As trailer parks close, Katrina victims struggle to stay afloat

The closing of FEMA trailer parks, hastened by unhealthy levels of formaldehyde in the trailers, has highlighted continued problems faced by Katrina evacuees three years after the disaster: the lack of affordable housing, inadequate social safety nets, and the risk of falling into homelessness.

The New York Times reports:

The closing of Renaissance Village, near Baton Rouge, and the other remaining FEMA parks represents the final chapter in one of the largest and most tumultuous efforts by the federal government to provide emergency housing to a displaced population. Over the course of two years and nine months, the Federal Emergency Management Agency put up 9,000 families in trailer parks scattered around the Gulf area, where residents endured cramped, inadequate and often poisonous conditions.

Some evacuees have moved out of the parks and have gone on to find other housing, but many of those suffering from disabilities seem likely to fall into homelessness. The Times, in a series that follows some of the last residents of the Renaissance Village trailer park as they make a difficult return to life on their own, reports that government planners were left unprepared to deal with the needs of many of these disabled evacuees, some of whom suffered from “mental limitations, physical afflictions or addictions.” According to the Times:

Support systems have been slow to catch up. Red Cross money for necessities like furniture, work clothes and, in some cases, cars, ran out just as Renaissance Village and most of the other trailer sites were closing, and many residents are making do with nothing but a mattress.

“I know we’re behind the eight ball,” Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, told the Times. “People talk about recovery, but on one level, we’re still responding.”

Local charities and nonprofits are trying to fill in some of the gaps, but many struggle to keep Katrina victims from falling through the cracks. Groups such as the Homeless Alliance and the Community Initiatives Foundation are part of a consortium of agencies trying to keep those ineligible for FEMA assistance from becoming homeless.

New Orleans’ notorious homeless camp cleared

This week the remaining residents were moved from the large homeless encampment underneath the Claiborne Avenue freeway overpass near Canal Street in New Orleans.

The once crowded and noisy tent city had become notorious, as an eyesore to some (in January New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called the scene “a mess”), as a health hazard to its residents and outreach workers, as a site of drug deals and theft, and as a stark symbol of the surmounting housing crisis in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The chaotic concrete settlement, where many student and church volunteers daily dropped off donations of food and clothing, saw a rotating group of more than 200 people, who according to the Times Picayune, lived in horrendous and unhealthy conditions “amid raggedy tents, scattered mattresses and rat-infested couches.” Many had come from abandoned houses and other smaller camps across the city. In fact the overpass encampment ballooned at the start of the year after state and city officials closed down a similar camp across the street from City Hall.

As the Times Picayune reported:

One of the difficulties of emptying the Claiborne camp with any haste was the level of illness there. Most of its residents suffered from untreated mental illness and life-threatening medical conditions, according to detailed surveys conducted by [UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a coalition of advocates for the homeless]. That same survey found that 86 percent of those living at the camp were from the New Orleans area, a statistic that surprised many and flew in the face of Nagin’s May tongue-in-cheek comment about solving the homeless problem with one-way bus tickets out of town.

Many of the frailest people interviewed under the overpass said they had lived with family before Hurricane Katrina, often a mother or sister. Many times, those family members were now dead or displaced, leaving them solo for the first time in their lives.

UNITY had spent the past couple of months gradually removing severely disabled people from the camp to shelters. The Associated Press reported that many from the overpass were taken to the city's Salvation Army facility, where they underwent checks for any physical or mental disabilities. They will be given a month at the facility, while they are provided housing vouchers that will buy them another three months of shelter in an apartment. Severely disabled people likely will be eligible for more long-term rental assistance and services.

Last month, Facing South reported that Congress passed an emergency war spending bill that included a provision providing $73 million for 3,000 subsidized housing vouchers to shelter physically and mentally disabled Hurricane Katrina victims. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and Gulf Coast housing advocates had been pushing Congress for more than two years to provide additional relief to the Gulf Coast and worked tirelessly in last couple of months to secure this needed funding.

