New Orleans has an affordable-rental-housing crisis, in the wake of the failure of the federal levees in 2005. Best estimates are that some 80,000 rental units were whacked by the floodwaters. A multi-billion-dollar federal program, creaking slowly into high gear, gave so-called Road Home money to homeowners to rebuild flooded properties (some of the folks being evicted by FEMA from their trailers are elderly people living in trailers on their lawns as they painstakingly restore their homes).
But rental housing -- where working folks in New Orleans lived? A few hundred million were sent to the state for a program which is even now just getting past the starting line. Now, Monday's Times-Picayune reports another example of the frustrating, Kafka-esque series of absurdities that confront working people trying to come home. HUD, which runs the local housing agency, has been paying money to maintain empty units, while ignoring the people on its waiting lists, and refusing even to update those lists. The reason, supposedly: the agency sees its mission as housing its pre-Katrina residents. That's ironic when you recall that HUD last year spearheaded the destruction of most of the "Big Four" public housing projects, taking thousands of largely habitable units offline, units that had stood empty since the flood.
In the larger picture, the 800 vacant units are a drop in the bucket. But, as a reflection of HUD's approach (and the federal government's approach generally) to a housing crisis created by the failure of the Corps of Engineers to engineer and build a dependable "hurricane protection system", it's typical.
Despite the petitioning of more than two dozen U.S. congressmen, dozens of local, state and national housing and/or governmental groups, and an opinion offered by the American Bar Association, Treasury has yet to amend its program.
Not only will this prevent planned construction and rebuilding from being completed, it will actually halt current construction as well, leaving unfinished, uninhabitable eyesores all over the Gulf Coast.
Check out www.gozoneexchange.blogspot.com to see what the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency is doing to address this issue.
Most of the money that followed the distruction was insurance money.
FEMA trailers had all the same problems that you continue to mention. Especially, those who put the trailers on their own lots as their homes were repaired and rebuild. All moving and hook up expenses were the property owners responsibility. Including putting in a sewer line, telephone pole, moving the trailer itself etc.
When I moved out of Wichita Falls in 1984 there were still many blank concret slab froundations remaing in the two residential neighborhoods.
What ever the effecient ways of handling these problems is, this Country has not even come close to finding them, and that is a sign truely bad governance at all levels.
President Obama must not know about this otherwise he would do something about it, right?
President Obama must not know about this!
He can't be like that GWB guy, can he?
That's not possible!
No! Not possible!
Not possible!
No!
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2009&base_name=femas_gulf_coast_eviction_noti
http://www.nola.com/news/?/base/news-1/1243833645183980.xml&coll=1
http://www.kansascity.com/444/story/1227999.html
or take action at http://gccwc.wordpress.com
Your article is totally on point as to the current situation. I would simply like to add that the local government could also make it easier for residents to access the first time homebuyer and soft-second mortgage funds which have already been allocated. This would allow lower income residents to begin buying property and restoring it in areas of the city that have been slow to recover. The problem is that the amount of red tape faced by those applying for these funds is monumental.
It's his Katrina by a magnitude of 1,000
And
Army Corps of Engineers Levees!
If that helps!
But, I don't think it helps!
Well, hasn't so far, anyway!
Up until the 1990's, my middle- and upper- middle- class family included some longtime New Orleans renters. It's really a blessing they were deceased before Katrina, because the aftermath would have broken their hearts.
Beginning in 1815, New Orleans has been saving this country's bacon, and you can take that right up to World War II, when the Higgins Boat so radically changed amphibious warfare.
Harry, I think the real reason it's been so difficult for the working poor to return to New Orleans is the simplest one. They were never meant to return. It was a ruthless and efficient episode of ethnic cleansing, although almost no one dares call it by its real name.
I really feel sorry for the displaced Louisianians at this point. Some still have the LA license plates. Most have resigned themselves to LSU bumper stickers and a car from Kenner or Metairie and a TX plate on it. In many cases, the move was the best thing that happened to them. Their kids got placed in good schools with good instructions and a lot of them had a chance to get affordable housing and fairly good paying jobs. There are 60K-120K of former Louisianians living in Houston at this point
I imagine those numbers would have been reversed four years ago, had an article on the coming demise of GM been posted in the midst of "heckuva job" and Spike Jones' documentary.
I'll post this in the hope that I can do my part to incrementally tweak this article's ranking. For while GM is an industrial tragedy on a huge scale, the communities that got soaked by Corp--and yes, New Orleans suffered not a natural disaster but a dousing by incompetence--those communities are arguably in worse shape.
For starters, there are no Honda or Toyota brand apartments just down the street.
How ever do you find hats to fit on top of that tiny little point?
First, if you build a city below sea level in a hurricaine zone, you must assume something will happen, someday, and take some responsibility for your property.
Second, if the place hasn't rebuilt in 4 years, it's the residents' fault. You can take a pile of mud and logs and turn it into a brick and frame house in 4 years!!!
If I was a vindictive person, I could say that you'll be on your own, buddy, if your home was destroyed by incompetence and you were left to your own devices to fix it.
Wherever it is that you currently live, your continued comfort and prosperity depends on some kind of civil works, be it fuel or power distribution, snow and ice management in the north, water supply in the desert. The list goes on.
But I'm not a vindictive person. Instead I'll remind you that regardless of our political stances, we both pay taxes that some point are entrusted to public officials to keep the lights and heat on, keep the drinking water flowing in and the flood water out. If your home was ruined by incompetent engineering from the Federal government, I would hope--nay, expect--that some of my tax dollars would end up in your pocket.
Change you can count on!
New Orleans is exactly where it has to be. Let's fix New Orleans, rather than write off nearly three hundred years of history, and restore the wetlands rather than forcibly migrate five hundred thousand people.