Aid flap is new threat to New Orleans rebuilding
By Gina Keating
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - As homes in New Orleans' flood-stricken zones inch toward habitability, a bureaucratic storm is brewing between state and federal relief agencies that could derail the city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
The dispute over how $7.5 billion (3.8 billion pounds) in federal aid is handed out is slowing disbursal to more than 120,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed by the storm on August 29, 2005 and by subsequent flooding.
Officials from the state of Louisiana contend that a new federal requirement that aid checks be issued jointly to homeowners and their mortgage lenders could mean that money bypasses the owners -- many of whom lost their jobs as a result of Katrina -- and goes straight to paying their defaulted mortgage payments.
A federal official said the government, in demanding a change in payout procedures, was relying on lenders to act fairly to New Orleans homeowners.
"If banks simply grab this money as a way to compensate for their subprime losses, we would not consider that the moral thing to do," said Bruce Sullivan, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But state officials note that banks are feeling a pinch all over the nation because of a crisis in subprime mortgages and many would be likely to grab the Katrina cash.
GRATEFUL
Meanwhile, Katrina victims grow older and angrier as their woes go unanswered amid endless government bickering.
Barbara Johnson, 79, has all but lost faith that the government will come through with the aid she needs to rebuild her mould-infested home on a nearly deserted block of 1940s bungalows in St. Bernard parish, so she turned to charity.
"I am so grateful for the love of these groups that come in, because the city is not doing a 'blah blah' thing," Johnson said as college kids on spring vacation ripped out water-logged debris and piled it roof-high in her front yard.
Throughout St. Bernard, the Ninth Ward and Lakeview, some of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, temporary trailers pop up as residents return. But the city's population is only about half of what it was before the storm.
Johnson has been waiting for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state-run, federally funded and roundly criticised Road Home program since being rescued from her attic days after Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Road Home program has received more than 121,000 applications and has 60,000 still to process, and has closed on fewer than 6,100 of them. Of $7.5 billion in funding, some $4.7 billion has been allocated, but not necessarily paid out.
The standoff between state and federal officials makes it even less likely that residents like Johnson will see any money, unless banks agree not to claim the back mortgage payments.
It has also prevented the state from rolling out a new software program that was supposed to help reduce the backlog of claims.
STALLED
As state and federal officials try to resolve their differences, the state is struggling to keep money flowing and "maintain some kind of protection for the homeowners to do repairs on the property," said Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
Wyeth said the state and HUD expect to announce this week how aid will flow to homeowners with mortgages, and what lenders are likely to deduct from grants, which average about $76,000.
The state agreed last week to pay out grants to homeowners without mortgages in lump sums and with less oversight to ensure that the funds were spent on repairs.
Most streets in once-submerged neighbourhoods remain deserted. Despite a burst of grants from the state program last month that fuelled new construction, some residents are angry at the slow recovery.
"It doesn't make sense. Everywhere we been, we build other people's (countries) but when it come to ourselves it's completely different," said Vernon Lawrence, 75, pointing to the cost of the Iraq war and reconstruction. "Here we are in this country suffering like hell."
Lawrence was speaking after coming out of the Road Home's office in East New Orleans, not far from where his two-story home flooded during the storm. He was applying for a grant and was pessimistic.
After his insurance company failed to pay out on his homeowners policy, he managed to gut his home and make it liveable with a $15,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He doesn't hold out much hope of getting relief from the government any time soon.
"They going to preach a good sermon but...I just wonder if they're going to deliver the things they said they're going to," he said.
(c) Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=546992007
Last updated: 09-Apr-07 14:39 BST
Monday, April 9, 2007
Ninth Ward Article from Boston Globe
By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times | April 8, 2007
NEW ORLEANS -- Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks, and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.
It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.
And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.
To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful. In her mind's eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch "door-popping," their grandfather's term for playful gossip and people-watching.
Harris and Flores, whose feisty, stubborn devotion to their neighborhood has become well known to City Hall since the storm, are determined to reclaim the neighborhood that nurtured five generations of their family.
Their efforts may seem quixotic to people who know the Lower 9th Ward only from television news: block after block of houses flooded to their rooflines, and people waving frantically for rescue atop their homes. After the waters receded, crumpled houses had been ripped off their foundations by the wall of water that burst the levee and lay strewn about, some on top of one another.