Despite the small victory on the housing voucher front, more than two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ lack of affordable housing remains one of the most pressing crises facing the recovery effort (rents have increased by about 40 percent since the 2005 disaster).

As Facing South has extensively reported, New Orleans is rapidly becoming a city with less and less space for its poorest. There are not enough beds for the homeless and there is a stark shortage of affordable housing (worsened by the fact that public housing complexes have been demolished without first providing enough replacement units.) The affordable housing crisis continues to contribute to New Orleans’ growing homeless population, one that has doubled to an estimated 12,000 since the 2005 disaster. Many of the city’s poor continue to live in substandard and overcrowded housing. Many of the city's homeless continue to live in shelters that are struggling daily to stay afloat financially.

Hurricane Katrina storm memorial delayed

As the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the AP is reporting that few expect the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina monument to be built by the target date of Aug. 29. During the second-anniversary ceremony, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin promised $1 million to the project, which will be a tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the estimated 1,600 fatalities, and the resting place for 85 bodies that remain unclaimed nearly three years after the disaster.

According to the AP:

What could have been an inspiring focal point for New Orleans has dissolved into a project that is forgotten, frustrated and delayed — much like the Katrina recovery itself. Some say a lack of follow-up by the mayor is the cause, but [New Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard] places the blame on his own overburdened office, and the fatigue of a scattered city that had its share of problems long before the levees failed.

Facing South has reported on the slow recovery and the continued barriers to rebuilding for many New Orleans residents. A post-Katrina housing crisis continues to feed a surge in homelessness. More than half of the working poor, elderly and disabled who lived in New Orleans before Katrina have not returned. Because of critical shortages in low cost housing, few expect the tens of thousands of poor and working people to ever be able to return home.

Last week the Census Bureau reported that New Orleans ranks as the fastest-growing large city in the nation. New Orleans’ population rose 13.8% to 239,124 in the year ending July 1, 2007 (still a marked decrease from the city's population in 2000 when it stood at 484,674).

But while an estimated 67 percent of New Orleans population has returned since the 2005 disaster, government statistics indicate many are not original inhabitants, with up to 200,000 pre-Katrina residents forwarding U.S. Mail to other parts of the country a year after the storm.

The AP reports that there is no organized group of surviving family members, as was seen after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, to push for the memorial. Dislocation is blamed for the lack of activity to support the monument, but many non-profit and community groups that have returned to the city say they are still too overwhelmed with caring for the survivors’ recovery needs.

Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill that includes Gulf Coast relief

President Bush on Monday signed the $162 billion supplemental appropriations bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move that will provide funding to the wars through the first month of the next president’s term. According to CNN, the supplemental spending bill also contains a new GI Bill that expands education benefits for veterans who have served since the 9/11 attacks, provides a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits and more than $2 billion in disaster assistance for parts of the Midwest that have been hit by record floods.

The bill also includes hard-fought for provisions for Gulf Coast rebuilding—$5.8 billion for Louisiana levees and $73 million for Gulf Coast housing vouchers to shelter physically and mentally disabled Katrina victims.

As Facing South reported last month, Sen. Mary Landrieu has been pushing legislators for more than two years to provide additional relief to the Gulf Coast. She said the funds from the bill will help a few thousand in New Orleans, but is concerned that much needed money for hospitals, police, and flood prevention was still cut from the final bill.

As Landrieu stated in a press release last week:

“This bill provides a foundation for some of the remaining recovery needs on the Gulf Coast, but the task is not completed. The House of Representatives unfortunately caved to White House demands and cut from this Supplemental critical funding the Senate had passed for our very real domestic emergency along the Gulf Coast. Gone are provisions to finally make our hospitals whole, to beef up our criminal justice system – much of which is still operating out of trailers – language to accelerate closure of MRGO. Also gone is the flexibility I added for Louisiana to pay back over 30 years its cost share for repairing the federal levees that broke in 2005. The House did, after a media onslaught, keep in the bill funding for 3,000 vouchers for extremely low income Louisianians who are seniors, disabled or both. It is a crucial provision that will go a long way toward keeping our most vulnerable population off the street.”

