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[NOLA_C3_Discussion] re: fema trailer parks

 

 

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1150867840216610.xml & coll=1

 

Desperate for a place to call home

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Jennifer Moses

BATON ROUGE -- While life here has long since returned to a semblance of

pre-storm normal, the normality is deceptive, mainly because the

abnormalities -- like some raving great-aunt no one talks about -- are

hidden away. Thousands of displaced evacuees, not only from New Orleans but

also from St. Bernard, Cameron, Vermilion and Jefferson Davis parishes, are

still stuck in squalid, miserable, dangerous FEMA trailer " villages " -- the

same camps that opened with such fanfare and rejoicing just a few months

back.

 

Not only that, but there are two tiers of FEMA villages. The official ones,

like the cheerily named Renaissance Village, with its approximately 1,500

residents in some 500 trailers, and the equally misnamed, if much smaller,

Mount Olive Gardens, don't offer an awful lot in the way of amenities. But

they do at least provide security, management, gates and, in the case of the

giant Renaissance Village, a soon-to-be-opened, privately funded child care

center.

 

The second-tier FEMA parks aren't quite as glamorous. These are the trailer

camps that, because FEMA had trouble buying enough land, have sprung up all

over Baton Rouge in commercial trailer parks, like the unnamed one on

Victoria Road, conveniently tucked behind a hooker pickup point, or another

unnamed one off Greenwell Street, where I recently met a young mother named

Lindley Rushing, her fiancé and her three nursery-school-age children.

 

Her ex-husband having abandoned the family and her fiancé being disabled by

a recent accident at work (and eligible for exactly zero in either

unemployment or health benefits), Rushing and her family are dependent on

welfare and so poor that a family outing has to be planned days ahead to

make sure that there's enough ready cash to pay for gas.

 

" Don't get me wrong, " she told me. " I'm grateful that we're here -- there

are families worse off than we are. " But, she added, she can't let her

children go outside because there is no safe or even reasonably clean place

to play; the nearby park, popular with drug dealers, is littered with broken

glass; the sound of gunshots punctuates the nights; and the psychotic man

who lives a few doors down has a habit of banging on her door at all hours.

Recently sewage backed up into her trailer, soaking the entire floor. She

had to wash everything, which -- given that Laundromat prices have more than

doubled since the storms -- constituted a financial stretch. " We're

middle-class poor people, " she said.

 

She's not alone. Across the state, more than 200,000 people are living in

trailers or unfinished houses, many still in tents, without insurance,

health care, access to decent public schools or, in many cases, jobs. In

fact, so many people are desperate to make their homes livable that FEMA is

still delivering trailers to the New Orleans area. To date there are some

70,000 FEMA trailers in some 60 villages in Louisiana alone, with additional

trailers parked in yards. And not a single one of those trailers is strong

enough to withstand hurricane-strength winds.

 

What is strong enough for that is the so-called Katrina Cottage, a

two-bedroom, aesthetically appealing house that can not only take 200-mph

winds but is also cheaper than the travel trailers and, perhaps more

important, built to last -- meaning that the Katrina Cottage can serve as a

permanent dwelling.

 

According to Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery

Authority, some 80,000 rental units were lost in the state. FEMA's plan,

meanwhile, continues to be finding more trailers. Which makes sense, because

FEMA's job is in fact to provide temporary, emergency housing. To that end,

the agency has declared that after 18 months, the villages will be shut

down, the idea being that by then the 200,000 or so " temporary " residents

will have found long-term housing solutions.

 

It's just too bad that, as early as October, when the " Katrina Cottage "

first became available, no one had the bright idea to scratch the trailer

solution (with its six- to nine-month delivery schedule and $4 billion price

tag) and go for one that might actually work. Whether the villages will

empty according to schedule is doubtful, given that in Florida, residents

hit by Hurricane Andrew were still living in FEMA trailers 10 years after

the disaster.

 

Of course, people are working on long-term housing solutions: That's the

business of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is hoping to provide

36,000 to 50,000 affordable rental units, primarily in the New Orleans area.

And that's because the vast majority of New Orleanians stuck in FEMA

trailers are desperate to return to the place they still call home.

 

.. . . . . . .

 

Jennifer Moses is a writer who lives in Baton Rouge. She wrote this column

for The Washington Post.