Almost entirely black and working class, the neighborhood became symbolic of an economic divide, in which the have-nots were stranded, overlooked by their own government to the point that foreign nations offered help.
But to many people who lived there, the Lower 9th is not a symbol. It is a 22-block neighborhood, once home to 19,000 people.
It had a significant percentage of owner-occupied homes, a core of closely knit longtime residents and even its own celebrity: pioneering rock 'n' roller Fats Domino.
(Domino, who remained in his home during Katrina until being rescued, is rebuilding and expects to move back by summer.)
And it had families such as those of Harris and Flores.
Before Katrina, Harris, 31, and Flores, 34, were next-door neighbors in lookalike reddish- brown and tan brick ranch homes. Their cousin Vernine Veasley owned the house on the corner, and another cousin, Inez Ellis, lived one block over.
Josephine Butler, their grandmother, was less than two blocks away in a wood-frame Craftsman bungalow that her husband built in 1949. At least a dozen more relatives lived throughout the Lower 9th, which spans two square miles.
Flores finished renovating her flood-ravaged house in December and moved back in with her two children. They're the only family living on her block. "I hope to serve as a beacon of hope to my neighbors," Flores said. "I want them to see it can be done."
Harris is the midst of repairs to her home. And last month, Butler, their grandmother, moved into one of the first new houses to be built in the Lower 9th Ward since Katrina.
Butler and Gwendolyn Guice, her neighbor of 25 years, were given keys to houses designed by architecture students from Louisiana State University, mold and termite-resistant elevated wood-frame structures built to withstand 160 mile-per-hour winds.
The houses -- one painted beige, the other powder green -- stand against the Katrina-scarred terrain: abandoned skeletons of buildings, missing street signs, and pockmarked pavement.
But none of the surrounding blight deterred Butler from returning to the neighborhood she has called home for almost 60 years.
"I've been here for so long, I just enjoy being here," said the 84-year-old woman.
The maternal great-grandmother of Harris and Flores moved to the then-sparsely populated Lower 9th in the 1940s, after the death of her husband.
Ophelia Hugle Short worked cleaning stately homes along prestigious St. Charles Avenue for $3 a week.
Butler and her husband, C.F., a longshoreman and welder, decided to build their home next door to her mother's in 1949 after a fire destroyed their tenement building in the Uptown neighborhood.
"We just decided we weren't going to rent no more," Butler said.
C.F. Butler cleared the land covered in cypress trees, built it up, and with the help of his wife and her brother, laid the floor, installed the wood siding and hung the new home's sheetrock. The house occupied the center of a quarter-acre lot.
The sisters recall their grandfather describing how he worked 16 hours on the docks in the city and then came home to work on the house. The stories stuck with them.
"You owe something to that memory, that perseverance, that determination," Flores said.
NEW ORLEANS -- Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks, and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.
It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.
And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.
To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful. In her mind's eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch "door-popping," their grandfather's term for playful gossip and people-watching.
Harris and Flores, whose feisty, stubborn devotion to their neighborhood has become well known to City Hall since the storm, are determined to reclaim the neighborhood that nurtured five generations of their family.
Their efforts may seem quixotic to people who know the Lower 9th Ward only from television news: block after block of houses flooded to their rooflines, and people waving frantically for rescue atop their homes. After the waters receded, crumpled houses had been ripped off their foundations by the wall of water that burst the levee and lay strewn about, some on top of one another.
Almost entirely black and working class, the neighborhood became symbolic of an economic divide, in which the have-nots were stranded, overlooked by their own government to the point that foreign nations offered help.
But to many people who lived there, the Lower 9th is not a symbol. It is a 22-block neighborhood, once home to 19,000 people.
It had a significant percentage of owner-occupied homes, a core of closely knit longtime residents and even its own celebrity: pioneering rock 'n' roller Fats Domino.
(Domino, who remained in his home during Katrina until being rescued, is rebuilding and expects to move back by summer.)
And it had families such as those of Harris and Flores.
Before Katrina, Harris, 31, and Flores, 34, were next-door neighbors in lookalike reddish- brown and tan brick ranch homes. Their cousin Vernine Veasley owned the house on the corner, and another cousin, Inez Ellis, lived one block over.