Mississippi advocates struggle to protect funding for Gulf Coast housing

Facing South reported earlier this month about the struggle by New Orleans advocates to keep a $76-million Katrina aid package from being axed from the supplemental spending bill for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bill has been going back and forth between the House and Senate for the past few months, and much of the domestic funding is at risk for being cut again. This week the bill is back in the Senate and is expected to go up for a vote tomorrow.

In light of this, advocates in Mississippi are asking their senators to reinsert the request for $20 million for project-based Section 8 vouchers in Mississippi into the bill before resubmitting the Senate’s version to the House. Advocates argue that these funds would enable Mississippians to continue to work toward recovery.

“This is needed funding to help with housing and case management,” Mary Troupe, executive director of the Mississippi Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities, told Facing South. “It’s for the hardest hit cases on the coast. People with barriers, senior citizens and people with disabilities who do not have the funds to move out of their FEMA trailers. FEMA is requiring them to evacuate the trailers and there is no housing for people to move into. We also need funds to get special case management workers to work with these individuals.”

Troupe explains that the struggle for including this domestic funding has been a regional effort by lawmakers and advocates in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to support recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast. The $76 million New Orleans aid package would secure 3,000 permanent supportive housing vouchers for the state of Louisiana, and the $50 million Alabama aid package would go into a community development fund.

Gulf Coast advocates are encouraging concerned citizens to call in to their senators' offices in order to save the funding on the Senate side.

Aid for Katrina’s disabled homeless population could be cut

Congress may be preparing to ax a $76-million Katrina aid package that would provide housing assistance to physically and mentally disabled homeless Katrina victims. Sen. Mary Landrieu recently added the aid provision to the $212 billion supplemental appropriations Iraq war finance bill.

Landrieu’s provision is now in danger of being cut by House Democrats. As reported in the Times-Picayune, House Democratic leaders are trying to accede to President Bush’s demands to keep the emergency war supplemental bill close to $184 billion. With the House making plans to trim $108 billion from the bill, the domestic Katrina housing assistance is in jeopardy.

But Landrieu isn’t ready to give up. With prospects for passing regular appropriations bills uncertain in an election year, Landrieu told the Times-Picayune that attaching Katrina funding to emergency spending bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be the only option available for additional spending on Gulf Coast recovery.

“This bill is the most immediate way to meet our domestic emergency needs on the Gulf Coast,” Landrieu told the Times-Picayune. The housing assistance funds would cover 3,000 rent-aid vouchers for homeless and elderly people who because of mental or physical disabilities have not been able to recover from the 2005 hurricanes, according to Landrieu.

The call for Gulf Coast housing vouchers is not a new one. Gulf Coast housing advocates have lobbied for vouchers for the past two and a half years, and in fact, a voucher provision was cut from the 2006 war supplemental under similar political pressures. In a letter to The Advocate, Valerie Keller, co-chair of the Louisiana Supportive Housing Coalition, calls on Congressional leadership not to abandon, yet again, Louisiana’s most vulnerable victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. “Thousands of disabled men and women lie in oppressive heat, suffering without medical care or safe housing,” she wrote. “Recent studies reveal many of these disabled homeless people are at imminent risk of dying.”

Facing South has extensively reported on the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans. More than two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, the city's lack of affordable housing remains one of the most pressing problems facing the recovery effort. Moreover, the housing crisis continues to contribute to New Orleans' growing homeless population, one that has doubled to an estimated 12,000 since the 2005 disaster.

These homeless populations are becoming more visible throughout New Orleans, with some populations camping out in tent cities under a freeway overpass near Canal Street not far from the French Quarter and many more filling several blocks of Claiborne Avenue. As we reported last month, a recent survey by Unity of Greater New Orleans found that 86 percent of people living in these city encampments are from the New Orleans area, a majority of which are homeless due to Hurricane Katrina. The survey also found that in these homeless camps 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent are “tri-morbid"—they have a disability, an addiction and mental illness.

