Katrina: 27 Months Later, More Homeless December 3, 2007

It’s a crime and a crying shame. Why this is just supposed to be taken as an inevitable part of life in a first-world country such as America is beyond me. Today’s New York Times clues us into a crisis that those of us with foresight most likely saw coming.

Basically, there’s not enough housing for all the people who lived there previously. This is causing an “acute” housing shortage, and landlords are asking for up to $1,100 a month for units which went for less than 1/3 that price before the storm:

Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.

About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months…

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city…Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

…Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

Many residents were assigned FEMA “caseworkers” who were to address their needs and help them move from the transitional housing in trailers to more permanent residences. There’s just one catch:

…[I]n interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.

“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”

Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.

They’re basing their fears, of course, on the fact that “leaving them stranded” was precisely what FEMA did during the storm and in those crucial days afterwards.

The homeless population of New Orleans has doubled and is growing.

I can not help but think — no, better yet, I realize — that this is part of a grand scheme. A standard of living on the level of New York or LA (because I’m not even paying $1,100 a month in Brooklyn) would sufficiently insure that the lower-income residents would be marginalized exclusively to the (environmentally unsafe, structurally unsound, et al.) neighborhoods they could afford. And when combined with the fact that studies are returning wage differentials between white and non-white men in the neighborhood of 39 percent, this implies that you’re going to chronically see poor black homeless people in the streets in New Orleans (just like the days immediately following the storm), even though the poor encamped on the steps of City Hall are, at present, ethnically diverse.

Pushed from apartments to trailers and from trailers to tents, the middle- and low-income residents of New Orleans just keep getting screwed by this pro-gentrification MO. Sufficient affordable housing has still not been built, and homeless advocates say it may take far too long to build enough housing units to shelter all the city’s displaced. And more and more, we hear the same rhetoric from the unrealistic “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” crowd:

“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”

“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”

What’s the next step in the recovery?

Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”

May G-d have mercy on them, and may these poor Katrina victims get justice, speedily.