Josephine Butler, their grandmother, was less than two blocks away in a wood-frame Craftsman bungalow that her husband built in 1949. At least a dozen more relatives lived throughout the Lower 9th, which spans two square miles.
Flores finished renovating her flood-ravaged house in December and moved back in with her two children. They're the only family living on her block. "I hope to serve as a beacon of hope to my neighbors," Flores said. "I want them to see it can be done."
Harris is the midst of repairs to her home. And last month, Butler, their grandmother, moved into one of the first new houses to be built in the Lower 9th Ward since Katrina.
Butler and Gwendolyn Guice, her neighbor of 25 years, were given keys to houses designed by architecture students from Louisiana State University, mold and termite-resistant elevated wood-frame structures built to withstand 160 mile-per-hour winds.
The houses -- one painted beige, the other powder green -- stand against the Katrina-scarred terrain: abandoned skeletons of buildings, missing street signs, and pockmarked pavement.
But none of the surrounding blight deterred Butler from returning to the neighborhood she has called home for almost 60 years.
"I've been here for so long, I just enjoy being here," said the 84-year-old woman.
The maternal great-grandmother of Harris and Flores moved to the then-sparsely populated Lower 9th in the 1940s, after the death of her husband.
Ophelia Hugle Short worked cleaning stately homes along prestigious St. Charles Avenue for $3 a week.
Butler and her husband, C.F., a longshoreman and welder, decided to build their home next door to her mother's in 1949 after a fire destroyed their tenement building in the Uptown neighborhood.
"We just decided we weren't going to rent no more," Butler said.
C.F. Butler cleared the land covered in cypress trees, built it up, and with the help of his wife and her brother, laid the floor, installed the wood siding and hung the new home's sheetrock. The house occupied the center of a quarter-acre lot.
The sisters recall their grandfather describing how he worked 16 hours on the docks in the city and then came home to work on the house. The stories stuck with them.
"You owe something to that memory, that perseverance, that determination," Flores said.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Thoughts on Gert Town
-MATT DOURDIS (via email)
When we first arrived in Gert Town, the first thing I noticed was the devastation. The area looked run down and dilapadated. However, I believe that was how I perceived the area because that was what I was told to expect. Though, when I took a moment to truly assess the area, I noticed something much more encompassing than the destruction: the re-construction. On some streets, there would be a dilapadated lot next to a re-finished duplex. The juxtaposition of both the ravaged and the re-built perfectly illustrates the spirit that the Gert Town Initiative. The people of Mid-Town have taken an awful situation, perpetuated by red-tape and bureaucractic road blocks, and have begun to re-establish themselves, not only as individuals, but as a community. Ultimately, this is what our mapping project was all about. The people who run the Gert Town Initiative are residents of the area who have taken action to make sure the district is re-built to the community's specifications to accomodate the residents' needs. The mapping project seeks to make that goal attainable by organizing and categorizing the parts of the district in most need of development while ensuring that the development the does occur compliments the unique aspects of Gert Town. In the end, Alyssa and I were successful in creating the database and documenting the destruction; However, it was the re-construction that made creating the database worthwhile.
When we first arrived in Gert Town, the first thing I noticed was the devastation. The area looked run down and dilapadated. However, I believe that was how I perceived the area because that was what I was told to expect. Though, when I took a moment to truly assess the area, I noticed something much more encompassing than the destruction: the re-construction. On some streets, there would be a dilapadated lot next to a re-finished duplex. The juxtaposition of both the ravaged and the re-built perfectly illustrates the spirit that the Gert Town Initiative. The people of Mid-Town have taken an awful situation, perpetuated by red-tape and bureaucractic road blocks, and have begun to re-establish themselves, not only as individuals, but as a community. Ultimately, this is what our mapping project was all about. The people who run the Gert Town Initiative are residents of the area who have taken action to make sure the district is re-built to the community's specifications to accomodate the residents' needs. The mapping project seeks to make that goal attainable by organizing and categorizing the parts of the district in most need of development while ensuring that the development the does occur compliments the unique aspects of Gert Town. In the end, Alyssa and I were successful in creating the database and documenting the destruction; However, it was the re-construction that made creating the database worthwhile.
