that can continue for folks, and it is not what moves them along in their recovery. So we are working to end this program. Throughout disaster history, our partners have addressed the populations that do not qualify for federal assistance, most typically state departments of social and health services and charitable partners like voluntary organizations."

It's hard to imagine that Louisiana's overburdened social services are going to come to the rescue of storm victims filling hotels and motels all over New Orleans. Affordable housing in the city has been decimated. Many city residents await trailers promised by FEMA, which property owners can move into while they work to restore their homes. Although FEMA plans to house 20,000 city residents in trailers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports a "major backlog" in getting them to residents.

Across the country, tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees remain housed in about 26,000 hotel rooms; 10,000 of the rooms are in Louisiana. Many in New Orleans say they've yet to receive help finding more permanent quarters from FEMA or any other government agency. Lawyers for evacuees say that thousands of applications for other housing aid have yet to be processed. Howard Godnick, an attorney representing Katrina victims in a class action suit against FEMA, says that since Dec. 12, three-quarters of applications that have been processed have been rejected, sometimes for minor errors in the paperwork.

The lucky few who do get temporary housing assistance from FEMA are faced with difficult decisions. Families will receive $2,358 for three months, less than $800 a month. That's no longer enough to afford even a one-bedroom apartment in New Orleans, where rents now start at around $1,100. To make matters even more difficult, Godnick says recipients aren't allowed to use the $2,358 to pay security deposits or utility costs. Those who dont have resources to pay their own deposits have to either convince landlords to waive them or seek help from private charities.

Because FEMA's temporary housing assistance isn't enough to cover rent in New Orleans, evacuees -- including homeowners whose houses were destroyed in the post-Katrina flooding -- are being told to resign themselves to starting over in states with more affordable housing.

"FEMA's response has been, 'We've got housing all over the country, we just don't have it in New Orleans. These people need to move,'" says Washington. FEMA spokesman James McIntyre told the Times-Picayune: "People now will have to make some hard choices. We have mobile homes and travel trailers available in parishes in northern Louisiana, or they can take advantage of housing opportunities in other states or metro areas."

For a person who has lost everything, whose savings are depleted and community dispersed, that's not so easy. Thetius Sanders, a 49-year-old grandmother, has been living at a Hawthorne Suites Hotel in Dallas. At the beginning of February, she returned to New Orleans to record with Shades of Praise, the interracial gospel choir in which she sings. Before the storm, Sanders rented a house in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb. It had a backyard "big enough to place another house inside," she says. She worked in accounting at the criminal district court in New Orleans, a job she thinks she could return to if she could find a way to come home.

Sanders expects FEMA to stop paying her hotel bill on Feb. 13, along with that of her daughter and two grandchildren. She doesn't know where they will go afterward. She has applied for every kind of aid available but so far has received only $2,000 from FEMA. During her five months in Dallas, she exhausted her savings by paying for food and for rental cars, which she needed to apartment-hunt in a city with little public transportation. Her own car was lost in Katrina. Sanders also has lupus and has been struggling to get government help in paying for her medications.

While in New Orleans, she plans to spend a few nights in the small apartment her sister is sharing with her own daughter and grandchildren. Sanders doesn't think she can move in permanently. "To be honest, the house is not that big," she says. Most of the people staying in her hotel are in similar situations. "Trust me, we're out there every day looking for places," Sanders says. "There's too many of us to put on the street."

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