Fwd: ] FEMA ends NOLA housing subsidy - thousands to be homeless

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Homeless again in New Orleans

 

When FEMA cuts off their hotel subsidies Feb. 7, thousands of Katrina

victims will be forced into the streets.

 

By Michelle Goldberg

 

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.

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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. "

 

FEMA originally intended to stop paying hotel bills on Dec. 15, but

Godnick sued and succeeded in getting a federal judge to extend the

program. With those extensions running out, evacuees face a confusing,

multitiered system that determines when people will be cut off. People who

wanted to keep their hotel rooms were supposed to call FEMA and get a

registration number by Jan. 30. Those who failed to do so -- almost a

quarter of the hotel population -- will be put out on Feb. 7. Most people

who did register will have their rooms paid for until Feb. 13 in most of

the country and until March 1 in New Orleans.

 

When the deadlines hit, advocates for the homeless are bracing for

disaster. " The tidal wave is about to happen, " says Michael Stoops, acting

executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. " The

homeless shelters in this country for the 'regular' homeless are already

full, and they can't accommodate many more people. They will have to turn

people away. "

 

" Before Katrina, " he adds, " I always believed that the victims of natural

disasters were treated better and differently than the regular homeless

population. When Katrina happened, I realized that the victims of natural

disasters are not treated any better than the old and regular homeless. "

 

Yet among certain white, affluent New Orleanians, one often hears

complaints that hotel dwellers are being treated too well. There's a sense

that the people still living in the hotels are shiftless or hopeless,

either loafers riding a federal gravy train or hard cases who will end up

living a marginal existence wherever they land.

 

Sitting in a lobby bar in the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street one day,

Lloyd Frischhertz, a lawyer from Lakeview, a largely white,

upper-middle-class suburb of New Orleans, strikes up a conversation with

me. He is a leader of a Mardi Gras Krewe, the local organizations, often

composed of business and civic personages, that put on the city's famous

parades. He is angry that the evacuees are occupying hotel rooms in New

Orleans that could otherwise go to tourists who would help stimulate the

economy.

 

" It should have been cut off already, " Frischhertz says about FEMA hotel

subsidies. " You've got a bunch of people -- I know somebody who

essentially has nothing -- who've been living in resorts, and they're

living it up. It's grand. While we can't get hotel rooms for our

out-of-town people to come in for Mardi Gras because they won't evict

these people. Why are they entitled to stay in these hotels? These hotel

rooms are necessary to rebuild our city. We've got to show the convention

business that we're alive. "

 

The four black men nursing their beers on the other side of the bar don't

seem to be living it up. They are living in the Doubletree hotel across

the street and all are facing imminent eviction. Three of them work at

Oschner Hospital, where they had stayed and labored through Katrina. One

of them, a 57-year-old gray-haired man with kind, wry eyes and a knit

Super Bowl hat, has the astonishing name of Jah Warhorse Rastafari. He's

part Jamaican and part Seminole Indian, and Jah Warhorse Rastafari is the

name his parents gave him. He shows me his driver's license, grumbling

that people never believe him when he introduces himself.

 

Rastafari, an Oschner Hospital chef, owned a destroyed home in Gentilly --

" a real good neighborhood, real big house, " he says. He is waiting for a

FEMA trailer so he can have a reliable place to live while he restores his

home. He's already gutted it and goes back often to visit. He thinks his

three bulldogs, all of whom ran away during Katrina, are coming back as

well. He says he sometimes sees their paw prints in the mud. " Katrina did

not get them, " he says. " My bulldogs are survivors. "

 

If his hotel payments run out before his trailer comes, Rastafari says

he'll either live at Oschner or sleep in his car. He's unlikely to get

much help staying in New Orleans from FEMA. On Feb. 2, the Times-Picayune

reported that acting FEMA director David Paulison " took a stern tone "

toward those who are still living in hotels while awaiting trailers,

saying that there aren't enough trailers for everyone who wants one. " We

can't keep putting thousands of trailers on the ground, " Paulison said.

" We need an alternative, and everyone wants a trailer put on their

property while they repair their house, but I don't know that's going to

happen. "

 

Rastafari is luckier than some others; while he badly wants to stay in New

Orleans, he has relatives spread throughout the country who can take him

in. " I have kin folks everywhere, " he says. " If I have to go, I'll just

go. I can always find a job because I can cook. " Others in the Doubletree

are less fortunate. " Some probably will be homeless, " he says. " If you

don't have a place to live, your house is messed up, you're just out. "

 

Sitting next to Rastafari is one of the unlucky ones. George Johnson, a

soft-spoken man of 59, works as a cook and in the storeroom at Oschner.

Like Rastafari, he stayed at the hospital through the storm. His apartment

was damaged and his landlady informed him that she was evicting him so she

could fix the place up and move in herself, as her own house had been

ruined. " I don't know what I'm going to do, " he says, eyes cast down. " I

don't know where I'm going to go because I don't have anywhere to stay.

I'm in a pickle. I haven't received anything from FEMA. I've been there

and they keep telling me, 'You're pending, call back.' "

 

As Johnson is talking, the bartender who served Frischhertz his chardonnay

walks over. He's been working at the Sheraton for almost two decades and

is also staying across the street at the Doubletree with his wife, a city

employee. Their three children -- the oldest is 20 -- are living in a

subsidized apartment in Dallas, where the whole family had been evacuated

after the storm. He recoils at the idea that he and his wife would have to

join them.

 

" This is how much I love New Orleans, " he says, rolling up his sleeve to

reveal a tattoo he'd gotten on his bicep after Katrina. It's an outline of

the state of Louisiana with the numbers 504 -- New Orleans' area code --

and " 4-Ever " written underneath.

 

The bartender's name is Michael; he doesn't want to publicize his last

name. A 42-year-old born and raised in New Orleans, he says he is stunned

and agonized by what seems to him like America's abandonment of him and

his community. He hates being called a refugee -- he feels like it's an

attempt to write him out of the American mainstream, to lump him in with

the pitiful masses of the Third World. " That hurts, " he says. " I've been

working since I was 18 years old. I paid my bills, I paid my taxes, I'm

not a refugee. Please stop calling me a refugee. I'm an American! I'm not

a refugee. I hate that word! "

 

" It's like the n-word, " adds Johnson.

 

If Katrina's victims are refugees, interjects Rastafari, " Where's our

refugee camp? "