Common Ground Legal
-ELI ROESCHKE
I volunteered for Common Ground Legal along with Jack, Tom, and Dan. Volunteers from The New England School of Law, as well as the University of Pennsylvania joined us as well.
Tom and I worked on a special Section 8 project for Common Ground that will come to be used in the pending lawsuit against the housing department of New Orleans. Our efforts may eventually help to save some 5,000 housing units across New Orleans, which in turn would allow countless numbers of displaced families to return to their homes. Tom and I covered a great deal of the city over the course of the week, making numerous appointments with landlords to verify HANO's list of available Section 8 housing. HANO claims there are approximately 900 Section 8 housing units currently available for eligible families, and thus housing projects such as the Lafitte housing project are expendable in order to further "develop" the city. It would cost more money to demolish the housing projects, than it would to repair them. After working on this special project, Tom and I verified that more than half of the 900 "available" Section 8 housing units were in fact unavailable. Some units were in disrepair most were already occupied. Therefore, the list of 900 available Section 8 housing units should look more like 300-400 and the undamaged housing projects should be reopened. Only then will low income displaced families be able to return to their homes. Hopefully the work Tom and I did, will help to make an impression in the pending lawsuit against HUD New Orleans.
From my first hand experience interacting with members of the community, our presence as volunteers in New Orleans was greatly appreciated. I plan on returning to New Orleans to volunteer again before I graduate, and I strongly recommend other students to do the same.
I volunteered for Common Ground Legal along with Jack, Tom, and Dan. Volunteers from The New England School of Law, as well as the University of Pennsylvania joined us as well.
Tom and I worked on a special Section 8 project for Common Ground that will come to be used in the pending lawsuit against the housing department of New Orleans. Our efforts may eventually help to save some 5,000 housing units across New Orleans, which in turn would allow countless numbers of displaced families to return to their homes. Tom and I covered a great deal of the city over the course of the week, making numerous appointments with landlords to verify HANO's list of available Section 8 housing. HANO claims there are approximately 900 Section 8 housing units currently available for eligible families, and thus housing projects such as the Lafitte housing project are expendable in order to further "develop" the city. It would cost more money to demolish the housing projects, than it would to repair them. After working on this special project, Tom and I verified that more than half of the 900 "available" Section 8 housing units were in fact unavailable. Some units were in disrepair most were already occupied. Therefore, the list of 900 available Section 8 housing units should look more like 300-400 and the undamaged housing projects should be reopened. Only then will low income displaced families be able to return to their homes. Hopefully the work Tom and I did, will help to make an impression in the pending lawsuit against HUD New Orleans.
From my first hand experience interacting with members of the community, our presence as volunteers in New Orleans was greatly appreciated. I plan on returning to New Orleans to volunteer again before I graduate, and I strongly recommend other students to do the same.
Renaissance Trailer Park article
This article from GOVEXEC.com, March 13, 2006.
FEMA works to keep trailer parks temporary
By Paul Singer, National Journal
Some excerpts:
Renaissance Village is the largest of the approximately 65 FEMA-run trailer parks in Louisiana. Agency officials insist that by April 2007, all the residents must find another home, find a new job or return to an old one, and generally resume their pre-Katrina lives. But an outsider walking through the rows and rows of trailers meets hundreds of people whose homes are gone and are unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon, whose workplaces were wiped out, and whose lives seem permanently shattered.
New Orleans wants to open a FEMA site for almost 1,000 trailers in City Park, but neighbors object. Scores of FEMA trailers are sitting empty, and thousands of evacuees remain homeless because of similar objections. Regardless of the government's euphemisms -- group site, village, gated community -- this slapdash suburb is basically a refugee camp. And a lot of folks just don't want a refugee camp in their backyard.
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who lost his job after Katrina, said of FEMA's trailer parks, "They've been a bad idea for 20 years." Brown added that, before Katrina, he had requested funding for an in-depth study of alternative approaches to emergency housing, but Homeland Security never approved his request.
FEMA works to keep trailer parks temporary
By Paul Singer, National Journal
Some excerpts:
Renaissance Village is the largest of the approximately 65 FEMA-run trailer parks in Louisiana. Agency officials insist that by April 2007, all the residents must find another home, find a new job or return to an old one, and generally resume their pre-Katrina lives. But an outsider walking through the rows and rows of trailers meets hundreds of people whose homes are gone and are unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon, whose workplaces were wiped out, and whose lives seem permanently shattered.