In light of this crisis, the need for housing vouchers for this population grows more and more crucial. As the New York Times reported:

“For these difficult cases, permanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.”

Nagin to present upbeat "State of the City" amid ongoing social disaster

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin will deliver his 2008 "State of the City" address this evening at the Port of New Orleans Cruise Terminal, and it's expected to be a boosterish affair, the Times-Picayune reports:

"I look forward to speaking again with our citizens about the recovery of New Orleans," said Nagin in a written statement this morning. "I said during my budget address to the City Council last year that we are reaching the tipping point, and the evidence bears that out."

Among those things he sees as indicators of the city's recovery: its hosting this year of seven major events, including the NBA All-Star Game; the population reaching 72 percent of pre-Katrina levels; unemployment nearing all-time lows; and the demolition of more than 8,000 storm-damaged properties.

What Nagin probably won't discuss in detail tonight is the ongoing social disaster in the city, where a severe lack of affordable housing has contributed to an estimated doubling of the homeless population since Hurricane Katrina to about 12,000. Asked about homelessness earlier this month at a panel discussion sponsored by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Nagin first charged that the people living on the city's streets came from elsewhere -- then quipped that the solution was one-way bus tickets out of town.

In fact, a survey [ppt] conducted earlier this year by Unity of Greater New Orleans, a coalition of advocates for the homeless, found that 86 percent of people living in the city's encampments were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A story in today's New York Times details the conditions suffered by those living in one encampment under a highway overpass not far from the French Quarter. About 80 percent of the camp's residents have at least one physical disability, 58 percent struggle with addiction, and 40 percent are mentally ill. One person who has since been moved to a safer shelter was a paranoid schizophrenic, diabetic, double amputee whose stumps had become infected from the filth.

The horrendous conditions are presenting a health risk to outreach workers -- and to the larger public as well:

Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said the camp had become a public health hazard since the city removed some portable toilets in February.

"Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis," Mr. Miller said. "There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one."

Before Katrina, New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless; that number is now down almost 30 percent to 2,000, despite the greater need. The situation is also dire for those whose health problems preclude living in group shelters due to the shortage of affordable apartments. That shortage in turn has been worsened by city, state and federal officials' decision to demolish four public housing complexes in New Orleans that had been barely damaged by the storm without first providing replacement units.

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a spending measure that includes $76 million for vouchers to provide rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people in the city. Unfortunately, the current House version of the legislation does not include that voucher funding. And if Congress does not act soon, even those people already receiving help will be in trouble, as the current vouchers expire at the end of this year.

In the meantime, Unity has put out a call for donations to help those homeless it does manage to settle in apartments. Among the items needed are small dressers, box fans, night stands, microwaves, televisions, mini-refrigerators, small appliances, hangers, new mattresses, cleaning supplies, toiletries, dining room tables and chairs, and bookcases. The group cannot accept clothing, shoes, toys, or used mattresses, but monetary donations are welcome and tax-deductible. For a text document with donation details, click here.

New Orleans to push homeless into barrack

At the same time public housing complexes in New Orleans are being torn down and redeveloped into mixed-income communities with less space for the poorest families, Mayor Ray Nagin has announced his intent to push the homeless people who've been living under Interstate 10 near the French Quarter into a tarp-covered barrack.

The 120-foot-long, 30-foot-wide structure stands on the grounds of the New Orleans Mission in the city's Central Business District. The barrack was built by nearly two dozen volunteers from churches around the country and funded largely by First Baptist New Orleans and the Louisiana Baptist Convention. New Orleans' homeless population is estimated to have doubled since Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.

The homeless relocation program is not voluntarily, according to a report from the Associated Press:

The city's public advocacy unit, unarmed officers with the New Orleans Police Department Homeless Assistance Collaborative, city housing department workers, and mission staff will usher people into the barrack as early as Thursday, [Nagin spokesperson Ceeon] Quiett said. Those who do not go elsewhere will face citations, and arrests could take place if drugs are found, city officials said.