***
New Orleans wants to open a FEMA site for almost 1,000 trailers in City Park, but neighbors object. Scores of FEMA trailers are sitting empty, and thousands of evacuees remain homeless because of similar objections. Regardless of the government's euphemisms -- group site, village, gated community -- this slapdash suburb is basically a refugee camp. And a lot of folks just don't want a refugee camp in their backyard.
***
Despite its fancy name, Renaissance Village is little more than a barren grid of metal trailers separated by gravel roadways. Patches of new grass sprouting between trailers are the only natural greenery. Some residents have landscaped their lots with potted plants from the local Wal-Mart but, otherwise, little distinguishes one trailer from the next -- beyond the black-and-white numbers pasted to their sides that serve as an address: C-10; J-18; F-9. The overall effect is "compound," not "community."
Few children are anywhere in sight. According to FEMA, the park has nearly 600 residents under age 18, but not many of them play in the dusty streets. Resident Anita Richardson says, "A lot of our kids in this trailer park are under a tremendous amount of stress. There are a lot of children, but you don't hardly ever see them. Even in the afternoon, you don't see the kids. They get off the bus, and they go home, and that's it. It scares me that kids don't go out -- even when it's sunny". . . .
Social services providers also worry about the invisible young people. Sister Judith Brun, a former Catholic school principal who is now a child-services advocate for the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, says she is very concerned about a potential rash of child abuse, because parents and children are cooped up in small spaces. Many kids are skipping school, she said.
FEMA allows local school officials to come into the trailer park to search for truant schoolchildren. Because parents can be evicted for failing to keep their children in school, some kids caught by truant officers have refused to provide their names. So now, FEMA requires residents to carry ID badges at all times and has threatened to kick out any child found without an ID.
***
FEMA's Michael Cosbar is sympathetic but says his hands are tied. "I see individuals who have needs, but we can't provide them for them. There is nothing in the Stafford Act that says that we can offer them assistance beyond what we can offer." The act, which governs federal disaster assistance to states, is quite clear, he said: FEMA can offer housing assistance for 18 months, and that's about it. "That's the law, and we have to follow the law. And it wasn't FEMA who set it up. It was Congress."
***
FEMA installed a water and sewer system for the park and provided the propane for heat, hot water, and stoves -- until February 1. Residents now have to pay for their propane, at a cost of $25 to $35 a tank. Richardson, whose four-bedroom house was destroyed by Katrina and who now shares a two-bedroom trailer with her husband and five children, says that the family burns through more than a tank a week.
When FEMA announced it would no longer pay for propane, residents went ballistic. Many are on government assistance. Some lost their jobs as well as their homes in the storm. And most came from houses or apartments in New Orleans where they had never used propane for anything but a barbecue grill. How would they know how to hook up the tanks, to use the gas efficiently? Would the senior citizens in the park survive a frost without heat?
Beyond the actual cost of propane, FEMA's announcement upset residents because it contradicted what many say they were told. According to Richardson, "They said to me, 18 months free. No utilities, no nothing. Free." That's a common refrain in Renaissance Village. Residents believe they were promised 18 months of free living, with all expenses paid. FEMA is now reneging on the deal, they believe, although everyone has a different story about how this promise was made, and no one seems to have proof of it.
***
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who lost his job after Katrina, said of FEMA's trailer parks, "They've been a bad idea for 20 years." Brown added that, before Katrina, he had requested funding for an in-depth study of alternative approaches to emergency housing, but Homeland Security never approved his request.
Scott Wells, FEMA's federal coordinating officer for hurricane recovery in Louisiana, told a Senate committee in December that the government pays $30,000 to $40,000 to purchase and install each trailer and that evacuees would be better off if FEMA just gave them cash. "Temporary housing is not cost-effective or customer-oriented," he said.
***
"What I fear," said Randy Ewing, interim director of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, the nonprofit group set up by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to coordinate state, federal, and private humanitarian assistance, "is [that] we will be left with thousands of people living in trailers that are dilapidating, and we will have the worst slums in America."
People's Organizing Committee
-JEN HERRMANN
Seven us worked at the POC. It was divided into three different projects. Two were more traditional legal research projects, which have been written about below. I, however, was working on their third project: community organizing. Organizing is crucial to the POC because its mission is to be run by the community: instead of the organizers telling the community what it wants/needs, it aims to do what the community wants.
Organizing has to be done in the evening, since that's when most people are home, so I spent the morning gutting a house. Teamed with college students from Wilberforce and Florida A & M, we pulled, ripped, swept, and wheeled everything out of a house that was completely upside-down inside. It was almost impossible to think that at some point that mess was somebody's home, so first it was only a destruction project, purely physical. As we pulled things out, however, the lives of the people who lived there began to take shape. By the end of the week, we knew that older folks lived there, the husband a pastor. One of them taught science, it seemed, because there was evidence of a miniature classroom. A teenage or college-aged guy lived there; we knew which room used to be his bedroom. We knew a lot about them...but what we didn't know is whether they were alive or dead.
The houses in the 9th Ward were all like this--a few were gutted but most of them were just as Hurricane Katrina left them in August 2005. The home ownership rate in that neighborhood was extremely high (80-90%), and now (former?) homeowners are scattered around Louisiana and Texas, most of them in trailers.
There is a trailer park in Baker (outside of Baton Rouge) called Renaissance Village. It has 600 trailers with 1,600 evacuees. It's pretty much a refugee camp. Supposedly it's temporary housing, but the POC and the residents with whom I spoke thought no attempt was being made to get people home. It seems to be an impossible situation: Add 1,000 adult evacuees to a town of just under 14,000, set them up in a trailer park on a cow pasture 90 miles from home with limited transportation, and expect them to be moving out in 18 months. As much as people want and need to get home (I can't describe survivors' passion to get home), how can they? How do you rebuild with no money? (We're talking about poor people here, whose most valuable asset was their homes, which are gone.) How do you make money with no job? How do you get a job when your neighbors are cows and you have no car?
Our job at Baker was to go from trailer to trailer and talk to people. Not talk, rather listen. After hearing their stories, we invited them to the Baker Survivors' Council meeting, where the POC would find out what survivors want/need.
Seven us worked at the POC. It was divided into three different projects. Two were more traditional legal research projects, which have been written about below. I, however, was working on their third project: community organizing. Organizing is crucial to the POC because its mission is to be run by the community: instead of the organizers telling the community what it wants/needs, it aims to do what the community wants.
Organizing has to be done in the evening, since that's when most people are home, so I spent the morning gutting a house. Teamed with college students from Wilberforce and Florida A & M, we pulled, ripped, swept, and wheeled everything out of a house that was completely upside-down inside. It was almost impossible to think that at some point that mess was somebody's home, so first it was only a destruction project, purely physical. As we pulled things out, however, the lives of the people who lived there began to take shape. By the end of the week, we knew that older folks lived there, the husband a pastor. One of them taught science, it seemed, because there was evidence of a miniature classroom. A teenage or college-aged guy lived there; we knew which room used to be his bedroom. We knew a lot about them...but what we didn't know is whether they were alive or dead.
The houses in the 9th Ward were all like this--a few were gutted but most of them were just as Hurricane Katrina left them in August 2005. The home ownership rate in that neighborhood was extremely high (80-90%), and now (former?) homeowners are scattered around Louisiana and Texas, most of them in trailers.
There is a trailer park in Baker (outside of Baton Rouge) called Renaissance Village. It has 600 trailers with 1,600 evacuees. It's pretty much a refugee camp. Supposedly it's temporary housing, but the POC and the residents with whom I spoke thought no attempt was being made to get people home. It seems to be an impossible situation: Add 1,000 adult evacuees to a town of just under 14,000, set them up in a trailer park on a cow pasture 90 miles from home with limited transportation, and expect them to be moving out in 18 months. As much as people want and need to get home (I can't describe survivors' passion to get home), how can they? How do you rebuild with no money? (We're talking about poor people here, whose most valuable asset was their homes, which are gone.) How do you make money with no job? How do you get a job when your neighbors are cows and you have no car?
Our job at Baker was to go from trailer to trailer and talk to people. Not talk, rather listen. After hearing their stories, we invited them to the Baker Survivors' Council meeting, where the POC would find out what survivors want/need.
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